THE NAME HUNG LOOSELY between them like a well-tended smoke cloud above a bar.

    "Is that what the fice be calling himself?" the fairy said—because it was a fairy. Behind the glamour that was Wayde, Tate recognized the same decayed being that haunted her nightmares. Even glamoured, he was always there, watching while she died.

     "I would never have guessed. The Sheriff seemed more of a dickie-bird to me."

     "He was a lot of things," Tate said too quickly. "But if you've chosen his face to frighten me, you've done poorly."

      The fairy dropped a booted foot onto the sand. The shaft, crafted from a stiff hide, ran the length of his calf, square-toed with a thick sole. The outer leather was smooth save for finely stitched side welts. On the back of his boot, a gold spur glinted. The yoke strapped against his heel let the rowel, a small toothy wheel, spin freely on its arched, intricately engraved shank. The rowel pinged sharply as his weight connected with the ground. He lowered an identically booted foot with the same force, continuing the discordant jangle.

     Specks of red matter, twice chewed dirt, dribbled down the anthill as he vacated the slope and stepped carefully over the crippled mushrooms. The sound of his spurs set Tate's teeth on edge. It was not a comfortable noise, the antithesis of her beloved brass bells.

     "Frighten you, no," the fairy leaned in as he circled her; his shadow smelled earthy and sharp, like sallow sand caught under a molding water trough. "But infuriate you. Now there is some real mischief."

     Tate squeezed her fists closed, nails nipping her palms. "You've been following us. I saw you."

     "Shame you broke your mirror," he said. "Ten more years of foul luck, I fear."

     "Who are you?"

     "Oh, I have many names."

     "Pick one."

     The fairy smiled. Wayde's lips quirked up, showing even teeth and a flash of gum on one side. "Before I tell you mine, you must tell me yours."

     "That's not usually how it works."

     The fairy clicked his tongue, "And what is usual?"

     Be respectful. Tate wasn't sure if the thought was hers or if the hair raised on the nape of her neck was a sign of Aida interjecting, but either way, she recanted and answered, "Tate. It's Tate."  

     "Tate." The fairy stopped his rotation in front of her. "T-A-I-T?"

     "T-A-T-E."

     He stroked his bristled chin in contemplation. "Since we're telling lies, call me Amon." Sweeping his coat hem aside, he slid backward into a flourished bow, spurs tinging.

     Tate forced a curt nod. Her clenched jaw barely let her neck move.   

     "Now, she is telling the truth," Amon said, pointing to Talia. He drew a deep breath. "Can you smell it?"

     Tate's chest tightened, tender to the fact that she'd been shouting Talia's actual name up the chasm without care. At that time, it seemed inconsequential compared to Talia's absence.
"Please—"

     "Please?" Amon crossed his arms over his currently broad chest.

     "Please," Tate softened the word, aiming for sincerity. "Please, I've come for my daughter. Let her go, and we'll be on our way."

     "Your daughter?" Amon looked at Talia, curled on her side inside his sprung trap. She was quiet now, eyelids heavy, her little moccasined feet crossed at the ankles. The magic inside the circle had started to leach, latching on to her with hooked teeth, suckling, gorging. Crossing the boundary of a fairy ring was tantamount to stepping on the footplate of a leg-hold trap. Once triggered, it closed impossibly tight. Soon, Talia would fall asleep, her soul fading into the Half-Light forever. Which Half-Light, Tate was unsure. Willa's duress over territories made her wonder where Amon dwelt.

     Her fingers absently brushed the ashen handprint on her skirt.

     Nowhere good.

     Kneeling, Amon reached out and let a hand rest on Talia's head. The breadth of his palm—Wayde's palm—covered her like a gunny sack. His fingers weighed on her corn-silk hair, crushing the curls against the side of her face.

     "I say she takes after her father, no?"

     Tate's stray hand had crept up to the pocket sewn shyly into the lining below her belt. At his words, a flush of heat—intense hate—swelled her throat, and she lunged, pulling a bone knife from its hiding place in her skirt. The knife had a milky white blade carved from a deer antler, thoroughly sharpened and sanded smooth to a wrapped leather handle. The gnarled burr played the part of the butt, naturally burled and close fitted against her fist.

     Weapons of metal weren't her only choices for protection, and Tate'd be damned before she traveled without one. She'd followed all the rules the Desert Folk had given her. Even Basile went bitless and barefoot, his saddle stripped of buckles. But traversing the gorge completely unarmed was an acquiescence she couldn't abide.

     "Tstststst," Amon threw up a hand as she rushed him. 

     Tate stopped short. The toes of her boots kicked dust over a pair of fetid mushrooms she'd nearly quashed. Her hem swung out, brushing the fringes of the invisible line. A shock, like a douse of ice water to her face, snatched her breath away.

