“You could always stake your claim as caretaker of The Island of Healed Sorrows,” he said, biting into a strawberry tree fruit he’d plucked earlier.
If he sounded any more autocratic with the next thing to come out of his mouth, I was going to stick my flick blade in his perfectly muscled chest and give it a good twist.
“You’re wrong, you know,” he said, adding fuel to my fire.
Great. Here’s where he tells me how stupid I am.
I eyed my jacket, and the blade’s pocket, wishing I had the nerve to follow through on my fantasies, but it was just rancid anger talking nonsense in my head. I would never do that. Besides, I’d never get that far. He’d stop me, catching my wrist before the blade got anywhere near him. And then we’d tussle and go dead still staring into each other’s eyes, me studying his baffling, seductive, indigo gaze, and I would wonder, could he…could I…could we—
Quit it. Now is not the time for fantasies.
“So, I’m wrong. Big surprise,” I said. “Tell me what I’m wrong about so I can feel even worse.”
“Knowing why they’ve red-flagged you may help change things,” he said.
“Decrees are final.”
“Until they’re not.”
“No decree has ever been lifted. Ever,” I said.
“We’ll see,” he said. “Are you finished packing?”
“I’m not packing. I’m stuck here as your fae island’s human hermitess until I die.”
Aril blew off my remark about the island and not packing and got up. He slung my pack of supplies from Sulla’s shop over his shoulder.
“There’s someone we need to go see,” he said.
“Who?”
“He’s back in Venice.”
15
“I, for one, am curious,” Aril said.
He meant, he was curious about the reason for the decree. I was, too. Now that the shock over being told I was going to die was over, I wanted answers. I wouldn’t give Aril the satisfaction of hearing he was right, though.
Just as he wouldn’t tell me who we were going to see.
He had a boat. I’d wondered about that, half-believing he’d transported himself to the island via magic. The cabin cruiser wasn’t large, but it was crafted in ways only his kind could extract from the wood that went into its making.
Masculine, bluntly cutting through the waves, the cabin cruiser was a lot like him. While the wood used for the hull was obviously cedar, I couldn’t identify the black-red lumber used for the decking and trim. It smelled fresh, just sawn, which told me that like a lot of things fae, it was alive. Perhaps not in the traditional sense; it wouldn’t leaf out or suddenly sprout branches, but it would never blemish, bleach, or accept a scratch without renewing itself soon after. Initially, I thought the woodworker had finished each board by painting intricate patterns on it in a language I couldn’t read, until I looked closer and saw it wasn’t writing but, instead, the wood’s natural grain.
Though Aril wasn’t the tallest fae I’d ever seen, everything on the cruiser had been designed to his body size, which meant I was swallowed by the furniture onboard. Sadly, he had exactly one of everything, one seat behind the helm, one chair at the dinette, an indicator of a lonely life I could understand and appreciate. Why provide seating or berths for guests when you never had any?
Down next to the hull, the boat’s fate cell sung in soft, muted tones, harmonizing with the fate cell in my back pack as it powered the engine. Night had already claimed the eastern horizon behind us. Ahead, the lights of Venice lit up storm clouds, tinting the gray sunset copper over the human districts and a dramatic prism of colors over the fae areas.
“Who is this guy we’re going to meet?” I asked.
“His name is Titus,” Aril said.
“And why do we—”
“He’s part-fae with a special skill we can use.”
I had more questions but didn’t ask them. He had more information, I was sure, but didn’t share it.
Midway to our destination, I asked Aril if he had a head on board and if I could use it. He said yes and that I could. Below decks, I got nosy and gave myself a quick tour, spartan stateroom; galley kitchen with a couple of burners, a sink, and very little food, and closets, sparsely filled rather than jam-packed. This left one door to peer behind other than the bathroom. I turned the knob as silently as possible and found an altar for working magic inside.
