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Chapter Six
“A sweet-face man; a proper man, as one shall see in a summer's day.”
—Pyramus, Act 1,A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The fae was all around us. Right within our sight, our touch, and beneath our feet.
Although those with magic and those without dwelled for the most part in separate realms, Sai saw first-hand, just now, how the two worlds could collide.
The Master came to him in the shadows of his hiding place last night. An ominous, formless black mist that withered everything it touched. Without sound or words, they conveyed that he would have “help” on the day of his visit to his prey.
Jailors, in other words.
Two demons with mouths packed with sharp teeth so large they could never close them. Beady black eyes and long, dagger-like claws.
To the human eye, they looked like strapping young footmen when they carried Sai’s gift into the Rathbourne residence. Or, rather, the Master’s gift. Once done, they blended back into the shadows between buildings, so that only Sai could sense their presence, lurking in the grimy spaces no one else would think to look.
The carriage he arrived in was made of brambles and thorns cast into iron. The wheels were misshapen and rusted, as if they were retrieved from a sunken ship that had been buried in the ocean for centuries. Probably, they had been.
But humans saw a perfectly constructed phaeton, gleaming with metallic accents, buffed to a mirror shine. Like the ones in theGrimm’s Fairy Talesthat Sai had glimpsed in the book store when he first began to spy on his prey.
For a moment, he thought that humans knew all about the Immortal Kinds and their magic. For, the store was filled with books about dragons and demons, angels and elves.
But he realized while he watched Brigid entertain the children during story time that these particular tales were invented for amusement. They weren’t supposed to be real.
If only humans knew the truth.
Case in point: The so-called flowers the demon servants brought in were nothing but a collection of grotesque insects, worms, and snakes. Sai had to surreptitiously kill a few that escaped the arrangement before they could slither into the family’s private rooms or create an infestation in the kitchen.
They were all spies of the Master, whispering secrets in the buzzing chittering of insects. Things that crawled behind walls and rotted brick and wood. Destroying the foundation and fabric of hearth and home.
But humans only saw fallen petals lying prettily on the ornate table, blown hither and thither by unseen bursts of air.
They were so easy to deceive, these weakling mortals. Their senses dulled by living pampered, soft lives; their mental acuities blunted to perceive only what they wanted to perceive.
They were like flocks of coddled sheep, waiting to be slaughtered.
Sai had never spent much time in the human world. And when he was here, he’d been in dragon form deep beneath the seas where no one could disturb him. In the past couple of millennia, since the Master imprisoned him, he’d been trapped in the other realm with their collection of unsavory creatures.
Always in darkness. Starving.
His body festering with unhealed, rotten wounds. Kept weak and helpless by the nourishment they denied him.
His prison was a dry, salted pit. The bottom was a bed of nails, sharp and long enough to stab through his scales and into his flesh. Wherever they jabbed into him, poison spread.
He would lie there in one position for days or weeks, for moving even a little only gave the barbs a new place to insert themselves. He was fed against his will, for he would have preferred death to this endless, agonizing torture. He didn’t even have to open his mouth to drink or eat. A black shroud would cover him and forcibly fill his body.
Never enough to strengthen him, however. Only to keep him on this side of the living.
No one spoke to him, for the other creatures in the Master’s collection didn’t use words he could understand, only rumbles, screeches and hisses. The Master never communicated out loud either, but he could hear their thoughts and intentions in his mind.
This mission he was tasked with, this one chance he had to gain his freedom and those of his friends—it was the first time in five thousand years that he walked in sunlight. Breathed air, foul with city stink though it was.
And today, sitting in the Rathbourne’s parlor, he was offered beverage and food.
His stomach had churned and gnawed on itself at the sight of abundant tea cakes and pastries piled high on a platter. The tea was deliciously fragrant, its scent steaming up to his nostrils in teasing tendrils.
His jaw ached with how hard he clenched it. He wanted so badly to taste the food. To drink the libation.
