Ink Exchange (28 page)

Now that she was able to go out walking regularly—away from Irial—she knew it was only a matter of time until she saw Niall. Of all the people from her life before the ink exchange, he was the one she was loath to encounter. He’d been beside Irial once: he knew what the Dark Court was like, what the world she lived in was like, and that lack of secrecy was something she didn’t know how to deal with.

She’d looked for him, and today he was there. He stood across the street, outside the Music Exchange, the shop where Rianne was most often found. Beside him was a man—a human—playing music that was foreign and familiar on a bodhran. Her pulse picked up the rhythm, the pace of the music settling in her stomach as if each touch of the beater were on her skin, in her veins.

Then Niall turned and found her watching him.

“Leslie.” His lips formed the word, but the sound was too slight to hear.

Traffic on the street moved faster than seemed safe to
enter, but Niall wasn’t human, hadn’t ever been human. He slid through gaps that weren’t quite there, and then he was beside her, lifting her hands to his lips, crying tears she wasn’t able to shed.

“He wouldn’t let me see you,” he said.

“I told him not to. I wasn’t in a place where I’d have wanted anyone to see me.” She looked away, watching the faeries watching them.

“I’d kill him if I could,” he said, sounding crueler than Irial ever did.

“I don’t want that. Not—”

“You
would
if he hadn’t done this to you.”

“He’s not awful.”

“Don’t. Please.” Niall held her, silent but for the sound of his tears. He acted like it was her he wanted, like all that she thought he’d felt was real, but she wondered. That urge she’d felt
before
, that compulsion to touch Niall, to press closer—it was gone.
Had it been an illusion? Was it there but swallowed down by Irial?
She looked at Niall’s beautiful scarred face and felt a flash of tenderness, but there was no temptation.

Along the street, the faeries watched with expressions gleeful and heinous. Chattering and murmurs rose as they speculated on what Irial’s fey would do, what Irial himself would do when he heard.

Kill the boy. He will.

Give him grounds to start a melee.

Nothing. She’s not reason enough to—

Is. Irial never took a mortal till this one. She must be—

Irial hasn’t allowed us to strike his lovely
Gancanagh
in almost
always.

Torture him then? Make
her
do it?

They chortled and carried on until Leslie turned her eyes to the shadows and shot a pleading look at one of Gabriel’s Hounds. In less time than it would’ve taken to speak, the Hound cleared the crowd, sent them scurrying by threat or force, hefting a few of them like misshapen balls and launching them down the street. Horrid splattering noises and shrieks resounded until even the man with the bodhran paused for a moment, looking about as if he heard some slight echo of the horrors he couldn’t quite sense.

“They listen to you?” Niall asked.

“They do. They are good to me. No one has hurt me.” She touched his chest where she knew his scars were hidden. Those scars told the answers to so many questions about him, about Irial, about the world she now called her home. She added, “No one has done anything but what I’ve asked of them….”

“Including Irial?” Niall’s face was as unreadable as his voice. His emotions, though, she felt those—hope and longing and fear and anger. He was a tangled mess.

Leslie wished she could lie, but she didn’t want to, not to him, not knowing that he
couldn’t
lie to her by word or emotion. “Mostly. He doesn’t touch me without asking, if that’s what you mean…but he made me this without asking, and I’m not sure anymore what’s my choice and
what’s his. When I…I
need
him or I’m…it kills me, Niall. It’s like starving, like something eating me alive from deep inside. It doesn’t hurt.
I
don’t hurt, but I know it should. The pain isn’t there, but it doesn’t stop me from screaming under it. Only Iri makes it…better. He makes everything better.”

Niall leaned close to her ear and whispered, “I can stop it. I think I can undo it. I can get what I need to break his tie to you.” And he told her that Aislinn would give him sunlight and the Winter Queen would give him frost, and he would burn and freeze the ink from her skin. “It should work. You’d be free of him. All of them.”

Leslie didn’t answer, didn’t tell him yes or no. She couldn’t.

“It’s your choice.” Niall cradled her face in his hands, looking at her the same way he had before, when she was not this. “You have a choice. I can give you that.”