Similar to Aril’s espresso flask, which was too big to fit in his shirt pocket but somehow did, this was no mere cubby. It extended well beyond where the boat’s hull should end. True to the fae ideal, the magic animating the space incorporated nature into every aspect, from the sunny beams of light, which had no visible source, to the scents of earth and leaf mulch. In front of me stood the living stump and roots of the tree that had furnished the boards for the boat’s decking, furniture, and doors. The roots, growing right into the walls, would be connected to the milled planking outside this room.
I walked up to the stump, cut level across the trunk to form a table top. On it, rested three sharp-edged weapons, a sword, a dagger, and a crescent-shaped blade with a handle at the center; a goblet made from a curved horn carved into a fantastical creature with the head of a lion, broad wings folded flat to its body and the tail of a dolphin; a lavender colored crystal suspended from a silver cord with literally hundreds of facets; a furred pouch I wouldn’t have dared to touch to see what might be inside, and one last innocuous object.
Of everything on the altar, it was the rock that drew my attention. Dull and unremarkable, it resembled something plucked from any ordinary pathway or neglected garden plot.
My fingers closed around it, and I knew I’d made a mistake. A familiar tingle raced up the nerves in my hand straight to my brain, only unlike with the jeweled fae history book I’d found in the library when I was twelve, my nerves spasmed and my fingers stung. I dropped the rock, which clattered and rolled off toward the edge of the altar, but not before a smiling fae woman appeared in front of me, her body wavering wherever it interacted with something solid, like the stump.
She smiled at me.
She was beyond gorgeous, ethereal in her beauty.
The same height as Aril, every bone in her body, every plane of her face, every inch of skin showed flawless refinement. Periwinkle highlights danced in her bouncy auburn hair. Her lips could have been made of rose satin. She laughed, and a shiver rode down my spine, her merriment too pure for human ears to hear.
She winked at me, but I knew her affection wasn’t directed at me.
She was a bright and the wink had been for Aril.
I argued with myself half a minute whether or not to put the rock back where it belonged on the altar, but I couldn’t make myself pick it up again, even using my sleeve as a barrier between it and my skin.
I stepped backward out of the cubby and quietly closed the door.
While using the head, I splashed water on my face. It was the only thing I could think of to calm myself down.
Was that what romantic love was? That feeling I’d gotten from the rock? Pain and longing and wonder too big to hold in any one person’s heart?
If so, I prayed to the saints that I would never have to experience it for myself. I wasn’t strong enough to deal with second-hand love. The real thing would be the end of my ability to function.
I’d been below deck too long. I rushed back up the stairs.
“Where exactly are we going?” I asked Aril.
He looked at me, and I knew he knew I’d touched the rock. He wasn’t so much angry, as cold toward me. I’d violated his privacy.
Cringing inside, I said nothing, pretending I didn’t understand his change of mood.
“Oasi,” he said, telling me our destination.
“Oasis?” I said.
He mistook my question for confusion and explained, “An oasis is a place in the desert where water—”
“I know what an oasis is. We’re going to a bar?”
With a name like Oasi, what else would it be? “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It isn’t a bar.”
“No? What then?”
Oasi turned out to be a thrown away piece of land butting up against the twin fae districts of Isola Luminosa and Mare Scuro. Cramped and shadowy, its buildings the color of soot, Oasi resembled nothing its name implied. Its quay sent out a hostile, don’t-even-think-of-docking-here-vibe. From what I could see, shivering in the stern of Aril’s cruiser where I’d retreated to avoid the deeper emotional cold from Aril in the flybridge, the streets were narrower than those of my home in Santa Croce. Odd, considering Oasi had to have been added during the merge and built up after the twenty-first century. It would have made more sense for the alleys and calli to be wide and regular, not oppressive and mazelike.
As we tied up on the canal separating Oasi from Luminosa, the skies let loose with heavy rains that added to the gloom of the mostly unlit streets. I pulled my jacket’s hood closer around my face but didn’t join Aril under cover in the middle of the boat.
