“Give me this geas,” he says through tears. He’s a mess. It’s unsightly. “I cannot live with the wanting anymore.”
I lay upon him the geas, and I am not sorry to spend the magic upon him. But we are not the same after all. Because I will live with the wanting forever and be glad for it. I will eat my own heart and consume my last hopes and not waver. I can barely look at his faithless carcass when I am done.
I’m surprised when he leaves without seeing her. Surprised, and yet my heart beats a little faster with anticipation. I need not share this meeting with someone else.
When the mayflies descend, I close my eyes and let them settle across my skin and over my face and arms. And when I finally open my eyes, she is there.
She does not speak.
She never does.
And it’s madness that I’m overly conscious of how her eyes widen at the wings on my back and how she seems to be nervous this time as she approaches me. Her wide eyes speak a thousand things and I only understand the edges of them.
“Lady,” I say, making my tone velvet soft and doing all I can to keep the longing out of it. “It has been too long.”
She nods at that, and her eyes are fiery where they latch onto mine. She has not liked that I have stayed away for so long. She does not want me to be gone for so long again. It has been what – two moons by her time? Not long for a mortal – no longer than fifty years is to an immortal like me.
“I seek your guidance, lady,” I whisper as she sways closer. “Your help in a thorny problem.”
I must not be like the mad mortal. I must not give my soul to her unasked for. And yet the strange fire burns within.
I hold up the little wicker cage where the bee buzzes. Not a natural cage of course. Not a natural bee. The second of the two magic bees I captured after our last meeting.
Her eyes narrow and I laugh my tinkling fae laugh that has charmed so many and does not charm her at all.
“I know better than to give you a living thing in a cage. I’ll not make the same mistake twice,” I say, opening the whicker globe. The bee leaps from it, rising to sting my lip. I ignore the sting. It has stung me before. Magic, it may be. Docile, it is not.
It flies from my lips directly to her, buzzing happily and then setting down in her cupped hands.
I’m not certain at first if she accepts my offering but then she looks up, wide-eyed as if utterly shocked by my gift. Her mouth falls open and she stumbles a single step toward me.
That look is enough to undo any man. Perhaps she turned it on the mortal before he gave his life to her. I don’t care if it is a trick. I am overcome.
My own lips fall open in a mirror of hers and I grasp the sharp-edged bars of her cage in both my fists. I feel the stickiness of blood from where the bars have cut me, and I don’t care.
It’s all I can do to bow my head and drop to my knees. It’s all I can do not to break utterly under the vulnerability of her gaze. She will be my undoing. I have not realized how she has stripped me to the core and how I am utterly at her mercy. But I am, I am.
“Show me,” I beg her, my voice cracking on the last word.
And she does.
* * *
