Unveiled

by Ruth Vincent

  “Thanks. Now I feel even more intimidated than I did going in.” I grimaced.

  He took my hand under the table and squeezed it. “You have nothing to fear here. You’re good at earning people’s trust.”

  I shook my head as I set my cider down on the table. “How do you know?”

  “You did a pretty good job earning mine. And I’m sure I’m a far tougher nut to crack than this girl.”

  That warm melty feeling came over me again at his words, and I smiled, nudging his knee under the table.

  We held hands beside our half-drunk ciders for a moment, not saying anything, just looking into each other’s eyes.

  His took a mischievous gleam.

  “You’re not going out to see her tonight, are you?”

  “No, tomorrow.”

  “So tonight you’re free?”

  “Mm-hmm, what did you have in mind?”

  He winked at me, that wink saying everything. Then he got up from the table, and I followed suit. He hooked his thumbs through the belt loops of my jeans, and tugged suggestively towards the bedroom. I let him lead me, laughing, my heartbeat quickening as we made our way down the dark hall. He stopped at the entrance to my bedroom.

  “Is Eva going to be home tonight?” he asked, glancing at her closed door.

  “Pretty sure she’s working late.”

  “So we’ve got the apartment to ourselves, then,” Obadiah whispered into my ear, nibbling on it, sending a pleasurable shiver through me.

  I leaned back, arching my spine against the firmness of his body, feeling arousal already pooling in me. “To the bedroom, then.”

  He nudged the door open with one foot, his hands warm around my waist, and there we were, standing over my unmade bed. I fell down on my familiar ribbon quilt, and he joined me, the narrow twin-size mattress that was far too small for the two of us sinking under his weight. His mouth found mine, and all of a sudden I stopped laughing, closing my eyes as our mouths met, his kiss urgent and hungry.

  His weight pushed me into the bed. My head fell back against the pillow and I winced as I felt something hard.

  “Ow,” I gasped, rubbing the back of my head.

  I’d forgotten the knife.

  Obadiah looked up.

  “What’s a’matter?” he asked, concerned.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” I said. “Let’s continue where we left off, shall we?”

  I tried to make my voice sound light. I was trying to fool myself more than him, to squelch the dread the knife had brought back to me.

  But Obadiah raised one eyebrow.

  “What is it? You’re as transparent as glass, Mab, something is up.”

  I sighed. Sheepishly I reached under my pillow and pulled out the knife. “This showed up in my room this morning.”

  Obadiah jerked back. Instantly I regretted showing it to him. I knew he was reliving the memory of when my mother had forced him to stab himself with that thing, and he had, not knowing if it was the Vale Cleaver and he’d pop back into the human world, or it wasn’t and he would die. I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “That’s why I didn’t want to show it to you,” I said quietly. “I won’t ever try to hide things from you. I just didn’t want to make you upset.”

  “It’s okay.” He managed a smile. “I’d rather you be honest.”

  He looked down at the knife lying beside my pillow.

  “So I guess it is what I think it is?” he said, eying it warily. I noticed he didn’t touch it. The human-like warmth of it probably freaked him out. It freaked me out.

  “I’m pretty sure. I guess I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure till you saw it, since you’ve seen it a lot more recently than I have.” I grimaced, regretting the words. “It’s the knife my mother offered you, isn’t it? The Vale Cleaver?”

  “Has to be. I’ve never seen another one like it. Well, except for its double.”

  We both stared at the ancient blade, so out of place against my soft percale sheets.

  “There’s a message written on it.” I held up the blade to Obadiah, so that he could read the text in English.

  He scanned the writing. “Your mother misses you.”

  “I know.”

  Dammit, the old lump was back in my throat. Sometimes I felt bad about the way I treated her. Then again, she’d also killed people. She’d killed children. But I was her daughter, as much as I tried to forget that fact. Thinking about it, I realized how many days it had been since I’d called my human mom too, who’d done nothing wrong. Now I felt doubly guilty.

