Witch-Blood

by Ash Fitzsimmons

  My mind whirled. If I really was—I forced myself to think it—witch-blooded fae, then my complete magical ineptness made perfect sense. I hadn’t read much about mongrels, but I’d heard that they seldom had any ability to speak of. That didn’t explain everything I’d just witnessed Toula do, however, but I put her aside for the moment. The bottom line was that if the grand magus was right, I was half fae. But I couldn’t be fae, my family was full of wizards all the way back…

  If I was fae, I mused, no wonder Dad was so distant.

  And what would Hel say?

  Before I could give it much thought, the door opened again, and the grand magus cocked his finger. “Mr. Carver? You can come in now, son.”

  I took a long breath, straightened my shirt, and, feeling like I was heading for the gallows, slunk back into his office.

  Toula was sitting on the far couch, facing the door. Beside her sat a man in a gray dress shirt and blue jeans. He seemed about Toula’s age, as far as I could tell—certainly no older than thirty—and I studied his face, trying to find something familiar there as his eyes widened. Certainly not his hair, which was wavy and dark brown, and barely skimmed his collar. I’d been towheaded like Mom my whole life. His brows were darker than mine, too, and arched above striking green eyes—old eyes, I realized, eyes that didn’t fit the rest of him. With a little flutter of dread, however, I thought I saw something similar in our noses and chins, but it was hard to be sure, as he was staring at me like he was seeing a ghost.

  “What—” he began.

  “Lord Coileán,” the grand magus replied, “allow me to present Aiden Carver.”

  His jaw dropped, and I stared at him, suddenly sure of two things: there was a faerie in the silo, and he was my brother.

  Toula confirmed it a few minutes later, and she and the grand magus left Coileán and me alone to get acquainted. We both drank—Coileán, it seemed, had few reservations about giving alcohol to minors—and I caught myself sneaking glances at him, looking for hints of myself. He had a few inches on me and, I guessed, probably better muscles—not a bodybuilder, but someone familiar with the concept of free weights. While he was relatively pasty, I could tell that, unlike me, he’d at least seen daylight in the last five months. His accent was a puzzle in that he seemed to have none—for all I could tell, he could have grown up in the Midwest, and whatever time he’d spent in Virginia had done nothing to change that.

  I knew I should be cautious—even the little I’d learned had stressed that faeries were, on their best day, dangerous. But Coileán listened as I told him about my family and my bullies, and he echoed Toula’s sentiments about my situation. He gave me space even as he stressed that he wasn’t going to hurt me. And then he made the offer that changed the course of my life: Want to live with me?

  The rational, logical, prudent side of me pushed for no, but all I could see was a way out of my bedroom and a chance—even a slim chance—that I could learn to do magic. Maybe I wouldn’t be a full-fledged wizard, and I didn’t hold out any hope of being Hel’s equal, but if I went with him to Faerie, then maybe someday, I wouldn’t be a dud anymore.

  I still couldn’t quite get my mind around the idea that I was a high lord, but I decided to deal with that later and ran out of the office to pack my things…and straight into the guys who’d delighted in making my life a living hell.

  If anything, my prolonged hiding had only made them more bloodthirsty. Morgan and Leo pinned me to the wall, and Milo, who had the hardest fist among them, broke my nose with one blow. Russell, their leader, stood back and gave orders for a minute before jumping in to take his turn, and his other lieutenants, Terrance and Dan, sat on my legs for a while to make me an easier target. By the time they’d tired and resorted to kicking me, I’d managed to curl up enough to protect my face, but one of my arms was long gone, my legs ached, and I could only hope that my insides weren’t bleeding again.

  And then, somewhere in the haze, I heard a door open, followed shortly by a series of thuds. The next hands to land on me were Toula’s, and as she tried to find out if I still had my major parts, I looked up to see the guys pinned against the walls, hanging a few feet off the ground. Coileán had his fingers around Russell’s throat, and the expression on his face was terrible—rage, barely restrained.

