Illa followed Thairn to the classroom. Holding his focus on keeping pace, on maintaining the slack in the leash. On the fall of his footsteps. On the tug of her guidance. Not on what was to come.
Thairn's teaching assistant was there to greet them as soon as they arrived. "Ms. Abercorn, good news!"
"Oh?"
"I saw that Principal Morley's lesson plan had some equipment we were missing, so I sent the servants to get it. There's been an announcement that Dr. Morley's Potions class has been cancelled today, so we don't have to worry about running class late to complete the lesson."
"How wonderful," Thairn said, with perfect cant. She tugged Illa along, followed Susan into the classroom. "Take roll while we get set up." A good excuse to give Illa names, information he might need later.
Susan frowned, but she followed orders, calling out names over the students' collective gasps and excited chatter. One student named Jenna got all the way out of her chair, eyes wide, fists clenched, and took a step towards the front of the room before a classmate--Michelle, the roll call said--persuaded her back to her chair with a steadying hand.
"That's not a person," a third student, Marco, hissed at Jenna. "Don't get tricked."
Good to know what Magdalena was having Thairn teach.
Jenna began to mutter something back, but Thairn's voice cut her off.
"Today, class, Principal Morley has honored us with the gift of an actual faerie for demonstration. We will follow the Principal's recommended curriculum to ensure you learn as much as possible." She wouldn't own this. Would not let even the faerie-hating illusion of Alanna own this. That was what Illa read in that careful wording. "We will start first with an anatomical lesson."
Off with Illa's clothes (as if that were going to humiliate him) and a hands-off, pointer-only explanation of anatomical differences from humans. Slighter frame, less ability to put on bulk. Pointed ears, long fingers, red eyes. That last one came with an explanation of what colors wizards had observed in fae eyes, strange for its lack of understanding of seasons. She had him speak at his native pitch, which proved surprisingly difficult. He'd been going near-uninterrupted decades (excepting that time in the forties) imitating human men. She thwacked him with the wooden pointer when he got it wrong, which in itself felt almost like a relief. Finally, he found the tone he used when he went home, the one that didn't feel quite right anymore, an androgynous tenor. She also had him demonstrate a feminine pitch--sans resonance, he was far too out of practice--to explain how easily fae slid up and down the scale to disguise themselves as humans. Fae had a broader vocal range than most humans, perhaps due to the music that made their magic.
She pointed out sex differences from humans. Explained the narrowness of his hips, how fae bore eggs for three months and then laid them to grow outside the body.
"One method of removing a faerie's magic," Thairn said, "Is to induce a magical block called tan'os."
He felt cold at that word. At the implication. Was that a threat from Magdalena?
"Tan'os is a biological process that occurs during faerie pregnancy, preventing all use of magic by the bearer. Even if you lack a breeding pair, this can be induced via self-fertilization, unlike with humans." A pause, and then. "Principal Morley would like you to know this, but personally, I haven't the faintest idea why you'd want to make a second faerie to have to control. Besides, their fertility rates are low enough that you'd need many, many tries. At a fertile period of the year, no less. It's far easier to just bind up their wings and use a potion to disrupt their speech."
A raised hand. "Can tan'os be hormonally induced?" Jenna.
Jenna's minder Michelle, meanwhile, was staring fixedly down at her notes, as if unable to look at him.
"Theoretically," Thairn answered, "But that's a better question for Dr... for a Potions class. To my knowledge, no such advance has been made."
She answered a few more questions, like why the tips of his ears were translucent. But, finally, she took him to the corkboard on the wall. Now it would begin.
"I don't think I need to tell you to not even flinch your wings without my say-so," she said to Illa, then undid the tie binding his wings. She'd done a different sort of corset tie this time, the kind that came apart all in one go once the main knot was released, rippling off his body and wings. He missed it when it was gone. It had been binding, but it had also been protection, and now it could no longer protect him from this.
Thairn undid the lark's head to finish, and signaled Susan to bring the brass pins. In the meanwhile, Thairn shoved Magdalena's lesson plan into Illa's hands, as if he were back to being a storage rack. They would serve as the object he could drop, to signal serious injury.
"Open your wings to their fullest extent, and press back against the corkboard," she said. When he didn't stretch out far enough, she did it for him, pulling his wings to full flare. She positioned the first pin between the veins of his upper right wingtip, in an open space in the cuticle. She pushed the pin through it, attaching his wing to the board.
He could not breathe. Only the feel of her hands gave him any grounding, and that was not enough.
