Rowan Vance realized the barista was a fae the moment he smiled at her.
To everyone else in line at Honeycomb Café, he was a cute twenty-something with a faded band tee, bleached curls, and a tattoo sleeve that looked like watercolor flowers. Human. Harmless. Maybe a little too obsessed with latte art.
To her, the glamour sat on him like a mask.
Behind the illusion, his eyes were wrong. The color was almost right—warm brown rimmed in hazel—but the pupil was a vertical slit, a cat’s eye, black and glossy and unblinking. When he moved his hand, the light hit his skin in a way that wasn't skin at all—too smooth, too reflective, like polished bark or the inside of a shell.
He should’ve been beautiful. Most of them were. But fae beauty was like knife steel—bright, sharp, and meant for cutting.
He caught her staring.
The wrong pupils fixed on her, then flickered to round human ones as if he’d just remembered he was supposed to be playing mortal. “You’re up,” he said lightly, as if nothing at all had changed, as if she hadn’t just seen through his borrowed face.
Her stomach tightened.
Rowan pushed her shoulders back and stepped up to the counter, keys clinking in her hand. He was just another glamour. Just another reminder that she didn’t belong completely in either world. The trick was to act like she didn’t notice.
“Large iced coffee,” she said, “three shots, oat milk, no syrup.”
“Big day?” he asked, fingers already moving over the register.
“Long one,” she said. “And you already spelled the beans, so I need the extra caffeine.”
He froze.
It was small—just a hitch, barely there—but she saw it. He looked up sharply, really *looking* at her this time. The air between them shifted. Hummed.
“Excuse me?” he asked.
Rowan smiled, all teeth. Her heart was beating too fast, but she didn’t let it show. “I said the beans are strong,” she lied smoothly. “I can smell the roast.”
Another beat of silence.
Then he laughed, but it was wrong. A little too bright, a little too sharp, as if it had edges. “Right. House special. That’ll be four seventy-five.”
She tapped her card. A faint shimmer prickled over her fingers when they bridged the space between them—his hand close to hers, a whisper of not-quite-touch. Magic, like the buzz of a live wire.
His gaze dipped to where her skin brushed the counter. She saw his nostrils flare, scenting—what, exactly, she didn’t want to know.
“Name?” he asked.
She hesitated.
Her mind offered a dozen options, all of them small lies. Kate. Jess. Emma. But lies with *them* could turn sticky. Names mattered. Words stuck.
“Rowan,” she said before she could stop herself.
His eyes sharpened. “Like the tree?”
“Like my parents had a thing for forest flora,” she said dryly.
He smiled again, this time slower. Appraising. “Rowan. Got it.”
He wrote it on the cup with careful strokes, but when he turned the lid toward her, she saw an extra mark beside the letters. A tiny curve that wasn’t part of any letter she knew. A sigil? A question?
She pretended not to care.
“Thanks.” She stepped away from the register and into the little clump of people waiting for orders. The café was its usual Friday chaos—students at laptops, moms with strollers, someone arguing with an invisible person over a Bluetooth headset that might not be there at all.
Outside, the October sky over Westbridge was a flat, heavy gray. The trees along the sidewalk were halfway turned, green melting into gold and rust. Autumn crept closer every day, and with it came the usual itch under her skin, as if something inside her recognized the season and wanted to crawl out of her body to meet it.
Three more months, Gran had said.
The words sat in her memory like a stone.
Three months until you turn twenty-six. Then they’ll come for you.
Rowan swallowed, tasting coffee and panic.
“Rowan!” the barista called.
She stepped forward. As he handed over the cup, his fingers brushed her wrist, just a fraction too long to be accidental.
The skin he touched tingled. Warm. Like static under the skin.
He was closer than before. Close enough for her to see the faint iridescence deep under the glamour, like oil on water. Close enough to see the sharpened attention in his eyes.
“Be careful,” he said, voice just a shade softer. The line behind her blurred. The café noise dimmed. “The wind’s strange today.”
