Titus let out an exaggerated gasp. “You’re not telling me she’s the one!”
“You’re slipping, Titus,” Aril said. “I would have expected you to already know that.”
“Slipping, my ass. You know it doesn’t work that way,” Titus said. “I have to touch.”
“So, touch.”
Titus looked uncomfortable. He frowned at me. “I don’t know.”
Aril admonished him, but it came close to mocking. “Titus, the powerful seer, afraid of a girl with all the substance of a water sprite? Though, technically, I agree, she is dangerous. She carries a flick blade in her jacket sleeve.”
“It’s not the blade that concerns me,” Titus said.
Aril could be a bully. “Just get on with it. We can’t stay long.”
“When have you ever?” Titus said, clucking in disappointment. “All right, girl. Whatever your name is. I don’t remember who they said had the decree.”
“Lunari,” Aril told him.
Again, as it had last night in the garden, a flicker of unease tickled the back of my neck. Something felt off when Aril said my name. Or was it just this unfamiliar place that had me on edge?
Aril gestured for me to go to the hybrid fae.
“He has to touch you to tell us what he knows.”
Ironically, the clutter I’d sensed in the room wasn’t liquor bottles or clothing. It was books. Printed books owned by a blind man. Hundreds of them rose in stacks up the walls, covered every surface, formed archipelagoes of old leather, cloth, paper, and glue stranded in the middle of the room. Other than pity for a man who loved books and couldn’t read them, I didn’t feel anything ominous in or about the place.
In addition to books, Titus had collected unbound manuscripts, piles of paper tilting, leaning, and sliding everywhere, much of it handwritten in fae languages, based on the gilded letters that lifted and vibrated a millimeter off the page when I tiptoed through the mess and brushed by them.
I stood facing the half-fae. He lifted his arms, turned over his hands, and held his palms out to me. “Lay your palms on top of mine,” he said.
I looked back at Aril, but the only thing I got from him was impatience.
“I don’t bite,” Titus said.
I did as he asked, placing my hands, palm side down against his.
Titus hissed, jerked his hands away, and stumbled backward until he caught his balance on the edge of a bookshelf.
“Dammit, Aril,” he said, regarding me with distaste. “You didn’t tell me she was dark and had just killed.”
“Sorry,” Aril said. “You never seem to mind when it’s me.”
“You’re a special case.”
I was sick of this and becoming pissed off.
“You have a fit because I killed a tree?” I said. “And to be fair, the tree was killed in my dream. I didn’t do it. The dream did.”
Titus leaned around me as if he wasn’t blind and could really see Aril.
“Tree? What’s she talking about a tree?”
“Whole other issue,” Aril said.
Titus collected himself and faced me again. “No, little fae. I’m talking about the one, two…was it four, no…” He paused and cocked his head. “…five men you killed a few nights ago.”
He could see what had happened in my apartment? I swallowed nervously. I wanted to bolt. I didn’t want to think about that night ever again.
“I killed no one,” I said, spitting out the denial.
“Really. Your indigo eyes would say otherwise,” Titus said.
“You can’t even see them to know what color they are.”
“I don’t need to see,” he said. “Not when I have this.”
He shoved back the sleeves on his tunic. Every centimeter of his arms from his wrists upward was covered in raised, flaming red abrasions. They weren’t simple lash marks from an injury or even a whip; they were spells, inscribed on his skin. Puffy and oozing, they shifted and changed from second to second, new lines and letters and symbols erupting from the layers of skin below the ones currently tracing patterns in his flesh.
“Holy crap,” I said.
“Holy crap, indeed,” Titus said. “They’re intelligence spells. My mother was a scholar, one of a guild in charge of safeguarding and cataloging every scrap of knowledge accumulated by the fae. I think of these,” and here, he lifted the hem of his tunic, showing hundreds more of the raised red marks on his legs, “as my welt spells. They never stop. They’re constantly rewriting themselves.”
I couldn’t help but stretch out a hand to feel the writing happening on his forearm.
“How do you live with it?” I asked.
He slapped my hand away.
“Don’t.”
I should have but didn’t apologize. He hadn’t been that considerate of me either.
“You better believe I’m in agony. It hurts like a twenty-four-hour son of a bitch,” he said. “And, oh, Aril, you better have something for me when we’re through here.”
“Don’t worry, I have enough to last you a month,” Aril said.
By this, I assumed he intended to pay Aril not in gold, lire, or other currencies, but in fae magic or medicine.
“A month? Oh, my God. Are you joking? A month?” Tears filled Titus’s useless eyes, spilling relief and joy down his face. “A month without the pain. I can’t even imagine it.”
“After you tell us what you know,” Aril said.
Titus’s hand fumbled for a wadded-up napkin that lay discarded by a stack of books on a nearby table. He used it to dab at his eyes and wipe his nose.
“Yes. Yes. Back to business,” he said. “You may not have stuck those fireheads at your place with that silly little switch blade in your sleeve, but you killed them nonetheless. You used power.”
Fireheads? He could see who they were?
“Why is it no one will believe me?” I said. “I don’t have magic.”
“You most certainly do,” Titus said.
