Sometimes, when the weather was just turning from autumn to winter, and the last of the late fruit was clinging to the trees, we partied in the apple orchard. The stories always talk about fey partying, and mostly those stories are true. The fey love a good revelry. They love the music and the fire and the food and the complete abandon of it all. And the apple orchard was as good a place as any to do it. It belonged to my father, and I’d laid the glamour on it myself. It was hidden, tucked away, the perfect place to get lost, let go.

Most nights when I went to the fey parties, I enjoyed myself. Everyone pretended a bit at those gatherings. I could be someone else there. Or no one. I got a few sideways glances, and most of the fey still kept their distance. But I could be lesser there. Or more. The fey let me pretend for a while that I was a whole thing, not a creature living in two worlds. That I wasn’t my father’s son. I loved being able to disappear into the fey, become invisible. There was a freedom in it I found almost nowhere else.

But sometimes, I hated them. Sometimes even the sneakiest glances were like weights, levered against me. Sometimes I didn’t want to be anywhere near the fey, didn’t want to spend my midnight hours in the middle of a cold, damp apple orchard, no matter how beautiful the music was. No matter how much I liked the way the bonfire turned the trees’ branches red and gold. Sometimes I just wanted to be home, curled in my bed, warm and alone and safe. But some of the fey found it easier to deliver messages to me here, make requests, and it was my job to listen.

I stood at the edge of the lit area, close enough that I could see the fire in the middle of the little clearing, but deep enough into the dark between the trees that no one tried to pull me forward to dance. I switched from resting on one foot to the other. The ground was frosted over, the weather far colder than it should have been for this time of year, for this place. Even my leather boots couldn’t keep the chill from seeping in, not when I was standing still like this, away from the warmth of the fire and the fey, my back against the old tree’s gnarled trunk.

A tiny woman appeared at my elbow. Her head barely came up to the middle of my chest, and I was not a tall man. Her hair was a wild puff of blond curls, frizzy and disarrayed but downy. The way it fell over her shoulders, soft and flyaway, made me want to touch it. She wore a thick sweater, holes here and there in the weave of it letting the cold air in. Her feet were bare.

“You should dance,” she said, her voice high and breathy. She ran a hand down my arm, her fingers stretching like claws over the leather of my jacket, catching on it the same way the bark at my back did.

I shook my head. “What do you need?”

She turned her face away and watched the dancers. For a long time, she said nothing, but I didn’t need to remind myself to be patient. I was used to the way the fey got distracted, lost track of conversations. I waited, letting my body go still so she wouldn’t think I was restless.

“Saben wants you,” she said at last, her voice rising and falling in strange places. “And I need two copper pocketknives.”

I sighed and ran a hand through my hair. “What for?”

The woman turned her head and smiled at me, her eyes just a tiny bit unfocused. “For coring apples.”

I didn’t get any more out of her after that. Her mind was caught in the music, in the flutes and fiddles and the pulsing beat of the drums. I glanced around for Saben, but either her messenger had mixed up her times, or Saben hadn’t bothered to wait for me, because she wasn’t there. I admit I didn’t search too hard. I wanted to leave.

I didn’t go straight home, though. I had to drive through the center of the city to get back to my house, tucked out of the way and far from my father like it was. It was the weekend, and the streets were packed, people walking to and from clubs and bars and restaurants, arms around each other, faces lit up, maybe a bit rosy-cheeked from drinks. It all seemed so far away from me. I was still wrapped up in the fey, their music stuck in my mind, calling to me, just like it’d called to Saben’s messenger.

I wanted to get it out of my head, the lot of it. I found a place to park, not far from a few of the clubs. I picked one at random and ducked inside. The room opened onto a bar and a few tables. There was another door off to the side, a bouncer standing in front of it. I paid him the cover, and he opened the door so I could walk down a steep set of stairs, narrow slats that caught at my boots. I stopped halfway down, squashing myself to one side so I wouldn’t block anyone, and glanced around the room.

It was darker down there, of course, and warmer. The shadows were highlighted with bright flashes of pink and purple and blue, sparks of light that came and went. They illuminated just enough that I could make out the mass of people, all tangled together on the dance floor. The music was something thumpy and deep and electronic. It pushed at me, made my heart beat faster, but in a way that was totally different from the fey music. This sound, this place, wasn’t forcing me into anything. I was being asked.

