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  He seemed to sense her discomfort, and he slid the gun back into his belt, letting his coat fall back down to hide it. He did not suit a gun, not while wearing clothes that belonged in the Fourteenth Century.

  “He’s going to wait for me in there all night.” She broke the silence between them, but as soon as she started speaking she realised just how much she wanted to cry. The muscles in her cheeks had that strange unstoppable ache, and her eyes felt warm and prickly.

  Bran frowned. “Most likely.”

  “What the hell does he want?” She turned her head to the side, trying to hide her face so he wouldn’t see her stupid tears. “What the hell is all this?”

  “What the hell this is, is in fact Hell.” His words came out harsh. It was cold, hard fact that he wasn’t going to try and soften to comfort her.

  “I don’t understand...”

  “Simple really. They exist, all the monsters you have ever heard of. They exist, and they want to eat you. Especially faeries.”

  He went to the door and closed it, sliding in about ten bolts that she hadn’t seen there the night before. “Some of them want to eat your flesh, but most of them want your soul. If you are exceedingly lucky, you might get one that wants both.”

  Evie wiped her tears on the sleeve of her coat. “Auran said this place was a portal.”

  Bran nodded, going to the fire and stoking it with the poker. “Yes, faeries come out of a Realm. Certain places and objects act as a kind of doorway between Faerie and your…our world.’

  Evie looked outside at the dark cobblestone alleyway, trying to make what he said sink into her brain. “So how come this place disappears? Why isn’t it always here?”

  “It’s just a glamour.”

  Evie frowned. “Glamour?”

  Bran answered her as if she was a half-wit. “You know, a spell. Magic that makes something appear to be something else.”

  “Magic.” If faeries existed, it was perfectly reasonable that there was magick, but the thought still sat on the outskirts of everything she could believe. Faeries, magic, souls. Magic wielding faeries that ate souls. All real.

  “If you have to stay here until you figure out what to do, you can make yourself useful. I had to shut shop early because of this. You have to earn your bread and keep, even in Faerie. More so, actually.”

  “I can’t believe you run a shop in Faerie. Why? Why would you live somewhere so dangerous when you aren’t one of them? Why haven’t they eaten you yet?”

  He ignored her, walking up the stairs to the door behind the elevated counter. He stopped outside it, reluctant to bring her in, she could tell.

  She thought back to their first meeting, how he had sent her away with a warning never to return. He pushed down the handle and opened the door slowly. Evie looked at him hopefully, until he waved her up.

  She should not have been so eager to enter the home of a strange man, let alone a strange man living in a portal to Faerie. A strange man with a gun. But the other alternative was a Faerie Prince and a wolf-man.

  She climbed the steps and entered Bran’s house.

  Chapter Ten

  The telephone wailed from Louise’s bedside table. She glared at it. It never left her alone, not even in her dreams it seemed. She looked back at the mirror, more specifically at the man in the mirror. He motioned to the phone with a graceful hand, indicating that she should answer it.

  She slid off her chest of drawers with a sigh and trudged to the bedside table, lifting the receiver and placing it against her ear.

  “Hello? ”

  “Lou? It’s Trix.” The girl sounded very anxious. “Is Evie home? She was supposed to call me.”

  Lou glanced at the alarm clock. Seven o’clock. “She isn’t home. I thought she was out with you, that’s what the note said.”

  “Shit. She wasn’t well, so we decided to just go home. I knew I should have walked her all the way. She was acting weird, like she was drugged or something.”

  Lou felt faint alarm seeping into her dream. “Drugged? Is she taking something, Patricia?” She used the girl’s proper name for full effect. Drugs would explain everything that had happened the night before. Evie disappearing, wandering the streets until midnight, and making up a ridiculous story about a robbery.

  “You know Evie wouldn’t do that Lou, she’s too smart. She won’t even take a drag of a cigarette.”

