Saben eventually sent one of her girls to check up on me, a day or so after Kin had come by. The girl was there to make sure I’d done as I was told, and to deliver any messages the fey had left me about tasks that needed doing. She didn’t even ring my doorbell, just sat outside my house until I came out. The poor thing was miserable. It was obvious that the iron was affecting her, even sitting as far away on my front lawn as she could. She handed me the messages Saben had collected for me, and I told her I’d been to see Kin, and that there wasn’t anything else to say about it. She nodded. She might have pressed me harder, to have something more to tell Saben, but it was pretty clear that the only thing she could think about was leaving.

It didn’t make any difference to me anyway. Not like I wanted her to hang out. I sorted through the messages, trying to decipher spidery handwriting, ink splotches, and patches gone wrinkly with water damage. Most of the fey, outside the high-court fey like the sidhe, aren’t too fantastic at writing coherently. Some things weren’t even in English, but someone had carefully translated those notes, attaching the translations with a paper clip. There were other notes in the same handwriting, explaining tasks better than the original message had. I wasn’t sure whose handwriting it was, who had bothered to make things easier for me. Saben maybe, although the idea was almost hard to believe.

I picked out the tasks that I’d work on first—the jobs that needed doing the soonest, the fey I liked the most, and the fey I liked the least so I could get those over with. The mer people fell into the last group. I hated going to see them, hated going to the rocky outcropping with the minuscule, gritty beach where they liked to meet, hated getting damp with sea spray when it was this nippy out. And I didn’t like the mer, aggressive and cruel as they were, either. They were deceptively beautiful, and appeared almost human, swimming in the shallows, their skin just slightly blue or green, their jaws a bit too narrow. But they were as far from human as any fey I’d ever come across. The mer were violent, bloodthirsty. Monsters.

I decided to do that job first. I’d get it out of the way. And it’d get me out of the house, at least. I hadn’t really gone anywhere since Kin had come by. I was letting myself get trapped in my own head, and I knew that was a bad idea.

I drove to the shore and parked. It was deserted, too cold even for the most diehard beach fans. This miserable, rocky stretch of land wasn’t very popular, anyway. I got out of the car, and the fog in the air slapped at me, the cold and the salt burning my lungs. It smelled coppery, too alive, too primordial. I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself.

I turned, ready to go and get this over with, and there was Saben, standing a little ways away, her back to the stairs that led down to the beach.

I raised a hand, and her eyes caught the movement. She raised her hand in return and walked to me. I felt underdressed in my jeans and old T-shirt and hoodie, and scruffy when she was standing next to me. She seemed as if she belonged there, perfectly comfortable, completely put together, her too-light dress twisting around her legs. It was yellow, the brightest spot of color in my view. She had blue and yellow bracelets running up one arm to match, and when she met my eyes, I saw that hers were highlighted with sapphire-blue powder and ringed in gold liner.

“I see Elina made it to you,” she said, referring, I assumed, to the girl who had dropped off my messages. “I knew you’d come here first.”

I ran my hand through my hair, the silver rings I had on three of my fingers slicking against the strands. Saben’s own hair tangled around her face, pushed around by the wind. She kept pulling it away from her eyes. “You shouldn’t do that to your girls,” I said. “All of my iron bothers them.”

Saben shrugged. “I told her I would bring the messages to you. But she wanted to do it. So I let her.”

I sighed through my nose. “You were never such a spoiled brat when you were a child.”

She grabbed her hair at last, in an irritated motion, her hands catching and twisting it into a tight knot. “Maybe you were just in the habit of spoiling me then too.” Her words should have stung, and I thought she’d wanted them to, but they came out almost gentle, with no barbs at all. I was surprised by the way she spoke, the directness she was offering me, even if she was trying to wound me with it.

I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, trying to work the chill out of my body. “What do you need, Saben?”

“You didn’t tell Elina anything,” she said, her face tipped up to me again, her eyes hard and a little cold, like they usually were, but there was something else there too. A nervousness, maybe. Or an energy. “Not really. Just that you went.”