I expected Aril to chime in with an I-told-you-so, but he didn’t. Nor did he have a reaction to Titus’s announcement that I’d supposedly slaughtered five men two nights ago, which I found odd. It would have surprised me to learn that about a stranger.
“No, you’re wrong,” I said. “I’ve seen Aril kill with magic. Nothing like that happened at my place. The men got sucked into one of my dreams. Like you have these marks, I’ve spent my entire life being tortured by dreams beyond my control. Those men killed each other when my dream made them look like what they hated and feared most, dark fae.”
“When your dream did that or you did it?” Titus said. “Little liar?”
“Liar!” I said.
“You’re lying to yourself. You’ve been doing that for quite some time.”
“I am not.”
I’d had enough. I headed straight for the door.
Aril stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.
“No! Don’t touch me.” I pushed him off and hopped angrily back away from him.
Aril lowered his hand, but his body blocked the door and he didn’t move. For once, his eyes showed an emotion I could read. Pity.
“You’re the one making up stories,” I said to Titus without turning around to face him.
“You are fae, dark fae now, whether you like it or not,” Titus said. “But you were born into a human body.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “I have some type of epilepsy, that’s all.” I looked down at my feet, embarrassed. “Fits!”
“Aril,” Titus said, now excluding me from the conversation. “This was done for a purpose. She was made for a specific purpose.”
“What purpose?” Aril said.
“I don’t know,” Titus said. “Actually, I’m surprised you aren’t telling me all about this.”
I sensed Aril’s body go tight with guilt. What did Titus mean? How could Aril know what was going on with me?
I closed my eyes, wishing all of it would go away. When I opened them again, blue jetted i
nto my vision from under the soles of my boots. Floor boards wobbled. The building jerked. I looked up and saw the dim apartment grow even darker. Aril’s entire face was overlaid with indigo.
Not again. Not another one. I can’t take this.
I began to hyperventilate. Nonsense blurted from my lips, “You have to find the table before it bites me.”
Rain fell at an angle through the front wall from the storm outside. The wall might as well not exist.
Titus spoke up, mildly agitated. “This, I presume is that whole other issue you mentioned?” he asked Aril.
Aril didn’t reply. His attention shot to the door. I heard nothing from outside.
I turned toward Titus, my face begging for an explanation, which, of course, the blind Titus couldn’t see. Why is this happening? I tried to say, but what came out was, “Please, Father Bartolo, don’t make me leave!”
Titus’s arm reached out along the bookcase at his back, fingers searching for a tiny casket wedged between books. He worked it free and negotiated his way around the piles of books and manuscripts without bumping into or tripping over a single one. He stopped in front of me, opened the casket, removed a beaten metal flacon, and set the casket on an Italian-Fae dictionary that weighed four kilos or more.
“It’s her power,” Titus said. “It’s too much for a human body to handle.”
“Can you stop it?” Aril said.
“What do you think I’m trying to do?”
Titus pulled out the flacon’s stopper, which was carved from a ruby and resembled a bird’s beating heart.
“Stick out your tongue, sweetie,” he told me.
I shook my head violently. I wasn’t about to ingest anything I didn’t recognize.
“It’s not poison,” Titus said. “I bought it years ago. It was supposed to help my panic attacks, but it wasn’t strong enough. I doubt it will do much for you, either, but it’s worth a dose to try.”
“Lunari, open your mouth,” Aril said. “We don’t have time for this now. They’re on their way here.”
The council’s guards? Already?
I looked my terror at Aril. He nodded grimly. Word had spread fast. The bounty on my head must have been high.
“Let Titus help,” Aril said. “I’m going to send them in the wrong direction.” His last words were, “Wait here. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back.”
“Lunari?” Titus brought my attention back around.
I stuck out my tongue and accepted two drops of the medicine from the vial. They steamed on the tip of my tongue and tasted like mildew smelled.
I shuddered.
“My reaction exactly when I took it. Let’s give it a few moments.”
I closed my eyes to shut out the blue world, though my hands clenched into hard fists and the apartment walls groaned and creaked. A minute later, my frantic breathing slowed, and my fists loosened. I no longer felt flecks of rain on my cheek. I opened my eyes a slit and then all the way. Watery blue still tinted the world. However, most of the natural color of things had returned. Rain stopped blowing through the wall.
“Better?” Titus asked.
“Yes,” I croaked. It was the most my vocal cords would deliver.
“It won’t last long, but at least you won’t destroy my house.”
We entered an awkward silence. After a minute of me pacing back and forth, wondering when Aril would return, my curiosity broke it.
“Were you fighting in the war when you were blinded?”
Titus burped up a lone chuckle.
“Hell, no. I was running for my life.”
“What was the war about?” I asked. I’d never known, and the only history book I’d found, the miniature one from the library, had ended decades before the wars started.
“Same thing the first one was about,” Titus said.
I sighed my annoyance.
“And that was?” I said.
“What wars are always about. Power and limited resources.”
He must have interpreted my lack of response as stupidity because he launched into more babble I wasn’t that interested in hearing.
“Do you know what a fish bowl is?” Titus asked.
“A bowl for holding fish?”