     Get back. This time, Aida's voice rollicked around inside her head, loud as a gunshot. Tate obeyed without hesitation, retreating just enough to feel the sun's warmth on her skin again. She held the knife out, doing her best to stay steady.

     Amon smiled. "Now we're getting somewhere."

     "Hands off of her," Tate said, tilting her chin up at the end of her demand, ignoring her mother's frantic images of kneeling and begging. "She's just a baby."

     Amon's eyes narrowed in a way Tate had never seen on Wayde. Even after Wayde summed her lineage with the rampant illness in Blackburn and applied the word "witch" as an explanation for the mysterious plague thriving in the gutters, even then, he had never achieved the expression on his face now. Displeasure of a different kind spread like wildfire. The glamour Amon used to invoke humanity faltered and peeled back. Traces of the paper skin and hard bone flitted into sight before reconstituting into its handsome mold.

     "What else have you brought me then?" the fairy said, catching one of Talia's curls. He gently rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger.

     Tate's mouth went dry.

     With each pass, a tiny bit of color vanished from the yellow curl leaving silver strands behind. Amon paused and lifted his hand to his nose to sniff his fingertips. Then he said, "Well?"

     "I don't understand."

     "I've seen the offerings in your saddlebags. Gifts for the other inbred upper-court whores," Amon hissed, "but I did not smell any intended for me."

     Tate swallowed or tried to. She thought of the items Amon referred to, of the reason she'd carried Talia a day's ride into this ugly gorge alone. A jar of Navajo coals for Willa. Goat cheese for the strange Shadow Twins. A pearl earring she'd uncovered in a creek for the fairy peppered with an obscene collection of human jewelry. Trinkets. Gifts. Offerings she'd curated carefully for months in exchange for her life. Resurrection came at a cost. Deeper than superficial scars (and Tate had plenty of those), eternal gratitude was wishes and whims. Servitude. It was a contract signed in her blood.

     But Amon was not a part of it. If anything, he was the cause.

     "I can bring you whatever you wish," Tate said, struggling to think. "What good is a baby to you," she watched the fairy reach for a second curl on Talia's head, "no, don't—just stop."
Amon growled and sprung from his crouched position. Knocking the knife aside, he grabbed Tate by the throat. His fingers clutched her. His skin felt clammy yet stiff, like dead hide. He pushed her backward. His movements were quick. Fluid. They were haunting as silk underwater. And at his raw touch, Tate's reality seized—

     Blue fabric, the color pulled from the flat sky overhead and forced into the lake, swayed gently beneath the surface, matched in sluggish time by patchy weeds and white silt. The bloom of the sky formed a skirt. The lower half throttled a set of stocking legs, twisted over and over by the lazy current. A fitted bodice and long, loose sleeves completed the expensive dress. Above the shoulders, dark brown hair drifted with the lake weed, reading nearly black in the fractured light dispersed by the shallow water.

     Tate stood watching on the edge of the sloped embankment, her tiny shoes powdered white by the salty shore. Her flat, childish figure remained undefined in her oversized blue dress. Blue, to match her mother's. Atop her head, tangled up in her wild hair, a buttery soft ribbon of the same kin fluttered limply in the warm breeze.

     —Tate knew this moment. She'd lived it, dreamt, feared, contemplated, and rejected it. But this time, something had changed. Instead of a weathered deputy standing beside her, sharing her grim view with a hand on her bony shoulder and stilted condolences on his lips, she was alone—

     The world grumbled. Fractures formed in the crystalline sand underfoot, sparkling like ice in the winter as they raced toward the dreaded lake. Tate covered her ears, palms sweaty, as the rumble thrummed into an awful roar, kicking her back teeth silly. Thick iron rods buckled the earth on either side of her. Wood railroad ties shoved upward through the dirt crust, spiked by more of the same glinting metal. The ground roiled, a frantic, feral animal, and Tate fell, collapsing on all fours. Pebbles bounced about her fingers. Dirt and grit vibrated, unable to stand still. And suddenly, with an ear-splitting whistle, the hulking shape of a locomotive thundered into existence, flinging ugly smoke clouds high into the sky.

     The air tasted burnt.

     Wheels, taller than she could ever stretch on her tiptoes, chu-chu-churned closer and closer. At the last moment, Tate rolled away. Her arm clipped a rail, and she cried in pain, falling over the side just as the train clattered by.

     Tate landed on something hard, slick, and impossibly dark. She sat up, cradling her burned arm. All around her, it was night. The lake was gone. The train had vanished. And she'd grown into her adult self again. The hard-packed ground beneath her was textured and black. Puddles soaked her scrapped knees. The scent of rain prickled her nose, mixed with something acidic that seared her with each sniff, worse than the wound on her forearm.

