Melissa Marr - Ink Exchange

She'd looked for him, and today he was there. He stood across the street, outside the Music Exchange, the shop where Rianne was most often found. Beside him was a man—a human—playing music that was foreign and familiar on a bodhran. Her pulse picked up the rhythm, the pace of the music settling in her stomach as if each touch of the beater were on her skin, in her veins.

Then Niall turned and found her watching him.

"Leslie." His lips formed the word, but the sound was too slight to hear.

Traffic on the street moved faster than seemed safe to enter, but Niall wasn’t human, hadn’t ever been human. He slid through gaps that weren't quite there, and then he was beside her, lifting her hands to his lips, crying tears she wasn't able to shed.

"He wouldn't let me see you," he said.

"I told him not to. I wasn't in a place where I'd have wanted anyone to see me." She looked away, watching the faeries watching them.

"I'd kill him if I could," he said, sounding cruder than Irial ever did.

"I don't want that. Not—"

"You would if he hadn't done this to you."

"He's not awful."

"Don't. Please." Niall held her, silent but for the sound of his tears. He acted like it was her he wanted, like all that she thought he'd felt was real, but she wondered. That urge she'd felt before, that compulsion to touch Niall, to press closer—it was gone. Had it been an illusion? Was it there but swallowed down by Irial? She looked at Niall's beautiful scarred face and felt a flash of tenderness, but there was no temptation.

Along the street, the faeries watched with expressions gleeful and heinous. Chattering and murmurs rose as they speculated on what Irial's fey would do, what Irial himself would do when he heard.

Kill the boy. He will.

Give him grounds to start a melee.

Nothing. She's not reason enough to—

Is. Irial never took a mortal till this one. She must be—

Irial hasn't allowed us to strike his lovely Gancanagh in almost always.

Torture him then? Make her do it?

They chortled and carried on until Leslie turned her eyes to the shadows and shot a pleading look at one of Gabriel's Hounds. In less time than it would've taken to speak, the Hound cleared the crowd, sent them scurrying by threat or force, hefting a few of them like misshapen balls and launching them down the street. Horrid splattering noises and shrieks resounded until even the man with the bodhran paused for a moment, looking about as if he heard some slight echo of the horrors he couldn't quite sense.

"They listen to you?" Niall asked.

"They do. They are good to me. No one has hurt me." She touched his chest where she knew his scars were hidden. Those scars told the answers to so many questions about him, about Irial, about the world she now called her home. She added, "No one has done anything but what I've asked of them. …"

"Including Irial?" Niall's face was as unreadable as his voice. His emotions, though, she felt those—hope and longing and fear and anger. He was a tangled mess.

Leslie wished she could lie, but she didn't want to, not to him, not knowing that he couldn't lie to her by word or emotion. "Mostly. He doesn't touch me without asking, if that's what you mean … but he made me this without asking, and I'm not sure anymore what's my choice and what's his. When I … I need him or I'm … it kills me, Niall. It's like starving, like something eating me alive from deep inside. It doesn't hurt. I don't hurt, but I know it should. The pain isn't there, but it doesn't stop me from screaming under it. Only Iri makes it… better. He makes everything better."

Niall leaned close to her ear and whispered, "I can stop it. I think I can undo it. I can get what I need to break his tie to you." And he told her that Aislinn would give him sunlight and the Winter Queen would give him frost, and he would burn and freeze the ink from her skin. "It should work. You'd be free of him. All of them."

Leslie didn't answer, didn't tell him yes or no. She couldn't.

"It's your choice." Niall cradled her face in his hands, looking at her the same way he had before, when she was not this. "You have a choice. I can give you that."

"What if it makes it worse?"

"Try to think what you'd choose if you weren't under his sway. Is this" — he paused—"what you would have chosen?"

"No. But I can't unchoose it either. I can't pretend I haven't become this. I won't be who I was before … and if the feelings come back, if I can leave, how do I live with what I've—"

"You just do. The things you do when you're desperate aren't who you are." Niall's expression had grown fierce, angry.

"Really?" She remembered the feeling, that moment when she looked at the ground and knew that even if Irial caught her the first time she jumped, there would be other times when she felt that desperation. The emotions she could just barely touch in that moment were a part of her as well. She was the person who chose this route. She thought back over the signs and warnings that something was amiss. She thought of the shadows she'd seen in Rabbit's office. She thought of the questions she hadn't asked Aislinn or Seth or Rabbit or herself. She thought of the shame she'd bottled up instead of seeking help. That was who she was; those were parts of her. They were all choices. To not act is a choice too.

"I don't think so, Niall," she heard herself say. Her voice wasn't soft or afraid. "Even under the addiction, it's me. I might not have had as many choices, but I'm still choosing."

She thought again of standing in the window of the warehouse. She could have chosen to jump. She hadn't. It would be giving up, giving in if I actually jumped. Isn't it better to endure? Theperson she was under the weight of her addiction was stronger than she'd realized she could be.

"I want a choice that doesn't hurt Irial or me," she said, and then she left him. Her choice would come—maybe not now, maybe not the choice Niall held out, and she wasn't going to let Irial or Niall or anyone else make it for her.

Not again.

The moon was well overhead when Irial crept across the room. It wouldn't do for mortals to see doors opening and closing on their own, so he stepped into the hall wearing his mortal-friendly façade. Several of the Hounds were standing guard outside the room, invisible to any mortals that might pass. There weren't any in the hall, though, so Irial let go of his glamour and shut the suite door behind him.

"Keep her inside if she wakes," he told the Hounds. "No wandering tonight."

"She doesn't cooperate so well. We could just follow, keep her safe and—"

"No."

Another Hound objected, "We don't want to hurt her … and she's so unhappy if we stop her from going out."

"So block the doors." Irial grimaced. He wasn't the only one swayed too much by his bond with Leslie. His weakness for her flowed into his whole court: they all had an unreasonably hard time doing anything Leslie disliked.

I weaken them. My affection for her cripples them.

The only way to work around it seemed to be keeping her from asking his faeries to do anything asinine. The alternative, breaking her irreparably, wasn't a path he wanted to consider.

Could I? He suppressed the answer before he let himself go further in that thought. Handing Niall over to his court had been horrific enough that he still dreamed of it. For centuries, he'd dreamed of how Niall had rejected him afterward. Weak kings didn't thrive. Irial knew that, but knowing didn't undo the ache when Niall chose to go to another court. That was a long-dead pain.