“No. It really isn’t. It is in no way a date. It is a debriefing. That’s all.” Marley flicked a hand at a tabloid magazine on the kitchen table, changing the subject hurriedly. “Will you remember to take the copy of Eclipse?”
“No problem,” said Branwyn, her fingers curling into the worn plush of the couch. She was careful to keep her tone cheerful, but Marley stopped again to frown.
“You don’t mind?”
Branwyn shrugged and turned it into a stretch. “She’s my friend, too. I can’t promise to read the damn thing to her like you and her mother do. But I don’t mind visiting her, Marley. I just don’t like brooding and when I visit Penny, there’s nothing else to do.”
“Bran, I—”
“Hey, check out the time. You’re late,” Branwyn interrupted. “As enjoyable as it is imagining what your dates will get up to without you, I think you should probably interfere.”
Marley gave her another horrified look, grabbed her purse, and fled the apartment.
Branwyn regarded the closed door for a long moment. Then Marley’s calico cat jumped up on the couch and gave Branwyn a meaningful stare. It meant, Pet me or get out of my spot. Since the cat was the size of a beagle, and magical to boot, it wasn’t an idle threat. So after tickling the cat’s nose for an entertaining moment, Branwyn relinquished the couch.
The magazine on the table pulled at her gaze. She squared her shoulders and picked it up. No time like the present.
At least it was nice out—a warm September afternoon. The smoky haze of the previous month had been washed away by a recent drenching downpour and the high sky was a brilliant shade of azure blue rarely seen in the LA autumn. But lower down, the smog was already accumulating again.
The private hospital that cared for Penny had a lovely garden filled with blooming white and yellow roses on the walk from the parking lot to the building. Arbors draped with bougainvillea kept the walkway itself cool. Penny’s room was just as pleasant. In addition to all the medical equipment that kept Penny’s body going, there was a large bay window overlooking a fountain, a plush navy couch, and a matching armchair. There was enough room to throw a party, and for the first few days after Penny had been hospitalized, her friends and family had filled the place, ready to welcome her back to the world when she woke up.
But she hadn’t woken up.
Branwyn tossed the magazine onto the stack lying on the round table between the couch and armchair before going to inspect Penny. She was almost as lovely as she’d been before she'd been hurt, except her dark hair no longer shone and there was a pallor under her deep olive tan. Still, if anyone ever held a contest for a brunette Sleeping Beauty, Penelope Karzan would win.
But there were no princes to wake her with a kiss. No magic could repair what had been done to her. No science could save her. There was nothing to be done, except wait and hope for what had never happened before.
Branwyn's eyes narrowed as she scanned the machines attached to Penny. Then she pushed the call button above the bed. A moment later, when a nurse peeked in, Branwyn pointed to a new monitor.
“What's this?” It was attached to some electrodes in Penny's hair and bore the logo of Senyaza, the corporation that owned this hospital. Other than the logo, it was just a beige box, with only five numbered LED lights, each one glowing a steady amber.
The nurse, a tall, middle-aged woman who Branwyn recognized from previous visits, came in and closed the door behind her. “You didn't touch it, did you?”
“No. What is it? It wasn't here last time I visited.”
The nurse came over to check the electrodes, as if she didn't trust Branwyn to not meddle. “It's an experimental monitor our technicians are testing. You'll have to ask Mrs. Karzan for more information. She approved it.” Technician was how Senyaza liked to refer to its wizards. They were the ones who said Penny would never wake up.
Branwyn ignored that. “What does it monitor?”
The nurse assessed her, then sighed. “They're taking special readings on her deterioration. Even though she may not recover, they'll have information that might help them save somebody else.” She stroked Penny's forehead and added, “It's a bit like being an organ donor.”
Branwyn's fingers curled into her palms. “She's not dead.”
The nurse gave her a compassionate look that made Branwyn hate her. “Yes, that's the point. It's a miracle, in a way. All the literature on her condition indicates a much faster decline is typical.” She moved to the machines and began checking them over. “Still, she's fading.”
