I lived in the hills, away from the city. If I wanted to avoid the fey, it would have been wiser for me to live closer to town, where there was more iron and less green. I hadn’t chosen the spot, though—I’d inherited the house from my mother. She’d never said it out loud, but I knew she liked the idea that it would be easy for my father to get here, if he wanted to.

I didn’t think of it as my mother’s house anymore. And it wasn’t exactly fey-friendly anymore, either. I’d pounded four iron studs into every threshold. The windows had steel frames. I collected wrought iron artwork—stuff that was meant to decorate gardens and walls and walkways. Some of it I set up in the yard, but I hung even more on the walls. I interspersed the metal with leafy plants, not unlike the ones Kin had in his house. The affect was half wild, half modern. It suited me, this blending of themes. It let me make the house mine. It also meant that a fey would have to be incredibly determined to get in, to step over the iron and breathe it in while they were there. I had gotten lucky, this one time, in the genetics department—the iron didn’t bother me at all, and I could use that to my advantage.

The morning after I met Kin in the park, I slept late, and after I woke up, I still couldn’t quite work up the energy to get out of bed. I had a fierce headache, and my joints were a bit creaky, but I didn’t lie there because I was sick. I was just . . . heart sore. Weary, maybe. Angry at myself, for hoping at all, and even angrier for lying here like an idiot. But it wasn’t enough to make me move, make me get up and shower and brush my teeth and pretend I was normal. Instead, I curled toward the window at the side of my bed, toward the chill coming off it. I tilted my head until it hit the glass and I could see straight up, past my postage stamp of a backyard, and see the slope of the hill behind the house and the clouds, puffy and pale blue, over the top of it at the same time.

I sprawled on my bed and kept looking up at the clouds, staring until I couldn’t tell if they were moving and expanding or not, and their back-lit edges burned my eyes. I wanted to lie there in a tangle. I wanted to twist my sheets around my ankles and wiggle my head enough that it sank just right into the pillow. I wanted to stay that way until it felt like my joints were disintegrating, melting enough that they didn’t hurt anymore. Melodramatic, I told myself. But for a second, staring at those clouds, I was comfortable, and my mind was blank, and I wanted that.

Someone knocked on my door. I turned my head away from the window. My bedroom was oddly located, with the front door nearly right across from it. I could see the window that flanked the door and the front porch beyond. It was convenient for observing visitors before they saw me. Whoever was standing there now was out of my line of vision, though.

I waited, and the knock came again. It wasn’t a timid knock. It didn’t sound like whoever it was had knocked and skittered back, away from the iron. Something told me that they were still standing right there, waiting. I got up.

It was Kin. He wore a blue V-necked T-shirt and those same jeans. His hair hung in a loose ponytail from the back of his head, and one ear was lined with small black studs. The plain outfit highlighted his body, his sleek legs and long chest and the sharp bones of his face. He looked almost like he had at the club, except that his scales were gone. Glamoured away, I supposed, so all I could see was the fine, smooth tan of his skin.

He leaned forward into the doorway, his hands on the frame, and I jumped. “You can’t—” I started. He stopped, confused.

“Can I not?”

I’d been thinking of the scales that were supposed to be on his face, the things that marked him so visibly as fey, as a creature that shouldn’t have been able to touch iron. I took a deep breath. “There’s iron.” I gestured at the threshold, and his feet, the way he was standing just over the metal that irritated all the other fey who came here.

“It doesn’t bother me,” he said, patient, a tiny smile sliding over his lips.

Right. I knew that. I’d seen him ride in my car, completely without complaint. In fact, just past him, I could see an old truck, paint flaking away from its sides, parked in front of my yard, and I realized Kin must have driven here. But the mantra of “fey can’t touch iron” was so deeply imbedded in me, it would take a while to remember that it wasn’t always true.

Kin was still watching me, waiting. I moved aside and made a little motion with my hand, some kind of half gesture that wanted him to come in. He stepped over the iron and into my house. He turned when we were level and stared at me. Right into my eyes, steady. It wasn’t something most people did. It was unnerving.

