Ash and Roses

Reverse Harem Fantasy Romance

T. S. Bishop

Ash and Roses: A Reverse Harem Fantasy

Book 1 of the Fae Kingdoms series

By T. S. Bishop

Copyright T. S. Bishop, 2018

Cover Design by Mariah Sinclair

Created with VellumCreated with Vellum

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Untitled

Also by T. S. Bishop

Acknowledgments

Prologue

The earliest memory I had was of my mother telling me a story.

It was a proper memory, with details and smells and everything. Not like the misty clouds of sound and color from my toddlerhood.

It stood out in my mind because it was one of the only times I could remember feeling safe and protected in my Mom’s presence. In the years right before she died, I became the savior and the protector for the two of us. I was the one keeping us both afloat on the perilous ocean of the wide adult world.

So this memory was the only proof I had that, once upon a time, I’d been a regular child who thought her mother was a god.

In my memory, we were both in the bedroom—which was just a fancy word for a little corner, separated from the rest of the moldy studio by a bookshelf Mom had thrifted—and light was streaming in through the window.

Dust motes danced in the air like sparks of gold.

Her blonde hair hung loose around her shoulders, fuzzy around the edges like a halo. It filled me with envy.

I could only see myself back then as a sullen, gap-toothed girl with knobby knees and mud-brown hair. I seemed to exist in the spaces she left for me, like a photo negative of a person. How I longed for hair like hers, golden hair that glimmered in the light like something magical, and for a smile that seemed to contain all the joy in the world.

Mom was irresistible. Even the secret sadness that she carried with grace only made her more enchanting. She was popular with everyone—my classmates, my teachers, and most of all, men.

Even years later, long after we had switched roles and I turned into the caretaker and she became the one in need of protection, she could command the attention of a room without even trying.

“Tell me a story,” I begged, head lying across her lap. The sweet scent of jasmine was in the air: her favorite perfume.

Her hands carded through my hair gently. “All right, but just one,” she said, like she always did. No matter how many times I asked for a story, she would say, “All right, but just one,” as she launched into a story that was certainly not the first of the day.

I nodded into her dress.

Although the streets below were noisy with the usual sounds of our rough neighborhood—ambulances, police sirens, breaking glass and shouting—we were in our own little bubble of serenity.

“I’m going to tell you the story of how I met a fairy King.”

I wriggled with excitement. This was my favorite story!

“What was his name?” I blurted out. Her hand stilled in my hair.

“No questions until the end,” she reminded me. That was her rule, and she insisted that I stick to it. For her, story-telling was an art, and she didn’t want to be interrupted at it.

I subsided as she continued. Her voice was soft, but it carried, and was amazingly expressive. She painted new worlds in the air every time she told a story.

“He looked like a prince out of a dream,” she said reverently. “His hair was black as midnight, and his clothes were made of rich velvet—dark green, like the heart of the forest. He was taller than anyone I’d seen before. On his head he wore a circlet of white gold, patterned like leaves and vines and that was how I knew he was a King. At its center, right above his forehead, was a cluster of rubies that glittered like drops of dark blood. It looked like a red rose fallen in snow.”

“Where did you see him?” I asked curiously.

Back in those days, I still believed unquestioningly in fairies and magic. It made complete sense to me that a handsome fairy King would have met my mother.

“I was lost in the wood beyond my parents’ house one summer when I was back from college,” she said, her voice losing some of its floaty, fairytale quality. “We’d had a fight, so I ran away. You and I would never fight like that,” she told me, and I nodded obediently.

I had no reason to doubt her. This was before all the bad things—before I knew hunger, before my mother found powders and pills, and most importantly, before Lachlan—and my mother was still my best friend in the whole world. We protected each other.

“I was lost. I’d been walking for what seemed like hours, and I was beginning to lose hope that I’d find my way back by nightfall. My parents had always forbidden my sister and me from playing in the forest, and the only time I defied them taught me why. The trees were huge and blocked the moon, so it was utterly dark. Sometimes I felt like the trees were deliberately blocking off paths that would have led me home and taking me deeper and deeper into the forest. I finally found myself in a clearing, ringed with hawthorns.”

“Fairy trees!” I exclaimed.

“Yes,” she smiled, forgetting to scold me for interrupting. “But I didn’t know that back then. I only thought it was a convenient place to rest for a little while. I’d been walking for hours, and I was so tired. Just then, out of a hole in the air, He appeared. It was the Fairy King,” she said in a hushed voice, “And he had come to see who was in his circle of protection.”

“A hole in the air! Was he happy to see you?”

“No!” she said, and giggled. “He was very stern, and said I had trespassed on his property.”

“Did you have to pay a fine?”

“Well, we fell in love with each other as soon as we saw each other’s faces,” she said, matter of fact. “So it didn’t matter anymore. And they don’t exactly give out parking tickets in fairyland.”

“So what did you do?”

“I went with him to Fairyland, of course!”

“Did you want to go?” I asked timidly.

I turned it over in my head. Tiny and ignorant as I was, I still couldn’t imagine wanting to up and leave for a different world with a man I’d known for a few minutes, and without even telling Mom. It sounded like exactly the kind of thing Mom was always telling me not to do—‘Don’t go off with strangers,’ she would tell me sternly. Wasn’t this the same thing?

“It’s not the same thing at all,” she said mysteriously. “It’s different for grown-ups.”

I accepted this unquestioningly.

“What was fairyland like?” I asked, in a hushed whisper, as though someone might be eavesdropping.

“Imagine living in a forest,” Mom said, voice dripping with wonder, “But the trees were alive like we are alive, and they could speak to you! And every forest creature could speak as well, as long as you took the trouble to learn their language. The water sparkled like a spray of diamonds coming down the waterfalls, which were everywhere. And all the fairies lived in the trees—because the trees would make houses for you, if you asked very nicely.”

“And the other fairies?” I asked eagerly, “Were they nice?”

“They were magical,” she said, “But very much like people. Some kind, some cruel, some funny and some strange.”

“And the Fairy King?”

“Ah,” she said, and I could hear the embarrassment in her voice. I pouted a little. This was always the part of the story that she held back from telling me, because I was too young.

“Aren’t I old enough yet?” I asked plaintively.

“Not since the last time you asked, two weeks ago,” she replied fondly. “Maybe in a couple of years.”

“You always say that,” I sighed. “So what happened to him? Didn’t you want to stay with him?”

Here, Mom hesitated, and the very unmagical spell that was holding the room in its own little bubble of wonder, burst.

“It was lovely there, but real life is more important,” she said. There was an undercurrent of something I didn’t understand in her voice. “Besides, I thought my parents would be worried sick about me.”

“How long were you gone for?”

“I thought it was years. I didn’t look any older, but I spent three years in fairyland.”

“Three years!” I gaped. “Did they think you ran away?”

“It turned out that I’d only been away for a single night,” she said. “Three years in fairyland, but a single night in ours. They thought I’d gone to sulk at a friend’s house.”

“Did you tell them what really happened?”

“I thought it was a dream,” she explained. “It seemed too strange to be real. I convinced myself that I’d gone a little crazy wandering there by myself, and invented a story to pass the time.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I definitely didn’t.”

“When did you realize it was real?”

“I don’t know,” she said, hands tightening in my hair. It didn’t hurt, though. She was always too careful for that. “I brought some keepsakes back with me. When I found them, I knew.”

I’d been satisfied with that answer, all those years ago.

Now I was a decade older, and there was a lot more between Mom and I. I would have liked to ask her about those keepsakes, I thought dully, as the cheap coffin that held her body was lowered into the waiting earth.

Maybe Lachlan hadn’t taken all of them with him when he ran away.

She would have hated being buried. The idea of lying in the cold earth would have disgusted her. But Aunt Ellie had insisted that she be lain next to her parents in the family plot.

It seemed pointless to argue, when I just wanted all of it to be over with.

Lachlan was gone where nobody could find him, though the police were looking. I was going to stay with Aunt Ellie and her husband with the fluffy moustache and the kind eyes, and finish my last year of high school in the town she and Mom grew up in and where she still lived: Edenfall.

What a strange name for a town, I thought, scrubbing at my eyes with a tissue.

I had touched my fingers to her forehead, when the casket was still open, feeling the papery coldness of her skin under my fingertips.

She was still beautiful, eyes closed like she was in serene sleep and hair golden like liquid light. She could have been a daughter of the sun god himself. And I was still the awkward-looking girl wishing so hard that I could be with her.

“Bye, Mom,” I whispered, ignoring the prickle of tears in my eyes as I threw down damp earth.

That day, when we buried Mom, I decided to bury her stories too.

There was no magic, no fairyland, no secret escape for me.

All I had left were the scars from Lachlan’s violence, a small shoebox that held relics from a happier time, and my name: Juliet.

I didn’t even feel a twinge of premonition that told me about the three boys in the sleepy, prosperous suburb of Edenfall who were going to neatly divide my life into two halves: a time before I met the Lockwood boys, and a time after.

Many things about Edenfall had changed since Mom lived there as a girl, it would turn out, but the magic still remained.

And I was caught in its shining, irresistible net, just like her.

The years ahead would going to be filled with nothing I was prepared for: blood, war, magic, power beyond my wildest dreams…and most important of all, the three fae princes who walked through a hole in the air and stole my heart.

1

Juliet

2 months later

“I am sooooo fucking drunk right now!” Liv shrieked into my ear as she waved her red cup of cranberry vodka out of the window. A car full of teenage boys hollered back at her, equally enthusiastic.

“Don’t fall out of the window, babe,” Brian said calmly, checking the rearview mirror. He caught my eye and tilted his head in a question. I shrugged helplessly back, arms full of Liv, trying in vain to tug her torso back into the car from where she was dangling out of the window.

“Take your top off!” screeched one of the boys in the other car. They slammed to a halt in the next lane from us at the red light, and one of them thrust his pelvis at Liv crudely. I sighed and looked away. Even in a wealthy suburb, teenage boys were going to be the same as they’d been in my shitty underfunded inner city school. The predictability of it all was strangely comforting.

“You’re a fucking pig!” Liv yelled back, equally enthusiastically. She was getting riled up, which apparently made her lose her preppy princess composure and turned her into one of those drunk housewives from reality tv.

“Back away from the window, Liv,” I said hastily, and pulled her back into her seat. She sullenly flipped them off and turned to me.

“You stopped me,” she accused.

I opened my mouth to offer some excuse, but just then the same obnoxious redheaded boy from the next car yelled, “Stupid fucking bitch!” and I saw red. I grabbed the cup from Liv’s hand, ignoring her surprise, and rolled the window down. I threw the drink in his smug face, and it landed perfectly, drenching his hair and eyes and dripping down onto his shirt.

“Holy shit, Brian, drive us the fuck out of here!” Liv said urgently, eyes wide as she peered over my shoulder.

“Holy fuck, dude, you smell like a red vine!” I heard another of the boys say right before we peeled off.

Brian didn’t need to be told twice. Luckily, the light turned green just then and we zipped away neatly, racing far ahead of them.

I remembered the astonished look on the brown-haired boy’s face and started laughing.

“My hero,” Liv said, nuzzling my shoulder in a fake fawning gesture.

“Oh, please,” I said, slithering out of her grasp. “If you weren’t so drunk you wouldn’t have tried to pick a fight with them.”

“They were assholes too!” she said, fired up.

“They were way out of line,” I agreed, which pacified her.

My cousin usually looked like she should have been in a just-obscure-enough-to-be-cool European designer’s Fall/Winter catalogue, but her cold Scandinavian aesthetic was just a front. I could see right through the façade, to the scary intense party girl with slight anger issues that lay beneath, especially when she was drunk.

“I told you she was cool,” she told Brian, adjusting her makeup in her phone’s selfie camera. “Is my lipstick smudged?” she asked me intently.

“No—wait, Brian thought I wouldn’t be cool?” I demanded.

“No,” Brian said quickly.

“He did,” Liv confirmed, “Brian doesn’t trust townies.”

“I didn’t,” he said, emphasizing the past tense.

“Good to know,” I said dryly, and let out a low whistle as I bothered to look out the window for the first time in a little while. “And I thought your family was loaded.”

We were speeding past the kinds of houses I thought only existed on tv, or belonged to the kind of people who had flashbulbs going off in their faces all day and every day.

“Oh yeah, this part of town is for the stupidly rich,” Liv said, smiling at the camera and frowning immediately as she found some imperfection. “Tech millionaires who can’t afford the Bay, celebrities who can’t afford LA. We’re like, the second choice town.”

“Wonder what the first choice looked like,” I said, raising my eyebrows at the opulence we were passing.

Each house was different from the last. An English Tudor-style mansion with a pool and huge backyard with its own treehouse was nestled next to a chrome and glass modern three-storey so chic I almost cut myself looking at it. A craftsman-style home, set back from the road with wrought iron gates and a long footpath entrance sat next to an elegant triple-story Victorian with pointed tops that looked like witches’ chimneys.

They looked like they’d been designed by the bored rich, with more money than taste.

But the largest of all was at the end of the cul de sac, and I understood why. It was enormous.

Mansion wasn’t even the right word for it, estate might be better. It conjured images of a hundred scurrying servants, maids and butlers and cooks, working hard to keep the lord of the manor comfortable.

It looked a little scary at night, if I were being honest. The only things that saved it from looking haunted were a) all the cars parked haphazardly along the driveway, and in some cases on the front lawn itself, and b) the shouting and thumping music and loud splashes that I could hear even as we parked a few dozen meters away from the front door.

“This house belongs to someone in your school?” I asked, picking up my jaw from where it had dropped to the ground.

“Someone in our school,” Liv corrected. I kept forgetting that I was going to start going to the same school as her. “Specifically, to the three Lockwood boys…well, to their parents but nobody’s ever really seen them. They’re brothers. They’re beautiful. And they’re trouble. Brian hates them.”

“I hate the big one,” Brian corrected. “He plays on your school team,” he explained, “He’s the main reason they keep winning.”

“Understood, I’ll stay away from any good looking boys,” I said.

I had no intention of following that rule.

If there was anything Mom had taught me, it was to enjoy myself whenever and wherever I could. For her, that had translated into doing drugs and popping pills that kept her in a hazy state of happiness. That wasn’t the vice for me. I did, however, like sex. I liked touching, I liked the brief connection of two bodies being intimate, bare skin on bare skin.

And I liked how I could put my clothes back on after feeling so good and go back to the apartment I shared with Mom and Lachlan and endure his fist meeting my stomach and his belt on my back, still keeping that champagne-bubble feeling in my stomach through the pain.

I knew some girls caught feelings from it. That wasn’t me.

So I felt safe in fucking the dangerous boys, the ones with sharp smiles and sharper teeth. Both sides knew the score. It wasn’t anything but a few minutes of fumbling in a dark corner, but that was still enough.

“Let’s goooo!” Liv said, breathlessly falling out of the SUV. Her heels tottered dangerously on the ground for a moment before she righted herself like a baby deer that had only just figured out how to walk.

Brian and I followed quietly in her shadow. She was our fearless leader, the one who led the way. I wondered if he felt as out of place as I did. He barely knew these kids, so we had that in common. He didn’t even go to the same school as them.

We passed a few dark shapes on the driveway, people speaking in low voices away from the party. They smelled strongly of weed. The noise was getting louder and louder. I could feel the thump of the bass slamming my ears like a physical object, the force of it traveling up through my feet like an earthquake. My heart began racing, and I felt my palms turn sweaty.

‘Calm the fuck down,’ I told myself, as we walked up the dimly lit foyer. I met the disinterested gazes of three girls wearing too much eyeliner. They barely rested on me for a fraction of a second, before lingering on Brian. Once they realized he was taken, they went back to their phones in silence.

To be fair, there wasn’t any easy way to have a conversation here. The music was so loud I’d have had to resort to hand puppetry or sign language to communicate.

Liv threw the front door open with all the confidence of someone who belonged there, but I hesitated and fell behind. I could see the crowd of people, and above them a dais, where the DJ was. She’d switched to something electronic, and it almost deafened me, tinny and metallic as everyone else danced like the floor was on fire.

“Come on,” Liv mouthed impatiently at me, and dragged me in against my will when I didn’t respond.

The sound hit me again like a brick wall, and the air was full of so many smells it made me dizzy. Weed smoke, cigarette smoke, sweat, stale perfume, sex, alcohol…

I was still standing there gaping, when a group of boys shoved past me rudely.

“Watch it!” I called after them, but one flipped me off and they kept walking.

But they looked familiar.

And one of them smelled like cranberry vodka.

I swallowed thickly. If I’d known they were going to be here, maybe I would have thought twice about dumping vodka on that one dipshit.

I looked for Liv, to try and warn her about those guys, but she’d disappeared completely.

Shit.

I couldn’t spot her gleaming blonde head anywhere. I should have at least been able to see Brian, who was head and shoulders above any other guy here, but he was missing too.

I was alone. In a house full of hostile teenagers.

My worst nightmare.

2

Juliet

I inched over to the drinks table, wondering where the Lockwood boys’ parents were, and what they were like.

They allowed their underage kids to host wild parties at their ridiculously nice house and buy enough alcohol to get them all drunk three times over, so that already put them miles beyond my understanding.

“What the fuck,” I said out loud, blinking at the various bottles laid out on the table.

There were fancy labels on them, which made me nervous. The way I knew alcohol was fancy was simple: the curlier and more unnecessarily elaborate the type on the label was, the more expensive the bottle.

And that made each of these bottles worth more than the rent on my Mom’s apartment back in the city. I decided to just make my own vodka soda.

I leaned back against the wall, cradling my drink in my hand and trying not to feel like a loser. What a difference a month could make in life, I thought ruefully.

Exactly a month ago today, I’d been trying to work two part time jobs after school, avoid falling asleep in class from tiredness, and not give Lachlan any reason to beat me up.

And now I was in some millionaire’s tasteless mansion, sipping vodka and watching rich kids flail around wildly like they were being electrocuted.

It was all because Ellie was so nice, I decided. She could ‘nice’ people into submission. One look at her sunny smile and her dancing brown eyes and nobody could say no.

Even when they agreed to do things they quickly learned to regret, I thought, as I remembered how I ended up here in the first place...

* * *

“We’re almost there, Juliet” my Aunt Ellie called cheerfully.

My head jerked up. I’d almost nodded off. Shit, that meant they’d noticed.

“Don’t worry,” my little cousin Derek said, incorrectly interpreting my jerk of surprise, “You weren’t snoring or anything.”

“Thanks, kid,” I said, looking out the window. “So this is Edenfall?”

“Not quite,” my Uncle Michael said, flicking a glance at the rearview mirror. “These are the outskirts, mostly woods out here.”

Despite having driven for several hours, my Aunt and Uncle showed no signs of strain or irritation, even when Derek decided to be a little brat.

“There’s a park around here that Mike and I go to on the weekends,” Aunt Ellie added. “Some nice trails there. Do you like to hike, Juliet?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well do you like video games?” Derek asked, joining in the interrogation.

“I’ve never played any,” I said. He looked shocked.

“Uh oh,” said Aunt Ellie, with a twinkle in her eyes, “You’ve unleashed the beast.”

“We’re gonna play once we’re home,” said Derek confidently. “You won’t be good at first. Nobody is, even I wasn’t—“

“—Even you?”

“—But they’re easy. I can teach you.” He looked at me with big, hopeful eyes and I couldn’t bring myself to say no. Even if he was a hyper little monster.

“Sure,” I said, smiling at him, “That would be awesome.”

My smile faded as I turned to the window. The scenery outside was unfamiliar—dark outlines of trees stood out against the lightening sky. It was nearly dawn. We’d been driving all night. The forest we were passing looked blue-black and pitch black.

It would all look friendlier in the daytime, I knew. Things usually did.

I felt my chest tighten as we raced past a sign that read: ‘Welcome to Edenfall! The most magical place in America!’

I was officially leaving my old life behind. No more sharing a rat-infested studio apartment with Mom and Lachlan. No more hiding bruises from classmates and concerned teachers or dumpster diving for food. No more spending nights riding the train to avoid being around Lachlan’s creepy, handsy friends during their poker nights.

Three months ago, if I’d been given the choice to trade my life for a better one I would’ve taken it in a heartbeat.

But not if I’d known I’d have to lose Mom to do it.

We were passing unfamiliar buildings that stood like boxes in the bleak light of the morning. Farmhouses and cattle sheds, storage and all the other things strange to a city girl. I’d have to go to school here.

Ellie and Michael had made that clear, finishing school was non-negotiable even though I was eighteen.

Not that I wanted to drop out, although school had always been a nerve racking experience.

Teenagers could sense, somehow, that I was the limping animal at the back of the herd. Easy pickings for hungry lions. And now in Edenfall I would again be thrust into the role of the sad new girl in too-big men’s clothes who was too weird to be around.

I touched a buttons on the side of the door, and put my head out of the window.

The fresh, cold air whipped mercilessly at my cheeks and filled my lungs with ice. I could smell pine and wood-smoke in the fresh morning air as my pulse thundered. I sucked it in greedily, and it left my body with the force of a punch.

“You all right, sweetheart?” Ellie asked from the front.

“Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’m fine.”

Derek had fallen asleep again, arms thrown carelessly and mouth hanging slack.

“We’re almost there,” said Michael again, as we passed little souvenir shops and grocery stores and bustling signs of life.

Forest smells gave way to the mouth-watering scent of baking bread and coffee as we passed one bakery after another. My stomach growled insistently and I clamped my hand over it, embarrassed that someone would hear it.

“God, that smells amazing,” said Ellie longingly, apparently thinking along the same lines as me. “But Olivia said she was making a welcome feast for you, so we have to go straight home,” she added to me.

“One spoonful of Liv’s food and she’ll think we’re planning on poisoning her,” Michael said quietly. Ellie elbowed him in the side.

“Don’t give Juliet the wrong idea!” she said, unable to suppress a smile.

“At least there’s fruit. Even our Liv can’t mess up fruit,” said Michael in a long-suffering voice. I laughed, partly at his tone and partly at the thought of turning my nose up at fruit. The norm for me over the past few years had been one meal a day.

Ellie had forced me to get a physical when she first saw me, and I was taking a variety of vitamins for my deficiencies. Apparently I’d been scarily close to getting scurvy and other things.

I was getting three squares meals now—Ellie and Michael were making sure of it—but that didn’t cancel out a life of scrounging for food, being used to a growling, empty stomach and, most embarrassingly, hoarding food.

I currently had three energy bars, a wilting banana, several little packets of ketchup and a stale cupcake in my backpack, all accumulated from snack stops along the drive. I even had some cookies and cereal that I’d stuffed into my backpack quickly in the breakfast room of the hotel where we’d spent the night.

I had to keep reminding myself that I wasn’t going to go hungry anymore. In fact, I hadn’t heard my stomach complaining in weeks now. But that didn’t make it easy to break the habit or change how my mind worked.

I was going to throw the stale food away when we got to the house, I decided. Old me would have been horrified at the thought, but I needed to get used to having regular access to food. I definitely didn’t want my hoarding habit to be noticed by Ellie or Michael, and have to have an uncomfortable conversation with them later.

Edenfall looked like a perfectly pleasant little town. Even this early in the morning there were sleepy-eyed dog walkers, runners and people who looked like they were going to work. Some called out to each other and stopped to chat. It was very neighborly. It reminded me of all the stories Mom had told me growing up about Edenfall, about how it was the friendliest place on earth.

We slowed down as we passed the last coffeeshop and drove through quieter, more residential streets. We pulled into the driveway of a large brick mansion whose porch was bigger than our studio apartment. There was space for five or more cars there.

“We’re home,” said Ellie in a sing-song voice. She jumped out of the car—just as though we hadn’t been driving all night and then some—and opened the backseat’s door to prod Derek awake. “Oy! Wake up, sweetheart, we’re home!”

“I’ll get the bags.” I said immediately. It was an effort to close my dropped jaw and look away from the mansion in front of me. They lived here? Their small, beat-up Camry didn’t exactly scream opulence.

Ellie forestalled me with an upraised palm.

“You’re not going anywhere except the breakfast nook and then, bed,” she said calmly but threateningly.

“Okay,” I said nervously, taking a couple of steps back.

Her face split into a smile and she grabbed me in a sudden hug. I controlled my instinctive flinch and relaxed into it. She smelled faintly of jasmine, even now. Whereas I knew that I smelled like sweat and car, but she didn’t seem to mind.

“Liv!” Derek called, racing into the house past Michael, “Liv, we’re home!”

Heart beating fast, I followed Ellie inside.

I was nervous about meeting my cousin Olivia. We were around the same age, and I knew Ellie and Michael were hoping that we’d get along. We would be spending a lot of time together, after all. We’d have to go to school together and—well, I wasn’t going to hope that she’d want to talk after class or sit together during lunch or anything like that. If she could tolerate me, that would be enough.

A tall figure came rushing down the stairs and threw her arms around me before I had any idea what was going on. I was getting hugged a lot today.

She was tall, long-legged and slender. I was ‘fun-sized’, as Mom liked to say, so she easily towered at least six inches over me. Her hug was warm and she squeezed the breath out of me, as though worried I’d try to slip away. As she let me go I got a slight whiff of strawberries from her long, blonde hair.

She was beautiful in an old Hollywood star way, and looked perfectly put together like she was going to a photoshoot where the theme was Eurotrash glam at an EDM concert. But as I straightened and caught the white flash of her wide grin, my fear vanished.

“Juliet!” she exclaimed, taking me by the shoulders and squeezing till it hurt, “It’s really you! Ohmigod, I’m so excited, you have no idea! I’ve been talking about you all the time to everyone!”

“It’s true,” said Derek from the kitchen entrance, sounding bored. “She couldn’t stop talking about you.”

“H-hi,” I stammered, “Hi Liv. It’s really good to meet you too…finally.”

“How was your trip?” she demanded, and didn’t wait for my answer, instead talking a mile a minute as Ellie called us into the breakfast nook.

I blinked when we entered the so-called ‘nook’, giving Liv half an ear as she chattered on. I’d been too overwhelmed to notice the interior of the house, but this was seriously ridiculous. Everything was at least twice as big as it needed to be.

There were two refrigerators for some reason, and a chandelier in the middle of it all. The main ‘nook’ area seemed to be a long, farmhouse-style rustic wooden table at the center of the room. It could’ve easily seated a dozen people.