Branwyn thought it was bad taste for an employee of this particular hospital to refer to miracles.
Senyaza Corporation, while a superstar in the field of electronics and communication, was also an umbrella organization for the nephilim—crossbreed descendants of angels and humans. Penny was here despite being an ordinary human because she’d been caught up in a conflict between the angels and their children.
Marley had said that Senyaza felt responsible for the situation, but Branwyn, always the cynical one, had thought there must have been another reason—maybe they'd been trying to cover their tracks. But now she knew: they wanted to watch Penny die. They wanted to gather data and use her as a living research subject. She wondered if they were even bothering to try and save her, or if they were going by the “literature” and taking the opportunity to do some extra science on the side.
After taking a slow, deep breath to cool her temper, Branwyn told the nurse, “She wants to live.”
The nurse finished checking the machines and gave her a tight little smile. “Well then, maybe that will be enough, dear,” she said with false cheer. “We certainly don't know everything here. That's one reason we have this.” She patted the new monitor. “Have a nice visit. Make sure to keep your guest pass visible.”
Branwyn stared out the window, her face hot, as the door clicked shut behind the nurse. There were other reasons she didn't visit as often as Marley did. Marley didn't need a guest pass to visit Penny. Marley belonged there. She was under Senyaza's umbrella. Branwyn was an ordinary human, just like Penny, but Marley was not.
A month ago, almost nobody had known that. Not Marley, not Branwyn, not even Senyaza. Marley’s employer and so-called friend Zachariah Thorne did, though, and when he got into trouble, he’d dragged her in after him. But the trouble hadn’t confined itself to them, to the nephilim and angels and other supernatural types. An angel had used Penny to get to Marley, shredding their friend’s soul in the process. That was why Penny was here. That was why Penny wouldn’t wake up.
Marley had tried to keep Branwyn away from the situation. They were best friends and she’d wanted to keep at least one of her friends safe. Branwyn still wasn’t very happy about that, despite the good intentions. She preferred to make her own decisions about how much danger she faced in any given week, and her tolerance was high. A lot higher than Marley's, damnit. But she’d tried to be understanding. Branwyn and Penny were as close as family for Marley, and she’d been under a lot of pressure to deal with things she barely understood. People made mistakes in that kind of situation.
Branwyn wrapped her fingers around the rail of Penny’s bed. She might be an ordinary human, but she still had a little magic she’d acquired from Marley’s technician-wizard friend Corbin. He’d given it to her because Marley asked him to, even though it became clear later that he thought most humans were practically useless. It wasn’t very powerful, practically a toy, the kind of magic they gave nephil children to protect them from danger, but if she wanted, she could activate a magical Sight and look at the remains of Penny’s soul.
Instead, she turned away. She’d seen it before: a shredded fragmentary glow surrounding Penny, interwoven with strands of acrid light and nodes of washed-out color, burned gray and dead in places. It never changed, never improved, just like Penny. She didn't want to see that it was getting worse.
She hadn’t believed in souls before Marley turned out to have an origin story and an angelic
parent. Not souls, not angels, not magic, and certainly not fairy tales. Branwyn believed in what was real. Reality was complicated.
She suspected souls were, too.
Branwyn glared at the pile of tabloids on the table. She hadn’t liked those much before, either.
Penny had, though. She was always happy to go through a new one. They were full of modern fairy tales, she said. Sometimes they amused her and sometimes she was outraged, but she was always so vibrantly alive when she read them. Not like now.
Muttering, Branwyn grabbed the most recent edition and sat in the chair beside Penny’s bed. No matter what the nurse said about “fading,” she was visiting Penny and she was going to do it right. She flipped through the magazine and read out headlines, just in case one of them sparked the return of consciousness. If the romantic escapades of Hollywood starlets couldn’t accomplish that, what good were they?