  Lou glanced back at the mirror impulsively. It was hard to know if she was still dreaming or not. Finvarra stood gazing out at her serenely, quiet curiosity gleaming in his eyes. It was still only a dream.

  “Look Trix, Evie was out until midnight last night. I called Richard home and we had to go out looking for her.”

  Trix was silent on the line.

  Lou continued. “I’m not going out again tonight, seems like some late teenage rebellion. She’s coming seventeen for God’s sake. I have to go.”

  “Right, Lou. Sorry for bothering you.”

  Lou hung up, feeling a twinge of guilt.

  “There’s nothing to be guilty about in a dream, my love.”

  She walked back to the mirror, the floating feeling of dream-state washing over her like a cooling wave. “You read my thoughts.”

  He gave a wicked smile. “I read your feelings. Do not worry about Evie. Children will be children. I have a son and daughter of my own. I foster son as well. I know how children are.”

  Lou sat on the dressing table, leaning back against the wall. “Don’t they miss you at home? I mean, haven’t they come looking for you?”

  “Time passes differently in Faerie. Perhaps barely a year has gone by for my son, and six hundred for me. Besides that, the responsibility to search for me lies with my foster son. I have little faith in that boy.”

  “Faerie?” Lou asked, barely hearing anything else he said. She leaned forward from the wall, gazing intensely in to the world she’d created. A shiver danced down her spine, raising goose bumps on her arms, tingling sharp as needles.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was an artist’s paradise. Art materials littered the labyrinthine hallways. Blocks of wood and sets of silver carving knives lay in the doorway of the first room that they passed. Blank canvases were stacked against the walls, which were themselves displaying intricate paintings in many different styles, some mix-matched fusion, and others elegant single-styled masterpieces.

  As she walked, she sensed a faint air of sadness leaking out of them. They were exquisite, and the hand that had painted them had tried to mask itself behind scenes of a light-hearted nature. She saw a medieval banquet hall, with a bride and groom feasting at the head of a long wooden table. Her eyes roamed to a child underneath the table, sitting at the feet of the guests like a dog, peering out of the picture with fearful eyes as if he wished Evie would simply reach in and pull him into her world.

  Bran hurried her past it when she tried to slow down, as if he was embarrassed. “I’m still decorating. I only moved here about a month ago.” He opened a paint-stained door and ushered her through, into a very cosy living room.

  “It looks amazing so far.” She stepped over a stretch of watercolour paper that was pinned flat on the floor with four coffee-cups. “I wish I had my own place. I’d paint on the walls too,” she said. Her eyes scan the room quickly, looking for any sign of another person living with him. “Don’t your house-mates complain?”

  He frowned for a moment, as if he was trying to translate what she had asked. Then he shook his head. “They don’t. They don’t come into this part of the house anyway. I do not wish them to tamper with my work.”

  Evie smiled, trying not to react to his strange hesitation. It almost seemed he was lying about someone else living with him.

  She paced around the room, and was glad when he motioned for her to seat herself on one of the settees. She sank into it with great pleasure. It felt like she had been standing forever, just as it seemed the day had gone on forever, and she had met up with Trix a century ago.


  Trix.

  “Oh my God!” She jumped back off the seat, running to the door. “Trix, she’ll think…”

  Bran grabbed her arm, pulling her back. “He’s out there, remember? You can’t leave yet. He will not wait forever I’m sure, but he is Unseelie, he will at least wait there all night. He will certainly be expecting you’ll have to leave.”

  “But-” Guilt coursed through her, she hadn’t been lying to her friend, not exactly. She just hadn’t been telling the truth.

  “Go ahead then. Leave.” Bran let go of her abruptly. “You came running in here screaming for help, and now you want to run back out into the night?”

  He brushed past her out into the hallway. “I really do not understand women. You would think I would at least have some sort of comprehensive knowledge of them after all this time, but I don’t. You perplex me.”

