Kin said he could ride in my car. I didn’t really believe him. I’d never met a fey who would willingly get in a car. There was too much iron, and they’d be trapped in it. The iron wouldn’t kill them, but it made them sick when they got too close, spent too much time around it. Saben and I had tried it when she was younger—she’d wanted to celebrate with me after I’d gotten my license. It hadn’t gone well. She’d passed out, and I hadn’t been able to get her to wake up for the longest time. I’d been so afraid that I’d slapped her. When she’d come to, I’d sworn I would never take her in a car anywhere again.

I’d met fey with different tolerances to iron. Most of the brownies I knew acted like it wasn’t there, but even they stayed away from it when it was right in front of them. On the other hand, I’d seen water horses actually shy away from it, like it would attack them.

Kin laughed when I hesitated at the car, though. He swung the passenger-side door open and shook his head. “I’m not like you. Not like the sidhe.”

I blinked, but then I nodded, because that was obvious. He didn’t act, didn’t behave, like any fey I’d ever met. He seemed more human than anything, and if he hadn’t had those scales, I’d have thought he was. Maybe.

“Ningyo.” He pointed at himself.

I’d gone around to the driver’s side, but I leaned over the roof to look at him. “That’s what you are?”

He nodded. “Water fey. Except, not fey. I’m yokai. So the iron . . .” He shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me.”

“So you can ride in my car, no problem,” I said, letting a little bit of disbelief leach into my words.

He grinned at me and opened the door. “No problem.”

He had me drive to his house. It was an actual house—or maybe a condo, since it was small and smooshed up against the houses on either side—with a lock on the front door, not some abandoned, glamoured, hidden place like most of the fey used. I mean, it seemed like he was probably actually paying rent on the place, and that surprised me. Two in one day—first Saben, then Kin. It was weird for me to see these fey acting like humans. Fey pretended all the time, made out like they wanted to live the way humans did, but they never quite got there, because when it came down to it, humans and fey were different. Different species with different ideas and different ways of living. But Saben was going at it like she meant to really make it work. And here was Kin, actually living like a human, from what I could see.

The house seemed normal on the inside too. Regular furniture, a few potted plants clustered near the door and hanging in the kitchen. I’d been expecting, again, something more fey—a kitchen with all the appliances ripped out, doors and windows thrown open so the wilderness could come crawling in, leaves on the floor, holes in the ceiling. Disrepair and magic marching hand in hand, because that was what you usually got when you went where the fey lived. But this was nothing like that. Beige carpeting, boring but clean. A red couch, and a blue easy chair that didn’t match but didn’t look too bad, either. There wasn’t any art on the walls, not a lot of personal touches at all, except the plants, but the place was homey, like a work in progress. It was warm inside, and it smelled just slightly dusty. Sunlight was pouring through the windows, lighting the place up, making it airy and softening all the edges.

“I just moved in,” Kin explained, throwing his keys on the kitchen counter. He glanced back at me. He must have seen the way I was looking around, trying to find something, anything, that would tell me this was a yokai’s house and not a human’s. He smiled at me, slow and gentle and kind of knowing. “I was raised by a human—my mother, the one who wasn’t ningyo.” He turned and headed down the hall. “I’m not what you think,” he called over his shoulder.

I heard a door click shut. I waited there, in the space between his living room and his kitchen, not really sure what to do with myself. I didn’t know if I should sit or if I should give up this whole weird endeavor and sneak away while he was out of the room. But he was only gone for a minute, and before I’d decided what to do with myself, he came back down the hallway.

He’d changed out of his kimono into a pair of tight gray jeans, and he was tugging a black long-sleeved T-shirt over his head while he walked. I caught a glimpse of his flat stomach, the sleek, tan skin of his chest, before he pulled the fabric down over himself. He looked up, and I know he saw me staring, because he smiled that wry little grin again, just the corner of his mouth lifting. Something sparkled in his eyes—amusement or pleasure—and I realized all over again how lovely he was. This magical being. He was, somehow, more and less human now, dressed almost like I was, dressed like any man our age might be, but too long and lean, too beautiful, too perfect.

He watched me watch him, until whatever was building between us got too thick, too heavy, and I cleared my throat. His smile slipped away, and he gestured with a flick of his hand, asking me to follow him. He walked into the kitchen, motioning at the stools lined up at the counter. I pulled one out and sat, a little confused, while he went to the cabinet and brought down two glasses.

“Aren’t you going to . . .” I shrugged. “Examine me or something?” Healers might be different in their techniques, but they all wanted to get their hands on you, poke and prod at you, one way or another.

