Sir Charles trails behind us, silently. Dane’s making jokes - is he not mad about me wanting to know stuff about their blood-getting anymore? I manage to get enough energy to be ashamed of how I look - half-swaddled in a towel, most of my naked bod on full display for him to see and make fun of in all its freshmen fifteen glory, in all its torpedo-boobs-since-middle-school glory and too-big hips and—
But he isn’t saying anything. He isn’t even smirking or making lewd comments like he usually does. My eyes travel down the hem of his black leather pants - he’s taken a bath and changed out of the bloodstained stuff, at the very least. He’s wearing a white dress shirt, the cuffs rolled up and the top buttons undone and his white-blonde hair slicked back, that stubborn forehead lock tamed for the moment. A few silver rings adorn his fingers, and he smells like rosemary more than anything else.
“Going somewhere?” I ask tiredly. The azure parts of his eyes are brightest today and they glimmer down at me, his long lashes so incredibly dark compared to the rest of his hair. I’m so tired his glamor doesn’t even get my blood throbbing - but I’m not tired enough that I can’t appreciate how beautiful he is.
“I wish I wasn’t.” He says it without an inch of his usual lascivious purr. There’s something like….honesty? From him of all fae? And while I thought His Horny Highness would drink in the chance to look at naked flesh - any naked flesh at all - his eyes haven’t roamed once from my face. He’s staring at just my face and for some reason it’s making me squirm.
“O-Okay well,” I clear my throat. “There’s the line. You’ve crossed it. Again. Get out.”
He jerks the comforter and sheets back from under my legs and throws them over me, the silk and cotton and goose down a warm, welcome whisper on my bare skin.
“Thank you,” He says. “For feeding Barnabus.”
“You care a lot about him, huh?” I ask wearily.
“He helped me, when I was…younger.”
“And stupider. And probably prettier.”
My eyes flutter shut, but I hear him laugh - soft and gentle (gentle? Not him) - and then nothing but black.
****
ALTAIR
After today’s scare, we all need a drink.
Dane perhaps a bit more than the rest of us.
I watch him slink to the bar, where Quinn’s been working all night. He wasn’t there for the scare because he was setting up shop here, but Dane and I filled him in when we first set foot in Seventh Circle. Quinn might pretend he’s not interested in anything, but all eight of us high fae were forced in this together the moment we agreed to Van Grier’s contract. The second the roots of our rose plants touched Monster Garden’s soil, we all had to start caring.
Quinn’s never been good at it. Dane cares too much. And me? I like caring. I like it in a way none of the other high fae do - Sythiel can’t stand me for it, and neither can Axel.
Sythiel. I rub the rim of my white russian and wonder where that green-haired bastard is right now. Off doing some mission for Van Grier, no doubt. Sythiel’s ability to locate Brightened on Earth is probably invaluable for hunting down Giselle - the Brightened who Van Grier considers his ultimate enemy. Right now, Sythiel’s somewhere on Earth fighting her and her army of Brightened, but for once I wish he was here with me, drinking and laughing at this table like the old times. Our binding under Van Grier has never been pleasant, but there’d been times it felt a little easier, and drinking at Seventh Circle was one such time.
Now it’s only Dane and I. Well, just me, really, because once Dane finds someone pretty he’s missing in action for the rest of the night. I wish I had his balls - he makes walking up to totally random strangers look easier than a spring breeze. He’s currently attached to a gorgeous brunette with legs to die for, the two of them sitting in a corner booth, and while they aren’t doing anything up top I’m absolutely positive she’s got at least her foot on his crotch and the moment I think that he dives into her neck fiercely, scraping his teeth on her with more desperation than usual.
“Oh Dane,” I sigh. “The day you learn restraint is the day I’m dead.”
I don’t know who the altar showed him he had to kill to help Barnabus, but it must’ve been bad. Dane would never tell me it’d been bad, of course - he might be easy to anger but he’s terribly slow to lean on others emotionally. I’ve seen him do it a grand total of twice in five eras. The eight of us used to joke he was a cyborg from a human TV show that’d gone haywire and gotten unpredictable.
Whoever he killed, it was bad. And I know it because I know that face of his. He’s wound so tight around himself one wrong move and he’ll shatter. I don’t know how he let himself get this bad - usually he takes care to unwind here at the club with a human, or by himself in god knows what forsaken corner of this city doing Bright-Lady knows what. He’s as diligent about it as Quinn is about running the bar, or I am about lazing about and doing nothing at all.
I’ve never seen him this worked up - not in the five eras I’ve known him.
I decide to wait until his chosen lady for the night gets up to use the bathroom. I watch her sparkly sequined dress go, and slide into her seat.
“Get out,” Dane sighs, nursing his seventh gin and tonic of the night. It takes a lot to get a fae hammered, but he’s putting work into it.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, or are you going to make me guess?”