“There’s nothing to tell.” I cocked my head at her. “I thought I told Elina to tell you?”

“She did,” Saben said easily.

“So?”

“So I wanted to hear it from you.” She leaned toward me, just the tiniest bit, like she could intimidate. It should have been almost laughable with how small she was. But I thought that little tilt of her head, the narrowing of her eyes, the fierceness that was so clear inside her, probably intimidated lots of people. “I wanted to hear the truth.”

I took a breath and held it, staring down at my sister. She was very clearly not the small child I’d left six years ago after my mother died and I’d gone traveling. When I’d seen her last, before I’d come back, her head had come just high enough to hit my waist. Now, she had to lift her face back to look me in the eye, but she didn’t have to tip it far. Her shoulders were narrow but toned, her cheeks sharp, all the baby softness gone. Her childhood charm had turned into calculating cleverness, an appeal that I had no doubt she wielded like a sleek weapon, using it to her advantage whenever she needed to. I would never have spoken to my sister about this before, any of this. Now, though, we were different people. We didn’t know each other, and she’d gone from being a little girl to a grown woman.

“The truth,” I said, making sure my voice was steady, nearly flat, “is that I’m sick. The truth is that something has gone wrong inside me and there’s no way to fix it. The truth is that I searched and searched, and there isn’t anyone on the planet who can make me better. Not human doctors. Not fey healers. Not your yokai. The truth is that I’ve come back here because this is where I want to die.”

She stepped back. It was such a small move, but from her, it was huge. It was like I’d pushed her, reached out and slapped at her. Like I’d hurt her. I was surprised. I honestly hadn’t thought she cared. I’d laid it out like that because I hadn’t thought it would matter to her.

I wanted to take it back, how blunt I’d been. Everything I’d said, even if it was exactly what she’d asked for. “I’m sorry,” I said.

She breathed out and turned away to face toward the ocean. She squinted her eyes against the wind, and for a long moment, she didn’t say anything. I thought briefly about walking away, letting us both pretend that none of this had happened.

Then she sighed. “You don’t come to see me.”

I was nearly glad for the way she’d slipped back into the odd twists of fey conversation, but her words took me by surprise all over again. I didn’t think she wanted me around. She never gave any sign she was happy when I was near her. Since I’d come home six months ago, we had only been distant with each other, the gentle ways I’d reached out to her in the beginning rejected. She had let me be around as her errand boy, but never any closer.

I wanted to be closer. I had loved her, dearly, when she was a child. I had considered her mine to care for, even though I wasn’t her parent. Even though I was only really around her part of the time. When we’d been together, we had fit. We’d belonged. Now we didn’t. I wanted to ask her, really ask, why she was living in that apartment and how she was getting along and who her friends were and how her conversations with our father went, if she still fought with her mother in that passive way I’d been so used to seeing, if she still preferred strawberry sorbet to vanilla ice cream, what she was reading, what songs she’d fallen in love with, everything I’d missed while I was away. But I couldn’t. I wanted to tell her how confused I was by all of it, but I couldn’t.

It was, when I stood back and examined it all honestly, my fault, what had happened between us. I’d thought I was going to die out there, in some far-flung corner of the world. I hadn’t thought I’d come home, one way or another. I’d wanted to leave her and our father and everyone else, let them forget me. I’d pushed them away. And now I was reaping the rewards of what I’d done.

“I was there the other day,” I said, instead of anything else, anything that would have been more truthful and harder to explain.

“I had to ask for you.”

“You’re cold to me,” I told her.

She turned to me, but she kept her mouth shut. She leaned forward again, like she wanted to touch me. She did touch me, sometimes, put her hand around my wrist or let me place my palm on her back, so the other fey would know who we were, would know who I belonged to. It was never a warm feeling, though.

I waited, but she didn’t come any closer, and she didn’t respond to what I’d said. After a while passed in silence, I dropped my eyes and moved around her, walking down to the beach, wanting to get this over with so I could get out of the wind.