“This is a very pretty and grim story, Vinnie, but I need to know how to get rid of the faerie I have, not summon more.” Vinnie turned to his grandmamma with a string of Boltivician, and he returned his attention to Daisy after her reply, his eyes seeming wider.
“She knows a faeya laskvets.”
Daisy leaned forward. “What?”
“Or knew. He is dead, now. He was a first-generation Ashlander. Others from our homeland learned of him…” He glanced down into his lap. “Ashlanders are not the only ones who hate magic. Many Boltivicians will kill any laskvets they find.”
“If there was such a man, though, he must have had a faerie ring to commune with them. Where did he used to live?”
Vinnie relayed the question, and then his grandmother’s answer. “Out of town to the north, off the highway to the coast.”
That was in the opposite end of town from Cyan’s faerie ring. Was there another so close? Or had the man traveled through Soot City to reach Cyan’s? “If there was another ring, I need to find it. That may be the only way to send my faerie back to his realm.”
Vinnie scowled at her, ignoring his grandmother completely. “And what will happen if you do not? If you let this creature fend for itself?”
“Those hunters found Mr Swarz, Vinnie – the ones from the Gin Fountain. They followed him to the faerie ring and destroyed it. If the faerie remains in our realm, just running about on his own, he might lead the hunters directly to the Stripes. And I don’t know for sure what happens when a faerie is loose in the human world for too long, but I imagine it’s quite tiring for them, and I don’t care for your grandmother’s notion that they’ll start eating people to replenish their energies.” Vinnie flinched at the prospect. “Please, Vinnie. I know this entire ordeal is absurd, but our whole company could be in danger because of this. You must ask her if she knows anything about another faerie ring.”
He grumbled something unintelligible beneath his breath – or maybe he just growled – but he turned to his grandmother and asked a question. His Boltivician was now more halting and hesitant than previously. His grandmamma shook her head and snapped back at him, and he began pleading with her until she sighed, muttering her response with obvious reluctance. She cast a knowing glare toward Daisy.
“The man was killed and buried on Hillfarm Road, some ways down from the lumber mill up there, where he was found communing with the faerie. She says our countryfolk will kill faerie summoners on sight, but they fear to tamper with the faerie rings themselves. If there was another ring out there, it may still be whole.”
Daisy heaved a relieved breath, slumping to rest her face in her hands. “Oh, Vinnie, thank you. And thank your grandmother! Mr Swarz and I will take him out there right away.” She looked up when she heard Vinnie’s chair scoot back. He stood over her and held out a hand.
“That is too risky. We will scout the area out first before you bring your mystical friend.”
She took his hand and allowed him to pull her to her feet. “You and I?”
“No. If those Boltivicians who killed this summoner are still around, it will be too dangerous for…” He glanced over his shoulder at his grandmother, who was fully intent on her puzzle now, ignoring the young folks standing in her living room. “You will need more protection than just I can offer.”
A tightness that had been wrapped around her gut since Cyan crawled through her window finally began to loosen at Vinnie’s readiness to help. “Jonas?”
“No, Jonas is a gentle lamb. At least one of the Pasternacks has the teeth we need.” He rolled a shoulder, glancing away bashfully. “Besides, they have a car.” Daisy agreed with Vinnie that that was something of an important detail.
Andre found himself out of sorts left alone in Miss Dell’s apartment. Once he had done his best to tend to Cyan’s wounds – several scratches and scars still remaining after all his efforts – Andre perched on the edge of her bed, feeling nervous about touching anything. Clothes lay draped over furniture around the space, apparently clean, but disorderly all the same. There were several stacks of books towered on the floor in the far corner of the room and by the foot of Miss Dell’s bed, and he could see scraps of paper peeking out from some of them. The bathroom and pantry doors had both been left open. With nothing else to do, Andre longed to tidy up a bit, but he didn’t want to affront Miss Dell again. He thought it would be a decent use of his time otherwise gone to waste trapped in there and a polite gesture besides, but she might regard it as him fussing over how she lived her life again.
