xvi.

HE WAITED.

FOUR days later, she showed up at his house, and she wasn't crying, and she wasn't angry. She was sort of resigned and sad.

He offered her something to drink, offered for her to sit down in the living room, and she just shook her head.

Her face looked wan and tired. "You don't understand."

He wanted to sit down, but she was standing, so he stood. They stood in his living room, and he eyed a throw blanket slithering off his brown leather couch. "I do understand."

"Oh, yeah? So, explain it to me."

"I don't think of you like a possession."

"I said explain, not argue." She was frustrated.

"Right." He nodded. "All right, I do… I want you. I can't live without you. And I can't let you die." He shrugged. "I know you're angry, because of wanting your choices and all of that, but you're not going to make the right choice, so—"

"So, you're just going to take my choice from me, is that it? For my own good? Because you know better than me. Because we're not equal—"

"I'm trying to make us equal," he countered. "When we spoke, the first night, I said that there was disparity because you could spend the rest of your life with me but I couldn't spend the rest of my life with you, and I just remedied that shit." His voice had gone hard. Huh. That was interesting. He hadn't realized he was angry about this.

Her nostrils flared. "You can't make us equal, Hollis."

He sat down on the couch, stunned.

"You don't think of anyone as being… well… real like you are."

"That's not fair," he muttered. "I… we're not the same species. It's—"

"Oh, seriously?" She gaped at him. "So, you're just superior to me, and I'm just your little pet—"

"No," he said. "No, it's not like that."

"You could have asked me before you did this."

"Yeah, I know, I just… I guess I wasn't thinking it through."

"Bullshit," she said, shaking her head at him. "Bullshit, you did so think it through."

He went still. Well, he should have realized she'd see right through him. This was his soul mate, after all, the woman he'd waited an eternity for. "Okay, okay." He lifted both hands. "I get that it was manipulative, and I'm sorry—"

"You admit that you were trying to manipulate me." Her voice broke.

"Don't be like that about it," he said. "You said it, you said that we were in love, and I never felt like this. And then I thought, I thought… she's going to die. And I can't. I can't go through that."

"So, you just kidnapped my skin and turned me into a trapped, kept doll."

"No, I'm saving you."

"I don't want to live forever, Hollis."

"Everyone wants to live forever," he said, waving this away.

"No, they don't." She was insistent about this. "Look, yes, everyone is afraid of dying, but that's not the same thing as wanting to live forever. If you take death away, you can't live. Living becomes meaningless, because it just goes on and on. Nothing matters unless there's an ending. So, no, I don't want that. I see how you are, right? And nothing matters to you."

"You matter to me."

"Because I'm going to die," she said.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "Because you're you, because you—"

"Because I'm alive ," she said. "You love the way I want things, the purity of my desire, right? Well, eventually, after several centuries, I won't want like that anymore. I'll get bored with wanting. There will be nothing else to want."

He was quiet. Was she right? He didn't know how to respond to that.

"I don't want to live forever," she said. "Give me my sealskin back."

He fiddled with one of his antlers. She'd surprised him. She'd surprised him, and no one surprised him, no one had in hundreds of years. That was why she was his soul mate, after all. But now, he'd really fucked up. He had entirely misunderstood her. "All right, I'll get it for you. Do you want to come with me, into the pocket I made in Faerie? Do you want to see it?"

She hunched up her shoulders. "Hollis, you can't—"

"No, I understand," he said. "You're done with me. We're breaking up."

A tear slid down out of one eye. "You used me. You made me into a receptacle of your pleasure. You didn't care about what I wanted, just what you wanted from me."

"Yeah," he whispered. "I fucked up."

"Just get the skin," she said, hugging herself. "I don't want to go on some little trip into Faerie with you. I don't—it hurts to be around you."

"Give me ten minutes," he said.

FIFER SAT ON her bed in her room, fingering the sealskin.

She thought she would have been crying. And she was sad. Really, really sad. But she didn't seem to have the energy for tears.

He'd just gone and gotten it, after all that. He handed it over, and he was solemn. He said he was sorry, that she was right about everything, and that he felt terrible.

But that hadn't helped either.

She sat there, fingering the sealskin and wondering if the very reason that he was other and strange and possessive had been the reason she liked him. If she'd just been attracted to him because he was toxic.

He wasn't right, was he?

Sex was not about men taking advantage of women. She was not aroused by being taken advantage of.

Okay. Fine. She was aroused by that.

But that didn't mean she was so stupid as to think that she actually wanted that in a real romantic relationship.

But then, maybe she was never going to have a real romantic relationship. Maybe the thing about the way her brain worked was that she just couldn't integrate. Sex was part of it, and sex had this grittiness to it, this element of primitive possession and this undercurrent of something savage. She was trying to take that out of romance, to just keep all the pretty unicorn-pink elements.