The words should’ve been nothing. Harmless. Small talk, at worst a weird pick-up line from a guy who liked his own metaphors.
But *they* didn’t do harmless.
Rowan met his gaze. “I work in a bookstore, not on a boat,” she said lightly. “I’ll try not to get blown away on the three-block walk.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes.
“You’re funny,” he said. “I like that.”
The temperature of the air seemed to dip a degree.
“Have a good one,” she said, and stepped away before he could say anything else.
***
The bells over the door at Ever After Books chimed as she walked in, the familiar tangle of scents wrapping around her—paper and ink, coffee that had seeped into the wood over the years, a faint whiff of incense from the metaphysical shop next door.
“Hey, Ro!” Harper called from behind the counter. She was perched on a tall stool, faded denim jacket draped over her shoulders despite the heater humming away in the corner. Her dark curls were piled on top of her head, chopsticks jammed through to keep them upright. “I stocked the new fantasy romances. We’ve got at least three covers featuring men who have clearly never seen a chest day they didn’t like. You’re welcome.”
Rowan snorted, the tension from the café finally loosening a notch. “Bless you. The customers will be pleased.”
“I’m *pleased*,” Harper said. “I mean, look at this man’s thighs. Those are tree trunks.”
“Your girlfriend is right there,” Rowan said, nodding toward the back, where Zia was half-hidden behind a stack of boxes, sharp jaw and tattooed forearms visible.
Zia didn’t look up from her box-cutter. “I am also pleased,” she said dryly.
Rowan took a sip of her coffee. The barista’s warning echoed in the back of her head. *The wind’s strange today.*
She shook it off. She didn’t have the bandwidth for more fae strangeness. Not when she had to make rent, pretend everything was fine, and keep from screaming every time someone brushed against her with iron jewelry.
“You okay?” Harper asked, squinting at her. “You’re doing the squint thing.”
“What squint thing?” Rowan asked.
“The thing where you’ve had a thought you don’t like and you’re trying to glare it into submission.”
Rowan huffed. “Before I came in, there was another…you know.” She flicked her fingers in a vague, sparkly gesture.
Harper’s eyes widened. “At the café?”
“Yeah.”
“Was he hot?”
“Harper.”
“What? If they’re going to stalk you, the least they can do is be good to look at.”
Rowan remembered the way his glamour had slid over something too smooth, too luminous to be real skin. The way his fingers had lingered on her wrist. How his eyes had sharpened when she said her name.
“He was…fae,” Rowan said finally. “That particular brand of pretty gives me hives.”
“That’s just your iron allergy,” Harper said. “Speaking of, I got you those new cooking tongs—silicone tips, no metal. You left the last pair at my place, and your pancakes should not be a near-death experience.”
Rowan’s chest tightened, but this time with something warm.
When she’d first started burning herself on stupid things—pots, doorknobs, the edge of a cheap metal table at the library—they’d thought it was an allergy. An odd one, but workable. Avoid iron, avoid misery.
It had been such a small, contained problem back then.
Before.
Before Gran’s confession had taken that tidy explanation, ripped it into pieces, and set the fragments on fire.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’ll pick them up tonight?”
“If you don’t, I’m coming over with drunk noodles and an entire season of that trash dating show,” Harper said. “So choose your fate wisely.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time,” Rowan muttered, heading for the back to lock up her stuff.
The store was long and narrow, shelves packed tight, ladders on rails to reach the upper sections. Fairy lights twined along the ceiling beams. The owner, Mrs. Carrow, liked to call it “cozy.” In reality, it was a half-step away from a dragon hoard with a cash register.
It was home.
She tucked her bag into the staff cubby and shrugged off her coat, the flannel shirt underneath soft from a hundred washes. When she came back out front, Harper slid off the stool.
“Okay, Captain Broody,” Harper said. “Talk or alphabetize. Those are your two options.”
Rowan sighed. “Does it have to be talk *and* alphabetize?”
“That can be arranged.”
