I shook my head at him. “Sometimes I wonder how I ever believed you were human.”
“An unkind thing to say.”
Yeah, to the other fae I know.
I was saved any further awkward conversation by the older gentleman entering the room with a large blueberry muffin and a tray with coffee. The man glanced at Casey’s hastily abandoned food. “Should I take the remainder of Miss Casey’s food to her suite?”
At my father’s nod, the man gathered the food and silently excused himself from the room.
I sank into the seat opposite from where Casey had been and poured my coffee into the too dainty cup. Then I hesitated. What if I can’t eat mortal food anymore? I broke a section of the sugar-encrusted muffin top free, but I didn’t eat it. I was starving, but as soon as I tried it, that was it. If I’d become addicted to Faerie food, there would no longer be the hope I wasn’t.
“For goodness sake, Alexis, just eat the food. It doesn’t matter what you did at the revelry. You blooded true as Sleagh Maith. You are fae.”
I blinked at him, the break of muffin nearly falling from my fingers. He shook his head.
“Do you think I don’t know what the date is? Now eat. I don’t have all morning to waste on you.”
Nice to know I’m important. I popped the piece of muffin in my mouth. Not only did it not turn to ash, but it was absolutely delicious, the relief making it one of the best things I’d ever tasted. I polished off the rest of my breakfast quickly, and then followed my father out of the sunroom and upstairs.
I expected him to lead me to his office or a sitting room. Hell, maybe even my old suite. Instead he stopped in front of the last door I expected—or wanted to walk through. He pulled out a ring of keys, and unlocked the deadbolt securing the suite that until three months ago had belonged to my sister. That was before a dark ritual had been performed in her bedroom and I’d unintentionally torn reality apart.
“Um, why are we going in there?” I asked, hearing the slightly too high pitch in my voice. Casey and I both had nearly died in that room. I still had nightmares about bodies decaying under my touch as a swollen red moon hung overhead.
“Because what you need to learn will be easier taught inside.” His eyes cut sideways, as if ensuring the hall was empty. Then he traced a glyph into the door, just above the lock. The unfamiliar glyph glowed green for a moment, but though I’d recently become more sensitive to fae magic, I felt nothing from the glowing symbol, even when it faded and the door popped open.
I held my breath as I followed my father inside. The sitting room wasn’t bad. Nothing had happened there—it was the bedroom where everything had gone down. And that was exactly where he led me. My steps grew heavier the closer we walked to the bedroom door, so by the time I reached the threshold, I could no longer lift my feet, and I stood frozen outside the door.
Casey’s furniture had been removed from the room, but the division where Coleman’s circle had been drawn was obvious. On the outside of that line, the room was a normal room with plush carpeting and tasteful wallpaper. Inside, now that was a different story. Inside that circle reality looked like a child’s finger painting—if the child were insane. The Aetheric broke into reality in large, color-filled blotches. In other places, the decaying stain of the land of the dead leaked into our world. Emotional imprints, old ones ranging the gambit of emotions from Casey’s many years in the suite, to the raw pain and horror from that night, stained the room.
“Don’t dawdle.”
Easy for him to say.
But if following him into the backdrop of half my nightmares was what it took to stop glowing, I could do it. After all, I’d survived what happened here. And I’d faced real nightmares—the creatures, not just the dreams. I could face an empty room.
I stepped over the edge of the circle, ready to be assaulted by my own memories. Instead a gentle warmth slid over my skin. The air seemed thicker, more real. Somewhere in the distance I heard laughter, music. It felt like…Faerie?
I looked up, sure enough a sky filled with early-morning sunlight replaced what from outside the circle had been a ceiling. And not only that, but the shadows in the room disappeared. I turned a small circle, trying to see everything at once.
“It feels like home, doesn’t it?” my father said.
I froze. He was watching me, a bemused expression on his face—his fae face. He’d dropped his glamour again.
“I don’t understand. Faerie and mortal reality don’t overlap.”
“Coleman’s spell created a tenuous, unstable pocket of Faerie. I believe your magic cemented it in reality.” He walked a weaving path across the room to a small stone bench surrounded by containers of flowers I’d never seen the likes of before and could only guess were native to Faerie.
“You come here a lot, don’t you?”
