Glamour of Midnight

by Casey L. Bond

  His eyes flicked between me and the charred candle wick. I focused on it, thinking about the fibers and what they might look like bathed in flame, but I couldn’t get a clear vision in my mind. I thought about the feeling of heat and the time I walked too close to a campfire and my skirts went up in flames. Iric threw me to the ground and rolled me around until it was put out, and then he checked me for burns. I was fine. Not a single burn or scratch on my skin.

  The wick hadn’t even begun to smoke. “Will the flame, Karis.”

  “Will the flame,” I grumbled. “Like I’m supposed to be able to will this thing to life,” I sputtered, shoving my sleeve up. The Asper was iridescent on my skin, but every scale shimmered so violently that it appeared to be alive, writhing beneath my flesh.

  “You need to focus. Forget about the Asper and will the flame.” He handed the candle to me. “Hold it. Maybe that’ll help.”

  I held it loosely, then tighter as I tried to make it catch fire. But nothing happened.

  “Make a flame!” he shouted suddenly.

  “I can’t make a flame! Nothing is working! I can’t picture it.”

  With a flick of his finger, the candle wick caught fire. “Do you see it now?” he asked snidely before blowing it out. Show off. “Your turn.”

  I stared at the candle, thinking of it bursting into flames and melting away in a fury of fire and wax. I was about to tell him where to shove the taper, when all of a sudden, he began clapping. Glancing from his hands to the taper, I noticed the wick was on fire.

  “Anger is one of your triggers,” he granted softly. He’d been baiting me.

  I blew the taper out and threw it onto a slab of stone. A sliver of smoke rose from the wick. “Loftin, what if I get angry and overreact? If I’m able to conjure fire, create light ribbons, build air bubbles, and make the earth quake…what if I lose control?”

  “Air bubbles and earthquakes?” he asked carefully.

  I winced. “Yeah.”

  He pinched his lips together. “You can hurt someone if you lose control. And as much as I hate to admit it, Finean is right. You need to train; both to learn your powers, and to learn to control them and your emotions.” Pausing, he remarked, “You look like you’re somewhere else,” interrupting my thoughts.

  “I’m worried about Iric.”

  “Finean will find him,” he mused nonchalantly. But the look he gave me affirmed that it wasn’t time to run yet. I glanced around, probing for the shadows watching over us. Probably Leancan.

  “How will he find him?”

  “Mirrors, water, metal. If there’s anything reflective, he can see what the mirrored surface sees.”

  I nodded once, biting my lip. Iric was in the woods somewhere. Unless he stopped for water, I wasn’t sure he’d be near anything reflective.

  Loftin pulled a piece of fruit from his pocket. It was still ripe. I grabbed for the red orb, but he raised his hand, keeping it out of my reach. A playful smile spread over his face. “Not so fast. I want you to make it rot.”

  “Why?” That was a waste. There was so little in this place, why would I want to make a good piece of fruit go bad?

  “To see if you can.”

  “It’ll rot anyway if it sits there. Why should I help it along?”

  “Karis?”

  “Hmm?”

  He sat it on a stone in front of me. “Make it rot.”

  I blew out a frustrated breath. Fine. I reached out to grab the apple, but he stopped me.

  “Try from there first.”

  “It would be easier if I held it,” I whined.

  He smiled as if to say it sure would.

  “You’ve seen rotten fruit. You’ve felt it and know how it smells. Make it rot, Karis.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  Loftin smiled. “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Make. It. Rot.”

  I shook my head. The people in Ironton were starving. I wouldn’t make this fruit go bad, not when they needed food.

  With a flash of metal, Loftin cleaved the fruit in two.

  The tips of my ears heated. “You have no idea what it’s like!”

  He scoffed. “I don’t? Oh, just tell me how much I’ve eaten over the last ten years. Tell me what a glutton I am. You don’t know anything about what I’ve done to survive. You think you’re the only ones who went hungry? Was it just your family, the people of the Trenches, or all of Ironton who suffer so badly?”

