Page 39 of Witch Slap

I have walked into rooms with demons in them. I've had a Kishi come at me across a table. I've stood in a hallway with an archdemon and in a ritual chamber with twelve High Priests deciding whether to end me, and every single one of those registered somewhere in my body first. In the animalistic part where fight or flight instincts live. The part that says oh shit before I do.

This registered as nothing at all.

He was the most beautiful person I had ever seen and I could not have described his face to save my life. I've tried since. I've sat down with a pen and tried. What I get back are fragments that refuse to add up to anything. I remember dark hair, then pale. A long clean jaw. Eyes that were green and then weren't. He wore a wool coat that was too good for a truck stop, and his hands were folded on the tabletop. There was a cup of black coffee in front of him he had not touched and did not intend to.

My pentagram lay flat as a freckle. My magic never stirred. The hair on my arms stayed exactly where it was, and my heart went on doing its eighty beats like a woman waiting in line for coffee. Every instinct I own looked straight at the thing in that corner booth and reported nothing.

Fae, said something very quiet at the back of my skull, in a voice I didn't recognize as mine.

"Hazel Ashthorn," he said. Well, I think he did. I heard it but didn't see his lips move.

The room kept going around us. The coffee machine hissed. Two truckers argued about the Browns by the register. Somewhere a microwave beeped four times and nobody went to answer it.

"That's not my name," I mumbled through numb lips while dread pooled at the pit of my stomach.

"No." He tipped his head perhaps an inch. "It is the name you were given. Those are different things, and I apologize for the confusion. May I offer you a seat? You appear to have been walking on ruined feet."

River arrived at my shoulder so fast the coffees slopped over his knuckles.

The temperature dropped three degrees. The whole building leaned very slightly in his direction the way rooms do around him now, and I put a hand on his forearm without taking my eyes off the booth.

"Ah," said the Fae. "The Blackman child."

"I'm four hundred years old." River snarled, baring his teeth at the creature. "Do not call me a child."

"Yes." A small, courteous smile graced his lips. "Please. Both of you, sit. I have come a very long way and I would rather not conduct this standing up in an establishment that sells fried cheese." His perfect nose wrinkled in distaste.

We sat.

I hated every second of it. But there's a particular math you run in a room like that. And the math said a creature who could stand in my blind spot and stay there wasn't going to be improved by me being rude at it over a plate of mozzarella sticks.

"You'll want to know how I found you," he said, amusement twinkling in his eyes. "Do you not?"

"I'd got about that far, yeah."

"You spoke to nature." He said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. "In a place I will not name aloud, you asked a great many old things to wake up and help you. They did. They were delighted to." His folded hands never moved. "And then they talked about it. To the trees at the edge of the field. The trees told the hedgerow, and the hedgerow told the ditch, and by Tuesday morning there was not one green thing between here and that lake of yours that wasn't gossiping about the girl who asked nicely." It sounded like he was telling me a story and mocking me at the same time.

The bottom fell out of my stomach and kept going.

"You can hide from a witch." He went on gently, which made it worse. "You seem to be doing rather well at hiding from a wolf. But nobody hides from nature once said nature is fond of them. I would suggest you stop using it. I imagine you won't, and I suspect by now you can't help yourself but reach for it."

"He's telling the truth," River hissed from next to me like he was pissed that the Fae was telling the truth. "As far as facts go."

"I am always telling the truth as far as facts go." The Fae turned his head a fraction. "You've fallen. I'm sorry. That's a rotten thing to happen to a person."

River didn't answer. He'd gone rigid beside me, and the cold coming off him climbed a few degrees.

"What do you want?" I asked before they started brawling.

"Simply to look at you." He turned to me then. It took about four seconds and it felt like being turned inside out. I was clenching my teeth so hard my jaw ached for an hour afterward. "Thank you. That's done now."

"What is?" I didn't know about River but I was ready to jump over the table and throttle the Fae.

"The errand I was sent on. There were those who did not believe you existed. Now I have looked at you, and I will go back and tell them that you indeed do." He lifted the coffee cup an inch and set it down again without drinking, a gesture so human and so obviously mimicked that I almost said something about it. "You will forgive me. The last two years have been somewhat disruptive for us, and I am still adjusting to the fact of you."

"Disruptive for you." I gaped at him like a dumbass.

"Twenty-six years ago, one of my people fathered a child with a witch." His voice never once changed pitch. "We were told it had not happened. We were told this by people whose word we are obliged to take, and so we accepted it. The matter was closed for twenty-six years. Then, two years past, something woke in a coven library in Cleveland and made a noise every one of my people felt in the marrow of their bones." A pause. "It has been a considerable adjustment."