“I helped you last night, didn’t I?” He counters.
“As part of your egotistical attempt at apologizing. Because you want me to speed up your feeding. There’s a bunch of reasons you’d help me and all of them are selfish.”
This makes his brows furrow even harder, his expression sharpening to that sword-like glare. But I won’t let it scare me. My blood races at the sight of that look, my body aching for him to press me against the glass dome and slam every bit of his flaming irritation into me - I cut myself off with a mental stone wall. I won’t let his glamor turn me on, here of all places, now of all times when I’m making myself clear.
“You try to decide what I can know, what I can do, what I can wear, even!” I regret the last one the second it comes out - he’s never done that. But I’m too far in to take it back and he’s just bought me the one dress and I really do like it, but it comes attached with so much of him. “I’m not your little doll to control just because I can feed you! I’m not going to tolerate being ordered around just because I’m a human and you’re fae! You’re not better than me!”
“I never said I was,” He snarls.
“Well you sure as shit act like it!”
There’s a moment where his gemstone eyes flash dangerously, and his glamor surges over my mental stone wall and all I want are his lean, long fingers undoing the button of my jeans, skimming the heat of my underwear over and over until I can’t take anymore and start to beg - he can hear me, can’t he? He can hear every second of this and I hate him for it, hate me for thinking it, hate him for existing, hate myself for meeting him in the first place -
It’s a kiss, my first kiss, but it feels more like an explosion of lips and teeth and tongue, his hand on my chin and my hands around his neck, pulling him in close, so close I can smell someone’s perfume on him and I hate it, hate the way he tastes like bittersweet rosemary, hate the way his tongue darts like lava into my mouth, searing me all the way down to my core and leaving a scorched path in its wake that aches with ash, wanting to be filled again and again. I bite into his lower lip, demanding more, thinking I can goad him into giving me more, even if I’m nowhere near as beautiful as the woman he’s slept with - the women he sleeps with - even if I’ve never done anything like this with anyone before I want to do it with him, even if I wish I didn’t want to I want to, holy fucking shit I want to -
He breaks off first - violently, like an earthquake splitting away from itself - and I stumble. By the time I’ve caught myself he’s gone, out of the dome, striding away on the lawn like hellhounds are on his ankles.
Everything catches up to me and I sink to the ground and lie there; a molten pool of a girl, the smell of dirt in her nose and the taste of rosemary on her bruised lips.
****
It takes me a good ten minutes to work up the energy to stand on my own two legs again. Ten minutes to trundle back to the mansion. Five minutes to make it to my room and collapse on the couch. Seven hours to get over what just happened.
Dane kissed me. I kissed him? I don’t know who started it, but we kissed.
I ran cool water over my lips to try to ease the throbbing at first, but even now they still hurt, faintly. A sick, twisted part of me relishes the pain - it’s the only reminder of what happened. Every time I accidentally lick my lips I relive the taste of Dane, the velvet feel of his hot mouth on my own. Just as hot as a human. Just as soft as a human. Not that I would know, but -
I try to dig my grave in the couch cushions and shove my head in there.
My first kiss - the thing I’d been thinking about since I hit thirteen, the thing I doodled about in old diaries and tried not to think about in high school - gone. Done. Over with. Given to a beautiful fae.
Under the influence of his glamor.
There’s no doubt all my feelings were just induced by his glamor. It took me over so suddenly and totally - I’ve never come (haha, me) close to feeling that way about anybody. The feeling in the rose dome hit me out of the blue like a ten-ton truck of bricks getting dumped over my head. Yeah, I’ve had the occasional sex dream about hot actor guys, and every time I masturbate it’s to some nameless hot dude. But sex dreams and fantasies have nothing on that feeling. I’ve never felt that way about anyone in reality, that all-encompassing fever-pitch of need and want.
It has to be his glamor. There’s no other explanation. His glamor sunk into me so deep today it pushed past how much I hated him.
He basically magically tricked me into kissing him, didn’t he?
Everything I said in the argument comes back to haunt me as I stare up at the gold-etched ceiling. I said some stupid shit. So did he, but that’s his deal. I can only apologize for what I said. Some of it wasn’t fair. Most of it was.
“Anyone would’ve been preferable to you climbing that thing on your own and risking your li-“ Dane stopped. “ - your Brightness.”
Risking my li? My life. Had he been…worried about me? Was I so mad at him I just assumed he’d been yelling at me for selfish reasons? No - he‘d corrected himself. My Brightness. That’s all he’s interested in, that’s the only reason he’d worry. He doesn’t give a shit about me, as long as I feed him.
Which I still haven’t done. Which is tomorrow.
And tonight is the linking ceremony. Vil will be home any minute - he said it’d take place at sunset, and it’s nearly seven. I check my phone, thanking the weather information that stocked days in advance; yup, sunset’s at 7:45. I’m still amazed weather information for Earth works for the Bright Place, but go figure. They must be linked up somehow.