  “The Slopers have plenty to eat.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because they have iron to purchase food with!” I fumed.

  “And why do they have so much more than the people of the Trenches?”

  My hands shook with anger. I’d never seen them, but the Slopers all had red hair, according to Iric. The color supposedly hated by the fae. Because of this hereditary trait, they deserved to be exalted. The gods had smiled on their families and their ancestors by giving them the land—rich in iron, a metal the fae also hated. And we were enslaved to the way of life to which we were born, simply because our hair was dark or fair or anything but red. It was ridiculous.

  Red like their hair.

  Red like the peel of this apple.

  The fae hated red? I’d yet to see a fae who didn’t love the color of blood, and every human and fae I’d ever seen bled the same crimson hue.

  “Karis,” came Loftin’s voice.

  But I couldn’t see. A black shroud of buzzing, angry wasps writhed over my vision.

  “Karis, stop,” he warned. Hands gripped my arms and shook until my vision cleared. “Stop!” Loftin barked. “Just stop.”

  His face was pale. The tendons on his neck were taut and his pulse pounded along the column of his throat as his orange eyes searched mine, wary and afraid. I swallowed and searched beyond him. There was no fruit, no taper, not even the marble slab remained. Everything had been turned to dark ash.

  I covered my mouth with trembling fingers. “Oh, no.”

  “It’s okay. You’re safe,” he tried to reassure me. But what else could he say? I turned it all into nothing. I wasn’t safe, and neither was he as long as he was with me. No one was, if I could reduce something so solid and alive to soft, gray remnants. The breeze began to scatter the ashes, hiding what I’d done.

  Squeezing my temples, I tried to quiet the roaring of my heartbeat in my ears. In my head. My lungs burned.

  Loftin approached with measured steps. “No,” I gritted, backing away from him.

  “Calm down. You only did what I asked.”

  “You shouldn’t have asked it.”

  “It was only an apple, Karis.”

  I looked into his eyes and saw he didn’t believe the words he’d just said, either. If I could do that to an apple, to solid stone, I could obliterate anything. My lungs clawed for air, but couldn’t reach any.

  I ran.

  19

  KARIS

  Loftin ran behind me, staying nearby but giving me wide berth as I stumbled through the forest. Through the once-proud trees was a clearing where the skeleton of another structure lay, bone-white stone arching into the sky overhead.

  Two Leancan caught up to us, but kept their distance as Loftin approached.

  And then the earth turned frigid. Strands of my hair whipped my face as she approached, knocking the Leancan off their feet and slamming them into the earth on her way to me. I considered letting the Banshee kill me or take me to Nemain.

  Loftin must have seen it on my face. He shook me. “You’ll never find Iric if you give up. Do not give up!” He waited until I looked in his eyes. “We’re too exposed. We have to run!”

  Loftin shouted, reaching a hand out for mine. Then he whispered, “This is our chance to escape.” I took his hand and we ran as fast as we could, jumping over the rocks and boulders, carving a path over land, but it was getting us nowhere. The next shriek was just behind us.

  He was right. Out in the open, there was nowhere for us to hide. The Ba
nshee flew across the land at speeds I couldn’t even comprehend. I could hear the claws on her fingers emerge as she flew impossibly fast, in a straight line toward us. Loftin shoved me to the ground and covered me with his body as she swooped.

  My chin struck the earth and my teeth crashed together, upper against lower. “Are you okay?” he panted.

  “Yeah.”

  “We have to run. She’s circling around, but we’ll have to dive down when she comes back and run when she doesn’t catch us.”

  He didn’t say what to do if she caught us. He didn’t insist I use my power or conjure light or try something new. He didn’t tell me to turn her into nothing. Maybe he knew I couldn’t have done it. Not even to save us both. I wasn’t sure I could come back from that, not the same as I was now. I’d used my crazy light ribbons to kill the Banshee so I could protect Loftin, but turning one to ash? That would make me just like Nemain. No, our only options were either to keep running until she gave up, or until we were too weak to go any farther.

