Twenty-Two
Ijump back, but the damage is done, and I’m not speaking of the blood frothing at the surface of my gash.
Phoebus’s complexion glows bone-white under his sheen of perspiration. He’s gaping at my shredded skin, at the rivulets of blood running down the arm I’ve raised to staunch the flow.
“Oh my Gods. We need to get you to a healer!” His voice is shrill with nerves. “Oh my Gods.” His eyes shine as brightly as his face now, full of tears, because he believes he’s just set my death in motion. “Fallon . . . Oh my Gods.” His vine drops to the stone floor like a dead snake before reeling back into his palm, while the iron crow keeps swinging like the pendulum of a clock marking my last hour.
“Phoebus, shh. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay. It’s not . . .” A sob lurches from him along with a deep croak. “Oh, Picolina, we’ll never get to the healer in time.” He shoves a blond lock out of his eyes, then grabs one of the broadswords hooked on the wall.
I take a step back. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll cut—I’ll cut off your—your arm.”
My mouth rounds. “No. No one’s cutting off anything.” I angle my raised arm out of his reach in case he decides to swing anyway.
“The iron . . . if it reaches your heart. And the obsidian. Oh my Gods, the obsidian!” He sucks in a rattling breath. “It’s just an arm, Fal,please. I can’t lose you.”
I’d forgotten about the obsidian.
I check my knuckles. Although scraped, they don’t bleed, and my fingers haven’t blackened. This may be a hasty prognosis on my part, but I don’t think obsidian affects me.
When my friend’s lips begin to wobble, I decide to confess the secret Nonna told me never to reveal to anyone. After all, I have a more terrible one now, and too many secrets will end up poisoning me in a way that iron can’t.
“I’m immune.” I keep my voice low, yet it feels like I’ve hollered it across the Lucin rooftops.
“What?” The sword tip clanks into the stone.
“I’m immune to iron.”
His blubbering halts. “You’re imm—you’re—you’re—immune? But you’re—you’re—” His look of utter defeat transforms into one of utter confusion. “How?” His wet eyes grow as round as Minimus’s. “Oh.”
He must be having some off-kilter musings because neither I nor Nonna have the faintest idea why I’m resistant to the metal that’s lethal to Fae, the same way I’m immune to salt that loosens faerie tongues.
“You’re—You’re a . . . a human changeling.”
“What?” I snap, because . . .what? “Nonna delivered me herself. She saw me come out of my mother.” But now that he’s said it . . . what if . . .?
No.I look like my mother and grandmother. Sure my coloring is different, my eyes slightly off-shade.
The blood drains from my face, pooling somewhere around my ankles. “Oh my Gods, what if I am?” My gaze shoots to my knuckles again. If I’m human, though, why isn’t the obsidian affecting me? Or is it?
“It’d explain why you have no magic.”
“But my eyes are blue,” I murmur.
“Violet. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen another Fae with that color.”
“But I resemble Mamma and Nonna.”
“Not all that much.”
“A changeling . . .” I touch the shell of my ear with my upraised hand, the room going in and out of focus.
Human.
That means . . . that means I’m going to die in seven decades. Or sooner.