Luminosa, in contrast to Oasi, soared over this dreary turd of an island.
Bright fae loved light, and every palazzo in that neighboring district shone with it. Waterfalls of silky radiance poured off the sides of buildings into the water. Shimmering rivers of color streamed over bridges and wound through small wildernesses, illuminated terraces, party spaces, and ceremonial grounds, all of it produced without a single wire, socket, or bulb. Working with light was as fundamental to them as speaking or breathing. Wave a hand, say a few words, and they could light up half of Venice, or twist a moonbeam into a Pegasus no larger than an acorn that pranced across your open palm before flying into the night.
Bleh. Too much power oozed from the place. Too much magic and gold and natural beauty all for them. Would it have killed them to spare a little for the humans forgotten by the wars that had destroyed much of the old city?
But, then, why would or should they? Fae owed nothing to humanity and vice versa, other than to abide by the laws set by their respective councils and treaties.
Aril secured the bow line and gestured for me to do the same with the stern line.
“Leave your things on board,” Aril said. “No one will steal them.”
“Here? You’re got to be kidding,” I said.
“The boat won’t let them.”
I was hesitant. Returning to the city was the stupidest thing I could have done right now. What in the hell had I been thinking to follow Aril here? The Island of Healed Sorrows might not have been ideal, but I could and should have found another place to hide out alone. A year, two years might have allowed memories to fade some. Not completely, but perhaps to the point where I could have reinvented myself.
You’re heading straight to your own execution.
Reluctantly, I climbed out of the boat, leaving everything I owned behind, tied off the stern line, and then caught up to him walking down the quay. I felt naked and exposed. If only I still had the carnival mask I’d left at Sulla’s.
To think I’d lived twenty-one years and never seen the bright fae’s Venice this close before or heard of its ratty neighbor, Oasi, though both lay less than three kilometers from where I’d grown up. How pathetic.
Aril and I didn’t talk. Though my fingers itched to slide the blade from my sleeve in unknown territory, Aril was at ease navigating the streets. They were lined with food stalls, enchanted sex shows, pawn shops dealing in Items of Great Value both Human and Fae, spell dealers, and body magic parlors offering everything the Lost Girls would have sold their last little kid to buy, from eye color changes to scales and fur to something called “High Court Enhancements.”
That last shop caught my eye because of the 3D video floating in the rain just outside the door. A series of barely clothed human women modeled gold tattoos of fae crests, sigils, and emblems claiming to be “authentic royal house designs.”
I stubbed my boot toe on a broken paving stone when I stared too long at one particular tramp stamp.
I’d swear it was the same ornate crown I’d seen burned off Aril’s chest.
“Try to keep up,” Aril said, voice sharp, and then, “Can’t you manage a glamour?”
“Me?”
“You’ve been spotted twice so far.”
I hadn’t noticed anyone recognizing me.
“What part of I’m a human don’t you get? I already have my hood pulled down as far as it’ll go over my face.”
We turned a corner into a street that had been roofed over to create a semi-outdoor market. Instead of shunning the crowd which had taken shelter there from the storm, Aril clasped my hand and led me straight into the thick of it, choosing the most densely populated parts of the market.
“What are you—”
“Quiet. Don’t talk until we’re out of here,” he said.
We passed vendors hawking octopus, crabs, and fish, as well as suicide eels—death after one bite for humans, a delicacy to the dark fae. We pushed and shoved our way around people gawking at jewelry and cosmetics guaranteed to conceal the human or fae sides of hybrid-Venetians who were anxious to blend in, stalls selling winter vegetables, and refurbished pre-merge electronics, each fitted with a micro-fate cell to get them working again.
I glanced at the price of one not-so-rare Samsung smartphone from the 2020s and swore.
Sulla, you greedy prick.
He’d been ripping me off for my salvage all my life.
