Page 45 of Kissed the Mark
I winced at the pain when she took too much,suddenly light-headed.
“Leandra, stop,” I whispered.
She threw down my arm; her eyes glimmeredred in the light, freshly fed. My blood trickled out from the sidesof her lips and trailed down her chin. My own arm had two littledots where she’d punctured me, blood smeared over the wounds in theshape of her mouth. “Should’ve let me use my tongue,” she said, hervoice hoarse. “It would’ve been…orgasmic.”
I hooked a foot around one of her ankles andshe crashed into the circle of pebbles—tricked, after all, intocoming to Faerie.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Unwelcome in Faerie
THE MIST SEETHED AROUND US, THE airport’s featuresmelting away. My vision blurred as Faerie overlapped the humanworld, fading in and out. Faerie was not, in fact, happy to haveLeandra back here.
“Where do we go now?” Leandra asked. Shesquinted at our vague surroundings like she couldn’t make sense ofthem. An unwelcome, bitter wind blew through my denim jacket.
“The Unseelie court in Chicago,” I saidsimply. I unsheathed the silver dagger from my thigh and flickedopen the tip of its pommel.
“Let me guess, it’s a magic sword? Or are wereally going to have to walk to Chicago from St. Louis?” Leandra’stone was acerbic as ever. “I don’t suppose you guys have like, amagic unicorn that can take us?”
From the pommel’s compartment, I unraveled along piece of black ribbon. Leandra watched me infascination—probably detecting my mood and wisely not making somesnarky comment.
At the end of the ribbon, a bell came loosefrom the pommel’s compartment, ringing clear in the quiet air. Aflock of crows that hadn’t existed a moment before took off. “Takeme home,” I whispered into the resonance of the bell’s ring.
Our surroundings shifted abruptly. Thislooked more like a real place, though it still had that softdream-like glow to it, the mist that brushed against our ankles.There was a palace made of purplish-pink stone, or maybe the stuffof clouds, surrounded by a bustling community enclosed by atranslucent gate. Just beyond the gate, a child shrieked, splashinganother child with a puddle in play, even though it was late atnight. So-called fairy lights lit the air in the city where I’d runaround every summer of my childhood.
“This is the Unseelie court,” Leandra saidin awe.
“Yes. Please be on your best behavior,” Ibegged. As soft as I could, I nicked my thumb with my dagger andpressed it to the gate’s lock. The doors swung inward, recognizingmy drop of blood as someone who belonged here.
“Am I going to meet your parents?” Leandraasked lightly.
A rush of emotions blew through me. Thesmell. It was a subtly sweet scent, wafting through the air,the mingled earthy and lavender smell of the semi-Utopian societythat was the Unseelie court. This was where I’d felt trapped, whereI’d always avoided going back to—but it was undeniably home, andnostalgia filled my lungs with every breath. Familiar faces gawkedat me, a few fairies even waving my way.
Everyone was interested in my visitor.
We walked up a cobbled road to the castleproper, where I would have to take Leandra to beg the UnseelieQueen for shelter. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that the odds ofthe queen agreeing to it were low.
Leandra made no secret of drinkingeverything in. I had to pull her along when she got distracted by acart selling fairy street foods, foods she ironically eithercouldn’t or wouldn’t want to eat. She stopped at a book cart andpicked up a leather-cased book, flipping through its foxed pages.“Do fairies like Henry David Thoreau?” she asked.
“He’s pretentious,” the cart-seller toldher, tucking his long, blue-dyed hair behind one pointed ear.Self-consciously, I touched the point of my own ear. It lookedridiculous on him, but I’d only gotten used to my own. Did I lookthat ridiculous all the time? Like some kind of character fromSteven Universe? “He lived near a train, so he wasn’t evenreally in the wilderness. And they say that he sent his laundryback to his mother.”
“I’ve heard that too. Why carry his work?”Leandra asked.
The bookseller’s lips quirked. He pushed apair of overly hipster green-tinted, triangular glasses up hisnose, the eyeglass chain clinking. “We like to make fun of humansall the time here. You should try it sometime.”
“I wonder what the Seelie court would havein their bookstores?” Leandra asked me as I dragged her away fromthe bookseller, who had a lot to say about Walt Whitman’sapparently infamous cover-page crotch bulge. “D’you think they readAnne Carson?”
“Who?” I asked. There was a feeling in mygut that sunk lower with every step I took; it was as though I wasbaring my whole life to Leandra, and exposing the community I’dgrown up with to her, too.
“The poet. Well, I thought you’d know whoshe was, or I wouldn’t have made that joke. I just meant theyprobably read books by people they care about, yeah? Since they’rethe less sinister fairies?”
The question rubbed me the wrong way. Itwasn’t necessarily incorrect, but it struck me as insensitive, andI was feeling particularly sensitive. “Are you just assuming thingsabout me based on this place?” I snapped.
“Olympia, no.” Her snippy mood from theairport had cleared up, while mine got worse by the moment. Iguessed being in a place as wonderful as this would lift anyone’smood. Or almost anyone’s. “I’m sure it’s nice to live here. I likemaking fun of humans, too. I thought you’d have some fairyliterature here or something, though.”
I didn’t tell her that a lot of fairies didlike human literature about them, thatTam Linwas taught inschool andThe Faerie Queenewas universally hated. That weall readGoblin Marketgrowing up, which taught me thatUnseelie are just less repulsive-looking versions of goblins. I hada lot to say but not a lot I felt comfortable sharing with a…withwhatever we were to each other.
“Are you okay?” Leandra asked under herbreath, when someone I used to secretly smoke with as a teengreeted me and I could barely raise my hand in response.
