Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

She didn't know what to expect when they finally got to the supposed site of fairy shenanigans. But it wasn't Seth telling her that they had to crawl across the ground from that point on. "They don't like humans or any being or creature that's humanlike," he said before she could ask. Then just as she was about to wonder aloud if they were the former or the latter, and whether that felt weird to him, he came out with something even more alarming.

"Okay, you see that shimmer? When we go through it, hold your breath."

He pointed, and sure enough she saw something in the air suspended between two trees. A kind of curtain, it looked like. Or a veil. Only not as obvious as those things would be. When she turned her head just slightly, it seemed to disappear. Then she turned her head back again, and there it was. A gauzy glitter, painted on nothingness. Unsettling, but sort of lovely.

"What is that?" she whispered. Then had no idea why she was already keeping quiet. It just felt like a hushed sort of moment, she supposed. And anyway, he whispered back.

"It's how they hide."

"So they actually use something."

"They kind of have to. I mean, people would trample them."

She pictured it when he said it. A bunch of hikers, unwittingly stamping on a twee little fairy village. Though if what he had said was true, the village probably wasn't that twee. Or even a village. It was something else. Something she had a lot of questions about.

"But the veil means people can't trample them somehow?"

"It makes people swerve around them."

"And it does something different to us."

The nonhumans , she thought. And this time her inward shiver was less pronounced. Like it was starting to sink in. It was starting to be a thing she could accept.

In part, she thought, because of Seth's eminently matter-of-fact and kind of goofy way of describing things. "Yeah. We see it," he said. "We can go through it. But if we breathe it in, it will absolutely wreck us. It will just make you feel like the most drunk you've ever been in your life. You won't even be able to stand up straight or remember what you did."

Though of course she knew why he was describing it that way.

She felt it immediately, and not with her witch senses. With her Seth senses.

"And did someone tell you that before you ever tried going through, or did you find out the hard way?" she asked, one eyebrow raised. And in response he grimaced and hung his head.

"Yeah, I found that one out the hard way."

"Woke up hungover and missing one shoe, huh."

"Only because the fairies stole it. Some of them live in it now," he said, almost marveling.

It was okay though. She understood why the marveling was happening.

"Holy crap, you weren't kidding about them being menaces."

"Oh, you don't even know the half it. Sometimes they get inside your walls."

"You mean like… you mean like The Borrowers ?"

"Yeah, but if The Borrowers ate your cat," he said. Then before she could dig deeper into that little nightmare, he added, "Now stay low." And just started crawling forward. As if she were going to be able to follow him, with the concept of cat-eating bug-sized people in her head.

"Seth, wait," she hissed after him. But he was already halfway through the veil and still going. And once he was through she would be out here, in the woods, amongst the shadow people.

So she shuffled forward, reluctantly, through the mossy under growth. Clothes snagging on twigs and brambles, dirt getting just about everywhere, breath held before she even reached the shimmering thing. Then she got to it and realized:

It wasn't just the fairies making her nervous.

It was this curtain of colors. The one that she could now feel buzzing and humming faintly against her face, her hands. That she could feel buzzing and humming inside her body —as if some part of it resonated in some part of her .

Someone like me made this , she found herself thinking.

And ultimately it was this idea that made her plunge forward.

Quickly, so she didn't have time to think about it too much.

Though she kept her eyes closed as she did. And she didn't open them, even after making it through. She just lay there on what felt like a bed of yet more twigs and dirt, taking tiny sips of probably alcoholic air. Looking at nothing, taking in nothing, not even sure if Seth was with her still.

Until she felt his hand on her shoulder.

His breath against the side of her face. A hushed whisper: Hey, you can look now. So she did. She let her eyes open a tiny bit. Just enough, she felt, to only see the smallest part of whatever horrors they were perpetrating.

And saw instead what seemed like the whole universe.

Just there, laid out in miniature, in a bowl of ivy and brambles.

Clear as day, thanks to the glow cast over the whole scene. Then she realized with a jolt: it wasn't just a glow. It was their moon . They had made an actual moon, somehow, in a sky as vast to them as hers was to her. Then somehow, they had dotted that sky with stars. Every single one a different color, and of a sort she could never have imagined. Even after what Seth had said, even after everything she'd thought, pastels were the thing that came to mind.

But this wasn't pastels. It was like the veil. It was almost holographic.

She thought of kaleidoscopes, of mirror balls. And even more so when her eyes adjusted enough that she could see them.

Because they weren't easy to glimpse. They were fast—just flickers of movement at first. And so small she honestly mistook them for motes of dust. But then one of them flitted directly into the beam of that great light, and turned just so, and oh god it stole her breath. It stole her words. She wanted to say something to Seth—to grab him and say "Oh my goodness oh my goodness."

But she couldn't. It was too much.

It was a whole tiny person .

