23

Mor Trisencor and the Limitations of Touch

The library roof was painted gold from the sun when Mor and Violet arrived with their pockets full of pens and notebooks. Of all the libraries in the city, this one had become Mor’s favourite due to its size—he could get lost inside with few humans noticing he was there—and its vast collection of myth and fable literature that ranged from ancient times to various human cultures. He’d avoided the academy library ever since he left the café to track Luc, fearing he might run into Kate there. Or Cress. He’d been using the literature at this library instead when he needed to do research for his articles.

Even though he was doing all he could to avoid those working at Fae Café, there were times when Mor wished he would run into Cress here by accident. Once or twice, he’d seen a pair of blue eyes through the shelves, and he’d scurried over to the next aisle only to discover a plain old human that didn’t resemble Cress in the slightest. He felt foolish for thinking Cress would ever come to a library he knew nothing about.

A slow ache grew inside Mor when he remembered the moment he’d seen Dranian battling Luc in the street. It had been a nauseating yet… invigorating sight for his sore, tired eyes to behold one of his brothers fighting his nemesis. It had both filled him with pride and terrified him in the same moment.

For a faeborn-cursed heartbeat, Mor missed the taste of enchanted coffee and sweet cookies so terribly that he stopped walking.

“What?” Violet staggered to a halt. She had an impatient look, which was astoundingly hypocritical.

Mor grunted and started walking again, taking the steps two at a time while Violet tapped her way up, making a clamour in the heels she insisted on changing into after she’d already insisted on changing everything else. Mor already missed seeing his sweater on her. Since the moment he’d opened his eyes and beheld Violet Miller in the middle of the night, fashioning dripping wet hair and cloaked in his garment at his bedside, he’d been battling between annoyance at having his sweater taken without permission and a sheer desire to put an enchantment on the material so she could never take it off. He’d been too poisoned by his injury to think clearly when he’d grabbed her and pulled her to him—sweater and all, overcome with some foolish need to see her up close without her face paint on.

Mor rubbed his eyes at the recollection, glad his secretary had believed his act about not remembering what he’d done. How shameful of him, after he’d been so adamant about keeping their relationship professional and making her work life miserable just for fun while he was at it.

Now his secretary wore that same pink dress she’d been wearing for ages, as though she refused to be seen in anything less extravagant while out in public. Her hair was braided to the side—something that had taken her a whole faeborn hour. Mor had gotten so tired of waiting, he’d nearly barged into the bathroom and shaken his hands into her hair to turn it wild again.

The great stone library’s front doors were pegged open at the top of the stairs, inviting them in. A sweep of cool air from cold air machines brought relief to Mor’s warm flesh as he strutted past the desk where kind human servants checked out books, and he made the long trek through the shelves toward the back.

Violet’s breathing grew heavy, and Mor snorted a laugh.

“If you wanted to be able to keep up, Human, you should have worn reasonable shoes like me,” he said back to her.

“I don’t have any other shoes,” she said.

Mor’s smile fell. “Queensbane,” he muttered, slowing his pace a little.

The section of back shelves was dimmer than the rest of the library, but a narrow, gated window allowed a sliver of light to spill over the space, giving magic to the air where dust particles floated in the stream. Mor breathed in the warmth of the well-used area. Libraries often told stories, and it hardly had anything to do with the books themselves. He took in the whispers of time, the fragrances of enjoyable tales tucked into the pages of the books. He wished he had the ability to look into the past of a space the way Cress did.

“I could seriously go for a bubble tea.” Violet stretched dramatically with her arms high in the air like she’d just climbed out of a cave after a season of hibernation. “Someday I’ll get you to try it. It’s delicious. Also, what exactly are we looking for here?” Violet asked, practically yelling.

Mor shushed her. “This is a library, Human. There are rules.” He was astounded that she didn’t even know the binding laws of her own species.

Violet sighed and flicked her braid off her shoulder as she reached for the books, pulling one out at a time to read the covers. “There’s no point in looking for fairytale books since you’re a fairy. You should already know all the fairy stuff,” she said as she reached for a tome on a high shelf. “And you don’t have to keep reminding me that I’m a human. You can just call me Violet since that’s my name—eek!”