He ignored the question, instead motioning to the spot beside him. “I don’t have a lot of free time, so let’s not dally, but do mind the dead zones. The clothes will rot off your body if you touch them.”
I was aware of that fact, but that he knew confirmed he visited this chaotic pocket more than occasionally. I knew he was in deep hiding, and that he hadn’t attended the revelry, so the fact he came here and described it as home somehow made him seem more like a person with actual emotions and stuff.
“Why here?” I asked as I wove my way to the bench. The heady embrace of Faerie held back the threatening panic attack, but I could almost feel the tightening of a remembered soul chain around my throat, the sting of a knife biting into my torso.
“Because Faerie will accept glamour more readily than mortal reality. Think of this space as your training wheels.”
Right.
My father then spent the next twenty minutes explaining the basic principles of glamour to me followed by an hour of trying to teach me how to feel Faerie’s magic. I was sensitive to Aetheric magic, and I was growing sensitive to fae magic as well, but reaching out and actually touching that very foreign energy? That was something different altogether.
Unlike Aetheric magic, which took ritual to reach and then had to be used or stored, Faerie magic was readily available but it was like water flowing through a grate. It couldn’t be stored. It was drawn as needed and passed through the user, bending to their will, and left nothing behind. In the mortal realm, iron blocked the magic and it was thinnest at dawn and sunset. Too much disbelief in a concentrated area could not only break glamour—it could thin Faerie’s influence.
The sun was high in the sky by the time I managed to pull the thinnest sliver of Faerie magic. It felt as soft as silk but had a strange weight as it entered my body, which wasn’t exactly unpleasant, just odd.
“Good, now imagine your skin a normal, human tone,” my father said.
My teeth were gritted from the hours spent attempting to reach the magic, so the fact his instructions made me laugh was more from tension than amusement. “Trust me, imagining myself not glowing isn’t hard. I shouldn’t be glowing in the first place.”
Except as I tried to direct that thin sliver of hard-won magic, it floated away from me without any noticeable change.
My father shook his head. “No, that’s disbelief, not belief. You can’t disbelieve the truth away. You can cover the truth, you can create something new, but either way you have to believe what you are creating.”
“So what you’re saying is that all faeries are delusional. Great. No wonder it’s the crazy ones that are in charge.”
He frowned at me, and then letting his hands fall to his thighs, stood. “I think that’s enough for today.”
“What? But I’m still glowing.”
“Did you expect to learn glamour in a few hours?”
I opened my mouth to reply, but stopped. The truth was, I’d hoped he’d tell me what the hell was going on and make me stop glowing. “Can’t you just…” I waved my shimmering fingers.
“If I glamoured you, it would only last until sunset. But why bother, or take the risk someone could trace my glamour back to me? I can’t hide you from the courts anymore—you’ve spoiled that completely.”
Why bother? Why bother? I glared at him. “Because I’m running a business under an OMIH certification. The ‘H’ in that stands for human, and humans don’t glow.”
His expression of detached disinterest persisted. Not that I expected anything more from him. Unless he was talking to lobbyists or potential voters, it was his most common expression. That thought made me pause, and I could feel just how devious the slow smile that crawled over my face must look.
Judging by the sudden spark of interest in my father’s eyes, I wasn’t wrong. When I just sat there, that smile still claiming my face, he broke the silence first.
“Yes?”
“You should bother,” I said, the words as slow and meticulous as my smile, “because if you don’t make me stop glowing, I’m going to call Lusa Duncan at Witch Watch and give her an exclusive about being your daughter.” I cocked my head to the side, gazing up at him. “I heard you’re planning to run as the presidential candidate for the Humans First Party. Just imagine the scandal when the story goes national, which I imagine would be, oh, dinner time-ish.”
He stared at me. I stared back. Making threats against the person I needed help from could backfire, but whatever his “long game” plans, as he called it, his political career somehow played into the scheme. I gambled it was one of the few things he cared about.
I wasn’t sure what response I expected from him, but it certainly wasn’t for him to smile. And not the false friendly controlled smile that the politician wore, but a smile that spoke of mischief and made his eyes light with amusement.
“An admirable attempt, Alexis. Flawed and doomed to fail, but quick and targeted.” He almost sounded proud. I was never going to understand the man. He pursed his lips, staring at me, and then said, “Stay here a moment.”