I thought back to the little folding table that we’d used for everything, in my Mom’s apartment. One leg had gotten a little wobbly when I’d fallen against it after a punch from Lachlan sent me reeling. We’d propped it up with bits of cardboard but it would still fall down if you put too much weight on it.

I slept in a sleeping bag on the floor and we had one floor lamp I’d gotten out of a dumpster so I could do my homework at night and not disturb Lachlan and Mom if they were trying to sleep. Mom, who always tried to see the bright side of things, called it ‘cozy’.

I didn’t exactly agree.

Lachlan sold our fridge and microwave a couple of months after we moved in. He claimed it was because it was taking up room, but I wondered then if our landlord agreed with that assessment, since they were hers to begin with.

Obviously, I never brought that up.

I wondered if anyone else had moved in since then, or if it was still labeled a crime scene.

The long table was covered in food, stacked in teetering piles and almost falling off and the delicious smells made my stomach rumble, quickly snapping me out of my daze.

“Did you make all this?” I asked, gaping as I took in all the food.

“I ordered in,” Liv said with a touch of sheepishness. “I tried to make pancakes, but they burned and the fire alarm went off, and then the fire department came and wanted to know if everything was okay…so yeah. It was a lot.”

“Trust me, we’re better off,” said Derek through a face full of food. Liv got him into a headlock at lightning speed and they began to tussle.

“I’m going to take a shower,” said Michael, kissing Ellie on the cheek before he got up. His eyes were heavy-lidded from lack of sleep, I noticed, and I felt a wave of guilt.

“You’re still going to work?” I asked anxiously. “Sorry about all this, I know the drive must have tired you out.”

“It was nothing,” he said, smiling at me and patting me on the head. “But you should go to bed soon, you must be really tired.”

I opened my mouth to explain that I hadn’t been driving all night on no sleep so I wasn’t that tired, when Liv patted the cushion on the bench next to her.

“You need to eat, you look dead on your feet,” she said firmly. I bit back a smile. Sounded like she’d inherited the mothering gene from Ellie and Michael.

They tended to eat their food in small bites, I noticed. Maybe because they’d gotten used to having all the time in the world, or they weren’t afraid someone would take it away.

As I poured wisps of cream into the black coffee at the table next to Liv, and listened to their pleasant chatter. It was so ordinary, and so strangely comforting to hear them talk about the mundane details of their lives.

“You girls have plans for the day?” Ellie asked. Her tone was still bright and cheery, but her head was drooping into her tea.

“I want to take Juliet shopping,” said Liv at once.

“No fair! I wanted to play videogames with her!” said Derek, dropping his fork onto his plate with a clang and startling Ellie awake.

“Well, you can’t,” Liv explained coolly, “because Juliet doesn’t want to be stuck babysitting you.”

“Mom!”

The most shopping Mom and I had done was when something had ripped beyond repair and we dropped by the thrift store off Broadway to look over their under $5 section.

Plus, I knew I looked raggedy next to Ellie and Liv’s easy, polished style. I stuck out like a sore thumb in my dark hoodie, faded and falling apart at the edges and jeans so old they had holes at the knee because I’d worn them out. All my clothes were shades of navy, black and grey, at least two sizes too big and meant to make people’s eyes skim over me.

My counselor had assured me the day before I’d left with Ellie and Michael that Edenfall had one of the country’s top schools, and that they were a magnet school for the kinds of colleges that I could never have dreamed of getting accepted by before.

“This is a real chance for you, Juliet,” she said, pursing her lips and looking down at my transcript. She was seeing my straight A’s and exceptional record, lack of extracurriculars aside.

I’d worked my ass off for those grades.

“You could end up going to your first-choice school if you play your cards right.”

She looked me up and down as I shifted in my seat. I was wearing a grey t-shirt with a black hoodie tied around my waist, over jeans that I had to roll up because they were too long on my petite frame. I let my hair grow out so I could tip my head forward and cover my face, hiding my expression from view. It came in handy pretty often.

“Make sure you’re prepared to interact with the students there,” she said finally, slapping my file shut. “They might not be the same class of peers you’re used to here.”

With those ominous words, she’d transferred my paperwork to Edenfall High.

When I was done eating, I sat with my head in my hands and listened lazily to Ellie and Liv talk about preparations for school, which started in a couple of days, and the supplies that Liv needed, and something about Liv’s boyfriend Brian…

That day, I fell asleep right there at the breakfast table, head almost dropping into my bowl of oatmeal, wondering why I felt so comfortable

3

Rook

Teeth gleamed white around me, smiles turning into leers in the rainbow darkness. I took a swig of the rancid piss mundies liked to rot their organs with and grimaced as it burned all the way down.

Someone handed me a straw.

“For the pixie dust,” she said, hooking a chin over my shoulder. It was intimate, and wrong. My scars tingled on my skin as I pushed her off, ignoring her hurt expression. She was new. She would learn not to fucking touch me.

Neat lines of fine glitter divided the table into slices. This was ‘the good stuff’, according to an imp dealer I’d found on the outskirts of town. He always said that, with the same shit-eating grin on his face, like he thought I wouldn’t know if it had powdered sage or some other weak shit mixed in.

But he had my by the balls.

I was desperate for the fix, and would have licked it off the ground while he fucked me in the ass if he wanted.

I inhaled the glittery stuff from the black ebony table, twisted my face as I felt things sparkle and pop in my head.

Oh, this really was the good stuff.

My head was full of fireworks, I told the girl, who leaned in to listen. Her shirt fell low, and I could see the tempting darkness of her chest, the swell of her breasts. She licked her lips eagerly.

I could see the simple greed in her eyes, the look of an animal that wanted its needs sated.

She wanted me to take her by the hand, show her to one of the opulent bedrooms in this mausoleum of a house, and fuck her.

Or maybe she wanted me to take her to my ‘parents’’ bedroom and fuck her there.

Or against the giant teak table in the study.

It was one of those options, I decided, reading the invitation in her eyes. Mundies were so fucking predictable.

“I’m going to dance,” I said, still feeling the tingly sense of calm from the pixie dust. Her face fell like a soufflé when I ripped myself off the couch, jumped lightly over the lumps of fallen mundies and went to where the crowd was thickest.

I soon lost myself in the crowd of gyrating bodies.

The dancing here was nothing like the ones my tutors taught me when I was still a prince.

Their lessons had been very proper and obsessed with etiquette and propriety. I wore silk tunics with high collars that choked me at the neck, and the crown that nearly bent my head with its weight, and place my arm around a lady’s waist—low, but not scandalously low—and we would rigidly turn about the room like the animatronic puppet shows mundies took their children to see.

The thought made me snort out loud.

Just then, someone noticed me.

“It’s Lockwood!” someone said, and soon they were all around me, trying to touch, trying to caress, trying to get a piece of whatever made me special to them.

I closed my eyes and soaked in everything but their touches. The crackle and hiss of the drug taking hold of me, bubbling through my blood like acid, and the languid way my muscles seemed to dissolve in its wake. I ignored the bodies rudely shoving into me, I wished them away.

I wished myself somewhere else.

My eyes opened, and everything was different. The pixie dust was slowly dragging itself through my blood, sweet as honey and warm as an open fire. I felt peaceful, contented even. My fear disappeared, and so did my anger.

Everything was wonderful, I decided.

Even the mundies seemed more tolerable, their gaping, good-natured faces only foolish and not unbearably needy.

My flesh seemed to expand to contain me, and I no longer felt like I was thinly stitched together at the seams.

“Your eyes, Rook!” someone gasped. “How did that happen?”

My eyes…they were probably thin gold discs now, under the influence of the pixie dust.

“Magic,” I said, grinning lazily. They laughed back at me, and everything was all right.

I could feel someone watching me. People were always watching me, obviously, but I could feel this person’s gaze on me like a physical touch. I turned and scanned the room until I found her.

I was disappointed.

Or rather, she was disappointing.

She was a mouse hiding in a dark corner, and when I met her eyes, she started and shrank back further into the shadows. I rolled my eyes and wiped her from my mind. What was she so afraid of anyway? I thought, scowling. This was a party. There was something fundamentally wrong with not having fun at a party.

“Will you take a selfie with me?” a girl yelled. Her blue hair frizzed up like a gentle halo around her head. She looked like an angelic punk, with her arms full of bracelets and piercings studding her face like molten silver in the strobe lights.

“Sure,” I said, used to the request. It meant they wanted me to stare at a glass screen and look sullen. Somehow, they seemed to get a kick out of it. Far be it for me to spoil their fun.

She flashed a quick, indifferent smile at me and fished something out of her pocket that gleamed a wicked silver.

I staggered back.

The noise around me abruptly went away, like someone had stuck cotton in my ears.

The gleam in her hand turned into a dagger, its point shining with malice. In its hilt was engraved a crest that I knew all too well. Her face wavered in front of my eyes, and turned narrower, more wrinkled and her wide eyes turned small and beady.

‘My Prince’, I heard a voice—the ghost of a voice—say slyly, ‘It is time for you to be blooded.’

From a distance, I heard someone saying my name, impatiently at first, and then with greater urgency. I didn’t respond.

A jolt of pain brought me back to the present.

“Rook!” Thistle was saying.

He sounded like he’d said it several times before.

I blinked him into clarity in front of my eyes. His big hands were on my shoulders, a reassuring weight.

I felt like a sagging balloon, like I would be floating in the air if he wasn’t pinning me to the ground.

“What?” I asked, voice thick with confusion and, well, from being on some potent drugs.

“What the fuck happened?” he demanded. There was no concern in his voice, just impatience. I saw the face of the selfie girl behind him, eyes cartoonishly wide with fear and worry.

“It was just my phone,” she stammered, holding it up.

It was in a silver case. The phone. For the selfie.

God, I was an idiot.

“What the fuck do you think?” I sneered at Thistle, shoving his hands away like they were burning me.

I came back to myself. I was in the middle of the makeshift dancefloor, having just hallucinated an old memory. But I was fine.

Memories were like old friends you owed money to. They always came back for you, no matter how far you ran. Or how much pixie dust you inhaled.

“Are you high right now?” he demanded, grabbing my chin again so he could peer into my eyes. “Why are your pupils dilated?”

“Do you think I’d be here if I wasn’t?” I demanded, and slapped his hand away. “Touch me again and I’ll make sure to shove your hand so far up your ass you’ll be tasting your own fist for days.”

I heard the girl give a choked gasp of scandalized glee as I walked off, leaving Thistle behind.

No doubt she’d make sure to let everyone know that my ‘brother’, the righteous Thistle had fought with me about my so-called drug habit.

Let them talk, I thought darkly. It wasn’t like there was anything else to do in this hellhole of a town.

The scars on my body sizzled like hot knives as the pixie dust left my system. It only lasted two hours this time. My fist hit the wall.

Fuck.

At this rate, I was going to run out.

“You okay?” a girl asked me vaguely. She had the kind but unfocused expression and powdery nose of someone who’d been indulging herself all night.

“Terrific,” I muttered, and slumped back on the couch. Thankfully, the clingy girl from earlier was gone. Everyone else was in various states of impaired, except the carrot-top boy that sometimes liked to hang around Thistle like a neglected puppy.

“Hey, Rook,” he said brightly, like he wanted a fucking pat on the head. I noticed his hair was wet, and he stank of vodka and grimaced. So he was shitfaced too. Just my fucking luck.

“Get fucked,” I said harshly, and closed my eyes.

4

Juliet

Sometimes, you meet people and you immediately know they’ll wreck you if you get too close.

I felt it as soon as I saw Rook, standing in the middle of that party surrounded by a group of fawning admirers, holding a red cup in his hand like it was a crystal tumbler of scotch.

I saw his broad shoulders and shock of white hair silhouetted by the lights and I thought, this guy is trouble. He’ll cut me if I get too close.

I was right.

Every line in his body made it clear that he was capable of violence. There was a kind of barely-leashed quality to him, in the contrast between his crisp white oxford shirt and the tattoos that curled over his forearms like dark smoke.

He was like steel under velvet.

I saw him and forgot to breathe for a minute.

I was the opposite of him in every way.

He was the life of the party, the one they feared and loved to an extent that they couldn’t explain. I was the mouse in the corner, left alone after my cousin Liv went to hook up with her boyfriend in one of the giant bedrooms upstairs.

I didn’t usually mind. I was introverted by nature, so parties were excruciating no matter what.

But in a flash, that changed.

Rook turned, as though he sensed my stare, and saw me.

I didn’t know how he found me so unerringly in the chaos, but when our gazes met I felt a lick of electricity that seemed to stop time.

Then he smirked, lazy and full of contempt.

His eyes promised secrets and filth, and I couldn’t drag my eyes off the glint of the metal piercing on his tongue when he ran it over his bottom lip.

Jesus, that should be made illegal.

I’d barely dragged my eyes away when it happened.

Someone knocked into me and spilled my drink on my dress.

“Sooo sorry,” the guy said disinterestedly, darting a look at me out of the corner of his eyes. He smelled like cranberry vodka. It was the brown-haired guy.

Fuck.

He did the onceover thing straight guys liked to do, leisurely starting at my legs and lingering at my chest before making it to my face.

Strange, how my mind worked. One moment I could be transfixed by a guy who looked like he could eat me alive and another, be ready to deck a guy who leered at my breasts.

“You look familiar,” he said.

“We’ve never met,” I said, and pushed past him. “Jerk.”

But thank god he hadn’t recognized me. He seemed like the type to make a scene.

“Bitch,” I heard him curse, and rolled my eyes.

The golden rule about being a girl in high school was that you could be called a bitch for anything from ignoring a catcall, to refusing to let someone copy your homework, to getting a better grade than someone on a test. It was unavoidable, and I was mostly desensitized to it.

I waded through the sea of people who were mostly too drunk or high or get out of my way and tried rattling the knob on bathroom doors.

The good thing about a house this big and opulent was that there were four bathrooms on this floor alone, and only three of them had people having vigorous sex or getting high.

The fourth was tucked away under the grand staircase, and as I slipped into it and locked the door, the noise from the outside immediately became muted.

It smelled like smoke but the fan was turned on so that would go away. I could still feel the thump of the bass when I touched my fingers to the marble of the sink, white and streaked with ribbons of dark blue and gold.

The taps were gold plated, because whoever lived here had more money than taste.

I looked at the mirror over the sink and met my own tired eyes. I looked like I hadn’t slept in days, which would explain how tired I felt.

I hadn’t been prepared for swarms of loud teenagers, peacocking and partying. I should have said no when Liv asked, like I wanted. Getting out of my comfort zone just made me, well, uncomfortable.

I wished that I’d bothered to put on something—lipstick, mascara, anything, so I didn’t look so much like a walking corpse.

The front of my shirt was wet with a red stain that was rapidly spreading. I pulled at my shirt, unsticking it from my skin and reached for tissues to wipe at it when someone rattled the doorknob vigorously.

“Someone’s in here!” I called.

“Come on, Jamie!” I heard a girl’s voice say and I sighed. It looked like I’d gotten in the way of a drunk bathroom hook-up, a classic of house parties everywhere.

Ah, young love.

“Come on, open up!” the guy was saying insistently, shoving at the door.

“Fuck off, Jamie!” I called back, annoyed.

“I’m gonna break this door down,” the guy was saying insistently. “You’re that girl that threw the drink at me!”

Well, shit. He finally realized why I looked familiar. Just my fucking luck.

“Are you serious?” the girl said, sounding over it. I knew how she felt. “Listen, we can just go upstairs—“

Someone was throwing their weight against the door, which was shuddering from the force. I stood there dumbly, holding a wad of crumped tissues in my hand.

Through my haze of shock I heard the frosted glass door to the bathtub sliding open.

“Someone bothering you, sweetheart?” came a voice that was raspy like smoke.

I turned and saw a lanky form unfolding himself from where he’d been lying in the bathtub to his full height, which was impressive. He must have been over six foot. What was even more impressive were the ripped, corded muscles in his forearms that stood out as he put his hands behind his head nonchalantly.

He was wearing a sleeveless white tee, and he had a tattoos crawling up his arms. More curls of ink crept up from his neck and toward his jaw.

I felt a thrum of heat in my belly, a feeling like buzzing warmth. This guy was something else. He was made for hopeless fantasies.

“Where the hell did you come from?” I asked breathlessly, although the answer was obvious. He left a little pool of ashes where he’d been stretched out in the tub. I guessed that he was the source of the smell of smoke earlier.

His eyes passed indifferently over me, a far cry from the leer I’d been subjected to earlier from Jamie. He took in my figure and my clothes and decided I was nothing special, judging from the flicker of boredom that settled in his eyes.

I couldn’t argue with his assessment.

Just then, the guy outside yelled something and began pounding at the door.

I shrank away, wondering if he was just aggressively drunk or on something else.

“You shouldn’t have brought your little buddies here, if they’re just going to act like savages,” he said to me, with contempt coloring his voice.

I opened my mouth, ready to tell him that they were not my friends, thanks very much, but in two long strides, he reached the door and pulled it smoothly open.

The guy outside, who was in the middle of throwing himself against it, fell on the tiled floor with force.

“Who the fuck are you?” my would-be rescuer demanded, toeing at the guy’s ribs with his boot, like he was roadkill.

I didn’t have to ask that question. My fists clenched. The guy with the tats caught the movement out of the corner of his eye and flashed me a look that I couldn’t read.

“What the hell, man,” Jamie groaned from the floor. He raised himself onto his elbows. He was moving slowly, like he’d hit the floor hard.

I wasn’t drowning in sympathy for him, though.

He craned his neck and his eyes moved slowly over us. His lip curled when he saw me, but when he saw the tatted guy’s face his eyes filled with something like fear.

“Shit,” Jamie said, scrambling back from us. “I didn’t know—“

“I’m sure you didn’t,” drawled the guy, crossing his arms. His tone was ice cold. “Because I’d hate to think you knowingly decided to interrupt the little moment of peace I’d achieved in this tasteless orgy that Rook calls a party just to find a place you could get your rocks off.”

“Oh my god,” said a girl’s voice.

The girl, Jamie’s companion, came into view. She was pretty, with short hair and a heart-shaped face. She was looking at Jamie, and then she took in the two of us. Her face paled with fear, just like Jamie’s.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice going high and scared.

“Don’t apologize to me,” the guy said coldly. “Just get out of my fucking space.”

Jamie’s eyes blazed with humiliation as he stood up. I tensed, waiting for him to do something stupid, but he mercifully turned away from the other guy. Then his eyes fell on me and he sneered.

“Should’ve known a bitch like you would end up on her knees sucking cock for the first guy who wouldn’t give her the time of day.”

“All right,” the tall, tatted stranger announced crisply. “I think I’ve reached my limit of rudeness for tonight.”

There was an explosion of violence, startling in its speed.

In a split-second, his fist met Jamie’s face and sent him reeling back, his face frozen in an expression of shock and fear. There was a loud, unpleasant crack of bone snapping.

Drops of blood bloomed in the air and on Jamie’s face.

I watched it all dumbly.

The girl screamed, a piercing sound which cut through even the loud music.

“Holy shit,” I said, staring at Jamie’s body.

He’d been downed with ruthless efficiency.

“You should take him away before I lose my temper,” the guy informed the girl, who nodded nervously and pulled him into a shaky standing position. They staggered away, with the tiny girl somehow supporting his bulk.

The music had gone quiet, or maybe that was just in my head.

“You must be a Lockwood boy,” I blurted stupidly.

He looked at me and I felt like a mouse under the unblinking gaze of a cobra. But I wasn’t scared. I was…intrigued. Something warm filled my chest, like fizzing butterflies.

“You must be new,” he said flatly, digging around in his pockets before emerging with a pack of cigarettes, “It’s either that or you’re fantastically lacking in self-preservation instinct.”

It was like we were standing in our own little bubble. A private little moment between two people who’d never met before and had known each other for five minutes.

His dark lashes, black like they’d been dipped in ink, fluttered as he took a deep drag from his cigarette.

I felt painfully attuned to his every moment, deeply aware of the width of his shoulders, the line of his body leaning against the wall, and the careless way he held the cigarette between his fingers. His knuckles were red and the skin was split from the punch he’d landed.

“A little bit of both, probably,” I said, dragging my eyes away from him. I felt incredibly self-conscious next to his easy, predatory grace. Messy and awkward and uncoordinated, that was me. “You should probably get someone to take a look at your hand.”

“It’ll heal,” he said indifferently. “That sweet boy your friend? I don’t know much about those, but you sure picked a winner there.”

“I think I didn’t fall to my knees and worship his cock at first sight, that might’ve pissed him off,” I said, defaulting to flat indifference like I always did when I was around someone who intimidated me. “But thanks for the tip. Why’d you do it?”

“Do what, new girl?”

“Punch him. If you did it for me—“

He removed the cigarette from his lips and started laughing. It was an ugly sound, like he could see right through me and was laughing at what he’d found. I felt my face go hot and humiliated.

“Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t do jack shit for anyone. I especially don’t do it for people who ruin the few moments of peace I manage to carve for myself. Make sure to stay out of my way and we’ll be okay.”

He dropped the cigarette to the floor carelessly and ground the heel of his boot on it.

He didn’t even throw me a second, careless look as he prepared to leave. Like an idiot, I expected—or hoped—for acknowledgment from him. A sign that he thought I was a human being. Stupid of me. Nobody at this goddamn school other than Liv was anything short of a psychopath, it seemed.

“Don’t be disgusting, Sorrel,” came another male voice.

It came from a guy with honey-colored hair and hazel eyes. He didn’t look a bit like Sorrel, but I somehow felt a likeness between them, in the easy arrogance of their posture and the way they acted like they owned the world.

This must be the third Lockwood boy.

I’d already had enough of them to last a lifetime.

He wore a tailored sweater of dark blue with the sleeves folded up to the elbow over dark wool slacks. He looked completely out of place next to Sorrel, like he’d walked right out of a European car commercial.

But they both still radiated an aura of casual danger.

He stood outside the bathroom, glaring at Sorrel. They were both acting like I wasn’t even there, which was fine by me. I wasn’t usually claustrophobic but now, I felt boxed in. I tried to ignore the feeling of being trapped as they spoke.

“What’s this I hear about you getting into a fight with someone?” Thistle continued, sounding supremely unimpressed.

They were facing each other now, and I couldn’t decide which one was the more dangerous of the two. There was an air of barely-concealed menace between them, and blatant hostility. Whatever they were, brothers wasn’t it, I concluded.

“Fight implies that he participated in it, instead of lying back and taking it,” Sorrel replied. “It was a light love tap, that’s all.”

“Rook won’t be happy. You know how he gets.”

“I’m sure he’ll find a warm body or ten to help him get over it,” Sorrel sneered.

Thistle shrugged. I didn’t think he really cared. Maybe he’d just showed up to do damage control and seen that it wasn’t needed.

“Who’s the Mundie chick?” he asked, tilting his head in my direction.

“Mundie--?” I asked, only to be ignored.

“Nothing but trouble,” Sorrel answered.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, palms upraised automatically.

I knew their reputation should have had me running away screaming. But seeing their cold, indifferent faces, as though carved from marble, made me want to…do things.

See them flushed and panting, big hands all over my body, owning me. I wanted to fuck emotion into them, see what they were like in the throes of passion. My hands itched to touch them, feel the rock-hard planes of muscle on their chests, to push them to the floor and get some sweaty, screaming orgasms out of it.

For the past few months, I’d been completely disinterested in sex or anything physical. It made sense, my short-lived therapy sessions made that clear. My libido was in hibernation, from grief…and other things.

Except now, finding two strong, healthy prime male specimens in front of it, it had decided to rev to life, like a racing car engine.

My body was an idiot, all animal instinct and panting eagerness to fuck.

But my mind was occupied with higher things, like what the fuck a Mundie was, and why I was being called one.

“Did you notice anything unusual?” Thistle asked me, his eyes intent.

“Just that your brother throws a good punch,” I said on autopilot, distracted by his eyes. Jesus, he could easily turn a girl into mush just by looking at her.

“She’s probably fine,” said Sorrel, locking eyes with me.

A light shiver ran down my spine for some reason, although I felt grateful that he was willing to vouch for me. My gaze flitted between the two of them, increasing the feeling that I was a small and stupid rabbit in the presence of large and hungry wolves.

“Fine,” grunted Thistle, moving maybe an inch to the side.

Apparently, this was permission for me to leave.

Not that I needed it, obviously.

“Gee, thanks,” I told Thistle, glaring daggers at him. His eyebrows flew up, clear surprise entering his eyes, erasing the studied boredom.

Good. Just because I thought he was hot it didn’t mean I was going to let him walk all over me.

I slipped between Sorrel and Thistle and felt the heat between them in me, like a living thing. I felt it roll over me, caress me like a purring cat. Sparking like electricity. I froze for a fraction of a second, looking at Sorrel to see if he’d noticed anything unusual.

His hand was rubbing the slight stubble at his jaw absently, as though feeling an itch. A hand which was devoid of scars.

Now, Mom always used to say that I didn’t know when to keep my mouth shut and my head down.

She usually said it with affection, so it didn’t sting. But it was still true. I could never control what I said. Years of practice had made me a little better at it, especially around adults—meaning Lachlan—but it still brought me down that day.

“Hey,” I said unthinkingly, “How’d your hand stop bleeding so fast?”

And it was true. The back of his hands, with the knuckles that previously looked scraped raw and bleeding, looked completely fine. No scratches, no blood. Just smooth, unblemished skin.

“Shit,” said Sorrel ruefully, lowering his arm.

“Sorrel,” Thistle rumbled, very close to my back. I felt the soft whisper of my hair brushing lightly against his chest.

“I know, I know,” he sighed. “Why’d you have to complicate things like this, new girl?”

“What—“ I managed, before he reeled me in by the shoulders and looked straight into my eyes.

“Look at me, new girl,” he breathed, voice smooth as molasses. Something about this was…odd, beyond just me standing chest-to-chest with a ridiculously attractive male model-type.

The timbre of his voice changed somehow, going grating and harsh. I blinked as I looked in his eyes, which also seemed subtly different. They’d started out a deep forest green, I was sure of it. Only now, subtle flecks of turquoise and blue were creeping in at the edges, giving his eyes a strange glow.

He looked…different.

Before, he’d been darkly handsome. Now, he was unearthly.

“Sorry about this, sweetheart,” he added, and his grip on my shoulder eased by a fraction.

