Jack took me home that night. I got the impression that letting me go home wasn't in the original plan, but I was so worn out from the cemetery that I don't think I could have handled being around any more people. Kieran had to half carry me out of the graveyard. My eyes kept itching, and I could feel tears struggling to escape my eyes but I wasn't letting them fall. I'd made enough of a mess, made myself look weak and incapable. I wasn't going to cry. If I couldn't help that though, I wasn't going to let anyone see me do it.

I pulled my hair out of its bun, letting the straggling curls fall around my face. Jack put his arms around me, placing his giant hand over the back of my head. His palm cupped from the nape of my neck to the crown of my head as he cradled me against his chest. Actually, it was probably closer to the top of his abdomen than the bottom of his chest, that I rested my forehead against, but the height difference was embarrassing enough that I was trying not to think about it.

"I'll see you later?" Kieran asked, his voice spinning around me in the darkness. I didn't have time to answer before we were falling.

It was less dizzying the second time. It still had a kind of sickening lurch, like when an elevator stops suddenly and you feel your stomach drop. Only it started with that feeling, like falling inwards, and stretched it until we were falling out again. The metaphysical equivalent of being turned inside out.

I wondered if we left a popping noise behind us, as the air was sucked into our absence, or if that was just the kind of thing they'd put in the movies so the audience knew it was magic and not just a scene transition. I didn't think I was going to find the answer to that, so I let the thought go.

I stepped away from Jack. We were standing in my kitchen. My wonderful kitchen. My very own kitchen. I looked up at the ceiling above my island bench - mine - and wondered what it would take to get a skylight put in, so I could grow my own herbs there, like Catriona did. Given that we were in a two storey house, I thought it would be a lot more complicated than Cat's had been.

Filled with dizzy relief at being home again, I turned the kettle on. I was almost overwhelmed by the rush of proud possession that filled me as I looked around my kitchen. That was literally the first time I felt like I was home. It's amazing what being somewhere totally foreign can do for your perspective on things.

"I should go," Jack said, awkwardly. He looked even bigger, standing in my kitchen, than he had towering over me in the open fields.

"Don't," I said, getting a cup out for him as well. "Sit down, have a cup of tea."

"I don't really drink tea," he said, pulling out a chair. "Do you have coffee?"

"Um..." I looked in the cupboard. I had a vague memory of Cat saying that I had to be stocked for unexpected visitors. Of course, the way she said it made it sound more ritualistic than that, but she'd given me a small basket, tied with a green ribbon, filled with things I'd never use. I dragged the basket out of the cupboard and put it on the bench. I found a jar of instant cinnamon coffee, with a gold foil twist lid. It looked expensive. More the kind of thing that caters to a niche market than the kind of thing you keep in your cupboard 'just in case.'

I frowned at the jar. What was Catriona thinking when she bought this?

"Cinnamon?" Jack asked, smiling his biggest, toothiest grin. If he didn't have such adorable dimples, a smile that wide might have looked predatory on a man his size.

"Yeah," I said, surprised, "is that okay?"

"That," Jack said, pointing at the jar in my hand, "is literally my favorite type of coffee, this side of the Ethersphere."

"Really?" I asked, opening the jar. It smelt good, in that rich, slightly sweet spicy way. Catriona didn't drink coffee though, so I couldn't imagine how she'd known to get this, unless... I spilled some coffee on the bench. Either this was a really big coincidence, or there was something Cat wasn't telling me. And I didn't believe in coincidences, not when they were this specific. I figured she'd had a vision about it. What I didn't understand is why she didn't tell me.

I sat down across from Jack, cradling my cup of tea. Jack took a sip of his coffee, visibly relaxing when the liquid passed over his tongue. He sighed, putting the cup back on the table with a kind of careful reverence. I've never been able to understand how some people can treat beverages as a type of religion but there it was, sitting across from me in my kitchen. I shook my head.