When she got to the horoscopes, though, she closed the tabloid and tossed it back on the table. She didn’t need astrology to tell her, oh dear, things were changing, best buckle down and prepare to face some hard truths. Angels weren’t the only supernatural creatures moving around behind the scenes. According to Marley, there were monsters and demons, too. And then there were the faeries. Even the supernatural world itself had to deal with some hard truths about the faeries after recent events
Branwyn had met the faeries for herself. Just like an angel had used Penny, a faerie Duke had tried to use Branwyn. It hadn’t worked out like he planned. Or maybe it had. She really wasn't sure. Just like reality, faeries seemed to be more complicated than they appeared. Branwyn thought he’d been on Marley’s side in the end, but she wouldn't have bet her lunch money on it. The Duke had gotten what he wanted out of the situation, that much was clear. His kind, bound away from the world for centuries, had a way back again.
Senyaza was very concerned about that, Marley told Branwyn, then promptly assured her they’d kept the angels from meddling directly in human affairs for a long time; they’d be able to manage the faeries. No problem. That the faeries had completely new ways of manipulating the world was just a minor snag.
Even if Senyaza kept a lid on the faeries, Branwyn's life was changing anyhow. It had already changed. Marley couldn’t go back to a world where she didn’t know about her own parentage and neither could Branwyn. The difference was that Marley was relevant and doing things, while Branwyn was expected to stay home and keep herself safe.
Only human.
Branwyn hurled herself to her feet and kissed Penny on the cheek. “I've got to go, Penny. But I'll be back again, and sooner this time, I promise.”
Leaving her thoughts behind wasn’t as easy as leaving the hospital, and for a while she drove on autopilot. Only when she realized that she’d navigated back to the neighborhood she’d lived in as a kid did her driving acquire a purpose. Her family was always good for a distraction and with five younger siblings still living at home, somebody was certain to be there.
A few moments later, she got out of her car at the rambling house where she’d grown up. The Victorian her great-grandparents had purchased more than half a century ago had been expanded multiple times. It had been an ongoing hobby of both her grandfather and her mother’s second husband, before they both had died, and the result was a functional, if unusual-looking, blue and cream building. A quick scan of the driveway told Branwyn that most of the family was home now, although her mother hadn’t yet returned from work and her grandmother was still on her sabbatical. She could hear the noise from the street.
Letting herself into the house, she paused in the foyer to identify individual sounds. From the far side of the house came a piano melding with guitar chords: Branwyn’s youngest sister, Meredith, working on her music, with her father’s assistance. From the rec room downstairs, the sound of televised machine-gun fire and laughter: Tristan and Morgan, along with some of their friends. And from the office her oldest younger brother had appropriated as his own, a girl shouting: “I just need to borrow it, Howl! For crying out loud, I have to do a presentation.” That was Brynn, Branwyn’s middle sister.
“You should have asked, then,” Howl said flatly. He appeared in the doorframe and saw Branwyn. “What do you want?” Howl—originally named Howell, but it didn't stick—was nineteen, and in college, and perpetually cranky. That might, Branwyn reflected, have something to do with the way she and his other older sister had picked on him non-stop for the first eight years of his life. But he'd made it so easy. When she'd developed a social conscience, around age fourteen, she'd realized it was totally, absolutely wrong to pick on a younger brother just because he was sensitive and serious, and she'd resolved to stop. That resolution lasted a few days, because he was so very Howl. Then she'd decided to only do it once a week, just to help toughen him up. She'd made sure Rhianna kept to the schedule as well and firmly disinvited anybody else from participating. But hey, what was done was done, and he’d turned out okay as far as she could tell.
“Adventure and distraction,” Branwyn told him brightly. There was never any point in beating around the bush with Howl these days, not if you wanted anything from him. “What have you got for me?”
“Noise. Please, please take some away with you” said Howl. “A dorm would have been quieter. Noise and chaos and entropy,” he repeated, saying the words like they had four letters each. “Take it all.” Brynn appeared around Howl, trying to stuff a tablet computer up her shirt. “And thieves stealing my stuff. Oh, and there’s rats in the attic. You can have the rats, too. I’ll keep the tablet.” As Brynn tried to scurry away, he grabbed her by the ponytail, yanked her back, and divested her of the device. She screamed and kicked at him, but he retreated back to his office and slammed the door in her face.
