The Dagda grabs the drinks just before it happens.
My thorns surface under my skin. Not the controlled pulse I’ve been learning. Something wilder. Something that looks like Fae poison ivy spreading across my forearms in patterns that glow sage green and pink.
One second there’s a table. The next my thorns are inside it somehow, and then?—
POOF. Gone. Absorbed into nothing. Like the wood never existed.
I stare at my hands. They’re glowing sage green at the edges.
Huh.
Macha sighs, laying her cards out on the not-there table. “Royal flush.” Her cards flutter to the floor.
She has a pair of fives. Not a royal flush. But you try correcting a war goddess.
“Oh.” Badb blinks, looking at me like I’m a mildly interesting specimen. “I see you’ve had a tantrum.”
“Her eyes are Fae again,” the Morrigan notes.
“No sclera.” Badb.
“Full green.” Macha.
I catch my reflection in the window behind the bar.
The face staring back isn’t mine.
My eyes have gone full green. Not hazel-with-green-flecks green. Not dramatic-lighting green. Full alien-abduction, no-whites-visible, something-ate-the-human green.
And my hair?—
“Why is my hair pink?” I grip the strands—when did they get so long?—and watch the color bleed through my fingers. Sage green at the roots fading into pink at the ends.
I look like a fucking houseplant.
“Glamour is failing.” Macha rises, stepping over the mess of scattered cards. “This is salvageable.”
I back up. They follow.
“Salvageable?”
My ass bumps the bar stool.
“Yes, salvageable.” Macha rolls her eyes. “We must strip the last of the glamour.”
“As I said.” The Morrigan sighs. “You have work to do.”
“No, you?—”
“This glamour must go.” She tsks, examining me like I’m a project she needs to finish.
“Barely any threads left.” Macha nods approvingly. “Well done, sister. The best glamour work you’ve ever produced.”
Which reminds me.
“You did this to me.” I step closer to the Morrigan, anger flaring fresh. “You put glamour on me. Which also reminds me, I have three years of my life missing.” I squint at her. “Where was I for three years?”
She barely twitches. Doesn’t move.
