Betwixt (23 page)

“Cutters,” she whispered, and for the first time Morgan felt the full weight of the woman’s obdurate gaze.

“The humans over there.” She looked in the direction of the young men and women trying to rouse themselves. “They will soon
awaken. You will not speak to them. You will allow them to be led back to their homes by their guides. They will wake up and
believe that this was all a strange, singular experience. A party. Which, until ten minutes ago, it was. This is the effect
of the dust that was given to you at the beginning of the night, and that will again be given to you at your exidis. You will
take nothing in between.

“Finally.” Here the woman who called herself Viv looked behind her, at the stage. “The pet there. She is human.” The
blonde was still standing, big and vacant, and Viv looked away. “The changelings used to have a practice of keeping uninhabited
humans in bondage, under the influence of dust, for their …” She paused and searched for the word. “Enjoyment. This is absolutely
forbidden. That girl should not have been here tonight.”

With this she turned to leave. Moth was at her elbow, leaning in, whispering. Around Morgan, order was resuming. She knew
the woman must have been giving them time to take in what they had just learned, and of course she would need to check on
what was happening with the dead boy in the ring.

The dead boy in the ring.

The people on the ground around the pillar were starting to rise, and Morgan knew instinctively that she should not be nearby
when they woke up. The red-haired girl — their guide, she reasoned, or a ringer — was attending to each, gesturing with hands
pointing at the sky, then hugging them. Others huddled around. The members of the Flame — for that’s why they had looked familiar,
Morgan realized — searched in the half dark for their things. Another young man, a roadie type, had jumped onto the stage
and was collecting backpacks. The blonde with the dreads from the parking lot was still there, staring at Morgan but keeping
her distance. She didn’t see Nix. And Ondine, head in her hands, had made it to a fetal position. Nearly everyone else was
gone. Morgan knew she should be, too.

She needed a moment to think.

A pretty face in the mirror. That’s what everyone thinks I am.

She crouched on the still-wet earth, then drew her legs to her chest and wrapped her thin arms around them.

“Tooth fairy,” she whispered, and laughed.

She had been right all along. She
was
different from other people. All those …
mortals
, with their Odor Eaters and their rotting teeth. She would be — the word seemed smaller than the feeling it inspired — a
scion, like Viv. No,
instead
of Viv.

Though she knew she was getting ahead of herself, an early memory sprang before her. It had been tucked away somewhere, from
a long-ago venture into the forest. She must have been younger than twelve, for the trees rose up high around her. A bird
— her adult eye named it a falcon — circled above, looking for prey. Morgan could feel its hunger, its cold heart, the thin
stream of air through its dagger beak. Each feather ruffled and the fine hairs on Morgan’s girlish arm distended in sympathy.
She sensed and smelled and swooped. Another bird, helpless under an uncaring sky, had crossed its path. In a vicious instant
the falcon had dived, caught the other in its talons, pierced its breast, and killed it.

K.A.,
she thought suddenly. Morgan pictured him, and a cold burning in her sinuses started. What was he, then? Were they related?
Were they blood? She recalled the words Viv had used, still strange on her tongue:
Changeling. Ringer. Corpus.
There
were so many questions. Who would answer them for her? Moth? The night of the party seemed far away. She shoved him and her
brother out of her mind. Her mother, too, though it was painful. Yvonne and her out-of-date coats and slutty sundresses and
cheap shoes.

Then she lit on it, as a child might on a toy she did not want to share. A half-formed word Viv had spoken at the end, in
a tone so low it seemed it had oozed from the volcano around them. The ones who were evil, chaotic. The ones who were out
to get them.

“Cutter,”
Morgan pronounced half audibly, and pushed herself up from the rocky ground.

A
T THE EDGE OF THE STAGE
, Moth felt in his pockets for the keys to the car he’d driven. He was already thinking of what was next: the first moment
he’d be able to talk to his ring. What would he say to them? He looked at the dissipating crowd, a scene he was so familiar
with after his years in training. He was anxious to do things right, to avoid the mistakes his own guide had made, and that
anxiety made him more jittery than usual. He scratched his chin where his beard should have been, jingling the keys in his
pocket.

“Stop fidgeting!”

Viv scrutinized the younger man. Nothing on her face moved. She stared, her hand on the stick she always carried, but never
leaned on, rather grasped, as a fighter would.

“Where is your head?”

Moth looked at his boots, then up again, trying to meet her eyes. The scion made him nervous, but he tried to quiet himself
by running his thumb over the edge of the keys.

“Attend to what I say.”

Viv, intense and steely, was nevertheless not haughty. Her authority came from somewhere more rooted, some deep, certain place
that allowed her to fixedly stare at the young man she was now addressing, calmly, precisely.

“You have been doing very well, Moth. You have made …” She rolled the stick in her right hand as she looked for the words.
“Marked improvement. The responsibility has been good for you. You’re lucky. You might have been left behind. You know who
I’m referring to.”

Though Viv was paying attention to the activities around her — the humans were gathering now; Moth could hear them asking
about their friend, whose body had since been taken to the road — she kept her eyes locked onto his.

“Look at me.” He did. “Did they check his sign?”

Moth nodded. “Yes. Still the X. The exidis was not complete.”

A shadow passed over the woman’s face, but she recovered herself and resumed.

“What happened to that corpus is not your responsibility. As we speak, the new ringer is about to depart the gathering, having
missed most of the first lesson. That cutter he is drawn to is more powerful than either of us acknowledges. No one has been
able to track him, even though we know he is here, with the girl. There is an active ringer here, Moth. Need I remind you?
And though yours does not yet understand his power, Bleek does. Had I known Nix would be so” — Viv stilled her twisting cane
— “
flighty,
I might have been able to intervene in such a way that at least he would have been able to hear the first lesson. Now he
is leaving, and the burden will be on you to transmit the information that he missed.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Not to mention to make sure he gets home alive.”

