June 23, 1920

There once was a gardener in Halifax who walked on the green one evening and found a dozen, little fairies dancing merrily about a plum tree. They invited him to join. But when he did, he stepped all over them in a graceless way, and they took off his feet instead.

"Vice is a bitch," said Mother, "be the same as the fairies, by God. Nary a moment of dance, and she'll have ye on yer knees."

But God had nothing to do with it. And not all fairies were little, some were quite tall. Indifferent as the stars, yet clutching like a fresh-spun spider's web.

I've known one in my short life.

And I had a tree once, too.

I am the girl in the blue dress you see before you, lying dead on the carpet, sea foam at my lips.

And Vice isn't a bitch.

Death is.

+ + +

Judas-trees didn't grow on the moors. There was the scalding cold to consider, and the unsettled rain. Trees like that need a warmer climate, not marshes or flooded coves, so how one came to be outside my bedroom window—tucked into the heath and the boggy ground—was a mystery. God, were he to play a part, did it on purpose. He knew it'd scratch at my window, stealing my wits in the dark, drawing pictures on the shutters, tapping out my name until my limbs quaked like branches and my heart softened, run round by the rings of my soul.

Then, one day that changed, suddenly, and without regard for life or limb, and I learned there were worse things to fear than trees and shadows:

War and Death.

And it became that tree I visited in the Nodding. A crooked, sturdy fiend from memory; with roots that fed on ankle bones, churning them like butter. It had no leaves. Only black bark and flowers, sharp as welled-up pinpricks in the bleak corners of my mind. In the Nodding, my Judas-tree grew on a beach scaled in shingles. The sand hardpacked underfoot. The waves hissed. Tormented. Bashing their heads again and again against unyeildy boulders to no end—

In the Nodding, the sky was old-ash gray, and I walked alone in my damp silks beneath it, through the sea-frets that blew impudently by, hiding the coastline under its skirts. I walked for miles that way, blinded. My bare feet bleeding the color of those Judas-flowers into the angered waves. Nothing existed there, except me and the tree.

Me the tree and peace.

And then one day, that changed, too.

+ + +

"Miss?"

The sea. I could hear it. Hushing faintly beyond billowing curtains. But it wasn't my sea. I was far from it here, in this place of vexing color and glib noise. The double-doors that led to the veranda had stood open all evening, allowing the warm night air a turn about the dining room. With it, traipsed the scent of burnt wood. On it, I could hear the sea that wasn't my sea, crying.

"Excuse me, miss?"

Her voice roused my attention, but it was her touch that drew me back to the party and the table. Her fingers rested on mine, tapping like a pulse. Her painted mouth separated, then closed again, and my mind uncurled crusty as an old bandage until I realized she'd asked me a question.

"May I bum a cigarette?"

A tremor gripped my hand and squeezed. I shrugged her fingers away to hide it. "I'm sorry, this is my last," I knocked the refuse from my cigarette into the saucer of my teacup.

"Just a taste, then?"

I hesitated, and then passed my fag to the woman. (Her name, I thought fuzzily, might have been Ellen?) She plucked it eagerly from my fingers, her smile a flinch in the corner of her mouth. She inhaled, deep, and exhaled smoke, adding to the haze. Between the amber-lit cigarettes and the candles widdling to nubs, the party guests wore phantom laurels like Christmas wreaths above their heads. Like the fog in the Nodding only thinner. Even the breeze failed to shift it.

"Interesting choice," she said, handing my cigarette back to me with a muttered thank you.

"The flowers?"

I'd studied them since the start of dinner: a centerpiece vase choking on the arrangement of crippled twigs and familiar red petals crammed inside its open mouth.

"Flowers? No, your gown."

A wave of heat rushed my neck and I fidgeted, thumbing the fag. "Not that it's your business, but it was all I had in my trunk," I said. I hadn't packed for dinner parties. I had one good dress to my name and money enough for a ticket to California.

The woman shrugged. "It is a beautiful blue. Matches the bruise on your eye."

The cutlery clattered as I bumped it.

She leaned closer; her eyes gleamed hard gray, like my sea in the Nodding, "You need a better powder."