Kin nodded without looking around. He turned on the tap and held one glass under it, filling it. He glanced over his shoulder. “I have tea in the fridge, if you’d rather. Or . . .”

I shook my head. “Water’s fine.”

He filled the second glass, then set it in front of me. He put his glass down too, across from me, and leaned on the counter. “I can examine you. I’d like to listen to your lungs and your heart. But I’d rather you just tell me what’s happening, first. What you think. You know your body. And I’m not a doctor.” He smiled at me, gentle, maybe a little sad. “I don’t work miracles, Luca. I think your father hopes I will. But I can’t promise that.”

I liked how blunt he was. I liked how he didn’t try to coddle me or tell me everything would be okay, that he would fix everything, when we’d both have known he was lying.

“Where do I start?” I asked him.

He considered. “You said it’s the fey bits eating at the human in you.”

I lifted a shoulder, let it drop. It wasn’t a medically or scientifically sound answer. But it was the best I’d ever come up with. It was what made sense to me. Human doctors thought I had some undefined genetic disease. Fey healers had seen people like me, but few and far between. And always half. Half human and half other.

“Would you believe that?” I asked.

He pursed his lips and tilted his head to the side. “I’ve seen a lot of things. Haven’t seen many half fey, half humans, though. There must be a reason for that.”

Because they didn’t live long enough. Because they were dirty secrets. Because they weren’t supposed to exist, and there was a handy malady that made sure they didn’t for long. So convenient.

“Did you grow up with your father?” Kin asked, surprising me. I raised my face, met his eyes. He shrugged. “Your people made it seem . . . You make it seem like you’re doing this, seeing me, for him. Not for yourself.”

I sighed. When he’d said he wanted me to tell him things, I hadn’t thought it would be this kind of thing. I didn’t talk about my family. It was a practice I’d had to start as a child, when kids wanted to know where my dad was and I couldn’t tell them the truth. Or when the fey taunted me about my mother. I thought about refusing to answer. Just shaking my head, because what did it matter, in the long run, if this man knew who had raised me? But he leaned back a little, as if he’d just realized himself that he’d asked something too personal. He tightened his hands on the tile and opened his mouth, like he was getting ready to say something, to apologize or take the question back.

“Yes,” I said, stopping him. “I mostly lived with my mother. But my father took me in the summers. I was . . .” I trailed off, trying to figure out how to say this clearly, simply. “I’m an open secret. He shouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me, should have abandoned me. But he never did.” Not completely. He hadn’t lived with us, he and my mother hadn’t been a couple, and he hadn’t always been there for me as much as I’d wanted. As much as I’d needed. But he’d been there some. In the summers, I’d gone to live with him in his large, white, wild house in the woods, not that far away, really, but separate from everything I knew. I’d lived with the fey for those months, with my father and Saben, and it had been my home. They had been my home.

Kin nodded. He didn’t say anything else, just turned around and pulled a tin from somewhere. He opened it, laid it between us, and gestured at it. Cookies were piled inside, and I took one. The cookie was good, sweet and buttery and spicy. It tasted like some of the cakes I got from the brownies, when they were in the mood to feed me.

“Is this a payment from a fey? For your services?” I asked him.

He laughed and nodded. “You got fey feeding you too?”

I nibbled at the cookie. “I run errands for them.” Sometimes they fed me, cakes and pies and preserves. Sometimes they gave me a basket of peaches or a necklace that I could never wear, or a handful of iron keys I could turn in for scrap. Sometimes I got nothing. Sometimes they spilled pennies into my hands, thousands of them, and were pleased that they’d managed to pay me in human currency. It was enough, most days. I had my mother’s house, and the food the fey gave me, and their payments left me enough money that I could buy things, now and then, pay the electricity and the water bill. It was more than I’d had for a lot of my life while I was roaming, always moving, living hand to mouth. I was content enough.

We ate in silence for a few seconds, and then Kin wiped his hands on a dishcloth. “Tell me,” he said.

So I did. I told him about the coughing and the blood that had started coming up. I told him about the muscle aches, so bad some days that it took effort to get out of bed. The bruising, horrific black and purple splotches that happened when I did the stupidest things, like bumping into a table. The dizzy spells, the occasional fainting. The idea I had, sometimes, that there was something inside me, inside my chest, growing and gnawing away at me, a monster trying to eat its way out. I told him about the iron tablets I swallowed, how, when I was lucky, they seemed to subdue it, subdue the fey inside me, enough that I could get through the day without hurting as much. I tried to be quick while I told him, lay it all out like it was just a string of facts. Like it was something that was happening to someone else.