Robots vs. Fairies(36)

The squeaking intensified, rose to a fever pitch, and I smiled as the incomprehensible cacophony crashed over me.

I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.

It had worked.

*

“How’s your back doing?” the boy Peter asked that night as he climbed into his bed. Into my bed.

“Better, I think,” I answered, and my voice was almost normal. I had been practicing all day, learning how to speak around the piece of wing in my mouth.

“Good,” he said. He kissed me on my empty cheek, and then he rolled over and he closed his eyes and his breathing slowed and he was asleep.

He was asleep.

And I was awake.

I waited, waited, waited. I waited until he was deep asleep, so deep that a pinch on the plumpest part of his cheek wouldn’t wake him. And then I swung a leg over his hip, and I settled my weight onto the bones of his pelvis. I felt his hips underneath me and I waited for two breaths. If he woke up, I wouldn’t need to make an excuse. He would assume, and it would be over fast enough, and I could try again another night.

Two breaths.

He didn’t wake.

I toyed with the spur in my cheek. It was sharp at both ends, broad in the middle. Too big to swallow whole. I shifted it with my tongue until it was between my broad, flat-bottomed woman-teeth. I breathed in once, filling my mouth with the smell of old blood and wet bone, and then I bit down.

It tasted like me and like blood. It burned my tongue, and I bit down again and it burned my cheek. I chewed, chewed until it was a fiery paste, and then I swallowed, and I felt it. Underneath the lingering pain of the blood.

I felt the magic.

It flooded me, bright and brief as lightning, and there was so little time that I didn’t even have time to think, and I did it in that moment, and it was perfect.

I changed.

The boy Peter’s eyes flashed open. He looked at me, first through the veil of sleep and then through the veil of terror. I grinned down at him.

“What the fuck?!” He struggled to sit up, but I clenched my new thighs, pinning him. He wriggled, caught, and it wasn’t until I rested a thick-knuckled hand on his chest that he stilled. “What the fuck?” he whispered again.

“Yes, Peter,” I whispered back in my new voice. In his voice. “What the fuck.”

“But—how did you—you’re—”

“Don’t you like it?” I asked. I leaned down until our noses touched, and then I kissed him. He kept his eyes open, panic clenching his pupils. “Oh, come on, Peter,” I said, my lips moving against his so that he would feel his own voice humming across his teeth. “What’s the matter?”

“But—you can’t—”

“You’re right,” I said. “I can’t. Not anymore. That was the last time. That was the last of my magic.” I kissed him again, brushing his Peter-lips with my Peter-tongue, and he flinched violently away.

“Go away,” he said, but his voice was weak and I knew that he knew better.

“Never,” I whispered, and I rolled off him. As I closed my eyes I smiled, because I knew he would not sleep that night.

He might never sleep again.

*

I had never looked into mirrors before the boy Peter ripped my wings off.

Now, every morning was a mirror.

“Don’t look at me like that,” he said when he woke to find me perched on my side of the bed.

“Like what?” I asked. “Show me. What does my face look like right now?”

“Stop it,” he said when I climbed into the bathtub alongside him.

“Stop what?” I asked. “What am I doing?”

He hit me once, a closed fist and a slow, weak push of knuckles into my nose. It wouldn’t have hurt, but I leaned into him to make sure. He looked at his hand, and he looked at my face—at his own face—with blood coming out of it, and he whitened.

“I didn’t mean to—” he started to say, and I wiped at the blood so that it smeared across my face.

“I didn’t mean to punch you,” I said. He bit his lip and I grinned. “I didn’t mean to make your nose bleed,” I continued in his voice, saying it the exact way I’d heard him say a thousand things. “I didn’t mean to hurt you like that. You just made me so mad.” I licked my lip where my blood was dripping, and the burn was worth it. “You made me so mad,” I said, “and I lost control.”

“Stop it,” the boy Peter said, and I laughed, and I kissed him, and when he shoved me away my blood was on his teeth.

He couldn’t look at me, but I wouldn’t let him look away. I would never let him look away. That night, with dried blood still flaking off my lips, I pressed my cheek to his. He flinched and tried to roll over.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered into his ear, my lips stirring his hair that was my hair that was his hair. “You wanted to see my true form, boy. Peter-boy.” He shook a little, maybe crying, and I grinned against his neck. “It’s only fair that you should see yours, too.”

I had not a scrap of magic left in me, it’s true. The boy Peter wept in our bed next to the perfect image of himself, from whom he could never escape, and from whom he could never look away—and it felt so good. It felt so perfect, to know that he would be constantly faced with the self that he had tried so hard to bury in accomplishments and explanations and excuses. In that moment, as I pressed my lips against his sob-clenched throat, I realized that there are more kinds of magic than the spark that had been stored in my little spur of bone and gossamer. That night he began a slow descent into darkness, and I felt a satisfaction deeper than that of a bellyful of bread or a fistful of salt.