Page 6 of Never Nix Up

Hurt that I’ve put there, unwittingly, by being what I am.

This is the curse of being a nix. Forever magical, forever entangled in a world that won’t let you go, and unable to talk about it.

“It’s not fair!” Vi bursts out. “How the fuck am I supposed to be able to protect any of you when these ridiculous rules keep me from—fuck this. Finn, drink this.”

And she’s shoving a bottle of something in Finn’s direction and I already know what it is. I know what she’s doing and she can’t… she shouldn’t…

Not to Finn.

Not to the one person thatIneed to keep safe, above anything else.

But Finn doesn’t look at me, she doesn’t look at Chlo. She looks at Vi and whatever she sees in that determined face convinces her, and she drinks.

6

Finn

The liquid tastes like arse. Properly disgusting. And I’d be more focused on that if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s some kind of glittery shit on Chlo’s face, and when I look at Hazel, she’s got it too.

“Not me,” says Vi, lifting her blonde bob to show me underneath. “I’m scale free.”

Scale…?“Vi, did you give me liquid LSD?”

“No!” she scoffs, and then her face turns serious. “Though that might actually be a little more believable.” She looks over my shoulder to where Hazel is standing, hands on hips, and angry. My sweet, shy Hazel isfuming.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” she asks. She’s not speaking loudly, but each word is over-enunciated to the point where I think I could cut myself on those sharp edges. “That wasn’t your decision to make, Vi.”

Chlo is looking similarly frustrated, but when Vi looks at her, she melts. “Probably could have been handled better.” Her ears are. No, Wait.

“Are your ears pointed?”

Hazel tries to take my hand and get me to sit down but I shake her off because she too has pointed ears. “Don’t touch me.”

All colour fades from her face, until the glittering scale things stand out more, vividly blue against her skin. They’re the same colour as her eyes.

“I didn’t mean…” Her voice trails off and she looks lost, more lost than she did earlier, drunk on exhaustion.

“They’re fae,” says Vi, looking more than a little displeased with me. “It changes very fucking little, so don’t snap at Hazel like that.”

“Fae?” My head is spinning and if I get overwhelmed by dealing with customers in the bakery, right now I feel like my head might explode.

“River nixes, to be precise, and most of them want nothing to do with humans like us.”

“Like us? Vi, you handed me some magic potion to drink.”

“It’s best taken with tea,” she admits, as if that somehow makes this whole scenario better.

It doesn’t.

“So what, you’ve all been lying to me?”

“Not lying,” says Chlo. “Just not telling you the whole truth.”

Hazel isn’t saying anything. She’s pulled herself into the corner of her booth again, and is trying to shrink back into the cushions. I feel like a fucking cad, but I don’t know what I don’t know. I don’t know if this is true—if this can possibly be true—or if I simply am high as fuck right now.

“Hazel…”

Her flinch feels like a knife in my gut.

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