He had a leather pack slung over one shoulder, and I pointed at it, hoping to break his stare. “What have you got?”

The half smile on his face changed a little, went uncertain, almost nervous. “I brought you things.”

I sighed, because I didn’t want to have this conversation. It had seemed to me, the other day, when he’d told me what he thought about my illness, that talk about this was done. Everything that could be said, that was important, already had been. I didn’t want to draw it out any more than that. But I liked seeing him, standing here in my house. I liked the way he looked against my cream walls and the vivid green plants and the wrought iron I’d hung all over the place. He still seemed almost too slender, like glass or a sharp blade, but he didn’t seem small. His presence was massive. He took up so much of my senses. So much of my concentration and my breath. He was energy and stillness and ink. Ink that splashed everywhere. And I didn’t want him to go. Even if that meant letting him tell me what he’d come to say.

“Come have something to drink?” I asked.

He nodded, and his hair flopped forward. Strands hung down around his face, a few long bangs curtaining the corners of his eyes and his cheekbones. He pushed them away with the tips of two fingers. He smiled, the gesture small and almost coy. “Yes, please.”

In the kitchen, I got water for Kin and lemonade for me. I pulled out a jar of orange slices soaked in tea. Kin dropped the bag he was carrying on my linoleum table and opened the drawstring. He pulled out folded packets of paper, little cloth pouches, small jugs, and a larger jug, all with black characters written on them that I didn’t understand.

I handed him the water and a fork. We sat, and I spilled the orange slices onto a plate in the middle of the table. He pushed his fork into one and ate around the peel, his teeth delicate on the pulp. He swallowed and tapped the tines of the fork against his bottom lip.

“Amazing. What’s in that?”

I shrugged. “It was a payment.”

His lips slid up at one corner again. “They expect a half human to live on orange slices?”

“Oranges. Blackberries. I get a lot of eggs. The brownies like to make casseroles and things.” I loved doing things for brownies. They fed me the best. They were mostly interested in making country foods—roasts and potatoes and turnips and squash, fried chicken, pancakes, pasta with a rich red sauce. And jams and preserves and breads. It wasn’t true that the fey don’t like bread. “There’s a sidhe who loves to bake. She brings me pies and cakes. She makes incredible frosting.”

Kin laughed. It was a soft sound, but deep, and so genuinely amused it was startling. “They like you.”

I smiled back. “I’m very useful.”

He watched me and his laughter slowed, his smile going gentle and then disappearing. His gaze flicked to the little pile of things he’d laid on my table. “I can be useful too.”

“I see.”

He took a sip of his water. Around his fingers, the glass dripped with condensation, like he was calling the moisture in the air to him. “Ask me what I brought you.”

“Kin . . .”

“Ask me.”

“Why?”

He took a deep breath, let it out. “Because if you ask, it means you’re interested. It means you care about whether any of this can help you or not.”

He’d figured me out so fast. But then, I wasn’t exactly trying to hide the way I felt. “I care that you brought it all,” I started. “I care that you want to—”

He shook his head sharply. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

So I closed my eyes and took my own deep breath, tilting my head back, steadying myself. Then I leaned forward and looked him in the eye, like he’d done to me earlier. “What did you bring me?”

He pulled each packet and jar forward, telling me about what they would do, how I should use them. There were herbs to eat, charms to hang around the house, drinks in tiny pots with specific dosages. He’d written everything down, but he explained it all anyway, slow and steady and soothing. He didn’t tell me any of it would cure me. When he explained what the things would do, he talked about lessening pain and making my muscles work better, easing my airways, blocking the fey parts of me. They weren’t cures. He didn’t try to pretend they were. But they were things that might make me more comfortable, that might let me live more normally, and I appreciated that.

As he talked about each item, he pushed it to one side of the table. When there was only the large jar left on the other side, he paused.

