Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows)

by Aileen Harkwood

  I thought I saw his head nod a fraction, almost a hint of a bow, and then he kept going.

  13

  One thing could be said about the pool; it did a hell of a cleaning job.

  I was clean. My clothes were cleaner than they’d ever been, my boots like new. Also, the splinter wounds I’d picked up sliding down the ladder in the votive chapel, some of which had grown red and slightly infected by the time I hit the water, had completely healed.

  Despite this, I slept the rest of the day under a cork oak, a full five meters away from the pool. It was the only tree not dripping with fruit or nuts that might fall on my head while I was out of it. I could barely make it to the tree and left my stuff where it was, hoping the pond wouldn’t mess with it somehow.

  As it had since I’d arrived, the scents of fruit at the height of ripeness invaded the night air, but I wanted human food. I was especially hungry for fresh fish, which the emergency stores in my pack didn’t include. My cravings, my problem. I was on an island without a fishing rod or even a hook.

  I broke open a bag of disgusting sardine jerky. I was dumbfounded that jerky could be made from sardines, but Sulla’s food suppliers had apparently considered it a real food item. My guess was a good deal of “reconstitution” of sardine pieces was involved.

  Though it was warm enough at night in the garden that I didn’t need it, I’d wanted a fire for the light and the pretense of companionship a campfire evokes. I used winter-dried marsh grasses and broken myrtle twigs gathered from the winter part of the island to start one under the cork oak and was lucky enough to find a pine tree downed by a previous storm, which I chopped into decent-sized logs using a tool I retrieved from the dinghy. The boat was untouched where I’d left it.

  A fresh branzino suddenly dropped in front of my face.

  I started in surprise until I realized the fish wasn’t flying through the air—which in this place, let’s be honest, wasn’t beyond the realm of the possible—but rather hung by its open mouth from the crooked finger of the most handsome male hand I’d seen in recent memory.

  Aril was back.

  “Agh! Don’t do that.”

  Whipping the fish out of my sight, he walked around from behind me into the firelight.

  His hands held not one, but two silver white bass.

  “I brought dinner,” he said.

  He’d put on a shirt and swigans, his kind’s version of boots, suitable for clambering over rough terrain and keeping silent while doing it.

  “I’m not eating any more fae food,” I said.

  “Not even the grapes?”

  My face flushed. I turned away in humiliation.

  “You saw.”

  “I did. You’re not the neatest eater, I’ll give you that,” he said.

  I faced forward again, though I kept my eyes down.

  “Thanks,” I said sourly.

  He held out the branzino. Their plump, glistening bodies found their way into my peripheral vision. My mouth watered just seeing them.

  “Shall we roast them over your fire?”

  I waved away his gift of delicious looking fish.

  “I told you, not interested.”

  He nodded, leaning over the bag in my hand. “Hard to argue with…”

  “Sardella jerky.”

  “Indeed. How is it?”

  “Mi fa cagare,” I said, pronouncing it repulsive, though the literal translation in most other languages would have been, it makes me poop.

  “Would it help if I told you I caught these in the lagoon?” he asked.

  “You did?”

  “Less than an hour ago.”

  “I’ll eat one.”

  “I’m honored.”

  Aril cleaned them and put them on spits and handed them to me while he stacked rocks high enough on opposite sides of the fire to suspend them above the flames. We said nothing to each other for the twenty minutes or so it took the branzini to cook. They tasted delicious, the best meal I’d had in years, which said something about my ability to procure food for myself, even before the decree. I didn’t fish, rarely cooked, and had had no access to fresh produce in Santa Croce. Food vendors weren’t keen on setting up stalls in the war-ravaged sections of Venice.

  When we finished eating, he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a flask that expanded to be multiple times the interior dimensions of that pocket. Were he a human street magician, I’d have called it a clever trick, but since he was fae, I knew real magic was used to distort the flask while stowed in his shirt.

  The flask was round and held a pint or more. He pulled off the gilded lid which turned out to be an espresso cup, complete with a handle that popped out from the side with a clink of ceramic, and a saucer that grew outward from the base of the cup when turned upright. He twisted off the real lid under that, and poured a shot into the cup, offering it to me. I shook my head.

  “I told you,” I said.

  “It’s just caffè.”

  “Handed to me in a cup that violates physics.”

  “You expect me to carry a human thermos?”

  I didn’t answer, unconvinced.

  He shrugged.

  “Suit yourself.”

  I looked at the coffee, swallowing my need. Coffee was rare in Ashia Hollow since the bean plants didn’t grow well here and had to be raised in magic enhanced greenhouses.

  He held it out to me again.

  I took it.

  He recapped the flask and a second cup appeared on top of it. He repeated the procedure, poured himself an espresso, and capped the flask a second time, setting it on a rock next to the fire.

  “You didn’t tell me your name,” Aril said.

  I sipped my espresso. Something felt off about that moment, a niggling worry that tickled the back of my neck. What was wrong? The espresso or something else? Secretly, I hoped it wasn’t the caffè. It was the best I’d ever tasted.

  “Lunari,” I told him.

  He drank his coffee.

  “Apt,” he said.

