Page 17 of A House of Cloaks & Daggers

Nothing Fucking Funny About Faeries

Ihad not realisedhow confronting the scene in our sitting room was until I saw it through my little sister’s eyes.

Dark green, rotten blood soaked the carpet, splattered on the ceiling and the walls—not to mention the disturbing smear of Wren’s blood-soaked handprint beside the doorway. Shards of broken glass made a minefield of the floor, and I became painfully aware of Brynn’s bare feet as she teetered on the threshold.

“Don’t move,” I commanded, forgoing gentleness for urgency.

She barely registered my voice, my presence—anything. Her eyes were transfixed on our mother, unconscious in the clutches of a creature that no child should ever have to behold in the flesh. She was steadily bleeding out on the floor, and it seeped into the caenim’s filth until our formerly off-white carpet turned a hellish shade of brown.

Desperation began to claw at my chest, a splinter of my soul determined to flee, but I forced myself to turn to Wren and find his eyes through the tsunami of tears stinging mine.

I found them to be mostly empty, the light snuffed out but edged with something like aggravation.

“Fix her,” I pleaded. “With magic.”

I expected him to object, to make some kind of crack about necromancers or witches or surgeons, and I was prepared to fight him on it. I had seen him use magic when he burned that key, and while I hated to admit it, Jonah had been beyond the point of saving long before I had even asked. But my mother was still alive.

When Wren made no such jibe, my surprise came and went with the twitch of a finger.

He merely clenched his jaw and nodded solemnly. “I make no promises.”

“Fine,” I stammered. “Fix her—now.”

Scooting back to make way for him, I pushed myself to my feet and brushed the glass from my clothes. The sickly green mess from the caenim’s decapitation stained my hands, blending into the dark denim on my knees, and my mother’s blood was all across the front of my white shirt, soaked into the thick threads of my knitted cardigan. I wiped it off as best I could and went to my sister’s side.

“It’s okay,” I crooned, retrieving her bear from the ground.

Brynn was like a mannequin when I tried to return the toy to her arms. She stared, open-mouthed, at the disaster on our sitting room floor as fat tears silently rolled down her bone-white face.

“She’s going to be okay,” I promised.

My sister did not reply.

She didn’t look as if she was capable of speech anymore.

Heart cleaving in two, I wondered if she would ever find a way to talk, or laugh, or smile again after this.

I wondered if I would, too.

We remained on the threshold together, immobile, because I knew better than to lead her out of the room while Wren worked. Firstly, because I knew the scene before us was burned into the back of Brynn’s eyelids regardless of how far we got from the room. And secondly, because I wanted Wren to feel me watching him. I needed him to feel the pressure and sheer importance of healing her with whatever magic he possessed.

Wren didn’t look up at me, but I knew he felt my eyes on him. Felt the impact of my sister’s tears as they hit the floor.

The light went out.

The television screen turned black.

My hands, stained and smelling of copper, gripped Brynn’s shoulders. She was motionless and cold.

Wren lifted his hands, holding them parallel to my mother’s chest, and the same pearlescent light I beheld in Dante’s Bookstore glowed against his palms.

Gold and silver and white.

The beginning and the middle and the end.

It was ageless and ancient, brighter than any flame and colder than any sun.

He kept it contained to his hands, subtle and well controlled as tendrils of his power flowed into my mother’s body. I had no idea what he was doing, but I prayed it would save her.

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