She could see it had a perfectly formed, pretty little face, skin a deep brown, leaves woven between locks of curled hair. Clothes made out of bark, tiny hands and tiny feet, and when she squinted, oh yes, there it was. A set of wings, fine as gossamer, iridescent as oil in water, and fluttering so fast she could hardly make them out. She had to wait until one landed on what looked like an upturned can of beans, before it really became clear.

Then of course it was the can of beans that had her attention.

The way they'd carved windows into it. And used cobwebs instead of glass.

Two of them emerged from a door made out of a bottle cap, as she watched.

And there was more, there was more. There were streets lined with pencil cases, and makeup palettes turned into hot tubs. Old Barbie cars full of seething little bodies of all shapes and size; bottles filled with fairies licking the obviously intoxicating insides.

And all of it, always, surrounded by magic.

Suffused with it, in a way she could feel even more strongly than she had with the veil.

This didn't just hum inside her. It sang , down deep in her bones. She saw one of them—naked and plump and pink and streaked with mud—hurl a bomb of stuff that sparkled when it exploded, right in the face of the fairy no doubt responsible for the filthy state it was in. And when it did, two things happened:

Said fairy immediately turned into a tiny frog.

And Cassie felt her entire body vibrate.

A great burst of words went through her head: I can do that, I can transmogrify, I just need caterpillar cocoons and the reflection of starlight in a puddle and walnut shells, lots of walnut shells crushed into a fine powder.

And oh god, it was just. It was so overwhelming.

It was everything she'd ever hoped was waiting for her, just beyond the reach of reality. Which was probably why, when Seth turned to her, he said, "See, I told you they were a completely awful, terrible nightma—Oh my god , are you crying ?"

And she couldn't say anything about it.

He was absolutely right. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

"Of course I'm crying. It's all so beautiful."

"Cassie, one of them is eating its own toenails."

"Honestly, stuff like that only makes it more amazing. It makes it more real. They are real beings, they really exist, even though they're tiny and they have wings and they light their world with a moon they made up," she said, and wanted to say more too. But she had to stop for a moment, because she was getting choked up. And when she finally managed to continue, she could only ask, "I mean, can't you see how wondrous this is? How amazing? How beautiful?"

Then felt incredibly silly about it.

Because he didn't answer right away. He was silent for quite a while. And then he gave her a single, solitary, sad-sounding yes —but when she turned to look at him, he wasn't even looking at this amazing, beautiful thing. He was looking at her. He was staring at her, only her.

Much to her exasperation. "You're not even paying attention to them," she chided.

And in response he sort of jerked. He seemed flustered. Like he'd been caught red-handed cheating on a test and couldn't think of a good way out of it. He just looked at the fairy world spread before them—as if to make up for not listening or not seeing what she saw.

Though all it did was make her feel strangely awkward.

And the awkwardness increased when she stared out at the scene in front of them, and realized what was going on a few inches from their faces. A bunch of fairies, romping away together in a big heap of tangled limbs. Everything all messy and sticky and greedy, in a way that should have been funny. It should have been ridiculous.

But instead, she found herself thinking of that time they had watched Dracula together.

Sometime after the thing at the quarry, she thought it must have been, because she remembered she hadn't wanted to wear a big T-shirt and nothing else, like usual. She had gotten under the comforter in her closet with full pajamas on. And he hadn't even taken off his jeans.

Though it hadn't mattered.

Everything had still felt so incredibly naked. As if every accidental touch dissolved the clothes between them. His forearm brushed against hers under the comforter, and she had thought of the thick hair he had there now, the muscles burgeoning farther up. And when their thighs had accidentally kissed, he'd muttered a word under his breath.

Shush , she'd wanted to believe it was. So soft , she knew it had been.

Because it had made her blush. It had made her go over and over it in her head, wondering if he'd meant it in the good way. If he liked how plush she was, in a manner she had struggled to imagine anyone doing, at the time.

In fact, she still struggled now when it came to Seth. She looked back at that heated moment through a kind of fog. All of it blurred by memories, of him hanging out with those jackasses. Of things he said he hadn't meant to say, but still had anyway.

And it made it hard to see. To understand what had happened, as that little closet grew hotter and hotter, and the film grew more and more seductive, until finally they sat side by side, their eyes locked to the screen, both of them breathing too quick and sweating too much.

Silent, she remembered.

Until finally he'd said, in a strangled whisper, "I don't think we should watch anymore. It's making me want to… you know." And of course, she'd pretended she hadn't known what you know meant. But she had, and she knew even harder here, now, looking back on it through adult eyes.

If I'd said go ahead, what would we have done , she found herself thinking. Then even more intensely: What would we do now, in the same position? Because it felt like they were—she couldn't deny it. They were trying not to watch something ridiculously steamy, while sitting far too close together.

Just like they had then.