     Tall buildings, the like of which Tate had never seen, not even in books, hulked on either side of what she now took to be a street. Shiny, flat, seamless glass, seeded in verticle rows —windows?—glowed steadily from the inside out. Iron and glass and steel and unforgiving, flawless rock towered into the hovering fog. 

     But above the wonder and confusion, Tate felt something else:

     Her lungs were on fire.

     Tate's feet lifted. She gasped. The sky tilted, then leveled again, and with a thud that knocked her teeth together, she laid out on her back, ripped loose from the rain-soaked poisonous world in her vision, resurfacing in the Offering Gorge. She blinked, slowly grounding her senses. The stringent flavor of blood tickled her tongue. She must have bit it on impact. Her rapid breaths filled her ears, surging in and out of her nose fast as train smoke. The sand scorched hot through her thin cotton blouse. The prickly burr of the knife, still with her, triggered her grip, and she tightened her hand around it. A thick breeze touched her thigh where her skirt had peeled back in her fall. A solid weight, a man's weight, Wayde's weight, settled on her hips.

     Tate came to with a jolt. "No!" she tried to sit up, but Amon stopped her, pushing her back down. Tate swung her arm instead, stabbing blindly with the bone blade. The fairy snapped his hand around her wrist before claiming the knife himself.

    His knees sunk into the sand on either side of her rigid body. Oily coattails rested across her bare knees. He said, "You should listen to your mother more often," and tipped the knife's point to touch the top of her left breast.

     Tate froze, but her heartbeat swelled to spite her. Each whump threatened to shove her heart up and out, impaling itself on the milky-white blade that hovered lightly above its hollow.

     "Do you offer yourself in exchange?" Amon said.

     Tate looked at Talia. Tiny ants swarmed the sleeping baby, blanketing her feet in shuddering red. Soon she would disappear under them. Tate's skin crawled at the sight of it.

     "Do we have a deal?"

     But of course not. How could they? How many people came into the Offering Gorge and vanished? Surrendering to the fairy world was akin to death, and Tate had definitive feelings on that subject. Her deal with the Desert Folk held the pretense of freedom; pledging her soul to Amon in his Half-Light meant eternal imprisonment.

     Frustration burbled from between Tate's clenched teeth. She returned Amon's growl with a guttural moan, lifting her head to glare at him before resigning herself to the sand.

    "Eighteen years," she said. A sickening pit whirled open in her stomach, widening with each decisive word she spoke. "Give me eighteen years. On her—" she paused, closing her eyes against rising nausea, "you can claim what's yours on her birthday. A baby is nothing to you, but a young woman is a useful gift."

     Amon considered her offer, Wayde's face an indifferent mask.

     "We have a deal," the fairy said. "Eighteen years, sealed in blood." Without a second word, Amon pushed down on the knife in his hands.

     Tate screamed.

     The carved blade tore through her dress into flesh, passing muscle and bone, gliding straight to her heart.

Something touched Tate's face.

    She opened her eyes.

     Talia smiled down at her. Dirty palms pulled Tate's chin up how they did every morning. With a babble of unintelligible words, Talia rocked forward and planted the summation of an open-mouthed kiss on Tate's tear-stained cheek.

     "Mama," Talia said.

     "Baby."

     Though Tate had only done it twice, coming back from the dead lacked the spectacular gut punch she'd assumed would accompany her essence returning to her body. In reality, she just

     woke up.

     Tate rolled onto her side. Snippets of her last moments flurried about in her head. Her fingers trembled, finding and tugging free the knife in her chest. Her torn blouse sucked at the fresh blood that followed, pulling the red flush across her breast to her shoulder. Still shaking, Tate shoved her fingers into the tear, feeling for the scar as it formed. There would be a swell bruise around it tomorrow.

     Dazed, she spied the fairy ring in the corner of her blurry eye, or what remained. The wind had pulled layers away while she'd been vacant. The anthills puddled to red crumbs, and the mushrooms had disintegrated into a black ash circle.

     A whispered thought pushed Tate into action. Scrambling on her belly, she reached to snatch a handful of the ash before the wind stripped it away.

     Eighteen years. Amon's voice echoed in her mind as she fumbled to pull the trick bag from her neckline. Prying open the puckered doe-skin, she sprinkled the black dust she'd saved safely inside.

     "What have you done?" Willa's worried voice floated to her.

     Tate sat up. Willa stood nearby, clutching Talia on her angled hip, who, at a year-and-a-half, already rivaled her in length.

     "The only thing I could," Tate said. Deep inside her, guilt pinged like a golden spur.
And she hated it.

A/N: This chapter killed me for many reasons (most tied to an inane sense of imposters syndrome iykyk). Consider this my obituary. Thank you for attending.