A book spilled off the ledge above her, and Mor watched it smack the top of her head, spin off, then slap the floor. Quiet conversations throughout the library went silent as every human within hearing range undoubtedly stopped to wonder what fool had broken the binding silence law of the sacred building.

Violet rubbed the top of her head. “Ow!” she said, even though it was seconds too late.

Mor huffed and folded his arms. “I think I regret bringing you with me. I should have locked you in the office while your hair was still wild and unruly. Bringing you out in public is an enormous hassle.”

Violet shot him a look. “You didn’t even try to catch that book before it hit me!” she accused.

“I’m standing over here,” Mor pointed out with a shrug.

“You’re tall. You could have smacked it off course before it smoked my head. My…” She teetered, her lashes fluttering, and Mor’s arms dropped. Her feet wobbled in her heels, and when one of her legs gave out, he sprang to her side, catching her waist and steadying her on her feet.

“Queensbane, Human!” he whispered loudly at her.

“I told you to call me Violet,” she had the mind to say even while she teetered.

“Why are you so weak? And…” Mor glanced off in thought. “How did I not notice that you were in this state when we left?”

Violet tipped forward, her cheek coming against his chest. Mor looked around to see if anyone had noticed. ‘Lovey dovey shenanigans’ were against the law of the library as well, as was scribed upon the list of rules by the door where they came in. Violet’s closeness to him might be considered such a thing as a shenanigan of the ‘lovey dovey’ sort.

Mor cleared his throat when Violet didn’t move from him. “Human,” he said. She remained still and rebellious. “Violet,” he tried again, hoping her name would make her snap out of it. A thought crossed his mind, and he released a huff as he realized. He took hold of her arms—his bare hands against her.

Nothing happened.

“Violet!” he snapped again—only this time it was him who broke a sacred library law with his shout.

She flung her head up, her eyes wide. She seemed to try and blink away her dizzy spell. “What?” she mumbled.

“You didn’t take your cold iron, did you?” he scolded.

Her mouth moved as she sorted through responses, and she looked around like she was trying to come up with a blatant lie.

“Vi-o-let.” He growled through his teeth. “You can’t imagine how tempting it is for me to enchant you right now. I’m typically too considerate for such a thing, but I don’t like bickering. It would be easier if you would just do what I told you.”

A laugh lifted from her as though she’d come back to her senses. “You want to enchant me?” she asked doubtfully. “How would you do that? With a magic wand?”

“With a kiss,” Mor corrected. He leaned in and looked into her eyes, feeling the warmth of that little flare that arose in the greens of her irises. Her rhythm galloped when his gaze dropped to her mouth, tracing over it.

“Don’t even think about it!” She stepped back, pulling from his grip. She folded her arms.

Mor gave her a look that promised he’d more than thought about it. “I’ll wait until you’re not expecting it,” he promised.

Violet’s face twisted into a scowl. “I’ll take double my iron pills every day then. We’ll see how it goes for you when you try!”

Mor nodded, satisfied. “Fine then. Do that.”

He marched around her with a sigh. Some humans were far too easy to manipulate.

He came to the shelf with dozens of books that told tales from all over the human world. One in particular caught his attention above all the others. One he’d been eying for months but had never wanted to touch.

He pulled the book out. A picture filled the cover of a white fox with nine long, luminous tails all with deep red tips. The fox held a ruby in its teeth.

A stifled moan brought him back around to observe his human secretary. She held onto the shelf with one hand for balance as she adjusted her shoe with the other. Mor hadn’t noticed how sharp and deadly those shoes were until she held one up in her hand. He caught a glimpse of torn flesh at her heel before she put the shoe back on. She stood tall again, still wobbling a smidgen when she let go of the shelf. She leaned her back against the bookcase and… her eyes closed.

Queensbane, was she going to take a cursed nap right here in the library?

Mor dragged a hand through his curly hair. “Wake up, Human,” he said, tucking the book under his arm. He walked over to her and dropped to a knee to reach her feet. Violet started when he took hold of the first shoe and tugged it off.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he pulled off the second shoe, too. He stood and handed her the pair of deadly foot weapons—which seemed to really only be a weapon against her.