Cyan didn’t seem pleased to be locked in, either, as he curled on the bed and whined. After a while of sitting in still silence with Andre, the faerie began chewing at the raw skin around his elbow, where feathers appeared to have been torn out. It looked as though he had fought with some animal on his flight from the woods. Andre reached over and tried to swat Cyan’s arm away from his mouth. “Stop that.” Cyan recoiled and snarled at him. “Oh, hush. You’re worse than an alley cat.” Although he was certain – mostly certain – that Cyan couldn’t understand human words, the faerie sat up at his tone, wrinkling his flat nose. Andre could tell he was growing restless.
“Daisy will be back shortly,” Andre said, in a weak attempt to sooth the creature. “We must wait patiently.” His tone wasn’t enough that time, though, and Cyan crawled off the bed, wandering the room and glancing about. Andre hoped he wouldn’t make for the door, as he wasn’t certain he could physically stop the faerie if it came to it. He stood, all the same, and paced a few steps behind Cyan. Cyan didn’t appear to mind, and he shuffled to the kitchen, poking his head into the open pantry.
“Do you need more to eat?” Cyan began rifling through the contents of the pantry before Andre could step in to handle the food for him, but he ultimately turned away empty-handed. He drifted instead toward the bathroom. “Just exploring, then?”
Andre waited at the doorway, watching Cyan poke about the items in the bathroom, peering into the wastebasket by the sink and plucking an empty jar of pomade from the floor to examine. Cyan was distracted from this when he noticed the mirror hanging over the sink, and he leaned forward to look at his reflection. Miss Dell had said that faeries had a different appreciation of the world, and Andre was not sure how this translated into a human understanding of intelligence. Did Cyan recognize that the faerie he was seeing was merely his own reflection?
“A handsome fellow.” Cyan glanced toward Andre at the comment before turning back to the mirror, tapping its glass with a single claw. Andre almost warned the faerie against scratching it, but he knew his words would go unheeded. Cyan lost interest before he could do any damage and returned to examining the jar of pomade still in his hand, peering in and whimpering when he found it empty.
He was in need of something, Andre could tell, but if not food, then he wasn’t sure what. Stepping into the cramped bathroom, he reached out to take Cyan lightly by the arm. “Come back to the bed, and we’ll figure out what you need.” The faerie jerked his head up at the touch, his nostrils flaring, but there was no anger or fright on his face. Instead, he stepped close to Andre – too close – and tilted his head down to sniff the human man as he had that first night at the farmhouse. Andre fidgeted under the heat of Cyan’s breath, embarrassed to be so affected by the creature’s attention.
With a huff, Cyan lifted his head and pushed past Andre, hurrying back into the studio. He worried that Cyan might go after the box of trinkets – and be hit by the spell infused into the ward – but instead he went to Andre’s coat hanging by the door. Andre had one empty vial of mana in his pants’ pocket, but there were full ones still in the coat. He had brought a decent supply, in case something should go wrong with casting the ward. Cyan fished one out and held it up. It still shimmered with a faint glow in the dim light of the studio. Cyan tapped on the glass of the vial as he had the mirror, whimpering before turning to Andre. He held the vial out and murmured in his lyrical language.
“Is that wh
at you seek?” The vial had a tin twist-top that enclosed it, and that seemed too much for Cyan to puzzle out. It was curious, then, if the faerie wanted the contents so badly, that he did not just try to shatter the glass. He must have been at least smart enough to understand that it would do him no good.
Andre took the vial from Cyan’s hand but did not open it. “What could you possibly want with this?” Mana was a mortal creation, a mixture of gemstone dust and raw honey and hallucinogenic fungi. Surely the faeries didn’t have such a thing in their own realm. Andre worried that the concoction might even be poisonous to Cyan. Mana was sweet, though – a painful, smothering sweetness, the kind that coated the throat and blanched the tongue – and Cyan did have a taste for sweet things.
Cyan hunched his shoulders and whimpered again. He was a strange creature, but the academic in Andre wanted to understand him and his odd mannerisms and abilities. More than that, Cyan was a lovely thing, and he had saved Andre when those mage-hunters attacked, although it was Andre he had to thank for their assault and the destruction of the faerie ring. Miss Dell wasn’t the only one to whom Andre owed recompense, and he hoped that Cyan was at least clever enough not to drink something that would poison him.