"Hold still," she said. "Be a dear."
He tried to let it sink into him. Had to let it sink into him. Pushed his mind into obedience, into do, don't think. Stood straight and kept his wings extended out and did. Not. Start. Screaming. It didn't hurt much. But pain would have distracted him from that slight tearing feeling whenever he wavered, those new punctures as she continued on, systematic.
When she had finished both his upper wings and his lower wings on both sides, she invited the class to come take notes and make sketches. Added post-its to the corkboard with parts of the wing diagrammed, explained the way that different parts rubbed together to play music and cast spells. She showed them the ordinary vascular system, visible and thriving, and described the hidden magical vascular system.
She pulled out the pins at the end, the lesson plan creasing in his hands as he bore it. He waited for her order before he closed his wings. Tried not to think about the holes. She could heal them later. She could heal all of this later.
Next was a demonstration of his blood, using microscopes borrowed from the Potions classroom. Any needles the house doctor had available were steel, so she bled him instead with a titanium blade, let the class come collect samples, and renewed the cuts as needed. That felt good, at least, though he tried not to let it show. Her breath hot on him as she leaned close in concentration, the sharp slice along his upper arm and the back of his shoulder. Somewhere, in a fantasy part of his mind, far away from here, she was doing this alone with him, and he was asking if she'd like to drink it. There was disappointment to be had, in how poorly faerie blood interacted with vampires, and how disastrously that intersected with his own fantasies.
In the real world, humans were surrounding him, scraping the blood off of him onto glass slide trays, some so terrified that others had to do the collection for them. What had Thairn been telling them? He felt a zap of out-of-control magic from one student. Thairn pulled that one away, got the sample herself.
He rested, while they examined his blood. She cleaned his cuts as they waited. The alcohol burned into his skin, pushed him a little further under. He would need it, for the next part.
It was time, now, for the demonstration of implements that wizards had developed to catch and keep hold on faerie prisoners.
First was a magical device placed on his wings that could detect when he was casting magic. She bade him play a light spell, and he fiddled his wings the right way, the way that would make a flash, but just before the light would have come--
He collapsed on the ground, muscles not his own, pulled tight by TENS pulses. He did drop the lesson plan then, and she deactivated the instrument. He gathered the paper up again before she could compromise herself by stopping to check on him.
She moved on, lecturing as she went. The rope, in one of the corset ties. An aluminum frame that connected from joint to tip with a spidery locking mechanism. A papery cover made from the wings of mantises, a rare and horrifying creature in Faerieland that could negate faerie magic. The traditional veil, sheer red fabric weighed down with copper weights and chains and tassels with which to tie love-knots.
She lingered on that one the longest, because Magdalena wanted her to explain the shameful cultural context: the past enslavement of fati, lesser marital partners meant to sire. (Magdalena knew this, no doubt, from cultural briefings she would have gotten from her handlers, up until she faked her own death.) Illa would be fati to Thairn, should they marry. She was an odd-numbered child in the birth order, and he was an even number. Her family had the higher status and the better magic, and it was bearers who passed down both of those things. Magdalena even had Thairn switch pronouns from "it" to "vo" for that part of the lecture. A masculine pronoun used to gender breeding animals and humans and degrade fati. Did Magdalena think that would shame him? He was submissive and promised to be fati and unbecomingly appreciative of how that veil felt around him. Did being called "vo" shame him, when he'd spent so long here that his mind half-felt like a human man's, anyway? Not that he'd call a human "vo", it seemed rude to use anything below "brell", the neutral pronoun used for fae. But, come on. He had to keep from smiling.
The chainmail veil. No need to control his expression now. He looked at Thairn with every terror that thing made him feel, and she looked at him with nothing but the naked hate Alanna had to show. She addressed cuts on his shoulder first, bandaging them properly where she hadn't before, so the iron taint couldn't enter his bloodstream and poison him. She didn't heal him, not in front of the class. Her persona as Alanna had no healing power.
She first draped the veil portion over his wings, cold steel links pressing nausea into his cuticle. Did up the locks, the chain portion that went around his chest to make it secure. He held himself kneeling, crumpled the lesson plan into his thighs, and tried desperately not to move.
"Susan," Thairn called. "Be a dear and get the trash can. This tends to make them vomit."
He was near to it, too, stomach roiling. But, he held on. Until...
