Melete ushered in the new year with an enormous glitter of a party. Black-tie and champagne, cut-glass chandeliers, and mirrored walls to reflect every sharp-edged sparkle back on the attendees. Lavish enough to remind us that we weren’t just some sort of pocket outpost for Faerie, but also a place that had been home to a deep pool of artistic talent—talent that had very wealthy friends.
I embraced the invitation to glamour and slunk into a silver shimmer of a dress, lined my eyes black, and painted my lips wine-red. When I saw Evan, I was glad I had gone to the effort.
He was wearing a tuxedo, but his shirt was embroidered all over, white on starker white, with a pattern that shifted and changed beneath my gaze. On his head, the coronet of tarnished silver he had been wearing on Halloween, bent and curved like thorns. There was a sort of haze around him, making him look backlit, carved in relief.
“You look . . . ,” I said, searching for words the rightness of which seemed peculiarly to matter.
“Yes?”
“Like a sacrifice.” The truth fell from my mouth like a stone.
“Ah. Gavin has dropped the glamour. This should be an interesting night.” Evan held out his hand, and I put mine in it.
I understood what he meant when we walked into the party. All of the impossibility of the ride through Faerie brought together in a ballroom. All pretense that the Fae were human had been let fall like veils. It was quite clear that they were anything but. We had stepped sideways from the mundane, moved elsewhere from the ordinary.
Eyes like the darkness and bones too sharp. Horns that spiraled from brows and hair made of feathers, made of flowers, made of butterfly wings. Skin scaled like a serpent’s. Still beautiful, even when they weren’t. The Fae drew the eye until looking away was the pain of heartbreak, a pool of loss.
Everything looked dull, contrasted with their wild glory. Even Melete looked less than golden and perfect. The cracks in the paint, the scratches on the floors glared, as if the presence of the Fae was too great to bear. For the first time since I arrived, Melete seemed pale, ordinary. Mortal. The Fae were impossible, and they were the most real piece of the night.
Even knowing what I did about the tithe, about what dwelling too long in Faerie could do to a person, I understood why the world was full of stories of people who had worn themselves into nothingness, into death, in search of the thing that would let them stay in Faerie forever. Who had tasted Faerie food and starved themselves to death waiting for a second bite. It would be so easy to let myself go, and do the same.
Beneath the voices, beneath the music, beneath the champagne fizz and crystal chime of glass, the ticking of a clock. A counting down. Change. Ending.
“Will you dance with me?” Evan asked.
I nodded, and he pulled me into his arms. For a minute, two, three, that dance was all there was. His hands guiding as we turned across the floor, my feet in steps so old they could have been a ritual, a conjuring. The awareness of skin and the distance between it. I wanted him like breath.
The song changed, and the enchantment broke. Somewhere, a clock grew louder.
As we danced, I looked around at all the unfamiliar faces, women and men, polished and groomed and in elegant clothes. Melete’s donors. The gallery owners and the angels of the theater. Editors of white-shoe presses that spent their summer Fridays in the Hamptons. The ordinary ones, though not a one of them would have thought themselves such. “What will they remember tomorrow?”
“Some will convince themselves this was a masked ball,” Evan said. “Others will half-remember what they saw, and laugh about the eccentricities of artists. There will be those who remember the entire thing clearly, but blame it on an excess of drink or drugs. One or two will see it for what it truly is. They will never forget, and they will never speak of it.”
He spun me out, back in, dizzying turns.
“The rest of us,” he added, “will simply have a good time.”
“Do they remember Gavin, what he is, when they see him dance?”
“It’s part of the glamour. He’s larger than life onstage, not himself. The people who meet him, either here or there, they already expect him to be half-magic, so they don’t think about whether he might be more than that.”
We turned again, and I stopped, gasped. “Oh my God, is that Davina Harrison?” The tiny dark-haired woman talking to Gavin was enough of a presence to distract even from the Fae. Which was only to be expected from someone who’d won three Oscars and two Tonys in the past decade. No, I realized as I did the math. Not quite a decade.
“It is, and I should say hello. She was the tithe before me. Here—I’ll introduce you.”
Davina’s eyes landed on my necklace during Evan’s introductions.
“A writer,” she said. “How lovely. Come tell me a story.” She tucked my arm in hers and stepped away from Evan, away from the periphery of people trying to catch her eye.
“Will you go?” she asked.
No need to ask where. “Yes.”
“Good. Time is always too short not to grab onto anything that brings what You want closer. And there’s no sin in ambition, just denying it.” Her voice like honey, like whiskey, and no wonder people wrote plays as prayers that she would star in them.
“Are you glad you went? I’ve heard it can be hard.”
“Anything in life worth having is hard to earn.” She plucked glasses off of a passing tray. “Even for someone like her.”
I followed her glance. Marin was all in red, the firebird, the phoenix’s flame. As she and Gavin danced, the shadows of antlers branched over his head. When they moved together, it was like magic. Not the magic of Faerie, or of spells and incantations, but the magic of art, which transmutes difficulty into ease, which steals the eye and breaks the heart. The magic that gives the lie to reality. Already half-magic, Evan had said of Gavin, but even without being Fae, Marin was, too.
“She’s my sister.”
There was pity, then, in Davina’s eyes. “Well, I wish you both the best of luck.”
The clock, louder still, its count the echo of a great hidden heart.
I danced with Ariel, who was looking Dietrichesque in a tux that clung to her like honey. “I’ll give the Fae this,” she said. “They throw a hell of a party.”
“Do you know—”
She laid her finger on my lips, silencing my question. “Haven’t decided. I’m not thinking about any of that tonight. Tonight is for champagne and dancing with pretty girls and gorgeous boys and the fabulous Fae. It’s for celebrating, and for stealing kisses.”
