Nature would have her way with the city and its inhabitants, but not yet.
As Tam crossed the edge of the Quarter she trailed her hand over an iron fence. New Orleans had fallen in love with wrought iron. Fences, ornaments, light posts, it was everywhere. Elegant scrolls of iron marked home after home in the city, and since faeries were allergic to the stuff, Tam was grateful for the city-wide madness for ironworks.
She could see some of the stronger fey, but most of their kind lingered at the edge of the river or out in the swamp.
He is stronger than all of them.
Even when he wasn’t near, Tam thought about her faery stalker—and despite every lifelong instinct she had, she had started to watch for him. He was the one who brought joy or terror to the faces of those unseen creatures that gathered in the green spaces in the city.
In front of her in the gentle waves of the Mississippi itself, Tam could see a kelpie lifting out of the murky water. The horse-like creature was a gleaming, glorious beast. In common words, she suspected that they were best described as “water horses.” It was as if a horse type creature had been carved of water, hooves that looked like shards of ice. Those hooves churned waters, creating white-tipped waves that rocked the boats in the Mississippi River.
“Beautiful,” she whispered. Tam didn’t speak to the fey in ways that could get her caught, but she whispered words into the air.
“Are you lost, miss?” a man asked. It wasn’t him, her guardian devil, but by the look of him he meant her trouble.
“No.”
He stepped closer though, too close for safety.
Tam tried to back away, but the man grabbed her and tugged, intent on wresting her bag from her hands. In it was all the money she’d made selling her jewelry. Money was the difference between disaster and more time to try her luck again.
“No!” She tugged her bag. “Stop!”
But then, the man dropped her bag, and Tam scrambled after it. While she was on the ground, the would-be thief went sailing over the bank and splashed into the muddy Mississippi. If Tam didn’t have the Sight, she’d be stunned. She did have it, though, and she knew exactly why the man had gone flying.
Invisible to every mortal eye but her own was Tam’s own personal monster.
“Curious,” she murmured, looking around as if confused.
Her eyes met Irial’s briefly, a flicker of a moment before she pulled her gaze away from the grinning faery. She never let her gaze linger on him long, not unless his back was to her.
As she came to her feet, clutching her bag in her hand again, she whispered, “I swear I have a guardian devil sometimes.”
He laughed, and impulses she hadn’t known she possessed came surging to the surface.
“Oh . . . perhaps he tripped,” Tam whispered, pointedly staring at the ground and sliding her foot forward as if looking for a loose stone. There wasn’t one. She knew it. Irial knew it.
What he didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that she saw him. He might be acting as if he was her guardian angel, but Tam feared that his fascination with her would lead to horrible things if he found that she saw him as he watched over her.
These were truths, facts that Tam and her family had embraced to keep themselves safe: the fey couldn't lie, couldn't cross moving water, couldn't abide being Seen; they loved sweets, good whisky, and tormenting mortals. Mortals who saw them were blinded, eyes gouged out, and Tam would rather keep her eyes.
So, she couldn’t thank him for all the times it seemed like he was there when she needed him. No whispered words, no damning confessions.
But as she tucked her hands in her pockets, Tam felt a slip of metal. It was a crude ring, one she could finish but hadn’t. In her exhaustion, she’d tarnished and fire-scaled it, so the metal looked nearly black with streaks of purple. There was an odd charm to it that had stopped her from correcting it. Now, as she stood at the edge of the river, she fingered the ring.
Quickly, without looking at Irial again, Tam placed the ring on a rock. “I don’t know if you’re truly out there, angel or devil, but if you are, whatever you are, I offer this as a token of my thanks.”
Tam started to shiver slightly at her brash act.
His attention was fixed on the band of metal she’d placed as an offering to her guardian. If he knew she could see him, she wouldn’t dare do such a thing.
Surely, he’d think of her as nothing more than a fanciful mortal.
“For me?” he asked.
Irial gazed at the ring--an incomplete piece that she hadn’t even shown a jeweler--as if it were the crown jewels. And then he glanced at her. As he did, he smiled. The faery that had been merely gorgeous before seemed to be as glorious as a waterfall toppling over a cliff into the sea: too dangerous to touch, too alluring to resist.
Tam watched from the corner of her eye as he scooped the blacked ring into his hand.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, voice thick enough that Tam almost turned her head to stare directly at him.
Irial slid the ring onto his finger and held his hand out. Under the midday sun, the ring was fire-shot as if sparks had hardened into the band. Glints of red, blue, and purple appeared as the light shined on it.
“You’re a peculiar mortal,” he said in a lower voice. “And I want to know you.”
Tam’s hands folded into fists. There were rules, and they all came down to the same thing: Do not attract the attention of the fey.
What have I done?
Truth be told, she already had his attention. Now, she’d offered him a token of thanks. In that moment at the edge of the river, Tam told herself she was settling a debt; he’d rescued her purse from the thief; she owed him. But she knew that wasn’t why she’d offered the ring to Irial. She’d simply wanted him to have the metal band she’d shaped and worked with her hands. She wanted that token, a ring no less, to be on his hand. It wasn’t an urge she wanted to consider very long. The answers her mind offered frightened her already.
They stood quietly at the river, an invisible faery and Sighted mortal.
Tam wished she could ask questions. Some were more pressing than others. Why her? Why was he kind when the Dark Court was, well, dark? Would he truly steal her eyes if he knew she could See him?
But asking any of those questions would reveal her Sight, and that she knew what he was.
Tam looked out at the sky and the river for a heartbeat more, and then she turned away and returned to her home. She left him there, staring at a ring she’d made. She left him, but the awed look in his eyes haunted her every step.
Niall
The boat from Amsterdam was a wretched thing. Niall had paid the outrageous fare for passage on a wooden hull ship. No steel monstrosity, this. It was a wooden vessel, one of the sort that ought to be retired by now and likely would be in the coming years. The newer steel-hulled ships were dangerous for the fey. Some could weather it, sicken but not die, and others were barely injured. Most fey, however, struggled with the mere idea of being trapped in steel vessels.
“Last passage,” one of the faeries at his side said.
They stood hip-to-hip invisible to all but the other faeries on the ship and stared at the rolls of water that seemed to stretch for eternity. Wind and water and sky, there was nothing else to see from here.