Brynn kicked the heavy wooden door once, then turned to her older sister. “It’s not rats, it’s ghosts,” she confided. “Rats don’t sing. I’m going to get it on video and put it on the internet. As soon as I finish my presentation for History.” She kicked the door again.
Intrigued, Branwyn leaned against the wall. “Jaimie sings,” she pointed out. Jaimie was Branwyn’s mother’s third husband and a musician.
“Not like this,” said Brynn positively. “This is choral and late at night.”
“Why does Howl think it’s rats?”
“Because of the scratching and the things moving in the shadows when we’re up there. He thinks the singing is just a prank. He says you and Rhianna used to do that sort of thing to him all the time.”
“We might have,” Branwyn admitted. “We had to entertain ourselves somehow and he was handy.”
“Well, you haven’t been home in two weeks and Rhianna hasn’t been home in months. So it has to be something else.” Brynn nodded at her own logic.
“Why ghosts, though? You’d think they would have showed up before now. I mean, we've lived in this house a long time. I'm pretty sure Grandma would have discovered ghosts if we had them. She finds out everything.”
Brynn gave her a patient look. “It’s mysterious noises in an attic, Branwyn. I used to tell Meredith pixies lived up there, but let’s be honest. The only thing in a Victorian attic is ghosts and madwomen. And there’s no madwomen.” She added conscientiously, “I checked.”
As Branwyn put a foot on the staircase, she brightened. “Are you going to see? It’s the little room. Be careful of the rat traps.”
“Good luck getting the tablet. Try bringing him a big glass of lemonade, then waiting until he goes to the bathroom,” Branwyn said in return, and went upstairs.
She remembered the little room Brynn mentioned, although she hadn’t thought about it since she was around Brynn’s age. It was up on the third floor, beyond a small door in the old attic playroom, tucked under the eaves. These days, the playroom served as storage for elderly electronics equipment. The door was behind a box of speakers, so small that the box completely hid it. Branwyn shoved the box to another corner, avoiding the rat traps, then opened the door.
Beyond was a small room thickly coated with dust. A tiny lamp was attached to one wall, linked to the same circuit as the main attic lights; a narrow window near the low ceiling let in a bar of sunlight. The remains of a doll’s adventures in toyland had been abandoned some time ago: tea accoutrements, ponies to ride, dragons to slay. Branwyn recognized a few of the toys as things she’d played with and more as gifts her baby sister had acquired at birthdays and holidays. The dust had been disturbed in a trail leading to another set of rat traps, each one baited and poised to snap.
Branwyn looked at the rat traps in the outer room again. They’d all been set off and the bait stolen, she realized. A flicker of motion caught her eye, and she glanced sharply to the right.
There was a snap from the little room. When Branwyn peeked through the door again, all four of the traps within had been set off. Had one of the dolls moved? She couldn’t tell. But she certainly didn’t see any ratty pawprints in the dust. She crawled into the room and promptly sneezed, then sneezed again.
The dust settled, but it settled into a familiar shape: the outline of a child’s fairy doll, laid out on the floor like somebody had drawn it there.
Branwyn's mouth curved in an slow, pleased smile. The faerie Duke she’d met had first manifested as a doll-like pixie. He’d not only been interested in humanity, he’d been interested in her. He'd even sent her a sweet letter after it was all over, written in dusk blue ink on handmade paper that smelled of the ocean, and delivered by magic. After reading it, she'd felt quite charitable toward him, even inclined to forgive the fact that he'd abducted her. He'd apologized for that, after all, and he'd been acting under—and fighting against—a magical coercion. But despite his assurance that she would have a chance to see him again if she wished, there was no followup.
It was disappointing, because she'd been very much looking forward to letting him make it up to her. As week after week had slid by, the tendency toward forgiveness had faded. But not the curiosity.
Maybe she’d been looking in the wrong places. Or perhaps he’d gotten her address wrong.
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