  I turned the knife over, so that he could read the message on the reverse side, then thrust it back under my pillow, figuring Obadiah had seen enough, and because I couldn’t bear that pulsing warmth in my hands.

  “Do you think there’s any truth to the message on the other side, about things getting worse in the Vale?”

  “I don’t know.” Obadiah sighed. “Things were pretty bad already.”

  “Or is that just a ploy to get me to come home faster?” I asked.

  “Could be either, knowing her. But she very well could be telling the truth. You saw how bad things got with the Elixir drought. I doubt it’s gotten better.”

  “What can we do?” I said.

  “Nothing,” Obadiah said. “We’ve had this conversation before. We still don’t have a plan.”

  The heat of desire was leaving me, worry beginning to pick away at it.

  Then a change came over his eyes, the familiar spark I loved so much.

  “Look,” he said tenderly. “If you want to go back, or feel you need to go back, you can go back. I’m sure Reggie will give you the time off. And I’ll come with you.”

  I warmed at his words. I wanted him to come with me, and yet I heard my voice saying, “You really don’t have to. I know you don’t like to leave your club alone for that long.”

  But he pressed his finger lightly to my lips.

  “In any case, you can’t leave tonight, or tomorrow, because you promised Mrs. Whatshername that you’d meet her out in West T.”

  He paused, and I saw the roguish spark in his eyes growing. I knew exactly where he was going with this, and I blushed, liking it very much. “You know, there is something we can do that could take your mind off your worries in the meantime.”

  He bent down, nibbling at my ear, and then his hot lips traveled down to kiss my neck.

  It worked. All the thoughts that had been going round and round in ineffective circles in my mind vanished in the trail of kisses down my shoulder.

  We leaned back onto the soft cotton sheets.

  I reached up, entwining my fingers in the tendrils of his hair, bringing his lips even closer against mine. This was what I’d been looking forward to all day.

  He leaned over me, the weight of his body pressing me down into the mattress. He pinned my wrists playfully behind my head.

  He loomed above me now, and I gazed up at him, drinking in the way the last rays of sun made his crisp white shirt almost glow. Leaning over me, his hands pressed over my wrists, that look in his eyes, he was a god in man’s clothing—or lack of clothing—as, never breaking eye contact, he began to slowly unbutton his shirt.

  I smiled, gazing up at him.

  And then I stopped.

  Something had caught my attention, and now that I had seen it, I couldn’t un-see it. All the desire that had been building inside me froze in an instant.

  “Obadiah, what’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said, smiling down at me, but I knew what I’d just seen.

  His hand, undoing the buttons, was shaking.

  Not shaking in a nervous way. Shaking in a full-on, tremor sort of way, like a “something was medically wrong” sort of a way. The muscles beneath his skin were flinching and twitching in a jerky offbeat rhythm from the tips of his fingers down the length of his arm.

  “Obadiah, what’s going on? Are you okay?”

  He looked at me, then down at his hand, and sa
t up, shifting away from me. He must have seen the tremor I was seeing, because he removed his hand from his button flap and thrust it into the pocket of his blue jeans, hiding it from me. There was a small flinch in his eyes, a tightening in his brow.

  “I’m fine,” he said. He bent down and began to kiss my neck again.

  The alternating swirls of his tongue with a nibble of teeth always felt delicious, but I was not going to let him distract me like this, not till he told me what was wrong.

  I sat up abruptly in bed, pulling the sheets around myself, and looked at him squarely.

  “What were we just saying? About not hiding things from each other? Hmm?” I raised one eyebrow, as best I could, in imitation of his classic one-eyebrow-raising maneuver, although I couldn’t do it nearly as well as he could.

  He smiled, but didn’t meet my eyes.

  “No,” he said quietly, sitting back upright, “we don’t.” He gazed out the window at the little sliver of sunset we could glimpse between the neighboring buildings.

  “Seriously,” I said, “what’s wrong?”

  He sighed. “It really is nothing, love. Nothing to worry about.”

  But I noticed he was sitting on his hands.

  “Come on, just tell me.”

