Page 125 of A Fae in Finance
“You can hold on to me the entire time,” I offered, already regretting it.
We moved in a pack, shuffling like turtles on a highway up the step into the train.
Gaheris took everything in calmly, his face alert and interested. Lene had her face in Sahir’s chest, her feet on his like a child dancing with her father.
I led them to a set of four seats facing each other. Sahir put Lene on the inside with her back to the train wall. Gaheris sat across from her, still blandly untroubled. “This seat is unpleasantly made,” he observed. “The fabric feels displeasing.”
“It’s called plastic,” I said. “I think. It might be something else, I don’t know.” I watched Sahir sit next to Lene, boxing her into the wall. She relaxed slightly.
Gaheris reached across the open space between us and held her hands. I reached out, too, and put a hand on her knee.
“Sahir, what day is it?” I asked, unsure if my parents would even be there.
It wouldn’t matter; I needed to try, at least.
“It’s a Sunday,” Sahir said.
I flushed, realizing I had requested off from Jeff on a weekend. But honestly, I’d worked every single weekend since I’d been trapped in Faerie. The time-off request was necessary.
“My family will probably be home.” I tried not to think about walking into my house, or how it would feel to look at my mother. If my grandma would be awake, or napping in her bedroom and unwilling to be disturbed.
The train whistled, and I watched Lene’s claws shoot into Gaheris’s palms. “Ow,” he said. He stayed motionless, though, and let her claw at him. He curled his fingers up to touch her wrists.
“It is just the train telling us it will start moving,” Sahir said, staring out the window at the platform below us.
The train jerked to a start, and Lene mewled. I squeezed her knee. “It’s all okay,” I said. “It’ll only be twenty minutes.”
It was twenty painful minutes for all of us, which served as a compelling reminder of why I never took Doctor Kitten anywhere.
Lene alternated between trying to curl onto our laps and yowling and scratching our arms whenever the train changed velocity, turned slightly, made a noise, or existed. Whenever I wasn’t in pain, I felt terrible for putting her through this. And whenever she decided to claw into my flesh, I felt terrible.
When the train slowed at the Princeton Junction stop, I leapt from my seat. I nearly tumbled down the stairs in my haste, then jerked to a halt in front of the train door. It didn’t open any faster than usual.
I hopped out onto the small platform at Princeton Junction, staring around the parking lot. Sahir carried Lene out in his arms. She’d stuck her hands and feet in the air. Gaheris came last.
My body felt weird, sensitive and tingling.Faerie will call to your blood, Roman had said. I’d felt it almost immediately, buzzing in my stomach like I’d drunk too much soda, and pricking down the pathways of the nerves in my arms and legs.
“It’s about a mile-and-a-half walk,” I said. I really looked at my companions for the first time since we’d entered the mortal realm, foreign against the familiar backdrop of my home train station. All four of us wore the same green tunics and leggings, with soft brown boots.
Gaheris seemed taller and leaner than usual, impossibly skinny against the gray sky, with his bone-white skin and red flames that could pass for hair unless you looked closely. Lene, brown fur bristling, stood slightly shorter than me. Her ears twitched at every puff of wind or squeal of a passing car.
And Sahir stood at my side, shorter than Gaheris, broad-shouldered and stoic, with his proud beaked nose and soft eyes. He looked outward, alert and searching for something on the horizon.
“Let’s go,” I said, though it was already cold, and I knew my ears would hurt terribly by the time we’d walked to my parents’ house. My feet, still blistered from the day before, hurt terribly already.
I led them down the concrete steps and onto the street.
We made good time, passing few cars. This was fortunate, because Gaheris seemed incapable of grasping his own mortality.
“Gaheris, get out of the road,” I snapped, the first time a car came toward us.
“Miri, steel cannot kill us,” he laughed. “Your myths are archaic and incorrect. I do not fear these vehicles.”
“I think anything going fifty miles an hour could kill you,” I said.
He didn’t seem convinced.
We passed the reservoir, only stopping once so that Lene could chase a few geese who’d missed the migration memo.