Steadying the cigarette on my dry lip, I took a drag to settle my nerves before crushing what remained of the butt into the middle of her salad. "So do you," I nodded at the faded, black needle-scars like constellations on the inside of her elbow.

She arched an eyebrow, and fixed her high glove to cover the marks, "I'm Belén, by the way."

So that was her name. "Irene Grace."

"And what is it you do for a living, Irene?"

Her question riffled the dread in me—A monster sliding beneath the calm soil I'd meticulously laid over many years, ready to shake loose. "I'm a nurse."

"Did you learn in the Great War?"

My swirl glass sat on the table. I picked it up, emerald green wallowed at the bottom. I took a sip, one of many, and tried not to think up any answer that would unlock the crypt inside me. My demons broke their nails fighting for an escape. If I didn't acknowledge their efforts, they could never be revealed.

"No," I lied, shushing them, and took another sip.

Belén watched me, curious, "Do you like your absinthe?"

"Yes," I said. "It's even better with your sugar cubes, how generous of you to provide them."

Belén flinched again, a different corner this time, and ticked her rings against her plate, "And what brought you here, Irene?"

"An aeroplane."

She laughed and selected a silver fork to torture her uneaten food, forming it into a wall around my spent cigarette. "I was invited too..."

The absinthe melted, bitter and cold on my tongue; the flavor of winter rain. Belén talked, but I was vacant. The incongruous murmur of the party, once background chatter, now flooded me, falsely warm. Lights winked cheekily on anything shiny; bright streaks of white and gold that confounded me. The long table we sat at, all nine of us, raced toward the veranda, stretching away from me at a dizzying pace. And seated across it, I saw a man who shouldn't have been.

He was pale as a minnow, brocade shoulders flashing like scales in the sun. His hair was russet and wine. His mouth sharp enough to slit my wrist open with a kiss.

"...and I wonder at our host? Their chair has remained empty all evening..."

Belén's voice floated around me, whispers in a dark room. My lips were stitched tight as sutures, and I couldn't reply. I'd drunk too much that evening.

All I could do was stare dumbly at my fairy. And he at me.

"What's your poison?" Belén hissed in my ear. I couldn't turn my head, but I felt her close-by. Her breath on my earlobe. But when I closed my sore eyes, I saw her in my mind: the vellum skin twisted around too many bones. Blush-bruises where youth sank in its sockets. The needing so familiar to us both.

"Shame," I whispered, moving my thick tongue and weaving the word into something else, "that the flowers have wilted in this heat."

"What flowers?"

What flowers indeed? For the more I stared, the less I saw. Nothing but the absinthe fountain sat fat on the table. No vases. No blooms or sticks. Only ice-water dripping from spigots, flanked by duck and flayed fish, perplexing me.

"Where did you get that?"

The fingers of my left hand massaged the pinched scar on my knuckles.

I made them stop.

My fairy reappeared in the doorway, beside a maid who couldn't see him. There was an ache in my throat and an urgency in my chest that forced me to rise.

"I can't breathe," I gasped. "I need air."

+ + +

The Nodding wanted me.

I floated free of the dining room and its strangers, of Belén, too, and went to the bedroom that was mine for the night, in a mansion that was both too big for itself and still so close it throttled me. Seated at the vanity, I gutted my pocketbook feverishly. Spreading the insides across the doily like a gypsy reading a fortune in the belly of a small animal, until I found what I'd hidden secretly at the bottom.

And there was something else.

My hand trembled, hovering over a folded paper that had spilled out amongst my last few coins, a powder case, and a blood-stained handkerchief.

I picked it up.

Fairies used animals as messengers. Greasy ravens. Big black dogs. But the bellhop who found me in hospital was remarkably ordinary. Sent by ordinary men. His arrival addled me to distraction. No one knew the hostel I lodged in but I. And the inelegant invitation he delivered, the one in my hand now...I'd known who'd written it by the envelope alone. Impossible because,

Julien Jean Bouvier was dead.

