FORTY-FOUR
The cold swirled into Sorcha’s cloak as Aly tripped down the stairs.
She shivered, pulling the wool more tightly around her as she sat on the bottom step, curling her knees up under her chin.
The terror on Calum’s face was still emblazoned in her mind, and the way he’d said she was his enemy rang in her ears.
She pulled her sleeve up, staring at the grey, puckered scars that wove up her forearm like a cloth made from threads of decay. Iron scars, Calum had said. She ran her fingertips over one, a jagged slash on the inside of her arm. A shudder passed through her, nausea rising in her throat.
She wasn’t fae. She couldn’t be. She wouldn’t be.
Footsteps sounded on the steps above her and she jerked her sleeve down, hiding the offending scars. Calum descended towards her, and she shrank back, pressing against the damp stone wall as fear flared in her gut.
Calum recoiled, hurt flashing across his face, but he stopped, lowering himself to sit three steps up from Aly and resting his elbows on his knees. He was in his shirt and waistcoat, his sleeves billowing in the wind that gusted in from the sea, but he didn’t seem to notice the cold.
“I’m sorry,” he said, staring at his clasped hands.
Aly pulled in a sharp breath. “I know.” But she knew he could have killed her if he’d tried, and a part of him had wanted to. His hatred and fear of the fae had, for a moment, overridden his affection for her.
He looked at her, his eyes shimmering with tears. “What can I do to make it right?”
Aly pulled Sorcha’s cloak around her legs as though she could cocoon herself safely within it. “I don’t know.” Something in the trust between them had fractured, and she didn’t know if it could be healed, or if she’d always fear he would decide that being fae made her his enemy after all.
Calum’s shoulders slumped at her words, his face creasing with regret. Aly’s heart ached, and she cast about for a way to fix it.
“But you can start by telling me what you know,” she said.
“About the fae, and about me.” She looked out at the canal, remembering the bodies she’d helped dispose of in there over the years.
Bodies, sometimes, of people she’d tortured or killed.
Her stomach lurched. She’d shoved Rory’s corpse in there just hours ago.
“Is that why I’m—” She swallowed, her throat burning. “Is that why I’m the way I am?”
Calum frowned at her. “What do you mean?”
Aly’s eyes stung with tears, and she blinked them away.
She could still back down, bring this unsteady conversation onto more familiar ground.
All she had to do was ask about her lack of ability with magic, or her impatience, or any of the other traits her mother had blamed on her father.
But she had to know. She had to know if there was something broken within her, something that might never be fixed, because she was fae.
She knew the stories, knew the fae were capricious and cruel, and she’d seen that mirrored in Grant, in Calum’s fear when he spoke of them.
She had kept alive by bending her morality to necessity and by flouting the law where she found it unjust. It was what she had to do to feed herself—that was how she always justified it. But that wasn’t the whole truth.
Desperation didn’t explain the thrill that went through her after a successful theft.
Hunger didn’t account for the vicious delight she felt at the prospect of locking Grant up to wither away alone.
And it wasn’t need that had driven her into Grant’s bed, that had made her like him when he wasn’t being barbaric—or that had made her like him despite knowing he could be barbaric.
She stared at the dark wool pooling around her.
Perhaps she had been drawn to him out of a sense of affinity, as though her heart had known they were two fae in a sea of humanity.
And perhaps, too, his brutality had ignited something within her, something that had always been lurking beneath the surface.
The cold air sliced at her lungs as she inhaled. “Why I’m like Grant.”
Whatever Calum had expected her to say, it wasn’t that. He shook his head, shock rippling across his features. His hand lurched forwards, then snapped back, as though he’d reached for her and then thought better of it. “You’re not like Grant.”
“I’m sitting here in my underwear and your sister’s cloak because the rest of my clothes are covered in a dead man’s blood. A man I stabbed.”
“And why did you stab him?” Calum spoke like a teacher leading a pupil to the solution to a difficult maths problem.
“Well, because he would have killed me,” Aly said.
Calum let out a flicker of a laugh. “Exactly.”
“That’s not the point.” The backs of Aly’s eyes stung.
“He’s dead by my hand.” It had been him or her, she knew that, but it didn’t stop her reliving it in her head, wondering if she could have done something differently.
If she hadn’t led with a knife, perhaps she could have reasoned with him.
If she had fled rather than hesitating, perhaps she could have escaped before he tried to stab her.
