by SM Reine
“Fuck everything?” Arawn asked with a sly grin. “Do I need to protect the Hounds from you?”
“I am not in the mood. Fuck off.”
“Right here? Right now?”
“Arawn, please,” Charity said.
“Ooh, the p-word.” He stuck a needle in his tattoo gun. The gun itself was not sterile, and he wasn’t wearing gloves, but it was still slightly less gross than usual. “What’s got you like this?”
“Everything!”
“Come here and talk to papa.” He patted the tattoo chair.
“You’re not inking me with one of your gross pictures.” Arawn was a big fan of gross tattoos. Stuff that looked like rotting bodies and maggots and stuff.
“People pay me a lot for my tattoos,” Arawn said. “You’d be lucky if I did draw on you.” He traced his tongue over his upper lip. “Tell you what. If you sit your ass down, I’ll let you pick your first tattoo, even if it’s something all stupid white girls like to get. Like flowers. Or a bird.”
The old dental chair did look much more comfortable than the bench she was on.
Charity flopped onto it. A Hound stuck its head over the side to sniff at her, as if evaluating her tastiness, and Arawn punched it in the skull to make it run off.
“So Genesis is probably in danger,” she said. “That’s a thing.”
Arawn licked his tattoo needle. “Bet it’s Marion’s fault.”
“Yes! It’s Marion’s fault!”
“Shocking.” The needle came out of his mouth black, as though he’d dipped it in ink. He snagged a Hound by the collar as it slithered past him, yanking it halfway into his lap. “Lemme tag this guy’s ear real quick and I’ll get to you.”
“Not with the same needle,” Charity said.
“Picky, picky, picky. You act like you’ll die of hepatitis. You’re a fucking vampire!”
“There hasn’t been adequate research to determine if vampires are susceptible to blood-borne illness. I’m not risking it.” She groaned and threw an arm over her eyes. “Not that blood-borne illness will be a worry if Genesis gets screwed up. Nothing will exist if that happens. No undercity, no Sheol…”
“No revenants,” Arawn said.
She hesitated. She hadn’t given it thought until that moment. “This is probably also true, and…I don’t know if that would be such a bad outcome.”
Charity looked down at her chest for the first time since Seth had tossed her through a ley line.
It was amazing that they’d even let her walk away from Alfheimr. There was no doubt what had produced the blood that caked her shirt. Nobody but the sidhe bled liquid emeralds and sapphires.
An entire legion had gotten mauled, and Charity had gone to Alfheimr drenched in their blood, and she’d still walked away.
She was so stressed out that it felt like someone was twisting a corkscrew into her heart.
“Char,” Arawn said. It sounded like he’d already said her name a few times and she hadn’t heard him. She finally looked up from her bloody clothes. “The world without revenants would be a shitty world, and I wouldn’t want to live in it.”
The sentiment didn’t uncorkscrew her heart, but she did feel a little tingly.
“There will also be no humans if the universe unravels and explodes,” she added, “and that’s definitely a problem.”
“Shame.” He kicked the foot pedal, and pressed the buzzing tattoo gun to the inside of the Hound’s ear. Its howl bounced off the old medical equipment hanging on the walls.
“There’s this kid who’s got to get through this hole in space-time—they’re calling it the Genesis warp—and if he doesn’t go through in time, then everything might explode. The last twenty years will definitely be undone. Losing twenty years is the good result, though.”
He gave a disinterested hum. His left arm was barely more than bone dangling with scraps of skin but he still didn’t struggle to pin the infuriated Hound against his thighs.
“Marion says she wants to make sure Benjamin gets through the Genesis warp,” Charity said.
“You don’t believe her.”
“She’s up to something. I don’t know what. She’s obviously lying to Seth—and why would she lie to Seth if she was trying to do the good honorable thing?”
Arawn released the Hound. It bit his leg. There wasn’t much to damage, but he kicked it off anyway. “Why’s it good and honorable to make Genesis happen?”
