“Andyoushould stop trying to lie to my face,” said Lord Fine. “I just found you trapped in some kind of sleeping disturbance. It was as if you were paralyzed. I’ve never seen a nightmare like it. Yet you seem so completely unsurprised that I’m certain you go through whatever that was on a regular basis.”
The bright orange-and-red flames would die down soon, but for now were still dancing high. They sat without speaking for a moment, watching the fire, the rain loud against the glass.
Lord Fine spoke first. “Jade told me some of your past. The blood magic.”
Sebastian stiffened.
“I realize I don’t fully know the standards of your paranormal world,” Lord Fine added, “but that sounded very much like the stuff of nightmares.”
Sebastian chewed on his lip. “Not nightmares, exactly,” he tentatively admitted. “Well, yes, nightmares too, but these are technically blood terrors.”
“Blood.Terrors.”
“My blood was under another’s control. Sometimes, in sleep, the chains come back.”
Lord Fine’s voice was unsteady as he said, “So you, what? Can’t move until your blood remembers you’re free?”
I don’t know that my blood has ever remembered how to be free.Sebastian didn’t say it out loud, just nodded as he watched the fire flicker.
“Well that sounds absolutely wretched,” Lord Fine said flatly. “What brings them on?”
Sebastian tried to shrug, the movement jerky. “They come at random, perhaps more often when I get cold during sleep. It’s not as bad as it sounds,” he lied. “I can usually break the magic with something familiar.”
“So does someone stay with you to snap you out of it?”
Sebastian hadn’t shared a room with anyone since before the Puppeteer’s death. He shook his head.
Lord Fine frowned. “So what have you been doing?”
“Oh, you know,” Sebastian said awkwardly. “Using...familiar things.”
Lord Fine’s eyes narrowed. “Familiar like a painting of your childhood home?”
Sebastian winced. “Well—”
“The painting now hanging in Kensington to keep some nonmagical fellow’s home safe?” Lord Fine snapped at him. “Did you give away the very thing you use to break your blood terrors?”
Sebastian pulled the blanket up over the back of his head like a cloak. He wasn’thiding, he was just staying warm. “You needed that painting more than I did.”
“I wouldn’t have if I hadn’t destroyed your first one!”
“But you didn’t know,” Sebastian protested. “You had good reasons not to trust me.”
Lord Fine leaned forward, enough so there was now only a couple feet between them. “Stop making excuses for me.”
“But—”
“I saidstop it,” Lord Fine said, with the imperiousness of the aristocracy behind him. “I’m not made of glass. If you’ll recall, I was in the war too, butIwasn’t a medic.”
Sebastian glanced at him from under the edge of the blanket. “What does that mean?”
“It means everything you saw in your medical tent, I did or ordered done to the other side.” Lord Fine’s voice was tight. “You don’t arm your medics and send them onto the field, and you don’t call for a medic to interrogate the man who knows where your captured soldiers are held prisoner but won’t talk. Trust me, Sebastian: you don’t need to sugarcoat your demons. Not for me.”
Oh. Sebastian swallowed. “I’m sorry that happened to all of you,” he said quietly.
“Not good memories, no, but you seem to know a thing or two about that,” Lord Fine said gruffly. “My point is that I can handle the consequences of my own actions, I can handle your past, and I can handleyou, particularly because I suspect you’re so sweet that if I broke out the handcuffs again, you’d let me use them on you. I swear, you’re like something out of a storybook, a fae prince who escaped an evil curse and now martyrs himself for the good of the ungrateful humans, and I refuse to be part of such a fanciful fairy tale.”
Sebastian furrowed his brow. “You might be the one being fanciful.”