Smiling, she leaned in and kissed me, and I could taste the champagne on her mouth. “Happy New Year, Imogen.”
“Happy New Year, Ariel.”
Still the clock. Something ending. Almost. Not yet.
The candleflames crept higher, and the shadows deepened.
“I would dance with you, if you will.” The man wore unrelieved black, his hands covered by gloves of smooth leather. His eyes were black too, entirely so. Fae.
“Of course,” I said, and put my hands in his.
He moved like coiled shadows, and his touch burned my skin like ice, even through the gloves. He was all I could see as we danced, him and the lights reflected in the drowning pools of his eyes. My feet followed his steps as though all other paths were barred to me.
“I have always wondered why you humans celebrate time’s passing, when you yourselves have so little of it,” he said.
“Maybe that’s why we celebrate,” I said. “Because we’re still here.”
He cocked his head, a snake watching prey. The nerves at the back of my skull told me to flee before that regard. My heart fluttered like a dying bird.
“Or maybe we just like the champagne.”
He laughed, and his laughter echoed in my head. “I like the shape your words make. You are such a little piece of time. I can make you take up more of it.”
The floor spun from under me. I was falling, falling, falling.
The room, the lights, the party were gone.
Only black as I fell, a veil spun from nothing wrapping me like cerements. Spinning into emptiness, unmoored from myself, slipping out of my skin. Coldness crept, ice-like, into the gaps in me, crackling along the emptiness, hoarfrost, and desolation.
Falling. Forever.
Ice in my blood. In my soul.
Curling through the darkness, the scent of a forest. Sharp and green, bright resin and rich loam. A white stag, horns climbing from its brow. Spring sending shoots through my veins.
The call of a horn, and the blackness split and cracked.
Floor, solid, beneath my feet.
Words in a language I did not speak, burning the air. Hands pulling me back into my skin, into a body needled with frostbite.
I opened my eyes.
“If you kept us better fed, we would not hunger so on our own.” He spat the words at Gavin, blood the color of tarnish dripping from his mouth.
“And I have told you that you will not cross out of our bounds unless you control your hunger. You will go from this place, now, and you will not return.” Gavin was something dread and terrible, his bones electric beneath his skin.
A clock chimed. The air vibrated like lightning had passed through unseen, and all around the smell of leaf mold and pine needles, the mineral coldness of river waters foaming white over rocks, the musk of running animals.
A burst of rot and a smear across the air and lights so bright against my eyes that I stumbled.
And my hands were caught in Gavin’s, and the room was only music and the clink of glasses and the song of a hundred small conversations. Candleflames and champagne and dancing. “You are well?” he asked.
My feet followed his through the turn of a waltz. “Yes,” I said, and in saying it, I was, the word a spell of its own.
“Forgive me,” he said, bowing his head, the horns still reaching like a crown. “That should not have happened.”
Brushing it off meant everything was fine. “It would hardly be a party if at least one of the guests didn’t misbehave.”
He smiled, but there was tightness in it, and his eyes were dark and far away.
The music slowed, and I danced with Evan again, holding on, leaning in to him, letting the warmth of his body call to me. For the small eternity of the song, he was all there was, his heartbeat beneath my own, the cedar and sandalwood scent of his skin surrounding me. Here, now, real.
The clock ticked forward. All of the clocks, an echo of time itself.
Clocks were everywhere—fixed on the walls, set in the centers of tables, hanging on the very air. There was no escape from the marked time, no way to avert eyes from its passing.
Trays glided through the crowd, carrying glasses full of champagne, a universe of effervescing stars. A hand, red-gloved, plucked a glass, and then the rest of the woman bloomed out of the air in front of me. The scent of roses was everywhere. I tasted it on my tongue like liquor. “Are you having a good time?” she asked, voice lingering over the last word.
“I’m certainly having an interesting one,” I said.
“You hold your truth as if you were one of us, weighing its value in scales so as not to spend too much of it.” Words bloomed like ink over her skin as she spoke. “I had an artist before. A painter. Mediocre. You, though.” She stroked her hand down my throat. “You might be more useful. Would you like to be my artist?”
A painter before. The story Marin had told me months ago, about the painter who had left Melete, unworthy of his muse. I didn’t want to be anyone’s, but I also didn’t want to piss her off. “You do me great honor.”
“I know.” She clinked the rim of her glass to mine. “Think on it. Anything written can be changed.”
She walked away, and I felt like I had escaped.
Janet stood separate, like a shadow, her dress the same medieval green gown as the stained-glass woman hanging over the door of her house. She had wrapped herself in reserve, but her eyes watched the Fae like they were holy and she had come here on pilgrimage.
I bumped into her on my way out of the restroom, and she grabbed my arm, hard enough to leave bruises. “They would give you such power over them, and you don’t even see it. You are as much of a failure as my daughter.”
She yanked her hand back and pushed past me, but she was the least of what I cared about, so I didn’t ask, didn’t follow. I slid back into the glamoured shine of the party.
Helena and Gavin danced, her hair the only bright spot atop a dress that was a column of stark black. Her face was so pale as to be nearly translucent, and I thought I saw tears sparkle on her cheeks. But she danced with him until the end of the song, and did not look at Janet as she walked away from her, after.
The clocks became more insistent, and the people in the crowd called out numbers, encouraging the new year in. As if, without our voices, time might stop.
Three.
Two.
One.
The striking of the clock and the kisses and the golden sparkle of the wine. Glasses smashed to the floor and the mirrored reflection of the night stretching on until forever. Faces bright and wild. Skin flushed with lust and alcohol. Cheers and celebration and loss beneath it. The death of one time, to usher in the next. The Fae, feral and beautiful. And hungry.
Waiting.
A new year.