24
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I was born and raised in England, which meant that the familiar stretch of grey-and-brown bricks was nothing more than home.
There was stone in every direction for as far as the eye could see when we stepped out of the inn, the textured and aged structures that spoke of times long before me and likely long before Killian himself.
And though I had seen similar sights nearly everyday from the moment I could walk, to now, there would always be something magical about looking at those buildings and the tales that every laid brick could tell.
Perhaps not magical in the way Saoghal was magical with its greenery, its golden wood-dust, and its winged inhabitants.
But magical in the way of the rise and fall of greatness and the generations of lives lived in a world designed to remake itself.
It was with a groan and a new sort of exhaustion that I stretched my hands up and over my head, twisting as I went just to free the knot that was determined to contort my spine into a pretzel.
Nothing would have prepared me for Killian’s sudden presence at my back, his solid mass warming me as his chest pushed against me and he set his chin into the curve of my neck, his hands finding my waist. Shock pulsed through me first, driving me to consider shivering and shooting out of his hold.
But then came comfort, louder and more demanding than shock, and I instead sighed and rolled my body into a safe curve that fit perfectly against him.
“It’s very brown,” he murmured against my ear, his breath heated with nothing but familiarity that made me only crave his closeness even more.
“This is coming from the pixie that lives within the trees?” I offered only after I completed my fifth yawn.
“A different type of brown.” Killian finally let me go and I wanted to cry for him to come back and never release me from the cocoon of his being.
The only reason I refrained from doing that was because as he moved to my side, I looked to him and saw a whole new sort of bewilderment in his eyes.
Excitement brought a gleam to his darkened eyes and a thrilling sort of confusion drove them wide as he blinked around at everything around us.
Now I understood why he had thought bringing me to Saoghal was fun. I could get used to seeing the way his eyes flicked around and the muscles on his taut face twitched with every new piece of information.
I also understood Raegan’s half-dig at me last year, when he had claimed he offered me new information just to see my eyes widen. For once, it was nice to not be the one not shocked.
Killian went to step out onto the street and I managed to grab him by the back of his not-of-this-age attire, yanking his body back up to the sidewalk.
“What was that for–”
A car, travelling much faster than the posted limit, screamed at us both and blew a gust of wind in our direction that flared Killian’s hair in all directions.
Grumbling beneath his breath, his snarl was beast-like in every way as he gathered the remnants of his hair and tossed it above his head into a knot.
Shit. His ears.
I glanced around, my eyes scanning the length of the stone roadways and the few people flitting by on their daily walks, and realized that in this world, the real world, it was unlikely anyone would pull themselves out of their own heads long enough to notice his ears.
And if they did? Well, the ears matched the cosplay story that we were rolling with.
It was as Raegan had once said, “You humans have this phenomenal ability to very rarely care about anything beneath your own noses.”
I had scoffed at him, then. But now, well he was right. Of the few people that had happened by us in the few minutes since we stepped out of the building, not one had looked in our direction.
“What was that!” Killian roared, stepping backwards until he was hiding behind me.
It was adorable, in the way that he was a battle-seasoned pixie warrior capable of shredding someone apart with his bare hands, yet a small, on-its-last-legs hatchback sent a pang of fear through him.
He would’ve been horrified to hear that I had been hit by not one car, not two, but three. That was a story for another time.
“It was a car,” I laughed, my humour only furthered when Killian stepped to my side and interlocked his hand in mine. For safety, I assumed. “They’re transport. Like… horses?”
“What a rude car,” he huffed, frowning in the direction it had sped off in. “It saw me and continued on!”
Having to explain the concept of the car not being sentient and therefore did not see Killian seemed like a conversation for another day, so I just laughed and tugged on his hand, beginning to drag him down the street.
His sudden gasp threw me into a panic, turning to face him only to see his large arm raised and his finger pointed at a house behind me. “That building! It is on fire!”
He was, of course, referring to the smoke rising out of one of the chimneys.
“It’s not on fire.” I continued to giggle as I pulled harder at his suddenly very-still body. “It’s inside.”
Another gasp. “The inside is on fire?” Then he was pulling on me, starting to drag me towards the house. “We must save them, then.”