"You want to ask me something," Jack said. He sounded like he was making an observation, more than asking a question. I've heard people talk about the weather with less certainty. Nice day, isn't it? No.

"Eolande," I said, glaring into my cup.

"Of course," Jack said. I could feel his eyes on me. "You don't know much about your history, do you?"

"I didn't know I had a history," I said, realizing he was talking about 'my people,' the necromancers, the 'deadly aristocracy,' or whatever you wanted to call them. "Until the professor told me." I met Jack's eyes across the table. "I genuinely thought I was human."

"Human is," Jack shrugged, "as human does."

"Thanks," I nodded, not because Jack's words actually helped me adjust to the news, but because he was trying. The fact that Jack thought I could still hold on to the dangling threads of my humanity, when I could do something so completely beyond the laws of human nature, meant more to me than I cared to admit.

"It's been so long," he said quietly, his voice slipping into that soothing rhythm that lets you know you're listening to an old story, "since the Deadly Aristocracy walked among us -" I couldn't help interrupting.

"Why did they leave?" I asked. "I mean, why go from being aristocrats to a place where we can't even admit to what we are."

"Is it a secret here?" Jack asked, sounding surprised.

"Well, yeah," I shrugged. "Ever hear of the witch trials? People hunt the supernatural here."

"That's..." he frowned, "interesting."

"I thought you were in human relations."

"I am," Jack said, shifting in his chair. "I just haven't had any humans to relate to, before." I stared at him. "I was the king's valet," he admitted, "like a manservant, I guess. I think you call them personal assistants now. But I would have been in human relations, if the king needed me to be. That medallion," he pointed at my chest, "that's your passport between worlds. We are the only two people in all the worlds who have them," he said proudly.

"How do you know that?" I asked, suddenly feeling the medallion hang heavily against my chest.

"Because," Jack said, clicking his fingers in the air. A small, silver key appeared between them, like he was a very good magician. Only, I was pretty sure he hadn't done it with sleight of hand. "I'm the only one who has the key to the vault."

"What about the deadly aristocracy," I said, purposely avoiding giving the name the same reverence the Fae gave it, "if they crossed between the worlds, shouldn't they have them?"

"No," he shook his head. "The Deadly Aristocracy didn't just leave, you were exiled."

"Exiled?"

"The official history says that you made slaves of the dead in the Otherworld, and that the Greater Fae would not stand for it, so you went to a place where the people had no rulers to protect them. You were given a one way ticket, so you couldn't return." He shrugged. "Now, I'm not so sure about that."

"The victors write the history books," I said.

"You know the truth?"

"No," I said, "that's just a saying here. They use it in movies a lot, as an excuse for the bad guys, usually. A means to an end, and all that."

"Do you believe that the ends justify the means?" Jack asked. He said it so seriously that I actually took the time to think about my answer.

"No," I said, slowly. "I know that some things have to be done, and sometimes they're not very nice, but even if they're done for the right reasons, I don't think your intentions make up for it."

"No balancing things?"

"Like a spreadsheet?"

Jack nodded.

I pressed my hands together. "Who decides what good deed makes up for what bad?"

"I'm not a theologist," Jack said.

"Neither am I," I said, "but sometimes I wonder, even if you could make up for all the bad things, would that make you a better person?" I took a long sip of my tea, my throat parched from talking. "Or would it just make you a bad person, who happens to have an out for their conscience."

"Do you think there are good people and bad people?" Jack asked. He smiled, like it was a joke, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes.

"I think that there are people who do bad things," I said. "Isn't that enough?"

"Yeah," Jack nodded. "I guess I was expecting you to say something about Eolande."

"She scared me, Jack, she really did. But I'm not going to change how I feel about the world because of one fucked up individual."

"You don't think she's a bad person?"

"Automatically?" I asked. "Only because of what she's done."

"Fair enough," Jack said. "But I think you should know that there is a reason she tried to kill you."

"Oh, well, if there was a reason," I said, rolling my eyes. Like that made anything better.

