A House of Cloaks & Daggers (The Gift War #1)

7. Nothing Fucking Funny About Faeries

Chapter seven

Nothing Fucking Funny About Faeries

I had not realised how confronting the scene in our sitting room was until I saw it through my little sister’s eyes.

Dark green, rotten blood soaked the carpet, splattered on the ceiling and the walls—not to mention the disturbing smear of Wren’s blood-soaked handprint beside the doorway. Shards of broken glass made a minefield of the floor, and I became painfully aware of Brynn’s bare feet as she teetered on the threshold.

“Don’t move,” I commanded, forgoing gentleness for urgency.

She barely registered my voice, my presence—anything. Her eyes were transfixed on our mother, unconscious in the clutches of a creature that no child should ever have to behold in the flesh. She was steadily bleeding out on the floor, and it seeped into the caenim’s filth until our formerly off-white carpet turned a hellish shade of brown.

Desperation began to claw at my chest, a splinter of my soul determined to flee, but I forced myself to turn to Wren and find his eyes through the tsunami of tears stinging mine.

I found them to be mostly empty, the light snuffed out but edged with something like aggravation.

“Fix her,” I pleaded. “With magic.”

I expected him to object, to make some kind of crack about necromancers or witches or surgeons, and I was prepared to fight him on it. I had seen him use magic when he burned that key, and while I hated to admit it, Jonah had been beyond the point of saving long before I had even asked. But my mother was still alive.

When Wren made no such jibe, my surprise came and went with the twitch of a finger.

He merely clenched his jaw and nodded solemnly. “I make no promises.”

“Fine,” I stammered. “Fix her—now.”

Scooting back to make way for him, I pushed myself to my feet and brushed the glass from my clothes. The sickly green mess from the caenim’s decapitation stained my hands, blending into the dark denim on my knees, and my mother’s blood was all across the front of my white shirt, soaked into the thick threads of my knitted cardigan. I wiped it off as best I could and went to my sister’s side.

“It’s okay,” I crooned, retrieving her bear from the ground.

Brynn was like a mannequin when I tried to return the toy to her arms. She stared, open-mouthed, at the disaster on our sitting room floor as fat tears silently rolled down her bone-white face.

“She’s going to be okay,” I promised.

My sister did not reply.

She didn’t look as if she was capable of speech anymore.

Heart cleaving in two, I wondered if she would ever find a way to talk, or laugh, or smile again after this.

I wondered if I would, too.

We remained on the threshold together, immobile, because I knew better than to lead her out of the room while Wren worked. Firstly, because I knew the scene before us was burned into the back of Brynn’s eyelids regardless of how far we got from the room. And secondly, because I wanted Wren to feel me watching him. I needed him to feel the pressure and sheer importance of healing her with whatever magic he possessed.

Wren didn’t look up at me, but I knew he felt my eyes on him. Felt the impact of my sister’s tears as they hit the floor.

The light went out.

The television screen turned black.

My hands, stained and smelling of copper, gripped Brynn’s shoulders. She was motionless and cold.

Wren lifted his hands, holding them parallel to my mother’s chest, and the same pearlescent light I beheld in Dante’s Bookstore glowed against his palms.

Gold and silver and white.

The beginning and the middle and the end.

It was ageless and ancient, brighter than any flame and colder than any sun.

He kept it contained to his hands, subtle and well controlled as tendrils of his power flowed into my mother’s body. I had no idea what he was doing, but I prayed it would save her.

His eyes shuttered. He fell still.

But his magic continued to work.

Gently, a wisp of his power stretched out from the steady stream of light travelling between his palms and her chest. It curled around the caenim’s wrist, holding it up as other, smaller beams of light shot out and wrapped around each of its five long fingers. Slowly, the strings of light removed the claws from my mother’s chest, and then her stomach. When they were free, the lacerations were filled from within by a shimmering light.

Wound by gaping wound, Wren’s magic stitched, pulled, and knitted my mother’s flesh and skin back together. Even the rips in her pyjamas were repaired, the stains burning away without singeing the fabric.

