Six Months Later

Jack was sitting on my doorstep, ostensibly waiting for me to get home.

"I suppose this is an improvement," I said.

"Sorry it's been so long," he said, standing up. "I had some things to organize."

"I wasn't expecting you."

"And yet you brought supplies." He nodded to the open box I was carrying. It held three bottles of Riccadonna Asti, a box of crackers, and a jar of coffee. I'd tried the coffee Catriona bought a couple of weeks ago and the habit had stuck. I genuinely wasn't expecting Jack to turn up. I wonder, if I had been expecting him, would I have bought the coffee?

"We're having a new year's party," I said. "Did you want to come in?"

"I shouldn't," he said, but I could read something else in his eyes. They pleaded with me to repeat the invitation.

"Come on," I said, pushing the door open.

"Guess I missed your birthday," Jack said, nodding toward the bottles of wine as I unpacked them into the fridge.

"Oren made cake."

"Oren?" Jack froze, all the muscles in his body becoming filled with tension in a heartbeat. "Zephan's Oren?"

I stared him down. "He was never Zephan's," I said. "You don't own people."

I didn't mention that Oren would have been the first person to argue with that. Not because he thought he belonged to Zephan or anything, because of me. If he had a say in the matter, he'd say that he was mine.

It was ironic, really.

The one thing I wasn't prepared to give Oren a say in was his freedom. He had no choice there, he was free whether he liked it or not. The problem was, he didn't seem to like it. I hoped he was the only person I'd ever meet who could turn freedom into a kind of slavery.

"Anyway," Jack said, awkwardly changing the subject. "I've brought you some things." He put a cloth bag and a box on the bench. They were both plain white and unadorned. I didn't know who was in charge of gift wrapping in Faerie Land but they were seriously lacking in imagination. At the very least, a ribbon would have made the whole thing a lot nicer. I reached for the bag first.

"What's this?" I asked, peering into the bag. Tiny chunks of metal gleamed up at me. If I didn't know any better, I'd say that Jack had just given me a sack full of gold nuggets.

"Gold," Jack said.

Right, I thought, good thing I know better. It's probably a bad sign when your subconscious starts giving you sarcasm.

"Why?" I asked.

"Payment," Jack said. He shrugged awkwardly. "From the king."

"Oh." I pushed the bag away. "You couldn't have brought cash?"

"Guess I missed the Human Fae exchange bank."

"Easy enough to miss it," I said, "Terrible location."

"Shocking hours."

"Understaffed."

"I've missed you," Jack said.

"Me too." I smiled. I was glad that what happened hadn't come between us.

"Open the other one." He pushed the box towards me.

"Who's this from?" I asked, lifting the lid. The contents were swaddled in tissue paper so that, when I opened the box, all I could see were layers of white.

"That's from the new court."

"The new one?" My fingers hovered over the folds of paper.

"Many of them were once called the lesser Fae." Jack grinned. "We haven't thought of a new name yet. At least, not one that everyone's happy with."

"I can see how that would be difficult," I said. I peeled back the layers of tissue paper. "Shoes?"

"Magic shoes," Jack corrected.

"What's magic about them?" I asked, sliding the shoes on.

"They wouldn't say," he said. "I guess it's supposed to be a surprise."

"Hmm." I couldn't remember the last time a surprise had been a good thing. I paced across the kitchen. "They're comfy at least. I suppose that's pretty magic for a stiletto."

"They look good," Jack said, leaning back against the bench to look me up and down.

"Thanks."

I put the shoes away in silence. It was just one of those moments where the conversation runs dry and you can't think of anything else to say. Only, it kind of felt like there was a lot to say, a lot of things that, for various reasons, we hadn't gotten around to saying yet. I looked up at Jack.

"Listen -" he started.

"Would you -" I laughed uncomfortably, hearing our words tumble over each other's.

"I've really missed you." He looked suddenly serious.

"I've missed you too."

