“Only when I had to. Mostly, I tried to scare family away when they were getting too bloodthirsty.”
“Yeah? What were you doing, outside of that ‘mostly’?”
“Panicking. Lashing out. You know what they say about a cornered rat, right?”
I thought of my brawl against the Faerie swordswoman, yesterday morning. “Yeah. I guess we’re the same, mostly, in that respect. I don’t like confrontation, but I’ll do it when my hand is forced.”
Rose seemed to pick up on my line of thought. “You handled it pretty well. Both times, Faerie and the bird zombie things.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I couldn’t do that. I mean, not in an up-and-up fight.”
“How would you handle yourself outside of an up-and-up fight?” I asked.
“I did okay, before. Now? I dunno. Not many chances to get into confrontations, in my private little mirror world.”
“It might be worth getting yourself prepared,” I said. “We know some Others can reach you in there. Padraic did. Get yourself a weapon or two, to start with.”
“Blake-”
“And we need to figure out what your capabilities are. What can you do, what does it cost you? You awakened, right?”
“Why does it feel like you’re preparing for a fight, more than you’re preparing for fights in general?”
“Because I am? Because we know Laird is making a move later today? A kind of revenge?”
“Okay. But Maggie was a concern, when you were setting up your circles? With the chain? Are you sure this isn’t a response to her? To the betrayal?”
“It isn’t. Not directly.”
“But there’s a connection.”
“Maybe,” I said. I was about to rub my eyes, then stopped. I still had spatters of faerie-hair juice on my fingers. And my hands. And on my wrists, beneath the cuffs of my sleeves.
The hair was my go-to power source for the moment, so I didn’t have to use my blood, but I’d splashed some when using the mortar and pestle. Not something I had a lot of experience using.
Was there a book out there with a list of expected side effects from this sort of thing? What happened if you got faerie ink in your eyes?
I set to washing my hands, pulling off my jacket and shirt, removing the hatchet from where I’d hooked it into my belt so it wouldn’t cut me. I was careful to get all of the ink off with soap and hot water. “Yeah. Maybe there is a connection. It feels more real than it did. Rooted in what we were doing. It’s not like I’ve seen Molly’s body, the idea of her being murdered was abstract. Real, but abstract. Now I know I’ve looked in the eyes of the person who ordered it.”
“Yeah,” Rose said. “I get that. But are you talking about looking Maggie in the eyes, or Laird?”
“I was thinking of Maggie when I said it.”
“Maggie’s the middleman. She didn’t commit the murder herself. And she did it because Laird pushed her to.”
I glared at Rose. “Are you defending her?”
“No. I’m not,” Rose said.
“It sounded like you were.”
“I’m trying to put it all in perspective. It was goblins who did the deed. Laird who put everything in motion. Can you honestly say, seeing what Laird has pulled already, that you couldn’t have ever made a mistake like that? If Grandmother hadn’t warned you what was out there? If you weren’t vulnerable, with Laird going all-out?”
I finished washing my hands, drying them by running them through my hair. “I don’t want to forgive her. I think that’s fucked up, kind of, if I’m dismissing the death of someone I cared about so easily. For what? For an ally? A bargaining chip? Is it really worth surviving, if that survival requires that kind of compromise?”
“Okay. I’m not going to ask you…”
Rose trailed off.
“What?”
“Your arms.”
I’d moved into her field of view. I looked, turning my arms over.
It took me a second to realize what she was talking about. I was so used to them, my attention didn’t tend to linger on them. The tattoos.
The birds and the background colors were more vivid and distinct than they’d been the day they’d been finished. Which was worse? Rose being right when she had said I was fading in color, with the tattoos being that much more colorful by contrast? Or the tattoos being infused with color by some outside means?
“You bit a Faerie. Maybe you caught something?”
I moved my hand, so the chain and locket rattled a fraction. “Faerie thrive on attention. Why would there be any glamour affecting the tattoos?”
I could see Rose’s frown.
I looked, using the sight, and I could see the innumerable connections that spread out from me to the outside world.
Friendships… thin, barely perceptible. I’d neglected them, I supposed. Family bonds, some local, some not. Magical bonds, and bonds of ownership, of home and emotional attachment.
Nothing that suggested a big, complicated working. No conduit of power that could be feeding this strangeness into me.
“I don’t think it’s anything Laird did,” I said, my voice low, talking more to myself than Rose. “The Duchamps… it’s more their style, maybe, and they’d be subtle about it, but I don’t think so.”
“No. Doesn’t seem like something he’d do.”
Numb, I said, “Back when I first awakened, I saw my tattoos moving. They were almost alive, then.”
“I don’t know, Blake. I can start reading some stuff, but… I don’t know.”
“Fuck,” I muttered.
“If I had to guess?”
“I’ll take a guess,” I said. I didn’t take my eyes off the birds and branches that marked my arms.
“Maybe it’s just an extension of the idea before? You’re drained. You gave too much of yourself, at a time not long after we’d sort of fudged the truth? Something could have filled that void.”
My blood ran cold. “I’m possessed?”
“I don’t know. I’m guessing. We know any practitioner becomes a bit more Otherlike when they get into anything more than the surface level magics. You’ve-”
“I’ve barely waded in the damned pool. If it was that easy, every practitioner would be freakish. Grandmother got into hairier stuff, and I didn’t see much that was unusual about her.”
My hands were shaking, as much a response to the thudding of my heart that rocked through my entire body as anything else. My body was… it was supposed to be sacrosanct, in a way. I was twenty; I was hardly expecting any big changes. A scar here, a wrinkle there. Not my tattoos turning against me. They were supposed to be mine. Good things, things I liked looking at, things that invoked memories of my friendships.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Blake. Except-”
I looked at Rose. She’d stopped.
“Except what, Rose?”
“Except… if you think of all of the things that set you apart from the typical practitioner…”
“The thing I almost summoned, the one the lawyer told me to call. I almost called it. I can still feel the connection now. Weaker. I probably wouldn’t have to call it seven times to get it to come… but maybe I’d have to call it more than the once.”