Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
BEE
I don’t know how long I stay in the bathroom, staring at the door, listening to the drip, drip, drip before I finally move for the bathtub.
I tighten the tap until the leak stops.
For a while, I stand here, looking down on the murky water.
Everything Tess was wearing earlier, when we watched the dark fae march down the road, watched Ramona’s throat get torn out—it’s all in there, soaking in the water.
Some suds are surviving, speckled and glittering along the surface of the water, but enough are gone that I can make out the sweatpants floating halfway down the tub.
Ramona’s fear turned on her—it killed her. It alighted in her, sparked panic and action to work as one. And that meant she fired the rifle. Her mind perceived the threat of the moth as the fae attacking her.
It isn’t logical. It isn’t rational.
But people are strange in fear.
Those sweatpants swaying in the water steal me back to the van on the street. I held her out there, I held Tess in my arms, felt her quiver, I smelled her urine in the air.
That pure, unfiltered fear pulsed through her.
But she didn’t react the way Ramona did.
Didn’t hide as Emily did.
Didn’t act as I did.
This is Tesni’s fear.
Dissociation.
A break in the mind that snaps her out of reality.
She will know what’s going on around her, what I told her, she will know that the darkness came from elsewhere, and that the others are a race of fae.
She will know all of that, just as she now knows what I am.
But for Tess, knowing it is merely fact. It is logic. It is what it is.
She won’t feel it, won’t process it.
That takes longer.
This is something I have been avoiding doing to her, pushing her over that edge—for one major fucking reason.
I don’t trust her in this state.
I dream about it sometimes, in this dark world: Someone aims a gun at her, and she just smiles, spreads her arms, then spits in their face—she welcomes the end, she triggers it.
Tess isn’t untrustworthy because she’s suicidal. She’s just volatile, unpredictable.
I need her focused and present.
Otherwise we can both kiss our lives goodbye.
My work on Tess isn’t yet done.
But before I go find her, I take a moment to wash my face in the sink, then brush out my ponytail. It’s all kinked, but the ache at my scalp begs for loose hair. I dampen it, just like Tesni did her own, one section at a time in the basin, then I clip a small towel around my head.
I slip out of the bathroom, feeling a touch fresher, but it would be better if we were at our original safehouse, the one we were meant to head back to after the raid at Costco, because that place is remote, near the highway and the woods, but with a bathtub and running water from the tanks outside, so actually having a bath isn’t a noise problem there like it is here.
But the return to that safehouse was made impossible by the never-ending parade of dark fae blocking our path.
This place, we stumbled into at random.
In all truth, in all shame, we were in such a state of panic when we fled—we just ran.
Ran and ran and ran.
Left our bikes behind, unspooled a rope between us, so we didn’t lose each other in the dark, and we bolted—until we couldn’t run anymore.
The door we took led to a stairwell, and up there, on the first floor, another door opened to a small apartment.
This one.
The problem with apartments is there’s never a fireplace.
So the sight of Emily—huddled up on the couch, eyes reddened and raw, aimed at the sheen of the dead TV, with a dozen blankets wrapped around her—is not surprising.
It’s a cold night.
The days and nights are both dark now, but I can feel the difference in them.
I leave Emily on the couch and make for the kitchen—and I find Tesni.
Hair still turbaned, she is perched on the counter, tucked between the wall and the sink. Beside her, the window is cracked open, and through the gap, she exhales a ribbon of cigarette smoke.
I shut the door quietly behind me. “Should you be doing that?”
With the state of her lungs post-plague, it’s not the brightest idea she’s had. But Tesni is nothing if not utterly self-destructive.
She just stares at the grey wisps dancing in her face. “If you’re fae, why don’t you look like them?”
The bluntness of the question strikes me still for a heartbeat. Honestly, I expected her to ignore the whole thing entirely until she can process it.
My answer comes as soft as my steps, “I don’t look like those dark ones because I’m of light—and I’m half.”
I pause my approach at the toppled dining chair.
“Half,” she echoes, then brings the cigarette to her mouth. Still, she doesn’t look at me. Not a glance aimed my way. She watches the smoke dance in her face. “What does that mean? How can you be half of another species?”
“The same way some humans have neanderthal DNA.” I tuck the chair back into place under the table. “That’s a different species.” I move for the counter. “Like mules and donkeys can breed, like coyotes and wolves, or lions and tigers.”