"If you are worried this provides insufficient immobility," Thairn said to the class, "there are pins you can use to further secure the wings. As long as you avoid the vascular system, you do not risk blood poisoning. However, I would not use these if you don't want to risk damage. It is difficult to ensure you don't nick a vein, and that would cause blood poisoning. But if you don't care, well, then they're quite handy."
She turned to him. "Take this position," she said, in that too-calm voice, guiding him into place. "Make sure you hold it perfectly, or I will miss. And don't scream; it's disruptive." She grasped the tips of his upper wings through the chainmail, stretching them out to a memorized degree. Took the first iron rod in her gloved hand, with its needle-like tip. Punctured, through the mail and through his wings and out the other side.
He did not scream. She'd ordered him not to scream. But his breath came ragged, and his eyes ached with salt tears, and he clung with his bound hands to the trash can that Susan had brought, barely keeping hold of the lesson plan.
She locked the rod at the end with a clip, pulled another part of his wing taut, and got out the next.
It kept on. It felt like agonizing hours, pin after pin. He'd thought himself immobilized before, when he'd been pinned to the wall, when the chainmail had been put on, but this... the slightest breath made his wings feel like they were being eaten alive by rust, like it was rotting away his cuticle. The room swam, and his throat ached raw from holding back sobs, and he was trying, trying to be still. No amount of submission to Thairn could save him from this.
She did not leave the pins in him long, not as the rest of the world counted time. She left them in forever, as far as time passed for him.
And then she was pulling them out, and that was worse. He could feel the tearing. He used the trash can and wept, the papers clenched in his fingers. He held on as still and as long as he could. He would rather go back to that first night with the chainmail than endure this, all those hours stacked against all these minutes.
She pulled out the last one. Unlocked the iron from his chest. And tried to gently remove the chainmail. It snagged on the holes. She had to strip her gloves to have enough dexterity to uncatch him from it. And even at just enough contact to work the links off his wings, her face paled, sweat sheening on her brow. She did it, got it off him, and put those gloves back on.
"As you can see," she said to the class, her voice yet strong, "This method causes side effects and may be impractical for your needs."
She wrapped up the lecture, assigned homework, thanked Susan, and got the servants to return most of the equipment. She rebound his wings with the gentlest of the demonstration instruments, the veil of red cloth. If Magdalena questioned it, well, Magdalena's own lecture had said it was the most shaming, right?
Instead of asking where Alanna was meant to deliver him, Thairn took him down the halls. The walk long, slow. At one point, Illa stumbled. Leaned heavy against the wall, wings drawn tight beneath his veil, unable to hide the agony.
Thairn took his arm to steady him. He flinched, and it jerked his whole body. Pain? Or her touch? He wasn't sure, and the uncertainty riddled him with fear. That he might not be able to stand her touch any longer. That this might finally have broken the bond between them.
No. Please, no.
She got him to her office. Put a pillow on the floor by her desk and had him sit there at her feet while she graded papers. She took off the collar and set it on her desk, too. After that, she didn't touch him, not one brush.
It was the best she could do for him. And he needed it.
"You're late," Magdalena said, as she surveyed the ruins of Lucía's laboratory.
"Your lesson plan caused trouble for our favorite teacher," Malcolm said. "I had to fix the faerie's arm before she could use them. Nasty stuff, what the Wingless put inside them. Unless you wanted the faerie dead?"
"No. We're keeping it alive. Good work."
Malcolm gave a nod. "I recommend a healing before you put them to any further use."
"Later. I want to talk to it first. And to you."
"To me?"
She gestured to the rubble. "Your final competitor has fallen. Congratulations. You are now my successor."
He bowed with a grand flourish. "I am honored to accept."
"We'll have a proper announcement in the ballroom later." She coughed, doing her best to make it sound as hoarse and sickly as she could. "It's a good thing, too, boy." She dropped her voice. "Between you and me, I don't think I have long. Good to have the succession secure."
"I would assure you that I won't disappoint, but, I think you know that, or you wouldn't have selected me."
"True enough," she said. He had no chance of disappointing her. All he had to do was die.
"If you don't mind, I'd like to go tie up a loose end. Pay a visit to my dear Great-Aunt Greta. Who knows? Maybe she'll talk once she knows I'm the heir."
Magdalena snorted. "Not likely, boy. She spoke to me before the succession, you know. Asked me not to select you." Keep that wedge between them. Keep him from trusting Greta, now that Greta had shown herself willing to wiggle through loopholes in her oaths to secretly visit Magdalena's counterpart.