“If I was a human you could just read my mind,” He snorts.
“But you aren’t. So I’d appreciate a little help.”
“Bright Lady, you’re so fucking nosy. Have you always been this nosy?”
“You’re just mad I can read you without needing my powers.”
He buries himself in another belligerent sip of his drink, his eyes flashing out at the dancing crowd over the rim of the glass. All of us are pretty equally handsome in my opinion, but Dane shines brighter than all of us in places like this - dark places that carve out his cheekbones and sharp, thick, brows where he keeps all his sloppily-disguised emotions. Where I melt into the dark, he burns bright in it. He always has.
“Brightness overdraw,” He finally grunts.
“Come again?” I tilt my head and fiddle with the end of my sleek braid.
“Brightness overdraw,” He repeats impatiently. “If a fae is near death they soak in far more Brightness than they need to compensate.”
He’s undoubtedly talking about Barnabus. “Where did you learn this?”
“The house fae showed me some Old Helnesa rune books. Apparently Van Grier has some in the library. The house fae pulled one out and showed me that particular passage when that girl didn’t come out of the tub for six hours.”
“You can read Old Helnesa?” I blink.
“You can’t?” He frowns. I stutter suddenly;
“W-Wait, six hours?”
Dane nods and downs more gin, lazily sliding the ice around with his tongue in a way I’m sure drives the ladies wild. “Barnabus didn’t know it, but he took nearly all her latent Brightness in one feeding.”
“And he’s a land fae,” I muse. “He needs a lot to begin with.”
“The book said -“ Dane bites down on an ice cube, hard, flinching with it. “ - it said severe Brightness overdraw can kill a Brightened feeder.”
My heart nearly stops. May - our strange, sweet, naive May - dying? I stand abruptly but Dane pulls on my sleeve to get me to sit again.
“Don’t. She’s in bed. She needs rest.”
“And how do you know that?”
“The book said so.”
“No, I mean how did you know she’s in bed?”
He glowers at the leftover ice in his cup like he wants it to disappear. “I put her there.”
“She let you in her room?” I raise a brow. “You tried to choke her.”
“She wanted me,” He scoffs defensively, half-under his breath. “So I was allowed to walk in.”
And suddenly,
all the pieces of the Dane-puzzle start to fall into place - his tightly wound body, his keener desperation than usual, the way he keeps glowering at his goddamned ice. But he can’t. He knows that. We both know that.
“She hates you, Dane,” I say softly. Dane leans back in the booth immediately, slamming his glass down.
“I know that.”
“She’s a human, Dane.”
“I fucking know that, too.”
He knows better. We both know he does. Dane isn’t the one to fall for humans - he uses them like tools, specific contraptions to ease his suffering. Axel is the one to lose his head over a pretty mortal body, Ioriss is the one to write love poems and songs for them. I lost my heart two times over two beautiful men long dead between the centuries. Even before we were captured by Van Grier, before the Bright Place was sealed off, Dane was the only one of the eight of us who never fell for a human. He never made our mistake. He loved a fae once, a long, long time ago. We all did, and her name was the Bright Lady. But he never strayed from loving her, never looked at another since her ascension.
Until…
“Don’t you dare look at me like that,” Dane rips into me. “Like you pity me.”
“I’m not. I’m just thinking. It could be a passing fancy,” I find my voice. “Like this young lady you’re here with tonight.”
Dane doesn’t say anything, and that’s how I know he’s really in trouble.
“She not even your type,” I mutter to myself half in awe. “She’s single-minded, and bizarre, and I can assure you with the clarity only mind-reading can afford me that she’s had no previous experience with intimacy -“
“Do you ever shut up?”
“Sometimes,” I smile. A sultry voice in my head starts talking about how sexy Dane is, which means his partner’s headed back this way. “Listen, it’s time for me to vacate, but we’ll talk about this later, okay?”
He just grimaces, and I get up and walk into the club feeling more apprehensive than when I patrolled the grounds today for shadow fae. Quinn motions me over to the bar, and I approach.
“That’s his eleventh drink overall,” Quinn polishes a glass methodically. “I’m cutting him off, but I need you to be here when I do.”
I sigh and nod, knowing what he means - Dane hates it when Quinn tries to do what’s best for him. And anyone, really, but mostly Quinn. He tries to fight him about it, on occasion. They’ve never gotten along, partly because they’re polar opposites and partly because they both loved the Bright Lady possessively and with all their hearts. And when two men love one woman, they never really forgive each other. It takes a great swallowing of the pride to forgive, and Quinn and Dane are the least capable of that out of the eight of us.
“He told May to feed Barnabus,” I say. “Not knowing it would -“
“Brightness overdraw.”
I frown. “How do you know that?”
“He’s got the book in his coat pocket,” Quinn puts the cup down and starts drying the next one. “I’ve been reading through the pages when drink orders get slow.”