With more pressing matters than the weather on my grubby hands, I bathe and choose the most comfortable outfit I can to prepare for whatever this ceremony is; a white t-shirt and a plaid skirt. It’s a little too 90’s, but it’ll do.
I know Vil’s home because Sir Charles vanishes from my room, immediately running out and not coming back, his tail between his legs. Vil’s probably called him. Damn - I hate Vil for it and the way he’s chosen to use it, but a Brightness with the ability to bind fae to your will if they agree to it is incredibly useful. I mean, mine is too. But his is objectively stronger overall. And crueler. I don’t want to be mushy and say feeding someone makes them your friend, but I feel like it’s a better way to go about asking fae to do stuff for you than, you know, ordering them to without their choice in the matter.
In the end, I didn’t discover anything about Vil while he was gone. No secrets, nothing that could help me undo his bindings on the high fae. And now that he’s back it’s going to be a hundred times harder to find anything, if there even is anything.
“There you are, May.”
I look up to see Vil standing in my doorway, his tan even tanner against his white suit and brown hair. He crosses the threshold easily - and I didn’t realize how weird it would be to see that after only keeping company with fae for a few days. Everybody else in this house has to linger in the doorway. Everybody except him.
“Hey, Vil.” I try to look relaxed. “How was your, uh, trip?”
“Just fine,” He seats himself across from me on a love seat. “I stopped in the garden to look at the high fae roses - I must admit I’m impressed.”
“Thanks. Did you see Barnabus?”
“Yes - he told me all about how you fed him after the shadow fae attack.”
“Right but…why did the shadow fae attack?”
“I’m still looking into that,” Vil muses behind his hand. “Though, as I told you before, many people aren’t happy I’ve bound the eight high fae. It could be an attack by the fae themselves. Or it could be Giselle.”
“Can she also order fae with her Brightness?”
Vil’s mild brown eyes flash up at me. “Her Brightness allows her to inspire them. Which, in many ways, is more useful than my ability to bind. Binding requires much feeding, which is why I hired you. Before you came, I was nearly taxed to my limit. But Giselle has no such limitati
ons - she can inspire legions without having to take on the burden of their feeding. A very dangerous ability, to be certain. Then again, she can’t command them directly as I can.”
“So each Brightness has like, strengths and weaknesses,” I frown. “So what’s mine? The strength is obvious, but the weakness?”
Vil seems to consider it, then stands up abruptly. “You should prepare for the linking ceremony. It’s to take place in the garden, in the eastern pavilion.”
I won’t let him off that easy. “What’s the weakness, Vil?”
“Hrm?” He looks up, as if he was thinking. “Oh, my apologies. I have no idea what your Brightness’s weakness is. I’ve never met anyone with a Brightness like yours before.”
I deflate a little, and he waves his hand.
“Either wear something with a lower cut on the chest, or something you don’t care about.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I’ll need access to your chest.”
“Oookay, that’s not ominous at all,” I mutter as Vil walks out the door. Something with a lower chest cut, huh? My mind immediately flashes to the dress in the hallway. It’s the lowest cut thing I own. Well, sort-of own. I still think of it as Dane’s, mostly. Not that he’d ever wear it. I imagine him in it and start laughing - he’d probably look better than me.
But my laugh lasts about as long as it takes for me to lick my lips and feel the bruise on them, and the kiss comes flooding back. He’s going to be at the ceremony, isn’t he? Fuck. Fucking shit on a cheese stick. How am I supposed to face him with that hate-kiss between us?
You could try ignoring him for once, I coach myself. Yeah right. All he has to do is walk into a room and my whole body goes on edge like a terrified cat puffing up. A cat that also happens to be in heat.
I’m still feeling bad about the unfair thing I said to him. He doesn’t try to control how I dress. That was just me projecting. Maybe, if I can’t apologize for that shitty comment directly at the ceremony, maybe I can show him I didn’t mean it.
But if I wear the dress, it’d be like accepting the it as a gift once and for all. Accepting that I’d put something he gave me on my body. It’s a stupid pride thing, I know, but when it comes to Dane all I can do is cling to my pride, or what’s left of it after his glamor ravages it.
“No, May,” I sigh. “You did wrong. So make up for it. You can’t tell a high fae how to apologize and then not do it right yourself.”
I’m right. Thanks, me.
No problem, me. PS. If you kiss Dane ever again I’m divorcing you.
****
The house fae comes to get me at 7:45 right on the dot. He squeaks a little when he sees me in the pastel pink dress, and as he leads me down the hall I feel something playing with the long train of the skirt.
“You like it that much, huh?” I laugh. The house fae squeaks embarrassedly and puts the skirt down, his huge feet imprinting in the carpet as he marches ahead of me like he’s determined to pretend to be serious. He leads me to the front door, where a beautiful blood-red sunset leaks into the sky.