Moth bit his bottom lip. His arms were crossed in front of him in bottled frustration. He seemed to want to say something,
yet he remained silent.

“What is it?”

He shook his head, a brief but strong tremor.

“I will not tell you that you are forgiven,” Viv continued. “You have not earned it yet. Since the failure of your ring, you
have been a model changeling: your actions just and true, your
intent pure. But how is it that you managed to elude eliminating Bleek? How is it that he is here now, pet in tow, to disrupt
a peaceful gathering of our tribe, a welcoming of the new changelings? How is it that this area, your territory since birth,
has stayed mysterious enough to you that you did not know a cutter was gathering power in your presence?” She blinked, the
intensity of her stare deepened, and Moth coughed.

“I don’t — I don’t feel well. I’m feeling sick. I’m tired. The schedule —”

“The schedule nothing. You are allowing your human traits to dominate you. You must be stronger. Your will must be more aligned,
you must be clear and leave off what belongs to your corpus. You are not human, Moth. You are fay. Nothing humans have is
what you want.” Viv abruptly pulled a slender stiletto from the folds of her billowing black coat. She held it in her palm
for a moment, as if balancing it, then smoothly, with one deft movement, flipped the blade in her hand and drew it across
Moth’s cheek. He looked down; a purple-red slash carved into the bone below his left eye. It welled a moment, threatening
to spill.

“Do you feel that? No. You don’t. That is because it belongs to your corpus. You are incorruptible. Incandescent. Fay. You
are not ‘sick.’ You cannot be sick. Unless you are not what I think you are.” She raised a dark and slender eyebrow.

Moth looked up, his eyes steadier now.

“I am exactly what you think I am.” He shook his body, took a breath. “I’m sorry.”

Viv tsked. “Are fay sorry, Moth?”

He hated it when she played her games with him — hated it most of all when she won. “No. I am not sorry. I must speak more
precisely. I have been worried about the ring. They are not an easy group. Getting them here today took more cunning than
I am used to. And Ondine —”

She nodded once, silencing him. “Yes, Ondine is different.” She smiled, then blinked exactly three times. “Ondine has the
potential to be a scion. You know that.” With that Viv looked at the guides ushering away their humans, and behind them, the
lingering changelings responsible for dismantling the finial before the authorities arrived. To the police the Ring of Fire
would appear like a teenaged party gone awry.

“Moth,” she said, almost as if talking to herself. “You are perhaps the most indefatigable changeling I have overseen. But
you are not human. This is the hardest thing for a ling to understand. That what you were born with, you in fact are not.
I know.” Viv looked pained then, her eyes darker. “This is the great sadness of our kind, that we cannot hold on to what we’ve
been given. That sending you off is so —” She looked up to the sky then. It had begun to lighten from the moon, and the bowl
of the heavens was turning a dusky purple, speckled with the milky seeds of stars.

“I remember the feeling. I remember …” She paused, as if searching for the word. “Pain.”

For an instant Moth’s eyes joined the scion’s. He winced, touched his cheek, and returned his hands to his pockets.

“At any rate, the cutter has already begun. Now we must be on the defensive.”

Moth nodded. “I’ll find Nix. I won’t let him leave without the first lesson.”

Viv returned his nod, but didn’t move.

“And I will eliminate Bleek.”

She nodded again, and with her eyes slightly downcast, spoke once more.

“This is not easy for me. I have known Bleek since he was first changed, as I have you. Your guide failed you both. That you
made the correct choice speaks to your true fay nature. You will be rewarded in Novala.”

Moth knew he was free to go, and yet he waited a moment more, inwardly doubtful he’d be able to do either of the things he’d
promised. The scion’s sentries stood by, waiting for a sign, but Viv only stared. She stood looking at the sky, at the tops
of the trees, seemingly oblivious to the hushed activity around her, the stick she always held twisting in the dust this way
and that.

O
NDINE COULD NOT MOVE.
Everything had shifted around her. The people that had surrounded her earlier, in motion — hugging, clapping backs, chanting
— were gone. Jinn — she shuddered to think of the boy’s mouth on hers — was gone. Nix was gone. Only Ondine remained: curled
in a fetal position, having passed out, she realized, sometime after she saw the blood coming from the blond boy’s mouth.
Not early enough, she rued, to have missed the psychotic blather of the head of this sickening cult. Gone was the riot of
bodies, dancing, jumping, spinning, replaced by a sparsely populated and dark miasma of treachery.

Nothing made sense. None of it: not the trees, not the mountains, not the moon. Moth there, talking to that woman. She wondered
how much dust Jinn had given her. Had she actually thought she was flying?

And Nix. He had fallen into her life when she was weak. To think she had opened herself to him. Let him into her bed. Where
was he now? She felt disgusted, wanted to get the memory of his touch off of her. The touch of all of them.
Fay.
Whatever these drugged-out lunatics called themselves.

She looked around. The gathering was almost empty. She’d have to find her way back to the car alone.

Except Moth, of course. Moth was still there.
Moth never goes anywhere.
He nodded and knit his brow, listening, hands in his pockets, to the freak in the long black coat. The woman was around fifty
— sickeningly old to be chasing after teenagers, whatever she wanted them for — with a creepy hairstyle. All black, with a
strong widow’s peak that gave way to a tight, smooth crown, lined, like rims on a car tire, with silver. One huge braid coiled
near her nape six, seven times. Like those bumper stickers:
MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOM.
It would be useful for the police later.