by Sara Thorn
“So, aside from creating magical forests inside lifeless caves, what else can you guys do?” I asked Quinn. One of the other fae men in the room laughed from behind the pages of the book he was reading.
“Ooh, let me show her!” another of them said.
Quinn gave his friend a nod, and the man jumped up from his bed and walked toward me.
“You’d like to kiss me, wouldn’t you?” the man said.
Quinn started to protest, but his friend interrupted him by telling him he wouldn’t really kiss me.
Of course, he won’t, I thought. I don’t even know this guy. Why would I want to kiss him?
But the closer he moved toward me, and the more he smiled at me, the more I found myself wanting to kiss him desperately. Until finally, I felt as though I would explode if I didn’t. But right as I lurched toward his face, he smiled and the feeling that I had ended.
“What the hell just happened?” I asked, slightly annoyed.
The man laughed a little and then went to sit back down.
“That was a glamour,” Quinn said. “It’s a power the fae have which can make us seem enchantingly alluring, to the point in which most humans can’t resist. It can also be used to change our appearances or to change the appearance of other things to human eyes. For example,” Quinn reached for my hand and turned my palm to face upward as he dropped what looked like sparkling gemstones into my hand.
I lifted them to look at them closer. “These are beautiful.”
“Maybe not quite so close to your face,” Quinn grinned.
“Why not?” I asked as I turned to look at him.
His eyes darted to my hand, and when I looked back at my palm, I saw that instead of gemstones, two docile spiders rested there. I screeched and dropped the spiders onto the floor.
“Sorry,” Quinn laughed in an earnest apology. “They were just the first thing I saw to use as an example.”
I smacked him playfully on the side of his arm as I sat back down. “I hate spiders!”
The guy with his face sunk deeply into his reading laughed again.
“Does it work on vampires?” I asked. “This glamour power?”
“Sometimes,” Quinn answered. “But vampires aren’t technically among the living, so magic can be fickle when it’s wielded against them. Most of our magic is too unpredictable against the vampires to be used with any sort of guarantee that it will work. Except for shadow magic.”
At the sound of those words, the other men looked up with a solemn and serious expression.
“What’s shadow magic?” I asked.
“Not something Quinn should be discussing with you,” the fae who was reading said as he set his book face-down on the top of his bed. “It’s dangerous and dark and a widely unaccepted practice.”
“It’s not,” Quinn argued. “It does contain its fair share of malevolence, but it is only unaccepted by those who fear it.”
The man who glamoured me made a quick attempt to change the direction of the conversation. “We can also shapeshift,” he said. “Wanna see?”
“Absolutely!”
But before he could demonstrate yet another cool fae ability, a woman walked into the room. She was small-framed and thin and had the most lovely rose-gold hair that was short enough for her to shake her head and have it stick out in several different directions. She interrupted the man who was about to show me his shapeshifting with a friendly but firm reminder.
“Now we all remember that every exchange is two-sided, don’t we boys?” she said in a gentle voice. When she turned around to look at me, the two violet cat-eyes that stared back at me immediately disarmed me.
“Mara,” Quinn said as he stood up to go hug the woman. “This is my younger sister, Sen.”
She smiled, and I returned the gesture.
“What did you mean about a two-sided exchange?” I asked her.
“Every transaction of magic in the fae world is a two-sided exchange,” she answered. “For every magic that is used, there is a cost to be paid.”
“Your eyes,” I couldn’t help myself from saying, “they’re so beautiful.”
Sen smiled at me with a sad sort of kindness. “A result of a shapeshifting accident.”
It seemed that everyone already knew what had happened to her, and the other guys went back to minding their own business and heeding her warning of not carelessly wielding their powers around for show.
“I was just passing by,” she said to Quinn. “Thought I would say hello, but I can’t stay; there’s work to be done.” She turned to me before she left. “Nice meeting you, Mara.”
“Nice meeting you, too,” I said.
Sen whispered something into Quinn’s ear about not letting himself get overly protective, as she glanced at me and smiled, and then walked away down the hall.
Quinn could tell that I was brimming with questions still as he sat back down beside me.
“When we shapeshift, sometimes we temporarily retain the features of the animals we turn into. In my sister’s case, her eyes never changed back after a time that she had turned into a cat. No one really knows why.”
“Well, she’s absolutely beautiful,” I said.
Quinn smiled, and I felt the side of his hand, nearly touching my thigh as we sat on the bed.
“Do fae have weaknesses?” I asked.
“Why would you want to know that?” Quinn said with an edge of defensiveness in his voice.
“I’m sorry,” I said after I realized how that must have sounded. I mean, I barely knew these people, and I was basically prying into all of their secrets. “You don’t need to tell me that; I was merely curious. I had asked Cassius about his weaknesses since he said he didn’t have that many, so I was just wondering if fae had weaknesses like the vampires do.”
“And did Cassius tell you what his weakness is?” Quinn asked.
“No. Why, do you know?”
“Yes. Cassius is a Dhampir, which means he has only one weakness…magic.