Malcolm swallowed it readily. "She always did regret that I didn't breed out the way she wanted."
"You and you," Magdalena said, picking out two guards. "Show Malcolm to where we have Greta."
"Yes, Madame." They set to immediately. Malachi's men, and all the more professional for his death. He always had been a bad influence on his minions. These two had survived that botched Test of the Bull. It spoke well of their ability.
Mickey followed the two guards down the same halls that had housed Rhett. And that would house him again, if Mickey and Thairn weren't able to come up with an escape plan soon--preferably one that would also let Aunt Greta escape. Hopefully, Mickey would be able to ditch these two guards once they showed him where he needed to go.
They took him to a doorway watched over by another of Malachi's goons. To be expected--in life, the man had led the family's muscle. It had been a surprisingly functional balance between the three of them, before the succession had thrown it all out of whack. Malachi, pugilism and protection; Lucía, alchemy and addiction; and Mickey, deception and diplomacy.
Too bad they really could never have been friends.
The door guard opened the ward for Mickey, who stepped forward, past his guides. Mickey put his hand on the wall, to feel out the ward and how he could warp it. An eye to his au–
That wasn't Greta.
A punch hit him square in the back. He jerked sideways to press himself against the wall, not wanting to put his back to either the guards or to the stranger imprisoned here. Hard knock--he could barely breathe. Drew his sword-cane, readying for a fight. A hot bite of nausea--bad memories of the last time guards had betrayed him, maybe? His shirt damp with sweat, clinging to his back.
The door guard attacked with a knife, lunging fast and hard into his range. Mickey parried with a neat quarte, but the force of the blow knocked the hilt askew in his hand, his grip strangely weak. He grabbed firmer hold.
That nausea stronger now, the room in vertigo. He held his stance as firmly as he could. Let the wall secure his left side, hold him up. Backed towards the corner as the knife blows came, the guard pressing too close to let him use his range advantage. Mickey called his evocation forth, flame flickering to life down the length of his blade, but the effort pulled forth a wave of hot dizziness. The flame the only light in the room. The rest was so dark.
He attacked, but his speed was off. His opponent easily knocked it away, and it loosened his grip again. Before he could reclaim it, another strike with the knife flew at his open side. He blocked, and it broke his grip completely. Scrabbled for the sword on the floor, grabbing hold of the hilt. A dark liquid spilled down from his back over his arm, pouring onto his hand, over the hilt, into the carpet. The spreading spill breaching the rectangle of light from the doorway.
Bright red.
He couldn't lift the sword. Couldn't unbend his body. The vertigo overwhelming, until finally he felt the rough fibers of the carpet press into his cheek. Vivid, until the sensation, all sensation, began to fade. Every sense shutting down.
That blow in the doorway had not been a fist.
There was a secret exit in the back of Lucía's laboratory. She had run for it after the first explosion. She knew the gas line was there, knew it would be the next thing to go.
She was dripping with who-knew-what potions, pin-cushioned with fragments of glass. Her sole solace was that she'd used the emergency shower just before the explosion. The water was a solution containing slowsand, so, at least there'd be a delay before the magic started to hit her.
Mickey was going to tell Magdalena that Lucía was dead, wasn't he? Sealing wards had sprung up behind her as she fled, closing off the lab. He had to be behind it. He'd been the one to land her in an explosion in the first place, and she was the final obstacle to his power.
Granted, sealing off the laboratory was practical no matter who had come up with it. An exploding gas line blowing up volatile potions might well destroy the entire building if left uncontained.
What were her assets? Alanna, that was one. Mickey knew Alanna belonged to Lucía, but if he thought Lucía was dead, he'd begin to trust Alanna again. Alanna's class would be starting soon, so it would be hard to call her away subtly now. But later, when Alanna was alone, Lucía could summon her to use. Alanna was such a good liar, too. She'd make the perfect asset.
Loyal Tea required repeated exposures in combination with positive interactions with Lucía. She'd managed to dose her lab assistants and the students in her extra-credit lab section. A few of the servants. The doctor, unfortunately, had always taken too many confounding substances to dose properly. But she'd been supplying his medicines and feeding his drug addictions for years, so he'd likely help her anyway.
