The Undead Pool

I shook my head, wondering what it might have been like to have Trent between my sheets, his hands on my skin, the feel of his muscles under my fingers. Sighing, I shook the image from me, hoping Newt couldn’t see the goose bumps. “He knows how to free you from the curse.”

“And yet he won’t,” she said, voice soft. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think we could leave our prison now even if we tore the walls from space itself. We’re like fireflies in a jar.” Head tilted, she picked up a nearby jar, eyeing it. “What are you doing with all these jars, anyway?”

Concerned, I looked at Trent and Al, and she tapped the table. “I’m watching them,” she said sharply. “What are you doing with the jars?”

Feeling pity, I said, “You were the one with the jars. Trying to catch fireflies.”

She slumped in her chair, mood distant. “I don’t remember,” she breathed, handing it to me. The glass seemed to tingle in my fingers, and she pulled herself together when it left her. “I’m so glad we had this chat.”

I breathed a sigh of relief tinged with worry. I’d learned everything, and nothing. “Me too,” I said as I stood, jar still in hand. Somewhere between sitting down and now, she had put on a long flowing white gown that might look good next to Al in his British lord finery.

“Go collect your elf from Gally before the silly demon kills him. You’re going to want the pleasure of that yourself,” she said. “And, lovely, be sure to have sex with him before you do. Elves know what magic is good for.”

“B-but you said . . .” I stammered, shocked when I felt the line pull through me and she vanished, leaving the sunshade and the spoiled tea to go bad. The cookies, though, she’d taken.

“This is so messed up,” I whispered as I picked my way to Trent and Al, my jar of nothing tucked under an arm.

Trent took my elbow. “You don’t need to worry about Nick anymore.”

I thought of Newt’s somewhere safe, and I jerked away. “If you ever attack Al again, I’ll never speak to you,” I said.

Huffing in satisfaction, Al sidled closer, his burnt-amber-scented bulk domineering.

“That goes for you too,” I added, shoving him back with a finger on his chest. “Honestly, you’re both an embarrassment, rolling around in the dust, trying to see who has the biggest magic wand.”

Al frowned. “What did the crazy mother pus bucket say?”

I looked out over the baking dirt, trying to see it green and moist. That you loved Ceri so much you made a slave of her for a thousand years because that was the only way you could have her. That the Goddess was real and you all killed her. Not to have sex with Trent. “That someone is pulling wild magic out of the lines and to find out who and stop them,” I said, and Al growled something almost unheard.

“I’ll find out who,” Trent said grimly. “And we will stop them, Rachel.”

I turned my back on the ruined earth and the ugly nothing that the elves and demons had made of the ever-after. That we would find them and stop them was a foregone conclusion. What had me concerned was that Newt, dancing about catching fireflies, could feel the wild magic as well as I.

I wasn’t the only demon sensitized to wild magic. Newt was too.

Ten

Jenks’s kids laughing in the garden was like audible sunshine, keeping me awake as I lay on my bed and stared at my shadowed ceiling. The heavy covers had been kicked off hours ago to leave me chilly under just the sheet, my arms crossed behind my head and my foot moving slowly back and forth to make a moving bump that Rex occasionally patted. It was around four in the morning, but slumber had been elusive and I was beginning to think I might see the sunrise before I dropped off.

“Just go to sleep,” I moaned, and the cat purred.

My mind wouldn’t shut off, circling around and around what had happened in the ever-after. I was sure everything would make sense if I looked at it from the right perspective, but it never moved toward understanding: Newt with her jars of nothing, Nick dead in Newt’s hidey-hole, the feel of wild magic prickling over my skin intensifying as I took Trent’s hand, Al hurting me in his outrage that Trent was going to enslave them through my ignorance, Al spending a thousand years trying to find a way for elves and demons to have kids, Newt being sensitized to wild magic—the same wild magic that had set Al off.

Demons didn’t practice wild magic, but clearly it was a cultural bias, not a physical inability. I thought it telling that Newt believed in the Goddess when much of the elven population didn’t. Was she insane, or just aware of more than the rest of us?

Did Trent believe? I wondered. He was going to sacrifice two goats to her. Was it rote or belief? Did it matter to the Goddess if he believed as long as the goats were dead? Did I believe?