Not Quite Human

Chapter 6

On any other day, Neil would have laughed. Anyone would — waking up in a hospital bed while someone leaned over you ranting about fairy tales being real had a certain comedy to it. He did laugh, in fact, right up until Nerezza held a mirror in front of his face and then, quite calmly, morphed into a humanoid serpent that managed somehow to be exotic rather than horrifying.

Neil blinked several times. This was not a Christmas joke. This was real. Nerezza was a snake, fairy tales were apparently a documentary, and he — he looked weird.

He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. His entire life, it turned out, had been built on a lie. His father — his vile, detestable father — had been an evil fey who had destroyed countless lives. His mother was some diminished version of a fey herself. And he, Neil, had apparently come out the other side of a bloodstone absorption looking like something out of a fantasy illustration.
He stared at his reflection, the panic rising steadily. "How am I supposed to go out in public with wings on my back? I'm going to be trapped in here for the rest of my life." He turned from the mirror. "And why are my ears so pointed? How do I explain any of this to Mama?"

Nerezza laughed. She genuinely couldn't help it. His panic was more than a little entertaining.

From what she could observe, the boy appeared to be a leprechaun — not the squat, bearded, green-hat variety that humans had invented, which she had always suspected came from a few dwarves being misidentified at a distance. His features diverged from the standard in a few notable ways, the wings being the most obvious — leprechauns didn't have wings, and they weren't generally quite so delicate in appearance. She attributed the differences to the bloodstone. Blood fey tended to develop features that set them apart from others of their kind; they were more powerful, marked differently, though not distinct enough in shared traits to constitute their own race.

"I'll give you an amulet to conceal the wings for now," she said, her forked tongue tracing her lips. "As for your mother — she already knows. The family that adopted her were fey, after all." She smiled, slow and wicked. "Now. Since you appear to be in one piece, shall we begin testing your limits?"

Neil stared at her. It was Christmas. Christmas. Surely there was something in the Bible about this — an eleventh commandment, something along the lines of thou shalt not attempt anything productive on the day the Almighty sent his son to grace the earth. Nerezza could not make him work on Christmas. That was simply not how things were supposed to go.

Nerezza's expression darkened at the mention of it.

"The only reason humans celebrate that day," she said, with considerable disdain, "is ignorance. They dress up in ugly red suits, wear those ridiculous pointed hats, and impersonate that vile man as though he deserves to be remembered fondly. I hate Christmas."
She said it with a finality that closed the subject — or would have, had Neil not been staring at her.

Nerezza's mind had already gone elsewhere. Back, thousands of years, to a time before Christmas meant what it meant now. To a time when she had been very small, and her heart had been full of something other than what it held today.

Her parents had been loving people. Powerful, too — her father had served as the right hand of Lady Legasus, the fair queen of the Seelie Court. She remembered that time as one of creeping dread beneath a bright surface. The Seelie Court had been choking on fear, strangled by whispers of a rebellion led by blood fey — Santa Morpheus Clause and Marger Maggie Dale Inn among them. A blood fey rebellion was no small thing. Even children felt the weight of it. She remembered a certain Voodas slipping into their house late one night to share information about what was being called the Spirit Revolution, his voice low, his eyes moving to the windows.

The tables turned at Voodas's death. His body had been strung from a tree in the marketplace for everyone to see — eyes scooped out, teeth gone, every inch of him bearing the marks of a thorned whip and fire. She had been a child. She had seen it anyway.

Her parents had been tense for many nights after. She remembered that too.
The night it happened had started as most nights did. She'd been playing with her stuffed reindeer, Moose, while her parents sat by the stove talking in low voices. The quiet was broken by her mother's wail — sharp and sudden, the sound a banshee makes when she sees what's coming. Her parents had come to her a few minutes later with that particular look in their eyes, the one that meant something had already been decided. Her mother had held her close, kissed her cheek, and then carried her gently to the storeroom and locked her inside.

She remembered hearing the door break open. She remembered pressing her eye to the keyhole. She watched her parents die without making a sound, too small and too frightened to do anything at all. She watched Santa rise from it — his coat soaked through with her parents' blood — and laugh. That customary, rolling laugh. Ho ho ho. The sound of someone who had enjoyed themselves. He picked up Moose from the floor, turned him over in his hands, wiped some of the blood onto the toy's nose, and tucked him under his arm as a trophy.

He was killed eventually, of course. But the humans saw only what they were shown — a wealthy, generous man, a donor to orphanages, cut down unjustly in a street brawl. They made a legend of him. A warm legend, a cheerful one, a figure associated with giving gifts to children. Santa Morpheus Clause, who had deserved to rot in the deepest pit of Taroth, the prison for the irredeemably vile, instead got to play hero for eternity.
It irked her. It more than irked her.
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had been a stuffed toy. Moose's nose, stained with her parents' blood.
Neil was very quiet for a long moment.
He had been one of those children who woke up extra early on Christmas morning, too excited to sleep. He felt sick now, thinking about it. He felt worse for Nerezza. She had been dealt genuinely terrible cards, and it was something of a miracle that she was as functional as she was. He didn't say any of that. It didn't feel like the right moment for words.

He just sat with it.