“That’s how it’s supposed to happen!”
“There’s a difference between ‘it did happen’ and ‘it was meant to happen.’”
“Everything that happens is meant to happen,” Charity said. “Everything happens for a reason.” She had to believe that. She wasn’t a revenant by a casual backhand of fate, but because she had a role in this world that was best served by a twisted vampire.
Arawn whistled to another Hound, setting down his tattoo gun. He wasn’t going to mark this one on its ear. It was limping around the parlor. As soon as it got within arm’s reach, he grabbed it to inspect its bright-red paw pads.
“Even if Marion really wants to get Benjamin through the warp, chances are pretty much zero it’ll happen at this point. She doesn’t have an army under her control. They’re all with fucking Konig.”
That earned Arawn’s first real emotional reaction. He looked angry. “That pissant isn’t dead yet?”
“And then Seth… Ugh. Seth! He must know that Marion’s in over her head, but he’s choosing to ignore it. Anything to stay in the mortal worlds with her for a few more minutes!”
“None of this sounds like your problem.”
Charity propped herself up on her elbows to glare at him. “He’s my best friend! Of course it’s my problem!”
“Death is your best friend?” Arawn asked. “He’s a limp rag that got hair-sprayed into the shape of a boring, vaguely god-like figure.”
“He was the only friend I had when I was pretending to be mundane at the hospital. There was Oliver, but…” He’d tried to kill her. Seth hadn’t done that yet. And when he did, eventually—because he’d have to—it would be in a much kinder fashion. She entrusted Seth with both her life and death. “He’s a great person, a great doctor, and usually very smart. He’s also the longest relationship I’ve got in my life right now.”
“So?”
“So he’s being stupid! And he’s not listening to me!”
“Yeah,” Arawn said with surprising sympathy. “Love makes all of us morons. So what you wanna do to save him from his stupid self?”
Charity sat up straight on the chair, the leather creaking underneath her. “You want to help with Seth? You hate Seth.”
“Like I said. Love makes us stupid.”
And then Charity’s heart stopped too.
She stared at Arawn, unsure if she’d heard what she thought she’d heart, and unsure if she wanted to have heard it.
“Did you just say that you…?” No, he’s not in love with you. That’s stupider than Seth believing Marion wholesale.
“Remember that first dinner we had in the undercity?” Arawn asked, abruptly changing subjects. He returned his attention to the Hound’s paws. There was an inch-long thorn from the Middle Worlds buried between two toes.
“First dinner?” She remembered a lot of dinners with Arawn. Lunches, too. As long as her relationship had been with Seth, her relationship with the heir to the Pit of Souls had been much more intense.
He’d asked specifically about the first dinner. Charity tried to remember.
“Kebabs,” Arawn said helpfully.
Oh no. Now she remembered. “You didn’t tell me they were human sweetbreads until it was too late.”
“You already had the blood smeared all over your mouth.” He grinned. He seemed to have fewer teeth than in recent days. It was most likely that Adàn, irritable shifter that he was, had punched them out of his skull. “You mostly wanted to know if it was ethically sourced. What’s the ethical sourcing of human meat? Volunteers? Who
in their right mind fucking volunteers to be eaten?”
“Cannibalism fetishists,” Charity said defensively. “They exist. People will fetishize anything.”
“It wouldn’t support an infernal population if we stuck to cannibalism fetishists for meat. It’s also not nice to eat fetishists even if they ask for it. They’re sick, you know. There’s a reason you nurse types don’t let suicidal people plant bullets in their skulls.”
“Because you care about the safety of crazy people?”
“You do,” Arawn said. “And I’m saying there’s no ethical way to feed everyone, even when you’re straining the bounds of ethics.”
“I’m not talking about feeding everyone like that.” As much as Charity hated it, she understood that most predators needed to do what they did to survive. She couldn’t begrudge demons breakfast any more than a mountain lion. “I’m just talking about what I eat. I don’t need to eat human meat to survive.”
