Not Quite Human

Chapter 13

Neil sat in the car, fingers tapping steadily against his thigh, releasing the occasional long sigh into the silence. His stomach felt strange and there was a weight in his chest — the particular combination he usually reserved for exams. He'd barely slept. His brain had spent the entire night generating possible faces for the Seelie queen: a female version of the Joker, a towering woman missing an eye, an ancient hag with crooked teeth and spectacular pimples, a lady with a impressive beard, a warm and plump grandmotherly type, Medusa. His imagination had been thorough and entirely unhelpful, producing nothing that didn't make him want to quietly relocate to another country.
At least he wasn't going alone. Damien had come. Nerezza had declined — Seelie territory wasn't somewhere she felt comfortable, which Neil found both understandable and deeply unhelpful.
The Seelie city wasn't what he'd expected. He hadn't anticipated houses made of candy or anything like that, but he'd assumed different — more obviously magical, more visibly extraordinary. It looked, at first glance, like any other city, save for the fey moving through it without bothering to look human and the shops selling things that had no business being sold. One was offering the skull of a necromancer for a hundred crystals. Neil peered at it as they passed. It looked fairly ordinary to him — a bit yellower and considerably dirtier than the ones in biology class, but nothing that explained the price tag. He supposed different things floated different boats.
He was glad they'd left the car at the city gates. Walking gave him more time to look around — and, more importantly, more time before he had to stand in front of a queen.
After a long walk through streets of escalating eccentricity, they arrived at the castle.
Neil stopped.
The dragon outside was enormous, orange, scaly, and had the look of a creature that considered things roughly Neil's size a light snack. Damien walked directly up to it without breaking stride and presented the letter of invitation. The dragon extended its neck — Neil's heart lurched sideways — and examined the letter with apparent concentration before stepping aside. It exhaled a churning column of blue fire at the gate, which glowed briefly and swung open.
Neil stared.
Dragons could read.
He spent the next thirty seconds wondering whether somewhere in this world there was a school full of small dragons arguing about whose fire burned hotter, and almost laughed out loud. Almost. He fell into step behind Damien, keeping as much distance between himself and the dragon as the space physically allowed. He had no particular desire to find out whether dragons sneezed fire.
Inside the castle, the darkness surprised him. For the home of the fair queen, it was one of the most deeply shadowed places he had ever set foot in. The walls were black, lit by chandeliers that provided exactly enough light to see by — which turned out to be a problem, because what the light revealed was a vast collection of animal heads, skins and mounted specimens, several of which looked disturbingly fresh. Neil nearly walked into a preserved fey body displayed in a glass case before he registered what it was. It was posed with its mouth open in a silent scream, one eye missing.
It looked remarkably like Santa Clause.
"It's there to remind people that rebellions don't go unpunished," Damien said, reading his expression. "He deserved it."
This was, objectively, true. It didn't make it less horrifying to look at.
A tiny purple elf led them through the corridors in silence. Neil's hopes for a warm, potato-shaped queen faded with every step. Whoever lived here, he thought, could make the Joker genuinely nervous.
He envied Damien his composure enormously.
The throne room doors opened. The elf bowed so deeply his nose scraped the floor, then retreated backward out of the room without once turning his back to the queen. Neil glanced at Damien, wondering whether he should bow. Damien simply stood, relaxed and casual, so Neil settled for standing very still and trying not to look as terrified as he was.
He looked at the queen.
Her skin was almost chalk white, her hair — white as well — falling nearly to the floor. Her nose was blunt, her expression unreadable. Her eyes had no whites in them at all: two deep, lightless pools of black. Her dress seemed to move of its own accord, small ripples passing through the fabric as though it were water, a faint light surrounding her that hurt to look at directly.
Those black eyes found Neil and began to take their time.
He felt it immediately — the sensation of being opened. His thoughts pulled out of him one by one, like slips of paper drawn from a bowl. He held very still, kept his eyes fixed somewhere on the queen's forehead, and refused to look away. If he was going to end up on a wall somewhere, he was going to manage it with some dignity.
Damien cleared his throat quietly. The queen had a talent for this, and Neil was visibly close to his limit. She was, in his experience, more hiss than bite — a snake that preferred intimidation to actual violence, at least when violence wasn't strictly necessary. But the throne room was not the place to find out what happened when a boy Neil's age burst into tears in front of her.
The queen's mouth curved into a wide, crooked smile. On her arm, a myna bird let out a piercing screech.