Chapter 10 #2
I chew, listening to his words. There’s a strong possibility I imagined the whole thing. Surely, low solence sugar during pregnancy can lead to hallucinations. A fairy creature has not infiltrated the council. I have never heard of that before. I’m just seeing things.
Pregnancy hallucinations are a new symptom for me, but a much more likely explanation for what I saw.
Taking the container of crackers from his hand, I shove another down my throat and ask Melek one more question. “What colour were his eyes?”
“Really, Alora, what is going on? Why are you so concerned about his skin and eye colour?”
“Please, amuse me, husband—” I see the crinkle of lines around his eyes, a thin sliver of light filtering through the gaps in the pantry door. He huffs out an exhausted breath.
“His eyes are grey, like everyone else’s here.”
“Are you sure?” I can’t help it. When I go back out there, I need to know what I’m looking for. Is this pregnancy making me crazy? Maybe it’s all those medications the Doctor has Mary spoon-feeding me each day.
“Alora…”
Plastering my lids open, I give him a good look at my eyes. The eyes he stares at every day. The eyes that mark me different—unchosen, unworthy. They are bright blue, not grey.
“I’m sure, wife.”
Satisfied, I inhale another cracker and ponder. I’ll go back out there, and this Adam will have bronzed skin and grey eyes. Excellent. Sorted. I shove another cracker down my throat.
“Wife?” It’s a command. I snap out of my introspection. “If you are not well, you can go rest in our room. Is it the baby?”
His hands rest on my protruding bump. “I’m sorry.
I’m okay. I was just hungry and had a dizzy spell.
I’m good now.” Back straightening, I place a wary smile on my lips—one he can probably see straight through.
His eyes turn into slits, suspicion evident, probably because I’ve never had a “dizzy spell” before.
Not to mention the strange questions. I’m a known pregnancy crier.
I probably should’ve burst out in tears.
“Let’s go back out and eat some proper food.
These crackers aren’t hitting the mark.”
Melek doesn’t let me stray far from his side for the rest of the evening.
The vultures—council wives—barely get a lick of me, which I’m somewhat grateful for.
Adam has disappeared, and I haven’t been able to locate him since our first meeting.
The only conclusion I can come to is that I was seeing things—pregnancy brain.
Delusional. The last thing I need them doing is slapping a label like hysteria on me.
In four months, Melek will have two babies from me.
An heir and a spare. He could get rid of me.
I could be disposable to him after I birthed this baby.
My spiralling can’t have come at a worse time because it’s at this exact moment, while shoving a cream puff in my face, that a purple body crosses my field of vision. Craning my neck, I ask, so only Melek can hear, “That’s a purple fairy, right?”
Two keepers in head-to-toe black suits roughly tug the chained male, stumbling in bare feet, without a stitch of cloth on him.
Ice-blue eyes flash around the room, unsure, but placid enough not to cause trouble.
No doubt those orbs were much darker before they began feasting on him.
A dining chair is placed before the fireplace in the living room, and the thin, lithe fairy is told to sit.
A stifling voice is in my ear. “Yes. And Mary has already taken Sunny up to his room.”
His words pass through me as my eyes lock on the sunken form of the fairy man before us.
The males of the Halo Council circle around with drinks in hand, their dutiful wives beside them.
Last time I had witnessed this was at this same event, last year—Lord Belial’s holiday party.
Sunny stayed at home with Mary, and Melek insisted I go to socialise.
Proof of life, since the residents of Halo probably assumed I was a ghost, since I hadn’t been seen outside of our estate for several years beyond the odd party I was made to attend.
“This holiday season, we are blessed with the bounty of our saviour.” The glint of a bronzed dagger catches my eye.
Lord Asmodeus’s wife, a thin rake of a woman with blonde hair and bulging eyes, holds up the arm of the fairy as the lord speaks.
My stomach churns into knots. The hand I’d placed in my husband’s pulls away on reflex. “Soon, we will begin anew.”
Lord Asmodeus takes the dagger, finds a raised gash on the purple fairy’s forearm, and slices deeply. The figure in the chair barely twists, the chains around his arms and legs rattling slightly as his arm is moved to capture the flowing pearlescent solence in a glass flute.
The wound drips slowly, and I find myself transfixed on the man in the chair. Two small horns protrude out of his hairline. Scraggly white hair is cut unevenly around his pointed ears. Leaning back, long lashes bat over cheeks, and he sighs.
It’s true when people say you grow used to seeing a thing, accustomed to the onslaught of thoughts and rattling emotions. Eventually, it becomes normal. I never want to see more of this ritual because I never want it to be “normal” to me.
This is and always will be barbaric, savage.
I know exactly what these men and women of Halo would call the fairy—savage—so the irony isn’t lost on me when that’s all I see when they pass the flute around the room, taking sip after sip, savouring the taste of a creature sought to extend life and beauty.
A bunch of savages. The flicker of the orange flames only serves to accentuate the garishness of their…
Ugliness—the absence of kindness in soul and thought.
Humanity is not within the humans of Halo, if you can call them that.
Human? What does that word even mean anymore?
The faces continue to mean nothing to me.
Instead, all I see is one colour—red. Each person is the representation of everything I despise, of every wrong I intend to right.
At least, this time, they didn’t torture him.
Though I expect this fairy is too far gone to be susceptible to lashings. They give up eventually.
I do too.
I’m gone before Melek can question my disappearance.
For a moment, my feet slow, expecting him to stalk after me.
He does not. I don’t know if Melek drinks.
I’ve never seen that glimmering liquid on his tongue before.
Not seeing it is my continual lie. There’s only one way he looks like a man in his prime as opposed to one hitting beyond mid-life.
Looking would make me an accomplice. I can barely stop my own child from witnessing what goes on in this place. Before, Sunny was too young for such things. Now, he’s becoming of age. I can’t protect him any longer.
My time has run out, and I’m heavily pregnant with another.
Despair radiates like its own visceral entity from the beginnings of my soul. All hope is gone. If the fairies can’t fight them, what hope does a swine have? Heading on wobbly legs for the downstairs toilet, I hide, trying to steady my rasping breaths without being assaulted.