“But you sure are beautiful when you do it.” Arawn gave a triumphant cry when he finally managed to wrench the faerie thorn out of the Hound’s paw. Its whine shook Charity’s eardrums. “Then there was dinner the next day.”
She didn’t need help remembering that one, although it hadn’t been an official dinner. “Okay, but they were murderers.” Arawn had plucked humans out of a gang war on the surface and dragged them down for retribution. “What’s the point here?”
The Hound struggled out from Arawn’s grip, snapping at him once before darting away.
“You tore their fucking heads off and drank the blood that dribbled out, like this.” Arawn mimicked holding a severed head over his, and he licked in the most unflattering way possible. “Then you cracked their ribcages open…” He stomped on the ground. The Hounds scattered. “And you ate their guts fresh, one whole day after you freaked out over human kebab.”
It wasn’t like Charity savored those memories. “You’re picking on me.”
“How’d you end up looking like this?” he asked, taking her arm into his hands with surprising gentleness. He’d always been so gentle with her like that. “All this blood, it came from somewhere. Also, what do you want tattooed on you?”
His tattoo gun was buzzing. Charity’s heart flip-flopped with nerves.
She could have just told him to go away, like she’d always done before, but…
Okay, she wanted one of his tattoos on her body. There was no point denying it to herself. Just no maggots.
“I’d like a caduceus,” Charity said. “That’s snakes wrapped around a staff. The medical symbol. I want to remember that I’m here to take care of people, not eat them.”
He lowered the needle to her skin without warning, without asking for details, without reference. It felt like being scratched by the claw of a persistent cat. “So you ate people. That’s what happened.”
“Yes, I ate people.” She let her head fall back on the chair and shut her eyes. The needle moved slowly down her forearm while Arawn held her in place. “It’s the most people I’ve ever killed at one time.”
“They were bad guys?”
“They were acting on Konig’s orders.”
“So bad guys,” he said. “Bet you saved a lot of people doing it.”
She remembered Ymir shepherding the seelie through the Veil. She didn’t know what was on the other side, but she knew it had to be better than what Konig would have done to them. “Gods, I hope so.”
“You know, I like hurting people,” Arawn said. “I like destroying bodies. I desecrate the dead and vivisect the living.”
“That’s not something I want to hear while you’re drawing permanently on my arm,” Charity said. Even though it was far from a surprise.
“That’s the thing. I’m desecrating your body right now. Changing it forever. And it hurts while I’m doing it—I like knowing you’re in pain.”
That was so gross. “Tattooing is different from what you do to all the…you know, the human meat that you keep around.”
“There’s good ways to feed our urges, and there’s bad ways to feed our urges,” Arawn said. “You feed your urges in the good ways. For the first time, I’m imagining a world where I can feed my urges in only the good ways too.”
Her eyes popped open. Arawn was leaning over her, his focus on her arm, and she got to study his misshapen features.
She had never felt so flattered in her life.
“Thank you,” she said softly.
“Konig’s different. Marion’s different. What they do has nothing to do with love and fun, but with some weirdo game of superiority. They can’t live like us. They act classy but they’re worse than dirt.”
Her mouth twitched with a smile. “So what do I do?”
“You get on my chair, tell me your problems, and I help you,” Arawn said. “I’ll send my hungriest Hounds to Ransom Falls so that they can eat Marion’s guts. I don’t want a world without revenants.”
She suddenly didn’t know what to do with her hands. Or her lips. She was thinking about her lips a lot right now, and Arawn’s lips, which were sort of rubbery and tattooed on the inside with obscene words.
Charity had completely forgotten that she was even in pain from the tattoo gun.
“You’d do that for me?”
“Sure. I like you how I’ve never liked anyone. You’ve made me stupid. I like that too. You’ve got all my demons for whatever you want, so long as it involves making sure Genesis happens right.” He lifted the tattoo gun again, and he wiped the excess ink away.
He’d already finished a small, simple caduceus on her arm. It was beautiful. He was an amazing artist.