I wasn’t sure that I had the energy to join the crowd, but I wanted to be near them, near all that humanity. I made my way down the rest of the stairs and around the edge of the dancers, dodging people who were too lost in themselves to watch where they were dancing. I found an empty spot against one wall, and I tucked myself into it, pressing my back against the concrete. Blending in so I could watch. So I could lose myself in a completely different way than I usually did with the fey.

I let my gaze drift around the room, stopping whenever I saw someone who caught my attention. There were fey here too. I’d expected it—they loved to party, no matter where the party was taking place, and there were more than a few who had no problem interacting with the human world. No humans would notice if they weren’t searching for something out of the ordinary. The fey glamours were good. But my eyes snagged on hair that was too feathery, glittery skin, the soft flutter of wings, all of which could have been a costume or my imagination, but weren’t. I ignored them. They didn’t really matter anyway. They weren’t there to see me, and I wasn’t there to see them. And this place, for once, was more my world than theirs.

I swayed back and forth with the music and the flickering lights. The crowd moved in a lazy way, and I watched them in a lazy sort of way. I wasn’t looking for anyone in particular, didn’t even expect to stay long. I just wanted to be part, even a fringe part, of something different, for a few minutes.

My eyes snagged on a bright-blue shimmer. I turned my head, searching for whatever it was I’d seen, that deep-aqua light. It sparkled again, and I saw the boy, the man, it had come from. He was maybe a bit taller than me, his skin lightly tanned, his hair long and black and straight, loose over his shoulders. The sparkle had come from the flecks of glittery color at the corners of his eyes, across one cheekbone, down the side of his neck. He raised his hands over his head, and I saw splashes of green, shining and catching the lights of the club.

If I hadn’t known, if I wasn’t always so aware of things that were different, I would have thought the shimmer was makeup or some elaborate jewelry. But I’d spotted the other fey in the crowd, and I knew this man was one too. I wanted to turn away. I’d come to get away from all things otherworldly, not to latch on to it, even in this indirect way. But I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was sleek and graceful and beautiful.

He didn’t act like the other fey. Fey don’t seem self-conscious, to the outside observer, but they are. They always want to be noticed, want someone to be staring at them, watching them, falling in love with them. Most of the fey I’d spotted in the club were either clustered together, doing their damnedest to attract attention, or they were wooing some poor unsuspecting human. Or both. But this man was solitary. He was dancing with his head thrown back, his eyes closed, his arms lifted. He didn’t focus on anyone, and he danced by himself. He was in the middle of the crowd, and it was as if he was absorbing the energy of the music and the people around him through his skin, pulling it in, but he wasn’t trying to move closer to anyone.

While I watched, a girl bumped into him. He opened his eyes and looked down at her, laughing and waving away her apology. She smiled back at him, and gestured to the gaggle of young men and women around her. An invitation if I’d ever seen one. But the man with the glitter on his skin smiled again, a little gentler, and shook his head. The girl shrugged and drifted back into the crowd. The man twisted his body, a sinuous flick of movement that pushed him in the opposite direction. While he drifted away, he glanced up, and his eyes met mine.

He didn’t smile at me like he’d smiled at the girl. His shoulders went a little straighter, though, and he held my eyes. He was still swaying to the music. He should have had to break our stare sooner. But we watched each other for long seconds. I took him in, the black hair falling in his eyes, the slender line of his throat, the splashes of color across his skin. Scales, I thought. Like fish scales or snake scales, chips of blue and green and purple. He was as beautiful as I’d thought, lithe and elegant. I wondered if he’d keep staring at me. I wondered if he’d come over. Or if I’d go to him. I almost wanted to, wanted to press myself against him, feel the way he moved while he danced. My heart beat harder in my chest, hard enough that I could feel its rhythm over the thump of the music.

A group of people danced between us, blocking him from my view. I looked down, and when I looked back up, he was gone. I could have searched for him, waited until I caught sight of his colors again. But I didn’t let myself. I shook my head and inched my way back around the crowd. I was tired and achy, and I’d seen something better than I’d planned. It was time to go.

My sister, Saben, was staying in an apartment near the outskirts of the city, where there was less iron in the air. It was still more iron than she could handle, and she didn’t belong there, but she pretended it didn’t matter. I didn’t know why she was doing it. Maybe so she could prove something to me, or to our father, or to herself in her mind. It was all a guess to me, and it didn’t matter much, anyway. She wasn’t really any of my business.

When I got to her apartment, the door was ajar, and I pushed it open the rest of the way, letting myself in. Saben was standing in the kitchen. She spun toward me, no surprise on her face, like she’d already known it was me before she even saw me. Her arm lifted.

“What’s this?” she asked, holding an object out to me.