In fact, this was worse, because they weren't even sitting. They were lying down. And neither of them had thought a thing about where they'd put their limbs, after they'd messily crawled through the veil. Which meant their thighs weren't just accidentally touching. They were practically tangled with each other. She could feel the heavy weight of one of his over hers. His hips against what felt like her waist.

And then lastly, oh lastly.

His hand was on her back.

She could feel it, as burning hot now as it had seemed cool and insignificant before. It was searing through her sweater. In a sec ond it was going to leave a brand, in the exact shape of his too firmly pressing palm.

Then that palm abruptly slid down, and god, god.

He wasn't going to actually do that, was he? He wasn't going to touch her there ?

He hates me there , she told herself. Only, telling herself that wasn't working as well as it always had in the past. How could it, when he'd said what he'd said just before he'd carried her over the gorge? He told you he didn't mean the insult , her brain rambled. He told you he was just repeating what Jason said .

And even though that likely meant nothing at all, even though it didn't mean he found her butt suddenly sexy, she held her breath. As if she actually wanted him to. As if she liked the idea of him liking it. As if she had just been waiting around all this time, mooning over the idea of the Great Seth Brubaker being all gone over her ass.

Which was not the case, at all.

Yet somehow, it didn't feel like terror or disgust over him doing it, either. It was some jumbled, messy thing in between. Thick with heat, but sharp with fear and confusion. And each of those feelings seemed to feed on the other, until she could hardly stand it any longer. She thought she might go mad, she might do something completely terrible, if this lasted one second more.

So it was really a relief when reality brought her back to her senses.

Or not reality , exactly.

More like a screech, of a sort her human ears had never heard before—tiny and thin, yet somehow painfully shrill at the same time. And when it came, his hand snapped away from her lower back. Like it had never been there. Like she'd just imagined it all, the same way she'd probably imagined it all back then, too, while watching Dracula in her closet.

Things just aren't like that between us , she told herself.

And that put her mind straight.

Which was good, because that shriek? It meant that they had been spotted. One of them had seen, and now it was shrieking its little lungs out. It was shouting so loud, in fact, she could actually make out the words after a second. Big ones, big ones are here, big ones have invaded , it cried in a weird language that she could somehow understand, anyway.

Then in response, a bunch of them immediately swarmed up to where this little snitch sat, on the tip of a leaf. Most of them clearly furious, some of them already carrying tiny weapons, others wearing bits and bobs as armor. Like they had a little defense force, she thought, and tried not to marvel over it all.

Because right now, she really needed her wits about her.

Seth was already getting up. And he was dragging her with him.

"Okay, we have to run," he said. "We have to run this instant."

Then suddenly they were barreling through the undergrowth in what felt like the wrong direction, with a fairy army hot on their heels. And it was hot and it was heels. She could really hear the fairies now, loud and clear. I claim their butt cheeks for my next batch of bottom soup , one of them yelled. Get his shoes , another cried. Then ridiculously, inexplicably: Dave needs a new house .

So of course all she could think was: One of them is called Dave ?

As she tried to avoid crashing into a tree.

In fact, she only managed because Seth grabbed her. He got hold of her arm and hauled her left, just as she tried to go right. And when she almost stumbled into a hole covered with rotten wood, he did something even wilder. He somehow grabbed her around the waist, a millisecond before she went in, and lifted her over it.

All in one smooth motion.

Like he didn't just have feet that were on wheels.

Every part of him was. Right down to his senses.

"Duck," he said, and she did, narrowly avoiding a branch that would have whacked her in the face. Then just before they reached the veil, he called out a warning. But it was okay, it was fine, because that sense warned her first. She felt it ring through her, loud as a gunshot.

Then she held her breath. She plunged through.

She made it to the other side, and safety.

And was surprised to find it was actually safety, too. The fairy armed forces hadn't come through. It was just them, breathing hard, half terrified, half laughing. His hands on his knees, hers on her hips. Everything as it had been before.

Yet not the least bit the same at all.

Oh, she knew it wasn't the same. She could feel it clearly in everything they did, from that point on. It was in the easy way they walked back to the gorge together, and jumped over. And in the look on his face, when she told him she'd make more potion for him. And how, as she walked up the steps to her house, he briefly caught her hand and clasped it.

Like it was nothing now, to touch her.

Then just as she was feeling overwhelmed by that gesture, he spoke. He said, "Oh wait, I almost forgot. I got this for you." And he took a book from his back pocket. A guide of some sort: Taking Your First Steps into Accidental Witchery .

Nothing, really, on the surface.

But underneath, she knew what it meant.

She felt it immediately, keenly: the deal didn't matter to him. He didn't care if he was no longer the only source of help to her, and so might possibly lose what she did for him. All that mattered was that he had something she needed—and oh that thought made her heart ache. It made her almost burst with the need to say, I would do the same thing for you .

But by the time she looked up, he had gone.