“Don’t be sorry,” I said. I should have been trying to squirm out of his gasp. But I couldn’t. I was mesmerized. “Just don’t do whatever it is, then you won’t need to be sorry. See? Simple.”

“Forget what you saw happen just now,” he said.

I blinked at him. That was it? I just had to…promise not to say anything?

“Sure, I’ll never say anything to anyone,” I assured him. But his grip didn’t slack.

“No, listen to me, sweetheart” he repeated. “Forget what you saw with my healing. Forget it.”

It felt like there was a weight on my shoulders pressing me down, far more than the grip of his hands on my arms. Each word was like a nail being hammered into my skull. His eyes were gentle and persuasive, and I felt a slow roll of warmth, like honey, go through me.

I wanted to agree, to forget about…what was I agreeing to forget, again?

I looked away from his too-compelling eyes and down, trying to ground myself.

Mom had always been trying out new meditation techniques from the internet. And she’d been into woowoo stuff in general. Healing crystals, rings for concentration, the works. She’d never met a thing that had no basis in science without wanting to try it.

I blinked, realizing that I felt more relaxed. Thinking about Mom seemed to make me feel better. Whatever it was—a bout of nausea, whatever, dissipated quickly.

“Fine,” I said, blinking rapidly and meeting Sorrel’s eyes. I felt better, less disoriented, more myself. Whatever happened had passed. “Fine, I’ve forgotten.”

He dropped his arms from my shoulders like he’d been burned. All the warm gentleness from before was gone.

“Are we done here?” asked Thistle, sounding like we were wasting his time.

“Don’t be rude,” I said. His eyes widened as Sorrel chuckled behind me.

“You really need to pick your battles better. Thistle could snap you like a twig,” he said, close enough to flutter the hairs on my neck. “And hold on.”

“What for?” I snapped. I wasn’t bothering with politeness, anymore.

I’d only been in the bathroom for twenty minutes or so, but I’d had enough of the shitshow that this party turned out to be. With or without Liv, I decided to head back to the house.

Something soft was thrown at my head. It was Sorrel’s shirt. Thin and white and smelling of the forest.

“So you don’t look like a crime scene out there,” he explained.

I took it and fled.

5

Sorrel

Fuck Rook. Fuck him right in the ass for having one of his embarrassing old-Roman style orgies tonight, of all nights. I could hear the thump and shriek of house music through the bathroom door.

He knew how I felt about his parties. They were extravagant, tasteless and none of us liked anyone who showed up, including Rook.

In fact, out of the three of us I was pretty sure he hated mundies the most.

Rook would laugh if he saw me, curled up and trying to light my cigarette with shaking hands, feeling the scrape in my chest that said I was running out of magic. Well, fuck him.

Thistle would tell me I was an embarrassment to my house and to get myself together. I couldn’t even disagree.

But I didn’t relish it, like Rook did. He got something from being around other people. It was like a craving for him. He got all weird and quiet if he hadn’t hung around people in a while. He lived for the crazy high it gave him, because he was normally an emotional void.

It was pretty fucking creepy.

Thistle tended to be more generous about Rook. He said it was because Rook had PTSD. That was a Mundie way of saying he’d killed too much and been killed too many times to not be mentally shredded at the end.

Boy, did I sympathize.

I was there too, Rook, thank you very much. But I didn’t turn into a fucking psycho. My parents would’ve been proud at how well I was holding up.

I liked to smoke because it gave me something to do with my hands. And I liked the feeling of drawing the smoke into me, feeling it twist and curl inside and then let it out, like a beast trying to be free.

I could concentrate on the feeling, on the taste of the papery wrapper between my teeth, and ignore the mindless sound and fury around me. I liked to smoke because the disgusting white cylinders were the only thing that could create a veil between the world and me.

I liked to smoke because the mundies said the smoke would eventually kill you, and I really did like the sound of that, especially since immortality wasn’t a given for me anymore.

They’d invented all sorts of ways to kill each other, the mundies. I sometimes thought Father would’ve liked that side of them, even though he hated everything else about them. He did so respect a particular type of viciousness, mostly when it came to taking down his enemies in ways that combined ruthlessness and efficiency.

Oh but that was in the good ol’ days, three years ago, when disembowelment was still considered a suitable punishment for disloyalty.

Now we were politely drinking unpoisoned tea and sparring delicately over non-aggression treaties.

They were, anyway. Everyone back home. I was stuck here.

Obviously.

This shitty bathroom was the quietest place in the house or outside it, I’d found. I’d put up some low-level wards on it so the unwary wouldn’t find their way in.

I lit up, feeling my pulse slow at the first inhalation of smoke. Hadn’t failed me yet.

It was on these nights that I found myself thinking of my old life.

Something about the desperation that made Rook indulge himself in debauchery reminded me that this was it, for the three of us.

There was never going to be a triumphant return to our families’ courts, with fanfares and glory and shining swords dipped in blood.

There was just sex, humans, and death.

At least, I assumed Rook and Thistle were having plenty of sex.

I certainly wasn’t.

Try fucking a Mundie while being excruciatingly aware of the transient nature of their existence, I fucking dare you. They were like those stupid little moths that hover near lamps and give off a sad ‘bzzt’ sound when they snuffed out seconds later.

It wasn’t their fault, probably. I mean, they might have lived longer if they didn’t think up creative ways to kill themselves slowly, but there just seemed to be something self-sabotaging about them. Determined not to be happy, determined to kill each other.

This was the world Mother and Father had doomed me to.

The door clicked open and someone came in trailing the faintest hint of jasmine.

She cursed, softly and fluently at something, while I wondered what to do.

Jumping out of the shower seemed to be something I might get arrested for, but lurking in the tub didn’t seem entirely aboveboard either.

If I was back home, I would have leapt out at her and we would have wrestled, with some playful stabbing and biting until one of us felt like having sex.

My years of observing humans told me this wasn’t an acceptable course of action here.

I could make out her silhouette through the shower curtain, and fuck, she was gorgeous.

Small and perfectly shaped, with a long curtain of dark hair falling to the small of a pinched waist that flared out to generous hips. My mind flickered to wrapping an arm around that soft warmth, burying myself in the soft dark of her hair. Fucking her from behind as I held on to that pert, rounded ass.

There was no harm in indulging in a bit of fantasy now and then, even if I was basically a monk.

I stayed still, putting out my cigarette, mind wandering to something far less pleasant.

I wondered how the fuck she’d gotten through my wards in the first place. They were designed to keep people like her out. Fuck, was I really that far gone that I’d lost the ability to do any magic at all?

Sharp, vicious anger thrummed in me at the thought. I wasn’t used to being powerless. I’d been in line for a throne, once. I’d had an army of people who obeyed my every whim. My fingers itched to grab a sword and work the hopelessness out of my body, sweat the powerlessness out of my skin.

Luckily, some dickbag friend of hers seemed hell bent on knocking the fucking door down, which pleased me immensely.

Here was a good target. My weird, intriguing Mundie girl seemed less than thrilled with him too, which made me wonder if they’d gotten into an argument.

In that case, I wouldn’t be punching him for me, I’d be doing it for her, I reasoned.

“Someone bothering you, sweetheart?” I asked, as I announced my presence.

She didn’t shriek or start throwing things at me, which I was grateful for.

“Where the hell did you come from?” she asked, breath hitching interestingly.

I itched to slip my tongue in the space between her parted lips, swollen like they’d been stung, and fetchingly red.

My eyes lingered on her, taking in the way her drink-soaked shirt clung to the curve of her breasts, leaving very little to the imagination. Well, my imagination, anyway. Through her thin bra I thought I could see a hint of nipple, a soft bud I wanted to put my mouth to and nip gently, teasingly as I coaxed soft cries from her.

My jeans tightened and I took my eyes away.

I needed to concentrate, fuck.

I said something snotty about not bringing her buddies here, and didn’t wait for her response before swinging the door open, just in time for Mr. Chivalrous to fall on his face.

And what a fucking douchebag he was. My dislike grew like leaping flames when I noticed the way he looked at the girl—dislike and contempt, mixed with greedy lust. Ah, so probably not friends, then. I thought I remembered his face. It gnawed at me for a moment before I could place him. He was Thistle’s friend. I had trouble recognizing him because he usually wore a look of slavish devotion around Thistle, not the mingled hate and lust he was directing at the girl.

One thing led to another, and before I knew it I was feeling the hot, sharp wave of rage that preceded violence, and the itch in my fists grew too strong to resist.

I just hated seeing the flash of hurt, so quick anyone who wasn’t watching her closely would have missed it. Quickly followed by her face shuttering completely, and she snapped on a mask of cool indifference. Like she’d been called those things a thousand times before.

I didn’t bother telegraphing my movement, or giving him a chance to duck away. This wasn’t about instilling fear or respect. It was, my Father would say, an old fashioned lesson. I didn’t use any extra speed though, because that would have been cheating.

Thistle and Rook were going to kill me, was the split-second thought I had before my fist connected. They hated when things got messy with the mundies. Too late for regret though, and to be honest I didn’t regret it one bit anyway.

My fist struck his face with a satisfying blow of impact, followed by the unmistakable crack of bone. Ah, forgot my own strength there.

Droplets of blood flew through the air and I felt the heat of it as some fell on my forearm.

Blood sang in my veins in answer, and I stood taut on the balls of my feet, waiting for his response.

I had missed this, and not known that I’d missed it until now.

He reeled back, falling down and cowered on the ground. I let my arms fall, disappointed. I was hoping for a real good brawl. He’d ruined it for me. He’d crumpled like a square of tissue paper. It was no fun kicking a man when he was down and refusing to get up.

I told them to fuck off, and watched with little satisfaction as he was dragged off. At least the girl seemed grateful, if surprised. Not the dazed shock of someone witnessing violence up close for the first time, though, like I’d expected. More the subdued surprise of someone who’d expected this to go south and it hadn’t.

She said my name. I liked the way her mouth shaped the words, the little rosebud curl in the middle before letting the sound disperse in the air.

You can’t touch her, I reminded myself. Nothing good comes from getting close to humans.

In lieu of balling up my fists again, I scrambled for my cigarettes to give me something to do. My voice came out harsh, unintentionally so. I saw the slight hope in her eyes and rushed to squash it. I couldn’t have her believing we were anything other than monsters all the same. It was safer for everyone…especially her.

Later, I wished I’d gotten rid of her right then. It wouldn’t have become messier, I wouldn’t have had to make her forget. That expression of fucking amazement on her face when she saw my clean skin…it was a pity she’d never remember feeling it.

Of course, when Thistle sniffed trouble and made his way onto the scene, all bets were off.

I was just relieved he didn’t propose wiping every single Mundie that had been to the house that night. He was that kind of paranoid.

As soon as his cold eyes fell onto the girl, I knew she was in trouble. I held my breath as she moved away, hair swinging gracefully…until she made the mistake of looking at me.

My hand. My mistake.

I heard Thistle’s intake of breath, and the weight in his voice as he said my name.

“Sorrel,” he said.

A warning. A curse.

The meaning in his eyes was clear.

Take care of this, or I will.

He was a looming shadow over her back, a monster with glittering amber eyes in clothes from Ralph Lauren. I smoothly took her by the shoulders and reeled her in, until we were standing chest to chest.

“Sorry about this, sweetheart,” I said.

It seemed important that I apologize, although I saw Thistle tilt his head at me from the corner of my eye. He thought that kind of thing was a waste of time. He liked to wipe them and get it out of the way.

Which was why I couldn’t allow him to be the one to do it. He’d brute-force it, scare her into forgetting. I hated that.

I forced my power to bubble up, felt the familiar buzz of it in my chest.

She looked up at me with a trace of surprise in her eyes, but still confident and fierce. I liked that, and wished that it mattered in the face of magic. But it wouldn’t. It never did.

She was strong, and I was oddly proud of that.

But a couple of tries later—scraping the bottom of my pathetic little puddle of magic—and she forgot, finally. I was relieved. I didn’t think I had another attempt in me, and what it would have done to my pride to fail in front of Thistle was unthinkable.

She wasn’t sagging against me like a ragdoll, eyes glazed like I’d seen that happen before, and it had always made me nauseous. She looked at me with anger now, and even that was fine. It meant the important parts were still in there.

When she left in a huff, trailing a subtle scent of jasmine, Thistle turned to me with a frown.

“What the fuck was she doing here?”

That was actually a relevant question. One I unfortunately didn’t have an answer to.

“My wards must have been weak,” I shrugged.

He cursed. “Get your shit together,” he said harshly. “And don’t put us at risk for shits and giggles, Sorrel.”

“Were you such a tight-ass in the army too?” I asked, watching him go still with satisfaction.

I’d crossed an unspoken line. None of us talked about the war—ever.

I could only guess what his experience had been like. I was royalty, so I got the prime assignments. That I managed to slip away each time and go into the thick of battle wasn’t relevant. It was a choice

Thistle, though, he probably had to fight his way up until he was at the top, his ascent leaving the bodies of his former superiors in his wake.

Hopefully because they’d died fighting, and not been poisoned or quickly ‘taken care of’ by Thistle, but I never really knew with the cold-eyed bastard.

It had clearly stuck with him though, judging by how he approached every inconvenient problem like it was a military campaign. He had the same level of ruthlessness too, because I guess old habits die hard with some people.

“I’m warning you,” he said, lowering his voice.

It was interesting how he went softer and softer the angrier he got. Whereas I’d regularly gotten into shouting matches with my family back home. Somehow his whispering was even more effective than shouting would have been.

His hushed words carried, probably because the acoustics in here were so impressive.

“If you ever expose us to some Mundie because you let your dick get carried away, I will roast you in a fire pit and feed you to the selkies.”

I wondered what that meant, other than it being an explicit thread on my life. Had he noticed that I was attracted to the girl? I couldn’t believe it. The only person more emotionally illiterate than Thistle was probably Rook.

That didn’t mean he was celibate though. Of course not, sex was…very different back home. It was a step up from shaking hands.

But Thistle never took notice of other people’s feelings. He ran over them as though they were daisies in the path of a bulldozer. Which meant…that he was probably projecting. I wondered if he’d even noticed how he’d slipped up. Probably not.

“Hey man,” I said, palms upraised and eyes wide with fake innocence. “I’d never sabotage our cushy little life here. You know me.”

“I do know you,” he said, voice dark with meaning. “I know you’re an impulsive, sentimental idiot and you’ll do anything if the cause is noble enough.”

“You sound a little cranky, darling,” I said, amused. “Is Rook giving you trouble again?”

This was good. I was never able to rile Thistle up like this normally. It must have been the Mundie girl, her casual lack of fear when he entered. It must have thrown him off, poor Thistle, so used to being the Big Bad Wolf.

He had the ‘man of few words/strong and silent’ thing going. Mundie girls loved it, they thought it meant he was deep and tortured. Conveniently for him, it stopped them from noticing how little he cared…about them, about anything.

“Won’t he notice you’re missing?” I added, seeing his fists ball up at his sides. I enjoyed winding him up, usually I was the one bursting with rage, but I definitely didn’t want to get in a fight with him. I’d seen him fight—just once, and that was enough.

He was a vicious fucker. Didn’t mess around, laid the guy out all casual with three strikes—punch to the groin, solar plexus and jabbed the eyes to leave him temporarily blinded--like he was just playing at it.

I didn’t think he really enjoyed it, didn’t think he felt the rush like I did. That might have been the worst part, that he did it so impersonally. Like he was playing a game he didn’t really care about.

I clocked his fists slowly relaxing and took my own right hand out of my pocket, where I’d clamped it around a dagger. Never say I wasn’t prepared for anything.

“Don’t let me hear about you pulling stupid shit,” he said, with a last, suspicious look at me before leaving.

“I won’t,” I said, sing-song at his back, “let you hear about it,” I added in a hiss when he was out of earshot.

The noise was coming back.

The shrieking humans falling all over each other and scrambling to get Rook’s attention.

The floor-thumping trash they called music.

The faint buzz of energy emanating from the outer rooms as they had sex and drank and made merry…with Rook at the center of it all.

6

Juliet

“Where the fuck have you been?” Liv demanded.

I looked her up and down. Her hair was mussed and strands stuck to her sweaty face, which was positively glowing. Despite asking me that, she didn’t seem too concerned, like she was floating on a high of endorphins.

“You have the ‘I just had sex’ look on your face,” I accused, just as the music dropped out between tracks. I felt many judgmental eyes on the two of us.

“Oops,” I said, as the music started up again. The dancing resumed and we were ignored again.

“Keep it down,” Liv hissed, dragging me out of the living room where most of the not-PG activities were happening.

“You did, though,” I said, raising an eyebrow at her in the much quieter hallway. “That’s your post-sex face.”

“I do not have post-sex face,” she declared, looking away from me and twirling her hair. Her words were undercut by the dreamy look in her eyes.

“I call you out,” I said, chin up. “I call you out for being a lying liar who lies—ah!”

She descended on me, quick as lightning, and tried to shut me up. Her arms were longer, an advantage of being nearly a foot taller than me, so she had me by the shoulder with a hand over my mouth before I could say ‘uncle’.

“All right, all right!” she hissed, “Brian and I got a moment alone in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs.”

Even under her iron grip on my face, my nose wrinkled.

“Classy,” I tried to say, but it came out as “Mmph” instead.

“I need you to not be a prude about this,” she said in a warning tone, and let me go.

“Fine,” I said, breathing in deep and trying not to think about where her hand had been before she clamped it over my mouth. “How was the party sex?”

“I knew you’d be like this,” she said, rolling her eyes. I just grinned back at her unrepentantly.

“Did you use--?”

“What? Oh yeah, Brian had some.” Her tone seemed to imply she thought that was cute.

I could respect a guy who was prepared for any contingency, but that didn’t stop my suspicious mind from thinking he’d expected to get laid tonight.

“How was your night? Sorry I, y’know, left.”

“No worries,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant as we made our way to the front door. I think we both needed some fresh air. “I was trapped in a bathroom with Sorrel Lockwood and saw him punch a guy out. No biggie.”

“What?!” she shrieked, loud enough to scare the birds out of the trees.

By the time I was done explaining what happened, we

7

Thistle

Sloppy, I thought grimly.

That was a sloppy, careless glamor by Sorrel. They didn’t take if you didn’t want to do them, and he clearly didn’t. With his bleeding fucking heart and lack of concern for who saw him doing magic, he was definitely going to get us killed or locked up.

Unless Rook managed it first, obviously.

At the rate they were going, I wasn’t sure who was going to get us there faster.

I watched the girl leave, hair swinging gracefully over a pert, round ass, from beneath my dipped eyelashes. No need to make Sorrel think I’d taken a special interest. He did so love to jump to conclusions.

But to be fair, she had been…defiant. Openly contemptuous. Both things that would have made for a deplorable soldier, but in a pretty girl they were oddly attractive.

“You just going to stand there and not talk all night?” drawled Rook. He flicked some ash off the tip of his cigarette and it landed on my boot insolently. We were standing in a corner, closed off from the rest of the crowd with a hand-painted silk screen with carvings covered in gold leaf.

It had been ludicrously expensive, an antique from Japan. Luckily, the dealer had the spine of a wet noodle and it had been child’s play to take it from him. I’d even managed to wrangle white-glove delivery out of the deal. Of course, I might have considered actually transferring the money to his account, but Rook liked to play with their minds.

It was the most he could manage, these days.

Days later, the guy would find a bag full of leaves and twigs where he’d thought there were piles of cash. Rook thought it was hilarious.

It was a place that put me right by the window, and if I cracked it open just right I could roll a quick joint and smoke in peace, usually. Young sage leaves, not the smelly green ones the mundies liked to smoke.

Pure, undiluted pixie dust wrapped in sage plucked by the light of the full moon. There was nothing quite like it in two worlds. I inhaled and blew it out in lazy rings, letting it hit me, slow and warm. It felt like rolls of honey slowly dripping down my insides.

He had nothing of the terrified look he’d worn earlier. Instead, he looked cool and disdainful, like he’d never had the episode of whatever it was in front of a scared human girl.

That was Rook all over. Whatever was inconvenient to remember, he tossed aside like it never happened. I occasionally envied him for it. Must be a nice way to live.

This time, Rook had followed me like a rabid puppy, snarking about Jamie, mumbling something too quickly to follow. He reeked of that awful stuff the humans liked to smoke—bitter and brown and acidic, it stuffed up my lungs and made my eyes water.

I wondered why he and Sorrel liked it so much. Maybe they thought it helped them blend in.

I looked over at Rook, at his silver-white hair and his eyes black as a demon’s and smothered a laugh. Nobody would ever mistake him for a human, not even the stupidest of the humans themselves.

You could see it in the way they tip-toed around him, cloying and sycophantic but bristling with fear all the same. It was more good sense than I’d expected from them, but I guess even they couldn’t fully blot out their instincts.

Rook caught the edge of my stifled grin and smiled back, lazy and vacant. I wasn’t sure what he’d been taking besides the pixie dust, or how much. I knew he liked to dip into other things when he ran out. They brought him little offerings, the humans, little pills in funny colors.

I could always tell when he’d taken them, his sweat started smelling sickly sweet with a hint of something rotten that hit you in the back of the throat. They made feel him different in way that I guess he liked. He kept taking them, anyway.

They didn’t stop the screaming nightmares though. Nothing did, and so he’d mostly stopped sleeping. I wasn’t sure how long it was going to be physically possible to keep that up. We didn’t die like the humans did, but they seemed to need only the flimsiest of excuses to keel over.

They were as delicate as moth’s wings, easy to rip off and then they disintegrated in your fingers like ash.

But we were hardier. I’d seen it in my time on the battlefield. Severed limbs and starvation slowed us down, but it took more than that to erase us from this world. So Rook could keep himself awake for as long as he liked, and grow more and more bloody-eyed and ragged looking if he pleased but eventually, even he would have to succumb.

“Having fun?” he asked, tilting his head curiously at me. Another few flakes of ash dropped down.

“Sure,” I said, looking out the window at the starless night. There was a sliver of moon in the sky, bone-white and glowing like a feral grin.

“You’re lying,” he sighed, and put the cigarette out on his arm casually. I gritted my teeth as his flesh singed and the embers hissed out.

“Don’t like to me, Thistle,” he added, slinging an arm around my shoulder, heedless of how stiffly I was standing. “You know how I hate liars.”

“I do,” I agreed. I could smell the burnt flesh, and my lip curled involuntarily.

“So what are you really thinking?”

“I’m thinking you’d better fuck one of those mundies that follow you around like shadows before they start complaining.”

“Oh, them,” he said carelessly. It was possible that he hadn’t even noticed them. “They’ll live. They’re boring me tonight, though.”

Nothing was quite as ominous as hearing that Rook was bored. That may have been partly why he attracted the mundies to him. They liked danger, to look at its bright flame and feel its heat…until it started to hurt them.

“They’re not all boring,” I said, and bit my tongue. Quite literally, and I tasted the sour metal of blood on my teeth. My thoughts had strayed too far.

“Yes they are,” said Rook contemptuously. “They like to crawl in the mud and wallow in their flesh sacks and all they think about is sex and death.”

“Whereas we are so elevated,” I murmured. He rolled his eyes at me.

“Well I know you love them,” he said, and my blood froze in my veins. “You’ll even go to school with them, and play games with them, and pretend you’re no better than them.”

“Ah,” I said, insides loosening. He hadn’t meant that girl. “Soccer.”

“Soccer,” he repeated in a sneering voice. “Waste your time as you like, just remember we’re not immortal anymore. Anyway, there’s been an interesting rumor going around about our dear ‘brother’,” he added, with a world of meaning in his tone.

There was a pause, which was filled by the incredibly loud music that was apparently ‘hot right now’, and assorted shrieks and yells. Either they were all playing a game, or someone was being murdered.

Neither of us turned to look.

“I find it hard to believe there could be anything interesting about Sorrel,” I said, careful to keep my tone contemptuous. The soft gasp of his near-silent chuckle reached my ears. The hairs at the back of my neck prickled from how close he was.

“I thought you’d be mad,” I said giving up.

There was no use lying to Rook. I wasn’t good at it anyway. I was still looking out the window. “He could’ve ruined your party.”

“Is that what you thought? I assumed you were afraid I’d go mad at the scent of blood and start on some barbaric killing spree,” he said, smirking at me. “Always so worried about keeping people alive, aren’t you?”

A hint of teeth flashed white under the strobing lights.

“You might not have noticed this, but mundies tend to get upset when lots of them turn up dead and dismembered out of the blue,” I explained, faking earnestness.

“Poor Thistle,” he said sympathetically. “Neither of us is what you were expecting, are we? If only the world was filled with a few million more of you, perfectly disciplined at everything—at eating, at shitting, at killing. You even hacked away at us exactly as you were trained to, didn’t you? I heard from the guards. They never left me alone, but at least they brought me news. I think they expected me to kill you the moment I saw you,” he added, voice dropping. He had a distant look on his face.

“It wouldn’t have been the most outrageous thing, given your track record,” I reminded him.

I still remembered the floor of the clearing where the Houses met, formerly made of pristine ivory. Rook had slashed the throats of a nobleman—one of his own House. In a smooth, precise movement, he cut across his throat from ear to ear, and left him to bleed wearing a scarlet smile.

Everyone else had been horrified.

I’d privately been impressed by the precision of his slice. Very clean and quick, he’d clearly been practicing.

I remembered the way the rest of us fell silent, waiting for the Queen to do…something. Instead she’d smiled, proudly as if to say Look at this monster that I have leashed. And then she’d punished him all the same. It was the cruelest binding I’d ever seen, but I was still secretly relieved.

If he did end up killing me now, at least it would be a clean, ordinary death. A slit throat or a quick stabbing were nothing out of the ordinary in a soldier’s life. But the other things he’d been able to do were out of nightmares, things that were only whispered about.

I looked at him and saw a monstrous creature, a thing to be feared.

Too bad its face was so deceptive.

“Oh no,” he said brightly. “You’re not even on my list.”

“Somehow I’m not all that reassured,” I said, “But okay.”

I caught a glimpse of the figure with dark hair who was sitting on one of the garden benches.

She had familiar dark hair, and was alone. I frowned.

Just then one of his stalkers came looking for him. Apparently he’d been gone for too long. They were positively pining in his absence. She hooked her arm around his neck like a possessive python and it was impressive to see how quickly he shrugged her off.