It could have been minutes, hours, or years that I spent standing with my sister in the doorway, watching his powers at work.

It was hypnotic.

He was hypnotic.

As if he heard my thoughts and had something to say about it, a long tendril of his light split from the others and stretched towards me. The beam radiated a corporeal warmth and softness as it stroked over my forehead and my hair. With a featherlight touch, it danced along my shoulders and arms to where my hands rested upon my sister before finally reaching my legs.

The sensation was not like being caressed by a physical or immaterial thing, but rather like the essence of something—or someone.

Wren’s essence .

As if in affirmation of my thoughts, I could have sworn I saw him smirk when he indulgently guided the tendril of light down my thighs. I didn’t dare move or speak to reprimand him lest I distract him from his continued work healing my mother. And when he pulled the extra thread of his power back, I decided I wouldn’t mention it at all—because he had used it to remove all traces of blood and gore from my body, clothes, and Brynn’s shoulders, upon which my hands had been resting.

At last, Wren reclaimed every drop of his magic and lowered his hands as the light faded. Gently, he eased my mother into his arms while the pieces of glass from our window rose up from the couch and the carpet, levitating towards the broken frame before piecing themselves back together.

He lay her down on the couch as the caenim’s body and surrounding pool of blood burst into flames.

Brynn flinched.

The startling movement relieved me, and I released the breath I was holding hostage in my throat. At that point, any movement from her at all would have had that effect. I stroked a soothing hand down her arm while the fire hissed and whooshed, leisurely eating up all traces of the caenim and the mess it had made in our house.

“She’ll be fine,” Wren said, striding to the window to draw the curtains closed. It was utterly perfect, somehow in better condition than ever before. “You can go to her now.”

My little sister moved like a fairy—or a faerie—and crossed the room in the blink of an eye, throwing herself on the edge of the couch. She sobbed quietly into our mother’s chest while I hovered above them to check her breathing.

Slow and steady .

Her eyelids fluttered as if she were dreaming.

“She’ll sleep for an hour or a day,” Wren murmured. “She’ll wake feeling as if the injuries never happened.”

“But she’ll remember?” I traced calming circles across my sister’s back.

“Yes. Did you want me to make her forget?”

I sighed. Of all the memories my mother had from her life, that night would not be the worst, but I still wished that she didn’t have to carry it with her for the rest of it. Brynn, too.

“I’m going back to the bookstore,” Wren informed me. “Someone has to clean up and get the old man home. I’ll check on her again when I’m done.”

“Wait.” I kept one hand on my sister, who had mercifully stopped shaking, and inched the sleeve of my cardigan down to cover my free hand, wrapping that arm around my waist as I pivoted to face him. “Why did she look at you like that?”

Firelight danced across his face, within his eyes. “It explains why the fae-lily didn’t work.”

“What does?”

“If that mortal louse is not your father,” he elaborated softly, “and one of my kind is.”

No. No .

That mortal louse was my father. The alternative was unthinkable. I had not endured the abuse of a complete stranger —

“But not you?” Internally, I kicked myself for even feeling the need to ask. For acting like I cared when I didn’t.

Wren let out a single, harsh laugh and gave a pointed glance towards my hair and then my mother’s. “Redheads aren’t my type.”

I pressed my lips into a thin line and willed the blush to stop spilling over my cheeks. I didn’t know what to say. There was no logical reason for me to feel offended by his blunt dismissal.

“Auralie, I promise that I am most certainly not your biological father.” He tilted his head to capture my gaze, eyebrows raised as if he was waiting for me to have a light bulb moment.

“Oh,” I muttered. And then, “Oh .” Embarrassment coloured my cheeks again. “Of course. Because faeries can’t lie.”

“No, we can’t,” he agreed, with no small amount of annoyance. He tousled his hair, brushing his fringe back from his eyes. “But that doesn’t mean you can trust us,” he added, striding for the door. “I’ll be back soon—or maybe I won’t.”

I almost laughed as I watched him duck his head to fit beneath the doorframe on his way out, but I didn’t.

Because there was nothing fucking funny about faeries.