I waited until much later to call. Not just because it felt like I’d drunk a mug of broken glass, but because I didn’t know what I was going to say. It was after midnight when I called him, putting one hand on the bracelet.
Grimm showed up immediately, his mouth open, his eyes squinting to see me better. “Marissa, what do you need? Can I get you something?” Grimm acting like my nurse. That was actually funny, except that it hurt to laugh.
“What happened?” Each word took more time to coax from my throat than an entire speech.
“The Fae Mother gave you a kiss, my dear. Their touch can be deadly.”
I took another sip of ice water, letting it numb me. “How much of it did you hear?” I trusted Grimm. He’d earned it in most ways.
“That’s not how it works.” He glanced to the edges of the mirror. “What I heard and what you heard are two entirely different things. The fae speech is not unlike my own, and without this mirror to translate we’d have a lot harder time getting things done.”
I coughed and swallowed another mouthful of broken glass. “I heard what she said to you. She said you play a dangerous game.”
“My dear, that’s the best that your mind could do with her words. Our conversation would have taken you three years to transcribe. I told you, what you heard and what I heard are not necessarily the same.”
I made a mental note to ask Ari what she had heard. “The Fae Mother said something. I heard curse, but the word, it moved.”
Grimm’s face went impassive the way it did when he was going to tell someone he wouldn’t grant their wish, or he wouldn’t kill someone, or he wouldn’t (we never said couldn’t) bring back the dead. “Harakathin.” The word spat from his mouth like aural vomit, and I shivered.
“That’s it. My only hope against the Hara—”
“Don’t say it,” Grimm’s voice came out a sharp hiss. “We don’t call curse children back once they leave.”
“So I accepted her blessing.”
He closed his eyes and exhaled. He didn’t say I screwed up. He didn’t need to. I’ve worked with him long enough to know his face, and yes, possibly even his personality.
“I screwed up, didn’t I?”
For a moment he looked angry, but then that look of concern took over. “Marissa, dear, I’ve been lax in certain areas of your training, I admit.” Grimm flashed over to the bedside dressing mirror. Guess now that I was breathing on my own he didn’t worry about medical devices. “If you worked for another fairy, you would have learned these things by now. If you had any talent with magic, you would have learned. I’d have seen to it, it’s only proper.” To hear Grimm tell it, sending me to community college had been the apex of learning. Hearing him talk like this felt weird.
“I’ve told you the word for curse. Do you know the fae word for blessing?”
I knew the tone, and waited.
“Harakathin.” Again I felt the word shiver out, but it passed by without the feeling of darkness. “The word is a spell when spoken in magic, my dear. Each one is a living creation, and they do not work in ways one might expect.”
“So she cursed me?” I said, feeling the weight go out of my arms. I floated in a cloud of despair.
“It’s about intent. She blessed you, but the blessing won’t simply do what you command, and that might be deadly. Let’s say, for instance, she gave you a blessing to protect you from sorrow. You begin a deep depression. Will the blessing cure your depression, or cause a house fire and kill you? Either ends your suffering. Perhaps she blessed you with good fortune, and you have cancer. Will it make you find out earlier, or hide it so that you die swiftly? Which do you think it will do?”
I propped myself up on the pillow to try and read his face for cues, but he was blank as a poster. “I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. You are tired, and you should sleep. I’ll send a cab to the hospital when they release you.”
I gathered myself for what came next. Now that I knew what the blessing was, I kept wanting to look around and spot it, see if it was standing there, watching me. “Tell me about the Black Queen.” I heard the hiss of air as he caught his breath.
“You know about her, or I can get you a children’s book in Kingdom about her. Perhaps one with rhymes and pop-up pages.”
I’d sat in too many rooms with too many customers to be fooled by that. “Tell me about her. Tell me why the fae think she’s coming. Tell me why she’d come for me.”
The room shook like an earthquake and across the hospital the doors slammed all at once. Grimm’s face flashed with anger, but not at me. “You have nothing to fear from her.”
I waited until the tremors died down. “Then tell me.”
“When you are better, Marissa. I swear on the Root of Lies itself I will tell you about her.”
I flopped back into my bed. “You don’t have hands to hold it with. That doesn’t mean much.”
Grimm held up a hand so I could see it. “The Root of Lies could kill even a fairy, my dear. I swear on it, I will tell you, but you must wait for when I think the time is right.”
I grasped the bed rail and sat up to get a better look at him. “Promise me. Everything you know.”
“Never. Only what you need. You are young, and the story of her life would twist your own from hearing it.”
“The Fae Mother said I was twice blessed.” The meaning of that sank in.
Grimm nodded, like I’d told him I signed for a package. “Well, you’ve never been one to do something by halves.”
Ten
AFTER FOUR DAYS in the hospital, I expected more reaction to my return. You would have thought I never left. Rosa didn’t so much as tip her head to me when I walked in. Evangeline, feet up on the conference room’s table, glanced over the paper she was reading, then went back to the sports section.
“What, no hello? No welcome back from the dead?”
She folded it up. “There are easier ways to get a few days off.”
I glanced at Grimm’s mirror. “Hey, Grimm, if I was legally dead, does that cancel my debt?”
“Debts are canceled at, and only at, the point of embalming,” said Grimm, his normal business self this morning.
“Ready to serve, Fairy Godfather,” I said, hoping my enthusiasm didn’t sound as fake as it felt.
Evangeline gave me the “teacher’s pet” look. No one ever got fired for kissing up to the boss.
“Evangeline, you will need to handle the final arrangements for prince project 2.0,” said Grimm.
Evangeline and I exchanged glances. Every once in a while, Grimm got the idea it was time to go modern. It never ended well.
“What’s wrong? Is my new, hip dialogue not appropriate? I searched all the Internets last night and determined where we can arrange a new meeting.” Grimm cocked his head, waiting for our reply.
“Last time you used a computer it caught fire,” I said.
Evangeline added, “Then the desk it was on caught fire.”
“Then the building it was in caught fire,” we finished together.
The Agency had good fire sprinklers for a reason. Fairies and technology were a bad mix. “Grimm,” I said, “You always tell me to stick with what you are good at.”
He snorted and rolled his eyes. “Oh, all right. I’ve studied the auguries, and I have determined another opportunity to arrange a meeting between our princess and her prince.”
“So we’re going to do it over?” I knew I’d been out a couple of days but I didn’t expect Grimm to move that fast.