“What if it makes it worse?”

“Try to think what you’d choose if you weren’t under his sway. Is this”—he paused—“what you would have chosen?”

“No. But I can’t unchoose it either. I can’t pretend I haven’t become this. I won’t be who I was before…and if the feelings come back, if I
can
leave, how do I live with what I’ve—”

“You just do. The things you do when you’re desperate aren’t who you are.” Niall’s expression had grown fierce, angry.

“Really?” She remembered the feeling, that moment when she looked at the ground and knew that even if Irial
caught her the first time she jumped, there would be other times when she felt that desperation. The emotions she could just barely touch in that moment were a part of her as well. She was the person who chose this route. She thought back over the signs and warnings that something was amiss. She thought of the shadows she’d seen in Rabbit’s office. She thought of the questions she hadn’t asked Aislinn or Seth or Rabbit or herself. She thought of the shame she’d bottled up instead of seeking help. That was who she was; those were parts of her. They were all choices. To not act is a choice too.

“I don’t think so, Niall,” she heard herself say. Her voice wasn’t soft or afraid. “Even under the addiction, it’s me. I might not have had as many choices, but I’m still choosing.”

She thought again of standing in the window of the warehouse. She could have chosen to jump. She hadn’t.
It would be giving up, giving in if I actually jumped. Isn’t it better to endure?
The person she was under the weight of her addiction was stronger than she’d realized she could be.

“I want a choice that doesn’t hurt Irial or me,” she said, and then she left him. Her choice would come—maybe not now, maybe not the choice Niall held out, and she wasn’t going to let Irial or Niall or anyone else make it for her.

Not again.

C
HAPTER
34

The moon was well overhead when Irial crept across the room. It wouldn’t do for mortals to see doors opening and closing on their own, so he stepped into the hall wearing his mortal-friendly facade. Several of the Hounds were standing guard outside the room, invisible to any mortals that might pass. There weren’t any in the hall, though, so Irial let go of his glamour and shut the suite door behind him.

“Keep her inside if she wakes,” he told the Hounds. “No wandering tonight.”

“She doesn’t cooperate so well. We could just follow, keep her safe and—”

“No.”

Another Hound objected, “We don’t want to hurt her…and she’s so unhappy if we stop her from going out.”

“So block the doors.” Irial grimaced. He wasn’t the only one swayed too much by his bond with Leslie. His weak
ness for her flowed into his whole court: they all had an unreasonably hard time doing anything Leslie disliked.

I weaken them. My affection for her cripples them.

The only way to work around it seemed to be keeping her from asking his faeries to do anything asinine. The alternative, breaking her irreparably, wasn’t a path he wanted to consider.

Could I?
He suppressed the answer before he let himself go further in that thought. Handing Niall over to his court had been horrific enough that he still dreamed of it. For centuries, he’d dreamed of how Niall had rejected him afterward. Weak kings didn’t thrive. Irial knew that, but knowing didn’t undo the ache when Niall chose to go to another court. That was a long-dead pain.

Being tied to Leslie, indulging in parties with the mortals as he and Niall once had, these things had brought long-silenced memories back to the surface. It was yet another proof that her mortal influence had tainted him, changed him. It wasn’t a change he liked. The vine that stretched like a shadow between him and his mortal grew suddenly visible in the air before him as his agitation increased.

He told the Hounds, “Don’t speak to her other than to tell her that I forbade you to let her leave the room. Tell her you’ll bleed for it if she goes anywhere. If that doesn’t work, tell her
Ani
will.”

They snarled at him, but they’d tell Leslie. Hopefully, it
would inspire her to obey his wishes for a few hours while he cleaned up the latest mess.

Inside the first room the floor was strewn with the weeping mortals who’d survived the most recent round of festivities. They’d endured longer than the last batch, but so many broke in mind or body too easily. They were wailing as the madness of what they’d seen and done settled on them. Give them a few drugs, a little glamour, and some simple enticements, and mortals willingly dived into the depths of hidden depravity. Afterward, in the light, when the bodies of those who’d died were entwined with the still living, there were those who didn’t know how to hold on to their sanity.

