Midnight is a curse.
The house holds its breath like a prayer, silence sewing itself into the walls. There is nothing signifying that this place is a home, the fluorescent tubes lining the ceiling dull and dark, turned off for the night. The one in the kitchen has not been replaced yet even though it burned out a week ago. Mary’s bedroom is blanketed in the same quiet threaded through the rest of the house, the tips of her fingers spilling over the edge of the bed. She did not get a candle when the clock struck twelve, but if she had, it would still be flickering, barely cold in her cake.
I am awake. I have been awake since Mary fell asleep, fingers tangled in my thick dark fur. She clutches me to her chest like a lifeline, her heartbeat thrumming in my ears, and her even breathing hitches ever so slightly when I wriggle out of her grip. For a moment, I still, every bone in my body wishing to stay by her side, especially when her dangling fingertips clutch at me even in her sleep as if I am the only thing tethering her to this side of the light.
He makes the choice for me. My paws hit the ground with a soft clack and he is there. There are no glimmering portals, no silvery folds from another dimension sliced open in the air. There is only him, tall and thin and pale, inhuman in his beauty. Bronze hair feathers over ears pointed at the tips and his sapphire eyes are neon where they pierce straight into my soul. He is clad in white velvet from top to toe, a fur-lined cape draped over his slender shoulders. In his youthful appearance, barely twenty if he were a man, those eyes are an anomaly betraying his true age. He has millennia in his stare. A lifetime lived over and over again. From where I stand on all fours, a barrier of fur between him and Mary, he looms over me, his head almost touching her ceiling.
He smiles with too many teeth. “She slumbers. This will make it all the easier for us.”
“There is no us. You are not welcome here, fae.” Behind me, my tail puffs out. If he notices, it does not perturb him.
“I suppose the birds have told you about me.” That same pleasant smile curls wider, stretching the corners of his cheeks upwards. “I hope they have told you what happens to those who stand in my way as well. I am the firstborn prince, after all.”
“Your title means nothing in this world, Ronan.”
“Perhaps not to you. You are just a cat, really. I cannot blame you for being a fool.” His gaze roves over Mary’s sleeping form, and the approval clouding those impossibly old eyes makes my skin crawl. “I have come to take Moira back as my bride, as was promised to me.”
“Her name is Mary. And she did not make any promises.”
“It does not matter. She was promised to me and we will be wed when the sun rises, regardless of what some cat thinks. My Moira—”
“Mary.” I stand my guard, fur rising over my entire body. “She is n
ot your bride. She is my girl.”
He glances at a watch that does not tick. “She is eighteen now. A woman.”
“She will always be my girl. And you will not take her away.”
Ronan gives me an indulgent, almost piteous smile, as if he feels sorry for me. As if he, with the centuries in his eyes, has any right to feel sorry for me. “You are a cat, so I will not blame you for being a fool,” he repeats, “but I do not think you understand. She is not human. She cannot stay here.”
Mary shifts in her sleep. Her skin is the colour of old paper held too close to the sun. Sickly, they call it. Yellow. Wrong. Jaundiced and thin where she lies swaddled in the blankets tucked beneath her chin. She has always been too small for her bones and too clever for her years, words sharp as needles, eyes older than the adults who flinch from her. Her mother screamed the day Mary turned one, when she pulled the rose-pink blanket away from her tiny body and saw what she called a creature instead of her perfect baby girl. The birds told me as much. They have been with her longer than I have, long enough to see the way kids laugh at her visage and adults curl their lips like she is spoiled milk. They heard the way she attained fluency before her second birthday and how she taught herself to read by her third. They were there for her fourth, when she’d been down by the canal—parents walking a mile away, as if hoping she’d fall in and drown—and she leapt like a jackrabbit into the water. Snatched a small burlap sack from the grey depths, still mewling. A man’s cat gave birth to two kittens. He only wanted one.
Mary’s parents never quite touched her again after that, too terrified of the thing they’d raised—as if being small and sickly-looking and far too smart was a crime. As if she was not supposed to be able to swim when other children her age were still mastering the art of walking. It did not matter to her and it did not matter to me either, when she named me Shadow and let me sleep curled by her side even though she allowed no one else to even touch her hand.
She has been with me ever since. This will not change now.
“She is not human,” Ronan repeats—slower this time, as if I am stupid, as if I need explaining. As if I do not know the gravity of the choice I am making, not letting him spirit her away. “I admire your stubbornness, cat, but she cannot stay here. She does not belong here.”
Perhaps she did not in her childhood when she only had me and the sun and the stars, but times have changed. Mary has grown although her head barely reaches the shoulder of an average girl and her skin remains tinted pale gold. She has softened enough to sit next to humans her age, enough to hold her tongue back when adults chastise her for being a shade too sharp. She writes like breathing, stories of princesses who save themselves and witches who were never truly evil after all. A heart-shaped keychain sits on her nightstand, a gift from a girl who makes her smile almost as much as I do. She tells me tales of her life at school—how she will be eating cake in class next week, bought by classmates who have come to accept her as one of their own. There is no love in this house, and perhaps that is all that Ronan sees, but there is a place for Mary in the world all the same. I do not need the birds to tell me that much.
Ronan acts like I do not know anything, but I know enough to know that Mary has just begun to live.
“She is a child,” I say. “She has barely started her life, and you already wish to end it.”
He shrugs. “If that is how our marriage ends, so be it. It is fault on Moira’s part if she is not strong enough.”
