Tithe (19 page)

“No, you don’t understand,” she said, but she knew it was she who had not understood. She, who had tried to pretend. Roiben had known all along that he was offering her his life.

You
idiot,
she wanted to scream.

“Rath Roiben Rye, I command you to get the fuck out of here with Spike and me, right now!” She screamed it, as loud as she could, sure that he was close enough to hear her this time.

Roiben turned, his eyes flashing fury. He seemed to channel that anger into his sword, because his next blow cut open the golden-eyed faerie’s throat.

Kaye wobbled on her feet, trying to shore up her knees, trying not to fall into blackness.
Her ankles and wrist burned, and all she could taste or smell was iron.

Then Roiben was pulling her through the crowd with a blood-soaked hand. He tugged her into a run, and Spike was beside them, running too.

As they stepped outside the brugh, a figure stepped in front of them, but was cut down before she caught more than an impression of something awkwardly tall and pale gray in color.

Then they were in the graveyard, running down the tumbled quartz path, past plastic flower grave markers, and flattened soda cans, stepping on cigarette butts, and they seemed like talismans that might actually keep the monsters at bay.

Until she realized that she was one of the monsters.

“But lest you are my enemy,
I must enquire.”
“O no, my dear, let all that be;
What matter, so there is but fire
In you, in me?”

—YEATS, “The Mask”

Kaye trod up the driveway, her mother’s Pinto looking both familiar and strange, as though it was part of a painting that might suddenly be turned on its side and revealed as flat. The door to the back porch seemed like a portal between worlds, and, even close as she was, she wasn’t sure she would be allowed to step through to the kitchen beyond.

More than tired, she felt numb.

Roiben leaned against an elm tree and closed his eyes, unsheathed sword dangling limply from one hand. His body was trembling lightly, and next to familiar things, the blood soaking his arm and thigh looked ghastly.

Right then, Lutie swooped down from one of the trees, circling Kaye twice before landing
on her shoulder and scrabbling to press a kiss against the damp skin of her neck. It surprised Kaye, and she flinched back from the sudden touch.

“Scared, silly-scared, scared, scared, scared,” Lutie chanted against her neck.

“Me too,” Kaye said, pressing her hand against the buzz of the tiny body.

“They’ll be a score of songs about you by nightfall,” Spike said, eyes gleaming with pride.

“There would have been twice as many if I had died like you planned, wouldn’t there?”

Spike’s eyes widened. “We never …”

Kaye bit her lip, forcing herself to swallow the hysteria that threatened to bubble up her throat. “If Nephamael was going to take the glamour off me, he was going to take it off my corpse.”

“Dismiss me, pixie,” Roiben said. His eyes had a hollow look to them that made her stomach clench. “I was careless. I will hold no grudge against you or yours, but this foolishness ends
now
.”

“I didn’t plan this—your name. I never meant to use it for anything.” Kaye reached out her hand to stroke the edge of his sleeve.

The effect was instantaneous. He circled her wrist with his hand, twisting it hard. Lutie squealed, springing from Kaye’s shoulder into the air.

There was no anger in his voice, no sarcasm,
no heat. It was as strangely hollow as his eyes. “If you wish me to endure your touch, you must order me to do so.”

Then he dropped her hand so quickly it might have been made of iron. She was shaking, too scared to cry, too miserable to speak.

Spike looked at her wide-eyed, as though he was reasoning with a lunatic. “Well then, Kaye, tell him he can go. He says he won’t hold a grudge—that’s a generous offer.”

“No,” she said, louder than she intended. They all looked at her in surprise, although Roiben’s gaze darkened.

She had to explain. She turned to him, careful not to touch him. “Come inside. You can clean up your cuts there. I just want to explain. You can leave tonight.”

His eyes were dull no longer; they blazed with rage. For a moment, she thought he was going to kill her before she could manage to stammer out his name. Then she thought he might just walk away, daring her to stop him. But he did neither of these things.

“As you say, my mistress.” The words curled off his tongue, cutting deeper than she had thought words could. “I would prefer no one else learned the calling of me.”