I thought about all the magic the fae had and how Quinn said it was too unpredictable to count on when used on vampires. But Cassius wasn’t really just a vampire, and Quinn just revealed to me that Cassius’s one weakness was the very same thing the fae happened to have a lot of.
“In answer to your question,” Quinn continued, “iron. All fae folk have a weakness to iron, which was why the vampires’ attack on us was so successful. They used iron weapons and iron shackles and chains to bind us.”
“What does iron do to you?” I wasn’t sure that I actually wanted to know the answer to that question.
“It burns us to the bone.”
That night, I ate dinner in the fae quarters with Quinn and Sen and all of their friends. I really liked the fae. They were captivating and intriguing, and beneath their kindness and welcoming demeanor, there lay a powerful mystique that seemed as though it could turn on a dime. It made me think of those zoo animals that always looked so peaceful behind the cage, right up until the point that someone got too close and they bit the hand that both fed them and kept them in captivity. I thought about what had Quinn said and how he had implied things would change. And I wondered how many of these fae were going to bite the hand that kept them here.
I watched as Quinn laughed and talked and popped chunks of sweetbread into his mouth. If I had thought about kissing the other fae while under that glamour, I was thinking about the way the wine lingered on the tops of Quinn’s wet lips a thousand times more, and that wasn’t even due to any magical spell cast on me. Perhaps it was the charming setting, sitting on the soft moss around a slab of well-laid-out, edible delicacies. At least the nourishment and lodging weren’t rudimentary, and at least I had time to be around these people and not chained to Cassius’s chair or some other form of vampiric torture.
When the night wound to an end and crept into the wee hours of the morning, Quinn and I sat alone alongside one of the corridor walls. Our backs leaned up against the stone, with our legs stretched out
in front of us, I stared at the twinkling star lights overhead as I struggled to keep my eyes open.
Quinn rubbed his hand over the top of mine and smiled in a way that made him look the part of a fairy, as the milky light poured over his cheekbones.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you back to your room to sleep.”
“Can’t I just stay here?” I asked. I didn’t want to leave this little slice of peaceful magic tucked away within the vampire den.
“Unfortunately, no,” he said, looking as sad about it as I felt. “Cassius would have a fit, and that wouldn’t bode well for either of us, especially you.”
I sighed and let Quinn pull me up by my hands until I was standing on my feet. We held hands the entire walk back to my room. When we got within sight of my doorway, he pulled me to a quick and silent stop. Athan was standing at the door to my room. His head turned to look down the hall toward us, and Quinn immediately dropped my hand, which I assumed was in an effort to protect me.
“You have to go to your room now,” Quinn whispered to me without taking his eyes off Athan. “I’ll be here at the end of the hall until he’s gone. I promise I won’t leave until I know he has left.”
“Okay,” I said, meekly. I wanted badly just to turn around and run back into the fae quarters. I was about halfway to my room when I glanced over my shoulder and saw that Quinn had vanished. What the hell? He promised me that he wouldn’t leave. A feeling of sadness and betrayal swept over me at the thought that I couldn’t trust the one person here who I thought was my friend.
“Out for a stroll?” Athan said as I reached the doorway to my room, which he was blocking.
“It’s not like I can really get out anywhere,” I said sarcastically. I was bound and determined not to let him smell fear on me. “I didn’t realize Cassius held a party tonight.”
“He didn’t,” Athan said.
“Then, why are you here?”
A grin unfolded on Athan’s face as his lips curled upward, and a sick feeling rested in the pit of my stomach.
“Does Cassius even know you’re here?” I asked, already knowing the answer to that question.
Cassius didn’t know. Athan was here to steal me away, and by the time Cassius found out, I would already be inside Athan’s dwelling, surrounded by his followers, and it would be too late.
“Mara,” Athan said quietly enough that it wouldn’t wake the other girls in my room. “We are old friends, you and me. I have always looked out for you in your world, and now that you are in mine, you should feel the same allegiance to me that you had. Why don’t you just come with me quietly, and I’ll help you get acclimated to your new living arrangements personally.”
I readied myself to launch into a futile attempt at protesting, but thankfully, I didn’t have to. Before I could even open my mouth, Cassius was standing at my side with a look of ferocious insurgence.
“She won’t be going anywhere with you,” Cassius snarled.
I could see the tips of his pointed fangs when he opened his mouth to speak through gritted teeth. They must have a way of retracting them at will because I had only seen his fangs on two occasions. “Get out of my house.”
Athan looked as though he would challenge Cassius. He didn’t seem as easy to back down as he had been the other night. “I think you might need to remember who the leader is here. Perhaps you’ve forgotten that you are under my rule and that I have the support of more followers than you could ever hope to rally to you. You have spent all these years pissing away any chance you had at being recognized as a viable leader here, engaging in your frivolous, drunken celebrations. What exactly is it that you are celebrating again, brother? You’re lack of command over anything besides a few worthless fae?” Athan’s eyes glanced down the hallway behind Cassius, and when I turned to look, I saw Quinn standing there. He didn’t abandon me after all; he went to get Cassius.