"No," Jack said. He pushed away from the bench and took a step closer. I tilted my head back so that I could keep him in my sights as he loomed above me. He seemed taller, somehow. Maybe I'd just gone long enough without seeing him that I'd forgotten how tall he was. "I've really missed you," he repeated. Only this time I felt the words as though he'd breathed them across my skin.

"I..." I didn't know what to say. He didn't mean what I thought he meant, did he? I frantically went through my memories of the time we'd spent together, searching for something, a sign, anything that could help me figure out what the hell was going on. "What?"

"Everything's changing in Faerie, and that's good, I know it is but..." Jack's expression became intense as he stared down at me but his eyes seemed to focus on a point in space somewhere behind me, as though he were looking through me into some distant memory. I don't know what he saw there but it made him shudder.

I realized then that Oren wasn't the only tortured faerie I knew. I reached out to pat Jack on the shoulder but only managed to reach as high as his bicep.

"Why don't you sit down?" I guided him to the kitchen table. "I'll make you a cup of coffee and you can tell me all about it."

"Thanks," Jack said, dropping into a chair. He put his elbows on the table and leant his head against his cupped hands.

I tried to ignore the shudders that ran through his back while I made him a cup of coffee. There's something deeply disturbing about seeing someone Jack's size break down and sob. As though a person's height can make them emotionally unbreakable. I guess nothing can make you unbreakable, that's part of being human.

I patted him on the back as I sat down beside him. I sloshed some of his coffee on the table when I put it down but I didn't bother wiping it up straight away. There are more important things than cleaning up. A sobbing friend definitely counts as one of those things.

"This isn't just about missing my pretty face," I said. "Talk to me."

"It's just -" he gave a shuddering sigh and took a sip of coffee. "He's too much like his grandfather."

"Who is?" I asked. Jack glanced at me out of the corner of his eyes.

"Kieran."

"Oh," I whispered. Then I made the connection. Jack had been the old king's personal valet, until he was murdered by Zephan. Maybe there was more between them than just clothes.

"Everything reminds me of him." Jack shook his head. "I thought I could handle it, you know. Like changing the world would be enough of a distraction." He sagged in his chair. "It's not."

"I'm sorry," I said. It sounded lame, even to me, but I didn't know what else to say. I rested my hand on Jack's arm, trying to offer him whatever support there might be in my touch. "Is there anything I can do?"

"I feel like such a prick asking," he said, "but I just can't stand it there anymore. I can't stand being surrounded by everything, you know?"

"And you think," I said slowly, trying to understand what it was he was asking, "that moving to Brisbane will help you get over it?"

"When you say it like that," Jack said with a wry grin, "it sounds stupid."

"I'm just not sure it's a good idea," I said. "I mean, shouldn't you be around friends and family right now?"

"He was the closest thing to family I had," Jack said. "It's okay," he stood up. "I understand that you can't deal with me like this. I shouldn't have come here."

"No," I said, grabbing hold of Jack's arm, "it's not that."

"Then what is it?"

"You just took me by surprise." He glanced toward the door. I tugged on his arm. "Sit down." He sat. "Look, I have a spare room, and you're welcome to stay as long as you like, I'm honestly okay with that. But there are things you have to understand about this world, about our place in it -"

"I know that we're a secret here, the Fae."

"It's not just that." I shook my head. "It's so much more personal than that." I searched his eyes to make sure he was really listening to me. "This isn't just about you." I held up a hand to forestall his interruption. "I know you're hurting. We all are. I haven't had a decent night's sleep since this whole thing started, since you came into my life."

I shook my head. "I don't blame you for that. I really don't. But the thing is, if I let you stay you have to promise to leave all of that behind. The politics, the Faerie stuff. All of it." I looked down at my hands as they fell into my lap. They looked, almost, defeated. I glanced back up at Jack. "I can't have you making things worse. Not just for me, but for Oren too."

"I've known him a lot longer than you have," Jack pointed out.

"I know you have." I sighed.

