Prince from the Other Side

Chapter 5: Glamored

I knew I was distracted during my set that night at the pub, but my usual fans only showed in half the numbers and the bar felt sleepy on a Sunday night. Everyone busy drinking alone and dreading Monday.

Cass's face told me as we were packing up that she was still sour over the four hundred I'd let go to Birdie the night before, and I carefully didn't ask her about tips for this gig. There was a prickly silence between her, Toby, and me in the car on the way home. This was a new kind of silence for us—not weary, post-show silence of late-night exhaustion, but tense and anticipatory. I didn't break it until I was back on the roof with Toby and we were halfway through the bottle of cheap red wine he'd brought up from the kitchen.

“Cass is mad at me," I said dully, staring out at the muggy midnight city.

“I mean, she thinks you're trying to sabotage your own career." Toby shrugged, passing the bottle back to me. Toby was never one to mince words.

“Just because I don't want to do one show—"

“THE show, Hester. And besides, the real reason she's mad is because she thinks you're lying to her."

“Lying." I almost choked on the wine. “About what?"

“About why you won't do it. What could you possibly have that's 'personal' with Sy Dage?"

Slowly, the wine softened the edges of my dread, and I was tempted to say some fraction of the truth. I knew that was a bad, bad idea. But still… “Our families have some bad blood," I said tentatively.

“Seriously?" Toby gave me a very Cass-like look of utter skepticism. “That's all you're going to give me? Drink your wine."

“It's your wine, and it's awful," I laughed, but I obeyed. “They offered me free tickets to the O2 show tomorrow. Don't tell Cass."

“And you're not going?!" Toby's face was going pinkish with something like outrage. “Hester, I am going to tell you something very seriously. If you do not take me to that show, I am going to be mad at you for like a year."

I froze, the wine going bitter on my tongue. “You like Sy Dage?"

“Who doesn't? Yeah he's kind of sad-boy rock, but his lyrics are genius. Or at least really, really good."

I sighed. The wine rose to my head, making my senses swim and pinch. Toby, so immune to magic, still wasn't immune to the intricate precision of a fae tongue: naming the secret things that mortals didn't know they needed words for.

“You don't have a gig tomorrow," Toby continued stolidly. “And you should get familiar with his stage presence and whatever. If you're going to be playing with him in like forty-eight hours."

“Sooner than that," I muttered. “There's rehearsal."

“Whatever!" Toby threw up his hands in exasperation. “Hester. I am telling you. We are going to that show, and you are going to love love LOVE it. Trust me."

***

I always did trust Toby—he was one of my best friends in the world—but as I sat crumpled in the back of a rideshare the next night, I could only summon up a feeling of oily dread. The Unseelie magic of Sy's music had been unpleasant enough through my laptop speakers. What would it be live? What if I couldn't take it? I would never be able to sit through the show, much less play alongside this adversary of my people. I would let everybody down. Toby was practically vibrating with excitement in the seat next to me as we pulled up to the crowd and fervor of the stadium.

O2 used to the Millennium Dome, once a vast exhibition hall around the turn of the new millennium. It was one of the largest structures in the world, and it was also situated just beside the potent terrestrial magic of the Prime Meridian where the meridian brushed its edge. Nearly ringed by water, it would be a potent space for magic of any kind—especially for a fae magician who knew what he was doing and had the doting energy of tens of thousands of fans to draw on.

I was half hoping the box office people wouldn't have an updated list, that they'd roll their eyes at me and tell me to buy a ticket like everybody else. But as I sidled up to one of the glass windows with its stony-faced attendant, I had a terrible premonition that this was all going to go exactly as planned.

“Picking up?" asked the attendant, a bored-looking girl with a shaved head and a ton of genuinely stunning piercings.

“Ah. We're on the list." I gulped, feeling ridiculous. This was the kind of thing people said in bad movie scenes.

“Name?"

“Hester."

I waited for her to ask me 'last name?' so I could say 'no last name' and confuse and annoy her enough that she'd turn us away. (Though it was true, I'd had my name legally established in the single word. That small slip of magic to forestall bureaucratic barriers was one I absolutely did not regret.)

