place in between worlds, that crystalline haze of not-quite-there. Reality didn’t have sharp enough edges, daylight wasn’t harsh enough to penetrate to where I was. So at first, I did nothing but throw up and wipe my lips, let Pepper-Man soothe me with gifts of leaves and thorny branches. Then my body started to change: a dark trail appeared across my abdomen, from my navel and down to my sex. My small breasts ached and the nipples swelled. I put my hand on my belly and thought I could feel life pulsating through my skin, just below my fingertips. It felt mysterious and alien, yet magical and sweet. The connection to the embryo was instantaneous and strong. It was mine. I felt that.
The child was mine.
XV
This is where things gets ugly, I’m afraid. No good thing—no spell—ever lasted.
I woke up one night, ice cold and sweating. My sheets were sticky again, and this time it was a lot. I screamed when I saw it, or wanted to scream, but it came out just a sad and wailing sound. All that blood pouring out of me; my hopes, my love, just slipping away between my thighs. I writhed on the mattress, on that slick pool of red.
“Pepper-Man!” I cried out. “Pepper-Man!”
“I am here,” he said calmly. He was in the white wicker chair by the window, thin curtains billowing in and obscuring his pale form. His voice was somber, his face chiseled in the semidarkness.
“What is this?” I asked him. “Why is this happening?”
“It is a faerie child you carry. It was never meant to walk this earth.”
“But why?” I sat up shivering; knelt on the mattress with the sheets a twist around my feet, flecked with stains of blood.
“It cannot live like you do, it belongs to the mound, like me. That is the curse of faerie.”
“No.” My voice was just a whisper. “My child can’t die. I won’t let it.” I doubled over in pain again, pressed my face against the pillow while a fresh wave of nauseating pain coursed through my body.
Pepper-Man rose from the chair then, reached out a hand. “Then come with me now, come to the mound. Maybe there is still a chance! Maybe we can save the child!”
Silently I took his fingers. I tried to stand up, but I couldn’t, so he gathered me in his arms and we set off; jumped out through the window and down on the chilly lawn, went into the woods, between the silent trees.
My consciousness was slipping then; the sky above became a blur. The dark blue night and the tall, black treetops bled together, became wings before my vision. My nightgown was soaked through; Pepper-Man’s hands were slick. My child was leaving me, drop by shiny drop.
“You knew it all along,” I accused Pepper-Man in a faint voice.
“Yes.”
“But I have heard of others, half-faerie, half-man…”
“Those are just in your books.”
“I don’t believe you,” I argued weakly, only because I didn’t want to believe.
“Those few who live to birth are weak and sickly. We leave them in cradles and take healthy children back in their stead, to soothe the mothers, mostly. Our kinds were never meant to breed, my Cassandra. We are like day and night, light and darkness, life and death.”
“A twilight child.”
“Just that.” I could hear that he was smiling.
“But it can live in the mound?”
“Maybe it can, if we arrive there in time.”
“You should have told me.”
Pepper-Man didn’t reply to that.
In the mound they laid me on a mattress filled with hay and herbs. Harriet brought me drought to drink. Gwen stripped me of my clothes, smoothed the wet tendrils of my hair and wiped perspiration from my brow. They spread my legs wide and looked at the damage.
“Faerie births are never easy.” Harriet shook her head.
“Oh, she comes through just fine.” Gwen was looking at the bloody mess.
“Her?” I asked.
“It is a girl.” Gwen’s eyes were shimmering gold.
They had cleared the space before one of the fireplaces, the very same spot where we would make Tommy Tipp some years later. There was a fire blazing, water and herbal concoctions boiling in copper pots. The air in there was dense and warm, scented of blood and greenery, faintly of decay.
The other faeries had withdrawn to the other side of the room or left the mound altogether. I was grateful. It felt like a courtesy, them doing this for me, giving me some space in my desperate hour of need.
Pepper-Man was there, though, quiet sentinel, feeding