Tears bloomed in the corners of her eyes. That old fear sensation was starting in the tips of her fingers and toes, the somatic terror that gripped her at night, that had hunted her like a dog all her life. It was the fear that her body felt before her mind could comprehend it.
“Ianto,” she tried, even as she moved the pencil tremulously against the paper, “please. I don’t . . .”
“No whimpering now,” he said, clucking his tongue. “You’re a girl, not a child.”
And then there was a sudden, immense groaning sound. A wrenching rattle. Behind Ianto, the chandelier at last loosed from the ceiling and fell to the floor. In one splendid, brilliant moment, it shattered, bits of glass flying out in all directions. A shard of it cut her cheek; another lodged itself in her calf, cutting right through the nylon of her stocking.
Effy gave a quiet utterance of pain, but Ianto scarcely seemed to notice at all. The whole floor was a constellation of shattered glass, glittering like hoarfrost. Even as blood tracked down her cheek, all she could think of was Preston, downstairs, drowning.
“I can’t do it,” she whispered. “Please, Ianto, please. Just let him go.”
“Love is terrible, isn’t it?” Ianto said, over the sound of the churning water below. “That’s why the one line became so famous. ‘I will love you to ruination.’ I think we all understand what it’s like to be wrecked by it. Even me.”
Ianto leaned close to her, so close that she could smell the salt and rot that wafted from him, the damp-earth scent of something not quite human.
His fingers gripped the back of her neck, fisting handfuls of golden hair. He jerked Effy’s face toward his and pressed their lips together with such violence that it was like seawater striking stone.
Time slowed around her again. Effy sat silent and still, green vines growing around her wrists and ankles, trapping her in that chair.
She knew that if she tried hard enough, she could escape this: she could go somewhere into the deep caverns of her mind and hide until it was over, until her body was hers once again.
But Preston was downstairs. Drowning. While Ianto took her lower lip between his teeth and bit hard enough to make her bleed, Effy reached into the pocket of her trousers and found the hag stones.
When Ianto broke their kiss for just a moment, Effy crammed the stones into his face, into his mouth, with as much brutality as she could muster. He staggered backward in shock, choking on the rocks, garbling curses.
“You little whore,” he spat, hag stones dropping to the floor. “You were meant to have kept yourself pure for me.”
She had one last hag stone, gripped between her index finger and her thumb, in the hand that was missing its fourth finger. Trembling, Effy raised it to her eye.
The world around her rippled, as if it were a reflection on water. And then a shuddering metamorphosis took place: Where Ianto’s torn white shirt had been, there was now a vest of black bramble, and under it just muscle and sinew and pale, pale skin, all wrapped around bone. His hair had grown longer, sleeker, reaching the middle of his back. His face had been handsome before, but too rugged somehow, too obviously weatherworn and human. Now it was impossibly, unreasonably beautiful, cheekbones as sharp as blades, eyes so pale they almost looked like they had no color at all, just the white and a black iris, like an eclipsed sun.
His fingers ended in claws, and he reached out to Effy with one hand, beckoning.
The shock of it nearly stopped her breathing. Effy lowered the hag stone, yet there the Fairy King still stood. He wore a coronet of bone. His hair was dripping with fetid water. She blinked and blinked and blinked, but nothing could erase him from the room.
“I really am mad,” she managed, choking on the words.
“No,” the Fairy King said, and his voice was the sound of shears through silk. “You are seeing truly, the way you always have, Euphemia. You were offered to me on the riverbank, and then withdrawn. I don’t like to be forsaken. I have spent twelve years chasing you, but you hid yourself from me with your banal mortal tricks. No more. I come to claim what is mine by right. Once offered, a sacrifice cannot be revoked.”
It could not be real. And yet Effy knew that it was—it must be. There was no escaping this. It was what her entire life had been lurching toward. She had hidden behind her pink pills, behind her saints, behind the scolding of the doctor and her mother. She had convinced herself out of it. And it had almost worked.
But here in the Bottom Hundred, in this ancient, sinking house, there was nowhere left to hide.