“Hold these,” he said. She took them by the stabby points and held them to her chest as Mor reached around her legs and lifted her into his arms. He would have carried her out that way if he wasn’t worried about the wrath of the librarians who might consider his noble act a ‘lovey dovey shenanigan’ and cast him out of this building for eternity. He vanished from the shelves instead.

He put Violet to bed when they returned to the cathedral. She tried to object, but all it took was a little nudge and she’d toppled onto his duvet. Her eyelids didn’t protest—they closed immediately as she mumbled something absurd about bubble tea again, and Mor sighed, fighting the impulse to point out that she was of no use to him in this state. He dug through her purse for her cold iron pills, and he set them on the pillow beside her face so she could find them when she awoke. As he pulled the blanket around to tuck her in, he eyed the scrapes with leaky blood on the backs of her bare heels. No wonder she’d had such trouble keeping up to him on the walk.

Mor left Violet there to sleep off her dizzy spell and he flipped open his library book. He read as he puttered around the cathedral and cleaned with his free hand. The book told stories of nine tailed foxes among humans. Fun, thrilling stories. Completely unrealistic stories. All of the foxes in the tales were cunning females. None of the stories told how to defeat or outsmart a fox, though one told of a human stable boy who swallowed a female fox’s bead during a kiss and stole her powers. Another one told of a great fox feast where the foxes tricked humans into eating poisoned food, then made them bargain to get their lives back. Yet another told of a lonely female fox who stole one thousand secrets and transformed herself into a human. The last two tales he didn’t bother to read. It was all nonsense anyway.

Mor slapped the book shut after several hours. He used both his hands to clean after that.

The cathedral was in much better shape by the end of the day. Mor’s back had grown stiff from all the sweeping and scrubbing and window washing. Even the wooden rail of the stairs was polished.

It didn’t look perfect, but at least the lobby and the living space were shiny. He hadn’t gotten around to sweeping the dusty hallways or stabbing the spiderwebs in the corners with a broom. That was a job for another day.

He stopped at the office to straighten the papers but found that everything had already been tidied up. The articles were organized on the shelf, the desk was clean, and the floor looked to have been scrubbed of its ink stain. Mor ventured in, his fingers trailing over the empty desktop. He paused at a freshly printed paper still sitting in the mouth of the ink-giving machine. It seemed Violet had forgotten to come back for it. He slid the page out and began to read the article, already having every intention of publishing it, but no intention of letting her know that right away. She’d come riding into his cathedral on such a high horse, he was determined to make her work hard for her accolades at The Fairy Post.

Violet’s words soared off the page. A slow smile crept over Mor’s mouth when he reached the end of her work. “Secretary” didn’t feel like a fitting title for the human female scribe. Not that this was the first time he’d read her articles. Perhaps he had been a little obsessed with Violet Miller’s writing even before he saw what she looked like on TV and had been nearly assaulted by her in his bell tower. Though her prettiness had nothing to do with anything.

Mor cleared his throat and stuffed the page back into the printer’s mouth where it lay flat on the tray. It wasn’t like her articles were the only ones he had been saving all this time. It wasn’t like the thought of her writing columns alongside him made him feel warm and cozy and happy on the inside. It wasn’t like that.

Dusk came over the human city before he knew it, and Mor headed to the upstairs closet to fetch a blanket so he could sleep on the couch.

A sound emerged from his bedroom—muffled voices. He chose a thin blanket from the stack in the closet and headed to peek into his room. He’d assumed Violet would wander to the office after she woke, but when he cracked the door open, he saw her sitting on his bed staring at her phone, her covers off, her hair tousled, and her cheeks… stained with tears. His fist tightened around the door handle as he debated whether to announce himself and go in.

He spied a human news reporter on Violet’s phone screen. Mor tilted his ear to listen.