“Brilliant.” Titus pursed his lips. “I’m talking live ones, Lunari, not dead cooked ones. The humans in the world before ours kept fish as pets.”
Fish? As pets?
“They didn’t eat them,” he said. “These were small ones. Pretty ones.”
My thoughts traveled back to the Pool of Peace and the tiny gold and silver scaled fish flitting back and forth at the bottom.
“They had translucent glass bowls that were big and round for them to live in,” Titus said. “They’d put gravel in the bottom of the bowl, some plants. Sometimes they’d set large rocks and coral in there for the fish to hide in. The owner fed them and maintained everything, the water, the temperature. They cleaned the bowl when the fish filled it up with fish shit.”
“So?”
I wanted Aril to return. It didn’t feel safe here.
“So, the fish had what they needed, but they couldn’t go anywhere,” Titus said. “They were trapped for all their lives in the bowl.”
“What does this have to do with war?” I said, only half listening now.
Aril, please hurry. Get back here.
“Ashia Hollow is the fish bowl.”
“Okay.”
I didn’t add anything to my okay, which only wound up Titus with the need to explain.
“Do I have to spell it out? The glass bowl is our barrier around the hollow. It holds in everything we need, but we can’t get out.”
“I’ve heard of people who left through the barrier.”
“Really? Did they really make it through? Come back and tell people about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Doubtful,” Titus said. “The barrier is where the Dark Lord’s evil is said to be kept.”
That sounded familiar from the fae history book. Hadn’t there been a Dark Lord Acura who was responsible for tearing apart the barrier between human and fae worlds?
“What do you mean? How would his evil be stored at the barrier?”
“Who knows? A fog? A forest? Whatever it is who’d want to chance a stroll through that?”
“No one, I guess.”
“Precisely. So instead, the humans and the fae who are trapped in Ashia’s fish bowl fight over who gets the most power, the most food, the most space from the limited supply of those things.”
“If you’re talking about power,” I said, “the fae win. They could make us their slaves now if they wanted.”
“You’d think, but it’s not that easy,” Titus said. “Power and energy are tricky. They form complicated webs, and we survive because of a delicate balance between the two. The fae need energy from the humans, while humans need the magic that keeps the hollow intact. Everything re-circulates and is refreshed and reused according to a specific ratio in the spell that created the hollow. Upset that mix of energy-to-magic by killing off or enslaving one side or the other, and you run the risk of filling up the bowl with enough fish shit to choke us all.”
Titus stopped talking, and his sudden morose expression told me he was reliving his past, maybe the moment the mortar had hit and he’d lost his sight.
“The two wars we’ve had almost tore the barrier apart,” he added a few seconds later. “We’re lucky any of us are still here.”
He fussed with stoppering the flacon of medicine, returned it to the casket, and then tottered back through his horde of books and manuscripts to replace the casket where it had been.
Now,” he said, “while we’re alone, there’s something I need to tell you. I didn’t want to mention it while Aril was here. I didn’t want to upset him.”
My alarm spiked anew.
“I’m sorry to have to give you this kind of news…”
My anxiety tried shooting for the moon, but the potion he’d given me kep
t a lid on it.
Whatever you have to say, hurry up.
Titus turned, standing exactly in the spot where we’d found him when we arrived. He clasped his hands in front of him.
Come on. Just say it.
“Even if you do manage to avoid execution, you’re not going to last long,” he said. “You’re destined to burn out soon.”
I couldn’t process that. For a full five or six seconds, I just stared at his sunglasses.
Die. That’s what he meant. Dead. Decree or no decree, my life was nearly over.
How thoughtful of him not to want to upset Aril. As if that would upset him. Did Titus even wonder how I might take it?
“You’re a weapon waiting to be used,” he said. “Made by the fae for something large, quick, and dirty.”
I found my voice at last. “A bomb. I’m a fae bomb?”
“Since when have the fae ever used something as crude as bombs?” Titus said. “You’re thinking like a human. You should start thinking like a fae. Artful. Shrewd. Cunning. That’s the fae.”
“Dark fae, you mean.”
He clucked his tongue and pursed his lips. “Oh, my. Aren’t you adorable? And so heartachingly undereducated. You should be asking Aril for a lesson or two about the brights,” he said. He leaned in my direction, his next words in a conspiratorial voice. “He was a royal, you know.”
Aril, where are you? I want out of here.
“Royal what?” I said.
“A member of the high court.”
High court? I thought about the tattoo video outside the body magic parlor and its promise of high court enhancements, the gold tramp stamp Aril’s glamour had possibly given me.
“I…I don’t really know what that is,” I said. “The high court.”
“You’ve heard of a country called England? Read about it, perhaps?”
“It doesn’t exist anymore,” I said.
“Right you are. A pity. I wish I could have seen it.”
I watched the door, willing Aril to return.
Please get back here. I’m going to be certifiable if you don’t get back soon.
“Aril was a nephew to the queen,” Titus said.
“What queen?”
He laughed. “You can’t be serious. Rasha, of course.”
“Rasha.”
The fae history book had mentioned a Queen named Rasha who had sacrificed herself to form the hollows. Was Aril’s aunt that same Rasha?”
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 13