The invitation gave like an egg shell in my grip. In the vanity mirror, a girl in a blue dress swept everything off the table top in her distress, save the one vial in her hand. Glass scattered on the floorboards, skittering away from itself into dark corners to hide from her misery. And the mirror caught the back of her, walking barefoot on the shards toward the bed.

Julien was to blame.

Where did we meet? London? I hardly knew him a year and I'd crossed an ocean to see him. Then he was dead, murdered, in every newspaper, and I was in hospital with a contusion on my forehead and a swollen eye.

Who did I struggle with, they asked?

I wouldn't tell them.

This was his mansion, and I hated it.

The Nodding wanted me. It galloped faster than a horse caught by a cart on his heels, overtaking my desires. The spoon rested heavy on my tongue. I swallowed my medicine, what I'd stolen from the hospital and hidden in my purse. Bitter as absinthe without sugar. And then I fell, like an angel, into a pile of down and leaves and linen wrinkles.

+ + +

The sea.

It was my sea. I could hear it, angry and suicidal and close at hand. Beneath my cheek, the smooth sand was ice. The wind was fiercer than I recalled, screaming and moaning like a wild thing, tugging my blonde curls and shaping my thin dress around me with child's fingers.

Something was wrong.

I opened my eyes.

A dead man glazed wide-eyed back at me. Gasping upright, I found myself wreathed in corpses at the dais of my Judas-tree. It grew above me on a mantle of rock, back bent against the wind, springing from the shingles like a crooked hand half-buried in French snow. Beneath it, and slightly to my left, the fairy perched. His coat tails spread like wings on a boulder showered in red petals. His powder-pale face and brocade clothing twisted time backward. Ringing to mind grand balls and headless queens.

"You took awhile," he said.

I stood. Trying not to brush the rotting soldiers at my feet. This wasn't right. The Nodding was supposed to be safe from my nightmares, not riddle them across my shores. It was bad enough the fairy existed here too, where once it was just my Judas-tree and me, but this...

"I was kept," I said.

"Where?"

"A party."

The fairy swept to his feet, snapping the silvery tails. The wind did not crease him. "I saw your party. And I was not invited, how rude. Who is it for?"

I extended the crumpled invitation caged loosely in my hand.

He traversed the slippery stones in his antique shoes, easy as walking a carpet, and, standing as tall as I, took the paper to examine. "What do you believe this to say?"

A time. A date. A place.

A threat.

"I'll be ruined," I whispered, "If I do not attend a party of strangers, at the house of the man we murdered."

"We?" the fairy's brow knit behind his absurd, thorny eyebrows. "I killed Bouvier as you wished. And in exchange, you were to visit, which you have not."

"I tried to come sooner," I replied, coloring from the intensity of his un-Christian gaze. "The hospital wouldn't prescribe...I had to..." I gestured to my bruised face. "Do you think I enjoy hurting myself? Bashing my head on door frames to get what I need. Do you think I am pleased with stealing?"

"Yes. And by this party, it would appear someone else thinks so too." The fairy flipped the paper, holding it, disgusted, between thumb and fore. "Why else would you pay to keep it a secret? If not to keep doing it."

I snatched the invitation back, finding, instead, a grubby scrap etched in ink:

One hundred pounds monthly, or else. Love, J.J.B.

The dry, bloody, thumbprint on one corner was mine.

"I came to tell him I hadn't any more money."

"You came to kill him. And still, someone knows what vice has led you here."

"No one knew but him."

I wavered. If I was certain, then why did I answer the party summons?

"Why not ask him yourself?" the fairy spread his fingers toward the sea behind me. I expected a spark. A jagged lightning spear. But he simply sighed and faded away, his body taking up with the mist into nothing.

The fairy had appeared in the Nodding on the eve of Julien's first note. Julien had sent his blackmail with flowers. I pricked my thumb on the stem's teeth and made a wish beside my bedroom window on the moor—summoning a fairy-servant from the stories I'd heard, to do what I could not—

keep my secret safe.

I turned.

The waves boomed off the cliffs. The fog drifted lazily like smoke after a strafing. And everywhere I looked, men and boys were strewn like shells for combing. All, that was, save one man in a white linen suit. He stood upright in a familiar way, facing the sea. It was him I aimed for. My sandy, bare feet left footprints where I walked; indentations that welled with blood. And around me, ravens poked holes in soggy uniforms, seeking bloated flesh.