  “Apt?”

  “Yes. You’re nocturnal, are you not? Your magic follows the moon.”

  Nocturnal? What, like a bat? Bullshit on the magic, too. I liked to sleep during the day, and the moon was the moon. I loved watching it, that’s all.

  “I told you. Not fae,” I said.

  “And yet, as I told you before, I smell magic on you.”

  He drank his espresso, his eyes providing no hint to his thoughts.

  For a moment, I got lost in my own thoughts, worrying about the dark fae hunter I’d evaded back in the city. If I was supposedly dark fae, as Aril claimed, why had I been hunted? Did dark fae hunt each other?

  I tipped my espresso cup back and forth to watch the caffè flow from side to side, not sure what to believe. I was human in every aspect other than my newly transformed eye color. Aril could have ended me at any time. Why drag out the inevitable? Unless he was like Whisper and sometimes liked to toy with his food first.

  But he saved you.

  Yes, he had. For reasons he hadn’t explained. And he’d brought me food and drink.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked.

  “Does what hurt?”

  “That injury on your chest. It’s black like you were just burned.”

  I looked up at him at the wrong moment, or maybe the right one, to catch a wisp of bitterness or rage or sorrow or shame or maybe all of these things combined to invade his expression.

  “It’s an old wound,” he told me.

  Before I could sort out what I’d seen, the show of emotion was gone and the dark of his eyes hid his thoughts from me like the new moon transiting unseen through the sky that night. I couldn’t see the moon above so it must not be there. I couldn’t read his feelings in his face, so they must not exist.

  “Does it have something to do with your job?”

  A dot of blood appeared on the side of my cup. My index finger trembled and the nick across the tip started bleeding again. I could feel it c
oming, another dream fit.

  No. Not now.

  “My job?” he asked.

  “Protecting this place, from men like the ones you killed on the beach.”

  This time he shut down with a cold display of annoyance. He tipped the rest of his caffè into the fire and turned his cup upside down. He picked up the flask, fitted the cup and saucer over it. Instantly, it reverted to a gilded thermos cap. He looked at me expectantly, obviously waiting for me to finish my espresso and hand over my cup to him so he could put it back, as well.

  Okay, so he didn’t like to talk about himself any more than I did about me. But his reply gave me a sliver of information to chew on.

  “My job isn’t restricted to this island,” he said. “I just happen to be here.”

  “So you don’t kill for fun.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Or personal gain.”

  I remembered the body blow of energy he’d taken when the first of the two Venice hit men had died. Had he absorbed all of it? No. Most had scattered God knew where, but he’d received a healthy chunk. I saw it. Energy like that had to be worth something to a dark fae. Magic required energy.

  “Good night,” Aril said and rose to his feet. “Keep the cup.”

  I lifted my face to look at his.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I put the skull on the plate and fried it.”

  In the act of stepping away, he halted and glanced back at me. Frowned.

  Damn.

  Everything went blue. My vision wavered at the edges. The seizure was here.

  I’d tried to say, I’m sorry, I’ve said something wrong.

  Instead, true to the incomprehensible logic of dreams, however, I’d spewed a garbagey word salad, total nonsense.

  “Rotting could cut up the shoelace.”

  My pulse caught in my throat. My face flushed. I was mortified. Couldn’t the fucking thing have waited another minute for Aril to leave?

  “What did you say?” he asked.

  Concentrate on his face. You can get through this.

  I dropped the espresso cup and saucer. They shattered on a rock. Blue espresso spritzed the campfire, sending up blue steam.

  “Because my apartment has mucus,” I said.

  It sounded funny, but Aril didn’t laugh.

  “Lunari, what’s wrong?”

  I didn’t want to open my mouth again and risk more gibberish. I pointed at my head and shrugged. How could I convey it was just me having one of my unruly migraines?

  Moss bubbled around us.

  Aril, watching me, didn’t notice the ground boiling.

  Why would he, you defective idiot? It’s your dream, not his.

  “What’s happening?” Aril said. “Are you ill?”

  I can’t control it, I needed to tell him, but what I screamed was, “Brights want the keyholes taken out of the floorboards. Today!”

  The cork tree at my back shook. It peeled itself of its bark in wild sheets that unfurled in a nonexistent wind, tore off, and sailed away. Leaves stripped themselves of their branches and every branch on the massive tree snapped down toward the trunk like someone abruptly closing an umbrella that had lost its fabric. A branch weighing hundreds of kilos swung straight for my head.

  I couldn’t move.

  A dream, Lunari. The branch isn’t there.

  Reflexes jerked at my body, but I couldn’t duck out of the way.

  Dream. A dream.

  “Stop!”

  Aril’s command reverberated through the garden. The power in the one word blew outward in concentric rings from where he stood over me. Shock waves riffled through of the pool nearby. Pines at the edges of the garden bent outward, almost in half.

  Everything within seeing and hearing range froze.

  Time froze.

  The branch stopped mid-swing, I smelled the sap from torn leaves and twigs.

  It’s real?

  This wasn’t like my past dreams that had left behind mementos for me to find in my apartment. A tree, brought to life by my own dream, was trying to kill me.

