Effy swallowed hard. It was true that there were more women at the university than ever, and many of them left without wedding rings. Ten years ago, the only reason a girl went to college was to find a husband. Her grandmother still inquired about this every time she wrote, asking if Effy had met any nice young men. No, Effy always wrote back, I haven’t.
The car lurched and jostled, making her heart clatter in her chest. In one last effort at civility, Effy asked, “Have you ever been married before?”
The car sloshed viciously through wet sand.
“No,” he said. “Marriage is not for all men.”
“I understand,” she said, trying to be charitable. “My parents never wed.”
There was a long stretch of silence, during which the wind wailed so loudly that the windows seemed to rattle.
Ianto was driving far, far more quickly than Wetherell had driven in the same car. Effy grasped the edge of the seat and bit down on her lip. The inside of the car smelled like brine and musk. It smelled like Hiraeth.
“Are you in a hurry to get back?” She nearly had to yell over the sound of the wind and the sand flying up to pelt the windows.
“Of course,” Ianto said. But it was closer to a growl.
The tone of his voice pinned her there, like a needle through a butterfly wing. She was filled with a vague and ominous fear, fingers curled around the handle of her purse, blood racing and heart pounding. A bodily, animal instinct was telling her: Something terrible is about to happen.
“I’m sorry,” she said. The air in the car felt extraordinarily stiff and heavy.
She had not taken her pink pill that morning, she realized.
Ianto’s gaze shifted from the road, and she had not been imagining it earlier—his once turbid eyes were now glassy and sharp. Something manic was glinting in them.
“We spoke for an hour and you never told me what I really want to know,” he said.
Effy wanted to tell him not to look at her, to keep his eyes on the road. The car was hurtling up the cliffside so quickly that her body was practically pinned to the seat.
Miserably, she managed to reply, “And what is that?”
Suddenly Ianto whipped his head around to check the road. And that was when Effy realized the car had no rearview mirror. The side mirrors were turned inward, invisible. If Ianto wanted to look behind him, he had to crane his neck backward.
How had she not noticed that before, when Wetherell was driving? Had there been mirrors then?
Her vision was beginning to blur. Not here, she begged herself. Not here, not now. She had the pink pills in her purse, but she couldn’t risk taking them out in front of Ianto. She couldn’t bear the questions he would ask about them. The hag stones in her pocket bounced jaggedly with the rhythm of the car.
“Why did you really come here?” Ianto said at last. His voice was that same low, rasping snarl. “A beautiful girl like you doesn’t need this project to pad her résumé. Any hot-blooded professor would give you highest marks in a heartbeat.”
Her panic crested like a white-capped wave, and then Effy saw him. He was sitting in the driver’s seat, where Ianto had only just been. His black hair was as slick as water. His skin was moonlight pale, and his eyes burned holes right through her, down to her blood, down to her bone. His fingers uncurled from the steering wheel and reached for her, nails long and dark and sharp as claws.
She wasn’t wearing her seat belt, so when she flung the door open, it was easy enough to hurl herself out of the car.
Eight
The Fairy King had many forms, and some looked, on the surface, identical. Some days I could not tell if the husband who came to me was the one who would kiss my eyes closed with infinite tenderness, or if he would press me down into our bed and not care that I whimpered. Those were the most difficult days. When I could not tell the kind version of him from the cruel. I wished he would be a serpent, a cloven-footed creature, a winged beast—anything but a man.
From Angharad by Emrys Myrddin, 191 AD
It took Effy an hour to reach Hiraeth, her legs numb beneath her, vision blurring and then sharpening in dizzying turns. Her hair was damp and plastered to her face, her stockings ripped to ruins. Also, she was bleeding.
Preston was standing at the top of the stairs, and when he saw her, he lurched down, taking the steps two at a time.
“Effy,” he said, breathless, when he arrived. “Where did you go?”
“Where’s Ianto?”
“He came back half an hour ago, alone.” Preston gestured toward the black car in the driveway. “I tried to ask him where you were, but he just brushed past me and locked himself in his bedroom—what happened?”