Halfway through the throng of shoppers, Aril suddenly snatched a black pork pie hat off a table and tossed the vendor a silver lire coin. He pushed back my hood and shoved the hat on my head, whispering a word in my ear in English too softly for me to grasp it, even if I could have translated. All of this was done without stopping for a beat or Aril letting go of my hand.
We threaded through the last of the crowd and out into the rain again, sprinting to make it under the first awning down the block.
I did a double take when I saw our reflection in a store window. Blinking back at me was the model from the holographic video outside the tattoo gallery, the girl with the gold crown tramp stamp. I couldn’t see my behind, of course, to check for the stamp, but in the glamour Aril had created for me, I wore significantly less clothing, despite the winter chill. Holding my hand in the reflection was an unsavory human male who could have been the girl’s pimp or just your average low life.
We kept moving. Five minutes and twice that many turns of direction, we ended up standing in front of a beat-up door surrounded by black trim carved to mimic a trio of headless snakes braided together. Aril knocked. I touched the trim. One of the braids slithered and shifted against my fingers. I snatched my hand back.
No one answered the door. No lights were on inside, at least not in the front room.
Aril thumbed the latch and opened the door, despite no one inviting us in.
16
“I smell Frankincense,” a light and breathy male voice said from the far corner.
The apartment had no entry hall, and dark as it was, I couldn’t tell if the room we stood in was all there was to it. The place smelled stuffy and sounded cramped, the shuffle of our feet buffered by furnishings. Aril motioned for me to shut the door.
“Aril. You’re back,” the voice said. “And you’ve opened the wound again.”
This person could smell the blood from Aril’s chest wound that morning, a wound that had since healed?
“Just a scratch,” Aril said.
“It’s never just a scratch with you. But then, your blood always does smell delicious to me.”
Delicious?
“Who is this guy, a vampire?” I said.
“I wish, my dear,” the man or fae in the corner answered.
He was right, though, Aril’s blood did smell of Frankincense. That was exactly the scent I’d inhaled this morning when he’d bled on his shirt.
“A light would be nice, Titus,” Aril said.
“Oh! Where are my manners?
Of course.”
A lamp clicked on in the corner. I saw the man’s dark sunglasses and choked, though thankfully I made only a faint noise.
Another Sulla?
He wore a wide sleeved tunic that went all the way to his ankles, plus socks, and house slippers. He was old. I wasn’t sure how old. I wasn’t good at judging ages past thirty-five. Older than Sulla, at any rate. Sulla had only had a few gray hairs. Titus’s short, curly, Romanesque hair was all gray, and his skin sort of draped around his chin. Medium height and chunky was where he most resembled Sulla, and the sunglasses, of course. Did his eyes change every few seconds behind the dark lenses? I watched for facial tics. His upper cheeks remained still, no twitching.
“Titus’s mother was fae,” Aril said.
“I guessed,” I said. “Do your eyes…?”
“Do my eyes what?” Titus asked with a smile and a hint of irritation. He pushed his sunglasses up onto his forehead. Eyes the color of aquamarines flooded with spoiled milk glared at me, unseeing. “I’m blind. Is that what you wanted to know?”
“Sorry.”
“Me, too. Believe me.”
“It’s just that I knew a half-fae who wore sunglasses all the time whose eyes…” I wasn’t a stutterer, but I faltered now, unsure how to say it without offending him more. “…weren’t norm…were…”
“Deformed?” Titus completed the thought for me and lowered the glasses back over his eyes. “Yes, that’s a defect in hybrids. Not that common, but I’ve seen it. No, I am merely blind. I lost my sight to mortar fire in the last war.”
“Titus received something else from his mother,” Aril explained to me. “A gift.”
“What a sweet way of phrasing my affliction,” Titus said.
“It’s why we’re here, Titus,” Aril said. “We need your ability.”
“Why else? Not because you would ever want to visit.”
“Titus,” Aril warned.
“Yes. Yes. Tell me what you need.”
“There’s a decree.”
“Morte dal consiglio,” I said.
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 12