“…and the whole hospital is sympathizing with thirteen-year-old Sophie Ellis as we all hope and pray for her to wake up. The girl lived at the Moon City Youth Home along with fourteen other kids. The accident occurred early this morning when a passing truck lost control and struck her. Sophie Ellis’s injuries are critical, but the doctors say she may pull through.” The voice changed, and Mor guessed he was listening to the doctor now. “Miss Ellis may never be the same if she wakes up. In some head injury cases like these, the victims must deal with repercussions their entire lives.”

“Violet.” Mor stepped in to interrupt her show.

Violet glanced up from her phone, revealing a look of torment on her face a split second before she dragged the back of her hand over her eyes and wiped it away. Her black eyelash paint stained her knuckles. She cleared her throat and tried to smooth down her disorderly hair.

Her watery green gaze darted back to his. With her face paint smudged, Mor could see her freckles—the same freckles he’d spotted the other night and had needed to see up close.

“If you break every time you see someone who appears as helpless as you felt in your childling years, you’ll never be able to survive,” he said. He came to the bedside, having the strangest overwhelming impulse to push her hair behind her ear. As it was, half her face was covered in stringy, tear-drenched hair strands. But his hand pulled into a stubborn fist at his side so he wouldn’t be a fool.

Violet looked down and nudged her bottle of cold iron. At least she was taking her supplements.

“She’s just thirteen years old. And she lives in a youth home, so even if she wakes up, she has no one. Those are always the worst stories,” Violet rasped.

Mor swallowed, his throat a smidgen tighter than normal. In the beginning, Violet had appeared quite strong and goal driven. But in this moment, she looked like a lost childling who couldn’t figure out where she belonged. Perhaps he should have never prodded into her story while he interviewed her in the kitchen. Perhaps this unearthing of her feelings was his fault. Perhaps he hated the way it felt to see tears on her face, even if their relationship was professional.

He didn’t feel like being professional at the moment.

She wiped the damp hair away from her face on her own, and he was relieved he didn’t have to do it. Though, one measly rebellious strand still stuck to her freckled cheek. Mor’s fingers twitched. He couldn’t stop looking at it, feeling its call to be dealt with. She was not his to hold, or to comfort, or to fix up. Queensbane, he would plunge himself into an ice-cold shower after this until he started thinking reasonable thoughts about his secretary again.

Her lashes fluttered when her eyelid paint got in her eyes. She tried to wipe it away, but she missed a gleaming black spot entirely, and Mor fought an exasperated sound, clasping his hands together. “I know I’m the one who told you to take your cold iron, Human, but I’m pretty faeborn frustrated that I can’t touch you right now,” he blurted at her. He didn’t mean for it to come out hoarse, or with begging, or laced with a tone of desperation that surprised himself.

He was relieved humans did not hear stories in the tones of speech. He may have had a faeborn heart attack if she’d caught what his had just said.

Violet’s expression was unreadable. It was somewhere in the vein of startled, but there was something else hiding in the cracks of it all, too. Her slender throat moved as she swallowed, and she shoved the blankets aside. Heat rushed through Mor as he realized he couldn’t tell what she was thinking, and he worried perhaps she had picked up on the story in his words after all.

“I want to go back to work,” was all she said. She slid off the bed, dragging over Mor’s-Kate’s slippers and sliding her feet into them.

Mor breathed a silent sigh of relief. He glanced at the window where the stars were beginning to show. “This late?”

“Writing about facts is how I relax. I just want to read some mindless information for a while.” She brushed past him, the scent of her garden house going with her. Mor’s gaze was left on the bottle of cold iron pills. Pills that made her a weapon against fairies.

Pills that had been the only thing stopping him from making an utter fool of himself this evening. He might have held his secretary against his chest like a real faeborn lover until the ache left her voice. He might have clung to her all night if she hadn’t mended fast enough, or any number of other disastrous things. Thank the sky deities for those pills.

Though, it was strange how putting one little object in her mouth could give her so much power.

“Violet,” Mor said before she reached the hall. She turned back. Mor stared hard at the pills on the bedside table as his head blossomed with another thought. A great, wild, heavy idea. He tore his gaze away and landed it on her, though his attention was long gone. “I’m going out in the morning. I may leave before you’re awake. Don’t open the door for anyone while I’m gone.”