They migrated toward the new arrivals shelf. Harper started stacking books, and Rowan began the mindless work of shelving—author last names, proper categories. Romance, fantasy, mystery. Humans sorted everything into neat little boxes. It was comforting, in a way.
Sometimes she wished she could sort herself the same way.
Changeling. Not human. Not fae. Somewhere in the crack in between, bleeding.
“Gran was worse last night,” she said finally, not looking at Harper. “She—she forgot my name for a second.”
Harper went still, a hardback in her hands.
“She remembered eventually,” Rowan said quickly. “It was only a moment.”
“But it freaked you out.”
“Everything freaks me out now,” Rowan said, a little too sharply.
Harper bumped her shoulder with hers. “She’s ninety-two, Ro.”
“I know.” The words came out strangled. “I know. It’s just—every time she gets worse, it feels like the floor drops out a little more. Like I’m running out of…of time to fix any of this.”
Any of *this*.
The fact that the woman who’d raised her had made a bargain with monsters and handed over a baby in exchange for a life.
The fact that Rowan wasn’t the child who’d been saved—but the one taken.
The fact that somewhere, there was another girl with Rowan’s DNA and someone else’s memories, breathing fae air, walking fae halls. A stranger who should have been her.
Three months, Gran had said.
Then they’ll come for you.
Harper shoved the book onto the shelf a little too forcefully. “You can still tell her no,” she said. “You don’t have to go along with it.”
“I don’t think that’s how this works,” Rowan said.
“Then we find another way. I don’t know, we move to Antarctica. I bet they hate penguins.”
“Harper…”
“What? You’re not property. They don’t get to just show up like hey, we’ve come to collect, thanks for keeping our kid warm while we gallivanted around being sparkly assholes.”
Rowan huffed out a short, humorless laugh. “They’re not going to ask nicely,” she said. “They don’t need my consent.”
“Well, they don’t have *mine*,” Harper said.
“Pretty sure that’s not legally binding in Faerieland.”
“Then I’ll go to war with international fae law.”
Zia’s voice floated over from the back. “Babe, you’re five-two and once lost a fight with a jar of pickles. Maybe don’t declare war just yet.”
Harper flipped her off without looking.
“Seriously,” Harper said, turning back to Rowan. Her hazel eyes were fierce. “We will figure something out, okay? Gran’s…she loves you. She made a bad deal when she was desperate a million years ago. That doesn’t mean you’re doomed.”
Rowan swallowed.
The thing was, she didn’t *know* if Gran loved her.
That was the worst of it.
She knew the story now. She knew about her mother, barely twenty and dying in a hospital bed, lungs filling with fluid that wouldn’t clear. She knew about Gran wandering into the wild wood behind their old farmhouse and walking too far, past where the paths made sense, until the shadows slanted wrong and the air tasted like copper and apples.
She knew about the voice that had come from the dark under the trees and the offer it made.
A life for a life.
Your daughter for the one we choose.
She knew the rest. Rowan wasn’t blind.
Her mother had lived. Long enough to hold her.
Long enough to die in a car wreck three years later, but magic didn’t care about the fine print. A life was a life.
And the baby the fae had chosen—the one swapped for Rowan at the hospital, the one Gran had given up without knowing, without being told—had grown up in another world with a name that wasn’t hers.
And now the debt wanted paying.
“You okay?” Harper asked. Softer this time.
“No,” Rowan said honestly. “But I will be when I’m alphabetized through R.”
They worked in silence for a while, the quiet activity soothing some of the chaos in her brain. Outside, the sky darkened as the afternoon slipped toward evening. Customers came and went. A kid cried because his mom wouldn’t buy him a graphic novel with too much gore on the cover.
Normalcy. Noise and paper and human mess.
She clung to it.
Around six, Mrs. Carrow came in with her arms full of grocery bags and her hair caught in the gust of wind like loose cobweb. “Hello, lovelies,” she called. “Ro, dear, could you close tonight? My son’s flight is early tomorrow, and I still haven’t packed.”
“Of course,” Rowan said.
