Part 1
All That Remains
Tate
Tate had always assumed that the day Faerie decided he was not an ornament they cared to keep, he would be put out of his misery swiftly. After all, why advertise the evidence of their mistakes?
He had been proven wrong over the years, time and time again, in the way the Court of Night preferred — thoroughly, cruelly, and expediently.
He had barely taken two steps out of the Plundered Pixie’s back door that night when he felt a tug at his chest and a swift roll beneath his feet. The pathway had a tug of insistence. The sides of the packed black earth gave way to something unsteadier, moss riddled with hidden roots, deeply embedded within the forest floor, corralling him down the center, while a faint breeze pulled at his ankles, the earth itself seeming to roll beneath him, urging him along.
Already with this shite. There was nothing he could do about the leash that tied him, but the ground . . . he had little patience for being bullied by dirt.
Tate paused slightly, glaring down before driving the heel of his boot hard into the forest floor. “Fuck off!” he demanded.
The pull around his ankles dissipated immediately; the rolling stopped. The forest floor was just that — packed black earth and nothing more. Some things, at least, knew how to listen.
He kept his breathing low and slow, counting until he felt the mortal world loosen its grip, sliding off him like silk.One . . . Two . . .He had barely made it to three before the smell of the fires invaded his nose fully, the veil sealing him in, recognizing that he had come with intention, that he was not merely a wanderer.Faerie. Again.
“I fucking hate it here,” he announced to no one.
Doorways like this always had a bit of an entry run. Gates were different, as were mirrors and trees, and pools of water. Straight through, a topsy-turvy arrival, you went in on one side and came out on the other with little ambiguity in between. Entry points like this were different. It was a thinning in the veil brought on by the season, loose enough to cross from one side to the other, but the middle point clung to both worlds simultaneously.
A good thing, too.
It was how Silva had not lost sight of the Pixie the night of his party. It was how she’d managed to exit the reception hall earlier that same night at the wedding, after whatever happened had happened. Tate didn’t need to know the specifics. What he did know was enough, enough to raise his blood, testing the pop of his jaw as he walked slowly but confidently.
He did not rush, nor did he hesitate. No sense in giving them something to use against him later. Hesitation was akin to regret, and if one had regrets, one had weaknesses. Weakness was something he had no intention of showing. Not on this side. Never again.
Autumn spread out before him, her twisting branches reaching up to the ink-black sky, still heavy with blood redleaves, the last of the season. He could see the smoke drifting through the trees, a haze moving through the moonlight, the incense curl of it tickling his nose. Overhead, the moon hung grotesquely over the trees, vast and white, completely unnatural. He scowled at the bright light it emitted, disliking the long shadows she threw against the pathway, the twisting branches of the trees twinned in illumination on the forest floor.
Already, nothing was going to plan.
Not that he had much of a plan to start with. Plans were things one could be tricked into counting on, and if thoughts were too deeply held in the mind, they were easy enough to pick out, like prying a nut from a shell.
His was more of a loose agenda.Get her coin. Kill the cunt. Find a door.
He didn’t have a method in mind for accomplishing any of it, a necessity in Faerie. It meant he could remain loose and fluid, prepared for when things inevitably went banjaxed, which had already begun.
Setback number one.
He’d been walking for what felt like an hour already, an hour he may as well have spent on a treadmill, for as far as it seemed he’d gone. The very forest was fucking with him, forcing him to walk and taking him nowhere. He knew without needing to glance over his shoulder that the door to his old girl was still there, just behind him, like a bleedin’ taunt.
Tate didn’t look back. Looking back never helped. Looking back was also something that had the shape of regret, and at that moment, he was too fucking aggravated to feel anything but annoyance.
Keep breathing. Keep centered. Stay slow.
“If you’re going to push me along, d’you think we can fucking get somewhere? I would have taken a longer nap if I’d known.”
Just breathe. Keeping his composure was a skill learned long ago, honed relentlessly through his simultaneously tumultuous and serene childhood, sitting on a bench in the corner of his grandfather’s workshop whenever he found himself in trouble, which was often.
“Mind yourself, lad. That’s all I care about.” Faelnor, the elf who’d raised him as his own blood, was never interested in hearing Tate’s excuses for fights he found himself in. “Learn to mind that temper now, Tate. Save yourself a world of hurt for the future.”
He had. It was a skill he’d practiced from the other side of the bar for countless years, perfected across hundreds of pool tables. And in the course of his fractured life onthisside of the veil, he had discovered that keeping that outward composure was the key to also keeping the upper hand.
And it wasn’t as if any of the gobshites here could do so.
The court could find insult in a bouquet of roses; quick to pique, faster to temper. It was proof enough to him that humans were brainless fools for being taken in by his kind for so many millennia. In his experience, the fae showed their hand at every turn, held nothing in check, their eyes and their smiles telegraphing their every intention. They counted on fear outrunning sense in those with whom they treated or traded and fear was usually enough.Fucking predictable amateurs, all of them.