Spike blinked up at the Unseelie knight, apparently unable to control a shudder. Lutie watched them from the crook of the elm tree.

“The. Thistlewitch will need to know what
had happened tonight,” Spike said slowly.

“Go ahead,” she said. “We can talk about it later.” Taking the spare key out from underneath a dusty bottle of bleach, she opened the door as quietly as she could. The house was silent.

Roiben followed Kaye into the kitchen, and the sight of him carefully closing the backdoor and filling what was probably a dirty glass with water from the tap was so incongruous, she had to stop and watch him. He drank, tipping back his head so that the column of his neck was thrown into profile. He must have seen her staring; as he finished the last of the water, he looked in her direction.

“Your pardon,” he said.

“No, go ahead. I’m just going to make some coffee. Uh, the bathroom is there.” She pointed.

“Do you have any salt?” he asked.

“Salt?”

“For my leg. I’m not sure what can be done about the arm.”

“Oh.” She rummaged around in her grandmother’s spice drawer and came up with a canister of Morton’s salt. “Wouldn’t iodine or something be better?”

He just shook his head grimly and walked in the direction of the bathroom.

A few minutes later he returned in his more human glamour. As before, his hair was more white than silver, the bones of his face were
slightly less jagged, and his ears were less prominent. He had discarded his shirt, and she was disconcerted to see the pattern of scars on his chest. He must have found some gauze; one thigh looked padded under the leg of his pants.

She poured the coffee into two mugs, alarmed to see that her hands were shaking. Spooning sugar into one of the cups, she looked a query at Roiben. He nodded and nodded again when she offered milk.

“When I first met you, I didn’t know I was a faerie,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “I presume that you knew you were not human when you blackmailed a kiss from me.”

Kaye felt her face flood with heat. She just nodded.

“The question, of course, is whether you aided me in the forest for the reward of my name.”

She stammered, the queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach intensifying. If that was what he thought, no wonder he was furious.

“There was no way I could have known what you were going to offer me. I just wanted to piss you off in the diner … and … I knew faeries don’t like to give out their real names.”

“One day, someone is going to cut that clever tongue of yours right out of your head,” he said.

She bit her lower lip, worrying it against
her teeth as he spoke. What had she expected—a declaration of love because of one half-hearted kiss?

Kaye looked at the steaming cup in front of her. She was sure that if she took a sip of that coffee, she would throw it up.

She needed a cigarette. Ellen’s jacket was draped over the back of the chair, and she fumbled through it for a cigarette and a lighter. Lighting it despite Roiben’s look of surprise, she took a deep drag.

The smoke burned her lungs like fire. She found herself on her knees on the linoleum floor, choking, the cigarette burning the plastic tile where it had fallen.

Roiben put the cigarette out with a twist of his boot and leaned forward. “What were you doing?”

“I smoke,” she said, sitting on the floor. Eyes already watery from coughing could no longer hold back tears. It seemed stupid that this was the thing that would set her off, but she sobbed, feeling more like puking with nothing in her stomach than any crying she’d done.

“They’re poison,” he said incredulously. “Even Ironsiders die from those.”

“I know.” She pressed her face against her knees, wiping her cheeks against the faerie gown, wishing she’d let him leave when he’d wanted to.

“You’re tired,” he said with a long sigh that might have been annoyance. “Where do you sleep? You might consider glamouring yourself as well.” His face was impassive, emotionless.

She smeared the tears on her cheeks and nodded. “Are you tired?”

“Exhausted.” He didn’t exactly smile, but his face relaxed a little.

They went up the stairs quietly. Her new senses were distracting. She could hear the whistling snore of her mother and the lighter, muffled breaths of her grandmother. Up the stairs, she could smell the woodchips and excrement of her rats, smell the chemical soaps and sprays in the bathroom, could even smell the heavy coating of oily dust that covered most surfaces. Somehow, each odor was more vivid and distinct than she could remember it being.

Ignore it, she told herself; things had been the same way the last time she had the heavy glamour removed. Just a perk to make up for the fact she couldn’t touch half the metal things in the house and one drag on a cigarette could make her almost pass out.

