Page 65 of The Brightest Fell

“I mean the more human I am, the more slowly I heal.” I’ve bounced back from being stabbed in the heart and dropped from the treetops, but I was more fae than human when those things happened. “I’m about to make a mess.”

“Oh.” Madden took a step back. “I can’t really explain blood on my work pants.”

“It’s okay,” I assured him, and turned to the things I’d asked him to bring me.

The Borderlands Café isn’t the biggest or the fanciest in San Francisco, but the owner makes it a point to buy the best ingredients he can. Belatedly, it occurred to me that I could have asked for a cup of coffee. Being closer to human meant caffeine would work on me again. After I fix this, before the hope chest, I thought, and got to work.

Alchemy is a science, precise and careful and refined over the course of centuries. People like Walther can spend their whole lives practicing their craft, and still feel like they had more to learn. In one of those “Alanis Morissette would call this ironic” twists, changeling charms work along similar principles. A French chef and a home cook can both roast a chicken. It’s just that one of them will do it with technique and precision and a guaranteed result, while the other will be working off of Grandma’s recipe, a handful of herbs, and a basic understanding of heat.

I have always been more of a home cook. I picked up the squeeze bottle of honey and wrung a healthy amount of sticky golden liquid into the bottom of the teacup before adding pinches of powdered ginger and mint leaves.

“He that has a tiny little wit, with hey, ho, the wind and the rain,” I chanted. My magic struggled to rise around me, cut-grass and copper and so very, very strange, and so achingly familiar. This was how it had been for me, for years. This was how I had grown up, struggling to reach the bottom rungs of a ladder that everyone around me seemed to climb so effortlessly.

Maybe using King Lear to focus the charm meant to save my stepfather was a little weird, but I’ve always had a thing for Shakespeare, and somehow I didn’t think Simon would appreciate me going for Hamlet. I added salt to the mixture in the bottom of my teacup and stirred it with my finger before reaching for the pot and adding enough hot water to cover everything. The smell that rose from the mess was sweet and medicinal.

I was going to fix that.

“Must make content with his fortunes fit,” I chanted, and drew the knife from where it rode at my hip, comforting and close. The blade was silver, enchanted to hold a proper edge, and I kept it sharp. Given what my knives were often used for, letting them go blunt was never a good idea.

Simon rolled his eyes, sensing the shape of what I was about to do. He would have told me not to, if he could have; I was sure of that. I paused to smile a little, trying to seem more encouraging than concerned. From the way his eyes rolled again, I didn’t quite manage it.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a professional.” I ran the knife along the ball of my thumb, opening the skin. The pain was bright and electric, as it always was, but this time, it didn’t fade: this time, it stayed and grew stronger, the skin unable to knit back together the way it so often did.

At least I’d have all the blood I needed. I held my thumb over the teacup, bleeding into the water-and-honey mixture. Then I reached for Simon’s hand, and repeated the cut along his thumb, adding his blood to the “tea.”

“Simon Torquill,” I said. “You have been bound for my sake, and for my sake, I release you. You have been bound by the blood of your brother: I undo those ties with the blood of my mother. Be fit. Be fine. Be free.” I raised the cup to his lips, holding it there until I saw him swallow. Good.

Now came the hard part. “The rain it raineth every day,” I murmured, finishing the phrase from Lear, and brought the cup to my own lips. The bloody red of his memories crashed down on me like a wave, and the basement—and my body—went away.

TWENTY

EVERYTHING WAS FILMED in red, like I was looking at the world through a pair of literally rose-tinted glasses. That was how I knew this was a blood memory, and not reality. Well, that, and the fact that I was standing, I wasn’t bleeding, and my body felt like my own again.

It’s almost funny. There was a time when I would have given anything to be a real human girl. And then that time passed, and I accepted myself for who I was always meant to be, and I learned how to be happy among the fae. Which was, naturally, when people started trying to give me back my humanity. A pity they never asked first.

“October.”

I turned.

Simon was behind me, a worried expression on his familiar, unfamiliar face. He still had the same bone structure as his brother, could still pass for Sylvester when calm or serious, but the more time I spent with him, the more I was coming to see him for who he really was. He was quicker than his brother, more mercurial, and oddly, more relaxed, at least when he wasn’t being villainous or dour.

I frowned. “Is this a memory?”

“No. You foolish, foolish girl.” He smiled wryly, shaking his head. “You understand the principles of what you do, but not the possible consequences.”

“I’ve heard that one before.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Simon stopped smiling and simply looked at me. “What are you trying to do?”

“Remove the geas that Sylvester put on you.” The basement seemed to be getting bigger around us, the walls stretching off into some dark, sanguine distance. Everything was still overlain with red, but it was taking on more shade and nuance, the longer we stood here. “I figured if his blood was enough to do it, maybe my blood would be enough to undo it.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? I’ve hurt you before.”

He wasn’t wrong. But neither was I. I could feel it in my bones. I shrugged. “I won’t pretend that I’ve forgiven you for what you did to me. I sort of want to. It would be easier. I know that you didn’t mean to do as much damage as you did. That doesn’t make the damage go away. It doesn’t give my daughter back to me.”

It was funny, in a terrible way. Simon had been so focused on doing whatever he could to bring his daughter home that he’d caused me to lose my own child forever. I didn’t need to say that aloud; he knew what I was thinking. I could see it in the shamed, downcast tilt of his eyes.

“You didn’t tell Riordan she could have me.”