I barely knew Oren when I took him home from the hospital, but I couldn't just leave him. Not after everything we'd been through. We might have only spent a few hours together when Zephan was torturing me, and we didn't say anything, but there's something about going through that kind of thing together.

Zephan had tried to break me, to grind me down, he'd burned me, as though he could melt me down and forge me into something new, a slave to his whims. Instead, by burning me with Oren, he'd forged something else. Something I didn't wholly understand, but which couldn't be denied. I didn't really have a choice. I had to take care of Oren.

That's what I thought, anyway. I had to take care of him. I brought him home with me. I gave him a room, downstairs. I helped him find a bed. Took him shopping to buy clothes, taught him how the remote control for the TV worked. I taught him how to take care of himself, in this world, but he was the one who ended up taking care of me.

I've been having nightmares. Terrible, consistent nightmares that drive me, screaming, out of my own subconscious. It's always the same dream, and always the same part of it that haunts me.

It's not the blood. Not the rejection, or the feeling of being taken over by something so big and complex that I'll never be able to fully comprehend the way it took over my mind. I'm not even haunted by Kieran, he never visits my dreams. Instead, I see my captor, my torturer, the man I killed. It's Zephan. It's his eyes.

In the dream, I'm back in that room. The room where they took me and strapped me to a bench. I'm lying there still, my own vomit soaking through my clothes. Only, I'm not strapped down this time. I'm just lying there, almost of my own accord, except that I can't move. There isn't a single muscle in my entire body that responds to my silent screams. Something presses in on me, something I can't see, or touch, or understand. It presses in on me so hard that I can barely breathe.

Zephan is standing over me. Watching me. His pale blue eyes drill into mine. He just stands there, talking to me. Smiling. He paints a picture with his words and I find myself falling into the world he paints for me.

I'm wearing a white dress. I can feel a smile stretch across my face and there's this feeling in the pit of my stomach. It's all light, and bubbly, and somehow warm, as though nothing bad will ever touch me for the rest of my life.

I'm walking through a field. A crowd of people stands around me, cheering, laughing. It's the same field where the coronation was supposed to be, the same place where I killed Zephan, and the crowd is made up of the same people, but everything else is different. The sun is shining, people are happy, and I'm bringing the joy of life, the hope of possibility. No longer am I the harbinger of death, I'm their queen.

The crowd parts and I see Zephan. I fall into his arms, laughing, and then we're holding a child, a little boy. We're being driven through the streets of Faerie. Streets that I've seen before, in vision, when I searched through the land, and brushed past a dead man, still bleeding in the street. No one lies dead, this time. Not a  single person in all the land would dare to go that day.

Zephan holds the baby up. It's like that scene out of the Lion King. A shard of golden light falls across the baby and it looks like it's glowing. Only, to the people of Faerie Land, he's not glowing because the sun shines on him, he's being kissed by the gods, blessed by all the land of Faerie. He's glowing with the future.

Everybody starts cheering twice as hard.

"They love us," I say.

"No," Zephan smiles and it's like the sun comes out all over again. "They love you."

"They love our child."

I shudder, watching the vision unfold in Zephan's eyes. Even though I feel my heart turn over with longing for the future he paints. Especially because I want it. I want it so badly, it physically hurts.

I drag myself out of his vision, screaming. It's like waking up from a nightmare that you didn't even know you were having. Only, instead of waking up in your bed, safe and warm, you wake up covered in your own vomit, with a mad man staring down at you. Realizing he's lost me, he starts the next phase. He cuts me, he burns me, he teaches me, over and over, the meaning of agony. And this time, I don't have Oren holding my hand. I feel myself breaking.

Then the shadow comes. It's the longest, deepest, darkest shadow in all of human history. It comes over us and it changes everything.

I'm suddenly the one standing over him. I cut him. I burn him. I teach him the true meaning of pain. I watch tears roll across his cheeks, tracing thin liquid lines down to his ears. His eyes turn red and raw from all the crying he does. He screams, he begs for mercy, but I don't have any to give.

