Give Me (Wyrd and Fae #1)(39)

“Of course, dear. Only as long as you like. And I’ll give you a small gift to seal the bargain.”

Elyse slipped the ring onto Mary’s hand, the skin fresh, elastic, and smooth.



“Silver and gold find you.

Silver and gold bind you.

Serve not desire, but enhance delight.

All will be well, all will be right.”



After so much time, Elyse knew something about possession. There was barely a struggle. Alert faeling beats unaware human every day of the week. The first thing Elyse did in her new body was inhale, deep and long. Heaven to have healthy lungs again!

Then she let loose a scream, shrill and piercing.

No wonder Mary had been…reluctant. The lumpen mass of wrinkles lying on the ground looked grotesque and smelled worse. With a flick of her wrist, Elyse wyrded the body out of sight, out to sea. Let what creatures who dared to make a meal of it.

She spent the first twenty-four hours in blissful sensual submersion. Everything tasted better. An apple—an apple! What wonderful teeth. The better to eat you with, my dear, crunch, crunch. Coffee. Beans and onions. All delicious.

The next day, she gave Mary a bit of rein. Let her see the world, taste some food, smell the jasmine on the roof. She was docile—grateful to have a full belly. But soon it went bad. Once the novelty of daily food and a secure bed wore off, Mary resented the occupation. Elyse’s noble cause didn’t impress her.

Your sister is dead, she said. She’s not inside some tree waiting for liberation. You killed her.

Mary had to go. Too bad, so sad. Elyse pushed the host personality into a dark cubby in the brain and sealed the space over. Mary was weak and uninteresting, and it was easy to forget her, but the human body wore out after forty-three years, the blink of an eye.

In 1976, the world was sophisticated and prosperous and far too wary of strangers. No one was going to come in for tea and let Elyse slip a ring onto her finger. One day she found a young woman in the garden smelling the roses and didn’t bother with small talk. She jumped inside and put the ring on herself, once again wyrding the discarded carcass out to sea.

She’d taken the body of a countess. Beverly, a drug-addled flower child, but a countess nonetheless. Someone would miss her.

Elyse went up to the roof deck to gather a sense of the village. The countess’s husband was worried about her. She’d been missing for months. Perfect. Elyse wyrded him to believe that he’d received a telegram. It informed him of Beverly’s tragic death from a drug overdose. She’d been on a cruise and fallen overboard. Lost at sea.

No remains.

This time, Elyse prepared ahead for the day she’d need a new body. She created the legend of the Handover and wyrded the story into every human memory in the county.

Lady Dumnos was fine—a bit muddled from so much pot and acid, and too weak to fight. Still, Elyse never would have taken her if she’d known her history. Sun and moon! From Beverly’s time in Piccadilly, the memories of sex were astounding. Men, women—men and women! The poor thing had run into a band of fairies on mischief night. Elyse could tell they were fairies because she recognized one—Aubrey!

Elyse stopped the memory right there and wiped it from both their minds.

And then the boy. That was awful. Beverly had a child. Her despair over missing little Cade was so intense that Elyse had to wyrd the boy with an aversion to Glimmer Cottage to keep the two of them apart. She didn’t need that drama added to her collection.

Beverly was docile, but she had a clever streak. Passive-aggressive, they called it these days, but Elyse just called her sneaky. Sometimes when Elyse’s focus was off, Beverly would get out. She couldn’t get away or break her binding to Elyse, but she’d assert her independence in little ways. Drink peppermint tea, which Elyse loathed. Eat avocados, sun and moon save us. Marion brought them in.

The sister. Marion, the cheerful innkeeper who came by one day with scones and strawberry jam and clotted cream and screamed when her sister opened the door. That problem was easily addressed with a forgetting wyrd. She came again with gossip of the world and more good things to eat and eventually made herself wholly necessary to one’s happiness.

“Did you like the avocados?” Marion asked one day. “I found your note in my bag after I left last time.”

“They were perfect,” Elyse lied. Sneaky Beverly, finding a way to smuggle in contraband foods.

Beverly didn’t stop at food. She assimilated a pinch of wyrding skill, not enough to do harm, but one day Elyse found herself staring into the glimmer glass without remembering having picked it up.

“Beverly, what did you do?” Cade was in the glass, at an awkward age, talking to a girl.

I don’t know. I picked it up, and he was there.

Elyse was about to set a boundary on the glimmer glass to keep it away from Beverly when the girl in the glass laughed. A cruel laugh, not with the boy, but at him. Elyse felt the pain sear Beverly’s heart.

“Don’t look too often,” Elyse relented. “It will make you sad.”

After a few years it seemed Beverly had given up the glimmer glass until one afternoon when Elyse awoke from napping on the roof. The glass was in her lap, showing the boy—a young man now. He held a cat in his lap and scratched behind its ears, his face animated as if he was watching a play. It’s a telly, Beverly told her. You should get one.