  He was terrorizing magi’s sons—within sight of the grand magus—just because they’d attacked me.

  I wanted to laugh when Russell wet himself, but my chest hurt too much.

  Once he let them go, Coileán turned on the grand magus. I tried to diffuse the situation—the guys had just beaten me, after all, not come after me with wands—but Coileán looked like he was ready to skin a wizard or two by the time Toula got me to my feet. Maybe I should have been scared, and maybe the pain was clouding my judgment, but all I could think then was that I had a brother willing to beat the crap out of magi’s sons on my behalf, never mind what else he was or what he had done.

  That did it. Mom cried, but I packed my stuff and followed Coileán back to Faerie.

  The next year was a roller coaster. In the beginning, I had five other brothers and sisters in the realm—and then I had four, imprisoned for their part in the plot that had led to Coileán attacking his daughter and accidentally killing his girlfriend, Meggy. In the months following her death, he retreated even from me, spending more time alone in his office while he mourned. Still, I seldom wanted for company. Joey was social by nature, and he didn’t seem to mind having me hanging around with him and Georgie when he wasn’t canoodling with Hel. Val had started giving Joey rather painful lessons in swordplay and self-defense around the time that I moved in, and once he learned that the extent of my knowledge on the subject was figuring out which part of a sword was the business end, he took me on as well. I made Joey look like a master by comparison, but Val was patient, and he seemed to intuit just how hard to push. By the time that Coileán started seeking companionship again that spring, I was almost competent—not talented, and nowhere near ready to spar in earnest, but able to at least hit Val once every two or three rounds.

  As he’d spent millennia in the realm, Val was always willing to answer my questions about the place, but Coileán took it upon himself to start patching the larger holes in my education. The massive palace library—a misnomer, really, given that a good part of its holdings could have filled a decent-sized art museum—was put at my disposal, but more importantly, Coileán started taking me with him, showing me what he did all day and why. Toula was a fantastic tutor for magical theory and Val for swordplay, but my brother wanted me to know the ins and outs of Faerie—and I got the sense that he wanted to know me.

  At least Coileán had been in the mortal realm long enough for us to have some common ground. I couldn’t exactly meet him in the middle—I was almost eight hundred years his junior, and most of my life to that point had been spent in a bunker, taking computers apart to see how their guts fit together. He’d traveled, worked, fought, run, found time for flings…and, he admitted one night, he’d tried more than a few mind-altering substances, and he would be happy to give me the highlights if I swore never to undertake the same experimentation. In general, though, he gave me anything I wanted, as if he were trying to make up for the previous fifteen years. When he had a break, he’d escort me—and sometimes Joey—on day trips out of the realm, showing off his favorite spots. I saw more museums and galleries in three months than I’d seen in my whole life, and I gorged myself in some of the most amazing restaurants in the world. Coileán wasn’t embarrassed to buy guidebooks and take recommendations, and slowly, as we contemplated monuments and ate far too many desserts, we started to become…well, brothers.

  I began to get him. I saw the loneliness deep inside his shell, buried under all his raw feelings about Meggy and Moyna. The flashes of self-loathing. The moments of mixed despair and relief when another report arrived without news of Moyna’s whereabouts. The anger at the inevitable whenever he parted from the few mundanes whom he con
sidered friends, his quiet rage against death—a future they’d accepted as the natural pattern of life. I tried to put myself in his position: he’d lived long enough that nearly everyone he’d ever cared for had died, leaving him with a court that tolerated him, another court that resented him, and a small circle of friends with modest life expectancies. And then there I was—young, unsure, talentless, and hopelessly mortal, but still somehow the closest thing to family he had.

  Coileán actually liked me, but more astounding to me was my realization that he desperately wanted me to like him, too.