Harper made a face. “I was going to kidnap her for movie night.”
“You can still have her,” Mrs. Carrow said. “Just…slightly used. I’ll be gone by eight. Thank you, dear.” She disappeared into the little back room, trailed by the smell of fresh bread and rain.
Harper sighed. “Fine. I’ll go prep the couch and the emotional-support carbohydrates.” She looped her arm through Rowan’s and squeezed. “Text me when you leave, okay? And if any more of your glittery stalkers show up, call me.”
“And do what, exactly?” Rowan asked, amused despite herself.
Harper straightened to her full height, which put her nose just under Rowan’s chin. “I will verbally eviscerate them,” she said. “My words are sharp and my patience is limited.”
Rowan smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
Harper left in a little swirl of denim and curses about the cold. Zia followed later, pressing a quick kiss to Harper’s forehead on her way out. By seven, it was just Rowan, the soft jazz playlist, and the sound of the heater clicking on and off.
The store always felt different at night. Quieter, yes, but not just in volume. As if the books themselves were holding their breath, listening.
Rowan swept, straightened displays, pulled the metal sign in from the sidewalk. The sky pressed close to the windows, deep velvet shot through with thin strands of cloud. Her reflection in the glass looked pale and too aware, dark curls escaping from her ponytail, eyes a little hollow.
She turned away.
At seven fifty, she flipped the sign to CLOSED and slid the deadbolt, her fingers careful to avoid the exposed iron edge. Even that tiny brush made her skin prickle unpleasantly. The memory of the first real burn—years ago, when she’d grabbed a cast-iron pan without thinking—flashed in her mind. The blistered skin towering into angry welts, the hospital nurse clucking her tongue, the doctor frowning at the chart.
“You’re sure it was only a few seconds?” he’d asked. “This looks like a longer exposure.”
It had been less than two. She’d counted.
“Night, loves!” Mrs. Carrow called, wresting a bag of recyclables out the back door. “Lock up tight. There was a weird man hanging around earlier.”
Rowan’s heart stuttered.
Weird man.
“What did he look like?” she asked, trying—failing—to keep her voice even.
“Oh, you know.” Mrs. Carrow waved a hand. “Tall. Hood up. One of those long coats like in that movie with the slow-motion fights. He was just…standing across the street. Staring. I almost called the police, but he left when the delivery truck came.”
Rowan’s skin went cold.
“Probably just some guy with no social skills,” she said. Her mouth was dry.
“Probably,” Mrs. Carrow agreed cheerfully. “Still. You text me when you get home, all right? Or I’ll assume you’ve been kidnapped by a cult.”
“Will do,” Rowan promised.
As the back door shut behind Mrs. Carrow, the store seemed to exhale. The hum of the old refrigerator in the break room, the faint buzz of a streetlight outside—normal sounds, grounding.
She told herself the twist in her gut was silly.
The weird man could have been anyone.
Except…she’d been seeing watchers for months now. Shapes that hovered at the edge of her vision, always gone when she turned to look. A figure under the streetlamp that vanished when a car passed. Footsteps that didn’t match anyone she could see.
She walked the floor one more time to make sure everything was in place. When she reached the back aisle—the one with folklore and fairy tales, because Mrs. Carrow liked to organize them by “vibe” instead of the Dewey Decimal System—the hair on her arms lifted. The prickle at her nape sharpened.
Someone was watching her.
Her hand tightened on the book she was shelving.
“Store’s closed,” she called, trying to sound casual. “If you’re hiding because you don’t want me to see you in the romance section, just know we’re past that point in our relationship.”
Silence.
No footsteps. Not even the creak of the building settling.
She sighed and edged forward, peering between shelves. “I have a bat,” she lied. “And a mean right hook.”
The end of the aisle was empty. The shadows piled up in the corner like they always did—thick where the overhead bulb didn’t quite reach. Her reflection faint in the window, the street beyond quiet.
But the feeling didn’t fade.
It grew.
Her pulse thudded in her ears.
