“What do they see?” I asked, nodding my head toward the people sitting at the tables scattered around us.
Lark just leaned back in his seat, watching two men playing cards near us.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
I rolled my eyes.
“I can see the glamour,” I told him. “I can see you’re using one but I can’t see what it is. I just see you, your face, and the glamour. I see when you drop it and when you put it back on but I don’t see what it is. So, what do you look like to them?”
“I look like them,” he replied. “So does Rook. All beards and potbellies. If they looked too closely at our group, you would be the odd one out here, Ren.”
As if for emphasis, he dropped his eyes and allowed them to sweep over me again, but I was thinking about what he’d said. I would be the odd one out. Me, a professor, in this ridiculous black as night ensemble they had crafted for me. Me and not these two glowing Fae in even more elaborate finery unfit for this mountain, faces that looked to be chiseled from marble, piercing gazes that followed me wherever I went. Not them. Me.
“And before?” I asked. “With Wyn?”
“Same as them,” he repeated. “We blend in with the people that surround us. Lab coats and glasses, all lanky and scrawny.”
He wrinkled his nose, eyes drifting to the people drinking at the bar.
“We keep our faces, mostly,” Rook explained, joining the conversation as though he had been part of it all along. I narrowed my gaze at him, wondering just how good that Fae hearing was, as he settled in next to Lark, sliding his friend his mug before taking a pull from his own. “It’s easier when you don’t have to change your face and we aren’t as good at glamouring as—”
Lark’s sharp glare cut him off. The newfound certainty that they were definitely not telling me everything had me shifting uncomfortably as Lark leaned across the table, lowering his voice and pinning me to my seat with a narrowed gaze.
“I answered a question for you,” he drawled slowly, his voice like velvet in the quiet of the mundane tavern. “Answer one for me.”
I watched him cautiously as if I could derive his intentions with just a look. I couldn’t, though, so I gave a curt nod.
“How does a consulting professor, not even the head of her department, know about a door to the Immortal Plane?”
I tensed. He was using my own words against me. Not the head of my department, a mere consultant, that’s what I had told him I was. And it was true. All of it. But perhaps I shouldn’t have disclosed so much to these strangers. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let them so completely into my life. They certainly weren’t taking such liberties with me. So I frowned and sat back in my seat, glaring back at Lark. Rook looked between us but kept silent, as if knowing better than to speak. He was obviously accustomed to allowing Lark to take the lead.
“Your people come and go from our plane as they please,” I spat, not without venom in my tone. “Although it’s technically against the rules. That’s what they erected The Divide for in the first place, was it not?”
Lark did not answer so I answered for him.
“I may not know the history as well as you, I may not have lived through as many things as you must have seen, but I can reason out the rules of a place that exists for the sole intention of separation well enough on my own. Your people are not supposed to come here. But they don’t seem to care. Some of them come as if they’re on vacation. As if they can just traipse about our cities unbeknownst to us. But I see them. I always have.”
“What do you mean you see them?” he pressed. “How do you identify us?”
“You glow.”
He blinked at me, dumbstruck. Rook snorted.
“We… glow” he repeated, uncertain.
Perhaps he was beginning to wonder if I was actually insane. He wouldn’t be the first.
“You glow,” I repeated, crossing my arms as I sat back further in my seat. “All of you. Some more so than others. And if I get too close, I can feel you. I can feel that you don’t belong and you know it. How do you shadowstep?”
Lark’s jaw tensed and I felt Rook’s scrutiny burning into me from his side. But I kept my composure and held Lark’s gaze as he spoke.
“This is what we’re doing?” he asked, feigning a tone of amusement but I could tell he was on his guard. “Trading question for question?”
I just quirked a brow and waited.
“It’s a rare ability,” he confessed after a moment. “Not common within my realm by any means, available to a select few.”
“So not all of your kind are capable of it. Especially those here as mere tourists. Therefore, it stands to reason that there’s another way between planes, a door of sorts, an easy method of travel your kind created, undetected by us. I’d even wager you know where to enter it on the other side.”