  There was a small sheen of sweat on his brow that I could see gleaming in the fading light. It wasn’t from anything we’d been doing yet, and it wasn’t from heat. It was chilly in the apartment now.

  “I promise I’ll tell you, but can we wait to talk about it? Can we first . . . ?” He smiled charmingly at me. “I don’t want to think for a while.”

  But as good as his lips had felt, I couldn’t just turn my brain off. It was one of the downsides of being human.

  “I’m not going to be able to relax unless you tell me.”

  Obadiah sighed.

  “You’re not going to let me get away without telling you right now, are you?”

  “Of course not. I don’t let you get away with b.s., any more than you let me, and that’s why we love each other.” I smiled up at him, and his face broke out into a smile in return.

  “So why were your hands shaking like that?” I pressed him gently.

  Slowly Obadiah brought his hands back into his lap. They were still trembling like leaves in November.

  “It’s just a little tremor I get sometimes,” he said, his tone light, but he wasn’t meeting my eye.

  “Just a little tremor you get sometimes? That’s not normal; that’s concerning. Do you need to go to a doctor?”

  “It’s not a, um, health problem,” Obadiah muttered.

  “Then what is it?”

  At last he looked at me, his expression almost guilty.

  “You know, ever since we got back from the Vale eight months ago, I haven’t touched Elixir. I mean, not a drop. It’s not just that the cops raided my stash. Now that I know where it comes from, what the Queen does to her captives, I just can’t, you know? And I want to cultivate my own magic, instead of having to steal it from others. So that’s why I quit taking the stuff.”

  “I know.” I smiled at him. “I’m proud of you.”

  “Don’t be so proud,” he said, his eyes downcast again.

  I touched his cheek, turning his head to face me. “Obadiah, if you had a little Elixir, it’s not the end of the world. One drink isn’t what’s keeping those kids in prison. It’s the Fairy Queen who . . .”

  “I will NEVER drink Elixir again.”

  The sudden volume of his voice startled me and I drew my hand back.

  Instantly he lowered it. “I can’t. How could I? Knowing what I know now? Mab, I have nightmares about them. All those children—their sleeping, dead faces. I can’t, I can’t, I just can’t.”

  “I know,” I said. “I can’t either.”

  We’d both woken each other up in the night from bad dreams about the fairies’ human captives we’d seen in the Vale—whom we’d been unable to save. He held me and rocked me when I came to, screaming and clawing at invisible cocoons, and I held him when it was his turn.

  “I understand why you don’t drink Elixir. But if you’ve fallen off the wagon once, you shouldn’t beat yourself up,” I started, but he interrupted me.

  “It’s not that. I haven’t ‘fallen off the wagon,’ as you say. I haven’t had any Elixir.”

  “So what is it?”

  “I think that’s the problem. The problem is I haven’t had any.”

  I looked up at him, not understanding.

  “These symptoms started when I stopped drinking Elixir,” he said quietly.

  A lump of cold dread filled my stomach.

  What if Obadiah needed the Elixir? I’d seen the symptoms of Elixir sickness in the victims of the Elixir drought. I’d just never thought of it with Obadiah, because he seemed so human. The “Thirst,” as the fairies called Elixir sickness, had four stages. The first one was tremors. The second was weakness. The third was madness. The last was death.

  “Oh my god,” I whispered. “You’re half fairy. You must need the Elixir to survive. Obadiah, you’ve got to drink some. I understand your ethical objections; I have them too. But you won’t help the cause if you don’t have your health. If this is the first symptom of Elixir Thirst, you can’t let it get a foothold. You need to take some Elixir immediately.”

  Obadiah was starting to get dressed, and I noticed he shoved his hands back in his pockets whenever he could, so I wouldn’t see him shaking. “That’s the thing, though. I don’t know if I actually need it. I’m not like other fairies. I’m half human too. Maybe that makes me hardier? Maybe it means I can live without it?”

