Free Shadowfae by Erica Hayes Page A

with the need to touch someone, anyone. Another shower for me when I got home, this time a cold one.
    A pair of seagulls pecked squashed chips and fallen figs off the concrete on the corner of CarltonGardens. HugeMoretonBay trees loomed in the dimness above sun-browned lawn, fruit bats circling in the streetlight’s halo. A sunflower-hued water sprite hung from the streetlight, swinging lazily from one translucent long-fingered hand, dripping sweet-smelling silver droplets from her rippling wings onto the footpath. Her soft song floated on the still air like dust, lonely. I thought of Nyx, and my heart ached.
    I glanced across at Rajah, who was keeping his word, walking on the footpath’s outer edge, not looking at me. I realized I didn’t know where he lived, and I wondered how far he was going out of his way for me. The least I could do was say something. “How do you do that, anyway?”
    “How do I do what?”
    “Disappear.”
    He shrugged, sweat gleaming on his arms. “Barely. It’s a mortal trick I learned from a jaduwala in Kabul. A magician.”
    “You learned magic?” I was intrigued in spite of myself, dread tightening my stomach. I’d dabbled in a bit of witchcraft once, when I was young and stupid.
    “It’s what got me into this mess. I was irresponsible. I lusted for more power than I could handle, and I got careless. A student of mine . . .” Rajah’s eyes stormed briefly, dark. “He watched me, I let him get too close. He stole everything I had, my power, my reason, my dignity. He traded me to Kane in return for some tricks.” He shook his head, damp black hair sticking to his cheek. “I never wanted immortality. It’s funny how things work out. How about you?”
    Nervousness tingled, and I pretended I didn’t know what he meant. “How about me what?”
    “You know. Those.” He gestured to my bangles, careful not to touch me.
    My cheeks burned as I reflected on the hellish convent where I’d grown up. The stink of piss-starched linen, shutters pulled forever over the windows. Days of prayers, lessons, more prayers, starvation rations, and a thrashing the penalty for a mistake. Biting my split lips when the bruises stung under the rough white cloth that hid my face. Sleepless nights waiting in terror for cold, grasping hands. The night I finally escaped, I was limping as I crawled out into the stinking dung heap, squinting through one eye at magnificent, sprawling, shit-streaked London, the other eye swollen like a pea stuffed in its pod.
    Fifteen endless years old, with neither love nor pity in my heart. I sank into rebellious days of picking pockets and robbing graves, confidence tricks with my hair stuffed under a boy’s cap or curled in ringlets like a lady’s. Nights of mad absinthe-soaked reveling, ripped satin gowns dyed verdant with arsenic, paste diamonds in my ears, all the men I wanted and some I didn’t but took anyway because I could. I got diseases, and I sloughed them away with vinegar or whiskey or some other poison. I never got pregnant; the nuns and their gnarled beating stick had seen to that. I cursed the Church like it cursed me, and crawled laughing into the fringes of a shadow world, where the altars were dark, the crosses upside down, the rituals blended with blood and orgasm. The Continent, Paris, Amsterdam, Constantinople, wherever the black word spread me.
    And then Vorenus Luna, the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. The face of an angel, the body of a god, and not the slender weeping god nailed to those crosses but a glorious, virile idol of the weird who fairly glowed with power. Come with me, Jade, kiss me once more and I’ll show you real magic, not just fucking on an altar to spite some foolish absent lord. Take me the way I want it and I’ll make you immortal.
    Now I had real diamonds, silk gowns embroidered with golden thread, a carriage with horses, and all the man I wanted, for I only wanted one. He trained me in his every pleasure, molding me in