She says nothing.
“My mother is fae,” I go on. “My father is human. They met when my dad fell through a bridge into the woods near her village.”
I jump up to sit on the counter.
With only the sink between us, I rest my temple on the upper cabinet of glassware and watch her.
Tesni watches the darkness.
Her mouth moves around a murmur, “Fell through a bridge…”
Again, she’s just repeating words, as though trying to make sense of them, not exactly prompting me to explain.
And I don’t, because her mind is mush right now, and she can only take in so much.
Tesni can only handle so much.
She doesn’t try to throw herself off roofs or drown in liquor and pills when it all gets too much for her. She just… switches off. Something in her brain changes. Her smiles fade, and there is only that hollow gaze of hers left.
I once watched her exist on the couch for five days straight—without speaking a word.
No hobbies, no reading, the TV was on, but she didn’t pay much attention to the shows.
When I spoke to her, she just looked at me like I wasn’t there.
And it was then I first wondered if, hundreds of years before, she would have been considered possessed, or long before that, a changeling—and killed for it.
“So you’re half fae,” she says, unsurely, and turns a frown on me, “and half human.”
I nod before I add, “I’m a halfling—and also a kinta.”
I push off the counter and start for the cabinets. I search for food. The stuff stashed in our backpacks from the Costco raid is better left untouched at least for rainier, darker days than this one.
Ramona’s duffel was left behind.
Tess had the good sense to grab her own from the bike as I unspooled the rope to share between us, to keep us together in the dark, and Emily stayed sharp—she grabbed her own duffel.
We’ll need all of that later.
And it turns out we have plenty of food here in this apartment.
The first cabinet is lined with mugs; the second is stocked full of ingredients, like flour and sugar and salt; but the third, that’s the gold mine.
I snatch the packet of fettucine pasta.
There’s more in there. A lot more.
Plastic packets of penne pasta, spaghetti, even rice. There’s a whole row of jarred sauces, and even some parmesan cheese and tinned tuna flakes and cereals.
We’ll make sure to clear out these shelves before we leave. For now, we use what needs to be cooked, boiled, because out there on the road, moving around all the time, we won’t always have the resources to bring water to a boil.
Tesni’s gaze follows me as I set the packets down on the chopping board, then rummage around for pots.
Tess is quiet, save for the occasional inhale of her cigarette, as I fill the pot, then light the gas stove—but I feel her stare scratching at my cheek.
Click, click, click.
The flames whoosh to life.
I set down the pot then pour all the fettucine into the stagnant water.
“What’s a kinta?” she finally asks.
I leave the stove to do its work and hunt through the kitchen for bowls and cutlery.
This is strategy.
The more casual and at-ease I approach this conversation with Tess, the easier she might take it, like giving her space to breathe, but being right here if and when she has questions.
“A halfling born of human and fae,” I tell her. “A child that should be both—but is only human.”
Crouched at a bottom cabinet, I chance a glance at her. My hands still around the stacked bowls.
Tess stares out the window now, at darkness, a faint frown working on her face. It eases, loosens, then tightens again.
I can almost hear the words churning through her mind, the confusion unspooling.
I put the bowls on the counter, then reach for the cutlery drawer—and I answer the questions on her frown.
“The fae blood should be dominant in me,” I explain.
“I should be more fae than human. I should look like the light ones with only one human feature. But I am like this—” I spread my arms out.
“—and in the fae realm, that’s considered a defect, like being born without legs, only worse.
And then there are some who think it’s an abomination. ”
That I am an abomination.
The cigarette pinched between her fingers is burnt down to a balancing line of ash pinched between her fingers.
I lean my hip against the counter. “I left the light lands a long a time ago to be with those more like me. Kintas aren’t exactly welcomed with warmth in the fae realm.”
“You say realm and lands—” she huffs, then tosses the cigarette into the sink. It douses with a sizzle, but not before she’s already lighting the next. “What is that place?”
I fight the disapproving glare on the cigarette and force my stare to stick to her sock-clad feet on the edge of the sink.
“I’m from a world, like this one. That world and this one touch in certain places, which creates bridges.
In the fae world,” I say, “there are what you might call countries, but we call them lands.”