“My subjects await me,” he said grandly, and she giggled obediently.

I wondered if she would have been equally amused if she’d known that he really had been a prince with subjects, once. Subjects who would rather have ingested deadly poison rather than be near him, but still.

“Whatever,” I said, and didn’t turn to watch them leave. My gaze was fixed on the girl, her face shrouded in darkness and hair illuminated by the moonlight.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said as I approached her, twigs snapping under my feet. I spared a thought for my leather wingtips, probably scuffed and dirt-smeared beyond repair.

I didn’t think this girl would care about that, though. Her tone was indifferent, she would’ve had more emotion in her voice talking about the weather. The stubborn set of her shoulders and the suspicion in her eyes as she looked at me were familiar.

I rocked back on my heels, put my hands in my pockets, and tried to look non-threatening.

I knew I’d failed at that by the way her eyes narrowed, and her hands tightened on her thighs.

“Come to threaten me again?” she asked, voice falling like a whip. “I’m warning you, I carry mace and I’m not afraid to use it.”

8

Juliet

“I’m not here to threaten you,” he said, still looking at me intently.

“Uh huh,” I said, unconvinced. “So you just wanted to enjoy the fresh air?”

“No.”

“Oh,” I said, stumped. “Well, then—“

I was interrupted by him drawing closer and swallowing my mouth in his. His mouth burned on mine as his hands tightened around my waist. When he let me go, I blinked in surprise.

“Well,” I croaked. “Why didn’t you just say so?” And cracked a smile at him.

“Is that a yes?”

“That’s a hell yes,” I said.

I didn’t have to like him to hook up with him, after all.

The air between us was electric, and I felt the shock of anticipation every time my shoulder brushed his. The crowd seemed to barely notice us but still parted for Thistle like a wave.

We were in a little inescapable bubble, formed by the loose but possessive way Thistle laced his fingers through mine. It was an oddly intimate gesture—less territorial than slinging an arm over my shoulder, like others guys had done in the past.

It made me like him a little more.

Because I wasn’t really at a baseline of liking him a whole lot. It wasn’t about personality or compatibility, for either of us, I was sure.

For me, it was about the strength of his shoulders, the dark velvet of his voice and the way his eyes deepened when they looked at me. It was in the brutal play of muscles in his arms and shoulders and the rough calluses I felt in his hands and how I shivered thinking of him putting those hands on my body and playing me like a violin.

It was a wonderful distraction. When I was thinking about fucking him, I wasn’t thinking about how my mother was murdered or how lonely I was or how I was a complete stranger and had no friends in this strange new town full of weird rich kids who knew that I didn’t belong there.

I wanted him to sand me down to a smooth polish with his rough hands, burn away the useless thoughts until all I had left was the shuddering need to come.

I couldn’t begin to know what was really going through his mind—he seemed to feel a mix of contempt and dislike for me—but I knew his body was reacting in the same way, if the way his eyes lingered on my body was any indication.

“Here,” he murmured, dragging me through a doorway. It was cool and dark, and as he flicked the light on I saw that it was a sparsely furnished room dominated by a king-sized bed in the middle. All the noise from the outside immediately stopped, as though someone had pressed mute.

“Do you want to—“ he started, but I shut him up firmly with a kiss.

Less talking, more…other stuff.

He seemed to take the hint, obediently kissing back until we were both panting messes. It was warm, so warm as our teeth scraped and our tongues slipped into each other’s mouths, slick and purposeful.

When I surfaced for air, I realized that he was nudging the waistband of my leggings. I liked that he was waiting for me to do it, instead of going caveman and pulling them down like some guys did. I shoved them down my legs, took my floral top off for good measure, and moaned when he stroked my nether lips.

Every touch sent a throb of want right down to my clit.

He seemed to sense that I was dripping wet and ready, and nudged my thighs so my legs were parted, and slid one finger into me. Even his finger was huge and thick. I sighed as I felt him enter me, and when he curled it inside he touched the place that made me shudder like I was spasming from the jolts of pleasure.

When he had two fingers in me, I scrambled to open the fly of his jeans, and soon I could see the outline of his hard length through his briefs.

“Wow,” I said weakly. That was all I could manage.

This guy was hung like a horse.

When I wrapped my hand around him, my fingers could barely circle his width. But it didn’t seem to matter. His breath still hitched, and his mouth still parted, sucking in breaths.

Most guys’ O faces looked stupid. Thistle, though…he looked savage and glorious, like he’d been born to feel pleasure.

I came with a gasp when he started rubbing my clit. There wasn’t any finesse to it, but there didn’t need to be. He just had to put his thumb on the bud and press down, and I was gushing into his hand.

My grip on his length faltered when I came, still shuddering from the aftershocks, and he placed his callused grip over mine. I could still feel my wetness on his fingers as he pumped himself and spilled a moment later.

Some of it had gotten onto my fingers. I brought them up to my face and licked them clean, unselfconsciously.

I looked up to see his eyes fixed on me, and froze.

9

Rook

“Your brother’s hooking up with some girl,” a brunette with sly eyes informed me.

“Good for him,” I said, barely paying attention. “About time he got some.”

“Not Sorrel,” she said, pouting. I knew she’d hung around Sorrel for weeks, thinking she’d be the one to successfully lure him into bed. She’d sulked for days when she failed, just like everyone else. “Thistle.”

“Really? Didn’t he cut a swathe through everyone in this town who doesn’t use a walker already?” I asked, hiding a yawn behind my hand. I didn’t feel nearly the same fascination with my brothers’ sex lives as the mundies did. Obviously, they gossiped about me the same way but they (usually) had the sense to do it behind my back.

“I think she’s new,” the girl said. “Olivia Masters’s cousin.”

“Who?” I asked absently. “Oh, never mind. I wouldn’t remember anyway. Good for Thistle, he always finds a way.”

The party was dying down, everyone was drooping and generally looking like shit. It had been okay, but I was bummed that I hadn’t seen Sorrel punching a dude out. He was usually so restrained and boring.

He usually ended up cowering in some shitty corner trying not to have a nervous breakdown or whatever.

I didn’t have time for that shit. I flexed my fingers, feeling the ghosts of old scars tingling.

Sometimes I felt wistful at the thought that I’d never be able to bleed again. I liked to see the gleaming white streaks across my skin after cuts healed, just like the ones all over my chest.

Mother made sure I’d never be able to shed blood again, right before throwing me into this world. She’d cut me off from the source of my power, rightly fearing that I’d use it to go right back and kill her.

“The House of Aurelian has standards to uphold, son,” she always said, lip curled as she looked at me and found me wanting every time.

I had a quiet laugh thinking of how she’d react to me having a pleina-fueled bacchanal with a bunch of humans so mundane they wouldn’t sense magic if it bit them in the dick.

I got up, feeling the lazy slide of pleina into my blood like honey, creating a thick layer of cotton-y shielding between me and everything else.

“Don’t go,” said the girl pouted as I slipped out of the crowd of sprawled, tired mundies. Really, they had no stamina at all. It was pathetic.

I felt an itch in my bones.

It was becoming one of those nights when I was annoyed at everybody and everything. Even the soft cloth of my shirt seemed to scratch my skin, and my trousers—the heavy, thick denim that mundies liked so much—felt like it was weighing me down.

I ran down the streets, barefoot and quiet as a shadow.

I blended with the darkness so well even the nocturnal creatures didn’t see me. I stopped by the edge of the lake, panting slightly. My feet sank into the damp earth dotted with little patches of wet grass and waited.

The bright sliver of moon, like the edge of a nasty grin, was clear in the sky. The wind picked up, stirring dead leaves on the ground and rustling branches. I was patient and still, hands in my pockets.

I knew she’d turn up. It would be rude not to, and she was all about good manners.

Whether she would help me, was another question entirely.

“You again,” rasped a voice behind me.

I controlled the urge to flinch, and turned. She moved even more quietly than I did, and that was saying something.

A kelpie was standing there, and she looked extremely unimpressed.

She was tall, twice my height, with reeds hanging off her in sopping strands. Her hide gleamed midnight black, but her mane was streaked grey.

She was a very old creature, one of the oldest of our kind that I’d ever met. She’d probably been born before my Mother’s line attained queenhood, and that was hundreds of years in the past.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said insolently.

She snorted and tossed her head, eyes livid with contempt.

I wasn’t shit, in her eyes. Just a lost princeling with no status or power, come to beg for her aid.

Except I wasn’t any good at begging. I learned early on that it didn’t help, didn’t stop the swing of the blade or the sweet kiss of the knife.

“Why do you haunt me, boy?” she grunted. “I cannot trade you for anything you want. You have nothing to offer.”

I smiled my most charming smile.

“Look, I brought you an offering,” I said brightly, and tossed her a pleina.

She caught it from the air in a surprisingly dexterous gesture, and bit straight through the tough skin like it was a melon. Sharp, serrated teeth showed briefly in her mouth as she bared them wide, like a shark’s. I smelled the hot stink of rot and repressed a shudder of revulsion.

Oh, Mother, I thought, look at the kinds of people I hang out with now. You got me into this mess and now I’m forced to go begging some ancient, dried up kelpie for help. Don’t worry though, I’m still coming for you. No matter what I have to give up to do it.

“Let’s talk,” I said, sitting on a grassy patch, and patting the ground next to me invitingly. I pouted when she didn’t do anything except stare at me grimly.

“Don’t be like that,” I wheedled. “You know how I love our time together.”

“Don’t try to flatter me, boy. You’re a lying snake, just like your mother,” she said coldly. “And I know you’d do anything for a taste of magic again.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “It isn’t magic I want, although that would be a nice bonus. I want revenge. No more, no less.”

“Revenge,” she hissed.

“That’s right,” I agreed, tossing her another pleina. “Here, have another. Now isn’t this cozy? Maybe I wasn’t entirely clear about my motivations the last couple of times.”

“Six.”

“Hm?”

“You’ve come crawling here six times before. This is your seventh, little boy.”

I smiled brighter, suppressing a little flare of annoyance.

“Seventh time’s the charm. Isn’t that what they say? Now, about the gate—“

“Who says that?”

“Says what?”

“’Seventh time’s the charm’? Stupid thing to say, isn’t it.”

“You’re missing the point,” I said, thinking of all the ways I was going to kill her when I got what I wanted. She wouldn’t die quickly, oh no, by the time I was done she’d think death was a mercy. “I’m still looking for my gate.”

Gates were the only way to travel between our two worlds, and the rulers of the three kingdoms had closed the one they used to send the three of us here right after we came through.

Kelpies were useful little fuckers, which was why I kept coming back here. She knew every gate within a hundred miles of her home, the lake. Unfortunately, she was either incredibly unhelpful or it didn’t exist.

Could have been both those things, of course.

“There are no gates that you can reach,” she said, using a bone to pick the pleina seeds out of her teeth. I tried not to think of where she’d produced the bone from.

“Well, that’s not any fucking use to me, is it?” I said, flopping on to my back. I jumped back up once the mud started seeping into my clothes, ugh.

“Your mother and the other queens closed all the gates that they knew of,” she continued, putting the bone down, apparently satisfied with the state of her teeth.

“What does that mean, ‘that they knew of’?” I said slowly.

Fae were tricky fuckers, they could leave little loopholes and half-truths in their words that you’d never notice unless you were really looking. Luckily, a lifetime spent with a crazy mass-murderer for a mother had made that second nature for me.

“I mean, idiot boy, that they couldn’t very well close off a gate if it didn’t exist back then, could they?”

“Create a gate?” I said, genuinely surprised. “That would be actually brilliant, if it weren’t completely impossible.”

She made a rumbling sound, hoarse and rasping, like gravel rubbing together. I thought it might have been laughter.

“Poor little fae princeling,” she said mockingly. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to think in terms of possibilities? The greatest of us will the world into what we want it to be. The lesser ones whine and cry about impossible things.”

“I propose a trade. I’ll give you something, in exchange for knowledge.”

“What will you give me?”

“I don’t know, you’re near death and rotting away in this putrid lake in the town of Bumfuck, Nowheresville. I’m guessing there’s something out of your control that’s keeping you here.”

She went still.

“You would free me?” she asked.

“If I can,” I shrugged. “If it’s—possible, pardon my small mind.”

“I want your word,” she said hoarsely, “That you’ll free me of my curse once you obtain what you need to form the gate.”

“You have my word as a naïve little princeling,” I said, heart beating fast. “Now, what do I need?”

“Gates are formed by the intersection of magic and the mundane world,” the kelpie said in a droning voice.

I suppressed a groaned. Apparently I’d set myself up for some kind of Fae 101 lecture from a murderous magical entity.

“Gates can be places where kings and queens previously tore open holes in the fabric of reality so they could pass through. However, gates can also be created by those with the right…tools.”

“What kinds of tools?”

“Some you have at your disposal already. Your so-called brothers, who are trapped with you here. And…a human vessel. One human for the three of you.”

“A human?”

“A willing human.”

“For fuck’s sake, why?”

“An old, powerful tradition. The human represents the willingness of this world to connect with ours. Without the human, the gate cannot be opened.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” I said, “Lady, with all due respect, I hope you die of pustulent boils.”

A wet reed caught my around the throat so fast that it was just a blur of movement. It tightened slowly, and I clawed at the wet, slippery rope fruitlessly, hearing the slow, inevitable crack of the little bones in my throat.

My vision was beginning to go blurry, and I clearly wasn’t going to win a fight of strength against her, so I let my body go limp. She shook me back and forth like a ragdoll with the tentacle-like reeds before dropping me in disgust.

“Pathetic,” she sniffed. “Didn’t even put up a fight.”

“I’ve learned to lean into these things,” I said cheerfully, voice raspy with pain now that my throat was just a collection of broken shards. “Makes the torture go much quicker.”

“Pain is a teacher,” she said, lowering her great bulk onto her forelegs and sniffing me. “But you seem to have learned nothing at all from it. How unusual. In my day, my teachers would have given me an achingly long death to make me familiar with the concept of punishment. Clearly, our kind have grown soft since I was last there.”

“Well, they definitely tried. There was no shortage of trying. My Mother was definitely of the ‘if at first you don’t succeed, try and try again’ school of things, but it just didn’t take, although it did keep the smithies in the kingdom flush with wealth for a few years. Sometimes pain doesn’t teach. It’s just pain. You know how it did help?”

“How?”

“It turned me into a mean motherfucker,” I said, and felt my throat cautiously. “All fixed now. So will any human do for this gate opening? Can I just pick one up off the street? Will this kill them? Not that it would bother me, strictly speaking.”

“It shouldn’t kill them,” the kelpie rumbled, “But you’d need one with a certain magical affinity, or it won’t take.”

I scoffed. Loudly.

“Mundies don’t have magical affinity, in case that escaped you in your three million years of existence in this disgusting swamp,” I said. “That’s why they’re mundies. They crawl on the earth like worms and the only things more mundane are maybe trolls.”

She was unruffled, although she flicked a reed at me in warning for my rudeness.

“…not all of them are fully of earth,” she said finally. “In the past, some of us made…mistakes that weren’t rectified in time.”

“I hope to fuck you’re not implying what I think you’re implying,” I said, horrified. “That’s sick. It’s twisted.”

She snorted. “And you’ve never fucked one?” she asked scornfully. It was somehow even more shocking to hear her say the word ‘fuck’.

“Fucking them and breeding with them are two different things,” I said, rocking back slightly. The idea to me was…baffling. “Why bother? You may as well mate with a troll. Or a beast.”

“Yes, well, most of us agreed with your assessment. But there were a few that got away. A few that were smuggled away in secret.”

“They must have sent assassins after them, I bet,” I said, trying to picture Mother’s disgust and rage if she’d come to know of this. “They wouldn’t have lasted a week.”

“They’ve lasted years,” she said triumphantly. “Decades, even. They flourished.”

“That’s actually impressive,” I said reluctantly.

It was no small thing to avoid the assassins of the court.

“But how the hell do I find one of these mythical creatures? Finding one Mundie in a sea of them would be like trying to find a needle in a sea of identical needles.”

“Interestingly, the only reason I brought up this possibility only now and not before was that I wasn’t sure any of them even existed, let alone that they survived to this day,” the kelpie said.

“But now you’re sure?”

“I became sure earlier tonight. I smelled one.”

“What? In Edenfall?”

“Yes. You have its smell on you as well.”

“What?!” I yelped. “I was near one?”

“Apparently,” the kelpie said disdainfully. “You’re not very discerning when it comes to your friends. I understand your revulsion—“

“I’m a little grossed out, but…imagine Mother’s face!” I said gleefully. “If she ever got to know that I was consorting with half breeds. Oh god, it’s almost worth it just for that.”

“You have no loyalty toward your liege,” the kelpie said sternly.

“Truer words have never been spoken,” I said, getting up and dusting myself off, “Both about the lack of loyalty and the other thing.” I strained my sense of smell, trying to find what the kelpie had, but I smelled nothing out of the ordinary.

“Bring it back with you once you’re ready,” the kelpie said, and stood up as well. “Don’t forget the three components that you’ll need for the spell that opens the gate.”

And she vanished in a swirl of black smoke that smelled vaguely of rotten eggs.

At least now I had a place to start.

Someone at the party was an abomination who was going to help me get my revenge, and I needed to track them down.

10

Juliet

Thistle had the strangest look on his face when I turned towards him. When he saw me looking, he immediately flattened it out to something colder and more impersonal. I couldn’t forget that quick flash of unnamable emotion, though.

“I think I get it now,” I told him, stretching languidly. My muscles felt sore in the best way, like I’d just been through the best workout of my life.

Sex really was the superior workout, no matter what Liv liked to say about her spin classes and her flywheel.

“Get what?” he said. I watched him get up and fetch two towel, one of which he tossed to me before cleaning himself up.

“The fascination with you and your brothers,” I replied. “You’re a little strange, aren’t you?”

“You could say that about anybody,” he said. I thought I heard a trace of defensiveness in his voice.

“Not really,” I said softly. “Some people aren’t different. Actually, most people are easy to figure out. But you and Sorrel—I can’t figure you out.”

“I could say the same for you then,” he said mockingly. “Strange girls don’t usually show up to Rook’s parties and agree to have sex with strangers. That’s a little…reckless.”

“I’m a pretty reckless person,” I said, amused. “My mom used to say…”

“What? What did she say?”

“Nothing,” I said quickly, getting up so my legs dangled off the side of the bed. “So—I should get going, yeah?”

He said nothing, just stood there with his forehead wrinkled.

“I’m glad we got this out of our systems,” I said, and I knew that I was starting to babble but I couldn’t help it. The words were falling out of my mouth like word salad and I had no control. “I mean, let’s be real, we have nothing in common. You’re rude and I’m--”

“Annoying,” he put in.

“Oh, fuck you,” I said immediately, and felt the familiar sizzle of anger. “I was going to say, ‘not interested’.”

“Oh really,” he said, sounding disbelieving.

“Yes, really,” I snapped. “Why? Are you just used to having girls falling on your dick as soon as they meet you?”

“Yes,” he said simply, and smirked at me. I knew he was thinking that I’d done basically the same thing.

“Good talk,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Let’s never do this again though.”

I wasn’t feeling quite so aloof on the inside. Thistle was definitely an asshole, and I was sure that we didn’t even like each other, but there was something there.

Some stored up potential, waiting for us to act on it. I felt the gravity in the way we looked at each other, and even in familiar way our bodies had touched.

But he was also dangerous, anyone could see it in the way he moved, and the flat expression in his eyes.

He wasn’t safe. Nor was Sorrel, or the other brother I hadn’t met yet but heard so much about.

And after years spent on the run with Mom and Lachlan, I was in the mood for something safe.

That won’t last, I heard Mom’s gentle, playful voice in my head. You always liked living on the edge. Just like your father.

Yeah, the father I’d never met, who had abandoned me before I was even born. I wish he’d given me something else, something useful. Like a face that would launch a thousand ships, or a body like a model’s, or a genius mind.

Anything that would make me not just a regular teenage girl who just had an impulsive one-night stand with a hot, jerkish stranger.

I quickly got dressed, extremely aware of his eyes on me and his unclothed state as he lounged on the bed, comfortable as a cat.

It felt odd slipping back into the clothes I wore to the party—snug leggings and a floral crop top—as though it had happened years ago, when really it had just happened maybe an hour ago.

It was just the feeling of Thistle’s skin on mine, and the blazing heat and slick sweat of it that made the cloth feel cold and heavy and unnatural on my body. Like my body wanted him draped on me at all times. Very funny, I told myself sternly, you can’t want someone to be a human blanket for you. Especially not him.

Why not? A stubborn part of me asked.

Because…just because!

Nobody turned casual hook-ups into a regular thing. And I couldn’t stand the guy anyway, so why even think about it?

Ugh, my body was a level of stupid even my brain couldn’t handle.

“I’m gonna go now,” I said, clearing my throat awkwardly, holding my small purse to my stomach like a shield.

“Fine,” he said curtly.

If I was expecting a goodnight kiss, I certainly didn’t get it. That was probably for the best. I didn’t want to get caught up in a repeat of drowning in his hands and mouth.

Rolling my eyes, I slipped out of the room, to find that the party was dying down. I checked my phone. It was 5 am. Damn, these kids out in suburbia liked to party. I almost stumbled over a figure lying on the ground near the front door.

“Sorry,” I said quickly when he stirred and looked at me, bleary-eyed.

“S’okay,” he slurred. “You seen Rook anywhere?”

“No, sorry,” I said. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I just don’t know where Rook went,” he said, head falling back on the floor with a thunk. I winced.

“Is everything okay with you two?”

“No,” the boy said sullenly. “He banned me from his parties.”

“Well, that’s his loss,” I said soothingly, just as a mousy-haired girl tripped into the foyer from the living room.

“Darren,” she said, sounding annoyed, “Have you just been lying here this entire time? You’re such a lightweight.”

“Ava?” he said, lighting up. “Ava! Where have you been?”

“Trying to find Rook,” she said, shoulders sagging. “He just disappeared a while ago.”

“Don’t worry about him,” the boy said sounding sour. “He can take care of himself. I’d be afraid for any muggers or serial killers out there that happen to cross his path, actually. Fucking psycho.”

“Don’t talk about him like that!” Ava said, looking around quickly. She hoisted him up by the shoulders, an impressive feat for someone who was basically half his size. “Come on, I’ll drive you home. I’m still good to drive.”

“Need a ride?” the guy—Darren—offered me blearily, winking.

“No, I’m good,” I said, “Just looking for my cousin, Liv.”

Ava looked me up and down and apparently judged me not to be worth much attention. I couldn’t blame her.

“Your Liv’s cousin?” she asked, with a raised eyebrow. I knew what that meant. I’d gotten different versions of that raised eyebrow, and the faint surprise ever since I moved to Edenfall.

“Yeah, we don’t look very alike,” I said. “Um…so any idea where she actually is right now? She’s my ride.”

“I haven’t seen her for a while,” Ava said, shrugging. “She doesn’t usually stay in the den, it tends to get a little wild. I’d check upstairs, the rooms are usually quieter.”

“I was just up there,” I said, fiddling with my phone. “She wasn’t there.”

“What were you doing up there?” Ava asked, raising an eyebrow. I felt myself starting to flush. I couldn’t help it, I was a terrible liar. I started to stutter and stumble through an explanation.

“So I was—looking—I was there for—“

“Juliet?! Oh thank god, I finally found you! Why do we keep losing each other?”

I relaxed as Liv barreled into my back, chattering at full speed.

“I thought you were waiting in the garden for us,” she said, annoyed. I saw Brian’s hulking figure right behind her.

“Aw, were you worried?” I said, patting her cheek.

“That’s getting old,” she said, dodging me. “Oh hey Ava, Darren,” she said, expression clearing when she saw the two standing there. “Were you with them?”

“No she wasn’t,” Ava said clearly.

“I was looking for you upstairs,” I said, finally managing to get it out.

“Why?” she asked skeptically. “You knew I was being sick outside. Don’t tell Rook that,” she added to Ava quickly.

Ava just shrugged. “It’s not even close to the worst thing that’s happened in this house,” she said with a twist to her mouth.

“Come on,” I said, tugging Liv’s hand. “You too,” I added when I turned and saw Brian hovering indecisively.

Once we were in the car and buckled in, I turned to the two of them, hands twisting nervously.

“I have to tell you something,” I announced.

“I knew she was hiding something,” Liv crowed to Brian, to my annoyance.

“You did, babe,” he said obediently.

“You have to promise to keep this a secret, though.”

“I can keep a secret,” Liv said, raising her eyebrow at me. “Tell her, babe.”

“Liv can keep a secret,” Brian echoed, putting a huge, meaty arm around her.

“Well, you convinced me, Brian,” I sighed and wondered for probably the twentieth time that day how they could possibly work so well as a couple.

“I…hooked up with a Lockwood boy.”

There was a pause pregnant with meaning.

“I totally can’t keep this a secret!” Liv wailed.

She pointed at me dramatically. “You—you can’t just drop a bomb like that on me! This is worse than when Brian spoiled the Red Wedding for me before I watched it!”

“Babe,” Brian said, apparently shocked, “Did you just make a Game of Thrones reference? You were actually paying attention all those times we were at my house?”

I cleared my throat. They both turned to look at me.

“Can we go back to the topic at hand?” I asked plaintively. “Look, I don’t know how this is going to affect anything, Liv. We both agreed it was just a one-time thing.”

“A one-time thing,” Liv repeated, sounding stunned.

“Uh…yeah?”

“Well, which Lockwood boy?”

“The really big one.”

“The one who looks like he should be in a fighting pit somewhere?”

“I…suppose,” I said, mildly concerned by her imagination.

“Babe,” Liv asked Brian, “What’s that girl’s name? You know, the redhead in Edenfall Community College?”

“Lauren Ambrose,” Brian said at once. “She did a spread in Playboy a couple of years ago. I read it for the articles,” he added quickly as Liv and I both rolled our eyes.

“Well, that’s the last woman he was seen with,” she said triumphantly. “He got tired of Edenfall High girls a while ago.”

“I mean, so what?” I shrugged. “He was bored, I was bored, we were both…there. It was impulsive, maybe a little stupid. And I don’t even like him. He’s arrogant, and rude, and just plain annoying.”

“Uh huh,” she said skeptically.

