by J. C. Nelson
I glared at Death. “What do you mean, when he gets there?”
Eli held out his palms. “Seems like he missed his bus or something. Not to worry. Everyone gets there eventually.” He looked out the window, at the quell. “Now that, there, that’s nasty. No defense against it. Cuts straight to the soul, wraps it up.”
I can’t tell you what the Adversary’s answer was. My mind locked onto Eli’s words, going through them over and over, until my tongue finally birthed the question. “Grimm, why didn’t the quell affect me?”
In the city that never sleeps, you could have heard a pin drop. Or an asteroid drop, for that matter.
“I’m stepping out for some fresh air.” Eli backed out the door. “Nick, you want to come with me?”
Nickolas nodded and walked out as well, followed by the Fae Mother and the spirit of darkness who had once been my lawyer.
I kept my gaze locked on Grimm. “Why didn’t the quell affect me?”
Grimm kept his hands behind his back, as he looked out the window. “Do you know the meaning of your name?”
“Of the Sea. Answer the question.” I stood, pushing away my chair.
If he knew I approached, he didn’t react. “In Latin, yes. In Hebrew, Mara, meaning ‘bitter.’”
“Answer the question.”
Grimm turned, finally, and took his glasses off. “It has another meaning, as well. It means ‘wish child.’”
I knew I’d been adopted. Always figured I was yet another drug addict’s baby, given to my parents in return for who knows how much cash.
“The quell affects the soul, my dear. And while I can do wondrous things, I cannot make a soul.”
I held up my hands, looking at them, I can’t say why. “I don’t understand.” Grimm ran a series of orphanages just because “a baby” was a common wish. “I know about the orphanages. I signed the inspection reports when you were gone.”
Grimm sat down in the chair I’d just vacated, and rubbed his glasses on his sleeve. “I established my first orphanage twenty-seven years ago, Marissa. I don’t raise the dead. I don’t end the world, and until the night your parents came to me, I didn’t offer children. Ever.”
He gestured to the chair across from me. “Your father and his wife found their way through my wards the old-fashioned way—pure desperation. They showed up at fifteen minutes to six and, the moment I saw them, began begging for a child. In this day and age, we would say Clarisse had no viable eggs. All she knew was that she couldn’t have children. I turned them down, like everyone who wished for a child.”
“Yet here I am.” I didn’t sit.
“It was your father’s last words that struck home. He said, ‘You don’t know what it’s like. To want a child, to love.’ After he lost a fistfight with one of my agents, your parents left the office, and I remained. That night, once my employees left, I retreated to my demesne, and began to wonder. You might say I committed the worst mistake a fairy can.”
“Fathering an evil queen who kills anyone and everyone?”
He ignored my jab. “I let my mind wander. I asked myself, ‘What if?’ What if I hadn’t given my first daughter power? What if she’d been a normal girl, with no affinity for magic? What might have been?”
I shook my head. “There is no way on earth I’m your daughter.” The thought of it made me angry. No, anger paled beside this fury. I preferred being the child of a heroin addict than something like the Black Queen.
“Your genetic material is a combination of the blood your father left in the lobby and that of one of my most trusted agents. You are not my child, Marissa, much as I might wish it. You are my creation. Building a body, forming flesh, that is the easy part, like assembling a bookcase.” He saw the look on my face.
If my life had been any different the previous weeks, or if it had been one whit different from the moment I turned eighteen, I think I wouldn’t have believed. The thing was, part of me echoed with betrayal, and burned with the lies that made up my life. The other part nodded inside, like something I’d always known had been confirmed.
The how, the why of my body, those didn’t concern me. I’d settled those questions back when I thought I came from an orphanage. I spent six years asking myself who I was. It felt like longer, until I worked up the courage to ask. “What am I?”
“A woman.” Grimm didn’t meet my eyes.
It couldn’t be a lie, or I’d be lying dead from the thorn near my heart. But it wasn’t the truth either. “You can’t make a soul. Death told me that several times, and I think I understand why now.” As a matter of fact, so many things made sense now. Why the Adversary had turned down my attempt to bargain my soul for the end of the apocalypse. Why magic never obeyed my will. Why even the doorman at the Court of Queens couldn’t give me Mihail’s kingdom.
Why I couldn’t have children.
“Tell me. No more half answers. What am I?” I slipped into the chair, taking both of his hands, and waited until he finally looked at me.
“Isolde grew within her mother, nine long months, and in the normal manner, she took a tiny shard of her mother’s soul, and grew it into her own. You were formed complete. Alive, breathing, but without spirit to drive the body. You are a wish. Created by me, bound to flesh, and given to your father to raise.”
“You made a wish, just to put it into a body?”
“No.” He looked down at the table. “Long ago, a man came to me for a wish. Bitter at his ex-wife, he wished that she would never again be able to celebrate, as partying was her favorite vice. He died before he could collect and use his wish, but I kept it. Waiting.”
I bit my tongue. “And?”
“For guidance, I bound the wish to itself. It’s a subtle trick, one I suspect is quite similar to how the Authority created the first human souls. I swaddled it in the waiting flesh, and when the Agency opened the next day, I dispatched an agent to deliver you.”