Andre untwisted the top and handed the vial over.
Cyan, still holding the jar of pomade in one hand, took the glass bottle in the other, gingerly pinching it between a finger and thumb as he sniffed the opening. His dark, reflective eyes flickered up to Andre as he muttered something full of fluid consonants that sounded almost like an utterance of thanks, and his long tongue slid from between thin lips to lap at the vial’s contents. Andre only watched as Cyan’s eyes closed into pleased lines, and a delicate groan escaped the faerie as his shoulders shook slightly. It was a pretty, intimate sound.
Cyan had licked the vial halfway empty before he pulled away. When he opened his eyes, the sheen to them seemed brighter, and he pulled back his shoulders – no longer shaking – to stand up straighter. The scratches and cuts that Andre had not been able to heal completely were fading before his eyes, the raw skin by his elbow smoothing and returning to a healthy bright blue that matched the rest of the faerie’s skin, although the missing feathers did not grow back. Cyan shook his head and licked his lips, his mouth pulling into a more vivacious expression than any he had worn since crawling through Miss Dell’s window. There was an alertness to that grin, and Andre knew the feeling. Enough mana to replenish lost energies was a relief, but it was sometimes difficult to judge how much was needed after any given spell and not go overboard just a bit. Andre knew he had a tendency to look down upon mana addicts, but he – as every magician did at some time or another – had felt the rush of even a slight overdose of mana on occasion. A heady surge of energy that battered around in one’s brain, struggling to compel one’s body to utilize its full power.
But Cyan appeared to be experiencing it somewhat differently. All the energy was there in his eyes, but it was clear that he had control over it. He handed the vial, still half-full, back to Andre. While Andre screwed the top back on, Cyan returned his attention to the round little jar he held. Cupping it now with both hands, he held it up to his face, his dark eyes shifting to an iridescent white as his mouth dropped agape.
“Cyan?” Andre hesitated, unsure if he should take a step forward – as though there were anything he could do for the faerie if he were in danger – or several steps away.
Cyan’s loose lips began mouthing the liquid syllables of his language, but no sound came forward. Instead, a light appeared in the center of the jar. Just a speck at first, a round flicker glowing through the stained brown glass, but it grew until the light was intense enough to cast defined shadows of Cyan’s hands and arms on the dusty floor. The faerie’s silent incantation stopped then, and he blinked until his eyes returned to their normal, onyx-like state. He peered at the item clutched in his hands, tilting his head as if just now realizing it was there. The glow faded.
“What… What did you do?” Cyan lifted his eyes to meet Andre’s and answered in faerie-language, which was, of course, just as useless as Andre’s question. Before Andre could do or say anything more to try to puzzle out what Cyan had just accomplished, Cyan held out the jar toward him. After a faint ripple in the fibers of reality lifted the hairs on the back of Andre’s neck, the jar began to glow again.
Cyan glanced meaningfully at the box on Miss Dell’s dresser, then back to Andre.
Miss Dell had told Andre that creating trinkets required more power than faeries would willingly offer to the task. That was why the energy of a full human life was needed, to supply that power to the faerie crafters.
It seemed that there were alternatives.
“How did you know the mana would work?” Andre asked, more to himself as he took the jar in his hands. It glowed like a little lantern – pretty, but limited in its utility, as there was not even enough light to read by. To think that Cyan might have had to sacrifice a human life to otherwise create such a thing. Glancing toward the box, Andre realized with hollow dread – fully, cognitively aware of this thought for the first time – that Cyan had already committed such atrocities.
The terrified thought flitted off as Cyan’s knees buckled, and Andre dropped to kneel beside him, setting the pomade jar-lamp on the floor. It seemed the mana was still not enough. Andre unscrewed the vial of mana again and held it up to Cyan’s lips, cupping the back of the faerie’s head and tilting the bottle to dribble the liquid in. “There, now. Let’s hope this helps.”