"Relax, Irene."

His voice pushed my heartbeat down the stairs and I squatted in my silks and pulled a pistol from the belt of an armless boy.

I cocked the hammer, "You should be dead."

"I am. But not by your hand."

Julien faced me. His handsome youth was wasted, flawless skin now the color of an over-boiled egg—unhealthy white and grey-green at the edges. His once decadent eyes were the milky, cataract color of death. I felt sick.

I couldn't step backward. My heels were lodged against the unyielding legs of a corpse.

Julien's lips cracked. He appraised the sky and the sea and my Judas-tree, and toed a dead soldier with a wet oxford. "This is what you paid to keep all to yourself?"

I jammed the pistol at him, "No, you did this. This was a peaceful place, safe from the bullets and the screams and the noise in here," I put the muzzle to my temple and then pointed it back at him. "Until your letter ruined it! One hundred pounds? One hundred pieces of driftwood shaped like dead men on my shores!"

"I did that? Really, Irene?"

"You blackmailed me!"

Julien whistled low and mean. "Men, writhing in agony, pissing blood from their wounds, screaming to God Almighty from the pain—"

"Stop."

"—and not a drop of relief—"

"Stop it!"

"—save the precious lot swimming around in the veins of a Cornish nurse."

I shrieked. Unintelligible. I didn't want to hear those words—I never wanted to hear them! They fed the scrabbling demons in my head, the ones trying to get out. The pistol clicked as I pulled the trigger. Misfire. I pulled it again to shut him up for good. Click. Click. Click. Like Belen's rings on the plate. And still, nothing.

Julien pointed a finger at me, mocking, "You did this. How did it feel to look a dying man in the eye and tell him there was nothing to ease his anguish? When the morphine ran low but the bullets didn't. Did you like it?"

Bile rose in my mouth, "No."

"Tell that to them."

Groans, stolen from the wind, filtered from the sand in legions. The bodies moved like tree branches in the wind, stiff, heavy. Clammy palms grasped my bare legs, my hem, dragging me down to their level. Faces, like peeled wallpaper, begged for help. I fought them off in a frenzy, beating myself in the process. Until, finally, all I could hear was myself, screaming:

"I just wanted it to stop! Buckets of blood. And bones. And death. And men like raw meat!" I covered my face in my hands. "I wanted to live somewhere safe for a while, even for an hour. I wasn't trying to do harm." When I looked again, we were alone on the beach surrounded by the red petals from my Judas-tree, twirling in the tide. "I just wanted it to stop, I swear to God."

"God has nothing to do with it. You stole from those men."

I nodded.

"Say you betrayed them."

"Yes. I betrayed them."

And it was never enough, those silver hours. My need had been too strong. A nurse who steals opiates from her patients, especially soldiers. If that had gotten out...

And now I was wounding myself to filch from hospitals when their nurses weren't looking.

Tears bled from me, one at a time. "How did you know?"

"I never tell my secrets, Irene."

"Go to hell."

He laughed and pulled a pocket watch from his vest, opening it. "I should be seeing you there soon."

At his words, I coughed. Once. Twice. Something wet bubbled up to my tongue bringing a sharp, iron tang with it.

"I can't breathe," I gasped.

"Of course you can't," Julien said, melting into the visage of my fairy. "You've been poisoned."

+ + +

I watch myself from a corner of the dining room I never left:

I am on my knees, gagging. Belén stands near, a napkin spotted in my blood under her shoe. What a grand speech I just made. Everything I'd kept hidden spilling out, like the absinthe from my upset glass, the one I'd drunk all evening, that piddles on the empty chair. And who did I tell? Not a fairy or a dead man, but rather all the strangers at a table I couldn't see behind the Nodding.

"Vice is a bitch," said Mother, "be the same as the fairies, by God. Nary a moment of dance, and she'll have ye on yer knees."

I am the girl in the blue dress you see before you, lying on the carpet, sea-foam at my lips.

And Vice isn't a bitch.

Death...