  Just react. Run. Dive. Run. Stay alive. Don’t give up, he commanded.

  Stumbling forward, we ran as fast as our legs would carry us until the loud shriek behind us had Loftin screaming for me to drop to the ground. He was only a second behind, but his weight never fell on mine. I glimpsed back to see him in the clutches of the creature, being taken far too high into the air. His legs flailed uselessly.

  “Stop! Please don’t hurt him. Please!” I shrieked.

  The Banshee gave a grisly smile, but slowly lowered him back toward the earth and brought him forward to me. “Your kind never asks. Never says please,” she rasped.

  “My kind?” I breathed.

  “Royalty,” she snarled.

  “The others couldn’t talk. The other Banshees,” I concluded, trying to distract her as she hovered closer to the ground. Loftin clawed at his throat where she held him, trying not to allow her to asphyxiate him.

  Closer. She kept easing further down.

  Hovering just above the ground, she dropped Loftin, who collapsed in a heap on the ground, gasping for air, his face mottled and purple.

  “I am their leader,” she announced, a proud smile stretching over her face. “The strongest.”

  “Why do you keep attacking us?” I eased toward Loftin, whose eyes told me to keep back.

  “It is my order,” she answered simply.

  “Nemain gave you the order to attack us?”

  “Not attack,” she enunciated. She looked to me and rasped, “Retrieve.” But when she narrowed her eyes on Loftin, she whispered, “Kill.”

  I wasn’t going to let that happen.

  “Your services are no longer required, bounty hunter,” she imparted to Loftin in a saccharine voice. Just before she swooped down to grab him again.

  I jumped to my feet and raised the arm with the Asper. When she saw it, she hissed and flew backward. “Not alive. Can’t hurt me!” she wailed.

  Swallowing, and with every ounce of strength in me, I asked the snake to protect us. I imagined it alive, its fangs sharp as needles and ready to bite the beast who was ready to hurt Loftin. My forearm began to itch. Looking down, scales formed, not of mirrored ink, but actual scales. An Asper curled itself around my arm, striking out at the Banshee.

  The Banshee darted a quick glance at Loftin. He was too far away from me, and she knew I wasn’t faster than she was. I couldn’t reach him in time. She raced toward him, but I threw the Asper at her. It coiled around her neck, sinking its teeth into her flesh, retracting and sinking in again. It struck her until she fell from the sky and then slithered back across the ground to my feet, which were now next to Loftin. He scuttled backward, afraid of the animal that had just saved us. He surveyed me, eyes wide, as though he had never seen me before. As though he were terrified.

  “The Asper saved us.”

  “I know,” he whispered.

  I grabbed his arm. “I remember. I made the connection to my mother when I was a child. She’d begun experimenting with taking powers from a few Seelie she’d caught trespassing and then she used their powers on me, to try to force me to do things. I made the funnel to take anything she absorbed, so I could fight back.”

  He nodded. “Good.”

  The Asper coiled into a ball, waiting at my feet until I crouched and extended my arm to him, and then he coiled around it, situating himself so that his fangs were still pointed at the writhing Banshee only feet away.

  “You killed me,” the Banshee wailed.

  While Loftin stood, I inched toward her. “Karis,” he warned.

  “It’s okay,” I answered over my shoulder. She was in no shape to fight, and my Asper was ready to protect me again.

  “You tried to kill him,” I told her. “I was defending him.” But I didn’t turn her to ash. I didn’t obliterate her into nothing.

  “You don’t understand us.” The back of her head hit the ground with a dull thud. A black tear leaked from her eye, trickling into her dark, stringy hair before it disappeared.

  The air around us was suffused with feelings of sorrow and desperation. It seeped into my pores until all I wanted to do was cry with her. “Help me understand,” I implored.

  She raised her head, her neck shaking with exhaustion. Then she reached out for me. My Asper hissed his disapproval, echoed by Loftin, but with my free hand, I touched hers.

  The Banshee sighed, her raspy voice fading into one of beauty. “Thank you,” she uttered as her eyes flickered.