  Aril stood in the middle of the chaos, witnessing it first-hand.

  He picked me up, walked beyond the tree’s lethal range and set me down in the open, away from anything else I might harm.

  A second later, without any signal from Aril, time ticked forward again and chaos resumed, the tree beating not me, but itself to death.

  I observed the mayhem in shock, watching as the energy animating the branches eventually ran out. My clouded eyesight, drenched in blue, cleared. The dream died away. I should have been grateful to be alive and that Aril had been there twice in the span of a day to save me, but I only curled up on myself and shivered.

  Aril sat down next to me, pulled my rigid body into his lap, and held me. The last thing I remembered before falling asleep was his finger absently stroking my hair while he pondered the pulped remains of the cork oak.

  14

  “What brought you to Isola di Guariti Dolori?” Aril asked me the next morning.

  Morning. I hated sleeping a night away. It felt like a waste. Not that it mattered now. I wasn’t heading out to search ruins in the dark anymore.

  “Was it—?”

  “My illness?” I finished what I assumed was the sentence he meant to say.

  Sitting up took more effort than I could muster. I felt physically deflated. My body didn’t work right. I couldn’t hold a cup of water, didn’t even have the strength to chew breakfast, so when Aril asked I lied and said I couldn’t stand the idea of swallowing anything right now.

  “What makes you think it’s a medical problem?” he said.

  “You said it yourself last night. Remember, you asked me if I was ill?”

  “That…” He inclined his head toward the decimated stump of what had once been the most glorious cork oak I’d ever seen. “…did not happen because you had a stroke or a migraine or whatever else you’ve convinced yourself you have.”

  “Epilepsy.”

  “Fae don’t get epilepsy.”

  “And how many times do I have to tell you? I’m not fae.”

  He’d brought my belongings over to the same neutral ground he’d chosen last night, away from anything a dream fit might turn into a weapon. I’d propped myself up against my pack and now sat up a little straighter. A whiff of tree resin wafted into the garden. It reminded me of the wood in a church that had soaked up a thousand years of smoke and fragrant oils, deep and balsamy with pepper and citrus, but with an unexpectedly harsh and brooding after scent. I couldn’t decide where it came from. I turned my face one direction and sniffed, then another. It wasn’t until I saw the small red cloud of a stain on Aril’s shirt that I understood.

  Fae blood smelled of strange and often beautiful things. Hadn’t I just cut myself for him the day before to prove my blood smelled human?

  I pointed at the blood on his shirt. Judging by its location, it had to come from the wound on his left pec in the shape of a crown.

  “Aril?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “I scraped myself on a splintered branch last night.”

  “Don’t fae heal quickly?”

  “Yes.” He hesitated, “But I tore it open again while you were sleeping.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?” he said in a tone that said he was done with the subject. “You never answered my question. Why are you here on the island?”

  “It’s the first place I could find.”

  “To do what?”

  “Hide.”

  “From what?”

  I could be just as pissy and harsh as he could. “Does it matter?”

  Stubbornly, he waited me out. That was one of my first lessons regarding the fae. They could be patient. Came from living forever, or nearly forever, I suppose. They could afford the time.

  “I have the morte dal consiglio,” I said.

  He lifted an eyebrow, a silent, indeed. He’d brought out his espresso flask again, poured
, and lifted his gold cup to his lips.

  “That’s it. Giving me the eyebrow? That’s all you’ve got?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Don’t you want to know why?”

  “Did you want to tell me?”

  “Do I…?”

  What was I angry about? Everything. Why was I angry with him? Because just like any fellow human I might talk with, I wasn’t getting any sympathy.

  Sympathy? That’s what you want? You’ve got a death sentence hanging over your head and you want someone to let you cry on his shoulder?

  Crying wouldn’t fix this.

  “I don’t know why I’m marked,” I said. “I came home a couple of nights ago to find the red flag posted outside my door and people stripping my apartment of everything they could carry. Including, amazingly, the toilet.”

  “Stolen anything from anyone lately?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Seen anything you shouldn’t have?”

  “What? Like someone in high places committing murder? My life isn’t that exciting. Or wasn’t.”

  “Angered anyone?”

  “Only you.”

  “I meant someone influential on the council.”

  “I don’t know anyone on the council. I know the leader is Donato Nazario and his guards come from the Gagliardi family, but that’s it. I only know that. I don’t care about the council.”

  “They care about you, apparently,” Aril said.

  I forced myself to my feet and compulsively worked on tidying my gear, sorting the pack with the food and camping gear, and then straightening things in my backpack, placing them in order of need, the most frequently used items toward the top and in the most easily accessible pockets. Aril laid back watching me, his body propped on one arrogant elbow while he finished his coffee.

  “Aren’t you curious?” he asked.

  “About what?”

  “Don’t play dense. Don’t you want to know why you were given the decree?”

  “I’m going to die if I show my face anywhere anyone will recognize me, which means…anywhere…” I viciously zipped zippers closed, pulled straps on the pack so tight I knew I’d crushed that hideous leftover sardine jerky to bits. “Finding out why isn’t going to change that.”