“So that’s what Clara had against me.”
“Clara?” Grimm chuckled. “I didn’t take on Clara for another four years. Rosa carried you to your parents.”
Bile rose up in my mouth at Rosa’s name. “She knew what you did?”
“Rosa possesses a unique talent. She knows the true nature of everyone she sees, but I forbid that she tell you.”
Now I understood why Rosa never liked me. Why she treated me like furniture. Worse than furniture. The taste of bile in my mouth became stronger. No wonder she detested me. “You let Ari be attacked?” A second later, its companion followed. “Liam died.” I threw off his hands, pulling mine back. “You could have stopped this, and Ari wouldn’t be quelled. Liam would still be alive.”
“Not without harming you.” A tear formed in Grimm’s eye and rolled down his cheek, sparkling gold.
“And that matters? I’m not a person. I’m a thing. Another of your experiments. You let people die to keep me safe, Grimm. Beth died. I killed Liam, and he chose to let me. You think he would have made the same decision if he knew?” My shouts echoed in the hallways.
Grimm looked up at me, any sign of contrition gone. In fact, his rigid shoulders spoke of rage. “This is exactly why I did not tell you. And both of the people closest to you knew exactly who and what you were, Marissa.”
When I spoke, my voice came out like a whisper. “How?”
“Arianna’s spirit sight can see through your very flesh. She’s known since you two traveled to the focus point. Liam came to me two years ago, looking to make a deal of his own. I make you able to have children, he would serve me. He threatened to find another fairy if I refused. If you think it mattered to them one bit, you didn’t know either one. As I told them both, I feared that knowledge of your exact nature would make you value your life less. You would make dangerous choices, needless sacrifices.”
“Get out.” My gun couldn’t harm him, but I swore I’d beat h
im with my fists until he shut up.
“My leaving won’t bring Liam back. Now you understand why I no longer grant wishes. I’ve seen what they can become, and couldn’t bring myself to create them, just to die for someone’s whim.”
Somewhere, a part of me recognized that Grimm spoke the truth. At the same time, I couldn’t accept it. Couldn’t hear any more. I rushed for the door, leaving everything behind, dashing through an empty lobby and down the stairs.
I ran every morning, six miles, and the ritual had hardened my body to my will. And what I willed it more than anything was to take me away. I don’t know how many blocks I covered before I stopped, but it wasn’t because my side ached or my lungs burned like fire. I ran through a city of dark gray ghosts, in a world of absolute stillness.
No matter how far I ran, I couldn’t get away from the thing I most needed to escape. Me.
I stopped because no matter how far I ran, no matter how fast I went, I was no farther away than before. That, and the sound of moving metal caught my attention. A low, grating, creaking sound, among a world of gray.
I wanted to find a place to curl up and sleep. To forget about everything that had happened. Everything that I’d learned. Problem was, I wanted to find out what was making that noise. So I wiped my eyes, caught my breath, and walked out into the frozen city, listening.
For a couple of minutes, I thought maybe I’d missed whatever it was. Then the sound of breaking glass caught my attention. Like a cat after a laser pointer, I darted through the crowds toward the sound. Only when I reached a street corner and heard yet another window break did I think to be more cautious.
Creeping now, walking softly through the quelled crowd, I saw movement ahead.
A woman.
An older woman. Quite a bit older. In fact, more than anything, she reminded me of Clara, Grimm’s oldest agent. Note I didn’t say oldest living agent, because, like most of Grimm’s employees, Clara died on the job. Whoever this was, for once, I was facing somebody my size, my build. I could only hope that if I lived to be as old as she appeared, my hair would turn that beautiful silver.
She walked through the center of the street, looking at the crowd, studying the frozen traffic. Then she walked over to a cab and put her hands on it. With a sound like pudding sucked through a straw, the quell retracted, leaving the cab the same dirty yellow as normal.
My jaw dropped.
Walking to the front of the cab, she began to push against it, rocking it back and forth. Then she stopped, turned around, and looked right at me. “Give me a hand with this.”
I admit to thinking about running. It’s the most sensible thing to do in so many situations. Might be dangerous? Run. Is dangerous? Run. Boring? Run. I wasn’t sure what this old woman was, but she canceled the quell with her bare hands. Running should have been my primary objective.
Except that I wasn’t concerned about much of anything anymore, least of all threats to my safety.
I slipped through the gaps in the crowd, and approached. The woman had hazel eyes and lips that looked like she wore only gloss. Her simple button-up shirt would have fit a grandmother or a businesswoman.
“Push at the front. We only need to move it a few centimeters.” She walked over and set her back against it.
I pulled from the other side, and slowly the cab tires slid a tiny distance.
“That’s enough.” She stood up, walked to the front of the cab, and looked down the road, to where an unfortunate jaywalker was about to receive a door prize, if the quell ever let up. “He’ll still get hit. Can’t fix that, since it was his decision to step out, but at least he doesn’t die now.” With a brush of her hand, the quell returned, wrapping over the cab, returning it to normal.