  And I did. Fifty-seven dead wizards or not, he treated me like I was more than an inconvenient also-ran, more than the dud hiding in Hel’s long shadow. My sister loved me—I never doubted that—but my brother tried to understand me, even if he had no idea what I spent my free time building, or why. Eventually, he sat down and let me give him the short course in computing basics, though he fretted the whole time that he would make my machine explode. We agreed that my work area was an enchantment-free zone for safety purposes, and he sat beside me through a long afternoon to see what he’d been missing. I didn’t go into programming—I didn’t want to scare him off—and as for my pet robotics projects, I kept them safely out of his way. My room contained the single greatest concentration of iron in the realm, and I’d seen him stiffen and twitch whenever he got too close to my scrap reserves. But despite the land mines around us, Coileán stuck it out. It obviously bothered him when he didn’t know what I was talking about, and he paid attention when I went through the terminology. As for me, I didn’t care if he confused a CD drive for a pop-out cup holder—he was trying, which was all that mattered.

  Outside the safety of my room—I mean, in all honesty, no faerie was going in there if he could help it—Coileán was more like Hel when it came to me than either of them cared to admit. Sure, I had free run of the palace and its gardens, but if I went elsewhere, I went with an escort. Joey could be trusted to keep me safe with Georgie, and Coileán knew that Val wouldn’t let anything happen to me, but he also knew too well what some members of his court—hell, of our family—were capable of, and he sheltered me accordingly.

  He cared.

  And now…well, I was back in the silo, the epicenter of my miserable childhood, praying to anyone who might be listening that my brother was still alive.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Without a set schedule in Faerie, and faced with the phenomenon of days that lengthened and shortened at random, I gave up on my alarm clock shortly after arriving in that realm. But I had a pair of windows in my room that faced the sunrise, and so I let my circadian rhythms do what they wanted and woke when the light was right, usually sometime around ten. It felt great, and aside from Coileán’s occasional ribbing about sleeping my life away, I had no complaints.

  Down in the silo, however, finding myself without windows for the first time in months was jarring. An electric clock squatted on the bedside table, and the green numbers had changed every time I rolled over to check, but I had no real sense of time and was too wired to sleep. I tossed and turned until six, and then I gave up, called it a night, and knocked on Joey’s door.

  He looked haggard when he stuck his head through the crack. “You, too, huh?” he muttered, opening the door wider. “Come in, but don’t try to take Georgie’s food.”

  My nose twitched at the unmistakable aroma of sausage patties, and I followed it past the bathroom to one of the rumpled beds, where Georgie was sprawled on her stomach, shoveling meat into her grease-streaked mouth. Someone had coaxed her into an oversized T-shirt and leggings—Toula, I assumed—and haphazardly tied her hair back from her face, but that was as far as the humanizing process had gone. Georgie’s red eyes glanced up from the platter of sausage as I rounded the corner into the bedroom, then quickly fell back to the bounty before her.

  “Early breakfast?” I asked, plopping into one of the pair of chairs by the untouched table. Joey’s boots and gear lay on the floor between the beds, and his blankets looked as disheveled as mine.

  It’s not working, she replied as she bit a patty in half.

  “What’s not working?”

  Not enough. Too slow. These are useless, she thought, pausing to flash her teeth at me. They don’t rip well, and then you have to chew everything to mush.

  “We’ve already been through the Heimlich twice tonight,” Joey added as he collapsed onto the other chair. “One of the minor inconveniences of the human body is the inability to swallow pounds of meat at a time.”

  I forgot, she protested, giving him a disapproving stare. You don’t have to tease me.

  “I’m sorry, sweetie,” he mumbled, “I’m not teasing you, I’m just—”

  Exhausted. I know. Though only exhibiting the dexterity of a particularly gifted infant, she managed to close her fist around another piece of sausage and bring it to her mouth. But this is really hard, and it’s not filling me up.

  “Keep at it, we’ll figure something out,” he told her, then turned his baggy eyes to me. “Toula’s been bringing up leftovers from the kitchen for the last three hours, but it’s not putting a dent in her appetite. Maybe her stomach didn’t shrink all the way, or maybe it’s the fire, but Georgie can’t eat fast enough.”