“Okay, asshole,” she muttered. “I am not in the mood today.”
A draft rolled down the aisle, cool and dry, carrying the faint scent of something crisp and wild—like fallen leaves and distant smoke. The edges of the paper covers trembled as if brushed by invisible fingers.
Somewhere, a page turned, though she hadn’t touched any books.
The lights flickered.
*Not again,* she thought, fear rising like bile. “Stop it,” she snapped.
The air went still.
Rowan stared into the nearest shadow, jaw set. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to lurk and spook and—whatever this is. If you want something from me, you can come say it to my face.”
The silence that followed was almost…curious.
She hated that more than the fear.
“I’m not yours,” she said through her teeth. “I’m not anybody’s. So if you’re from—” Her voice caught on *them*, a word that tasted like broken glass.
She forced it out.
“If you’re from their world, you can go right back and tell them that.”
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, from the deepest corner of the aisle, where the light didn’t quite reach, a shape shifted. Not a full form—just the impression of height, of a shoulder turning. A glint like silver eyes catching nonexistent light.
She stopped breathing.
The shape didn’t move closer. It didn’t fade. It only…tilted, like a head cocked, studying her.
“Get. Out,” she whispered. “You’re not welcome here.”
The air sharpened, the way it did before a storm.
Then, as quickly as a blink, the feeling snapped.
The aisle was empty.
Her knees almost buckled with how fast the pressure released. She grabbed the shelf to steady herself, fingers digging into the wood.
“Okay,” she said out loud, because her own voice was better than the lack of any. “Okay, that’s it. I’m telling Gran.”
Like that would help.
She finished closing in a blur, hands a little clumsy, breath too shallow. When she stepped out onto the sidewalk, she scanned both ends of the street. Nothing but a couple walking their dog and a guy vaping outside the tattoo parlor.
The wind brushed her face, cool and damp. Leaves skittered along the pavement in little rust-colored eddies.
*The wind’s strange today,* the barista had said.
Rowan pulled her coat tighter around herself and started walking, the weight of unseen eyes prickling between her shoulder blades.
Behind her, at the second-floor window of Ever After Books, for a moment too brief to notice, something shifted in the glass.
A tall shape. The impression of a face.
And eyes like molten silver watching her vanish into the autumn night.
***
She didn’t go straight home.
Two blocks from the store, she turned left instead of right, boots crunching on stray leaves. The air smelled like woodsmoke and wet asphalt. Apartment windows glowed warm gold in the rising dark, rectangles of other people’s lives.
She shoved her free hand into her coat pocket, fingers brushing her phone. One swipe and she could text Harper, go straight to the comfort of cheap takeout, soft blankets, and reality TV edited to optimize emotional train wrecks.
She wanted that. The normalcy. The distraction.
But there was one place she needed to go first.
One person.
The nursing home sat halfway up the hill, an old brick building with white trim and a portico that tried its best to look cheerful. The sign read HOLLYBROOK MANOR in bright blue letters that failed to distract from the faint smell of antiseptic and boiled vegetables that hit her the moment she walked through the doors.
“Evening, Ms. Vance,” the receptionist said with a practiced smile.
“Hi, Sandra,” Rowan replied. She’d been here often enough that they knew her by name. Not exactly the way she’d wanted to become a regular somewhere.
“She’s awake,” Sandra added kindly. “Been asking if you were coming.”
Rowan’s throat closed up. “Thanks.”
The hallways were quiet, the linoleum floors reflecting the fluorescent lights in long, sterile stripes. She passed a TV room where a handful of residents watched a game show with vacant, or too-bright, eyes.
Gran’s room was at the end of the hall, near a window that overlooked the parking lot and a scrubby maple tree that was doing its best to turn orange.
The door was half open.
Rowan hesitated on the threshold for a second, then pushed it gently.
Gran was propped up on pillows, the TV muted, a crossword puzzle open on the rolling table in front of her. Her white hair, once a wild, iron-gray braid down her back, now curled flat against her head. Her skin was papery, but her eyes—pale green, sharp as ever—lit when she saw Rowan.
