“Enchanted threads—Gunther picked up the shirt and pants for me at a local goblin market ages ago.” Henry took a swig of the black coffee and wondered if Jason had added a little cinnamon to the grounds. “Blood dries, then flakes right off.”

“There’s still the bullet hole in the chest, though,” Jason commented over the rim of his coffee cup. “You sure you don’t want to borrow one of my shirts?”

Henry felt pretty certain he wouldn’t fit all that well into anything of Jason’s, not his clean shirts or his tidy life.

“Thanks for the offer, but when you’re known as Half-Dead Henry, a bullet-riddled wardrobe isn’t really a problem.” Henry glanced down at the tattered fabric of his shirtfront. “Anyway, the hole offers me a rare opportunity to tan my nipple.”

Jason almost choked on his coffee as he tried to stifle a laugh. Henry gave him a gentle slap on the back.

“Thanks,” Jason said, though he looked inexplicably flushed. Then Henry realized that his hand still lingered on Jason’s back, making the contact seem like a caress; the heat of Jason’s body radiated across Henry’s palm. He drew back, turning toward the cramped kitchenette.

“You don’t keep much of a pantry, do you?”

“There’s cereal and milk,” Jason replied, as if that constituted all the sustenance anyone could ever need. Henry supposed that, being a man who regularly ate cold chili beans straight out of the can, he couldn’t criticize. The shredded wheat cereal reminded him of old army mattresses, which probably meant it was good for him.

After he and Jason had both eaten, Henry decided to get down to work on Jason’s defenses. While he showed Jason a proper stance, Princess jumped down from the windowsill to lap the remaining milk from Henry’s bowl.

***

Henry wasn’t really the teaching type and his first few attempts to ascertain the extent of Jason’s power seemed to result in nothing. Whether he called a burst of cold blue flame or the tendrils of Lost Mist, he couldn’t seem to provoke the slightest magical response from Jason. Though, Jason certainly looked uneasy enough.

“Am I doing this right?” Jason asked. He eyed the guttering blue flames on his left suspiciously.

“You’re doing fine.” Henry tried not to sound annoyed. Normally, even the weakest nixie would throw off a few sparks in response to geysers of blue flame, but Jason demonstrated no discernable defensive reflex. If Henry hadn’t known better, he would have sworn there wasn’t a shred of power in Jason’s entire being.

He did note that each time he spat a blazing spell out at Jason he missed his mark by farther than he had intended. Henry’d never been one to miss his target, particularly not at this range and certainly not three times in a row. Some deft magic worked to deflect his assaults with a subtlety that aggravated him.

Standing at the foot of the futon, Jason looked nervous but utterly unaware of the forces surrounding him. He watched Henry with wide, dark eyes. His long fingers lightly tapped an uneasy rhythm against his legs.

“Let’s give it one more go,” Henry decided and Jason nodded his assent.

Just as Henry drew the burning power of an unformed spell into the hollow of his mouth—felt it flickering across the tip of his tongue—he saw Jason’s mouth move just a breath. Henry went still, straining to catch the word on Jason’s lips.

Henry felt, as much as heard, a bittersweet melody wash over him like the promise of redemption. Beautiful and definitely magic. Henry swallowed his burning spell back into his gut instead of wasting the energy.

“Do you know what you did just now?” Henry asked.

“Me?” Jason looked startled. “Nothing. I was just standing here like you told me to.”

“No, there was something. I felt it. Tell me what you were thinking about a second ago.”

“Nothing.” Jason shook his head. “I just had a little tune in my head but—”

“What tune?” Henry moved closer to him, drawing in the faint whisper of power before it could dissipate with Jason’s exhaled breath. Penetrating the camouflage of warm domestic tastes—coffee and milk—Henry discerned that spark of fire that he’d mistaken twice for cinnamon.

“It’s just a little song that I sing when I get nervous. My mother taught it to me.”

“Yeah? Like that song she taught you about the Stone of Fal?”

“That, and ‘Greensleeves’,” Jason replied.

Henry smirked. Jason definitely hadn’t been singing ‘Greensleeves’. No, an immensely potent magic fueled that other little tune of Jason’s.

“I need you to think about that tune—don’t sing it, not even a whisper. Just think about it, will you?”

“Sure.”

For a moment Jason simply looked thoughtful, his gaze distant and his fingers absently tapping in time to an unuttered melody. Then Henry felt the wards he’d set begin to shimmer and shudder with a kind of excitement. As he watched, his glinting, serpentine wards slithered and wriggled closer to Jason. They wove around him like love knots. Henry’s own damn spells. No wonder he couldn’t come close to hitting Jason.

“Fuck me,” Henry whispered under his breath. Then he raised his voice. “You can give it a rest.”

“Okay.” Jason looked nonplussed and Henry felt his wards slipping back into his control. “Did it help?” Jason asked.

“It cleared a few things up.” Henry studied Jason. “Tell me, when you were thinking of that song, what were you imagining—I mean, did you see anything?”

“It always makes me think of being safe…” Jason shrugged, but then added, “Anytime I hear music I sort of see the shape and color of the melody. With that particular piece I imagine the notes are weaving a shining gold orb around me…Sounds stupid, doesn’t it?”

Henry shook his head. “You see the orb when you’re thinking of the tune?”

“Yeah, but I see all kinds of shit—” A look of realization suddenly lit Jason’s features. “Is it really there?”

“Yeah, it’s there all right,” Henry assured him. “Your mother taught you a powerful protection spell. Clever, too, because it manipulates the powers around you so that someone watching for magic might not even notice that the spell is coming from you.”

“My mother knew all that?” Jason asked.

“I imagine she knew quite a bit more,” Henry responded. “How many songs in all did she teach you?”

“Dozen and dozens, but most of them are just normal songs. You know, ‘Do-Re-Mi’ sort of stuff…” Jason frowned at the small bone fife on his shelf. “Though there was one that was very strange…”

“Yeah? Strange how?” Henry prompted.

“I never got to play it,” Jason replied. “She made me memorize the fingerings for the melody on my fife but insisted that I never play even a note of it aloud…‘Amhrán Na Marú.’ I think that was the name of the piece. I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since I’ve even thought of it.”

Henry didn’t recognize the name of the song, but he did know what marú meant in the sidhe language. Slaughter.

“When you were practicing the fingerings on your fife, did you ever see anything?” Henry asked.

“Not really…” Jason responded slowly and Henry could tell that he was rethinking those pure, simple memories of his childhood. How different were they now that he knew his mother had been secretly training him to perform spells?

“One time, when I was about six, I’d gotten all excited about reading and writing music. I remember trying to write down the melody of ‘Amhrán Na Marú.’ I could hear it as I wrote it and then I started to see it...It scared me, all those white shining notes, razor sharp and spinning around me like saw blades. My mother caught me and tore the notations to shreds. She spanked the hell out of me. And after that I couldn’t forget about ‘Amhrán Na Marú’ fast enough.”

“Quite the lady, that mother of yours,” Henry commented.

“What do you mean?” A strain of offense sounded in Jason’s tone, but Henry ignored it. Jason needed to be told the truth—or at least as much of it as Henry could work out—but he didn’t imagine that Jason would thank him for it…He supposed that there wasn’t much Jason would thank him for.