August locked her fingers around my wrists, jerking me toward her, and snarled, “Let’s see how good you are at binding what isn’t yours now.”
I had time to open my mouth and take a quick breath, intending to ask her what the hell she was talking about. I had less than a second. Then the pain slammed down on me, hot and intense and biting as if I were bathing in acid, like every nerve in my body was suddenly, electrically on fire. I screamed. The smell of smoke and roses was everywhere, cloying, choking me, until I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see, I couldn’t stand—
When I was a child, Amandine tried to turn me human. She wanted me to die a human death, natural and mortal and inevitable. But it hurt. Oh, how it hurt. If she moved at anything swifter than a snail’s crawl, it was too painful for even the most devoted daughter to stand, and she had quickly learned that if she didn’t want me to flinch every time she came near me, she needed to go slow and easy.
For years, I’d blocked out how she had hurt me, refusing to think about it, refusing to even remember that it had happened, because if she was Daoine Sidhe, as everyone told me, over and over, there was no way her hands could have been enough to cause that sort of pain. When my own daughter had been born, I’d been afraid to touch her, because what if that sort of feedback loop was just how things worked among the fae, and no one had ever wanted to say anything in front of a flawed, mixed, mortal changeling?
My mind might have blocked out the pain, but my body remembered. It knew what August was doing, and it howled on a cellular level, fighting back as hard as it could. It didn’t matter. August was stronger, and she was better at using our shared magic, and as hard as I pulled away, she pulled me toward her twice as fiercely.
Don’t-look-here spells don’t make it impossible for someone to notice you. They just make it harder. With the way I was screaming, someone was going to notice me.
Then Simon was there, grabbing my shoulders, dragging me away from August. She let go with surprising readiness once it was her father pulling me out of her grasp. I stopped screaming and gasped, unable to speak as I struggled to get my equilibrium back.
It wasn’t coming easy. I didn’t even need the lock of colorless brown hair that had fallen to cover my eyes to know what she had done: it was singing in my veins, in the suddenly shifted watermarks of my mortality. Like our mother, like me, August knew how to change the blood of the people she touched. It was clear that unlike me, she’d had plenty of opportunities to practice. I was a blunt instrument and she?
She was a scalpel.
My heart was beating too hard and my body felt like it had been replaced by a hundred pounds of clay as I staggered to my feet, struggling to keep my balance in the force of too many changes, too quickly. Simon had his arm around my shoulders, sheltering me from August, whose eyes were still bright with magic and rage.
“That is enough,” he snapped, and his voice was the crack of a whip, the edict of a king: disagreeing with him would be impossible. August froze. Only for a moment. Long enough for him to let me go and move to her, grabbing her arms and restraining her.
My knees went weak, trying to force me to kneel. He was so beautiful. How had I never seen how beautiful he was? I didn’t even have the right to look at him.
The part of me that was still fae raged and wept at the same time, stunned into silent fury. There’s something in the human DNA that wants to bow before the fae, seeing them as too perfect, too beautiful to truly exist. It’s an old instinct, left over from the days when the purebloods hunted humans for sport, running them up and down the hills before putting arrows in their hearts and leaving them for their lovers to find. Bow, and maybe you won’t be transformed into a deer, or a tree, or a particularly interesting stone. Bow, and maybe your betters will let you pass in peace.
Bow, and live to see the morning.
The false Queen used to raise those responses in me. She was one of the only fae I knew who actually rejoiced in being punishingly beautiful, the kind of beauty that never did anyone any good, but could do them a world of hurt. I had hated the feelings she sparked in me then, when I thought they were an unavoidable part of being who and what I was. As my blood had shifted and those feelings had faded, I had been relieved. That was a part of my mortality I had never wanted back.
Well, I had it now. Lucky, lucky me.
August was struggling to break free of her father. I was sure she would have succeeded, if he hadn’t been pinning her arms behind her back so that she lacked the leverage to get away.
“August,” he snapped. “August, stop.”
She froze, twisting in an effort to see his face. “How do you know my name?” she demanded. “I didn’t tell you my name.”
Simon couldn’t have looked more stunned if she had suddenly turned him mortal. The color drained from his cheeks, leaving his freckles standing out like brands against his skin. “What . . . what did you say?” he stammered. “How do you not know me?”
“I’ve never met you before,” she snapped. “Let me go.”
The doorknob turned.
I whipped around, staring at the top of the stairs in suddenly unified dismay. We were going to be found. We were going to be found, and there was no way I could explain what we were doing down here. August wasn’t wearing a human disguise. I didn’t know whether I needed one or not, and it didn’t really matter either way, because I was too weak and too off-balance to disguise myself. I couldn’t do anything but stand where I was and wait for everything to go to hell.
The smell of smoke and mulled cider was so thin as to be almost imperceptible, but I felt the weight of Simon’s spell settle on me like a shroud. The door opened. Alan appeared, frowning down the stairs. He was a tall, thin, human man, dressed all in black, his hair pulled into a ponytail that left his slightly over-large ears prominently displayed. Most of the time when I’d seen him, he’d looked dour, even disapproving. Right now, he just looked confused.
“Damn raccoons,” he said finally, and turned off the light, casting the basement into absolute blackness.
I had thought the dark was deep before, when I’d been looking at it with the eyes of a more nocturnal creature. Now my eyes were as close to human as the rest of me, and the blackness was absolute. I fumbled in my pocket until I found my cellphone, holding it up to illuminate the area.
Simon was wobbling, even paler than before, like a man on the verge of collapse. His grip on August had slackened. She was free, looking wildly around, like she had lost something. She flinched when I held the light in her direction, raising a hand to shield her eyes.
“Papa?” she said, in a shaky voice. “I smell your magic—where are you?”