Charity lifted her arm to admire it. Her eyes were pricking with tears, which she tried to hold back. A crying revenant would not be pretty.
“You know, you’ve changed me too. You made me feel like…I don’t know. Like I’m not a mistake.”
“You’re the gods’ best design,” Arawn said. His thumb pressed against her tattoo, leaving an aching indentation on her dry husk of flesh. “In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I love the hell out of you. What’d you think about kissing? You seem like the kissing type.”
She would have probably fallen over if she hadn’t been reclining. “That sounds all right to me.”
He bent over the tattoo chair and kissed her.
Arawn tasted like rotten meat. His tongue was slimy, like the maggots he so often tattooed on members of his gang. His teeth had edges like razors.
Charity loved it.
She loved him.
That wasn’t something she’d expected to happen, but it was the result. And with their fingers wrapping together, pinning her against the tattoo chair where she’d just been inked, she felt the strain of fear draining out of her chest. All the guilty feelings over killing those unseelie—gone.
She was validated.
And there was no doubt in her mind that she’d be able to stop Marion with Arawn’s help.
20
Seth caught up with Marion preparing for the celebratory dinner in her new bedroom in Alfheimr. Her ever-present handmaidens had vanished, leaving her alone with her mother in a room that looked like it had once belonged to Titania. The unicorn mural was very much the aesthetic of the queen who’d chosen to wear butterfly wings everywhere she went.
He stood by the door, facing the wall respectfully, until Ariane finished tying the strings on the back of Marion’s dress.
“You can come in and bar the door,” Marion said. “You don’t have to wait over there.”
He did as she asked, putting a heavy wooden bar in place to hold the doors shut. It weighed as much as a mortal adult did, but it still didn’t feel heavy enough to protect them from the world outside. Even seventeen layers of Marion’s magic couldn’t have done that.
Seth lingered at the door after that, hands on the bar.
Charity’s words were stuck in his mind. The doubt in her eyes, the worry in her voice… They compounded with the seeds of doubt that Rylie had
planted deep within Seth’s heart.
Everyone hates Marion for a reason.
He turned to face her. She was a taller, younger version of her mother, who looked simultaneously softer and harsher. Ariane was threading the royal diadem in Marion’s hair.
“We’ve only half an hour until you’re due at dinner,” Ariane was saying as she arranged pins in Marion’s hair. She jammed them into place and ignored the way her daughter winced. “Have you begun to plan your stance for today’s events?”
“Konig won’t want me to speak,” Marion said.
“But you must be ready regardless. Tell me now…how do you feel about taking the Summer Court?”
“It’s a blessing to have secured our homelands at long last.” Marion glanced at Seth, and her shoulders sagged with guilt. “Now all sidhe may live in…” She shut her eyes for a moment. “We will live in peace under King ErlKonig.”
Ariane pinched her arm hard. “Unconvincing. Try again.”
“Leave her alone,” Seth said. “She’s doing fine.” Although Marion was obviously far from fine. The fact that she looked at all disturbed by the outcome of the invasion meant she was on the brink of snapping. Nobody faked happy better than Marion.
Everyone hates Marion for a reason.
“I don’t know about fine, but perhaps we will settle for sufficient,” Ariane said. She checked her watch. “My ride should be here shortly.”
“Your ride?” Seth asked.
He’d barely gotten the last syllable out when the air in Marion’s new bedroom rippled.
Another portal opened in her room. It was identical to the one that Ariane had entered through in Sheol, which was the only reason that Seth noticed that the floor was wet near Marion’s feet. She’d smashed another potion in order to help the Sheol gateway orient itself to the Middle Worlds.
Adàn Pedregon stepped through this time. He wasn’t dressed for the fluctuating weather in the Middle Worlds, nor did he seem to be dressed for entrance into civil society. He was shirtless, exposing the fresh tattoos Arawn had marked on his back, and he wore jeans dirtied by Sheol’s soil. It looked like he’d been hard at work digging holes or something.