"I'm just saying that you should know these things. In case it comes up again." I felt a cold chill dance down my spine.

"In case it comes up again?" I repeated, dimly.

"You should be aware of the folk tales," Jack said. "Apparently if a reanimated person destroys the necromancer who raised them, they get a second chance at life." He said it casually, like it wasn't really something to worry about. But then, it wasn't his life we were talking about.

"Do all the Fae know that?" I asked, feeling the ice cold chill steal into my voice. It occurred to me that it didn't even matter if what Jack said was true, that my death would return life to the one who killed me. What mattered was how widespread this story was, and, if every person I raised from the dead knew it, how many of them would try to kill me for it. Jack stared into me, his dark eyes seeming to read my thoughts as though I'd written them in the air between us.

I suppose I could have asked anyone.

If you were given a second chance at life, would you take it?

Very slowly, Jack nodded.

I nearly tumbled straight into bed after Jack left. That would have been a really bad idea. My clothes were literally covered in the remains of the dead. Not the freshly dead, either. Eolande had been clinging to my back when I yanked my power from her the second time. Her body had collapsed over me, splitting around the length of my body. Technically, I suppose, she was still clinging to me.

I stood in my tiny private bathroom, peeling my clothes away from my skin. They came off with a thick sucking sound. Dark splotches covered my clothes. Kieran's jacket had managed to escape most of the damage. There were some dark patches on one of the sleeves, where it had been draped across my back.

I filled my basin with cold water and got some soap out from under the sink. Sard wonder soap. If it got the stains out, I thought on the verge of hysteria, I'd write a letter to the company. Maybe they could use it in an ad.

I bundled the mounds of sticky cloth into the basin and dumped the soap on top. I watched the water stream over the bar of soap, turning milky white before diving into the darkened mess below. I turned the tap off and left my clothes to soak overnight.

In the shower, I struggled to scrub the smell of death from my skin, from my hair. My sense of smell was dulled by the long exposure to the clinging scent of death. I washed my hair twice, the first time to get all the sticky bits out, the disturbing small pieces of flesh - I gagged, feeling them slide through my fingers, down my hair, over my back. I doubled over, vomiting in the shower. My sides ached. I retched up the bitter flavor of stomach acid and tea, and was glad that I hadn't eaten anything for dinner that night.

I turned from my hands and knees, so that I was sitting down in the shower, hot water flowing down over my face. I felt like, no matter how long I stayed under the water, I would never be able to make myself clean.

Tyler moved into the downstairs room the next morning.

"Do you need a hand with anything?" I asked, watching him struggle with two boxes he'd piled on top of each other. The top box looked in serious danger of sliding out of his arms. I really hoped there wasn't anything breakable in it.

"No that's okay," he said, walking towards his new room. He stumbled on an uneven floorboard. He lurched, struggling to regain his balance. The top box slid two inches to the left.

I took the box from him. He rewarded me with a breathless smile that made his eyes - which I noticed then were the darkest blue I'd ever seen in a human face - sparkle like glinting sapphires.

"Thanks," he said, flicking his head back to shake the hair out of his eyes. His hair fell back to the exact same place he'd just shaken it from. He frowned, petulantly, and looked up at his hair.

"You need a haircut," I pointed out, trying to make it sound conversational.

"Not me," Tyler said, shaking his hair further into his eyes and pouting. "I'm totally rocking the emo scene here." I glanced over his outfit, from his acid green sneakers - over the stone washed skinny jeans, and the silver threaded vest - to the red flannel shirt, which miraculously fell short of clashing horribly with his hair. It took me way too long to realize that he was joking.

I put the box down in the corner of Tyler's room and backed out. I saw the smile fade from the corners of his eyes when I left. I wondered, at the time, what I had done wrong to damage his smile like that. I thought it was the same reason that most normal people only smiled at me half way. The same reason people shuffled away from me at the bus stop, averted their eyes when I spoke to them.

