There was no time.
Nothing stretched out in front of me and behind me, without beginning or end.
I had stopped existing.
I started to scream, but without any mouth or vocal chords or anyone to hear, did it matter?
Then I had an arm, because someone was grabbing it. And ears, because I heard James say, “Nuala! Why can’t she hear me?”
Something gritty was being rubbed on my skin, pressed into my hand, traced on my mouth. Salt, like the potato chips.
“Welcome to your death,” said another voice, and this one was low, earthy, organic, thundering from under our feet or inside me.
My eyes flew open. I was suddenly aware of the ordinary magic of them; the way the lids fit over my eyeballs, the curve of the upper and lower lashes touching as I blinked, the effortless way my gaze slid over to James beside me. There was still nothingness around us, but James was here in it with me, his red sweatshirt glowing like a sunset.
I gripped onto the hand he offered me, gritty salt pressed between our palms. What I could glimpse of his arms was covered with goose bumps.
“You see your death,” the voice continued, and I realized it was the massive antlered king, appearing in the nothingness before me. “And she sees hers. What do you see, James Antioch Morgan?”
Beside me, James turned his head this way and that, as if there were more to see than nothingness. “It’s a garden. All the flowers are white and green. Everything’s white and green. There’s music. I think—I think it’s coming from the ground. Or maybe from the flowers.”
“What do you see, Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine?” Cernunnos asked me, voice even deeper than before.
I flinched. “How do you know my name?”
“I know the names of all creatures that come through my realm,” the thorn king said. “But yours I know because I gave it to you, daughter.”
James’ hand gripped mine tighter, or maybe I gripped his tighter. I snapped, “I am no one’s daughter.” But maybe I was. I would’ve said I was no one’s sister, earlier.
“What do you see, Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine?” the thorn king asked again.
“Trees,” I lied. “Big trees.”
Cernunnos stepped closer to us, a dark mass in dark nothing, visible because he was something and the nothing was not.
“What do you see, Amhrán-Liath-na-Méine?” he asked, a third time.
I couldn’t see his face. He was too tall for me to see it, and that scared me almost as much as my answer. “Nothing,” I whispered. And I knew that was what I would get when I died, because I had no soul.
The void swallowed my word until I doubted whether I’d said it.
“Nothing has its pleasures,” Cernunnos said finally. His antlers stretched above him into the blackness. Blackness so black that I longed for stars. “You have no consequences. You have life eternal. You have unbridled hedonism at your feet, if it sings to you. Nothing is a small price to pay for such a life, when you lay your head down on the cold ground at the end.”
James’ fingers tightened and released around mine. He was trying to tell me something. Cernunnos inclined his head toward me. He, too, was trying to tell me something, to get me to say something, but I didn’t understand what. I wasn’t used to words being so important.
“Yes,” I said finally. “And I have a host of faeries to mock me. And a pile of bodies behind me, all used up to give me life. And what do I do with it? Use my life to suck life out of more bodies. Until I wear out, and I burn, and I do it all over again.” I sounded ungrateful. But I felt ungrateful.
Cernunnos folded his hands, which were not beast-like at all, in front of him. They were lined and sturdy and ghostly white. “It is I that has given you this existence, daughter. It is my poisoned blood in yours that drives you to the bonfire every ten and six years. My blood that means you have but half a life, and must pilfer the rest from those with souls, trading their breath for your inspiration. I thought only that you would find pleasure in years of self-indulgence, dancing, and adoration. I did not mean this life to cause you pain, though I see that it has.”
“My sister,” I said, and bitterness sharpened my voice despite myself. “Does she find pleasure in such a life?”
“She did,” Cernunnos said. “She is dead, now.” He made an odd gesture toward James, holding his palm up toward him, and James jerked as if he saw something displayed in the lines of the thorn king’s hand.
“The girl in my dream,” James said. “The one who was stabbed with the iron. I thought it was Nuala—I thought it was her future.”
“Like me, you see future and past both.” The antlered king turned his head, looking into nothing as if something was calling to him. “She was not meant to die this year. I will have my revenge, even from where I stand.”
He was fearsome when he said it; I heard nothing but the undeniable truth of his words and felt a shard of pity for whoever had killed my sister.
In the silence between our voices, the nothing pulled at me, threatening to rob me of my body again. I shivered, thinking of the sister I’d never known. She was nothing now—like she’d never existed. Which meant everyone who’d given her life had died for nothing. I realized suddenly, in this darkness, that even if I felt human now, I wasn’t. I knew, with a sudden, urgent clarity, that I was still a faerie, just slowly stripped of my powers by eating human food. This was still how it would end for me, this staggering emptiness.
“I don’t want to be nothing,” I pleaded, suddenly. I wasn’t sure if I was talking to James or Cernunnos.