I had threatened to kill and had killed one or two who had been foolish enough to say my birth name aloud in the Dark Court. I had been known as nothing but Seven since I could heft a sword, but if I owed anyone, it was my partner. Wasn’t this a bitch?
“It’s short for seventeen,” I gave in and grumbled. “When I was born my father was drunk. Well, he was always drunk, but he was drooling drunk this time. When he stood at my mother’s birthing bed to name me, he became, they told me,” I winced and it wasn’t because of a bullet wound, “caught up in the moment. He declared I’d be called Prince of Shadows, he who rides among the storm clouds and will forge the blackest and mightiest of swords to strike down the White Army, spilling their blood as a river…by then he sobered up some and remembered my mother had slept with his three brothers, his archenemy and I think Titania. Mom always liked to mix it up. That’s when he added Born of a whore who would rut with any barnyard boar that would have her. And then he passed out or I wouldn’t be Seven. I’d be Twenty or Thirty. Seven is short for seventeen which is short for seventeen syllables. He thought I was a cretin because I couldn’t memorize my name until I was fifty.” Which to give me credit was about a human child of four. “There. That’s your story. Happy now?”
He leaned back against the rock wall we were camped again, beans forgotten. His smile was as wicked as any Unseelie could hope for. “Actually, I think I am the most happy that I have ever been in my life. Let me bask in it for a moment.” Tilting his head back, he looked up at the ten stars and for once wasn’t, as we always did, counting them—the sand trickling down the hourglass. This time he was seeing them simply as stars. I could see by the softening of the stubborn jaw. He might not be a portrait of joy and rainbow farting bunnies, but he wasn’t grim. For a moment I could see home in him, see the magic lost.
Looking back down, he leaned over to search in his saddle bags to hand me a bottle of his precious scotch and lift one of his own.
I was shaky, but not so much I couldn’t clink my bottle against his with the peal of a bell. It sounded the same as the ones they rang at most of the outposts—a habit the Fey who ran them had picked up from the humans.
Last call.
Not yet perhaps, but soon. Close enough to be draining your glass and ordering that last round. There was no one I’d rather drink that last round with than a Seelie Fey. Who could possibly have known?
“You were the worst of the best,” I said and meant it for the compliment it was.
“And you were the best of the worst,” he offered solemnly in the same spirit.
Maybe Scotch was fast with a knife like he said or maybe there was a tiny speck of magic left in us after all. A magic that came from finding out what a millennia of balls, duels, conniving, spying, wars, taking the throne, losing the throne, all over and over again had failed to teach us: there was no Light Fey, no Dark Fey. There was only the inevitable end, the last dancing star to burn out and vanish. It would come, sooner or later.
But as Ialach had said, we wouldn’t be alone when it did.
Eleven Years Ago
The man from the park followed me home.
It should panic you, right? The man behind you, taking a step each time you did. It should terrify you. It’s how the night terrors began of every kid, and much as I hated to admit it, I was a kid—not always, but sometimes. This time, kid or not, I knew it was how all their worst dreams bloomed into genuine damn life. Those footfalls mirrored any of those in every horror movie made. The monster behind, the scrape of the shoe against the asphalt, homing in on you and only you. That was the nightmare made into real life. But it wasn’t how my dark nighttime visions began. Not me. Mine had happened before that. Mine was reversed. My reality came first before crawling into my nightmares. The truth was in both of them, awake or asleep, but I’d been awake in the beginning—conscious and aware of the man in the park.
The son of a bitch who had started it all in bloodstained grass, wouldn’t he be surprised when it turned out….
I’d be the one to finish it.
The Man from the Park
The first time I’d seen the invisible man…
Wait, that’s pretty hilarious, huh?