Samhain
Janet and Tam Lin stare at me, aghast at what I have just revealed.
My inner darkness does not frighten me anymore.
The power was so new then, and I was still so young. It frightened me to take a life. To be responsible for causing someone’s death, even accidentally. And now?
Now I take a different human lover every seven years and sacrifice them.
I have embraced the monstrous inside me, the wicked, the cold.
No longer do I retain the mortal senses of good and evil; Faery has never had any use for them, after all.
We know only hunger and satiety, wonder and dread, life and death.
We are the folk of twilight and shadows, the borders and the in-between; to understand that is the first thing every fae learns.
We have not the luxury for such ideas of goodness as the mortals hold.
My branched crown grows thorns and antlers, welding itself into my skull.
My fingers grow talons; the train of my gown turns into spiky roots.
I let my head roll as my eyes grow wide—I can feel the black taking over the brown and the blood-red.
Black vines twist down my arms and up my throat, where they turn into veins marring my perfect skin.
I grow, or I feel as though I do, looming over these youngsters like an ogre or a tower of stone.
Maybe I have become both.
I smile and reveal my fangs. I have not grown them. They were part of me all along.
Janet gasps, cringes away, to my great delight. Tam Lin widens his stance, puts his fists up as though to protect her—with what, I cannot say. He has no weapons; he hardly even has clothes.
Oh, the lightning burning inside me! Oh, the intoxicating taste of their fear! I bathe in it, the power of my own monstrosity raises the hair on my nape, sends prickles down my spine.
“Think you there is aught in me any longer of mercy and goodness?” My voice is sonorous, echoing off the clouds. “I killed the only man I ever loved.”
These mortals are young, they look small, tiny, less substantial than little pixies who flutter about the trees and tie knots in my hair. But Janet tilts her head and stares at me, still trembling but thoughtful behind her fear.
“The only man you let yourself love,” she says.
I blink first then scowl, fierce as the vicious nucklavee. “What is that supposed to mean?”
She shrugs. “I think you did not let yourself love another, after you lost your Thomas.”
“I killed him,” I grind out. “My love destroyed him, and so it is locked away forever. I will never feel that way about another.”
“But what of Jamie? What of Morven?” Janet asks. “Can you tell me you did not love them?”
I loved them both, of course I did. And if there is one thing I have done right in all my life, it is this: I took the boy away from his cruel parents and he grew up happily in Faery, as I’d envisioned. He found love . . . even if it was not by my side.
Still, my blood is fit to boil inside me. I would scratch out her eyes. Woe betide your ill-fared face and an ill death may you die! My head feels too tight, as if someone brought forth a cross and rammed in directly into my skull. I clutch at my hair. “Why do you torment me so?”
And Janet, fierce, foolhardy Janet, forgets her fear and touches the side of my face. Her fingertip comes away wet.
“Because you are crying, my queen. Even now, you mourn over Thomas’s death. That is how I know there is a mortal heart in you yet,” she says, and holds up her wet fingertip. “I only have to find out where it is.”