“Come on, Liv,” I said, laughing a little. “Have you seen him? I’d have to be blind or not sexually attracted to dudes to resist him.”

“All right,” Liv said, shrugging.

She started up the car and we began to trundle home. Brian was sleeping on the couch, which was another thing about the Masters’ that I didn’t understand.

“Aren’t your parents worried about you and Brian sleeping under the same roof?” I asked cautiously.

It seemed like the kind of thing regular parents would worry about. My Mom, on the other hand, had worried more about whether we were going to end up homeless in a week, or whether we’d be able to live on canned beans for a month.

“Oh, Mom knows we are for sure,” she said casually, as we pulled into the driveway and slipped into the house. We were being quiet since everyone else was already asleep. “She always drops condoms in my laundry basket. I’m surprised she didn’t do it for you too—maybe she forgot. I’ll remind her.”

“Uhh, that’s okay,” I said quickly. I didn’t want to get into the subject of my sex life with my aunt, no matter how understanding she was. “Oh, and promise you’ll forget about what I told you?” I repeated.

“I’ve got your back,” she said with a wink and a grin, and disappeared into her room.

I went into my room—it was still there, clean and airy and impossibly large. I flopped onto the bed and stared at my outstretched hand, lost in thought.

Something in what I’d said to Liv had jogged something in my memory. I’d felt a flash of alarm and confusion. What was it? Something about forgetting, and promising to forget—

“Promise,” I heard Sorrel’s silky voice in my ear, could almost feel the puff of seductive warmth from his mouth, the almost hypnotic sway that his eyes held over me. “Promise you’ll forget what you just saw, Juliet.”

I sat bolt upright.

“Motherfucker,” I said out loud.

Lurking in the shallows of my memory was the thing I’d seen earlier—the thing so dangerous that Sorrel had, somehow, made me half-forget it:

The miraculously smooth patch of skin that just moments before had been bleeding.

I stared at the knuckles on my own hand as my mind worked furiously.

They were hiding some big secret, and it had to do with who—or what—they were.

They’d unsuccessfully tried to mind-trick me into forgetting.

Another unexplainable thing.

But I was determined to figure it out.

11

Juliet

“Pass the butter.”

“We’re going to be late.”

“All right, pass the butter quickly.”

I looked exasperatedly at my cousin Liv, who was munching on a slice of toast unconcernedly. The four of them seemed completely calm and unworried about the fact that they were making me late for my first day of senior year.

“Aunt Ellie,” I said, hating the way my voice was going whiny, “When can we leave?”

“Soon, honey, soon,” she said, sounding distracted. She was swiping through some news article on her tablet, as Mike flipped the pancakes.

Back when I lived with Mom, Lachlan would always expect her and me to do all the chores so the way Derek and Mike helped around the house was…nice. It made me wish Mom had been with someone as kind as Mike, because she’d deserved so much better.

I pushed away the melancholy thought.

“Won’t we be late?” I asked her meaningfully.

“Oh no, Derek, we’ll be late for school! How will we bear the shame?” Liv said in a dramatic stage whisper to Derek, who giggled. I glared at him, betrayed and he quickly looked down into his bowl of cereal.

“Of course it doesn’t matter for you,” I told her resentfully, “Everyone knows you. No one cares if you’re late.”

“Everyone knows you too. They know you’re my cousin,” she pointed out with maddening logic.

“Oh, so I’m allowed to be covered by your umbrella of cool?” I said.

“Liv isn’t cool,” said Derek at once, while Liv rolled her eyes.

“No, but the teachers know you’re not a troublemaker. I mean, look at you!” she said, gesturing towards my outfit.

I looked down at myself, confused and slightly self-conscious.

“What’s wrong with my outfit?”

“You look very nerdy,” said Derek succinctly.

“Really?” I said, surprised. “What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?”

I was dressed in what I thought was a pretty standard school outfit: plaid skirt that went to mid-thigh, thigh high socks and a burgundy sweater over a crisp white oxford and sensible black pointed-toe loafers. I’d been forced by Ellie and Liv to go shopping, and had picked out what I thought would be most useful.

I’d modeled my clothes after what the popular girls in school back home wore. I’d always been too poor to afford anything other than thrifted shirts, giant hoodies and jeans with holes in them—not the stylish distressed jeans that came torn, either. I’d ripped them with how much I’d worn them.

So dressing like this felt blessedly normal.

“You look like you’re trying to parody geek chic,” Liv explained. She was wearing a beanie with cat ears over her long blonde hair, a flannel shirt that she’d tied at the front so her midriff showed, and dark skinny jeans. Her Barbour jacket hung over the back of the chair. She looked effortlessly messy and chic, with her winged eyeliner and black nail polish.

We were worlds apart, but I knew I didn’t want to look like her. She could walk into a room and people would try to copy her style. I just wanted to walk into a room and not be noticed.

“Just trying to make a good impression,” I said pointedly, “Which I won’t do if I’m late.”

“I might have forgotten to mention, Juliet,” said Ellie suddenly, looking over the top of her tablet, “I called the Principal today and told her you’d be an hour late to class because Liv would be showing you around the school first. She was very understanding.”

“Maybe you should’ve told her that before she started freaking out, mom,” Liv sighed as Derek giggled.

That was enough to make me wait with as much patience as I could muster—which was to say, none, as the family slowly got ready like a pack of snails. They seemed to do things in stages, with only one person getting it together at a time, so once Ellie was ready and waiting at the car, Derek and Liv both had to make several trips back to the house for all the things they’d forgotten.

First Derek forgot his gym bag, then his math textbook. Then, just as we were leaving the driveway, Liv yelled, “I forgot!” and raced back towards the house as I sighed and bumped my forehead against the glass window.

“We must seem so inefficient to you,” Ellie laughed, seeing the morose expression on my face in the reflection of the window.

“Is it always like this?” I asked.

“After the weekends it’s the worst,” she said sympathetically. “We all have a case of the Monday blues. Your Mom was so much like you when we were in school, though.”

“She was?” I asked, surprised.

That didn’t match what I remembered of Mom, but then again, she could have changed in all these years since she and Ellie had seen each other. Since Lachlan had changed her, to be more exact.

“Oh yeah,” Ellie laughed, tucking her hair behind the shell of her ear in a gesture that reminded me achingly of Mom. “She was always the first one out the door, and before I got my own car she’d be waiting for me, honking furiously for half an hour in the mornings while I got ready.”

“I’m back!” Liv panted, hopping in before I could respond.

Which was a good thing, I reflected as we finally drove away.

I wouldn’t have known what to say to her. How could I say ‘Sorry, I don’t recognize the person you’re talking about, even if she was your sister and my mom’, anyway?

There just didn’t seem to be any connection between the sad-eyed, quiet woman I’d known and the hungry, driven girl that Ellie had grown up with.

I let my eyes drift over the scenery as we drove, blankly taking in the visions of people going about their business, getting ready for work and school and everything else, children playing on swings in little parks and wooded areas, past houses and mansions and little sweet Tudor-style cottages.

It was all so nice and normal.

No one would ever believe that anything strange could take place in Edenfall. You just had to look at the Masters’s—a perfect little nuclear family, to know that. Their shiny SUV, their beautiful children, their big house.

But then there was me, the aberration.

The one thing that wasn’t like the rest.

That, I thought, described Edenfall perfectly.

An adorable town with its friendly neighbors and its quaint little shops and its huge, prosperous mansions. But there was something ever so slightly off kilter about it.

You could see it only if you looked very hard, beyond the pristine sneakers and tennis racquets and ladies who brunch and bottomless mimosas and country clubs.

And it looked very much like the grim slash of Sorrel’s mouth when he told me to forget.

Just forget.

I’d tried, but I couldn’t.

And not only about last night, either.

And it was too late now.

I was going to get answers, now.

“We’re here!” Liv called in a sing-song voice, startling me out of my reverie.

I looked to the left, and saw the sign she was pointing at as well as the big, proud building that loomed behind it.

“This is your school?” I said, awestruck.

“It’s pretty nice,” Derek said casually. “Not as nice as the new block the town over had made though.”

“Tasteless,” Ellie scoffed. “Chrome and steel. Who’d want to study in that ice box?”

I caught Liv’s eye in the rear view mirror and we both smiled conspiratorially. It looked like Ellie was a wee bit competitive about this kind of thing.

“It has an elevator,” Derek objected.

“That’s pretty cool,” I agreed reluctantly, but I was still rapt in my admiration of Edenfall High.

It looked like one of those old, castle-style college buildings, with old brick laced with green ivy and large ornate looking windows looking over a huge grass lawn where already kids were playing and studying and hanging out.

“How many kids go here?” I asked, blinking in awe.

“This is just the front building,” Liv said, “There’s more buildings behind this one that you can’t see. The gym’s in a separate building, and so are the classrooms for stuff like languages and all the science labs.”

“There are more classrooms?” I said, sounding like a broken record. “That’s…wow.”

“It’s a pretty nice school,” Liv said, shrugging. “What?”

“A pretty nice school?” I croaked in disbelief. “Liv, it looks like…a castle!”

“No it…okay, yeah, it looks a little like a castle.”

“That’s because whoever built this school had a modicum of good taste,” said Ellie smugly. “Now, I’m not going to get into the drop-off lane because traffic’s always so crazy on Monday mornings and the other moms get all political about it.”

“All right, we’ll get down here Mom,” Liv assured her, slinging the strap of her backpack over her shoulder, as Derek did the same.

“Bye honey! Juliet, can you stay back a moment?” Ellie asked.

I obeyed, hand on the doorknob, anxiety quickly clawing up my throat.

“Good luck, sweetie,” she said, eyes wrinkling at the corners from her smile.

“Uh—sorry? Oh, thanks!”

“I’m so absentminded, I completely forgot to give you this. Mike and I wanted to make a present of it, but I guess this will have to do. Here,” she said, handing me a slim, wrapped box.

“What is it?” I asked, touched. “You didn’t have to—“

“I wanted to,” she said firmly, shushing me. “It’s a phone, but don’t overreact, it’s nothing special. I’ve added the families’ numbers to it already, but it’s for your personal use, not just for emergencies. Go wild with Snaptalk and all those things Liv’s always talking about.”

“I don’t know those either,” I confessed, laughing a little weakly. “But seriously, thanks so much aunt Ellie.”

“Don’t thank me,” she said, patting my hand shakily. “When I think of what I could have done for you over the years—well, anyway. It’s too late now. We just have to live with our mistakes. Do you have your lunch that Mike packed?”

“Yes,” I said dumbly, waving the brown paper bag.

Liv was waiting for me, thumbs moving in a blur as she typed rapidly on her phone.

“Lexie’s having a total meltdown,” she said when she was me. “Mel is being a total asshole. This is so not ideal.”

“Who’s Lexie?” I asked with half an ear, watching the river of slow-moving students making their way up the driveway and towards the school.

“You’ll find out,” she sighed, and started pulling me towards the building too, so we were moving in the direction of the crowd. A few people waved and called out to her, mostly guys in Letterman jackets, whom she greeted with barely hidden boredom.

“Someone’s popular,” I said.

She snorted. “They want to know about my hot cousin, that’s all. Those guys don’t care about me. They know I’m with Brian, so they don’t get anything out of being nice to me. I mean, if they were jerks I would kick their ass, but we don’t really overlap.”

“Wait,” I said, blinking rapidly. I felt like my brain was a machine that was grinding its cogs on the phrase ‘my hot cousin’. “You mean…they think I’m hot?”

“I don’t know, why don’t you unbutton a couple of those buttons on your shirt and we’ll find out,” she cracked, and started laughing when I hit her with my textbook. “Ow, ow, that hurts!”

“AP Calculus doesn’t play around,” I panted, holding it up threateningly.

“Okay, okay!” she said, raising her palms in surrender. “It’s the whole sexy librarian thing you have going there, all right? Even these Neanderthal jocks like it. It’s like the most basic porn fantasy.”

“Now I’m creeped out,” I complained, looking around furtively. A couple of guys gave me appreciative looks, and one caveman-looking type did indeed spend an indecent amount of time ogling my legs. Ugh.

“Don’t be,” she said comfortingly, “They’ll all pair off with cheerleaders over the next week and the order of the world will be settled once more.”

“I thought you were a cheerleader,” I pointed out, confused.

“Yeah, but Brian and I are solid. We’re a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

“Sure,” I said, “And the other cheerleaders are…?”

“They just want to date the highest jocks in the pecking order,” she explained. “The QB is the best option, obviously, but they’ll take what they can get.”

“Does that make you head cheerleader?”

“Ha! No. That makes me a cynical bitch who needs stuff that looks good on college applications. Plus, I like keeping an eye on Brian whenever we play against his school.”

“Brian wouldn’t do anything!” I said, “Besides, you said you’re a once in a lifetime thing?”

“Yeah, but what if he forgets that?” she said practically. “Boys have hormones that make them act dumb.”

“So do girls,” I sighed, thinking of the other night with Thistle, his strong, sleek muscles and the way he’d eyed me like prey…it filled me with a rush, like champagne bubbles.

“I have brains enough for us both, anyway,” she said, and finally found what she’d been rummaging in her backpack for. “Come on, I found your schedule. We’re going to see Big Bird.”

“Who’s that?”

“Our Principal. Don’t call her that to her face, obviously. Her name’s actually Marie Jenkins.”

I followed her obediently through a maze of hallways that I was sure I’d get lost in within no time at all if I was by myself. Liv had the miraculous ability of parting the crowd for her, without even seeming to try. I soon realized that if I hung on to her backpack and stuck to her like a shadow, I’d be able to move quickly as well.

We soon reached the outer doors that were larger than any of the classroom doors we’d passed so far. The crowd had thinned after the bell, and it made me feel conspicuous, walking through the empty hallways, but Liv had flashed a confident smile at the one janitor who stopped us and we’d been let through without incident. I was already envious of her power to charm her way through any difficulty in this school.

“Mrs. Robertson,” she called cheerfully, opening the door without knocking and startling the poor lady behind the desk.

“Olivia, you startled me!” the woman said, clutching her chest.

“Sorry Lydia,” Liv said breezily, not really meaning it. “I’ve brought my cousin in here for her first day—she needs the orientation packet, I’m sure you have one lying around?”

The woman shot me a keen look. “Liv’s cousin?” she said, and her gaze softened. “Well, I suppose. It’s quite irregular joining so late after the start of the semester—“

“Her mother just passed away,” Liv explained in a small, sad voice. “We were told there wouldn’t be a problem letting her start late because of the extenuating circumstances beyond her control—“

“Oh, of course,” Mrs. Robertson said, shocked. “If I’d known—well, here you go, dear. You can go on ahead into the Principal’s office. She’ll have a word with you and let you start your next class on time.”

She slid a thick file over to me that had a picture of a diverse group of kids smiling on top of a picnic blanket that was spread over what I recognized to be the lawn in front of the main building that I’d seen earlier.

“Thanks,” I said, taking it.

“I’ll print out your identification card, so you can use it to scan into the science labs and all that,” she said kindly, nodding at me.

“I’ll wait right here,” Liv said, plopping down on a visitor’s chair.

“Oh no you don’t,” Mrs. Robertson said sternly. “You get back to class. You’ve already skipped your Biology class twice this semester and you can’t afford any more absences. I’ll write you a note.”

I left them to argue in peace and knocked timidly at the imposing door that was marked ‘Principal—Marie Jenkins’.

I understood why Liv called her Big Bird almost immediately. She was pale, with watery blue eyes and a long neck. Her blonde hair tufted around her head, and drew attention to her beaky nose.

She smiled vaguely at me, asked me a few generic questions about my old school, and let me go.

Relieved, and still clutching the sheaf of papers to my chest, I emerged to find Mrs. Robertson berating someone for coming in late and getting caught smoking in the boy’s toilets.

“You’re late again. That’s the sixth time in two weeks. And today’s Monday. You know what that means?”

“Enlighten me,” came a painfully familiar drawl.

“It means you’ve been late every single day these past two weeks,” Mrs. Robertson said sternly. She caught sight of me and her face transformed into a smile of welcome. “How did it go?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said, unnerved by the change in her demeanor. “Is Liv around to take me to class?”

“I sent Olivia to her class,” she said with a sniff of disapproval. “She was using you as an excuse to miss her first period. You’re an Honors student, she wouldn’t know where to take you anyway.”

I wasn’t sure whether to be amused or offended on Liv’s behalf.

“Anyway, I found you another guide,” she continued, looking resigned. “He’s not going to be very useful, I’m sorry to say, but he’s better than nothing.”

“You wound me, my darling Lydia,” came the arrogant drawl again from the figure seated in front of her desk.

“I can show myself around,” I said, or rather, squeaked. “It’s very kind of you, but I really don’t need a guide.”

“Oh no, she’s right. I’m a lot better than nothing,” said the voice, wicked dark and amused. “Besides, I know my way around very well, in fact.”

He unfolded himself from the chair, stood up and walked towards me, looming with his considerable height. I was left staring at his familiar, steel-tipped boots. I let my eyes drag upwards, until I reached his face, with its cheekbones like slashes of ice and emerald green eyes.

Eyes that were looking straight into mine with an amused expression overlaid with boredom.

I closed my eyes and groaned, “Sorrel.”

“In the flesh,” he said, grinding out his cigarette with two long, capable fingers right on Mrs. Robertson’s desk as she squawked angrily. Thankfully, it was unlit but I had to admire his nerve all the same.

“Aren’t you pleased to see me again?” he said in a tone that was quite different, staring deep into my eyes. It was low, intimate, caressing. Everything that was inappropriate in front of the Principal’s personal assistant.

“Not at all,” I said crisply, crossing my arms. “I wish it was literally anybody else.”

He quirked an eyebrow at me, as though to say, you’re kidding right?”

I raised both of mine challengingly in response. I wasn’t kidding in the slightest.

“That’s a very hurtful thing to say,” he said, putting a hand over his heart.

“Oh, please,” I muttered. “Anyway, I’m off to find my own way around this school. It can’t be so hard. If you can do it, anyone can, right?” I added, just to see the flash of disbelief in his eyes as I stormed off.

“Wait, you forgot your map!” called Mrs. Robertson faintly.

“Shit,” I muttered to myself and went right back in.

It really took the wind out of my sails to storm out and then come crawling back for something I’d forgotten. He was still standing there, eyes amused.

I snatched the map off her desk, ignoring both her curious gaze and his, burning into me like live coals.

“Well, off you go then,” she said, waving us away. “I’m glad I’m not sending you off with a complete stranger. You two can catch up later.”

We both left the room, and Sorrel easily outpaced me with his long strides.

“Hey!” I said, “Walk slower, please.”

He looked down at me with faint surprise. “You’re so short,” he said, doing that thing I hated, where the other person puts their hand on my head and then draws the diagonal line in space to their own, to find out how much taller they were. In his case, it was almost a straight line going up.

“Yeah, I’ve never heard that before,” I said grumpily. “Well done.”

But he slowed down anyway.

“I have AP Chemistry,” I informed him, when I felt like we were wandering down corridor after corridor with no end in sight. “That’s where you’re taking me, right?”

“Do I seem like the kind of person who’d know where AP Chemistry is?” he asked rhetorically, his voice rich with amusement.

“Fine,” I muttered, looking down at my shoes and letting my hair shield my face. “I guess I’ll find someone else to show me around.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Excuse me?” I said, “I’m pretty sure anyone else could take me to the lab, it’s not rocket science.”

“The only ones with a free period right now are the Cro Magnon meatheads on the field currently trying to beat the tar out of each other,” Sorrel informed me, eyes narrowing. “If you think I’m going to leave you with the first group of slavering, oversexed teenage mun—boys--when you look like that—“

“What, exactly, do I look like?” I asked, hands balling up.

“Like an adolescent boy’s fantasy of what a nerdy girl looks like,” he said, and gently tucked my hair behind my ear, “Tiny skirt and thigh high socks. It’s very…distracting.”

I froze. He was suddenly very close, close enough that I could feel the heat of his body. If I stepped even a couple of inches towards him instead of away, I would be pressed up against him, hip to chest.

“It’s not my fault you’re distracted,” I whispered.

“No,” he agreed. “But I still am. So long as I can breathe, and my eyes can see.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” I said, “Especially if it isn’t even original.”

“Give me credit for having good taste when I plagiarize,” he suggested, tilting my chin up.

Was he going for a kiss?

But that was crazy.

I sprang away from him as I heard footsteps approaching us, and hoped whoever was coming near didn’t see the flaming red color of my cheeks. I tried to think of something to say so it didn’t look so obviously like we were being interrupted doing something we shouldn’t have been.

“You keep saying Mundie,” I said. “And it doesn’t sound complimentary but I’ve never heard that word before. Is it a slur? If it is, I’m not cool with that, just so you know.”

“It’s…nothing. It just means…someone who wallows in mud.”

“Huh,” I said, now actually interested in the subject. “So is that a soccer-specific insult? It sounds familiar to me.”

“It’s…more cultural,” he said evasively.

I narrowed my eyes at him. I really couldn’t figure him out. One second he was warm and funny and seemed to want to kiss me, and the next he was being slippery about the most ordinary things. What was up with this guy?

I guess I wasn’t in any position to talk about secrets, since I hadn’t told him that I’d hooked up with his brother, I remembered with a mental grimace.

“Where are you taking me now?” I asked.

We were headed past corridors of classrooms, and I could see the heads of other kids turning and following us curiously through the windows that looked out onto the corridors. We were the only ones walking outside, and I felt extremely conspicuous. We went up a flight of stairs, still encountering nobody. Wind whistled through the walls. It was oddly peaceful.

“Didn’t you want to go to AP Chemistry?” Rook asked, and brought me to a door at the end of the first-floor corridor.

“You’re late,” the stern-faced teacher at the front snapped when I peeked in timidly.

“I was just showing her around, Ms. Cassidy,” Sorrel said smoothly, stepping in after me. She didn’t seem mollified, and Sorrel’s charm and good looks seemed to have no effect on her.

“Sit,” she said, waving at the only empty seats at the back of the class. “And write me a ten page essay on the concept of regeneration.”

I bit my lip and tried not to let my spirits plummet as I went to my seat. I felt sympathetic looks directed at me from my classmates, and guessed that this teacher was a known hard ass.

The lesson itself passed quickly, and I was pleased that I’d been able to keep up, and answered correctly when called on.

Still, a ten page essay wasn’t exactly the welcome I’d been expecting.

On the other hand…I thought I knew of a way to twist things to my advantage.

12

Juliet

After the bell rang, I caught up with Sorrel, whose long legs had taken him quite a distance, and tugged on his arm to get his attention.

“So, about the paper—“

“What paper?”

“The paper we’re supposed to write as punishment. It’s that or detention, remember?”

Sorrel looked supremely unconcerned.

“Let’s just agree on a topic,” I said, exasperated. “Then I’ll do the first draft and you can go over it after.”

“You have any ideas?” he asked.

“I do,” I said boldly. My fingers were trembling so I tucked them behind my back. “I’d like to write about the possibility of instantaneous regeneration.”

“Meaning?”

“Accelerated healing.”

“As a theory?” he said, raising one perfect eyebrow. He wasn’t looking worried. I cleared my throat.

“No, I mean accelerated healing found in people who are currently alive.”

He went still and deliberately turned to me with a curve of his lips that wasn’t looking too friendly anymore.

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” he said. “Where is this sudden interest coming from?”

I laughed a little breathlessly. “What if you just gave me a straight answer?”

He sighed, shoulders dropping. “What exactly do you want to know?”

“The truth.”

He chuckled, it was a bitter sound. “Asking me to fly you to the moon would be easier.”

I had to admit, I was disappointed. Some small part of me had thought that if I told him I suspected something, he’d come out with everything. That was obviously very naïve.

“Well then,” I said, taking my schedule out of my backpack and readying to leave. “You’ll agree that it’s a good topic for a paper, I hope?”

His eyes were heavy-lidded with some emotion that I couldn’t name—wariness? Anger? But all he said was, “You’re no good at subtle.”

“Sorry?”

“You need to get better at implying things with a smile,” he said, “Before you can proceed to making convincing threats. You should meet my—my brother Rook sometime. He has it down to an art.”

I refused to be distracted by his mention of the third brother. The mysterious Rook, whom I’d never met and only heard rumors about. I wasn’t falling down that rabbit hole.

“I wasn’t trying to threaten you,” I said, hoisting the bag onto my shoulder. “Just telling you how it is. But I’m glad you understood that I have a very personal interest in advanced healing in humans.”

“So close to the truth,” he said with a sigh. “But still so far.”

He stood up gracefully like a forest animal—more specifically, like a predator. He didn’t seem to think about his movements. It was like his body had trained itself to always look like a sleek, lounging animal that could pounce on you at any moment.

“It’s just the lunch hour,” I said, “I don’t need an escort. I’m sure I can find the cafeteria.”

“We’re both going in the same direction then,” he purred, “It would be rude of me not to accompany you.”

I looked at him indignantly, unable to turn him down without being rude to the interested scattered listeners who were clearly trying to eavesdrop on our conversation. As if I didn’t know that he just wanted to keep an eye on me. So I followed him out, through the thin groups of kids who were also going to be late to lunch.

I actually had the hope that I’d be able to eat lunch with Liv in peace, but of course that wasn’t allowed to happen.

We ran into Thistle almost immediately, looking stormy-eyed and disapproving in the light of the afternoon. He looked like he’d just come out of the showers. He was wearing a white t-shirt that was soaked through, and hid nothing about his admittedly spectacular body.

I felt a thrilled shiver go through me when I realized that I’d been up close and personal with those abs, those thighs…and that cock.

“Sorrel,” he said, greeting him flatly, with a tinge of hostility. My suspicion that they weren’t brothers grew.

“Thistle,” Sorrel returned. Thistle’s eyes flicked to me carelessly and away, but I saw his fists clench.

That was fine. If he wanted to ignore me, I could deal with it. People had mindless sex at parties all the time, right? That was all I was. Just some meaningless lay.

“What a sweet reunion,” I said, smiling with clenched teeth at the both of them. “Well, it’s been fun Sorrel, thanks for the tour. But I think I’ll find my own way to the cafeteria and have my cousin take care of things from there, okay?”

I took off, not looking back to see if they were behind me, and breathed a sigh of relief. I’d gotten the warning to Sorrel, I’d let him know that I knew something wasn’t right about him and his so-called brothers, and that I hadn’t forgotten that night after all.

