“She’s not here.”
“Where is she?”
“I’m not sure. I think she went to town.”
“Well, I can leave her a message so she’ll know to find me when she gets back.”
Imogen shuffled, not bothering to crack open the door. “What message would you like to leave her, milady?”
I fought back the urge to groan. “Just tell her to come find me when she gets back.”
“Anything else, milady?”
“No, Imogen, that will be all.”
Imogen promptly closed the door.
I made it halfway up to my rooms before I lost all semblance of self-control and found myself at Blaise and Imogen’s suite once more. Just in case Blaise had returned within the past ten minutes.
When I knocked on the door, no one answered. Perhaps Imogen had left to perform her other duties.
Figuring I’d better just leave her a note myself, I nudged the door open. Thankfully, it was unlocked.
I stepped into the shared suite, making a guess at which side was Blaise’s—the messiest—and scribbled a note on the pad of paper on her desk.
I turned to leave, but as I did, something caught my attention, just a flicker in the corner of my eye. When I turned, I found the edge of a piece of paper flitting from underneath Imogen’s bed. The draft from the vents must have blown it out from under the bed. If it made it much farther, I imagined it would end up on Blaise’s side of the room, and Imogen would be lucky ever to see it again, so I picked it up and placed it under a paperweight on Imogen’s desk.
But then my eyes caught the title.
Shifters: A Believer’s Guide to Transmogrify.
I couldn’t help it. My curiosity got the better of me, usurping my manners, and I unfolded the paper.
It was a pamphlet—one you might get from a shady vendor pretending to sell youth potions, except in the dusty corners in the back of the shop.
The type of shop Madame LeFleur owned, where she pretended to make her living off the beauty product shams she sold to unsuspecting customers in the storefront, while she peddled away Fates-knew-what behind that always-drawn velvet curtain of hers.
The pamphlet read:
Do you long to tap into your beastly form? Do you crave the power to unleash the monster within? Follow the steps below to harbor your soul to the moonlight and forever leave behind your humdrum life.
I rolled my eyes. This probably had come from Madame LeFleur’s shop. The peddler had likely written the instructions herself while drunk on faerie wine, then decided they weren’t half bad and figured someone would be foolish enough to buy the faulty instructions.
Imogen, strange as she was, didn’t seem like the type to wish to become a lychaen. Perhaps she’d bought one of Madame LeFleur’s DIY-blemish eraser kits and the shopkeeper had mixed up the instructions.
But hadn’t Imogen denied frequenting Madame LeFleur’s shop, claiming her stepmother thought the Madame to be a witch?
Though I supposed if Imogen was in the habit of buying this sort of product from the Madame, she might wish for that fact to remain concealed.
I flipped the pamphlet over. On the back was a list of ridiculous directions, some of which Imogen had crossed out and annotated.
The handwriting was definitely Imogen’s. Her script was fresh on my mind from trying to decipher the labels she’d written on my map—the way her letters ran together in a way that almost overlapped.
1. Collect five tail feathers from an albino raven fledgling on its first flight. Imogen had written “How???” at the end of this statement.
2. Steep the white tail feathers in a tea boiled to the temperature of the Oracle’s Hot Spring. I had to read it twice to decipher it, but in the margins was written, only three miles away, possible during a break on the third day of summer.
3. Drink the tea as the lip of the full moon—full moon was circled twice—crests the night’s horizon.
On the second page was a list of symptoms, some of which Imogen had marked as well.
1. Lychaenism may cause increased irritability. There was a check mark next to that one.
2. Lychaens will often have no recollection of their nights feasting, and will often awaken disoriented in a strange place, not sure how they got there. Imogen had circled the first phrase for this point and placed a series of question marks at the end.
3. Unwanted hair growth while in humanoid form may occur. The last symptom was crossed out entirely, except for the word humanoid, which was circled twice.
After examining the annotations, how seriously Imogen was taking this, guilt roiled in my stomach and I returned the pamphlet to the place under the bed. That way Imogen wouldn’t know I’d seen it. I knew Madame LeFleur and took little stock in anything she sold—at least, anything Imogen might have been able to get her hands on. While from a mental health perspective, it was a tad concerning that Imogen was weighing the pros and cons of becoming a lychaen, from a practical perspective—
Well, to be honest, I didn’t believe in such things.
I mean, I believed in lychaen. I wasn’t blind to reality. But it was common knowledge that, although lychaen had long been romanticized in horror novels, they were simply a subset of faeries, not all that dissimilar to the forest faeries of Avelea or the lightning sprites of Laei.
I didn’t anticipate Imogen would be turning into a lychaen anytime soon. Besides, perhaps she’d met a lychaen she was interested in. While it was uncommon, it wasn’t unheard of for humans to fall in love with faeries. I supposed it wasn’t all that different from falling in love with the high fae. Perhaps she had the desire, misguided as it seemed to me, to follow the object of her affection into that sort of lifestyle.
I figured it was best not to mention it.
So I left, and didn’t think a thing about it for a good while.