“There you are,” she said, voice thin but threaded with relief. “Took you long enough. I thought maybe the goblins had finally dragged you off by your ankles.”
“Traffic,” Rowan said, stepping inside. “You know how it is.”
“In Westbridge?” Gran snorted. “The only thing we have traffic of is gossip and raccoons.”
Rowan smiled and leaned down to kiss her cheek. The smell of her—powder and peppermint and something old—hit the back of Rowan’s eyes like a fist.
“Hi, Gran.”
“There,” Gran said when Rowan straightened. “Now the room’s less ugly.”
“You say that like you don’t insult the wallpaper more than you insult me,” Rowan replied, pulling the visitor’s chair closer to the bed.
“The wallpaper earned it,” Gran said. “Those flowers are an abomination.”
They were. Watery blue blossoms that looked like they’d been photocopied too many times.
“How was your day?” Rowan asked, settling in. “Anyone cheat at bingo?”
“Old Mrs. Pierce tried to smuggle an extra card under her shawl,” Gran said. “She would have gotten away with it if she weren't so smug about it.”
“Villainous hubris,” Rowan said solemnly.
“You laugh,” Gran said, “but old women with nothing left to lose are the scariest creatures of all.”
“Gonna add that to the list,” Rowan said. “Right under ‘fae in coffee shops’ and ‘mystery men in long coats.’”
Gran’s gaze sharpened at that, green eyes pinning her. “You saw one? Here?”
“Not here,” Rowan said quickly. “At work. Mrs. Carrow said there was some guy hanging around earlier, but he was gone by the time I closed.”
Gran’s fingers tightened on the edge of the blanket, knuckles white. “Describe him.”
Rowan frowned. “She didn’t say much. Tall, hood up, one of those long coats like out of a movie. I didn’t see him myself.”
“And you felt…watched,” Gran guessed.
Rowan shifted. “I feel watched a lot lately.”
“That’s because you are.”
The thin air in the room seemed to thicken, gravity pulling heavier in her chest.
“Gran…”
“I told you,” Gran said, each word carefully enunciated as if she could chisel sense into Rowan with patience alone. “They will come for you when you turn twenty-six. They’re not going to wait until the last minute to start sniffing around. They’ll want to…assess you.”
“Assess me,” Rowan repeated, because if she focused on the ridiculousness of the word, she wouldn’t have to think about the weight behind it.
“You’re not a lamb at a country fair, girl,” Gran snapped. “They’re not judging you for prettiest fleece.”
“I would win,” Rowan muttered. “My hair’s very fluffy.”
A ghost of a smile tugged at Gran’s mouth. “You get that from your mother,” she said softly. The smile faded. Her gaze slid away to the window, where the maple tree shivered in the wind.
Rowan’s chest tightened. “Tell me about her,” she said unsteadily. “When she was my age.”
It was a ritual between them. When Rowan was a kid, she’d asked for stories about Mom like other kids asked for bedtime fairy tales. When she got older and Gran started to forget things, Rowan had asked more urgently, trying to grab as much memory as she could before it slipped through both of their fingers.
Gran’s face softened in a way it did for nothing else. “She thought she was invincible,” she said. “Drove too fast, loved too fast. She used to sneak out at night to go dance at that terrible bar on the highway, the one with the neon cactus sign. She’d come home smelling like smoke and cheap beer and cheap boys, and I’d pretend I hadn’t been sitting up the whole time listening for her car.”
“Sounds familiar,” Rowan said, even though she had never once snuck out to dance at a terrible bar. Her rebellions had been quieter. Stolen hours in the library. Staying out late at the lake with friends. Kissing a girl behind the gym and pretending it wasn’t a big deal.
“You’re quieter,” Gran said, as if hearing her thoughts. “But you’ve got your own kind of stubborn.”
Rowan picked at a stray thread on the chair. “Did she know?” she asked. The question gnawed at her, over and over. “About…me?”