That wasn't the way life worked.

Yeah, maybe being asexual was just about being a mutant. Something that wasn't properly adapted to its environment. Something that would disappear out of the gene pool—obviously—because it couldn't reproduce.

So, she'd just have to spend the rest of her life swimming against the current, being wrong and never fitting in anywhere. She was defective, and she couldn't do anything about that.

HOLLIS FELT ANTSY .

He'd been in Shepherdstown for a long time. It was time for a change. He told himself it was for her benefit. He told himself that she'd be happier if she didn't have to run into him, that his presence would only cause pain for Fifer. So, out of the goodness of his heart, he'd disappear. All for her sake, of course.

Truth was, he hadn't been in this kind of pain in…

Well, he didn't even know.

He gave notice at the store with Gigi, telling her he could stay two weeks, but that as soon as she could set him free, he'd welcome it. She told him he didn't need to come back in. Turned out, she was really debating even keeping the shop open at all. The piercing was really paying the bills, all of the inventory and paying his salary was really a drain on her profits. His quitting gave her the nudge in that direction.

So, then, he just had to decide where to go. He had lots of houses in lots of places. He picked something at random, then selected which car he'd drive there, and started making the necessary arrangements.

He didn't tell anyone.

Then, at the last minute, Kevin showed up. Kevin stood in his living room, looking at all the boxes. "You're going somewhere?"

Hollis went over and took Kevin by the shoulder. "I should have told you the pocket was gone."

"Yes, you fucking should have. You dangle that in front of me, give me that, and then just… gone?"

"I'm sorry. Sometimes I'm not great at anticipating other people's emotional reactions with any accuracy."

Kevin snorted, shaking his hand off. "Well, now you've apologized, so it's all better."

"That's why you came, right? To get me to apologize?"

"I was thinking about getting in a fistfight with you, actually."

Hollis laughed, real mirth. He threw back his head.

"That's funny, huh?" said Kevin and punched him.

The fist caught him right on the side of his jaw, and it hurt. It was a bright explosion of pain that seemed to wake Hollis up, wake him up in a way that he maybe couldn't have been awakened before all this shit with Fifer, before she'd started the rousing process.

Hollis let out a growl.

Kevin's body elongated, a shadow falling behind him that didn't have anything to do with the light, and that didn't even look like the same shape as Kevin's body. The power in the room made the air crackle.

Hollis dropped every single bit of anything he was doing to contain himself. He felt his body fill up the whole space, felt every bit of his power collide with Kevin's power.

Well, well. That boy was stronger than Hollis would have suspected.

"Let's dance," said Hollis in a low and lilting voice, beckoning to Kevin.

Kevin's face turned hollow and fierce and sharp. He let out a laugh that echoed off the light fixture in Hollis's living room.

And then, they were really punching each other.

Hollis was holding back, not wanting to actually hurt Kevin.

So, Hollis ended up slammed into his bookcase, splintering it, books flying everywhere as the thing collapsed.

Then, Hollis hurled Kevin into his couch, which snapped in two and little bits of the stuffing went everywhere when the cushion exploded.

They both collided here and there, hard.

It was noisy. It was painful. Things broke.

It went on for too long.

Eventually, Hollis'd had enough and he let himself loom up over Kevin, showing the boy exactly what he was messing with.

The light in the living room snuffed out and the broken furniture shook, and everything felt cold and distant.

Kevin cringed, throwing up both hands to ward Hollis off.

And then it was over.

Hollis shrank down into himself, dwindling, sad. He sat down on his broken couch and cradled his skull in one skeletal hand, panting.

Kevin staggered until he ran into the wall, and stood there, also out of breath, bleeding from a cut under his eye. "What are you?"

Hollis chuckled.

"Are you him? Did you used to lead the Wild Hunt?"

Hollis groaned, sliding backwards on the couch.

"How did you get here? "

It was quiet.

A picture barely hanging on the wall squeaked back and forth on its nail before giving up the ghost and smashing loudly into the floor.

Hollis scratched the side of his neck. "Forget about Faerie."

"If it was that easy, I would," muttered Kevin.

"Doesn't matter if it's easy or not," said Hollis. "The fact that it's not easy is what makes it worth doing."

Kevin scoffed. "Whatever."

"She was right about one thing," said Hollis softly. "Things matter to mortals."

"Nothing matters," spat out Kevin.

Hollis pointed at him. "You're going to end up pining away for the impossible while everything that does matter—that could matter—passes you by and you're left with endlessly aching for nothing at all."

"You know what? Fuck you very much," said Kevin. "I'm glad you're leaving." He left.

Hollis sighed heavily into his wake.

By the morning, he was gone, too.