  Evie raised an eyebrow. “And you’re what, nineteen? What has this got to do with women?? She sighed. “Look, I need to call my friend. She’ll be crazy with worry.”

  “If your friend is as close as you say she is, she’ll be glad you stayed safe and worried her for a while, rather than disappear off the face of the earth. Believe me, if there were some way I could get you out of here I would do it. In a heartbeat.”

  There was no real reason that his words should have hurt like they did. She couldn’t expect him to like her, but he could at least be polite. “Well excuse me if I’m so repulsive, Bran.”

  She stormed back to the sofa and threw herself onto it. It was impossibly comfortable, and his home was getting hotter by the second. If she hadn’t been feeling so intensely mortified she might have been sleepy.

  “Look, I do not wish for this responsibility.” He ran a hand through his long hair, and shrugged.

  “I’m not your responsibility. I didn’t ask to be. Women don’t need bodyguards in this day and age.” She was surprised at the vehemence in her own voice, but she wasn’t some pathetic burden on him, and he needn’t dare pretend she was.

  She had been through a lot in the last forty-eight hours and she was still reasonably smart and capable. He knew damn all about her.

  Perhaps he realised he had actually upset her. He moved some tubes of paint from the other side of the sofa and perched on the edge of it beside her. He looked incredibly uncomfortable. “I don’t mean to seem cruel, I just don’t want to see another one of their toys played with and cast in a shallow ditch outside the Unseelie Court.”

  “I don’t intend to be a toy, and what’s this Unseelie you keep mentioning?” She kept a clear note of irritation in her voice, but his words had relaxed her enough to believe he didn’t absolutely detest her.

  Bran gave up trying to sit beside her and slid down onto the ground, leaning his back up against the sofa instead. “There is the Seelie Court, and all their lands and people. Then the Unseelie Court to rival them.”

  “Faeries have politics?” Evie asked dryly.

  “Most certainly. Seelie is old English for Blessed, so Unseelie means un-blessed. Good verses evil, with some neutrals in the middle. Ever heard of trooping faeries, or solitary faeries?”

  “Vaguely.” Evie shrugged. Trix would know what he was talking about; she had once gone on about playing a faerie in some RPG for over three months. Evie remembered because her dad hadn’t allowed her to play.

  “Well, trooping faeries group together, into courts and kingdoms and they hunt together. Solitary are the faeries stuck in the middle, they aren’t good or bad. I suppose you could say they are chaotic.”

  “Well that’s straight forward. Less complicated than the way humans are organised, if they even are.”

  Bran looked up at her, a wry smile on his lips. “When I say good, I mean faerie good. It’s different.”

  She almost threw her pillow at him for the pun, but he stood up, signifying an end to the question and answer session. The most important fact was that Unseelie meant bad, and that Auran was thus the Prince of badness, and he intended to get something from her.

  “Well I said I was going to make you useful, did I not?” Bran glanced about the room, before his eyes settled on a door at the back. “Are you a skilled cook?”

  Evie smiled. She did Home Economics as an A-level. “I’m modest of course, but everyone else says I’m pretty good.”

  Bran pointed to the door. “Well that’s the kitchen in there. If you just look around and see what you can whip together. I need to go out to the shop and clean.”

  Evie got up from the sofa with a measure of difficulty; it seemed to have partly swallowed her. She was glad when Bran went back out and left her to it. When she opened the door to the kitchen she was pleasantly surprised. Lou had told her horror stories about groups of boys living together at University. Stacks of dishes in the kitchen growing a new species between them, even dishes left soaking in the bathtub.

  Bran’s kitchen was small and neat. He had already painted it in warm colours, burnt oranges and yellows. There were no paintings on the walls, but the small table in the corner had a very decorative cloth strewn over it. Sitting on it was a woven basket of apples. Evie didn’t need to step closer to know that they were the apples, but she stepped closer anyway.

  It was almost as if her mouth went on fire at the sight of them. She licked her lips, trying to cool them but they tingled and trembled more fiercely.