I…didn’t really have a plan beyond that, but an idea was slowly starting to take shape in my head.

I found Liv sitting at a table, surrounded by cheerleaders. So much for not being part of that group. It made me a little resentful that Liv could so easily take for granted the friends that I would have killed to have at my old school, but that was an ungenerous thought. I was sure she really did like them…somewhere deep inside.

“Juliet!” she called, lighting up. “Come sit with us!”

There were some murmurs from the surrounding girls.

I guessed that I was jumping up a few places in the pecking order by sitting with Liv, and not everyone was happy about it. But I wasn’t going to turn down the chance to actually sit with the popular kids for once. It would have mattered to me a lot more in my freshman year, but I still enjoyed being able to plunk my tray down on a table of envious girls, who were in turn envied by most of the rest of the school.

“Girls,” Liv said, rapping her spoon against her lunch tray, “Pay attention, I want to introduce you all to my cousin. She just moved here from the city, her name’s Juliet and we’re all going to be very nice to her. All right?”

They agreed meekly, which cemented my belief that Liv was undisputedly running the show here. They introduced themselves with various levels of welcoming cheer.

A sleepy blonde girl, Rachel, and a red-lipped brunette, Olivia, seemed to be the nicest of the bunch.

“You can call me Olive,” said Olivia, dabbing at her mouth carefully with her napkin. “I go by Liv at home but we already have a Liv here, and I didn’t like the idea of being Liv R. It sounds like liver, y’know?”

“Sure,” I said smiling. “I just go by Juliet. It doesn’t really lend itself well to nicknames.”

“Really?” said another girl across the table, who I hesitantly thought was Vivian. “Well, maybe if you lack imagination.” Her face was fixed in a sneer.

Some others at the table laughed a little uncomfortably. I knew immediately that I wasn’t going to like this girl, if she was going to try and pick a fight with me over every tiny thing. I just fixed a smile on my face and acted unbothered, knowing that would irritate her more than responding bitchily. Liv hadn’t missed the interplay between us, and she raised an eyebrow at me to ask if I needed her to step in. I shook my head slightly. High school bullies weren’t even on my radar of things that kept me up at night.

As the hour went on, the girls soon accepted me into the group and I felt able to just disappear into the background, munching my sandwich and listening to their chatter.

A girl named Celia was eagerly dishing about soccer practice that had taken place earlier today. She was a tall blonde with large, watery blue eyes and an anxious expression. She was apparently dating a soccer player named Alex, whom everyone seemed to know.

I didn’t really want to hear about drama related to the soccer team, since that just reminded me of Thistle and put me in a bad mood, but I couldn’t help listening to snippets of their discussion.

“Alex was sooo mad after practice today,” she said, chipping at her perfect French manicure. “It totally didn’t go well.”

“I heard that too, from Troy,” nodded Rachel. “He said it was a shitshow.”

“What happened?”

“Well, coach thought Drew was limping slightly so he made him sit out the practice, which pissed them all off, obviously since it’s so unfair when he said he was fine and a sprained ankle is, like, nothing. So they had to bring on that guy as substitute—you know, Thistle?”

I looked up from my food, suddenly interested at the mention of Thistle.

“Thistle?”

“Yeah, he’s one of the Lockwood boys,” Celia explained to me, rolling her eyes. She’d mistaken my interest for confusion. “But coach keeps him on as reserve QB, probably because he’s built like a brick shithouse.”

“Um, he could get it every day of the week and twice on Sundays,” Rachel said, pretending to swoon. “Have you seen him, girls?”

“I think I’d be too afraid to fuck him,” Olive said, laughing. “He looks like he could break me.”

“He has that caveman quality,” another girl agreed.

“Since when is being huge and buff a bad thing?” someone else objected. “I’m not gonna complain if he’s hung like a horse.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t kick him out of bed, that’s for sure.”

I pretended to play with my salad and kept my face down so nobody would see that my cheeks had gone bright red.

“Mind out of the gutter, ladies,” Liv said, sounding amused. “I don’t want to traumatize my cousin the first day she’s here, all right? Just because we’re pervs on the inside doesn’t mean we have to be pervs on the outside!”

“That’s okay,” I said, raising my eyes and hoping furiously that my blush had died down. “So what about Thistle?”

“Yeah,” Celia said at once, happy to have the attention back on her. “So as soon as he comes on, Jamie starts getting into it with him.”

“Ugh, Jamie,” said another girl, wrinkling her nose. “He always gives me the creeps.”

“That’s because he’s a fuckboy,” said Olive succinctly. “Remember when he pretended that the nudes he emailed to the entire school were of Sarah Ronson?”

“Poor Sarah,” Rachel said, shuddering. “Thank god the carpet was the wrong color.”

“Jeez, that’s awful,” I said, shocked. And yet somehow not nearly as surprised as I should have been. I wasn’t going to tell these girls about how I’d met Jamie though. Not until I knew that I could trust them.

“Totally,” Celia nodded. “But anyway, so Jamie, right? You’d think he’d know better, Thistle’s like twice his size. But anyway, coach makes them run a couple of laps and it’s fine. Except then Jamie’s so obsessed with ignoring Thistle that he ignores his play and runs into Blake Everett. Who breaks his wrist.”

“Well, shit,” Liv said. “And what did coach do?”

“He gave Jamie a piece of his mind. It got pretty ugly. Then they needed a sub for Blake, right, so they could continue the practice somehow. And their only sub was Thistle’s brother.”

“Sorrel?” I yelped involuntarily.

“You know him?” Celia asked curiously.

“Um…he showed me around the school today,” I stammered.

“Oh, well so that’s where he was instead of practice,” she said, raising her eyebrows.

“That’s who Mrs. Robertson got to show you around instead of me?” Liv said indignantly. “I feel so attacked right now.”

“What was he like?” Olive interrupted, wide-eyed.

“You’ve never spoken to him?” I asked, looking around at the table, most of whom shook their heads.

“Nobody really knows anything about the Lockwood boys,” Olive admitted. “They just showed up out of the blue one day. And the third brother doesn’t come to class, like ever. He just throws crazy ragers with the stoner crowd. Ava Hanson and the others.”

“Yeah, Liv took me to one of those.”

“I thought she’d find it educational,” Liv said defensively.

“Oh, I’m sure it was,” Rachel said meaningfully and I laughed.

“So then coach sent Jamie to find Sorrel, but then he came back saying he couldn’t find him anywhere. And all that time he was showing you around the school?”

“Yeah,” I said, pushing my salad away. I’d only managed to push around the leaves idly, and all this talk of Jamie had kind of ruined my appetite. “He was…fine. Kind of rude,” I added, trying to squash their curiosity.

But if anything, that made them ask even more questions.

“Was he even better looking close up?”

“What did he smell like?”

“What?”

“I always thought he looked like the kind of guy who’d smell really good,” Olive shrugged unrepentantly.

“He smelled good,” I admitted reluctantly.

“I knew it!”

Luckily, the lunch bell rang just then, and I made my escape quickly, dragging Liv along with me.

“What’s the rush?” she asked, confused as we both tipped our trays over the trash. “Did you not like them? I thought you got along fine.”

“No, I did,” I assured her. “I don’t want to answer more questions about Sorrel and Thistle. Thanks, by the way, for not telling them about the other night.”

“What other night?”

“You know,” I said, lowering my voice, “With me and…and Thistle? I didn’t know that he was kind of notorious here.”

“Oh, no worries,” she said, face clearing. “We’re family, remember? And besides, bitches not snitches.”

“Bitches not snitches,” I agreed faintly. “Hey, can you tell me where my next class is? Sorrel and I don’t exactly get along, so I don’t want to depend on him to show me around everywhere.”

“No problem, sis,” she said, slinging an arm over my shoulder. It was easy for her, since she was about a foot taller than me, but the height different made us both look a little ridiculous. I felt a warmth exploding in my stomach. She’d called me ‘sis’, like it was no big deal.

“What class is next on your schedule?”

“AP Calculus,” I said at once. I’d already memorized my schedule.

“Ugh,” Liv said, groaning theatrically. “That sounds awful.”

“I like it,” I insisted.

“You nerd,” she said affectionately. “Hey, want to go to this new club in town? Mel says it’s hoppin’.”

“Well, if Mel says so…” I replied absently, mind still on all the questions swirling around in my head.

The rest of the day was good. Terrifying, since I had to introduce myself at the start of every class to a room full of bored teenagers, but still good. I soon realized that the classes were going to be way harder here than back home, where the teachers had been known to fall asleep during class.

When I got home, tired but triumphant, I found Ellie and Derek standing over a large, messy-looking cake.

It said ‘Congradz on ur 1st day!!!’ in sloppy icing letters and I couldn’t help beaming wide when I saw it.

“You made me a cake?”

“Of course we did!” Ellie said, briskly dusting flour off her hands. “It’s not exactly what we envisioned, though.”

“Mom wanted to do one of those cakes that have rainbow messages in them when they’re cut open,” Derek informed me. “She forgot that you need to be, y’know, good at baking to do that.”

“I’m good!” Ellie protested.

“The smoke alarms were going off when I came home,” Derek pointed out.

“All right, so you saved me,” Ellie sighed, head drooping.

“This is really good!” I exclaimed, tasting the icing.

“I’m glad, because we’re having cake for dinner tonight. I haven’t had time to make anything else.”

Later that night, when I fell asleep, full of cake and contentment, I didn’t remember anything other than how happy I was. It was the first night that I slept without dreaming, and without nightmares.

13

Rook

If there was one thing mundies got right, it was music.

Just for that I’d forgive everything else. Right here, on the dancefloor, pressed up against a dozen bodies with their hungry, reaching hands, with the music filling me up with its seductive beat, I felt nothing.

And it was wonderful.

There was just sweat and the burn of vodka going down my throat, and hands on me that I slapped away, until I felt fingers tugging at my jacket. I turned with a snarl, the rainbow lights casting strange peaks and valleys of shadows and light on faces.

It was Ava. Looking scared.

Ava was one of the first people I met, because she knew someone who knew someone who sold pixie dust. It didn’t do anything for humans, so it was harder to find than most things. But she had a contact. And somehow she just never stopped hanging around. I tolerated her, because she was occasionally useful. It was her idea to come to this club in the first place, I didn’t remember why.

She pulled me away from the dancefloor, which pissed me off mightily. Couldn’t a guy drink and dance in peace, for fucks sake?

“It’s Dozer,” she said, eyes wide with worry, “Someone told him you were here tonight, and he threatened to break your legs if he finds you here.”

“Not everyone can fall down stunned in the face of my considerable charm,” I said, shrugging, still annoyed.

“He says you cheated at cards.”

“Then maybe he shouldn’t make it so easy to cheat,” I pointed out.

“You’re not denying it?” she asked, the dismay clear on her face.

“It depends on your definition of ‘cheating’,” I said, fiddling with the leather strap on my wrist.

Mundies were so…black and white about things, it was exhausting. It was always either friend or enemy, truth or lie, win or lose. “I don’t care if he sees me, Ava. I can take him. With a name like Dozer, he had it coming.”

“The thing is, I don’t want Elias’s birthday to end in a huge brawl,” Ava said, voice taking on a wheedling tone.

“Who’s Elias?” I asked, genuinely confused.

“My boyfriend,” she sighed. “Remember? He’s the reason that we came here.”

“I didn’t know we needed a reason to be at a Mun—at a club,” I said, raising an eyebrow. I tried to connect a face with the name Elias, and had a vague memory of a thin, dark haired kid with big, sad eyes. Ava really knew how to pick ‘em.

“You know what I mean, Rook,” she said. “Look, Dozer’s here right now, and I don’t want it to get bloody. Could you please just…wait outside until he leaves? I’m going to try and get him to go somewhere else.”

“How the hell are you going to do that?”

“There’s a club down in Elephant’s Row with a high stakes poker match on tonight,” she explained. “He can never resist something like that.”

“Well done,” I said, reluctantly impressed. “When did you learn to scheme like that?”

“From you,” she said simply.

Oh. Right.

“All right,” I said, crossing my arms. “I’ll wait out back while you pull the strings.”

“I’ll call you when he’s gone,” she said, almost pushing me towards the backdoor. She was lucky I was fond of her, I didn’t usually tolerate anyone touching me.

The backdoor of the club opened out to an alleyway that smelled of piss and sex and vomit. It figured. I had a random thought float into my head, of Mother’s expression on seeing her precious young prince surrounded by the assorted filth of mundies, and threw my head back and laughed.

Cool, pure night air filled my lungs.

It reminded me of nights outdoors in the starlight, dancing around bonfires and drinking honey wine. I wanted the acrid burn of smoke in my lungs. I fumbled in my pockets and found a squashed pack of cigarettes and felt relieved.

I ran a fingernail along the rough wall and it caught fire. I loved showing this trick off to the easily impressed humans.

Made me feel like I was invincible. It was only a little baby flame, releasing a trickle of lazily coiling smoke into the air, and just enough to light a fucking cigarette. But I liked my little parlor tricks.

I was tapping off the ash when she came into view. I looked up disinterestedly.

It was a Mundie girl. A very pretty one, I had to admit, as I skimmed her curves with my eyes. She was small, her head might have come up to my shoulder.

She turned sideways for a moment, giving me a perfect view of the pert, round curve of her ass. An ass that it was all too easy to imagine doing filthy things to.

She stopped short when she saw me, eyes darting left and right. Fear lurked in them, and it made me want to reassure her, stupidly.

“As a strange guy dressed in black and lurking in an alleyway, I’m afraid I might be giving you the wrong impression,” I drawled.

She blinked and looked me up and down. I wondered what she could see. There wasn’t a whole lot of light, probably adding to my air of menace.

“What kind of impression would that be?” she asked. Her voice was clear and soft, with the faintest hint of a rasp at the bottom. It was fucking sexy.

“That I’m the kind of strange guy that dresses in black and lurks in alleyways,” I replied.

She smiled. “Impression corrected successfully, in that case. So who are you if not that?”

“I’m mad, bad and dangerous to know,” I said.

“You’ve gotta know that quoting Byron’s never worked to keep away any girl in the history of straight girls,” she said, still amused.

“Who said I was trying to keep them away?” I said, raising an eyebrow. “Are you implying that I’m your type?”

“I don’t really have a type,” she said, after an intake of breath. “I’m…flexible.”

“You make me want to see what that’s like.”

She looked down, and I could tell she was biting back that smile. I wanted to draw her face up, make her look at me, and discarded the idea immediately. That was crazy. And yet she pulled me in, like moon with the sea.

“Pass me a cigarette,” she said finally.

“These things’ll kill you,” I warned, to which she threw me a scornful look.

“You’re not in charge of keeping me alive,” she said simply.

“That’s very true,” I said, tossing her the carton. “Ever smoked before?”

“No,” she said, rattling the box and withdrawing one, “What’s it like?”

“Ever felt the iron grip of death on your heart?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s like that.”

“You seem familiar to me somehow,” she said musingly. I didn’t like the way she looked me up and down, as though she was stripping me bare. I felt old scars itch under my shirt.

“I get that a lot,” I said coldly.

This wasn’t fun anymore. She said I reminded her ‘someone’. No prizes for guessing who she was talking about. I had no doubt she was going to use me to get to them and move up in the convoluted hierarchy of high school popularity. “You must be my brothers’ age.”

“Brothers? Oh,” her eyes widened. “You must be Rook.”

“Very good,” I said, faking admiration. “The look of surprise and shock—very well done. Unfortunately, you’re in the presence of a master.”

“Rook! You motherfucker!” roared an angry voice from the entrance of the alley.

Well, well, well.

My night just got interesting.

14

Juliet

“Rook! You motherfucker!”

I started and turned, to see a giant of a man approaching us, unmistakably angry.

If I were Rook, I’d probably have peed my pants by then. Rook, however, seemed to be made of sterner stuff. He cocked an amused eyebrow at the guy’s approach and even had the nerve to cross his hands behind his head, looking nonchalant.

“Dozer,” he said, sounding lazily delighted, for all the world as though Dozer was his long-lost buddy.

Judging from Dozer’s clenched fist and the red vein threatening to pop out of his forehead, that wasn’t exactly the case.

“What a surprise! How did you know I’d be here? I can’t believe Ava gave me away.”

“She didn’t. I just thought of the first place a lying rat motherfucker would hide and came here,” Dozer growled. Every part of his tense silhouette screamed that he wanted to do violence to Rook.

“Good job, you found me,” Rook agreed, smiling wide, which only seemed to enrage Dozer further. If Rook had directed that smile at me, I’d have gone running for the hills. Neither of the two men seemed to possess a shred of survival instinct.

Which, funnily enough, Sorrel had accused me of as well.

I knew I shouldn’t have come with Liv to the club tonight, I thought, and sighed. Why did I let myself get roped into these things? For the tenth time that night, I wished that she wasn’t so sweet and persuasive.

But she’d promised that the drinks were great, and that the bouncers wouldn’t inspect our fake id’s too closely. She’d been right about both those things.

But the minute I stepped out for some air, it had all gone sideways.

Everywhere I went in Edenfall seemed to be laced with danger. First the fight at a party, and now I was caught in the middle of something that I was sure would end up in an ugly brawl. Please let me get out of this alive, I prayed.

Dozer stepped closer.

“I want my money,” he said.

“And I want to be able to have a fucking smoke in peace. Neither of us seems to be getting what we want tonight, baby,” Rook said gleefully.

I shot him a look. Antagonizing the person who could beat you to a pulp without breaking a sweat didn’t seem like the way to go, here.

“Give me my money,” Dozer repeated.

“You keep forgetting the ‘or else’,” Rook complained. “It’s no good if you don’t have the ‘or else’. ‘Give me my money…or I’ll beat you to a pulp’. Give me my money…or I’ll kill you. Give me my money…or I’ll kill your family and mail you their heads.”

“Yeah,” Dozer growled. “All of those.”

“Well, I don’t have your money, you can’t hurt me, and I don’t even have a family,” Rook said, spreading his hands wide as if to say ‘what can you do?’

It was crazy how fearless he looked, even though he could probably taste the violence that was going to be done to him in a moment.

“You just cheated it out of me yesterday,” Dozer growled, face practically purple. “How the hell did you spend it so fast? I don’t believe it.”

“Spend it?” Rook scoffed. “What am I going to buy with a pile of paper?”

“Are you serious?” I said, but quietly. Neither of them heard me, luckily.

“Then what the fuck did you do with it?” Dozer spat. He put his huge, beefy hands around Rook’s neck and even in the dim light that was filtering through to the alley from the streets, it was clear that he could have snapped the bones in Rook’s neck without a second thought.

This possibility didn’t seem to have occurred to Rook, who seemed bored more than anything at the prospect of being strangled to death.

In his place, I probably would have been begging for my life, and more than willing to hand over anything he wanted. But Rook just coldly said, “I threw it away.”

“What?!” Dozer and I said at the same time.

“You heard me,” Rook said.

“You threw it away?” I said weakly, forgetting to be afraid of Dozer noticing me. “How much was there?”

“You threw away fifty thousand dollars?” Dozer’s voice boomed, boiling with anger.

“Fifty thousand dollars?” I repeated, feeling like a well-trained parrot.

“It was just a pile of paper,” Rook said, seeming amused by our reactions. “And I won it off you fair and square,” he added to Dozer. “It’s none of your business what I do with my winnings after the game.”

“Then why even play?” I asked weakly.

“To win, obviously,” Rook said, cocking his head at me. Something strange and alien passed through his eyes in that instant. “Why else would anyone play?”

“Tell me where you put it,” Dozer said, taking Rook by the collar of his shirt and shaking him. “Tell me where you threw it, and I swear to god you won’t see me again.”

“First of all,” Rook said coldly, “You keep forgetting what I taught you. There needs to be an ‘or else’. Not seeing you again would be the carrot. Where’s the stick, Dozer? There’s not a lot you can do to hurt me, as even you should know.”

Dozer did seem to know this. I almost felt sorry for him. It wasn’t easy to negotiate with someone who didn’t seem to understand why money existed.

He let Rook go, but then his eyes fell on me.

Well, shit.

In a second he was behind me, one huge hand twisting my arms behind me, and another flicking open a slick blade with an edge sharp enough to split a hair.

My eyes were transfixed.

I couldn’t seem to move my gaze. Meanwhile, my mind was taking me to a place far away, to the day I found Mom’s body.

I couldn’t help it, and I couldn’t even bring myself to react to my life being threatened. Instead, I was seeing Mom, lying in her bed with her eyes glassy and open, her throat cut in a scarlet smile, bloody knife carelessly tossed onto the bed next to her.

“I’ll slit her throat quicker than you can blink,” he growled. I could feel his foul breath stirring my hair, but I didn’t struggle, still paralyzed by the memories. I could almost feel the stickiness of her blood as I touched her neck in disbelief, the air thick with its sickly smell.

“She’s nothing to me,” Rook said, lips pressed into a thin line. He looked at me indifferently. “I never met her before tonight.”

No, he looked through me, I should have said.

“What d’you say to that?” Dozer asked me, shaking me slightly so the blade’s edge stuttered closer and closer to the skin at my throat.

“It’s true,” I said, swallowing. The blade pressed my skin like a kiss as he stopped shaking me, not quite hard enough to cut, but it wouldn’t take long to get there. “We’ve never met before. I don’t even know him.”

“Are you going to try and beg for your life, little girl?” Dozer asked me. “Are you going to say you’ll give me anything if I let you go?”

“Ahem,” Rook said pointedly. “You didn’t let me finish.” He shrugged off his coat carelessly and threw it on top of a trash can.

All I could think was that he’d never be able to get the stale garbage funk out of it.

“Finish what?” Dozer said, but I thought I knew what Rook meant. He’d said ‘firstly’ about the ‘or else’. I didn’t doubt that he had a ‘secondly’ as well.

“’Secondly’,” I said softly.

“You’re paying attention,” he said approvingly to me, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt.

He really did have a flair for the dramatic.

There were tattoos on his forearms, I could see now. Long, curling waves of ink in black, white and gray. It looked like a story, or a tapestry.

I felt the faint wish to examine them in detail, before I remembered that I was being held at knifepoint by a guy the size of a semi, and was probably going to die tonight.

I should have been panicking. I knew that. Most people, when confronted by the immediate prospect of death, freaked out, which was a very reasonable reaction.

“Secondly,” he said, “I don’t like being touched. It’s rude. You know what my mother taught me to do to people who were rude?”

He moved like a coiled snake, flying out with a punch to the side of Dozer’s head that made the man wheeze with pained surprise and let me go.

I didn’t think about how easily the blade at my throat could have slipped and stabbed into my skin until I staggered away. When I turned and saw Rook holding the blade bare handed, I knew why.

It couldn’t have been as effortless as he made it look, and Dozer’s red face and the grunting sounds he was making as Rook bore his hand down made me sure that he was resisting as hard as he possibly could.

There was a nasty crunch as Rook forced Dozer’s wrist past what it could bear and it just snapped. Dozer howled in pain, and aimed a clumsy punch at Rook with his other hand, which was easily blocked.

“Are you even trying?” Rook asked flatly, which was just an unnecessarily dickish thing to say, in my opinion, once you’d already broken the guy’s wrist.

“I’ll fucking kill you,” Dozer grunted, eyes screwed up small with hate, and headbutted him with a force that made me cringe just from witnessing it.

Rook’s head listed to the side from the impact, and I was afraid for him in that moment. But he steadied quickly, and returned the headbutt viciously, with a punch to the throat for added impact. Dozer choked on air and scrabbled at his throat with his one good hand, falling to his knees.

Rook watched him dispassionately, with that same alien gaze.

“Rook,” I said.

His head snapped to me, eyes dazed and worryingly blank. The rude, aloof boy from earlier was gone. Someone else had taken his place. Someone whose frozen gaze worried me.

He’s not going to kill you just for breathing in his vicinity, I reassured myself.

Was I sure of that? No.

“You beat him,” I whispered, and cleared my throat. “You beat him,” I repeated more strongly. “Let him go. He’s not going to come after you again.”

“Is she right?” Rook asked. His boot was pressed to Dozer’s ankle, and I winced.

“I promise!” Dozer said desperately. “Please!”

“Are you hurt?” Rook asked, turning to me. He sounded indifferent, but he moved his foot, freeing Dozer.

“No,” I said, and felt a shudder run through me. It was like I was a statue made of ice, but now I was slowly thawing out, and the stale fear from almost dying was wracking my body.

“You should go,” I called out to Dozer, who didn’t need me to tell him twice. He picked himself up with a speed that was impressive for someone of his size and who now had a broken wrist, and moved so fast I almost expected to see cartoon dust clouds in his wake.

Rook was looking at me with a dull, glazed-over expression in his eyes. He didn’t even notice Dozer leaving, which I was thankful for. He might have done something drastic. I didn’t know this boy. He was like a coiled spring, and I didn’t know how he would end up lashing out.

“My Thursday nights aren’t usually this violent,” I said, trying to keep my tone normal.

I was acting like he was a spooked animal, which was ridiculous…wasn’t it? He had just done shocking violence right in front of me, and yet I was feeling sorry for him?

There was something seriously wrong with me.

“Are you okay?” I added belatedly.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…are you hurt? He hit you pretty hard in the head there.”

“Am I hurt?” he asked, repeating the words slowly.

“Yes. Are you making fun of me?” I asked.

“No,” he said simply.

“Okay, I guess we’re sticking to monosyllabic answers,” I said, more to myself than to him. “And that’s…fine. So, are you hurt?”

Rook took a moment to respond.

“No,” he said finally.

“Good,” I said. I shivered, feeling the cold again as the adrenaline left my body.

“You should put on your coat,” I told him. “It’s chilly. You’ll feel the cold once the adrenaline wears off.”

He looked blankly at the coat that I was pointing at.

He was seriously starting to freak me out.

But he did finally pull the coat off the trashcan. An expression of distaste crossed his face at the smell, such a visible change from the look of blank apathy from before that I almost whooped with relief.

“I’m Juliet, by the way,” I said unnecessarily. I didn’t really think he gave a good goddamn who I was, but the silence was unnerving. “Thanks for…well, thanks for that. Before.”

“I didn’t do it for you,” he said rudely. At least he seemed to have recovered from that dissociative state he’d been in before.

I almost laughed. Where had I heard those exact same words before?