I walk the rest of the way on my own. It feels like a walk to the gallows, sort of, if the gallows were a ring of four men in black suits standing in a circle under the big white marble pavilion covered in night-blooming jasmine. I swallow hard when I see them all wearing masks - regal, terrifying masks of gold that obscure their faces, stopping halfway for their mouths. But by now I’ve learned their body types, and their eye colors are too distinctive not to recognize. Altair stands on the left, shifting nervously from foot to foot, his black, star-studded eyes softening when he sees me. Quinn stands on the right, pale ice-blue eyes watching me boredly, like he’s over it already. Vil stands in front, holding what looks like a bouquet of roses in his hand - one light purple, one red, one green, one yellow, and one pink. And Dane stands at the stairs, welcoming me in like a grim specter, his dark suit hugging every plane of his lean body and his gemstone eyes unmistakable through the mask. And unreadable. They’re flat, empty, so different from the anger or disgust for me that’s usually there. My lips throb just looking at him, the memory of the kiss still jagged and fresh. He flickers his gaze once - up and down my body - and I wonder if he realizes what I mean at all by wearing this dress. Or is it a stupid thing to think, that he’d get it without me telling him?
If he does get it, he doesn’t let it show. Vil steps forward and clears his throat.
“Here, Miss James. Stand in the center of us.”
I walk up the stairs carefully, my converse padding gingerly past Dane like he’s a sleeping tiger. If we so much as touch I don’t know what will happen, anymore, even with three other people here. We might kiss again, or we might kill each other. No one knows - least of all me.
Every movement of Vil’s is calculated - he places the roses at my feet like a halo, and I’m the center of it. No one moves, Altair doesn’t even say something comforting. The ritualistic air of it all unnerves me, sets all my teeth on edge. I want someone, anyone to make a noise, to break the suffocating silence as Vil works.
He reaches out to me and touches my silver collar softly. And then he steps back, reaching into his suit jacket pocket and procuring a flask. He offers it to me.
“Drink this. The whole thing.”
“Is this part of the ceremony?”
“No. But you will need it.”
The ominous tone in his voice takes me from anxiety to full-blown panic. Booze is in a lot of rituals, right? Wiccan, Shinto, hell even Jesus made water into wine. In the old times people gave other people alcohol before painful things. My brain faintly puts two-and-two together, but by the time it does I’ve already drank the entire flask. The world spins pleasantly, and I don’t feel quite real anymore, like my body is half ghost, half not my own. Whatever was in there was strong. Maybe too strong. I manage to stay still and standing in the rose-ring, though.
“Altair first,” Vil says with practically no emotion. Altair walks up to me, his dark eyes shining through his mask with something like remorse. He leans into me, putting his hands on my hips as he says softly;
“I’m sorry, May.”
Before I can ask why his head descends to my neck, my shoulder, to my collarbone and then below it, in the center of my chest just above my dress’s lace edge. His lips rest there, and I try to move but I can’t - my arms and legs like stone, my head the only thing I can control at all. I tilt it down to look on in horror as a pair of long incisors - so long, so much longer and thinner and sharper than all those vampires in movies, like snake fangs - grow from Altair’s lips before my eyes, and I understand a split-second before it happens.
I should scream. I know I should - the pain is enough to warrant a scream. But all I can manage is an almost soundless gasp. The two points of his fangs bury deep in my chest, and it hurts so incredibly bad he has to be puncturing my heart. Faintly, I can feel his warm tongue lapping along the holes, drinking the blood that’s coming out.
Dizziness swarms my vision, so intense I barely register Altair pulling away from me, his chin smeared with my blood and his eyes flinching. The pain he inflicted suddenly lifts, though my dizziness doesn’t. Vil says something like ‘Quinn’, and I brace myself too late - his blue-curled head descending so fast and his fangs puncturing hard - mechanical almost - none of the hesitant gentle push of Altair’s. Pain all over again. His warm tongue drinks, and then he pulls away, pale eyes swimming in front of me with something like a shred of regret and one of his blue curls stained red. The pain subsides, and somehow it’s worse that it does before the next puncture, when it fades and the pain comes around again it’s like experiencing it for the first time - brutal and mind-numbing.
Nothing prepares me for Dane. As usual.
The tears have started in my eyes, either out of shock or fear at my impending agony - I can’t tell. They well up and spill over one-by-one, making it even harder to see his face. The streaks of azure and emerald in hi
s eyes blur together, and I feel his hands on my hips and even here - even in the middle of total torture his glamor tries to pull me under - however faintly.
He takes his time, and I hate it. His fangs grow long before he ever reaches my chest, scraping them against my throat with soft but insistent pressure. He feathers his lips against my neck and brings them down and if I wasn’t forced still I would shiver but I can’t, and he pauses in the crook of my neck and lingers there. For a second it’s just me and him quietly breathing in each other’s scents and warmth and then Vil barks for him to keep going and the way he imprints two soft kisses on either side of my collarbones before sinking lower feels like an apology -
Needles puncture me down to my marrow, the twisting in my chest so hard this time it rockets up my brain stem and the world goes black on the edges. His tongue is white-hot, languorously sliding over my wounds and all at once the pain pierces through my paralysis and shudders my entire body violently, and his hands move from my hips to encircle me - steadying me, pulling me close against him. He lifts his head and rests his mouth on my ear.