She went to him first. He was even easier to bribe than Lucía had hoped. It turned out that Magdalena, angry that Mickey could diagnose and fix something the doctor hadn't, was planning to fire him (and, implied in the shadows of that, probably have him killed). Lucía should have passed the doctor her idea to treat the faerie with grace, before Mickey'd gotten a chance to show off. Sure, the drug was addictive and potentially deadly, but the life magic bursts probably would have handled the situation. And it would have been easy to trick the faerie into thinking it required regular injections for maintenance. After that? The creature would have been fully dependent on them and willing to do anything they wanted.
All the same, the doctor's desperation was useful now. He patched Lucía readily and agreed to keep her survival secret. All in exchange for the mere hint that when she won the succession, she'd keep him around.
The slowsand had only delayed the potion effects for so long. All her close-to-hand antidotes (and her means of making more) were in her burnt-out lab. They might well be useless, anyway. The effects of different potions hitting her in the initial explosion had combined in the most bizarre of fashions. Her hands and feet were glowing. Books she looked at sprouted paper flowers. At least the vertigo was likely from Topsy-Turvy, which only lasted a couple of hours.
Her scrying spells, at least, were not locked to the laboratory, nor to her ability to walk in a straight line. She activated each thread of magic one by one, watching the goings-on in the mansion, anywhere that wasn't warded well enough.
Alanna was in her classroom, torturing the faerie for the class to observe. She had such polished precision, the same careful attention to detail she brought to her lab work. Admirable. Lucía would have to call on Alanna once the class was done.
Magdalena was overseeing the hazardous waste containment on the remains of Lucía's lab. Damn Mickey--she'd liked that lab. Dara was advising Magdalena, who was listening with a careful ear. A potential in, then. Lucía had dosed Dara, of course, so she counted as a loyalist. Perhaps would even be a loyalist without the drug, given their long collaboration.
Mickey was absent from all of his usual haunts, meaning he'd probably holed up in his bedroom. Damned wards there made it impossible to spy on him. Bastard.
Speaking of bastards, where was Xavier? It was possible he was in Mickey's room--the fool seemed to trust him--but it would make more sense for Xavier to be interrogating his captives. Lucía tugged on the threads of her scrying spells in the prison wing. Xavier had done the warding on the individual rooms, so she couldn't peer in there, but maybe he'd be in the hallway...
No Xavier. But the guard outside the zombie's prison room was cleaning the carpet. Interesting. Hard to tell what the stain had been. Blood, perhaps? And further down the hall... oh. Two of Malachi's lackeys were carrying a corpse.
Mickey's corpse.
Mickey woke on what could best be described as a bargain-basement operating table, a zombie chanting over him. A corrupted, cold, crawling sensation along his skin. Necromancy.
"Stop!"
The necromancer stopped.
Mickey brought his power to bear, that purple glow of life magic. There was heat to it, now, that hadn't been there before. Heat that reminded him of Thairn's healing kisses, of passionate nights beneath the cover of his wards, his bedsheets. He seared the necromantic sludge creeping along his body, burned it away with that heat. The necromancer was trying to help, at least, pulling away his magic, sucking it up back into himself. Mickey kept going until it was gone, then directed the healing to himself just in case, sealed the hole in his chest. Tried not to singe the zombie.
Where was Mickey's wand-cane? Gone, he couldn't feel it anywhere close. The sword that fit into it was still here, though, laid on a table nearby, crusted with blood. His blood, spilled over it when he'd bled out. Having an enchanted heart was certainly shaping up to be an experience. Had he originally been going to die? If Thairn hadn't intervened?
The necromancer was staring at him.
"Sorry to be rude and come back to life without your help," Mickey said. He sucked in a breath, grateful to feel his lungs fill with air. "I just prefer to do things my own way." He reached for his sword, but the necromancer got in between.
Mickey used the outstretched arm to push himself up to sitting instead, as if he'd meant to do that. He didn't feel much the worse for wear, miracle of miracles.
"Given the way your power feels," Mickey said, because that was definitely what had corrupted Rhett's arm, "you must work for Gabriel. Which is great news, because I have a few things I'd like to chat about with him." And then, to counter the distrust. "I've spoken to Rhett. I'm willing to help."
The necromancer signaled to him, led him down the hall. Out into what looked like a closed nightclub, two burly people smoking off in the corner, small tables and chairs arrayed around a well-worn dance floor. One of those tables was lit, and that one held a stout, young-looking man. Slicked-back black hair, light-brown skin. To tell the truth, he bore more resemblance to Mickey than he did to Magdalena. Her glamour must have gone off-kilter, over the years.
"It's about time I met you, Godfather," Mickey said. "I've been thinking about you ever since I talked to Rhett."
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