But instead the girl's eyes lit up, going dinner-plate round. I saw her quickly settle her face back into calm boredom. “Just a sec," she said, playing at nonchalant, but I could almost see her mind whirring: who was this twenty-something, silver-haired girl in non-designer black jeans and a clearly discount crochet halter top? I definitely didn't look like anybody who mattered.

A moment later a uniformed stadium security guard arrived and steered us politely but firmly through the press, ushering us casually around the security checks as if we, naturally, would refuse to be inconvenienced by such ordinary precautions.

“Friends and family section is in through there," said the guard, pointing through a roped off tunnel entry. “Keep these wristbands on, and enjoy. Any drinks are on the house."

“Jeez," whistled Toby under his breath after the guard had marched off back to his post. “Sy Dage must really f*cking like your music, girl."

I shrugged miserably. How in h*ll did I let myself end up here?

Yet another attendant lifted the rope barrier for us to pass through. And I stepped into another world.

It was not a friends and family 'section.' It was a deluxe friends and family box, with long white couches looking with an eagle eye view down onto the stage. There was, of all ridiculous things, a full, gleaming layout of gourmet-looking catered food at the back of the box alongside a long chrome-topped bar, where a bartender in an honest-to-g*d suit was mixing up something complicated and noisy for the little gaggle of people crowded around him. The people looked up and my heart plummeted. I recognized at least two A-list models, their mortal flesh tortured to perfection with fillers and foundation. The women wore crisp, precise clothes with very obvious luxury brands emblazoned on them. Beside them was another musician I'd idolized as a mortal example to follow, casually chatting to an up-and-coming member of a popular pop group who had just gone solo.

I squeezed Toby's arm, hard. “We shouldn't be here," I whispered. “We look ridiculous. This is a clearance bin shirt."

“We look like we're too cool to care," Toby hissed back. “Roll with it!"

I combed my fingers frantically through my hair, knowing I looked anything but “cool." The power and glamor of these humans was devastating—precisely because their kind of power was so foreign to me. The global adoration, the blaze of fame.

Glamor, I thought. Of course.

I breathed deeply, drawing in my focus with it. I coated myself in a deliberate sheen of magic, only a dusting, a suggestion: a quick, open-ended spell that caught the onlooker's idea of beauty and toyed their mind closer to perceiving what they wanted to see. It was a small security blanket, one of the most minor of spell workings. Fae had been using it for centuries with humans to curry favor and awe. Or just a little self-confidence, in this case.

Toby, so difficult to enchant at the best of times, seemed not even to notice. His eyes were glued to the stunning stadium view, the dramatic lights sweeping the vast dark expanse and landing dramatically on the deserted stage. I edged closer to the glass. The stadium thrummed with anticipatory applause. Voices hooted and howled, a dark cacophony in the black void beyond the glass. Only the stage appeared to exist, floating in darkness.

Then a single, slim shadow disrupted the spotlight glare.

The sound of applause shook the floor under my feet. I heard ice clink in the bar cocktails. The whole stadium must be shaking with the force of these people's adoration. I squinted, but gumbotron screens burst into life on either side of the stage, and suddenly Sy Dage's face was magnified to gigantic proportions, glowing over the worshipful crowd.

Sy was pale and angular, a lean, leather-tough mortal with a crumple of glossy dark curls framing his—well—elfin features. He was, undoubtedly, beautiful, in that tremulous, peculiar way that faeries and human prize so highly: a graceful kind of beauty that flirted with androgyny, that couldn't be sculpted convincingly by plastic surgery or cosmetics. He wore slouchy, dark clothes that made him look wraithlike in the supernatural brilliance of the spotlight.

Sy's dark, pensive eyes seemed to capture the whole of the audience, without the help of the giant screens.

Toby drew in his breath. “Whoa." It was a single, whispered, awed word. Toby, impossible to enchant, was already enraptured. I felt something squirm inside me and told myself firmly that it couldn't possibly be jealousy.

And Sy Dage lifted the microphone to his lips.