“Damn,” I spin a coaster around with one finger as I pout. “Why am I the only high fae who can’t read Old Helnesa?”
“If I remember right, you were off conquering the northern shadow fae while the Bright Lady taught us.”
“Ah,” It comes back to me. “That’s right.” He slides me a whiskey sour and I sip at it. “If only things were as simple as back then.”
Quinn lets out a breath. “A hundred-year-long Unification was hardly what I’d call ‘simple’.”
“But it was straightforward, wasn’t it?” I put my glass down. “Unite all the fae in the world, get them to obey a single set of laws so they’d stop killing each other and ruining the land. We were on the side of good, back then.”
Quinn is quiet as a girl flounces up to the bar and orders a tequila sunrise, her thoughts practically shrieking about how beautiful Quinn is, how badly she wants to get his number. Quinn feigns obliviousness to it all as he usually does and mixes the drink deftly, the golden juice mating with the red syrup in a beautiful splash of color. He slides it to her and looks back to me with his ice-coated eyes.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in our eras alive, Altair,” he starts softly, and even with my fae hearing I have to strain to hear him over the thumping music. “It’s that good and evil are convenient labels we slap on things to make ourselves feel better.”
I look down at my sour, but he keeps on.
“There is only survival,” He says. “Surviving, no matter what the cost.”
“Even if we have to kill other fae for it? Van Grier’s going to link us to May and make us fight, Quinn. Is it still worth the cost even if -“ I swallow, the whiskey’s bitterness clinging to my tongue. “- we have to go back on our word to the Bright Lady to protect all fae? It was our final promise to her -”
“That promise is what bound us to Van Grier in the first place,” Quinn cuts me off coolly. I’m silent. It’s true - we all know it’s true - but that doesn’t mean I have to like hearing it said out loud.
“Van Grier has us,” Quinn says. “But Giselle has the courts. Van Grier can send Sythiel out all he likes, but it’s only a matter of time before they overpower us.”
“May could feed us all,” I interrupt. “Her Brightness is strong -“
“Even all eight of us active wouldn’t be enough to keep all the Bright Place’s courts at bay. You know that best of all.”
I do. In my early days, when the Bright Lady was still trying to recruit me to her cause, I fought against her with my court, and my court’s allied courts. I nearly destroyed her and her six high fae followers, and had it not been for the Bright Lady’s uncanny ability to worm her way into my heart, I would’ve.
“Then what do we do, Quinn?” I ask.
“We escape Van Grier’s binding.”
“How?”
His ice-eyes melt on the edges as he wipes down the counter with deliberate strokes. “I don’t know.”
A Brightened binding is stronger than the tides, than the rotation of the moon around the planet. It binds all fae who agree to it absolutely. It’s unbreakable.
We’ve bound ourselves to unbreakable chains.
-11-
MAY
I wake up and I’ve never been hungrier in my life.
Okay, that’s a lie - when I was a baby I was probably turbo-hungry all the time. But right now I come pretty close, as evidenced by the fact my entire stomach is trying to eat the rest of my organs via osmosis.
I sit up straight in bed, marveling at the fact being hungry actually woke me up for once. Usually, when things got too tight on the budget, I’d just go to sleep instead of eating, and that kept me occupied until morning. But even then I was never woken up by my stomach grumbling. As if on cue, a silver tray tinkles in the hall and my door opens, the house fae wheeling it over the doorway as an offering.
“Holy shit yes,” I hiss, stumbling out of bed and over to the tray, Sir Charles loping behind me. My legs still feel like they’ll give out under me, but at least I can propel myself forward on my own now. Whatever hit me last night isn’t gone, but it’s fading. I rip off the lid of the tray - slobbering down the lamb-and-mint sausage patties and sweet buckwheat porridge with chocolate shavings. I’m halfway through a glass of orange juice and a bowl of perfectly ripe strawberries when the house fae makes an inquisitive little squeal.
I can sort of guess what’s he’s asking. “Oh I’m fine now, thanks. I think I was just tired yesterday.”
He makes more squeals, but I don’t understand any of them. I finish the strawberries and smile.
“Thanks, buddy. You pretty much saved my life. And my dignity. Did you hear how loud my stomach was rumbling?”
The house fae titters more, and I smack my hand to my forehead.
“Shit!” I clamber over the silk couch and yank out a fresh pair of shorts from my dre
sser. “Today’s the whole dormant high fae feeding day, isn’t it? I gotta go!”
I feel a yank on my shirt when I dash outside my room and into the hall, and I stagger back to look at the house fae and his invisible hand crumpling my shirt up. He squeaks again, this time sounding a little sadder.
“Hey, I’ll be okay,” I smile. “It’s safe to go out now, right? And I’m just fine now, see?”
I flex like a body builder for him, striking tough poses with all my muscles so he doesn’t worry. It seems to work, because he lets go of my shirt and squeaks resignedly.