Free Poison Kissed by Erica Hayes

daydreams, and soaked my nights with feversweat. I was high when it happened, my nerves strung tight on fight and sparkle, my blood afire with stolen fae adrenaline. Maybe it wasn’t real. Maybe I’d hallucinated the whole thing.
    Maybe I just needed to get laid.
    God, I was so pathetic. I couldn’t even wish myself back to the days before I’d noticed him like this. I’d noticed him that very first night in the spriggan gang’s squat, when he lifted me up by my shackle-scabbed hand. My knees had buckled, my feet slipping on the greasy floor, but he helped me stand, his hands cool and reassuring on my waist. He’d touched my bleeding lip with a single gentle fingertip, his eyes for once warm and compassionate, and said, Are they hurting you, miss?
    I’d never forgotten that shy, shivering melt in my heart when I realized he meant they shouldn’t.
    He’d paid the spriggan off on the spot by smacking the bastard’s grinning head against the wall until it bled and stopped wriggling. Vicious justice, maybe, but it impressed the hell out of me, and from that day, it was Joey for me.
    He cleaned me up, gave me a fresh start. It wasn’t easy, shivering and screaming and choking on nosebleeds, and a dozen times I wanted to give up. But I wanted Joey’s approval more. He found me a place to stay, a real house where they didn’t use my body or stuff drugs up my nose, and if sometimes I couldn’t pay the rent, no one ever came looking. He even found me jobs, off and on, basic stuff but clean, and sometimes he’d drop by to check on me unannounced.
    I lived for those days, his quiet questions, the heart-stopping flash of his smile.
    He wasn’t like anyone else I knew. He never lied, or apologized. Never patronized me. Never touched me. Like a dark knight from a fairy tale, cold and distant but ever-present, and people soon learned not to make my life difficult. Not unless they wanted trouble.
    Gifts are suspicious when you’re alone and vulnerable, and for a long time I waited and hoped to see what he wanted in return. But he’d already gotten it: loyalty, blind and absolute. I’d have done anything for him, and though he asked little at first—some spying here, a little spine-tingling thieving there, the occasional con trick or streetfight mayhem—I wanted more. I learned to fight so I could impress him, and soon no one gave me shit anymore.
    Safety, shelter, a decent living. He gave me all those things. But what he really gave me was a reason to live.
    When he kept his distance, I told myself I was only sixteen, and he was too old for me. Besides, he was an up-and-coming friend of important friends, a cousin of Salvatore DiLuca himself, and me just a cheap sparkleblind whore.
    I wasn’t sixteen anymore.
    I banged my head and clawed the mirrors with screeching nails, but my body wouldn’t relax, my blood boiling with empty hunger. Even now that I finally had this job, and got to see him every night, he still pushed me away. Like he went out of his way to prove he didn’t trust me, when the very fact that I still worked for him proved that he did.
    My hands shook, my magicspiced reflexes jerking to leap, strike, kill. Fuck it. I couldn’t function like this. It’d get me killed. I needed distance. I needed to get my mind back on the job. Where the fuck was Cobalt? He should’ve called by now.
    Seven years had passed, and I was no closer to finding my mother’s murderer and the healing I craved, that I’d get only when the bastard lay dead at my hands. But recently I’d found something that might help. Something dangerous and edgy, painful like razor oblivion and as compelling.
    I gritted my teeth, remembering last time, how the mindscrape had hurt me, how I’d woken weeping and covered in scratches from my own ripped nails. Digging through your own suppressed memories was a ragged road to insanity. But it might help. It had to help. I didn’t know what else to do. If I didn’t find my mother’s killer,