pull up “files” and “email,” make pictures bigger or smaller, or whisk them away with a flick of her hand. I, of course, thought it was Iron glamour that allowed such magic, though when I mentioned this to Diode, a hacker elf in charge of the castle’s computer systems, he laughed so hysterically he couldn’t answer me, and I left in annoyance.
“Hey,” I murmured, slipping my arms around her from behind. “What are you doing?”
She paused a moment, resting her head against my arm, then reached up and pulled a pair of thin white wires from her ears. “Checking the itinerary for the day. Seems the Cog Dwarves have been having trouble with disappearances in the Under-city. I’ll have to get Glitch to see what’s going on down there. Diode wants me to ban all gremlins from the security rooms, saying he can’t think with them running around getting into everything.” She sighed and leaned back in the chair, lacing an arm around my neck while the other hand still held the tablet. “And there are a ton of requests from the northern territories, saying knights from the Winter Court are causing trouble, harassing the locals on this side of the border. Looks like Mab and I need to have a talk. That’s going to be a fun conversation.”
She sighed and laid the tablet flat on the desk. I stared at the words flashing across the screen, a completely foreign vocabulary to me, even if I understood the language. Meghan glanced up at me, and a mischievous smile crossed her face.
“Here.” Rising, she plucked the screen off the desktop and shoved it toward me. “Take it. I’ll show you how it works.”
I balked, taking a step backward, eyeing the tablet as if it was a venomous snake. “Why?”
“Ash, you’re human now.” Meghan smiled and continued to hold the screen toward me. “You don’t have to be afraid of this anymore. It can’t hurt you.”
“I don’t have Iron glamour,” I told her. “It won’t work for me.”
She laughed. “You don’t need glamour to work this. It’s not magic, just technology. Anyone can use it. Now, come on.” She waggled it in my direction. “Just give it a try.”
I sighed. Very cautiously, I reached out and took it, still half expecting to feel a searing pain in my hands as my flesh reacted to the metal. When nothing happened, I held it gingerly in both hands and stared at the screen, not knowing what to do.
Meghan slipped beside me, watching over my shoulder. “Touch the screen here,” she ordered softly, demonstrating with graceful fingers. “See? You can access files here, pull up pictures, make them bigger like this. Try it.”
I did, and to my surprise, the tablet responded to my clumsy attempts, working exactly as it had for Meghan. I dragged a picture onto the screen, made it bigger, shrank it and whisked it away, feeling a foolish grin creep across my face. I discovered an entire library within the files of this strange device, more books than I had thought possible, all contained in this tiny screen. With the touch of a finger, music filled the air, one of the thousands of songs Meghan had “downloaded” from the “web.” I must’ve played with the thing for at least twenty minutes, before Meghan laughingly took it back, saying she still had work to do.
“See, now,” she told me, as I reluctantly gave it up, “being human isn’t all bad, is it?”
I watched as she sat down and began working again, fingers flying across the screen, eyes half-closed in concentration. Eventually, she became aware of me staring at her and looked up, raising a quizzical eyebrow. “Yes?”
“I want one,” I told her simply. She laughed and this time, I grinned back.
THAT WAS THE BEGINNING.
Humanity didn’t come easily for me, or all at once. I still missed my glamour, the easy way my body used to move, the quickness and the strength of my Unseelie heritage. To keep up my skills, Glitch and I would spar daily in the training yard as the Iron knights looked on, and though I remembered how to wield a sword, I never seemed to move fast enough. The maneuvers that used to be second nature were extremely difficult to impossible now. True, I had been fighting for a very long time, and my experience was such that none of the knights could touch me in a one-on-one match. But I lost to Glitch more often than not, and it was frustrating. I had been better once.
My physical limitations weren’t my only worries. I was often plagued with nightmares of my past, where I would wake in the night gasping, covered in cold sweat, ghostly faces ebbing into reality. Voices haunted my sleep, accusing, hateful voices, demanding to know why I was happy when they had died. My dreams were filled with blood and darkness, and there were many nights when I couldn’t sleep, staring at the ceiling, waiting for dawn. Gradually, however, the nightmares diminished, as I began to forget that part of my life and focus on my new one. The dreams never ceased completely, but the demon at the heart of those nightmares wasn’t me any longer. I was no longer Ash the Unseelie prince. I had moved on.
But, every once in a great while, I would have the surreal feeling that I was missing something. That my life with Meghan wasn’t what it appeared to be. That I had forgotten something important. I would shake it off, convincing myself I was simply adjusting to being human, but it always returned, taunting me, a memory keeping just out of reach.
Regardless, time moved on in the Iron Realm. Meghan ruled without opposition, maneuvering the labyrinth of fey politics as if she had been born for it. I immersed myself in technology; laptops, cell phones, computer games, software. And gradually, I grew accustomed to being human, slowly forgetting my faery side—my glamour, speed and strength—until I couldn’t remember what it felt like at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY
THE MARCH OF TIME
A frantic beeping dragged me out of a comfortable sleep. Groggily, I raised myself up, being careful not to disturb Meghan, and reached for the phone on the end table. The glowing blue numbers on the screen proclaimed it 2:12 a.m., and that Glitch was going to die for waking me up like this.
I pressed the button, put the phone to my ear and growled: “Someone better be dead.”
“Sorry, highness.” Glitch’s voice hissed in my ear, whispering loudly. “But we have a problem. Is the queen still asleep?”
I was instantly awake. “Yes,” I murmured, throwing back the covers and rising from the bed. The Iron Queen was a somewhat heavy sleeper, often exhausted by the demands of ruling a kingdom, and tended to be cranky when woken up in the middle of the night. After getting snarled at several times for a middle-of-the-night emergency, Glitch started directing all midnight problems to me. Between us, we were usually able to handle the situation before the queen knew something was wrong.
“What’s going on?” I asked, shrugging into my clothes while still pressing the phone to my ear with a shoulder. Glitch gave a half angry, half fearful sigh.
“Kierran has run off again.”
“What?”
“His room was empty, and we think he managed to slip over the wall. I have four squads out looking for him, but I thought you should know your son has pulled another vanishing act.”
I groaned and scrubbed a hand across my face. “Get the gliders ready. I’ll be right there.”
GLITCH MET ME on the highest tower, the lightning in his hair snapping angrily, his purple eyes glowing in the darkness.
“We’ve already searched his usual hideouts,” he informed me as I came up. “He’s not in any of them, and we’ve been looking since midnight. We think he managed to get out of the city this time.”
“How did he get over the wall?” I asked, glowering at the first lieutenant, who grimaced.
“One of the gliders is missing,” he said, and I growled a curse. Kierran, blue-eyed and silver-haired, was nearly eight in human years, and had just enough faery blood to make him as troublesome as a phouka. From the time he could walk, the household staff had been unable to keep up with him. Nimble as a squirrel, he scaled the walls, climbed out windows and perched on the highest towers, grinning in delight while everyone scrambled