“No,” Gran said, the word an old wound. “She died thinking you were hers.”
Silence fell, weighted and fragile.
“You loved her enough to make a deal,” Rowan said quietly. “But you loved her enough to let them take some other woman’s baby?”
Gran’s eyes closed briefly. “I knew what you would say, when you found out. I said it to myself a thousand times.” Her voice was raw. “It was wrong. I know that. I also know that when you’re standing at the side of your child’s hospital bed, watching her drown in her own lungs, and something in the shadows says, *We can fix this,* you don’t think straight.”
“You didn’t ask who they were going to take,” Rowan said.
“I didn’t ask *anything*,” Gran whispered. “That’s the kind of fool I was. I heard a way to save my girl and I grabbed it with both hands.”
“And I’m the fallout,” Rowan said.
Gran’s eyes snapped open, fierce. “You are not fallout. You are—” Her breath hitched. Her hand flew to her chest.
“Gran?” Rowan surged forward. “Gran, hey—”
Gran’s fingers fumbled over the call button. Rowan hit it for her, heart racing. Nurses appeared in the doorway in a blur of blue scrubs and calm voices. They checked vitals, adjusted oxygen, murmured reassurances.
Rowan backed into the corner, uselessness burning her from the inside out. She always felt like this here—too big and too small all at once, all sharp corners in a room built for soft endings.
After a few minutes, the crisis eased. Color crept back into Gran’s cheeks. The nurse—Kelsey, whose toddler always had a runny nose in the pictures she showed Rowan—patted Rowan’s arm.
“She’s okay,” Kelsey said softly. “Just got worked up. Maybe keep it light tonight, huh?”
“Got it,” Rowan said hoarsely.
When they were alone again, Gran beckoned her closer with a jerk of her chin. “Come sit, dummy.”
Rowan perched on the edge of the bed, careful of wires and tubes.
Gran’s fingers caught hers in a surprisingly strong grip. For a moment, the years fell away, and Rowan saw the woman who’d hauled firewood, who’d slapped a raccoon with a broom because it tried to steal her laundry, who’d scared off a door-to-door evangelist by telling him she was a witch who ate missionaries.
“You are *mine,*” Gran said fiercely. “Whatever else you are, whoever you were born to, you’re my granddaughter. I changed your diapers. I kissed your skinned knees. I cheered at your stupid middle school band concerts. I wiped away your tears when those twit girls were mean to you about liking other girls. I taught you how to change a tire and lie to bill collectors. I’ve loved you every day of your life.”
Rowan’s vision blurred.
“And I will not,” Gran said, voice trembling with anger that had nowhere to go, “see them take you without a fight.”
“You already made the deal,” Rowan said, the words like splinters.
“I’m not the only one who can bargain,” Gran said. Her eyes, suddenly, looked very old. Very tired. “I’ve…I’ve been thinking.”
“About?”
“About how lawyers wriggle out of contracts.”
Rowan blinked. “You’re going to out-lawyer the fae.”
Gran smiled, a quick flash of teeth that was pure mischief. “Don’t underestimate me, girl.”
“You’re on oxygen.”
“And I’ve still got more fight in me than half those glittering bastards.” She squeezed Rowan’s hand, energy fading. “They’re watching you because you matter, Rowan. They’re scared of you.”
“Pretty sure I’m the one terrified of them,” Rowan muttered.
“That’s because you don’t know what you are yet,” Gran said.
A chill climbed Rowan’s spine. “You say that like it’s supposed to be reassuring.”
Gran’s gaze slid to the window, to the barely visible line of the tree branches against the dark. The wind picked up, rattling the glass. Leaves slapped against it like hands.
“When I walked into the woods that night,” Gran said slowly, “I thought I was just a desperate woman talking to shadows. But they knew me. They knew…I had a thread of something in my blood. Old stuff. My grandmother talked about it sometimes. About a great-great—hell if I remember how many—grandmother who got lost in a storm and came back with a ring she’d never had before, and eyes that saw too much.”