I reached out and touched the jug. “And this?”

He straightened, and his jaw clenched. His hand folded into a fist, and he tucked it out of sight in his lap. “Good sake,” he said, and I swear his voice was tight. “For when anything else isn’t enough.”

And there it was. The admission, even if he wasn’t exactly saying it, that the things he had brought me would not always be enough. That they might not work at all. The idea that there would be times, many times, when what worked the best, healed me the best, would be something that dissolved me, something that took away the pain or made me forget what I was, or both. I took a deep breath and let it out. My lungs were better today. They could do that without protest.

“We’ll try the other stuff first,” Kin said. His voice was so soft. “If it doesn’t help, we can go in another direction.”

I blinked and raised my eyes to his. “Why are you bothering?” He knew I was doomed, as well as I did. This was a waste of his time. “You did your part. My father will be grateful.”

He focused on the spread of shiny white table in front of us. “Your father is a powerful man. It’s in my best interest to do my best for his son.” He shrugged and glanced up at me, peeking through his bangs and his eyelashes. “But really . . . I just want to.”

My arm was resting on the table. Kin stretched out a finger and ran it along a bruise near my wrist. It was purple, much darker than any normal human or fey would get from bumping against a doorframe, which was what I had done. My breath caught with a click. My arm burned where he touched me.

“You don’t even know me.”

He nodded and took his finger away. His hand stayed on the table this time, though. “What did you think when you saw me in the club?”

He was looking right at me again in that unnerving way. I shook my head.

“I saw you. In the club. And again, when you were hiding in the trees,” he said. His voice was so low I had to sit forward to hear him. “You tucked yourself into the shadows both times, but I saw you. I saw your hair. Copper, but too bright, like autumn but not quite.” His hand flicked up and touched his own hair. There was a spot between my shoulder blades that got tighter when he moved. He wasn’t looking at me anymore. His eyes were still on me, but he was seeing me that day, against the tree trunk, seeing me while I was watching him get out of the water. “I thought you were very beautiful.”

I couldn’t get a breath. My lungs were failing for the wrong reason. “Kin.”

“I still planned to brush you off, until you coughed.” His eyes focused on me again. “Spoiled sidhe. I thought you must be melodramatic. Faking it. I was going to examine you and send you on your way. But then you coughed like that, and you tried to hide the blood from me.” He shrugged. “You were all I could think about. Your illness. How to help. But just . . . you, too.”

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t think of anything. Then Kin sat back in his chair. “Nothing like the sight of blood to make you fall for someone,” he said, his voice flat and dry.

I laughed, right out loud. It sounded awful, like a bark, but it made Kin smile. The tension that had been building around us evaporated. It wasn’t funny, we both knew it, but it was a relief. Kin laughed with me, and it felt good. The way he watched me, a little bit of wryness to his expression, his eyes on me as our laughter wound down, told me he knew what I thought the medicines he’d brought would do. I let my head hang down a little, let the laughter and the tension go from me, sorry and relieved at the same time. It’s hard to tell someone that you think you won’t live long. But I didn’t have to spell it out for him. Didn’t have to tell him at all. He already knew.

I looked back up at him. It was as if something had snapped between us, as if the invisible wall that kept two strangers apart had fractured, the masks that we generally gave the rest of the world slipping a little. I stood and got a new glass and had him pour me out some of the liquid he’d said to drink, showing me how much I should take at a time. He handed me the list with all the instructions, and I promised to follow it. I thought I actually would, too. For him, where I might not have done it for anyone else, because he’d tried so hard.

“I’ll come back,” he said before he left. He reached out and touched my elbow, his fingertips just ghosting over my skin. “I’ll need to come see if these things are working, or if we need to switch. So I’ll come back.” It was meant to be a doctor’s order, I was sure, a stern warning to do as he’d instructed. But he sounded almost hopeful while he talked, his eyes trained so carefully on me, watching me. It was personal, more like a promise than anything.