Calum rubbed a hand over his face. “I know the cruelty of fae and, trust me, you’re nothing like them.”
“You don’t know everything I’ve done.” Her mind echoed with the screams of the man she’d tortured in Grant’s rooms just weeks ago.
Calum tilted his head, pointing to the sharp slash of white in his otherwise near-black hair, so different from the sparkling strands scattered at Sorcha’s temples. “Do you see this?”
“Aye.” Her heart pounded in anticipation, wondering what such an unnatural streak in his hair had to do with anything.
“It’s a brand.” He said the words so calmly that for a moment Aly thought she’d misheard. “The branding iron was cold, so the hair grew back in white.”
Nausea rose in Aly’s throat. She shuddered, staring at the slash of white in his dark hair. “Did Caoimhe do that to you?” That was the name Sorcha had mentioned.
“Aye.”
“She held a branding iron to your head,” Aly said, her stomach roiling. “To your head.”
“And she didn’t do it because anyone coerced her, or because she was struggling to survive,” Calum said. “She did it because she wanted to.”
Aly shook with rage.
“I know you, Aly,” Calum said, his voice tender. “You’re not like that.”
“But you were still scared when you saw my scars. You still said I was your enemy.” He must have seen something in her, something vicious that scared him.
“I shouldn’t have said that.” Calum’s voice cracked. “I shouldn’t have even thought it.”
Some of the tightness in Aly’s chest loosened.
“Are you—are you really okay with this? With me being . . .” Her gaze flicked to the white streak in his hair.
“After everything the fae did to you, I—I—” She couldn’t imagine he’d ever want to speak to her again.
She’d seen the way he’d responded when he learnt Grant was demi-fae. He’d been terrified.
Calum’s shoulders slumped. “You can’t control your heritage. It was cruel of me to hold that against you.”
Aly’s arm trembled as she reached for him, slowly enough to let him move away. He didn’t shift, and she clamped her fingers over his. His hands were cold as ice. “You were scared.”
“That’s no excuse.” Calum’s thumb slid back and forth over the underside of her wrist, soothing her.
They sat like that for a while, silence stretching between them like their clasped hands, until Aly said, “Do you think that’s why my dad left?” She’d been twelve, around the age when children started manifesting their powers—and all she’d managed to manifest was fire.
A breath of wind picked up a stray lock of hair, copper dancing across her vision as she shook her head to clear it away.
Calum’s thumb stilled. “It’s not your fault that he left.”
“Are you sure?” Aly gave him a weak smile. “My mum always said it was.”
“You were a child,” Calum said. “He made his own decisions as an adult.”
Aly tilted her head towards her shoulder.
“Maybe. Or maybe Mum made the decision for him.” She dropped her head, her vision consumed by their entwined hands.
“She changed after he left. She got—spiteful. I always thought it was because she blamed me for him leaving, but what if—what if she found out he was fae?” And that, by extension, her daughter was as well.
“When you told me Grant was fae, do you know what the first thing I thought was?”
Calum shook his head, his lips parting. “What?”
“All I could think about was . . .” She took a quivering breath, her hands tightening so the knuckles stood out white.
“Was how if he was fae, that means that I carried a monster inside my body for over a fortnight.” She shuddered.
“I terminated the pregnancy as soon as I found out, of course, for a multitude of reasons that had nothing to do with him being fae, but I just felt this—this deep, visceral horror when I found out it hadn’t even been human.
” She blinked, tears stinging her eyes, and turned to look at Calum.
“How must she have felt if she found out she’d not just carried a fae child, but birthed and raised one? ”
“You’re not a monster.” Calum clasped her hand between both of his. His lips were white, his jaw clenched tightly shut. “None of that justifies her being cruel, or evicting you, or anything else.”
“You just tried to evict me for being fae.”
“And I shouldn’t have.” His tone was firm. “Do you think it is your father then?”
“It must be. Mum’s a surgeon.” And surgeons used steel bone saws.
A gust of wind blew down the street, sending a shiver through Aly. Calum’s grip tightened on her hand. “Come on, let’s go inside.” He stood, her fingers sliding out of his.
Aly followed him up the steps into the warmth of the house. Sorcha sat by the fire in the parlour, her long legs stretched out before her and a cup of tea on the table next to her. She looked up from her book when they entered.
“There’s a pot on the kitchen table,” she said, her tone so nonchalant Aly could have kissed her.