  Her pale green skin faded to golden chestnut. Her hair thickened and the dark strands became a soft, honeyed brown. Her eyes settled into the color of rich earth. “Our true form,” she whispered.

  Loftin knelt by my side. “You’re Seelie. You’re from Autumn.” The sadness in his voice was almost too much to bear.

  The faery’s eyes fluttered, a crystalline tear falling from the corner of her eye this time. She opened her mouth to speak, but a soft gasp expelled from her mouth and she was gone.

  I covered my face in shame. My skin crawled as the Asper sank back into my skin.

  I couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t bear to face Loftin or the Seelie faery I just killed. Instead, I sat on the ground, completely broken, as sobs overtook my body. I killed her. I was responsible for her death. Loftin settled beside me, tucking me into his arms. I didn’t deserve his kindness.

  “You didn’t know. I didn’t know. No one did.”

  The words did not help or comfort me. If I were Loftin, I would have risen to my feet and walked away. I would have left me in the middle of Faery to fend for myself.

  “I’m so sorry,” I cried.

  “Karis,” he paused. “If you hadn’t touched her, we wouldn’t know what lay beneath. All this time we thought Nemain had unleashed the Unseelie. Now we know she’s been turning the Seelie into monsters, too.”

  What sort of person did such things? One who was purely evil. A queen who wanted to punish...

  “I’m an abomination,” I whispered. “You should have killed me the second I stepped out of Ironton.”

  Arms propped on his knees, he hung his head. “I’m not sure what you are, Karis, but ‘abomination’ is not a word I would use to describe you.”

  I closed my eyes and wished I’d never received sight, or been born fae, or been safely hidden away. There was a part of me that didn’t believe Finean when he told me Nemain was my mother and I was the only one who could fight her; that she was coming for me and wanted to kill me, to take my power. I didn’t want power. None of this seemed real. It felt like I was trapped in a nightmare.

  I grew up hearing stories, meant to lull the children of Ironton to sleep, about a lost fae princess who walked the woods at night, crying and lost, until one day, a faery prince with shimmering wings swooped down to carry her back to his castle. They fell in love instantly, and she never felt lost again. Because she was exactly where she was supposed to be.

  Did Finean make that up, too?

  It was a romantic fantasy,
but reality was far different. If I was the lost princess, I had been lost for a very long time. There was no faery prince to save the day, just the broken people around me. There were no beautiful fae castles. Only ruin, monsters, decay and death, and innocent fae turned into beasts.

  And then there was me. Capable of such horrible things.

  It was too much.

  I couldn’t sit there and look at the faery I killed for a second longer.

  I pushed to my feet and walked stiffly away. Loftin followed behind, but gave me space. He was watching over me still, but I had no doubt where we stood now. I was his iron.

  LOFTIN

  The Leancan had recovered and silently escorted us back to the ruined palace of the Spring Court. But I wasn’t ready to go into the darkness again. Not until she understood that she was the light.

  I decided to tell her how Nemain came to power, how she was born and then taken away. And then about my father’s role in all this.

  Karis stared at me, giving me her full attention.

  “After Winter fell, my father, in an attempt to save our court from her wrath, went to Nemain and tried to form an alliance with her, promising to help find you, even if it meant betraying the other courts. In the end, it bought our people some time, but not much. He watched from a safe distance as she tore apart the Spring Court, and noticed that some fae were running away and then disappearing altogether. He saw Finean taking whomever he could through a mirror in the woods. Finean begged Father to go with him, and disclosed that the mirror led to safety, but Father refused.”

  Her lips parted. “Your father told Nemain?” she guessed.

  “He did. He shattered the glass to stop Finean and presumably stay in Nemain’s good graces. When the battle of the Spring Court was over, she came to him to see if he’d sensed you within that court. That’s when he told her about Finean. In that moment, she knew who had stolen you and where you had been taken. Even though she knew you weren’t hidden away in the remaining courts – Summer or Autumn –she shredded them anyway. The Court of Summer fell next, followed quickly by Autumn.”