They went into her bedroom and she turned the old-fashioned key to lock the door. There was no way she was going to be able to explain Roiben to her grandmother, glamour or no.

“Well, I saw your room,” she said. “Now you get to see mine.”

He waded through the mess to sit on the mattress on the floor. She dug through the garbage bags and found a musty green comforter riddled with cigarette burns for herself. The pink one she usually slept with was already piled on the mattress, and she hoped that it didn’t smell too much like her sweat.

Roiben pulled off his boots, looking around the room. She watched his eyes settle first on the rat cage, then on the drifts of clothing, books, and magazines lining the floor.

“Kind of a dump, I guess.” She sat down on the boxspring that still graced the frame of the white bed.

She watched him, stretching out on her mattress, fascinated by the way the compact muscles moved beneath his skin. He looked dangerous, even tired and bandaged and wrapped in her pink comforter.

“What did you do with her?” He looked up through silver lashes of heavy-lidded eyes.

“What?”

“The girl this room really belongs to—what did you do with her?”

“Fuck you,” she said, so angry that for a minute she didn’t even care that she was supposed to be convincing him how sorry she was.

“Did you think I would credit the tears of a pixie?” he asked, turning so that his face was hidden from her.

Unspoken slurs hung on her tongue like
thistles, hurting her throat with the effort of swallowing them. They were both tired. She was lucky—he was still talking to her.

As tired as she was, she couldn’t sleep. She watched him instead, watched as he tossed and turned, tangling the blankets around him. Watched as his face relaxed into exhaustion, one hand curling tightly around the edge of the pillow.

He never had looked as real to her as he did in that moment, hair loose and messy, one bare foot hanging over the edge of the mattress, resting on a library book she’d always meant to return.

But she didn’t want to think of him as real. She didn’t want to think of him at all.

And then she was being shaken awake. She blinked in the unnatural darkness of drawn shades. Roiben was sitting next to her on the hard boxspring, hands gripping her shoulders so hard she was sure they would bruise.

“Tell me that you meant to tell me, Kaye,” he said, eyes bright.

She struggled to be more fully awake. Nothing about this scene made sense, certainly not the anguish so plain on his face.

“You were going to tell me that you were a faerie,” he insisted. “There was no time.”

She nodded, still stunned by sleep. He seemed huge; the whole room was swallowed
up by his presence so that it was impossible to look anywhere but into his eyes.

“Tell me,” he said, letting go of her shoulders, his hands moving to smooth the hair back from her face in a rough caress.

“I never meant … I wanted to,” she stammered drowsily, the words hard to fit together.

His hands stilled. His voice was low this time. “Make me believe it.”

“I can’t,” she said. She had to focus, to find the answer that would make everything right again. “You know I can’t.”

“Go back to sleep, Kaye,” he said softly, no longer touching her, his hands fisted on his knees.

She levered herself up to her elbows, blearily realizing that she had to stop him before he got up from the bed.

“Let me show you,” she said, leaning forward to press her mouth to his. His lips parted with no resistance at all, letting her kiss him as though he could taste the truth on her tongue.

After a moment, he pulled back from her gently. “That wasn’t what I meant,” he said with a small rueful smile.

She flopped back, cheeks reddening, fully awake now and appalled at herself.

Roiben slid off the boxspring and onto the floor. He was looking away from her, at the sliver of light showing under the dirty plastic windowshade.

Rolling onto her side, she looked down at what she could see of his face. Her fingers chipped nervously at a drop of wax on the comforter. “I answered the riddle. I thought she would let me go and I answered it anyway.”

He looked up at her abruptly, amazed. “You did at that. Why?”

Kaye wanted to explain it as best as she could. He was listening to her, at least for the moment. She made sure to keep her voice completely level, completely sincere. “Because it wasn’t supposed to go like it did. I never even thought of using you like that … you were never supposed to—”

“Be glad I did,” he said, but he said it gently. He reached up and ran three fingers down the side of her jaw. “It’s strange to see you this way.”