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I had been a soldier, even before the War of Thorns. That battle had only hardened me more. Martial combat was deep in my bones, and I had always longed for a partner who would wage war on me both with word and flesh. I suspected that Cricket would meet me dritto for reverso and push me back at every stage, and I’d let her. Seeing the flash of ire in her eyes had become my newest addiction.

“Fuck! The landlord!” I exclaimed as the Grey Hound performed a perfect posta di bicornio on me and forced me into the dirt on my ass.

“Whose landlord are we fucking?” he asked, bending to help me back up on my feet. “Been a while since I saw you at any brothel long enough to bed a landlord.”

“No, you cockheaded twat. Not fucking a landlord. The fucking landlord,” I grumbled.

“Captain, I think I might have hit you too hard. You’re not making any sense at all. Perhaps a little lie down in the temple? I’ll get the Bandrui to see if she can glue that brain of yours back together?”

“Oh, shut the fuck up, Grey Hound. I have elsewhere to be. Take command.”

It should have been harder to step through the mirror of her bedroom. I snorted my disdain for the shoddy workmanship of whomever had set the frail boundary on her mirror. Was it strange that a human with no connection to the Fae had even some means of protection on her portals? Not entirely. There were all manner of faiths in the human world that could mask energies and weave wards. Most humans, even the most benign of them, had some means of security in their homes from us. But my Cricket? She had what amounted to a wall made of tissue paper.

I gritted my teeth against the feel of the human realm across my skin. I hated this place. Even the air itself felt wrong, empty, lifeless, and void of magic. To a creature like me, this world was as inhospitable as the surface of the sun was to humans. I could only stand it for a short while, but I needed to ensure that whatever ties she had held here were seen to. She would not be returning to it. No matter what would transpire, I would not let her return here.

My last visit was cursory. But a few moments to peek in through the lens of her life and ensure that no threads of her previous life would be left dangling and bringing unwanted attention. Though Cricket believed us indiscriminate in our laws around slavery, there were still laws to be observed. Never take from the humans that which they will miss. It was a simple law that had over the eons been stretched around all manner of things from buttons to dresses to people to coinage.

I moved through the single room, with its simple bed on the floor and uncomfortable-looking bedding wadded up in the corner. Only a single pillow. If she had had a lover in this room, there would have been two. There were no decorations on the walls. No curtains on the window. No furniture aside from the bed, cords coming from the plug, and a pile of clothing in another corner.

I peeked into the open closet and found nothing but a discarded sack that looked like it might have contained groceries at one time.

Satisfied there was no evidence of a paramour, I moved from the lone room into the main living area. The desolation of this place crept into my body and twisted. The kitchen was dimly lit, the light over the sink flickering with age. The yellowing squat refrigerator whirred angrily. There were no pictures on it, like the few human homes that I had encountered before. No evidence of humanity at all. Just disrepair.

The only thing that seemed tended to was a lit-up tank that took up almost the entire back wall of one room. It looked like a habitat for some sort of creature, but whatever had once lived in it had long since fled, as the lid to the enclosure had been left off.

The television was pointed at the shambles of a couch, but there was no other evidence of humanity beyond that.

I spun on my heel as I took in the two and a half rooms of the home. This was where my Cricket had lived before she came to me. This was where she had slept at night. This was where she had eaten her meals.

It was awful.

There was no joy here. There was no love. There was nothing. Every piece of her life left in this room felt as if it had been holding its breath, waiting for the next stop on a journey.

The front door to the apartment had seven locks and a bar buried into the floor to keep it shut. If she had been welcoming anyone at all, it would have been a cold welcome.

There was nothing here but decay. It was hard to imagine the firebrand that I knew living here. I could not place her in any of the spaces she must have inhabited. I could not see her making a meal in the dusty kitchen. I could not imagine her coming through the door after a day at work. I could not see her showering in the cold, nearly empty bathroom. I couldn’t imagine anyone living in this place at all, except whatever had lived in the warm tank. That was the only thing in the entire apartment that looked like it had had any thought or investment of time put into it.

As I moved to stand before the tank, I wished whatever had been inside was still there. It would have been a nice gift to bring her back the creature she had shown so much love, but there was nothing. No trace of whatever animal had resided there.

My little bug was living up to being exactly what I said she was, a beautiful little liar.

A wry smirk pulled at my lips as I made my way back to the long mirror hanging on the back of the bathroom door and crawled through it.

Chapter 16

Seven more magical surgeries and three weeks passed. I did not see The Raven again.

The first week, I had stewed in my anger. By the second week, Violet had finally worked up enough pluck to ask me why I was staring at the storeroom door like I wanted to set it on fire. And I’d told her. The crunching of porcelain that was her laugh rolled through the storeroom and made me smirk despite myself.

The next day, she regaled me with the tale of her confronting The Raven while he was busy getting his face beaten in the bailey. She’d asked him if he was spitting up blood like that because he was trying to remember a task. She said he thought she had come as a matchmaker between herself and the Daughter of Dúluachair, who was her current mistress. How she’d chastised him for being so stupid and reminded him of his debt to me.

The first time I had darted anywhere on my newly healed legs was to the wash bin across the room, when I had woken up to a dozen dripping bloodied fleshy roses in a stunning glasswork vase on the tiny stool next to my platform.

The note read A beautiful liar, but my debt is paid nonetheless. An R had been inscribed and then crossed out with a larger E over it.

My grisly prize now lay in some midden heap Green Man had been all too pleased to locate for their final resting place. He was even more delighted to tell me that, in Human, he had been a farmer and could tell me with certainty that the flesh was not that of the pudgy man who had been my landlord but boar skin from the betrothal feast that had been held for one of the newly announced couples.

I was sponging myself down from a bucket of stale water when I heard the knock at the storeroom door. As my injuries had healed, I had started to be afforded a certain modicum of privacy. It was strange knowing that, the moment I would leave this temple, I would, once more, be worth no basic civilities.