“You’re Rook!” I said loudly, and he turned to stare at me like I was a dim-witted child.

“Yes. You heard Dozer calling me that,” he said, raising his eyebrows.

“Yes, but I mean—I know your brothers.”

“Ah. Figures. Which one is it?” he asked abruptly.

He seemed back to normal, although his edged flirtatiousness from earlier seemed to be gone, with a sneering aggression replacing it. His eyes traveled over my figure, assessing but not leering. I didn’t know what he was thinking.

“Which one is what?”

“Which one are you in love with?”

“Neither,” I snapped, glaring at him.

Or both, I added mentally, which was ridiculous.

“It’s not nice to lie to someone who just saved your life,” he said, coming closer. I was sure he was making fun of me.

“Oh, so I owe you now? Even though you’re the reason I was in trouble in the first place?” I said breathlessly, like a fool as he stopped inches from me. I could feel the heat rising off his body. If he just took one step closer…

“Why aren’t you hurt?” I blurted out, looking at his face. “You get headbutted twice, one after the other, but you don’t have any bruises or anything. I’d expect at least a—a black eye, or a split lip.”

His mouth twisted. I couldn’t tell if what I said was a mistake. He didn’t give me much of a reaction to judge.

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, his warm breaths fluttering over my cheek, “If you promise you can keep a secret.”

“I can,” I said, hushed.

“The truth is,” he said, “I can’t bleed.”

And then he threw his head back and laughed, a rusty, bitter sound.

“Why not?” I asked eagerly.

His eyes searched my face.

“You seem awfully calm about this for a Mundie,” he said accusingly. “What happened to your instinct for self-preservation? You should have run away like Dozer.”

“Yeah, I need to work on that,” I said. “Your br—Sorrel said the same thing.”

“He’s a regular knight in rusted armor, isn’t he?” Rook sneered. “I hope you acted properly dazzled when he saved you. He always saves people,” he added, sensing my unspoken question. “It’s his thing. Makes him feel noble. Anyway, I think it’s best that you forget what happened tonight. And stop asking questions. Do you understand?”

I felt the power in his voice, and the force behind his command. It squeezed me like an orange, exerting pressure on me until I nodded, breathless.

When it let go though, I didn’t feel disoriented like the last time. Maybe I was building up some kind of resistance? Was that possible?

Before I could answer him, I heard someone calling my name.

“Juliet?!” Liv’s anxious voice filtered into the alleyway from the street. “Where are you?”

“Shit,” I said, shoving past him. My arm burned from where it brushed his. “Liv!” I called, “I’m right here!”

“Oh thank god,” she said, and I heard the sound of her footsteps rapidly approaching us. When she came into view, her hair was plastered to her face with sweat, and her cheeks were covered with glitter.

“I was so worried,” she said, clutching my shoulders. “Some guy was bleeding out there and he was raving about some maniac going around beating people up.”

“That must have been Dozer,” I said, “I’m fine, though.”

Her eyes fluttered with relief and then her gaze went over my shoulder. “Who’s that?” she asked sharply.

“The guy who beat Dozer up,” I said, shrugging.

“What the hell happened?” she asked, forehead creasing in his direction. I knew that he wasn’t a very reassuring sight, looking like the lead singer of an early nineties punk rock band.

“He was under the impression that I owed him money,” Rook said, sounding bored. “If you’ll excuse me, I have a party, and dozens of warm and willing bodies to get back to and the night isn’t getting any younger.”

“That guy’s a charmer,” Liv said as he left, looking at me curiously.

“He’s a dickbag,” I agreed, picking up on the obvious sarcasm. “But you should’ve seen the way he took that guy out. Like something out of an action movie. Oh, and did you know he’s Thistle and Sorrel’s brother?”

“That explains the looks,” she said. “Pity he’s not that pretty on the inside.”

“Yeah,” I said, and felt a twinge of guilt for agreeing. Which was ridiculous. Just because Rook and his ridiculous body and tortured eyes made me feel hot and achy didn’t mean I needed to be soft on him.

“Why’d you leave, anyway?” she asked, linking arms with me. “I was worried—couldn’t find you anywhere. Brian thought you might have been hooking up with someone in the toilets so he’s gone to look.”

“I’m a little touched, but mostly grossed out,” I said, shuddering. “Classy, Brian.”

“He was just looking out for you,” Liv said, but giggled. “It’s so weird to think of him doing all that stuff. He used to be in a gang, can you believe it?”

“Brian?” I said disbelievingly. “The guy who watched My Little Pony with his niece?”

“Yeah, he got in trouble a couple of times with the police and everything.”

“Are you serious?” I said in a hushed voice. We were walking towards the bright lights of the front of the club, so I was keeping my voice down in case someone we knew overheard us.

I’d soon learned that Edenfall was kind of incestuous; you would see people you knew everywhere, because the town was so small. That had its benefits and its downsides.

“Yeah, he went to juvie,” Liv said, enjoying my reaction. “But he’s clean now. He went straight once he got out. Said he didn’t want anything on his permanent record.”

I let Liv’s voice draw me into a state of calm while I privately brooded over the night’s happenings.

Everywhere I went, whenever I turned around I seemed to be tripping over a Lockwood boy. All three of them had something to hide. And there was the itch I felt in my skin whenever they were close. Like I was going to crawl out of my skin with need.

I couldn’t figure out if it was any different from the obvious fascination other people felt towards them, though. All I knew for sure, was that they were dangerous.

How much longer before someone else started noticing the same things I had? They weren’t any good at keeping a low profile, that was pretty clear.

I would have to bring it up with Sorrel again. If I told him about what I’d seen with Rook, he couldn’t possibly keep denying it.

Could he?

15

Thistle

“You okay?” Jamie asked warily, studying my face.

I wondered what he was seeing, since I was careful to keep a poker face at all times. Good soldiers didn’t broadcast their thoughts to anyone who cared to look, and some habits stayed with you, even in exile.

“Fine,” I grunted, and stood up from the bench. We were in the locker room, changing into our training gear. Surrounded by the sweat and metal and dirt of human existence.

There was nothing filthier in the world than teenage boys, I thought tiredly, before putting my carefully folded clothes into my locker.

Like I said, some habits stayed with you even in exile.

Jamie was bouncing awkwardly in his cleats. I could sense the nervousness coming off him in waves, but ignored it. He would tell me what was bothering him if he wanted to. People like him never could be silent for long. He had the subtlety of a battering ram and said exactly what he thought. Maybe that was what had gotten him into trouble that night…

“What were you doing that night?” I asked abruptly.

“Where? Which night?” he asked, touching his neck awkwardly. My eyes narrowed as I scented guilt.

“That night at my brother’s party. I know you got into a fight with Sorrel.”

“What? Why’re you bringing up old shit now?” he grumbled. “That happened weeks ago.”

“Because I want to know,” I said simply.

I slapped him on the back in a show of friendship, hard enough that he stumbled forward.

“What the fuck?” Jamie sputtered, but the message was clear: I was the bigger, stronger, faster one. The sooner he answered me the sooner he’d be in the clear. I made sure to loom over him and look placidly threatening.

“Man, I didn’t do anything,” he grumbled, kicking a towel out of the way as we walked onto the field. “That bitch just made shit up and suddenly your brother gets all up in my grill, like who does that? She’s not even his girl, so what if I tried? Why the fuck did he care?”

“Tried what, Jamie?” I said impatiently, getting tired of his stream of consciousness rambling. “Did you hit on Juliet?” I asked.

“Might’ve,” he said evasively. “But, like, it’s just a bathroom, right? People shouldn’t hog it. Why lock it unless you’ve got something to hide?”

“It was locked?” I asked. “And my brother was in there too?”

“Yeah.” Jamie said. “Wait—you don’t think--?” he trailed off as he looked at my face. “Hey, man,” he said uneasily, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re freaking me out a little.”

“Good,” I said calmly and coldly. “Just remember that look the next time you see the girl. Because if you even look at her the wrong way again, I’ll—“

“Hey, hey, hey,” he said, raising his palms in surrender, “I got the message, all right? Your brother gave it to me the other day nice and clear.”

“Boys, you’re late!” Coach called, his red face looking annoyed already.

“Sorry, Coach!” we both called instantly. It was unwise to get on Coach’s bad side, which I’d discovered the day he’d made me run 13 laps around the field for passing ‘lazily’. Thirteen laps in the baking hot afternoon sun in June would make even fae tired, I discovered.

I’d tried out for the team on a whim, when some kid shoved the tryout schedule in my hands cheerfully.

“We need people like you to help Edenfall High win this season!” he’d explained, clapping his hands together dementedly.

“People like me?” I growled.

“I just mean…look at you! You look like an ad for a protein supplement,” he said nervously wringing his hands. That sounded like a compliment, and when I looked down at the tryouts schedule, I considered it.

Coach had taken one look at me and made me the sub for the QB without even having me try out.

It felt oddly like being a soldier again, although the other players were undisciplined, sloppy and seemed more interested in talking about who they’d fucked over the weekend than strategy or plays. That was fine with me, anyway. Other than Jamie, I tended not to socialize with them, which I’m sure increased their irritation with me.

Something that didn’t? The fact that we ended up winning every time Coach put me on the field. I didn’t fool myself thinking that they’d ever love me, but after our first few wins they were reluctantly impressed. After our tenth win in a row, they were ready to hail me as their god.

The only thing keeping Coach from having me start was the fact that I refused to. It brought me too much attention. I preferred staying out of the spotlight as far as possible.

I won’t lie and say it gave me no satisfaction. Going from being a lowly soldier of no birth or fortune, to a rich, popular football player was a change that I wasn’t going to complain about. In fact, of the three of us, I was probably the one who had the least to complain about.

I hadn’t left a loving family or high status behind, like Sorrel. I hadn’t been thrown away like trash by an unfeeling mother, like Rook. I wasn’t tortured or out for revenge. I prided myself on being ice cold, and not letting anything or anyone get to me. And it had worked like a charm.

Until now.

Somehow, that girl had gotten under my skin without me even noticing. With her dark eyes flecked with gold, and a body with curves that a man would sin for…any red blooded straight man would get hard for her. But having her be constantly on my mind was something else entirely.

I remembered how I’d seen her and Sorrel together outside a classroom the other day, looking friendly and my hands clenched involuntarily.

I knew she’d noticed my reaction, judging by the way her eyebrows rose. Slight hurt flitted through her face, which made me feel like crap. And then she’d ignored me. Pretended like I didn’t exist. Which, I tried to tell myself, was for the best. At least one of us had their head on straight.

So what if we’d hooked up once?

I’d had sex with plenty of girls since the three of us had been booted into Mundie-land. It shouldn’t have meant anything. Maybe I just needed to get her in bed again to work it out of my system. I thought of the lush spread of her hips, and the feel of her perfectly rounded ass in my hands, and inhaled sharply.

I couldn’t afford to be distracted on the field. Coach would notice and there would be hell to pay.

I made sure that I was focused in practice, so Coach wouldn’t call me out for not having my head in the game. The field was the perfect place to work out my various frustrations, so when we were playing shirts and skins, most of the other side was bruised and hurting at the end of the hour.

“You remember the concept of ‘on your side’ Lockwood, yeah?” said one of the juniors, pressing his rib with a pained groan. A chorus of voices agreed with him.

“Don’t mind him, Drew,” Jamie said, snapping his towel at me. I raised an eyebrow at him and he quickly stopped. “Our boy’s just a little sexually frustrated.”

“I thought the girls were lining up for you man,” Drew said, “You were my hero! You’re always neck-deep in pussy!”

I kept a scowl on my face to discourage any questions, and thankfully Jamie kept his mouth shut, so I was able to shower and leave without more inane chatter.

If other people had noticed a change in my mood, it must be bad. My baseline was already something that Sorrel liked to call ‘grumpy-ass motherfucker’, so a deviation from that was concerning.

I knew it was because the girl.

Juliet.

Something about being around her made me itch, down to my teeth. I felt like I was vibrating at a different frequency from everything else when she was around. There was a sense of something in the air. Something oddly similar to magic.

It buzzed beneath my skin whenever she was near, like a tiny alarm that was coded to her. It was fucking inconvenient.

Speak of the devil. I gritted my teeth as I felt it go off. She must be close. I looked around, and it was easy to see over the crowd, but Juliet was so small she would vanish in the middle of all these people. Luckily, people parted for me like a wave, and I saw a familiar dark head, at my level.

Sorrel.

Fucking Sorrel.

I should have known he’d be here. Skipped school for weeks on end, failed every assignment, didn’t turn up for practice, and yet somehow here he was now. Attending class, smoking behind the bleachers with the potheads, following Juliet like an obsessive shadow.

I decided to ignore the irony in this as I got closer to him. Sure enough, Juliet was standing next to him, smiling.

Fuck. She was smiling at him. Then she tilted her head down so her hair would cover her expression, like she was scared that people would see her being happy. I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the noise of the crowd, but I didn’t want to interrupt their conversation either. I was curious to see what they would do.

She looked up and said something that made his head jerk back with surprise, and he replied with a somber expression, turning down the corner of his mouth. I didn’t see that kind of look a lot from Sorrel.

Then he took her by the hand and they both slipped into the bathroom. My fingernails bit into my palms as I saw Sorrel place an out of order sign outside the door.

The sneaky bastard.

But I wasn’t going to follow them. It was none of my business, I told myself, and tried to believe it.

I failed.

16

Juliet

It happened in the twinkle of an eye: Sorrel got hold of my elbow in a gentle but implacable hold and whisked me into a room and had the door closed before I could even open my mouth.

He moved at the speed of lightning.

“Mmph!” I said indignantly, voice muffled by the hand he’d placed over it.

“Shh,” he said, appearing to listen carefully for something. “I’m checking for other people.” Seeming satisfied that he wasn’t detecting anyone else, he dropped his hand.

“This is a boys’ bathroom!” I said, outraged. “You can’t bring me here! I’m a girl!”

“Funny that you think I hadn’t noticed,” he muttered, and grabbed an ‘out of order’ sign from under the sink and placed it outside the door before closing it again. That wasn’t a bad idea, I had to admit to myself grudgingly.

“So I guess you must have a lot of practice holing up in bathrooms with girls?” I said tartly.

“Jealous?” he asked, with a hint of a smile, which vanished almost immediately. “Okay, let’s talk.”

“You go first,” I said, hoisting myself onto the edge of the sink. It was made of marble, and felt cold and smooth under my thighs. In fact, the entire bathroom was kind of ridiculously luxurious, like something you’d find in a five star hotel’s magazine advert. The walls were embossed with a kind of gold and gray marbling effect, the floor was tiled with a cool art deco geometrical pattern, and the sinks were made of black marble with gold specks, with lamps held in gold-plated sconces to light up the mirrors.

“Damn,” I said, distractedly, and waved my hand under a tap. Yep, it was motion activated, just adding to how extra everything in this school was.

The stalls weren’t exempt from being luxe. There were actual floor to ceiling doors that shielded each toilet from view, instead of the nasty ones at my old school where you could see upto people’s knees. It looked like each stall functioned as a mini powder room, with its own mirror, vanity and little pouf, too.

“Fine,” Sorrel said, moving deliberately to put his hands on the sinks on either side of my legs, effectively trapping me between them. “Pay attention,” he said, but his eyes dropped to my lips, almost subconsciously.

“Tell me what you want,” I said, trying to sound businesslike, but to my shame it came out sounding breathy instead, like some swooning damsel that I most certainly wasn’t.

“What’s your game?” he asked, looking me straight in the eye.

All right, it looked like we were done with the playful flirting and the teasing. He was getting down to it. That was fine by me. I’d finally get some answers.

“I don’t have one,” I said, “I’m not playing around. What’s it going to take for you to tell me the truth?”

“Truth about what?” he said, still playing it casual.

“The truth about you and your weird brothers,” I said, and surprised myself but leaning forward just an inch.

My lips pressed against his softly as I spoke, our breaths mingled as he let out the slightest gasp of surprise.

He wasn’t moving away.

That was the first thought I had since my brain short circuited as our mouths touched. The press of his lips, the way his hands moved with sure confidence to grip my thighs, thumb stroking the skin lightly, intimately—it was a little much.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he whispered back, tilting his head so we were almost kissing. Actually, I’d have said that we were doing a strange form of kissing, with our bodies pressed up together, his obscenely hot hands on my thighs and traveling further up every second.

There certainly wasn’t an innocent explanation for it, anyway.

“I refuse to get distracted,” I said, valiantly ignoring the ache in my pussy. I was throbbing with the need to get his hands on me. And his mouth, his beautiful goddamn mouth.

“Really? You seem a little distracted to me,” he purred into the line of my jaw, a sound that shot straight from my neck to my clit.

“You’re doing your best to distract me,” I said, not managing to sound very annoyed. “Tell me what’s going on with you three. I know about the memory thing you keep doing. And the healing thing. Your psycho brother wasn’t too subtle about it the other day.”

His big, capable hands moved to my waist, fingertips pressing into my skin like they were branding me. I hoped he would leave little bruises there, little purple fingerprints so I’d be able to look at them later and know he’d touched me there.

“Have you told anyone else about this?” he asked seriously.

“No,” I said. “But I did leave a note for Liv in my bedroom, in case you…tried anything.”

He shook with silent laughter. “Tried what, sweetheart?”

“Oh, I don’t know, kidnapping, torture, taking me to your murder dungeon, that kind of thing,” I said, ignoring the warmth in my chest when I heard ‘sweetheart’.

“It’s amazing what goes on in that head of yours,” he said, more to himself than to me. “But I need you to trust me when I say that you should leave this alone. Leave us alone, I mean. I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you you’re deluded, I know it won’t work on you anyway.”

“Just like your attempted memory wipe didn’t work on me.”

“I don’t understand why it didn’t work on you,” Sorrel said, frowning into the distance. “Maybe I did it wrong.”

“I knew you were sloppy about it,” growled a voice from the door.

We both jumped.

Sorrel took his hands off me, and I felt bereft of his warmth for a moment. Thistle glared at both of us, and I stared boldly back. I didn’t like the look in his eyes. It wasn’t exactly hostile, more…conflicted.

I had a sneaking suspicion I knew what it was about.

“How the hell did you know we were here?” Sorrel asked his brother, sounding half confused and half admiring.

“Never mind that now,” Thistle said impatiently. “And if you think you did a good job of hiding, I have news for you. You’re both frighteningly obvious.”

“I’m not going to tell anyone about your…abilities,” I said, addressing him directly. “That’s not what I’m here for. I don’t want to give you guys away or anything like that.”

“Why should we believe you?” he asked, face hard as stone. “What do you have to gain from keeping silent for us?”

“It’s not about gain,” I said, “That’s not the only reason people do things, Thistle.”

He scoffed.

“It’s about knowing,” I said, struggling to explain. “It’s about finding out that there are things out there that can’t be explained. Don’t you understand how exciting this is for me?”

“Wait,” Sorrel interrupted. “So when you said you saw our psycho brother, you meant--?”

“Rook,” I confirmed. “In a back alley behind a club. Your brother doesn’t exactly pick the classy spots, does he?”

“What was he doing there?”

“Getting into a fight with some guy twice his size.”

“What were you doing there?” Thistle asked, jaw clenched.

“I was trying to get some fresh air,” I said.

“Were you hurt?”

I remembered the edge of a knife, gleaming in the dimness, caressing my throat and swallowed.

“No,” I said, hoping my face didn’t give me away. “Your brother took care of the guy. Is he really your brother though?”

They exchanged a glance, so quickly that I almost missed it. It all but confirmed my suspicions.

“Tell me everything,” I ordered. “From the start.”

“You wouldn’t believe us if we did,” Thistle said, crossing his arms.

“Try me,” I said stubbornly.

“No, he’s right. This will…take a while to explain,” Sorrel sighed.

“I’ve got nothing but time,” I said, jumping off the ledge and grabbing my backpack. “And I want Rook to be there too. I want to see the look on his face when he realized he screwed up.”

“I’m inferring that he didn’t make a good impression when you two met,” Sorrel said, tongue firmly in cheek.

“Oh, you have no idea,” I said grimly. “Okay, how do we do this? I have class till 2 pm and I joined a study group but I guess I can say I’m sick if I need to—“

Sorrel chuckled.

“What?” I said, annoyed.

“I think he’s amused that you’re still worried about missing a study group to go uncover the strange and uncanny,” Thistle said. His eyes were hooded but soft. I couldn’t help but think that he was just as amused as Sorrel.

“I’m glad I’m so funny,” I said, lips twitching with amusement too. “But I need a free ride in college if I’m going to be able to go at all.”

“Let’s meet at 2,” Sorrel said, looking to Thistle for confirmation, who nodded slightly.

Interesting.

Neither of them seemed to be the leader out of the two.

I wondered if that meant Rook was. But no, I couldn’t imagine that guy successfully leading a pack of feral cats, leave alone people.

I snuck out first, and luckily nobody paid any attention to me. There were advantages to being tiny, most people would overlook you—literally.

Har har. I could be a laugh riot sometimes. I powerwalked to my afternoon class, which was integrations in Calculus. Luckily, I’d read ahead and solved the problems we were set with ease, so I spent the rest of the lesson mulling over what our conversation could have meant, and some of the strange things Thistle and Sorrel had let slip.

I gnawed on my lip as I wondered how Rook would react to seeing me again. I kept replaying the burning hostility in his eyes, and the quick lash of his tongue as he spat insults and sneered.

His dark, hooded eyes and arrogant, lush mouth floated forward and I quickly banished those images. It wasn’t relevant that he was attractive, in a rage-filled, out of control kind of way.

Considering the circumstances under which we’d met, I thought I was right to think of him as a ‘punch first, ask questions later’ kind of guy.

Well, I’d just have to stay out of arm’s reach.

And I still couldn’t understand Thistle. Sometimes he seemed openly hostile, other times he seemed to genuinely care.

I thought back to when he’d asked if I was hurt.

There had been concern in his eyes, and anger, although it wasn’t directed at me. I felt the memory of his touch on me, like a ghost, and shivered lightly.

His huge, strong hands that had gripped my thighs with so much certainty …he didn’t touch me like other guys our age had, that was for sure. He had the confident, brutish strength of someone who had earned it.

I remembered the practiced way he’d slipped one huge, rough-edged finger into me, and clamped my legs shut as I felt my panties getting damp. Not the time to get lost in pleasant memories, I reminded myself sternly. God, what was wrong with me anyway?

Ever since that night at the party, those three had wormed their way into my mind and somehow made me come back to thinking about them all the time, even when I had no business thinking about them.

I was relieved when the bell rang and we were dismissed, and was one of the first to spring up and drop my in-class assignment on the teacher’s desk.

I spent a guilty moment thinking about Liv, and how she’d promised to drive me home and remembered the shiny new phone I’d been given. Duh. I could be such a space cadet sometimes.

I thumbed a quick text to her, saying I was hanging out with some friends, and she immediately responded with a string of emojis that I thought meant she was excited that I was finally making friends.

I thought I’d be able to slip out of school and into the parking lot without being noticed.

Back at my old school, nobody would ever have cared, except to make fun of me for being poor and wearing second hand clothes that were three sizes too big. I had counted on having that level of invisibility here as well.

But it was clear to me that I was very mistaken by the third instance of a girl in a cheerleader’s outfit waving sweetly to me in the halls and other students nodding at me like they’d heard of me.

It was the halo effect from being Liv’s cousin, I guessed, and I didn’t know how I was going to get used to being seen.

Luckily, I didn’t have to hide bruises anymore or I would have been constantly terrified of someone finding out.

I stepped out into the parking lot. It was a cloudy afternoon with cold wind that had just a hint of damp to it. It was probably going to rain in a few hours. I could taste lightning on the tip of my tongue.

The parking lot looked about the same as the one in my old school, except of course that the cars were much nicer. Instead of Camrys there were Audis, and instead of Jeeps there were Range Rovers. Nothing but the best and most expensive for the kids at Edenfall High, apparently.

A couple of cars stood out from the rest by a mile. One was vintage-looking, with the retro-modern look of a spaceship designed in the sixties, and the other looked like it time traveled from the year 2118 to be here.

Somehow, I thought there would be no prizes for guessing who they belonged to.

“I knew I shouldn’t have expected subtlety from the two of you,” I said as I approached the two tall figures lounging against the front of their respective cars. “And yet.”

“What’s wrong with a little flash now and then?” Sorrel asked, patting the sleek front of his car protectively. It was painted a shimmering red, in a shade so loud that you’d be able to see it from space.

I…didn’t hate it.

“Only that it’s predictable,” I teased, and looked over at Thistle, who was gazing at me without speaking.

I was getting used to his silences. They just seemed to be part of him. I wasn’t going to take it personally anymore. His attitude to me, though, that definitely felt personal.

“She’s got us there,” Sorrel said lightly. “Did you get a look at Thistle’s ride?”

I did.

I hadn’t been able to help myself. It was black, but not a regular shade. It was a black so deep and matte that it seemed to absorb any light that fell on it. It was low and sleek looking, with a nose that descended to a tip flat and sharp like the edge of a blade and barely had space for two people.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” I said, mesmerized. I didn’t ordinarily get the way some guys seemed to get hard over cool cars but this car was sexy as hell.

“There’s only three in the world,” Thistle said in his deep, gruff voice and I thought there was the slightest hint of actual pride in his voice.

“That must have cost a fortune,” I said. Where did these boys get all their money? Nobody knew, since nobody had ever seen their parents. Whoever they were, they must have been loaded. And neglectful.

Sorrel exchanged a glance with Thistle.

“Let’s go,” Thistle said abruptly, lifting himself from his lounging pose. I darted a look at Sorrel, who didn’t react except to nod. I didn’t understand what I’d said wrong.

“Who am I riding with?” I asked, still confused by the sudden change in topic.

“Sorrel will take you,” Thistle said and opened his door, which opened upwards instead of outward. I had to admit that it looked fucking cool.

“What did I say?” I asked Sorrel quietly as Thistle tore out of the parking lot without a second glance back.

“It’s hard to explain without telling you stuff that Rook needs to be there for,” Sorrel said.

I wondered if I would ever feel like I had a good idea of what was happening around me.

Our ride to their house was tense, although Sorrel did his best to distract me with witty observations and sly innuendo that kept me distracted and blushing. It was funny how I could be bold and take charge when it came to having hooking up with guys I barely knew (see: Thistle), but show me a cute, good looking guy who gently flirted with me and I turned into a mess.