  He wrapped his arms around me, and I leaned back against him, thinking. His heart was a warm, steady presence at my back, but my mind was whirling. Did he need Elixir as a half Fey? I wasn’t sure, given that he was the only half fairy I’d ever met, the only one I’d ever known existed. But I didn’t want to find out the hard way. I couldn’t let him take that risk.

  I twisted my hips so that we were face-to-face.

  “Obadiah, until we figure out what it is that’s causing these symptoms and what to do about it, drink a little Elixir, okay?”

  He shook his head in disgust.

  “No, I’m serious. It’s for your health.”

  “I’m fine.” The edge was back in his voice.

  “No, you’re not fine.”

  “I’ll be fine. The shakes aren’t that bad; they’re not interfering with my life. Occasionally I’ll drop a glass in the club. Reuben calls me a klutz, but it’s not like I can’t do my job. I don’t need to drink any Elixir.”

  I frowned at him. “The shakes are just stage one of the Elixir Thirst and you know it. You can’t take that risk.”

  He frowned at me. “I’m not drinking any Elixir. I couldn’t live with myself if I did. I can handle the shakes and the . . . other stuff. I’m fine.”

  “What other stuff?” I asked.

  But he refused to answer me.

  “I said, I’m fine.”

  I shot him a look that said I didn’t believe it one bit. “I love you. That means I worry about you. Those two go hand in hand. Come on, if it was me who was shaking and sweating and worse, you’d be worried about me.”

  “I’d be going out of my mind, love,” Obadiah said quietly, cradling me against him, my cheek pressed against his chest, feeling the rhythm of his heart.

  I ran my fingers through his curly hair.

  “So if you won’t do it for your own health and well-being, do it for me?”

  “Don’t say that. That’s not fair.”

  “I’m just saying, don’t take the risk. A little Elixir wouldn’t kill you.” I nuzzled against him. “And I don’t think it will kill any kids in the Vale either. It’s the Fairy Queen who’s responsible for their deaths, not you.”

  “I used to drink Elixir ignorantly, but now I know it comes from human suffering.”

  It didn’t used to come from human suffering. Not in the golden ag
e, when the Elixir streams replenished themselves, when fairies deserved their magic, I thought glumly. But since the drought, he was right.

  “There has to be another way,” I said. “There has to be another way to get fairies, and half fairies, their Elixir, without killing people.”

  Obadiah was silent.

  I gazed up at him, studying the face of the man I was growing to love.

  And in that moment I made my decision.

  I couldn’t let him get sick from the Thirst. I didn’t want him to risk his life for his principles.. My hands clenched in the folds of the sheets.

  “I have to go back,” I whispered. I wasn’t sure exactly when I would leave, but I couldn’t put it off. Obadiah’s condition had pushed me over the edge. I had to deal with everything that was wrong in my world.

  “You don’t have to go back,” Obadiah said, knowing exactly where I meant.

  “I had to go back eventually. This just gave me extra motivation. I mean, I wasn’t going to let all those kids sit and rot there. And my Shadow too.”

  I still had nightmares about the girl, whose place I had taken in the human world when I became a changeling. In my dreams she was always chasing after me through dark tunnels of stone.

  “I have to save them all,” I said.

  “Mab, you can’t save everyone.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but shut it. He was right, but that didn’t change the need I felt in my heart.

  “When we go back, what’s your plan?” Clearly he realized I’d made up my mind.

  “Wait, what’s the ‘we’ you’re talking about? Obadiah, it’s my problem; it’s my fight.”

  “No, we’re in this together.”

  “You are not coming with me. My mother tried to kill you the last time you were there. It’s not safe for you. I need to go alone.”

  “No, you don’t.” Obadiah looked almost offended by the suggestion. “If I’m a boyfriend worth my salt, I’m not going to let you face your biggest demons alone.”

  I wasn’t going to let him risk his life for me, but it touched me to the quick that he wanted to, that he was instantly willing, for me. I hadn’t realized how lonely I had been all these years on my own, without a connection to the Fey world. And now for the first time, I wasn’t alone. I had someone to share these burdens with. But still, I cared about him far too much to let him do something stupid, just because he loved me.