Rowan swallowed. “Saw too much?”
“Saw…through,” Gran said. “Through lies, through pretty words. Through glamours.”
Rowan’s heart kicked.
“Thought it was a story, back then,” Gran said. “Then my daughter started getting sick. Then the woods started…calling.”
“You think…that’s why? Why I can see through them?”
“I think they didn’t pick your mother’s baby at random,” Gran said. “I think their world and ours…have been tangled up in our blood for a long time. They offered me a bargain because I was…I don’t know. On their map.” Her eyes closed briefly, breath shallow. “And now you are too.”
The room felt suddenly smaller. Closer.
“And the other girl?” Rowan asked, voice tight. “The one who was supposed to be here. The human one. What is she to them?”
Gran’s lashes fluttered. “A curiosity,” she said faintly. “A pet. A symbol. I don’t know. I never saw her. Just you.”
“You never *asked*,” Rowan said. Anger sparked under the fear, small and hot. “You never tried to—”
“Rowan.” Gran’s fingers tightened weakly. “Don’t…waste your fire on me. You’ll need it.”
“For when they come,” Rowan said bitterly.
“For when you decide what to do,” Gran corrected. “Just because they made a bargain with an old fool doesn’t mean you can’t…bend it. Break it.”
Rowan snorted. “And how am I supposed to do that?”
Gran’s pale eyes gleamed with something feral. “You’ve always been clever with words,” she said. “Twisting them. Slipping through cracks. You talk yourself out of parking tickets and late fees. You negotiated that job raise, didn’t you?”
“That was just—”
“That was practice,” Gran said. “For bigger bargains.”
A shiver ran through her. Her gaze flicked to the far corner of the room.
Rowan followed it on reflex.
Nothing there. Just the beige wall, the ugly print of a landscape, shadows pooling in the angle between them.
Still, her skin crawled.
Gran’s voice dropped. “He’s listening, you know.”
“Who?” Rowan asked, though she already knew.
“The one watching you,” Gran whispered. “The one with the silver eyes.”
Rowan’s lungs forgot how to work.
She hadn’t told Gran about the dreams. Not really. Not the details. Not how they’d started when she was seven and never fully stopped.
Not how in every one, there were eyes like liquid metal watching her from the dark.
“How—”
“Do you think I don’t know, girl?” Gran asked weakly. “You used to sleepwalk. You’d stand at the window and talk to the night like it was an old lover. You’d say his name in your sleep.”
“I don’t know his name,” Rowan said, shaken.
“You used to say something. Over and over.” Gran frowned, frustration flickering over her features as the memory skittered away. “Row…Rhow…Rhi…”
The word slithered just out of reach in Rowan’s mind, like a dream on waking.
“I don’t—”
Gran’s face pinched. Her breath hitched again. “I’m tired,” she murmured.
Rowan’s protest died on her tongue.
“It’s okay,” she said instead. “Rest. I’ll come back tomorrow.”
Gran’s fingers loosened on hers. “Tomorrow,” she echoed. Her gaze slipped past Rowan’s shoulder, to that same empty corner. For a moment, her face softened into something almost fond. “Tell him,” she whispered suddenly, fiercely, “he doesn’t get to take you like some prize pig at auction. If he wants you, he can bleed for it.”
Rowan’s heart stuttered. “Gran—”
But Gran’s eyes were closing, her breaths evening out into shallow, fragile sleep.
The words hung in the air like smoke.
Tell him.
He doesn’t get to take you.
If he wants you, he can bleed for it.
Rowan sat there for a long time, holding onto Gran’s hand and staring at the corner that looked empty and felt anything but.
When she finally stood to leave, the old woman muttered in her sleep, voice too soft to catch. A few syllables floated clear.
“…autumn…prince…”
The fluorescent light hummed. The maple tree outside rattled in the wind, showering the parking lot with leaves the color of rust and blood.
Rowan walked out into the night with Gran’s warning in her ears, silver eyes in her dreams, and three months ticking away like a countdown she couldn’t stop.