“I don’t know that,” Effy said. Her vision was still black at the corners. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Ianto gave a laugh that, this time, was remarkably soft—almost tender. “You can’t really think that the most qualified person for this project was a first-year architecture student failing half of her classes. Didn’t you ever question it, why the estate of Emrys Myrddin would hire a mewling little girl, with nothing to offer the world but a pretty face?”
Effy tried to reply, but her voice failed her. She managed only a small whimper.
“I didn’t need to read your file, Effy.” Ianto’s voice grew softer now, and he lowered the musket, bringing up his hand to cup her chin instead. “I knew what sort of girl you are. I’ve always known. A beautiful girl, but a weak one. One that no one would miss. Who would ask after you, if you vanished from your classes, from your dorm room? You were the perfect choice for this house. For me. A girl who could so easily slip away.”
Once upon a time, Effy had believed herself to be that girl. She had been terrified of anything that might hold her where she was, that might chain her where she couldn’t flee. She had fashioned herself into an escape artist, a magician whose only trick was vanishing. Permanence was dangerous. It had always felt like a trap.
Only now things were different. Perhaps her classmates would not ask after her, nor her professors. Perhaps even her mother would be glad to finally be done with her. But if she did slip away, through one of those tricky little holes in the foundation of the world, Effy knew that Preston would spend the rest of his life searching for her. She could not leave him alone. She could not let him drown.
And yet—she didn’t know how she could stop it.
Slowly, Effy unfolded the paper in her hand. Her fingers shook as she put the pencil to the page.
“There,” Ianto said, somehow even softer than before. “That’s a good girl. Build something beautiful for both of us. I don’t want to wait much longer. I’ve spent twelve mortal years looking for you, and now, finally, you’ve come home.”
Tears bloomed in the corners of her eyes. That old fear sensation was starting in the tips of her fingers and toes, the somatic terror that gripped her at night, that had hunted her like a dog all her life. It was the fear that her body felt before her mind could comprehend it.
“Ianto,” she tried, even as she moved the pencil tremulously against the paper, “please. I don’t . . .”
“No whimpering now,” he said, clucking his tongue. “You’re a girl, not a child.”
And then there was a sudden, immense groaning sound. A wrenching rattle. Behind Ianto, the chandelier at last loosed from the ceiling and fell to the floor. In one splendid, brilliant moment, it shattered, bits of glass flying out in all directions. A shard of it cut her cheek; another lodged itself in her calf, cutting right through the nylon of her stocking.
Effy gave a quiet utterance of pain, but Ianto scarcely seemed to notice at all. The whole floor was a constellation of shattered glass, glittering like hoarfrost. Even as blood tracked down her cheek, all she could think of was Preston, downstairs, drowning.
“I can’t do it,” she whispered. “Please, Ianto, please. Just let him go.”
“Love is terrible, isn’t it?” Ianto said, over the sound of the churning water below. “That’s why the one line became so famous. ‘I will love you to ruination.’ I think we all understand what it’s like to be wrecked by it. Even me.”
Ianto leaned close to her, so close that she could smell the salt and rot that wafted from him, the damp-earth scent of something not quite human.
His fingers gripped the back of her neck, fisting handfuls of golden hair. He jerked Effy’s face toward his and pressed their lips together with such violence that it was like seawater striking stone.
Time slowed around her again. Effy sat silent and still, green vines growing around her wrists and ankles, trapping her in that chair.
She knew that if she tried hard enough, she could escape this: she could go somewhere into the deep caverns of her mind and hide until it was over, until her body was hers once again.
But Preston was downstairs. Drowning. While Ianto took her lower lip between his teeth and bit hard enough to make her bleed, Effy reached into the pocket of her trousers and found the hag stones.
When Ianto broke their kiss for just a moment, Effy crammed the stones into his face, into his mouth, with as much brutality as she could muster. He staggered backward in shock, choking on the rocks, garbling curses.
“You little whore,” he spat, hag stones dropping to the floor. “You were meant to have kept yourself pure for me.”
She had one last hag stone, gripped between her index finger and her thumb, in the hand that was missing its fourth finger. Trembling, Effy raised it to her eye.
The world around her rippled, as if it were a reflection on water. And then a shuddering metamorphosis took place: Where Ianto’s torn white shirt had been, there was now a vest of black bramble, and under it just muscle and sinew and pale, pale skin, all wrapped around bone. His hair had grown longer, sleeker, reaching the middle of his back. His face had been handsome before, but too rugged somehow, too obviously weatherworn and human. Now it was impossibly, unreasonably beautiful, cheekbones as sharp as blades, eyes so pale they almost looked like they had no color at all, just the white and a black iris, like an eclipsed sun.
His fingers ended in claws, and he reached out to Effy with one hand, beckoning.
The shock of it nearly stopped her breathing. Effy lowered the hag stone, yet there the Fairy King still stood. He wore a coronet of bone. His hair was dripping with fetid water. She blinked and blinked and blinked, but nothing could erase him from the room.
“I really am mad,” she managed, choking on the words.
“No,” the Fairy King said, and his voice was the sound of shears through silk. “You are seeing truly, the way you always have, Euphemia. You were offered to me on the riverbank, and then withdrawn. I don’t like to be forsaken. I have spent twelve years chasing you, but you hid yourself from me with your banal mortal tricks. No more. I come to claim what is mine by right. Once offered, a sacrifice cannot be revoked.”
It could not be real. And yet Effy knew that it was—it must be. There was no escaping this. It was what her entire life had been lurching toward. She had hidden behind her pink pills, behind her saints, behind the scolding of the doctor and her mother. She had convinced herself out of it. And it had almost worked.
But here in the Bottom Hundred, in this ancient, sinking house, there was nowhere left to hide.
“Why?” she cried out, over the sound of the thrashing water below. It was the question that had plagued her more terribly than anything else. “Why me?”
The Fairy King laughed, a lovely and awful sound. “I am not as cruel a creature as all the stories say, Euphemia. I do not come for girls just because they are beautiful. You were a pretty young child, with your golden hair, but there are many pretty children, safe in their beds, who I cannot touch. I come for the girls who are left out in the cold. They cannot belong anywhere else but with me.”
Somehow, her missing finger began to throb, as if she had only just remembered that the loss of it was painful. A phantom pain, eerie and old, but a pain nonetheless. Effy gripped the hag stone, even though she knew it would not save her.
“The world has not been kind to you, Euphemia,” he went on, in his silk-sharp voice. “But I can be. If you obey, if you give yourself over to me entirely, I will be so kind, it will make you weep. When you were young, all I could take was your finger. Now I will have the rest.”