Ryan Graudin - All That Glows

And I’m sure we’ve never met.

“You should be moving on now,” I tell her.

The huntress keeps walking, her stilettos stamp hard on the faux tile. Every step is a gunshot to my ears.

By the time the train pulls into Tower Hill, my entire car is abandoned. The feminine voice from the loudspeakers informs me that the train will terminate here. I stand, noting how much steadier my legs are after hours underground.

The streets outside are heavy with dark; only a few flickering streetlamps fight the shadows. Most of London is safely nestled behind locked doors, unaware that Black Dogs and other soul feeders are prowling, searching for easy prey in poor drunk souls.

Something twinges inside me. There’s another immortal nearby. I tense, my stare roving across sidewalks cast star-set blue by streetlamps.

“It’s just me.” I turn at the familiar voice to find her outline, lean and unmistakable: Breena.

Dread joins my ever-present nausea. I know why she’s tracked me down. She wants an account for what I’ve done: why I abandoned Richard so suddenly without requesting a replacement.

“Is there something you’d like to explain to me?” Breena approaches with selective steps, the same way a cat uses grass and slowness to snag a songbird. And as much as I want to, I can’t fly away. The older Fae would only follow.

There was a time when I would’ve told Breena everything. We’ve endured much together: the fall of Camelot; watching the Black Death wash over the kingdom, luring soul feeders to every doorway in Britain. Those three days when London was alight, a living hell of fire and ash. Handling monarchs like John Lackland and Mary I with tendencies bloodier than uncooked beef. And wars: the Wars of the Roses, the Hundred Years’ War, the War to End all Wars . . . so many wars.

Throughout all of this and against all the customs of our kind, Breena has treated me as an equal. Despite her one hundred years of seniority, she both advises and respects me. I trust her with my life and beyond.

“Let’s go for a walk,” she suggests. “I haven’t been to the Tower of London in a while.”

Breena’s energy seems boundless as she strides ahead. There’s no rust or corrosion in her aura. No weariness to her magic. As if all these modern metals and electric currents swirling around us don’t exist.

“How do you do it?” I strive to keep up the pace, hoping that my question will distract her from the reprimand I know is coming.

“What?” She looks back, and seeing my distance, immediately slows.

“London. The sickness. All of it. You haven’t been to the Highlands in twenty years. How do you keep going for so long?”

We approach the dreary, aging prison. I brush my hand against its cool, lichen-covered stones, and a chill shoots through me. Death and pain lie in these walls, stained with so much royal blood.

“Love, I think,” Breena says as we pass through the iron portcullis.

I blink, allowing the word to simmer for a moment. Love. A word most Fae never even think to utter. There was duty, magic, power, honor—but never love. That was for humans, to fill the gaps in their lives. To make the shortness of their years bearable.

“A man?” I choke out the possibility. Only a few of our kind got tangled up in the emotions of mortal men—we never spoke of them again.

“Oh no.” She shakes her head, blond curls bouncing. “No man. I mean all of them, the mortals. Their songs, their emotions, their creations, their stories. If you embrace this city and crawl under its skin . . . there’s something here. Much of the Guard has seen that. That’s why the younger ones have stayed here so long. Most of the older Fae are just too aloof to find it, they stay in the Highlands and dictate things from afar.”

“But the sickness. It’s been eating away at me for days.” I wrap my arms around my stomach, where the nausea burns always, like acid.

“I don’t even notice it anymore. For the most part,” Breena admits. “It balances out after a few years.”

“Will you ever go back to the Highlands?”

“Nothing but Mab’s direct order can drag me away from here.”

We walk into the center of the old fortress, coming to one of the few benches scattered across the Tower of London’s grassy squares. Breena sighs as she rests against the hard, wooden slats.

“Now, you must have an excellent explanation for what happened this morning, because, try as I might, I can’t think of a reason why you would abandon your post like that.”

I stare at the patch of lush, manicured grass. Beyond us, in the shadows of cannons and trees, sets of beady eyes stare back. They belong to the Tower ravens, gifted with speech and intelligence—prophets clad in black feathers. To call them “birds” would be an insult.

Though the Tower ravens can form words with their sharp tongues, it’s only after receiving their visions that they use this gift. The last time they spoke to our kind was many decades ago, when a blitz of fire and smoke nearly razed the entire city. Their vision foretold that doom.

For now, they’re silent. They lurk in the shadows, watching as I struggle for an excuse Breena might accept.

“It—it was too much. I got tired. I needed to go underground,” I say.

“Why not call for a replacement? One of the younglings would have been there in minutes.”

“I wasn’t thinking straight. I haven’t been in London for over a decade, Breena! Don’t you remember how intense the sickness is at first? I could barely cast a summoning spell. I needed to get underground.”

The older Fae’s eyes narrow, their arctic blue refusing to leave my face. “We both know that you’re stronger than that,” she says. “The prince got to you, didn’t he?”

I look over at my friend, trying to quell my panic. Does she know about the failed veiling spell? About how, instead of murmuring the spell to steal Richard’s memory, I turned and ran? I don’t see how—none but the prince and I were there to witness it.

“He’s different. . . .” I don’t know how to go on. Many things, like the strange jolts that seized me when our eyes met and my careless touch, should be kept secret.

“Richard’s made all of us emotional. There’s not one Fae in the Guard who hasn’t been frustrated after a few shifts with him,” Breena assures me. “It’s nothing to worry about. You just have to push past it.”

Frustrated. Breena thinks I’m frustrated. She doesn’t know what happened in the garden.

But what about the draw between us? The connection? Had any of the other Fae felt that?

“Why, though? What makes him so different? None of the other royals have ever caused such trouble. . . .”

Something of a smile plays across Breena’s face. It’s times like these—all blonde and knowing—that she reminds me of the angels in the illuminations which monks used to paint into their scriptures. They spent hours bent over their manuscripts, brushes poised at just the right angle to capture the etherealness of their scenes.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard and asked that very question. I think,” she pauses, allowing her thoughts to fall in order, “some mortals have spirits that are stronger than others. Souls they haven’t yet grown into. They have potential, great potential . . . but until they learn how to harness it, they’re all chaos. Richard is one of those: a strong spirit who doesn’t yet know his place.”