“Killian,” I said through laughter. “It’s just… Heat.”
“Heat?”
“Yes.” I laughed some more as I wound my arm around his and yanked him back in the direction I had wanted to go. “To keep them warm.”
“To keep them warm,” he repeated.
Our walk continued more or less the same, Killian stopping every few feet to point something out or become unnaturally enraged over something he didn’t understand.
As we passed a pub on our left, it was the TV that he saw through the window.
As we passed a sweets-shop on our right, it was amazement and then rage when he saw a cardboard print-out of some celebrity that was looking at him weirdly.
Next was strolling down a long alley of pencil-thin connected homes all of which with cars parked out front, each of which Killian growled at and warned them to stay away.
My heart grew to a new, unnatural size when he stopped outside of a pop-up flowery, grabbed onto three sunflowers, and extended them to me.
I shot a somewhat apologetic look to the owner of said pop-up, pleading silently for her to not make a big deal.
“For you,” he said, eyes wide and heart beating on his sleeve.
I nodded, sucking my lips between my teeth before I did something stupid with them.
“Thank you, Killian.” With a true, overly raw smile, I took them from him and placed the petals to my nose.
It was a relief to smell something other than the overwhelming scent of sea-salt from Mount’s Bay, or the distinguishable aroma of mossy-stones of Marazion.
When Killian grinned, overly chuffed with himself, and turned away, I mouthed an apology to the elderly lady behind her cart and placed them back where he had taken them.
“Keep them,” she whispered, following her generous offering with a wink. My eyes softened as I tried to accept such random kindness from someone who, upon second glance at the two of us, seemed rather unfazed by our attire and Killian’s outlandish presence.
I mouthed a thank you and trotted away from her, catching up to Killian before he had the chance to throw a fist through a window when he saw a mannequin bothering him, whatever that meant.
Our stroll became comfortable in a way that walking down the streets of Marazion with a dozen-decade old pixie shouldn’t have been.
“I can show you some of the different things that we do–”
“No,” he said, cutting me off and turning into me in one motion. “Show me what you like to do.”
My brows twitched as I tried to keep the truth from my face.
There wasn’t anything I liked to do. I liked to rot on my couch and throw sunflower seeds at the wall, making Urram fly to catch each and every one.
I liked to flick through different TV channels in hopes that one of them would allow me to feel something.
I liked to lay in my bed, stare up at the ceiling, and pretend I was back in Saoghal.
But Killian was Killian and I wasn’t sure he would ever understand that. I wasn’t sure he’d ever understand that part of me.
So I tried for something else, instead. “When I was a little girl, my mum went on a trip to France–” I ignored how confused Killian looked at that word, “–so my dad brought me here. He called it our little secret and we got to spend a week in this town.”
Killian glanced around and I couldn’t tell if he thought a week was too much time in Marazion or too little.
“And… And I remember, so clearly, this one day. All of these years later and I still consider it one of the best days of my life.”
If Killian had been a ruder male, he might have asked me what my point was. But he didn’t, he just continued to stare at me with those big, round, animated circles of joy.
“Come on,” I whispered conspiratorially.
My hand was wrapped in his, my grip unfaltering, and then we were sprinting down alleys and roadways, ankles rolling over jagged stones and feet pounding against cobblestone.
The two of us laughed – laughed like Saoghal wasn’t one more bad decision away from destruction, like I hadn’t spent the last year so deep in the darkness.
Killian matched my pace as we ran our way to happiness, in a place where I never thought I could feel such a thing.
~
“It’s still here,” I cried in relief as we slammed to a stop outside of a somewhat run-down bakery on the outskirts of Marazion.
Killian’s nostrils flared, his eyes going glassy as he drew in scent after scent. “It smells so sweet.”
“Tastes even sweeter,” I said, my grin wide and unstoppable as I took his hand in mine once more and hauled the two of us through the door.
Killian flinched as the bell atop the entrance sang out, but managed to keep his cool long enough to glance around.
The smell of butter, warm and inviting, nearly sent me to my knees.
I waded my way through that tremendous aroma, sighing when it shifted to something sweeter and more promising, indicating icing in my near future.
Killian lingered behind me, his eyes soaring from the pastries on one side to the sweets on the other.