  If you’d just give me a cow—

  “Same problem,” he said. “It’d take you hours to get through a cow. Anyway, I don’t know what your system can handle right now, so it’s safer if we stick to cooked meat.”

  She swallowed and sighed, then cut her eyes to the door when it slammed open. Got it?

  “Got it,” said my sister, striding into the room with a bulk-sized jar of protein powder in her arms. “Sorry, had to wait for my neighbor to get back from the gym.” Spotting me, she tossed me the jar and pointed to the bathroom. “Sport bottle’s in there, read the package directions, start with one serving, and we’ll see how she handles it. And you were supposed to call me, remember?”

  “Little distracted,” I replied, heading off to mix the drink. “I thought you were staying in Nashville.”

  “Yeah, that was a big ‘nope.’ Give him just a minute, Georgie, and we’ll try a shake, okay?”

  Catching a glimpse of my greasy blond squirrel’s nest and baggy eyes in the bathroom mirror, I decided that I looked only marginally better than Joey that morning. I made up a batch of the concoction, which smelled like chemicals and claimed to be chocolate, and offered the bottle to our former lizard. “Probably best if you hold your nose and drink it,” I said, waiting for her to take it from me.

  Georgie frowned as she considered the mechanics of the situation, and she let Joey pull her up into a sitting position against the wall. “Here,” he said, taking the bottle from me and holding the straw to her lips. “Put that in your mouth and suck on it.”

  Suck…

  He mimed a fish face. “You pull the liquid up the straw. It’s faster to drink it this way.

  Hesitantly, she bit down on the straw and waited. It’s not working.

  “Look in here,” said Joey, tapping his forehead. “See how I do it. I know your mouth feels weird right now, but believe me, this works.”

  Georgie stared at him for a long moment, then closed her lips around the straw, screwed up her face, and managed to pull a sip of shake into her mouth—which she then promptly spat onto the comforter. That’s disgusting! she complained as she reached for the sausage platter. You actually eat that?

  Joey took a test sip and made a face. “Okay, this isn’t going to win any awards, but it’s not that gross.”

  It tastes awful.

  “It’s chocolate—”

  “Which the poor thing doesn’t eat,” Hel interrupted, smacking her forehead. “Don’t worry,” she told Georgie, “they make an unflavored version. I’ll buy some once the health food store opens, and we’ll blend it with something you like.”

  Her eyes lit up. Sheep?

  “No sheep, but I could puree some hamburger and mix
it in. And unless something’s changed of late, Thursday is butchering day—I might be able to get blood from the kitchen. Would you like that?” Georgie nodded with her cheeks puffed full of meat, and Hel patted her leg before turning to me. “Hey, Aid. You didn’t sleep, either?”

  “Still waiting for Val to get in touch.”

  Hel looked around the room, saw that it was just the four of us, and murmured, “Are you sure Val’s not involved in this somehow? I mean, he got you guys up in the middle of the night and threw you out without a real explanation…”

  She let the thought hang, but I shook my head. “Something else was trying to warn me when he came to get us,” I said, reclaiming my chair. Joey’s brow furrowed, and I hastily explained, “I was having this dream. I mean, I thought it was a dream. There was this woman, and she was telling me to run…” His face remained blank, and I mumbled, “Just me, huh?”

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t write it off yet. And I know Val,” he added, looking reproachfully at my sister. “He was scared. I haven’t seen him like that since the Gray Lands.”

  She grimaced as she always did at the mention of our brief invasion of that realm. Hel had migraines for a month from the strain of holding a gate open from Faerie against a wall of dark magic, and Joey said she had nightmares as well. I hadn’t mentioned to him that he, too, sometimes relived that excursion in his sleep, loudly and with much thrashing at the blankets—but if he didn’t know, Hel was bound to tell him eventually at one of their weekend sleepovers. Personally, having been responsible for pumping magic over the border that day, I remembered little but excruciating pain.