Quentin moved. I moved to stand next to him. When the Luidaeg needed me to bleed, she’d call me. She always did.
“Mother didn’t leave room for anything but herself when she made the pixies. That’s part of why you’re so small. She was never good at allowing things to become complicated. Poppy, give me your hand.”
Poppy, not yet aware of the danger of listening to the Luidaeg when she said that sort of thing, stuck out her hand. The Luidaeg picked up the bone needle and drove it into the tip of Poppy’s index finger.
The oversized pixie yelped and tried to jump back. The Luidaeg grabbed her wrist before she could, moving it so that her fingertips were positioned above the shell bowl.
“You promised,” said the Luidaeg, and squeezed.
Poppy didn’t bleed. Instead, something as thick and viscous as maple syrup began dripping from her finger—assuming maple syrup was bright orange and glowed like it was radioactive. She made a soft squeaking sound, half surprise and half dismay. Her wings rustled, but they didn’t chime.
“Keep your hand exactly where it is,” said the Luidaeg, and let go of Poppy’s wrist. She reached for the glass flask, pulling out the stopper. The smell of blood wafted from the silvery contents. It was . . . thin, diffuse, impossible to identify, except in the sense that I knew I couldn’t identify it. Whatever it was, it was something I had never encountered before.
“I don’t feel good,” said Poppy. The glow from her skin was starting to dim, leaving her pink and pale, save for the high spots of hectic color in her cheeks.
“Drink this,” said the Luidaeg, forcing the flask into her other hand. “You’ll feel better.”
Poppy looked grateful, too innocent or too confused to sense a trap when one was springing shut on her—or maybe she just didn’t care. Maybe she had already accepted that this was going to happen, and saw no sense in fighting. Whatever her reasons, she raised the flask to her lips and drank its contents without hesitation, gulping them down in three long mouthfuls.
Her eyes widened. Her jaw went slack. The flask fell from her fingers and landed on the floor with a sound like a single bell chiming. The stream of orange light was falling faster and faster, until it should have overflowed the shallow bowl. Somehow, the bowl seemed to keep expanding, growing broader, deeper, becoming wide enough to hold every drop.
The couch springs groaned. I shifted my attention to Simon, who was suddenly back to his original size. Still asleep, but no longer small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. That was almost a pity. He would have been so much easier to deal with if he’d stayed portable.
“Simon Torquill, whatever am I going to do with you?” The Luidaeg picked up the glass flask and walked over to him, crouching down and bringing the lip of it to his mouth. “Exhale,” she commanded.
Simon did. A glittering swirl of pixie dust filled the flask.
“Good boy,” she said, and slid the stopper home before slapping him, hard, across the face.
Simon opened his eyes.
The Luidaeg smiled, showing him a full mouthful of razor-sharp teeth. “Hello, failure,” she purred.
Sensibly, Simon recoiled, slamming himself up against the arm of the couch. When he couldn’t go any farther, he froze, eyes wide, as still as a mouse confronted with a cat.
“You know, if it were up to me, I might have left you as you were,” said the Luidaeg. “The Davies boy concocted a clever counter for my sister’s work, but he didn’t account for the brute simplicity of pixie magic. The two were battling for dominion in your blood, and your body elected to go back to what seemed safest: sleep. I don’t know whether elf-shot’s protections would have kicked back in and kept you from withering away. You could have died and taught me something at the same time, but someone was willing to ransom you. Earn this second chance, failure.”
“October, what have you—” began Simon, turning to face me. Then he froze, eyes going even wider, which should have been impossible. “No.”
I followed his eyes to Poppy. The light had almost stopped falling. The orange glow of her skin wasn’t fading anymore: it was gone. Her hair was still orange, the color of maple leaves in the fall, as were her eyes. Her wings had changed shape, becoming longer and thinner, more equipped to her current size. They were no longer transparent, but had taken on a dozen shades of sunrise, so that if she spread them against the light, they might mimic a little of the glow she’d given away.
“Yes,” said the Luidaeg. “This is what it costs when you’re not careful. When you fail again.”
“Luidaeg, what did you do?” The last drop of light fell from Poppy’s finger. She wobbled. I rushed to catch her and hold her up, keeping her from falling. It felt like the bones had gone out of her legs, leaving her limp and unresponsive.
The Luidaeg met my eyes over Poppy’s head. “What she asked me to do,” she said. “Simon needed to wake, but Simon was under a pixie charm. The only way to dispel it was to unmake it, and unmaking it required unraveling it at the root. I would have needed to take apart a pixie no matter what. I just happened to have a volunteer.”
“What did you do?” This time the question came from Quentin, and was underscored with a wounded confusion that hurt my heart.
The Luidaeg was a monster to me for years before the first time I realized I could see her as a friend. She was a story that local fae parents told their children. “Better watch it, or the Luidaeg will get you.” Quentin, though. He had been born in Toronto, where they had other monsters to warn their kids about. He had made his first bargain with her when he was little more than a child, and she had always treated him fairly, and with kindness, and with her own strange brand of love. She was one of the people he trusted most in the world.
This wasn’t the first time he had seen her be monstrous, but it was the first time he had seen her do something that could be construed as cruel.
“We say every kind of fae has a Firstborn, because it’s easier than explaining that the truth is complicated and sometimes things aren’t what they seem,” said the Luidaeg. There was a new hurt in her eyes. She was reading Quentin’s discomfort as clearly as I was, and she didn’t like it. “My mother made the pixies because she was lonely and sad. She didn’t count on the fact that anything made will start wanting a life of its own. Will want to be more than a drop of blood and an idea. So she told them ‘come to me if you want more, and I will give it to you.’” She switched her attention to me. “Remember the Aes Sidhe?”
“They all died,” I said automatically. Then I blinked. “No.”