The birds have told me of the cruelty of fae. They speak of children snatched away from their cribs, forced to live as servants, entertainment, pets. Women and men both spirited to a world not their own, viewed as far beneath. Ronan looks at Mary like that is her future, his lower lip curled like she disgusts him, a sick sort of fascination dancing in his aged eyes. To him, she is not human, but she is human enough.
To him, he is her god.
I spring up, darting to Mary’s side. He laughs, as if he thinks I will simply hold her close, but my teeth find the edge of the keychain resting on her nightstand. Slip it into my maw, resting on my tongue. It tastes like rust and certainty.
Ronan stills.
“What happened to the child you took?” I demand. “The other Mary.”
He looks at me as if he wants to squash me beneath his shoe. “It is none of your business, cat.”
“You took her for the same reason that you want to take Mary now. Why are you back? Why have you returned? Was one Mary not good enough for you?” I hiss, hackles rising. The birds have watched both Mary’s grow. They told me that the other one did not live past her fifteenth birthday.
“You talk too much. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.”
I let the chain of the trinket poke from between my lips and Ronan stiffens. The iron fob gleams in the pale moonlight. A death sentence for his kind. “Give me the truth, fae. Nothing but the truth. I will know if you lie.” Animals always do. I pad closer and even though he towers over me, he takes a step back all the same. “Even if you kill me, I will brand every untruth into your skin, and I will not stop until we are both six feet below.”
He sneers, features contorting in disgust. “There is nothing to tell. She grew up in our land as my mother’s servant. I wanted her, because she was always mine to begin with. That is all.”
I desired her. I longed for her. I despised her. She was human—less than. She was not worth the veil on her head when I wed her. She was not worth the skin on my hands when I beat her until she took her last breath. I look into the centuries in his eyes and see his truth—the truth of the monster beneath his skin, beautiful as the day.
“She never got to grow up,” Ronan says, and it is not regret that makes his voice thin. It is annoyance. “She broke. These things happen.”
My claws sink into the floor. The iron burns my tongue.
“The other one will suffice,” he says lightly. “She is eighteen. Ripe.”
In her sleep, Mary whimpers. Her life flickers before my eyes: twirling cotton nestled against pale yellow skin as she dances in front of the mirror, college applications strewn across her desk with writing degrees scrawled across them as her chosen poison, a girl with a laugh like bells pressing infinity into her palm. She is blooming, flourishing, thriving. She will grow up.
Ronan scoffs, as if he can read my thoughts. “You are old, cat. Your time is almost up. Accept it: she is a woman and she is mine. You should enjoy your final months alive instead of fighting like this.”
“I would gladly spend whatever time I have left keeping Mary safe. And she will not be safe with you.”
He sighs like I am a pebble in his shoe, a mere annoyance in the grand importance of his day. Then he begins to flicker—buzzing around the edges, white light filling in the corners of his silhouette. Spilling over the expanse of his tall, thin frame, licking at his feet and torching his skin ivory, so pure it makes my fur stand on end.
I know what is coming. The birds told me so. Close your eyes, they chirped, but I cannot—while my eyes are shut, he will creep past me and steal Mary away. I keep my right eye closed, but my left remains open even as Ronan explodes in an alabaster supernova.
He is the sun. He is the stars and the moon and the solar system, a constellation of white-hot fire, burning my eye away. I let the flames seep into my cornea and lick it bare.
When the light recedes, half the world is gone. Sunspots dance across the remnants of what used to be my left eye, a residual solar flare. Phantom pain. It is gone, and all that remains is pain—haunting, blazing pain, flickering through my veins and burrowing itself into the marrow of my bones, slicing more than just eye-deep. But I am breathing. I am alive.
“Fae,” I say through the iron in my mouth, teeth marks undoubtedly lining the fob from my clamped jaw, “you have stolen something from the human world. The gate is closed. You have taken your prize, and now, you must leave.”
There is surprise in his handsome face, white fire still ebbing from his skin. He gnashes his teeth at me—sharp for the first time. Sharp as my own. “What if I ignore all your petty talk and simply kill you right now?” For once, the casual arrogance is gone from his voice. All that remains is anger, knife-edged and hard, cutting deep beneath my flesh.
“You can, but you will never be able to go back. You will have taken a life without possessing my name and the gate to your land will be closed to you forever. You will be stuck in the human world, forced to be one of the mortals you despise so dearly. And I will rip you apart before you even get the mercy of that fate.”
His face is a mask of hatred. A monster of a man. The thing that haunts the space beneath children’s beds. “So you know all the rules, don’t you?”
“The birds told me so.”
With a snarl, Ronan tosses his cape over one shoulder. “I will be back,” he promises, venom-sweet between gritted teeth. Fire and brimstone in his neon stare. “When the clock strikes twelve in another eighteen years, I will return for my bride. And you will not be alive to stop me then.”
I hold his gaze, letting him see what he has done to me. What he will have to do to even think about taking Mary away.
“I still have one other eye to give.”
The air whistles. The room exhales. He is gone.
I wait for a beat, then two. When the world remains silent, I pad over to Mary’s bed and climb onto the mattress, coiling in place at her side—where I have been for the past fourteen years, and where I will remain. Her hand tangles itself in my fur and she snuggles up to me in her sleep, pressing her cheek against the top of my head. Yellow hair spills over her pillow, curling softly over her yellow skin. Tomorrow, we will eat cake—strawberry, her favourite, and eighteen will pass just as seventeen did. I press my half-blind face to her chest, feel her heartbeat beneath my chin, and wonder how someone this human could ever be anything else.
Written by: Amberlyn
Edited by: Hoe Yan