“Chela’s found a few sturdy ones to replace them. They’re enjoying the amenities over in the other room.” Gabriel tossed a girl’s handbag into one of the bins and then motioned at a corpse.

“Dibs.” Two of the Ly Ergs lifted her. A third opened the door. They’d take her somewhere else in the city to leave her for the mortals to find. “She’s ours.”

“No posing this one,” Gabriel snarled as the Ly Ergs left. The faery who opened the door lifted his hand in a dismissive gesture, flashing his bright red palm.

Irial stepped over a couple who stared blindly past him.

“She kept encouraging them to fight over her. Whatever’s spliced with that new X made her violent.” Gabriel emptied pockets and stripped away some of the shredded clothes, directing grinning thistle-fey as he went about the grisly
task. “They’ve been posing the ones they like. They set tea for several yesterday.”

“Tea?”

One of the Ly Ergs grinned cheekily. “We got them proper things, too. They’d have been naked but for the hats and gloves we nicked.”

A leannan-sidhe added, “We painted their faces, as well. They were lovely.”

Irial wanted to chastise them, but it wasn’t any worse than most of the things they’d done for sport over the centuries.
The Dark King doesn’t require kindness for mortals.
He tamped down his unease and said, “Maybe we should set up a stage over in the park by the kingling’s loft…. A scene from
Midsummer Night’s Dream…
or—”

“No. The other mortal that was scrawling plays then. What’s the one with the parade of sins?” A Ly Erg rubbed his blood-red hands over his face. “The fun one.”

“I like sins,” a leannan-sidhe murmured.

One of Jenny’s kin picked up a corpse. “We’ve got our gluttony right here. This one serviced every willing faery in the room.”

They were laughing.

“That’s
lust
, sister. Gluttons have the extra meat on their middles. Like this one.”

The surly Ly Erg repeated, “What’s the play?”

“Faustus. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus,”
Leslie said. Her voice was soft, but they all turned to the doorway where she stood. Her lacy pajamas were mostly covered by
the robe she’d slipped on. “Marlowe wrote it. Unless you believe the theory that Marlowe and Shakespeare were the same person.”

None of the faeries answered. Had it been anyone else, they’d have snarled at her or invited her to join the fun. With Leslie, though, they did neither.

She pulled a pack of Irial’s cigarettes out of her robe pocket and lit one, silently watching as they gathered the newly mad mortals. When they approached her, she opened the door for them.

They crossed the threshold and extended their own glamour to mask what they carried. She saw it, though. She got a close-up view of wide-eyed madmen, a fresh corpse, and bare flesh. Her horror and disgust peaked. She didn’t feel it, of course, but the rush of emotions she should feel swarmed to Irial.

Once the faeries were all gone, she walked toward him, flicking ash on the red-stained floor. Her bare feet were stark white against those stains. “Why?”

“Don’t ask me that.” Irial saw the fine trembling in her hands, watched her resist the backlash from the feelings he’d sought out.

“Tell me why.” She dropped the cigarette and ground it out under her bare foot. The trembling became worse as waves of mortal terror surged through her.

“You don’t want this answer, love.” He reached out for her, knowing that despite her best intentions, the backlash would soon pull her under.

She backed away. “Don’t. I want to”—she stopped—“it’s my fault, isn’t it? That’s why you’re—”

“No.”

“I thought faeries didn’t lie.” Her knees gave, and she dropped to the floor. She knelt on a wide red stain.

“I’m not lying. It’s not your fault.” His attempts to be the King of Nightmares, the Dark King, all faded because she looked lost. It was him who faltered, not her.

She gripped the carpet, bloodying her fingertips as she tried to hold on to the floor so as not to reach out to him. “Why were they here? Why are they…”

She obviously wasn’t going to stop asking questions, so he stopped avoiding them. “If I’m sated, I feed the court enough that you can have some freedom. The court starves a little, but not enough to cripple them…and as long as you stayed in the suite you didn’t need to know.”

“So we tormented them so—”