Chapter 192 Crankey Jem's History
POV: Tom | The Feral Den, back room
I have been keeping secrets for thirty years and I am tired of it in the specific way you get tired of carrying something heavy, not the tiredness of the first hour or the second hour but the tiredness that comes after so long that you have forgotten what it felt like to put the thing down.
Callum asked me once, in the early months, why I was helping. I told him it was because I believed in what he was building, which was true, but it was not the whole truth, and I have been sitting with the rest of it for three years waiting for the right moment and I have decided that the right moment is now, before the invasion, before the final raid, before whatever comes next in a story that has already taken more from both of us than either of us expected to give.
So I tell him.
I was born human. That part he knew, or suspected. What he did not know is what happened when I was seven years old in a market in Whitechapel, which is that a fae woman with silver hair and a coat the color of autumn stopped beside me and looked at me with the specific attention of someone who sees something in a child that the child does not yet know is there, and she touched my forehead once, lightly, and said something in a language I did not recognize, and then she was gone.
I was missing for three days. My mother filed a report with the parish. The parish did nothing, because missing children from Whitechapel in 1986 were not the priority of anyone with authority to act on them. I came back on the third morning, standing in the kitchen, with no memory of where I had been and no explanation for the feeling I had, which was that something had been added to me that had not been there before.
The feeling turned out to be accurate.
I spent the next ten years discovering what the fae had left in me. The ability to find things, which sounds simple and is not. The ability to move through spaces as if the spaces were designed for me specifically, locks and barriers and security systems responding to my presence the way they respond to authorizations they have already accepted. The ability to read rooms and situations and people with an accuracy that goes beyond ordinary observation. Fae gifts, watered down through a mortal body, not the full inheritance but enough.
Enough to become the best thief in London in the time it takes most people to finish school.
I tell Callum about the thirty years. The jobs, the networks, the specific architecture of a life built on being able to get in and out of anywhere. I tell him about Silas, who found me twenty years ago and who was the first person I had met who understood the fae-touched without needing it explained, who used me appropriately and paid fairly and never asked for more than what was agreed, which in that world is the closest thing to decency that exists.
I tell him about the dying last.
Not because it is less important but because I needed him to understand the thirty years first, so that when I tell him that the fae magic in my body has been consuming it from the inside for the past four years, he understands what I am saying, which is not that I am sick but that I was always going to end this way, that a mortal body holding fae ability is a temporary arrangement, that the woman in Whitechapel gave me something extraordinary and the cost of extraordinary is paid eventually.
One year, the healer Tom's fae contacts sent told me in February. Maybe fourteen months if I am careful.
Callum is very still in the way he is still when something large is landing.
"I wanted to see London free before I go," I say. "That is the honest answer to your question. You're building what the fae promised and never delivered, which is a real community, one that doesn't require you to be a specific kind of person before it considers you worth protecting. I have been watching people build things my whole career and most of what gets built is more architecture for the people already inside. This is different."
He does not say the things people usually say, which is the thing I have always valued about Callum, his instinct for when silence is the right response.
"The fae gate keys," I say. "I have three of them. Access points in London that the fae community uses and which most people don't know exist. When I'm gone, they go to Ash." I watch Callum's face. "He's fae-blooded. The facility suppressed it and the healers are drawing it out slowly. He'll need the keys eventually, when he's old enough to use them safely. Train him."
Callum looks at me for a long moment with the expression that means he is doing two things at once, which is receiving what I have just told him and deciding what it requires of him going forward.
"We'll discuss the dying after the invasion," he says.
"There's not much to discuss," I say. "It's a fact, not a problem."
"There's always something to discuss," he says. "That's a conversation for after. Right now I need you alive and working, and you are, so." He picks up the maps. "Tell me about the eastern access points. Covenant forces will use the docks."
I tell him about the eastern access points. The maps fill with the architecture of a defense that has not been built yet but which is going to be built, and I think about Ash with the fae gate keys and the specific satisfaction of a thing being arranged to continue after you are gone, which is not the same as immortality but is close enough for practical purposes.