I thought he stopped smiling because he sensed that part of me that drove people away. It seemed to unsettle some people more than others, that part of me that contradicted the very laws of nature, and I thought that it was disturbing Tyler from almost the beginning. When he ran from my house that night, I thought it was a confirmation of that thought.

I wasn't normal, I knew that. Instead of building relationships with people, I terrified them. Sometimes, they didn't even know why, you could see it in their eyes. On the bus, on the train, in the supermarket. I thought it was something like the smell of death, that clung to me. Only instead of clinging to my skin, and my clothes, it filled my very soul.

I thought it was only a matter of time before Tyler avoided me, anyway, and that that dying smile was the first sign of unease between us. Now, I'm not so sure. But I'm even less sure of what else it could have been. So that doesn't exactly help me figure Tyler out. Maybe, when it was all over with the Fae, I should have been interviewing him, instead of the other way around. But I didn't have the background in journalism to carry me through the awkward silences, like Tyler obviously did.

I look up at him across the table. I wasn't even sure how long I'd been silent, wrapped in my own memories. He looks back at me with neutral eyes, patiently waiting for me to come back to the conversation, I guess.

"Where were we?" I ask, struggling to remember what we'd been talking about. What I'd been saying before I fell silent.

"You were about to tell me about Faerie politics," Tyler says.

"Right," I nod. "The king was dead and they wanted me to ask him who the new king should be."

"They didn't know?"

"It was between two people, Kieran and Zephan. Cousins. I don't really know about the inheritance traditions or anything, there. I probably should have asked," I shifted uncomfortably. In hindsight it was an obvious question but it hadn't occurred to me at the time. "They seemed about the same age though."

"Okay," he says, letting the lack of explanation go. "So what happened when you raised the king?"

"I didn't," I say, looking straight into his dark blue, patient eyes. "I never raised the king of the Fae." He tilts his head, the way he does when he asks a question without asking, like a puppy. "There were," I had to pause and search for the right word. Eventually, I came up with, "complications."

Yeah, complications. That was one way of putting it. The more time I spent in Faerie Land, the more complicated things had become.

Jack gave me until the next day. I spent the morning helping Tyler move in, then the afternoon working on assignments. The only way I managed to keep from breaking up was to push the previous night out of my mind and focus on something else. I made myself concentrate on what was right in front of me. Made myself forget the horrors of the previous night. If I had dwelled on what happened, I think something in me would have died. No, not just died; killed itself. It's amazing what your mind will let you ignore, for the sake of self-preservation.

The first night Tyler spent living with me, he made me watch Lois and Clark. That was one thing that I was surprised to learn about him; Tyler had a terrible obsession with 90's television. His DVD collection took up most of one wall in the living room, once he'd set it up.

"What would you have done if I said you couldn't put them out here?" I asked, staring at the shelving unit he'd just finished stacking.

"Probably tripped over them a lot," he said, grinning up at me. The movies would have taken up most of the space in his room, so that was probably a fair assessment.

Tyler told me that watching Lois and Clark as a kid was what made him want to be a journalist.

"It's not really like that, though," he said, sighing. "But I suppose that's because the real stories aren't like that."

"Maybe by the end of your degree," I joked, "we'll have aliens in tights."

"It only counts if they wear their underwear on the outside," he said.

"All the superheroes are doing it," I waved the thought aside, the way people do in old movies when they say 'pish-posh' to something unimportant, or untrue. Not that I know what 'pish-posh' means. I suppose it's the old fashioned equivalent of the sound 'pfft.'

Tyler made macaroni and cheese for dinner and we ate it in front of the TV. Even when it was happening I had this feeling that it was probably the most normal night I would ever have.

So far, I haven't been proven wrong.

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Another chapter. Yikes, Laurel's got a price on her head. Kill a necromancer and you get a second shot at life. Who wouldn't try that?

Anyway, vote, comment, fan, whatever :)

x zuz