The whole time, his nostrils remained flared and his pupils shot wide.
An older gentleman, at least twice my age and grey in the hair, popped out of a back room and took his place behind the counter.
“You two look like you’re out to lure pixies into your midst.”
Killian and I both shot one another a nervous glance before I cleared my throat and turned my attention back to the shop-owner. “What do you mean?”
“There’s folk around these parts that drive out to the country, wearing the oddest of clothes, saying that all one has to do is lay a few items down in the grass. Then the pixies, they claim, will bless ya’.”
Killian snorted behind me and I coughed to cover up the noise. “They offer the pixies their clothes? You would think that fair folk might want other things.”
“Oh ya’?” His aged face was kind and inviting as he leant over the counter, lured into a conversation about the creatures that kept my heart beating. “Like what?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. “Porridge?”
“Porridge!” the shop-owned exclaimed before placing his hands to his stomach and laughing. “Absurd.”
Killian was chuckling behind me, still too fascinated by the food all around him to truly contribute. But he did call out, “Some of them are partial to maple-syrup.”
I tried to fight the desire to laugh along, because I knew that was his favourite–
And then it hit me. It wasn’t the porridge that lured Shea, Niamh, and Killian to me that day. It was the flavour packet, the powdered maple-syrup.
I had drawn Killian directly to me, and had never known it.
I glanced over my shoulder just to truly appreciate him, his towering mass in a shop too small for him and his impressive width in a space that tried to reduce him.
“Maple-syrup, hey?” the shop-owner hummed. “I ain’t ever tried maple-syrup.”
“You try? To draw them out, I mean?”
“Why of course. Could do with a blessing, myself. And I swore I did, once. I have strange dreams of the fair folk, some nights. Of their songs and their dances, of their spells and their magics.”
I narrowed my eyes, though the rest of me suggested joy at this simple exchange with someone who had no idea how on-the-head they were.
“Perhaps you did visit them, and they used their magic to wipe your memory?” I offered. Killian let out another laugh behind me.
“Perhaps. That’s what my wife thinks, too.”
“Imagine that.”
“Imagine that,” he said through a grin. “Enough about pixies, I suppose. What can I get ya’ fine folks?”
“When I was a girl, you used to sell this… Wait, that’s it!
” I pointed to the case near his elbow. Within, the strangest combination of cinnamon bun and danish I had ever seen.
The outside had that powerful drenching of white-icing and drool-inducing cinnamon paste, whereas the inside was filled with a pastry more akin to a danish, with the custard and fruit pieces to match.
“The cinnamon danish, hey?” the shop-owner, who as he leant to retrieve one revealed his name-tag to be Tony, said. I nodded several times, saliva already forming around my tongue as the thought of biting into it.
“What about for the lad?”
I glanced over my shoulder at Killian, who was crouched down in one of the aisles, his hands moving over something he had found interesting.
“What do you have with a disgusting amount of maple in it?”
Tony’s brow flicked up as he regarded the two of us for a second time. “I’ve got Maple Sugar Candies and a Maple Cinnamon Bun?”
“Sure,” I shot out, my stomach rumbling. “Both.”
He nodded, a grin on his face. “I’ve got a cake in the back, it’s from last night and I have been looking to pass it off all day. You two want it?”
I grimaced at the thought of taking a cake back to the pixies. Killian, Shea, Aisling, and Raegan all full of sugar?
But I nodded, anyway.
“Here.” With a groan, I tried my best to twist and reach deep into my bra for the few bills I knew I had stashed away in there when Rory sent me away.
“None of that,” he snorted as he started to pack things up. “Consider it a treat. For indulging me and my fascinations.”
If only you knew.
“Well then, take these.” As he passed me a bag filled with enough sugary-things to take down Saoghal, I placed the three sunflowers down on the table. Tony’s face lit up with a sort of peaceful admiration.
“Sunflowers. My wife’s favourite.”
“It seems our meeting was not by chance, then,” I said, offering him a parting smile before I turned on my heel and strode back towards Killian. It was a lollipop that he was mulling over beneath his fingers.
“Have a good day, Tony!” I shouted to the shop-owner.
“If you find them pixies, put in a good word for me!” he shouted back.