Ink Exchange

Chapter 33

Over the next week, he pushed her until she was so shadow drunk that she retched, but they didn't discuss it.

They fell into a routine she thought she could accept. Irial didn't tell her what happened during the nights, and she didn't ask. It wasn't a solution—not really—but she felt better. She told herself it was progress of a sort. Sometimes, she felt brief tendrils of lost emotions when Irial kept the connection between them tightly closed, when the shadowed vine stretched like a sleeping serpent between them. In those moments she could lie to herself and say she was happy, that there were benefits to being cosseted so—then the weight of what she had become rolled over her until the cramps of need made her insensible.

No different than any other addict.

Her drug might have a pulse and a voice, but he was a drug all the same. And she'd sunk to depths that would make her dissolve in shame if such feelings were still in her reach. They weren't, though: Irial drank them down like some exotic elixir. And when the awfulness reached its pinnacle, Irial's touch was all that would assuage the maw that yawned open inside of her.

What is it doing to me? Will the darkness consume me?

Irial didn't have that answer; he couldn't tell her what it would do to her body, her health, her longevity—anything. All he could tell her was that he was there, that he'd protect her, that he'd keep her safe and well.

Now that she was able to go out walking regularly— away from Irial—she knew it was only a matter of time until she saw Niall. Of all the people from her life before the ink exchange, he was the one she was loath to encounter. He'd been beside Irial once: he knew what the Dark Court was like, what the world she lived in was like, and that lack of secrecy was something she didn't know how to deal with.

She'd looked for him, and today he was there. He stood across the street, outside the Music Exchange, the shop where Rianne was most often found. Beside him was a man—a human—playing music that was foreign and familiar on a bodhran. Her pulse picked up the rhythm, the pace of the music settling in her stomach as if each touch of the beater were on her skin, in her veins.

Then Niall turned and found her watching him.

"Leslie." His lips formed the word, but the sound was too slight to hear.

Traffic on the street moved faster than seemed safe to enter, but Niall wasn’t human, hadn’t ever been human. He slid through gaps that weren't quite there, and then he was beside her, lifting her hands to his lips, crying tears she wasn't able to shed.

"He wouldn't let me see you," he said.

"I told him not to. I wasn't in a place where I'd have wanted anyone to see me." She looked away, watching the faeries watching them.

"I'd kill him if I could," he said, sounding cruder than Irial ever did.

"I don't want that. Not—"

"You would if he hadn't done this to you."

"He's not awful."

"Don't. Please." Niall held her, silent but for the sound of his tears. He acted like it was her he wanted, like all that she thought he'd felt was real, but she wondered. That urge she'd felt before, that compulsion to touch Niall, to press closer—it was gone. Had it been an illusion? Was it there but swallowed down by Irial? She looked at Niall's beautiful scarred face and felt a flash of tenderness, but there was no temptation.

Along the street, the faeries watched with expressions gleeful and heinous. Chattering and murmurs rose as they speculated on what Irial's fey would do, what Irial himself would do when he heard.

Kill the boy. He will.

Give him grounds to start a melee.

Nothing. She's not reason enough to—

Is. Irial never took a mortal till this one. She must be—

Irial hasn't allowed us to strike his lovely Gancanagh in almost always.

Torture him then? Make her do it?

They chortled and carried on until Leslie turned her eyes to the shadows and shot a pleading look at one of Gabriel's Hounds. In less time than it would've taken to speak, the Hound cleared the crowd, sent them scurrying by threat or force, hefting a few of them like misshapen balls and launching them down the street. Horrid splattering noises and shrieks resounded until even the man with the bodhran paused for a moment, looking about as if he heard some slight echo of the horrors he couldn't quite sense.

"They listen to you?" Niall asked.

"They do. They are good to me. No one has hurt me." She touched his chest where she knew his scars were hidden. Those scars told the answers to so many questions about him, about Irial, about the world she now called her home. She added, "No one has done anything but what I've asked of them. …"

"Including Irial?" Niall's face was as unreadable as his voice. His emotions, though, she felt those—hope and longing and fear and anger. He was a tangled mess.

Leslie wished she could lie, but she didn't want to, not to him, not knowing that he couldn't lie to her by word or emotion. "Mostly. He doesn't touch me without asking, if that's what you mean … but he made me this without asking, and I'm not sure anymore what's my choice and what's his. When I … I need him or I'm … it kills me, Niall. It's like starving, like something eating me alive from deep inside. It doesn't hurt. I don't hurt, but I know it should. The pain isn't there, but it doesn't stop me from screaming under it. Only Iri makes it… better. He makes everything better."

Niall leaned close to her ear and whispered, "I can stop it. I think I can undo it. I can get what I need to break his tie to you." And he told her that Aislinn would give him sunlight and the Winter Queen would give him frost, and he would burn and freeze the ink from her skin. "It should work. You'd be free of him. All of them."

Leslie didn't answer, didn't tell him yes or no. She couldn't.

"It's your choice." Niall cradled her face in his hands, looking at her the same way he had before, when she was not this. "You have a choice. I can give you that."

"What if it makes it worse?"

"Try to think what you'd choose if you weren't under his sway. Is this" — he paused—"what you would have chosen?"

"No. But I can't unchoose it either. I can't pretend I haven't become this. I won't be who I was before … and if the feelings come back, if I can leave, how do I live with what I've—"

"You just do. The things you do when you're desperate aren't who you are." Niall's expression had grown fierce, angry.

"Really?" She remembered the feeling, that moment when she looked at the ground and knew that even if Irial caught her the first time she jumped, there would be other times when she felt that desperation. The emotions she could just barely touch in that moment were a part of her as well. She was the person who chose this route. She thought back over the signs and warnings that something was amiss. She thought of the shadows she'd seen in Rabbit's office. She thought of the questions she hadn't asked Aislinn or Seth or Rabbit or herself. She thought of the shame she'd bottled up instead of seeking help. That was who she was; those were parts of her. They were all choices. To not act is a choice too.

"I don't think so, Niall," she heard herself say. Her voice wasn't soft or afraid. "Even under the addiction, it's me. I might not have had as many choices, but I'm still choosing."

She thought again of standing in the window of the warehouse. She could have chosen to jump. She hadn't. It would be giving up, giving in if I actually jumped. Isn't it better to endure? Theperson she was under the weight of her addiction was stronger than she'd realized she could be.

"I want a choice that doesn't hurt Irial or me," she said, and then she left him. Her choice would come—maybe not now, maybe not the choice Niall held out, and she wasn't going to let Irial or Niall or anyone else make it for her.

Not again.