I drag myself out of the dream. My pillow is soaked wet with my tears, and even though I don't make a sound, Oren appears beside me. He holds me and I cling to him in the darkness. We lie together in the middle of the bed, just barely hanging on and it's like we're right back where we were. We may as well be huddled together on my kitchen floor, bleeding into each other.

"Vindix," he calls me. I asked him what it meant the first time but he wouldn't tell me. He doesn't know that I googled it. It's Latin. It means something like protector, or avenger. I suppose, to Oren, they're the same thing.

"I'm a monster," I tell him. "I killed a man. I looked him in the eye and I took his life away." I bury my face into Oren's chest, and cry.

The thing that really gets to me about that dream is his eyes. The way tears flood across that bleached blue, the fear... The thing is, I didn't make that up. My imagination isn't working overtime, trying to come up with an image of Zephan, broken and pleading for mercy. I have that already. It happened. I did that to him, in real life, and it's not something I can go back and edit out of my memory.

I remember looking into his eyes as he begged for his life and deciding to ignore his cries. And that makes me wonder if a part of me is just as bad as him. I just can't seem to figure out the difference between what I did to him and what he did to me. We both looked down on each other, and neither of us gave in to mercy. Somehow, 'he started it' just doesn't seem like a good enough reason for murder.

"He begged me to stop," I say to Oren. His nightshirt is damp with my tears. "He begged me. But I didn't stop. I couldn't."

Oren doesn't stroke my hair, or rub my back in those soothing concentric circles, like any normal person would do to offer comfort. Instead, he just holds me closer, pressing the entire length of my body against his. He holds me so tight that I can feel the echo of his heart beating against me. He breathes in deeply and I feel the pressure of his lungs expanding across my chest. He exhales.

"Feel that?" he asks, even though he knows that I can. "I breathe because of you." I'm glad that he doesn't feel the need to hide behind a dead language when he says that. I need to hear it. I ache to hear it.

Oren has this theory; a life for a life. He says that, because I saved his life, it balances out the fact that I took one, like I'm square with the universe or something. I'm not sure that I agree with him, philosophically. I just don't think that morality should work like a spreadsheet.

I still end up clinging to the thought, though. I guess a part of me is hoping that he's right, because if he isn't, then that's it. I'm not human. I really am one of the monsters and the fact that I can raise the dead has nothing to do with that.

"Meus animus tu-us a um," he says. My soul is yours.

So, even though I have to agree with Jack when he says that he's known Oren longer than I have, I can't let that be the end of it.

"I know him deeper," I said.

"Are you sleeping together?" Jack asked.

"No," I said, quickly. Too quickly. "Actually, yes. But not the way you mean." I sighed, hoping that I made some kind of sense to Jack. "Look," I said, "the thing is, I'm done with Faerie Land, okay? We got out more or less in one piece, but if we start looking back, I'm scared we're going to realize how much we left behind, and I don't think I can handle that. Not really. So, if you're staying, fine. Stay. Stay as my friend, stay as my roommate. But there's no way in hell I can let you stay as a representative of that place."

Jack smiled. It was the kind of smile you never expect to see outside of a 1960's film. It was weary, it was sad, it spoke of days gone by and memories that are better left forgotten but still end up burying themselves next to your heart.

"Long before I represented the interests of Faerie," he said, slowly, "before I dragged you into everything, I was just a man." His smile faded away, leaving his face suddenly hard and exhausted. "I'm that still," he said.

All I could do was nod. I didn't think there was anything more I could add that wouldn't completely destroy the moment. It was one of those times where the sayings were actually right. Talk is cheap. Silence is golden.

And, sometimes, a single look can say more than all the words in the world.

-------

And weeee're done here.

Hope you enjoyed, and liked that I left it open so that I could write a sequel (eventually).

Any feedback is appreciated.

x zuz