I squinted at it. “A kettle.” I couldn’t blame her for not knowing. It was one of those artsy, modern types, with more angles than any kettle really needed. And the fey didn’t really deal in kettles anyway.

She set it back down on the stove and watched me while I took in her apartment. It was small, just a tiny living room and kitchen, and a bedroom I couldn’t see. I knew her rooms at our father’s house weren’t much bigger, but they felt bigger, more opulent and airy, the curtains always thrown open to catch a breeze, the puffed pillows pleasantly chilly when you lay down against them, the carpets thick and stark white. This place was cramped and dingy, gray, and a bit too warm with the afternoon sun coming in through the window. But Saben didn’t seem to notice. She considered it with me, and although she didn’t smile, her face lit up a little as if she actually liked what she saw.

“Where are the apples?” I asked. She squinted her eyes at me. I shook my head, dismissing the question. “I have the knives for your errand girl,” I said, and pulled them from my pocket to put them on the counter.

“She said you wouldn’t dance.”

I flicked my eyebrows up. “I wouldn’t.”

“Luca.”

“Saben. What do you want?”

She narrowed her eyes, her mouth clamping into a tight line, and I looked away. I remembered when she was small. I remembered when she was milk thistle fuzz I could hold in my hands. She had been soft and agreeable and I’d loved her.

“What?” I repeated.

She straightened her spine, stretching every vertebra, even though, as inadequate as my own height was, she would never quite reach it. The fact of my height didn’t stop her from pretending we were eye to eye, though. “Father wants you to do something.”

I didn’t even need to listen to what it was. “Get one of your girls to do it,” I answered right away. “Or one of your boys.”

“You have to do it.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a job.” Her voice was flat.

“What is it, then?” It hadn’t always been this way between us. I hadn’t always been forced to pry information out of her like I was pressing water from stone.

“He wants you to see someone. A witch.” She frowned. “Or maybe not a witch. A healer. A person who fixes things.”

I just kept myself from laughing. “A doctor?”

She shrugged, a short, sharp rise and fall of her shoulders. Her hand snuck out, and she touched the handle of one of the knives I’d laid on the counter. “No. Yokai.”

“What?”

“Fey. From Japan. Father thinks he knows things our healers don’t. He wants you to go.”

I should have guessed. “Why didn’t he tell me himself?”

Saben shrugged again, apparently uninterested in the question or the answer. “Busy.”

Sometimes when we talked, when we were together, I thought she would act like a human. Normal. Sometimes I thought she’d take down her walls and smile at me, or touch my hand like she’d done as a child, or complete a sentence in a way that didn’t drip with how high-class fey she was, with how different from me she was. But she never gave me an inch. She hadn’t for a long time.

I turned my head to the side and coughed into my palm, and from the corner of my eye, I almost, almost thought I saw her face flicker out of its stillness. Her hand folded into her dress and twisted the soft fabric into a knot.

It was bad timing on my part, to cough right then. It meant I couldn’t argue. Not when it was obvious that a person who fixed things was exactly what I needed.

I sighed and tried to figure out what to say to get myself out of this. “I told him I wasn’t going to do this anymore. That when I came home, I was done.” I’d been gone for years, had traveled pretty far, searching for healers, for answers. I hadn’t spent all of that time searching, that was true. A lot of it had been spent living, because there wouldn’t always be much time for me to do that. I’d spent those years getting lost, pretending I was someone else, someone whole in all the ways I was half. But I’d searched too. It was why I’d gone, and I had wanted an answer.

I hadn’t made it to Japan. But I doubted that mattered. I’d come home because there wasn’t anyone who could do what I needed. It didn’t matter where they were from or what kind of healing they did. And there wasn’t anywhere on the planet that could make me someone else, either. So I’d come back.

Saben’s lips flattened into a thin line, and she glared at me, but I was used to that too.

“He wants you to go.”

“Do you?”

She raised her eyes, too fast. I stared at her, waiting, but she didn’t say anything. Didn’t shrug or nod or shake her head. She just stared back at me.

“You want me to go,” I said, slowly, “so you can tell him you did as he wanted and made me.” Her eyes flickered away from mine at that, and I nodded. “You said it wasn’t a job. But it is. It’s a job for me. Right?”

She didn’t answer, but it didn’t matter. I would go, because she’d delivered me a message, and my job was to follow those messages, whatever they were. I wasn’t her brother. I was her errand boy. I found her pocket knives to core apples with. I touched iron when her people couldn’t. I told her about kettles. I did as she told me.