“I heard breaking glass.” It wasn’t much of a question. I couldn’t think of all the questions I really wanted to ask.
She pointed a few stories up. “I broke that window over there. See that crane? The cable’s rusted. I want people looking up, moving that direction for a better look, and out of harm’s way.” She pointed overhead, to a construction crane. Then she looked back at me. For a brief moment, the fear that kept me alive for years returned. A drive to run, to sprint back to the Agency, back to the lights and the harbingers and the fairy who’d lied to me all these years came back stronger.
“Stick around, Marissa. You have questions.” She pointed across the street to a bistro. “I have answers, and perhaps a few questions of my own.”
The fact that she knew my name didn’t faze me. The sheer number of things that greeted me by name without introduction had ceased to amaze me several years earlier. I might as well have had “Hello, my name is Marissa” monogrammed on every single outfit I own.
I followed her across the street. At her touch, the quell retracted, letting me move people from the chairs enough to sit down.
She walked through a half-open door, and a few minutes later, came back with coffee cups, steaming hot. “Sugar and cream, just like always.”
I wasn’t clear on whether I should say thank you or be creeped out. We sat in a pregnant silence that could have given birth to quintuplet conversations, without words. Then she put her cup down. “So, would you like me to tell you what you are?”
I thought of all the names that came to mind. “An aberration. A violation of natural law. One of Grimm’s freakish experiments.”
“I was going to suggest a beautiful woman.”
“I’m not.” Either of them.
She spit to the side and shook her head. “You sure look like it. Whatever you might have been, you’ve lived nearly thirty years in this world. In that body. By their rules. The process has changed you. And that is interesting, because it means that you might be able to do something about this mess.”
“Who are you?” I finally worked up the courage to ask the question. Most of the things interested in killing me never sat down to coffee first, but there had been a couple of exceptions.
“The final answer on everything. The reason why most things are.”
The Authority. The one the angels said I’d be better off not meeting. I tried to think back. What was proper etiquette for meeting someone like that? Bowing? Groveling? Sacrificing an accountant? I slammed the coffee cup down so hard it shattered. “This is your fault. You let this happen.”
“Not the tone I expected.” She reached over and collected the shards of my cup. “But yes, I let things happen. Of all the things I’m proudest of, it’s their free will. It’s precious. If they decide to do wonderful things with it, I accept that.” She began to fit the pieces back together, looking at the edges. “If they do horrible things, I have to accept that too. I can’t go changing people’s decisions, Marissa. Ever.”
“I’m not a person. You could have saved Liam.” Speaking his name brought tears to my eyes, made my throat close up.
“You are, in so many ways, just like every other person. You’ve lived in that body, as one of them, thought like one of them. Fought like one of them, and the process has changed you. What your Fairy Godfather did was dangerously close to infringing on my secrets. So I consider changing your choices much like changing theirs.” She handed me back the coffee cup, every crack perfectly repaired. “I sent Liam your way, you know.”
I turned it over in my hands, running my fingers along the smooth surface. “I don’t understand.”
“On the pier, five years ago.” She poured another cup of coffee from the pitcher.
“Why? Why would you do that to him?”
“For, not to. Oh, if you could have seen your Fairy Godfather’s face when he found out. You had your little game of hearts planned. Set the princess up with a prince. Make a little more Glitter. And then the wrong man just stumbles into your trap. I considered it a work of art.” She held up a sugar packet and cream cup.
“If I had never met him, he’d be alive.” Th
e tears ran like streams now, but my anger fixed where it belonged. On myself.
“You don’t know that. You and your friend the queen stopped a war that would have killed thousands. How do you know Liam wouldn’t have died there? Together, you ended yet another apocalypse and taught that demon brat Malodin a lesson that is quite literally etched into his hide.”
I shook my head. “Liam would be alive.”
“You two loved each other. I knew what you were when I sent him your way. And yet I still sent him.” Her tone shifted, became cold and serious. “You are of this world, Marissa. So I believe that you can fix this situation. You still have the ability to make choices.”
Of course something like this was coming. No one acted friendly to me unless they wanted something. “What do you want?”
“I want you to restore their choices. I can’t change what Isolde has done because, like you, she is too much a part of this world. But you can. I want you to go to her demesne and end the quell. I want you to kill the Black Queen.”
The sheer ease with which she’d manipulated me made me sick. My anger. My tears. All of them setting me up to do something I wanted to do anyway. “I’m not a killer.”
“Until an hour ago, you didn’t know what you were. Still, there’s something in it for you.” She looked at me over the edge of her coffee cup.
“Bring him back.” My heart leaped, and my will clenched around me like ice.
“No. I set rules for the way things must be. The dead stay dead, Marissa. But if you do this, I’ll give you the one thing your Fairy Godfather never could. A soul.” She set down the cup and waited, watching me.
“Bring him back. I’ll kill her a dozen times if you bring him back. Grimm says souls are limited, but you bring him back, and you can keep it.” I tried to force confidence into my voice.
“I can’t break my own laws. And souls are precious, that’s true, but I created the first ones. That said, I keep a few. There are crimes for which you can lose your soul, Marissa. Crimes for which I would take it.”