Clutching Andre’s upper arms to brace himself, Cyan lapped at the mana as it trickled into his mouth, smearing it across his thin lips. The same contented moan that had escaped from him before reemerged, and with the faerie now cradled in his grasp, Andre couldn’t deny the decidedly erotic shiver that raced down his spine and all the way to the soles of his feet when he heard it. His fingers tightened in Cyan’s feathery hair.
When the vial was drained, Andre set it aside and coaxed Cyan back up to his feet before retrieving the jar-lamp. “What a curious thing,” he said, again mostly to himself, “that you could use a tool of methodical magic to create a tool of ritual magic.” He tilted the lamp to peer directly at the light. It was nothing more than a tiny, floating spark in the center of the jar. “I do wonder if a human magician could accomplish anything of that nature.” Cyan watched him intently as he spoke, eyes again alert. “Ah, but our innate power is probably not enough to match yours. Still, this is a marvelous thing. When Miss Dell told me of the sacrifice used in ritual magic, I was crushed to realize that the entire practice might be too dangerous to even bother studying. The implications of this, though…”
Andre didn’t realize the rising excitement in his voice until Cyan leaned closer, unblinking as he examined Andre’s face. The faerie’s enraptured scrutiny only compelled him to allow the thrill of the discovery to take ahold of him.
“These artifacts – these trinkets – they can be created. With a combination of methodical and ritual magic, they can be created without the need for human sacrifice. An exchange of energies that does not destroy human lives!” Cyan nodded along, as though in vapid agreement. Andre hardly noticed. “And these trinkets, they fall outside the regulation of fearmongering politicians and their legislations, at least for now. If there were some way for my people to secure a partnership with a faerie, or multiple faeries, we could–”
He cut off as Cyan stepped right up to him, still unblinking, though his gaze shifted rapidly between the man’s eyes and his lips. Regardless of language barrier, Cyan seemed quite swept away by the passion of Andre’s revelations. And Andre, as he had upon their first meeting, when Cyan had taken to sniffing him all over, became overly aware of the faerie’s lean form, uncanny in its human-like masculinity. Any traces of exhaustion from enchanting the jar were gone, and Cyan was again confident and upright after that second dose of mana. The heat of his even breaths brushed tenderly against Andre’s skin.
“Oh, my.”<
br />
Intellectual inquiries flushed from his head as fresh memories of the feel of Cyan’s peculiarly textured hair and the sound of his pleased little moans overtook Andre. Leaning closer, Cyan reached up to run a finger across Andre’s jaw, his cheekbone, his lips. His action startled Andre into dropping the jar, and in an effort to grab it before it hit the ground, Andre nearly lost his balance. He could typically manage standing without the cane, but he was jittery from his excitement over the jar and, truth be told, Cyan’s affectionate touch.
Still, he had not entirely meant to stabilize his balance by grabbing Cyan by the hips.
That alarm returned for a fleeting moment, but Cyan responded with a soft trilling noise that sounded almost amused. “So sorry,” Andre muttered, and Cyan seemed to accept the apology as he went back to caressing Andre’s face. Andre kept his hands where they were, pressing firmly against Cyan’s soft skin. The gesture strained on his weaker hand, but Cyan’s wandering gaze pleaded for a connection with the man. With a shudder, Cyan slipped both hands to cup Andre by the back of his neck as he kissed him. He was no gentleman who wasted time with flirtation, either, slipping his tongue between lips and teeth to caress Andre’s own. Andre could taste the lingering sweetness of mana, but it otherwise felt no different than kissing any mortal man. As he wondered how else Cyan might feel like a mortal man, it occurred to Andre that he had not felt the pleasure of another’s carnal company in more months than he cared to dwell upon. He did not think of himself as a romantic sort, like Angel, but he had an inclination toward the occasional fuck, as many did, and it was pleasant to be the focus of another’s affection every now and again. Having made such of an ass of himself with Miss Dell, he was ashamed to admit his own wounded desire for another living being’s positive attention at the moment.
Wrapping his arms around Cyan’s waist, Andre pulled him closer, and, despite how little room there was for momentum, the shift of Cyan’s body to press up against Andre’s own was enough to send him stumbling back onto the bed.
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