Snow ✓

Bloúsma Sotívor

Her eyelids felt glued to the flesh of her face that she had to work to separate. Triumph brought Sweater sitting on the floor outside her cell into view. The hall was darker, the alien rectangles she was starting to suspect weren't windows after all now emitting a soft blue light.

Sweater pushed a dish that had found its way inside her cage into her foot.

"You should drink."

Her neighbor gave a sardonic snort as Snow closed her eyes and turned her heavy head away.

"Isn't it your lucky day?" Sweater said, his voice sharp with venom. "Back together at last."

"I long for the day I rip you open, eyes to groin, Methuselah," he said, lip curling on the last word as if it were a slur.

"You're going to be waiting a long time, dog."

Her neighbor growled.

Everything hurt. Snow wished they'd shut up.

"Make sure she drinks," Sweater said. "You wouldn't want your flower to wilt."

Her eyes flew open, but Sweater had already gone, the swish of the glass door the only proof he had been there at all.

"He's right," her neighbor said after a moment. "You should drink. They won't bring more until you do."

Her throat was parched and her mouth rancid, but Snow was stubbornly determined to furnish what little wiggle room she had left with resistance, so she pulled her knees to her chest and stared at her kneecaps, wishing she had been placed next to a less chatty cellmate.

A scream erupted from a cage further down, seemingly unprompted. Snow wondered how many abductees were here.

"I don't suppose you remember me."

Her brow crinkled at the insinuation. Having spent most of her life in solitude, she of course remembered everyone she had ever met.

"How could you? I was much fuzzier and on four legs, then."

That familiar prick of déjà vu brought her head around and she really looked at him for the first time. The beard and regular wear she thought likely the result of prolonged containment made it impossible to pinpoint his age. What she could see was his sinewy build and nasty scar, black and scabby, around his neck, but what made her hair stand on end were his eyes.

"My name's Hurgo, but I don't get to use it much."

Her breath caught at the shrapnel of a memory. The thought felt too preposterous to voice but she did it anyway: "Outside my house."

He stood a little straighter. "Yes."

A voice in her head giggled as she realized what she had admitted to herself. "You. You're a wereling."

The light in his eyes sharpened and he said: "Yes." She got the distinct impression that she had offended him.

Hand gripping the bar for support, Snow struggled up into a standing position. "I always thought that was a fable, another lie told by the humans to make the faeries seem all the more sinister, their keeping shapeshifting slaves--"

"I'm no slave." Definitely offended. "Faeries and solthus are paired in infancy. Tres and I chose one another."

Snow took Tres for the faery with hair the color of a cardinal's plumage, eyes that of an exploding star.