“I have command over my home,” Cassius said, unfettered by the insults Athan had hurled at him. “Which you are now within, uninvited, I might add.”
I heard a shuffle of many feet behind me, and when I turned around to look again, I saw the entire hallway filled with fae. All of Cassius’s male slaves were here.
Athan laughed theatrically. “Do you really think those fae will go against me? They fear me more than they fear you.”
“Possibly,” Cassius answered. “But they also hate you a lot more than they hate me.”
I stood completely still as I watched the two half-brothers lock eyes in a test of will. After a moment, Cassius was victorious again as Athan lowered his head and turned to leave.
“This isn’t over, Cassius,” he said in a taunting voice as he waved his hand around in the air above his head while he walked away.
Once Athan was out of sight, the rest of the fae went back to their rooms, all except Quinn, who stayed, standing in the hall, waiting to see what Cassius would do.
“Thank you,” I said to Cassius.
I wasn’t even sure why I was thanking him. He was still the one who kept me as a prisoner, not unlike what Athan would have done. But I had a strong feeling that being a prisoner for Athan would be much, much worse.
Cassius was still staring down the hall after Athan, even though he had been gone from sight for several seconds. When he turned to face me, his jaw was tightly clenched.
“Do you ever not get into trouble?” he said as if he were furious with me.
“What? But I was just—”
He grabbed me by my wrist and swung me around before I could finish my sentence.
“Wait, where are we going?” I shouted. “I want to go to my room.”
“No,” Cassius growled at me.
“Cassius,” Quinn started to say as he stood in front of us in the hallway while Cassius pushed past him.
Cassius shouted over his shoulder at Quinn. “You know as well as I do Quinn, that Athan won’t give up that easily. From now on, Mara sleeps in my room with me.”
I wasn't sure if Quinn tried to argue with Cassius or if he just agreed with him and recognized that it would be safest for me not to return to my room; Cassius had already pulled me too far down the hall to be able to hear if Quinn had said anything further. I struggled to keep up with him as he tugged me along beside him, and it wasn’t until we got to his door and he pushed me inside his bedroom, slamming the door behind us, that Cassius finally stopped and looked at me.
He stared at me with such a raw fury that when he raised his hand in the air, I thought for sure that he was getting ready to knock the head right off of my shoulders. I closed my eyes, preparing myself for a hard sting across the cheek at the very least. But instead, I heard the sound of stone cracking, and when I opened my eyes, I saw Cassius pulling his bloodied fist out from the crevice he had just made in his bedroom wall.
I stared at him as he stood before me, his hand held down by his side as the blood gushed from his open cuts and seeped into long puddles on the floor by his feet. His eyes stared at me as though he were lost, and his chest heaved with every exasperated breath he was drawing in.
“What are you doing to me?” he said.
Chapter Ten
That night, Cassius didn’t leave.
I sat with him and bandaged his hand, even though he argued about it the entire time. Then we both lay down in his bed; I was under the blankets while he lay on top of them. I was still in jeans and a sweatshirt, and Cassius still had on black jeans, although he had taken off his shirt because it had gotten blood from his hand all over it. He lay bare-chested on top of the bed as the candlelight flickered against his defined muscles, and I watched his chest rise and fall as he stared up at the ceiling. We hadn’t said anything about what had happened, and nothing at all about what he had said to me following the outburst that resulted in his hand punching the wall. I was too scared to ask him what he had meant…I was too scared to think about how I might feel depending on his answer.
“Why don’t you usurp the rule from your br
other?” I asked as I lay on my side with the blankets wadded in my fists and watched him.
“Athan is not my brother,” Cassius said without turning to face me.
“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “I know that. Why don’t you take your rule back from Athan?”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Why not? You’re definitely stronger than him. You even told me that yourself. You’re a Dhampir, and he’s just a common vampire.”
“Athan has many followers that support his rule,” Cassius said, void of any emotion.
“But your servants seem to be more willing to follow you than they would be to follow Athan. Don’t you want to stop him from continuing to threaten you?”
Cassius turned over to me so quickly on the bed that it scared me. He lay on one shoulder, which propped him up just high enough to hover over my face. “Don’t you think I want to overthrow that cruel and power-hungry bastard? Of course, I do, for fuck’s sake. But I don’t want to rule. I can’t rule. Why is that so damn hard for everyone to understand?”
I looked up into his eyes and noticed something that I hadn’t before, an internal conflict that boiled over inside him, one that he was trying desperately to quell, but that kept resurfacing. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to rule; it was that he was afraid of what ruling would turn him into. He was afraid of turning into his father.
“You might not be like him,” I said softly.
“Who?”
“Your father.”
Cassius laughed. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about. You don’t know me, and you don’t know anything about this world. You’ve been here all of what, three days?”
He was right; I didn’t know anything. But I did know the look in his eyes, vampire or not. I knew all too well what it was like to struggle with yourself against what called to you, and maybe someday I would tell someone about what I had gone through before I had ended up dancing in the city’s subway stations. But for now, I just lay alongside my immortal captor, and for a reason I that still had yet to figure out, I pushed him toward what was calling him.