  Why did Bran have a basket of them? No matter how good they tasted, or how bad she wanted them she knew there was something wrong about them. Still her hand reached out for one, betraying all her sense.

  As her fingertips brushed the shining red surface of the topmost apple, her mind threw warning pictures at her; distorted wings that dripped with blood, eyes blacker than night with a depth Evie knew she shouldn’t dare to even ponder.

  She drew back as if she’d been burned and went to the sink, turning the cool tap and splashing handfuls of water into her mouth and over her stinging dry lips. It didn’t quench her thirst but she didn’t look at the basket again. Instead she started searching through Bran’s cupboards.

  There was a carton of eggs in the fridge and a large block of cheese. She lifted them onto the worktop, deciding on omelettes. All the while she felt like the apples in the basket had eyes, and that those eyes were watching her, willing her to look at them again. So they could glitter and perform until she couldn’t bear not to sink in her teeth and view the world when it shed its disguise.

  She bit her lip hard, pulling a knife from the cutlery drawer and slicing the cheese as quick as she could manage. Her hands shook, and she nearly diced her finger several times before she finished. She searched for a pan, finding one in the cupboard beside the oven.

  She lit the stove. Watching the fire made her mouth burn unbearably, and she ran the tap again, splashing the water into her mouth and then all over her face. Get a grip, Evie.

  Get an apple, Evie.

  It was as if there was a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other. She didn’t get an apple. She grabbed the milk instead and poured herself a cool glass, gulping it down. Then she buttered the pan, and threw on the eggs.

  Only one. One won’t hurt. You need it.

  Ignoring the voice of temptation, she opened the bread bin and took out two white slices, then turned on the grill under the stove. She laid the bread out on the metal sheet and attended to the omelette in the frying pan. It was starting to take shape. She threw on the cheese. It melted, bubbling and hissing.

  Something cool touched her ankle. She looked down to see a smooth round apple, still rolling gently on the wooden floor from the impact.

  She glanced behind her at the basket. It sat there as it had before, a mountain of delicious red. But there was something behind it, yellow eyes peering over the mound, watching her malevolently. Then they slipped down behind the basket and she heard a high-pitched giggle. It sounded wrong, like an adult imitating a child.

  Evie reached down and picked up the apple at her feet. “Bran?” Her voice came out
in a whisper.

  She cleared her throat, but lost her confidence to speak again when the lights flickered, and went out. She heard claws tapping on the floor, scuttling past on the edges of her vision. The apple pulsed in her hand, just as it had done at the market.

  Eat me.

  She thought she was already down the Rabbit hole. She might as well.

  * * *

  Bran threw the used tattoo needles in the bin. They were made of silver, of course, though he kept a few iron needles in store. There had been occasions of masochistic faeries demanding he work on them with iron, so they could try and develop some immunity to it, or just to prove how tough they were.

  He had seen how ill it made them. It burned their skin like fire, and sickened their blood like poison.

  He had never thought of himself as cruel before those times, but he had relished them with a disturbing enthusiasm. It was a power trip, or simply some sort of pathetic, not nearly satisfying, revenge.

  He wiped his worktable with a cloth, and brought some perfume to spray. The place smelled of goat from the woman he had worked on last. Another smell lingered on too, bitter earth and old, dead water. He had sent that customer away, knowing it was a selkie looking for a taste of him.

  She had stood in the shop dripping murky water on the wooden floor, staring at him with wide hungry eyes through her long, soaking green hair. She hadn’t bothered to disguise herself. They rarely did these days, even when hunting.

  He had heard it was because of the city filth in the water outside. She would go back into the Unseelie Realm if she could, like most of the water faeries, but there was a severe lack of game in the main Realm. Game being mortal food.

  A knock on the door startled him, and his hand went to his belt, looking for a sword but finding the cold metal of the gun contraption instead. He didn’t think he would get used to that.