“Home sweet home,” Sorrel muttered as we turned onto the cul-de-sac that was familiar to me from the night I’d come to their party with Liv. It looked even more impressive by daylight, if that was possible. The shadows that hid large parts of the house from view were gone. It looked large enough to function as a grand museum, or some fancy English lord’s country estate.

We pulled up in front of the house, and Thistle’s car was surprisingly not already there.

“He’s a very careful driver,” Sorrel explained. Somehow, that made me like him more. I’d actually imagined him burning up asphalt and frightening suburban moms in their SUVs, but the thought of him patiently waiting at a red light was amusing.

“Come on,” he said, and we entered the house. The front door led into the cavernous front room, which had its own chandelier. To me, it seemed excessive, especially in the cold, hard light of day.

“Tasteless, isn’t it?” Sorrel remarked to me. I looked down sheepishly. “It’s okay,” he assured me. “It’s nothing I haven’t thought myself.”

I was curious about that remark, but I heard the sound of another car pulling up the driveway and looked questioningly at Sorrel.

“That must be Thistle now,” he said. “Do you want anything to drink?”

“Um…what do you have?”

“Water,” he said immediately. “And beer. And…ice cubes,” he finished, rubbing his neck in embarrassment.

“Can I have some water, please?”

“Sure,” he said, and went to the kitchen while I made my way into the living room.

When it wasn’t filled with hordes of teenagers drinking and dancing, it looked big enough to hold a town hall meeting. The white couch—pristine and unstained, I truly pitied their housekeeper—was an enormous semi circle that I thought I remembered Ava and a lot of other kids sprawling all over in the early hours of the morning. They had four remotes, and it took me a while to figure out which one actually turned the tv on.

“Oh, you got that to work,” Sorrel said, sounding faintly surprised. “I never did figure that one out.”

He watched the news with fascination. I found it weird. Who hadn’t seen the news before? Besides, it was depressing as hell. I kept flipping channels, but Sorrel didn’t look away.

“What, never seen a tv before?” I said, laughing. Before he could reply, I moved onto a more pressing concern. “Where’s Rook, anyway?”

Thistle came into the room, clutching a bottle of brightly colored energy drink. He took long, thirsty swallows before answering. “I’ll go find him,” he said, and threw his bottle in the trashcan.

“Aren’t you going to recycle?” I called after him, and sat back. Well, if he wasn’t going to bother, I certainly wouldn’t pick up after him like a maid. But not recycling really pissed me off, and I knew it would bother me if I didn’t put it away right.

Sometimes I hated how anal I was about stuff.

A few minutes later, Rook turned up looking bleary-eyed and sullen, with Thistle coming behind him like a hulking shadow. I guessed that Thistle had found him and forced him to show up.

Rook looked like he hadn’t slept in days, which I found weird.

What was he doing with all his time? He didn’t show up to school ever. Could even he just bounce from club to club without getting tired?

“Yes, Thistle,” he said boredly. “I see your little toy. She’s very attractive, well done. Why did you bring me here?”

“He didn’t bring me,” I said clearly. I wasn’t going to let him talk over me like I didn’t exist. “I asked to be here. With all three of you.”

I could feel Sorrel at my back, tense and unsmiling.

“You,” Rook said, narrowing his eyes at me. “I remember you from somewhere.”

“I was at the club the other night,” I said, looking him squarely in the face. “I was there when you beat up Dozer.”

“That’s right,” he said, still looking at me with an expression that made me want to run far away. It was bored but cruel. Like a snake that hadn’t decided whether it wanted to bite yet. “I remember. The question is…why do you?”

I took a deep breath. “Because it doesn’t work on me—your memory removing technique, I mean.”

“You’re lying,” Rook said, narrowing his eyes at me. I was disconcerted by the hate in his eyes, but didn’t falter. I wasn’t lying, and that knowledge was keeping me steady in choppy waters.

“She’s not,” Sorrel said quietly.

“And how would you know?” Rook sneered.

“Because I tried once before you and it didn’t take then either, douchebag,” Sorrel snapped. I gulped. I would never have spoken to Rook that way. I would have been afraid to provoke him, but Sorrel wasn’t the same way. He had less to fear, I reminded myself.

Rook stilled, and turned back to me.

“You’re saying it doesn’t work on you,” he repeated, slowly and deliberately walking towards me. I got the impression that I’d finally said something that rated his attention.

I planted my feet in the plush carpet and told myself firmly not to run. Even though someone who smelled like an apex predator to my lizard brain was stalking towards me like I would make a good afternoon snack.

“Yes,” I said, tilting my chin up defiantly. “And I want to know what the hell the three of you are doing.”

“You think you can just waltz in here and demand to be told our secrets?” he said, ice snapping in his tone.

I looked at Thistle and Sorrel, who stood waiting, and I knew this was something I had to overcome on my own.

“I’m not afraid of you,” I said, holding my ground. “There’s nothing you could do—you can’t frighten me. I’m done being scared by people just because they’re bigger and meaner.”

His shoulders slowly dropped, although the cold remote contempt didn’t leave his eyes.

“We’ll see if that’s true,” he said ominously. He raised his hand in front of me and moved his fingers in a wavey motion.

“What do you see?”

I looked at his fingers hesitantly. They were glowing with a strange light, and fumes like glowing colored smoke were rising from the tips.

“What the hell is that?” I asked curiously, moving to touch it before I stopped.

It could be poisonous or painful or something, I reminded myself sternly. But as my palm hovered over it, I couldn’t feel heat or any other sign that it was there.

“Is that it?” Rook asked, sounding bored.

I looked up at him, at his shadowed face that flickered in the light of the flames—

Wait.

I blinked once, twice.

His face wasn’t flickering.

There was no light coming off the weird magical thing anymore, but I could have sworn that there had been just a second ago.

I looked back at the flame hesitantly. Was it just me or did it look slightly blurry around the edges?

It didn’t even create a glow on his palm. It didn’t seem to obey the laws of physics at all.

On a hunch, I stuck my hand into the flame, fully prepared to suffer third degree burns because of my rash stupidity, and my whole body tensed, waiting for the pain to start.

Only it didn’t.

“Is this even real?” I asked, looking around at Sorrel and Thistle, whose expressions were unreadable.

There was a pause in the room.

“Satisfied?” was the only thing Thistle said to Rook a moment later, before moving closer to us.

He pinched the fire at Rook’s fingers and it poofed out, with no ash or any evidence left behind to show that it had ever existed.

He shifted slightly so he almost formed a barrier between me and Rook.

If I didn’t know better I would have thought that it was on purpose. But no, there was no way Thistle of all people would feel the need to protect me from Rook.

“Maybe,” Rook said grudgingly. He moved away without another word and fell on the couch moodily.

I pushed Thistle, feeling like an ant trying to shove at a mountain, and he let me pass with that same, unreadable look that he’d given me before. I wasn’t sure what to make of it at all. I would have even been more comfortable with open hostility, like the feeling that radiated off Rook when I came closer.

“I’m going to sit down,” I said, telegraphing my movements carefully.

“The fuck do you want?” he growled, eyes snapping towards me.

“I already told you what I wanted!” I said, bristling right back at him.

I wasn’t going to bow down to him, just because of his flashing eyes and ridiculous body. It was a bad time to notice things like that, or how his biceps stood out against the faded blue of his tank and how the tattoos on his skin rippled when he stretched—but that didn’t stop my traitor body from doing it anyway.

“I want to know what you’re doing in Edenfall, and who you actually are, and why you can do all this weird stuff—like the illusion you just made me see. And the attempted jedi mind trick thing you’re always trying to do. How many people in this town don’t remember things they should because one of you wiped them?” I asked, glaring around at the three of them.

Sorrel had the grace to look ashamed, but as usual I couldn’t read Thistle’s face, and Rook just glared back at me like I was dirt he’d found on his hand crafted Italian shoes.

“Most of them don’t care because they don’t remember it happened,” Rook pointed out, unfazed. “Kind of the point of wiping their memories, see? What I don’t understand is, what makes you different?”

“Was that a rhetorical question?”

“No!”

“Well…I don’t know,” I said, squirming under his intent gaze. “Nothing, I guess? I’m pretty average.”

“When was the first time someone tried to make you forget?” Rook asked.

“Last month, at your party. Sorrel did, when I saw his hand healed.”

“Which party? I don’t remember you.”

“You wouldn’t,” I said, barely holding back an eyeroll, “You were…busy.”

“Is that judgment I hear, little miss prude?” Rook asked, smirking.

“How could I be judgmental?” I asked calmly, “I fucked your brother that night, didn’t I?”

His smirk disappeared.

“Which one?” he asked coldly.

“I—“

“It was me,” Thistle interrupted. It was his first contribution to the discussion.

Sorrel went to the kitchen restlessly, and came back a few moments later with a tumbler of amber liquid. I noticed that he didn’t offer it to anyone else, and wondered what that meant. It was petty of me, but I’d done it to hurt Rook in some obscure way. I wanted him to know that he didn’t have the undivided loyalty of his brothers anymore—if he ever did, that is. They seemed to regard him with the cautiousness you’d give a feral cat.

“What I want to know,” I said, clearing my throat in the ensuing awkward silence as Thistle and Rook glared daggers at each other, “Is who the three of you are. Are you even brothers? Where the heck are your parents? Why’d they leave you by yourselves in this mausoleum? And how come you never show up to school? How can you do the things you do? And—“

“We’re not human,” Rook interrupted flatly. “We’re not from your world. We’re fae.”

He said it with the same lack of ceremony that someone else might say they were going to get a cup of coffee. Nothing in his expression implied that he thought he’d said anything remarkable, but I was still bowled over.

My first instinct was to disbelieve him.

“You’re joking,” I said uncertainly, laughing as I looked around at Thistle and Sorrel’s unsmiling faces.

“I don’t joke,” Rook said, sounding impatient that I wasn’t being more accepting of his ludicrous announcement. “We’re pretty far from human, and we’re trapped in your world for now, without the majority of our magic.”

“But you can still heal,” I said automatically, my tongue moving faster than my brain could think. It was somehow comforting that even when faced with discovering magic for the first time in my life, I automatically went into debate mode.

“Healing was always the least of our abilities,” Sorrel said quietly, looking into the amber depths of his drink. “And they took away everything else before sending us here to live out the rest of our lives. Which tend to be extremely long,” he added, looking at me. His eyes were bleak.

I shifted uncomfortably. I never knew how to respond to other people’s grief. I didn’t even know how to deal with my own, which was ever-present.

“Who sent you?” I asked softly.

“Our leaders,” Thistle shrugged. He seemed less affected by the whole thing than Rook and Sorrel. “There was a war. It went on for years. Instead of continuing to fight for a victory that lay somewhere beyond the horizon, our three kingdoms decided on a truce instead.”

“We were the price of that truce,” Rook said, hand clenched into a fist on the arm of the couch. “My dear mother was Queen, and so I was the sacrificial lamb.”

“My parents were King and Queen as well,” Sorrel admitted. “I was just a younger son—they could afford to spare me to the Mudlands.”

Sorrel’s voice held less bitterness than Rook’s, but also more raw pain. He sounded like he’d loved his parents, I thought with a pang in my chest. Unlike Rook, who seemed viciously angry at the thought of his mother…so, pretty normal by Rook’s standards. Somehow it didn’t surprise me that Rook had mommy issues up the wazoo.

“What about you?” I asked Thistle.

“I was a soldier,” he said simply. “Never knew my parents. They did fighting, just as I thought I would. I joined the fight as soon as I was old enough.”

“Listen to him, talking about it like he was simply a guy with a sword,” Rook said, curling his lip. “He was the butcher of the battlefield at Caspian, and fought his way up to the rank of General in a matter of years. You don’t get there by just wandering into the armory, grabbing a sword and hacking away. It takes skill, patience and a certain amount of bloodlust.”

Thistle didn’t deny it, merely raised an eyebrow slightly and looked away.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said, putting my head in my hands. “How could you have fought in a war for years, when we’re only eighteen years old? It just...doesn’t compute.”

“We’re from a different world entirely, do you think time would flow the same way?” Rook asked, successfully making me feel about two inches tall. “For fuck’s sake. Nothing about our world is the same as yours. We have magic, and power, and the fae are as alike to mundies as rabbit is to an eagle.”

“You know what, it makes a poetic kind of sense that you’re stuck with us, just because you hate us so much and think you’re so much better than us,” I said, glaring at him. He flipped me off and flopped onto his back.

“I used to think so too,” he said distantly. “My bitch of a mother always had a sense of humor about these things.”

“So how old are you really?” I asked them.

“It’s hard to say,” Sorrel said, placing a hand on my shoulder. It was a comforting, steadying weight. I felt anchored, no longer floating on a sea of strangeness. “Time flows so differently, and the fae age differently as well.”

“Okay, so you’re…trapped in our world because of some treaty you signed with each other’s kingdoms,” I said, recapping for my own benefit. “And…there’s no way to get back to your world?”

“Not ever,” Thistle said, as Rook stared at the ceiling.

“That’s awful,” I said.

“That’s the price we pay for duty,” Thistle corrected me.

That was a cold way to think about it. Well, maybe that was the only way he was able to stomach what happened.

“And then,” I continued doggedly, “You ended up here, in Edenfall. How did you get this house?”

“We have powers of persuasion,” Sorrel said. “It wouldn’t work on you—you seem immune. But people usually do things for us, if we ask…nicely.”

Slowly, I pieced together the truth.

The three of them were exiled fae warriors, not spoilt rich high school kids at all. They’d landed up on the outskirts of Edenfall when the ‘gate’ between their world and ours closed on them after the treaty. They’d decided to stick together initially out of necessity, and then just never bothered to leave.

I found it hard to believe that it had nothing to do with forming an attachment to each other, no matter how small, but I kept my mouth shut about it anyway. If they were going to be emotionally constipated, I wasn’t going to interfere.

They’d used their mind trick ability to get everything that they now had—the house, the expensive cars, even admission into Edenfall High.

“I just don’t understand why you’re going to school,” I said, chewing my lip. It was a bad habit I had, and I did it whenever I was working on particularly tricky problems. “You could do anything, go anywhere—hell, you could start modeling for magazines and fashion labels if you wanted to. Why stick around here?”

“Because getting an education is important,” Sorrel said, shrugging. “My parents would have been horrified if I’d dropped out of school to go jaunting around Mudlandia and cheating with my powers. We couldn’t help it at the start, we had no other way. But glamoring people isn’t as easy as it sounds. Strong willed people resist it, and it’s not a good idea to push. Plus, it’s the kind of thing that gets you noticed. And we don’t need anyone digging into our backgrounds and noticing anomalies. Also…our magic is draining out of us, slowly. In a few years we might not have any, so it’s dangerous to rely on it.”

“I, for one, do not intend on staying in this mudpit of a world a moment longer than is necessary,” Rook said, aiming a hostile look at Sorrel. “You can playact at being a Mundie all your like, but I won’t stoop to their level. I’m a prince, and I’m going to sit on that throne if it kills me.”

“It very well might,” said Thistle, who seemed to know something I didn’t, because Rook looked away, face red with annoyance.

“The gate we came through was near here,” Sorrel said sotto voce to me, filling the awkward pause. “Rook thinks there might be a way to get back by reopening it.”

“Is that possible? Who closed it in the first place?”

“My parents.” A sigh.

“My dear mother.” Bared teeth.

“My commander.”

“They closed it for good,” Sorrel told Rook, his tone indicating that he’d reminded Rook before. “That means we can’t go back. They knew what they were doing, Rook.”

“I beg to differ,” Rook said, jumping up with nervous energy, somehow sparked to life by what Sorrel said. “I have a friend here, who’s promised to help us get back home.”

“You don’t have friends,” Thistle said skeptically.

“Well, call us business partners then,” Rook said, face still alight with that same desperation. “She told me a way that we can open a new gate and go back.”

“That sounds too good to be true,” Sorrel said. “What’s the catch?”

“It was that we had to find a certain someone—a hybrid.”

“Between…fae and humans?” I blurted out, following their exchange intently.

“As a matter of a fact, yes,” Rook said, looking at me.

I felt like a butterfly pinned to a table under his gaze, which seemed simultaneously interested and revolted. “I’ve been looking for you, even though you didn’t know it,” he told me.

His hand came up to touch my face and I jerked back. He let his arm fall with apparent indifference and turned to the other two.

“Ever heard of fae and humans…breeding?” he asked them.

“No, because it never happens,” Sorrel said exasperatedly. “Rook, listen, I’m sorry that we’re stuck here, all right? I hate being here almost as much as you do—“

“—I doubt it.”

“—But we have to face the facts. We’re here whether we want to be or not. It’s not up to us. Bringing up old wives’ tales isn’t going to help any.”

“This girl is a hybrid,” Rook insisted, softly. He was keeping himself in check with obvious effort. “The kelpie said it the night of my party, that she smelled someone who was both fae and Mundie.”

“Even if that is true,” Sorrel said, “Which I’m willing to assume for now that it is, leaving aside the impossibility of that—“

“Did you know your parents, Mundie girl?” Rook asked me rudely.

“Why the hell should I tell you?” I said, equally rudely, faintly aware that just half an hour ago I would have been too terrified to say a word to him. Amazing how things changed in a matter of minutes. “They’ve got nothing to do with magic, or fae, or anything like that.”

“So you say. But Sorrel and Thistle both know I’m right, even though they won’t admit it.”

“Right about what?”

“Why our useful little memory erasing trick doesn’t work on you. A little biology lesson for you: there’s only two kinds of people who can resist it. You know who those are?”

“No,” I said, hating the little trickle of dread dropping down my spine.

“One of them’s us,” he began airily. “Can’t have our people wiping each other, then nobody would ever remember anything. Our persuasions have no effect on other fae either. The other kind…well, you know what happens when fae forget to use protection when fucking humans?”

“No.”

“The same thing that happens to humans. They get pregnant.”

“That can’t be,” I said stubbornly, “We’re different species, it’s not…possible.”

“Right, because we’re all about what’s possible, from what you’ve seen of us so far,” Rook said smirking. I had to admit, he had a point.

“I’ll ask you again,” he said, and damn if his eyes weren’t compelling me to tell him the truth. His ability may not have worked on me, but he remained a ridiculously charismatic person. If I didn’t know he was cruel and bad tempered, I might have developed some inconvenient feelings for him. “Who the hell are your parents, Mundie girl?”

“My mom was definitely human,” I said, looking down at my shoes. Even talking about her felt like a stab to the chest. “My dad…I don’t know, he could’ve been anyone. I never knew him.”

“We need to track him down,” Rook said.

“How’s that going to help?” Sorrel was asking.

“He might still know of a gate,” Thistle said.

“You can’t,” I said dully. “We can’t ask my mom either—she’s—she’s why I came here. Because she died. Well, she was murdered.”

There was a pause, in which I looked down and refused to notice their reactions. Surprisingly, it was Rook who spoke first.

“If it were my mother who died, I would be throwing a party right about now,” he said wryly, “But it seems that you both had a more…conventional relationship?”

Huh, that wouldn’t even rank in the list of dickish things he’d said that day. I was weirdly touched.

“Yeah, we were close,” I said, touching my neck as I did whenever I was anxious. “It was her boyfriend who did it—well, the police think it was Lachlan, anyway.”

“You knew him?”

“Yeah,” I said, eyes sliding up to meet his. “I knew Lachlan.”

“It doesn’t matter if we don’t know Juliet’s father,” Thistle said, clearing his throat. “Juliet has the same blood. Isn’t that how we’ve gotten this far?”

“Yes, but we haven’t asked if she wants to help us yet,” Sorrel said. The thought didn’t seem to have occurred to Rook, who spun on his feet and glared at Sorrel.

“Of course she’ll help us!” he said, running his hand through his hair distractedly. “She has to.”

“No, she doesn’t,” Thistle said firmly, and I became aware of how large and imposing he was, and how much violence was contained in his body.

“That’s sweet, guys, but I want to help,” I said.

“Why would you agree to do this?” Rook demanded suspiciously.

“I’m getting some mixed signals here,” I snapped, “Do you want my help or don’t you?”

“Not if there’s a catch,” Rook said, clenching his jaw. Something about him made me think of a wounded animal, hurt and vicious and lashing out at anyone, even when they were trying to free it.

“There’s no catch,” I said simply, “I’m a nice person. I do nice things.”

He scoffed.

“Let’s face it, Rook—you can’t afford to not believe me. I am what I say I am, and you can take my help or leave it. Considering that I seem to be your only chance of going home, I think you’ll take it, no matter what conditions I tack on.”

“She’s right,” Sorrel said quietly. “You want to go home, Rook—this is your only chance. The kelpie said so, you said it yourself.”

“Why even go to her?” Thistle grunted. “She’s a dangerous liar.”

“I didn’t have a choice,” Rook said flatly. “It was either go to her or give up. And I don’t give up.”

“Who—or what—is a kelpie?” I asked. I was really out of my depth here, not following any of what they were saying.

“They live in lakes,” Thistle said, mouth twisting, “Pull children and unwary people from boats and drown them. Then they eat them.”

I felt bile rise in my throat. “That’s disgusting,” I said, “Why are we taking advice from someone who does that?”

“I’ll grant you that she isn’t pretty,” Rook said, “But her advice is sound. And like I said, beggars can’t be choosers. She may be vermin, but she’s useful vermin. Her knowledge is sound. Her bargain was fair—“

“You bargained with her?!” Sorrel half-shouted, rising from his chair.

“Idiot,” Thistle said hoarsely, face whitening.

“You’re insane!”

“I’m lost,” I said, to no one in particular. “I’m so lost. I need an adult. What’s wrong with striking a bargain?”

“Pretend she’s the devil and you sold her your soul in return for a copper penny,” Sorrel said, face in his hands.

“Oh,” I said blankly. “Well, what exactly did you offer her in return?”

“I said I’d lift the curse that keeps her bound to her lake,” Rook said.

“Reckless,” Thistle spat.

“Do you have any idea how to break her curse?” I asked skeptically.

“That’s not our concern right now,” Rook said impatiently. “We need to open the gate first. Everything else comes later.”

“Do you guys agree as well?” I asked.

“I don’t feel like we have a choice,” Sorrel said, looking lost. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and feel his warmth, fae or not

“Agreed,” said Thistle.

“We’ll need to get you ready to open the gate,” Rook told me, standing up. “I’ll bring you a book to read, with instructions on how to cast the spell.”

He looked satisfied.

Not that I’d officially agreed to help him, but he’d evidently decided that he didn’t need to pay me any more attention.

That was fine by me, I thought, discreetly ogling the set of his wide shoulders as he stalked out of the room.

“Why do you guys put up with him?” I asked Sorrel curiously. “He’s a jackass.”

“He’s been through some stuff,” Sorrel said. “I wouldn’t expect normalcy from him, to say the least.”

“That’s all you’re giving me?” I said, cocking an eyebrow. “I’m helping you, remember?”

“I know,” he said, eyes soft and regretful. “But it isn’t my story to tell. You understand that, don’t you?”

“I…guess I do,” I said reluctantly.

Thistle got up without a word and went into the kitchen that I still hadn’t seen. A lightbulb went off in my head.

“House tour?” I said eagerly, leaning forward. I saw Sorrel’s eyes dip momentarily into the hollow of my cleavage and felt a rush of power. Yes, there was no doubt he was still at least a little attracted to me, even if I was apparently an abomination by the standards of his people.

“You’re serious?” Sorrel said teasingly, and swept the air in a grand gesture. “You think we can cover this place by tonight?”

“Maybe not all of it,” I said. Maybe just your bedroom, I thought privately.

He tugged me up by the hand, and I felt giddy like a preschooler as he led me through the rooms, inventing ridiculous stories to go with the opulent décor.

“This was the room where the previous owner of the house caught his mistress in bed with his wife,” Sorrel said, when we entered a huge room with a crystal chandelier and a pool table. I wrinkled my nose.

“What, on the pool table?”

“Love works in mysterious ways,” he said archly, “We shouldn’t judge.”

“Yeah? Why don’t you show me?” I asked, only kind of teasing. He smiled but didn’t take the hint, although it wasn’t really even a hint, more like a blaring neon sign that said ‘I’m wet for you!’

Slightly disappointed, I followed him to a sunroom, a wood-paneled study, and a huge library. I let my hand brush his, and touched his elbow every so often.

I felt the force of his eyes lingering on me like a physical weight, and smirked privately.

Oh, I had a plan, and as soon as we were in Thistle’s bedroom, I was going to put it into action.

“Is this a bedroom?” I asked, playing at innocence when passed a door that was slightly ajar.

“That’s Thistle’s,” Sorrel said, and inclined his head to the next door. “And that’s mine. Want to see?” there was a teasing edge to his tone.

“Yes,” I said mischievously. “But let’s see Thistle’s first.”

“If you insist,” Sorrel said, and with a grand flourish, he led me in.

We both felt that lick of exhilaration that came from being somewhere we shouldn’t.

I let myself fall back onto the huge, luxurious bed in the middle of the room and smiled up at Sorrel.

“This is actually the most comfortable bed I’ve ever been on,” I said, grinning. I bounced on it experimentally.

“Hey,” Sorrel said quietly, and put a hand on my thigh. I leaned into the touch, as I always seemed to do with him, and looked up.

“What?” I asked, equally quietly.

Then he started kissing me, hands on either side of my hips, and put the weight of his thighs on mine.

I smiled into his mouth. Now all I needed was a certain muscular guy with anger issues to join us.

17

Juliet

Sorrel’s kisses weren’t chaste or gentlemanly, like he’d been just moments before.

They were hungry and searching. He kissed me like he was trying to devour me, engulf me completely. I kissed him back enthusiastically until my mouth was sore.

He pulled back for breath and looked me over with heavy-lidded eyes.

“You look like a filthy dream I had,” he said admiringly, before pressing his mouth to mine again. His hands moved with a desperate fever, as though he couldn’t figure out where to put them. He ran them through my hair, no doubt fluffing it up and making me look like a cavewoman, and then stroked the skin of my ribs and my thighs until my nerve endings were sparking with desire.

I pushed at his shirt blindly, tearing off some buttons in the process. I heard him breathe a laugh against my mouth, but I didn’t care, too busy admiring the planes of his chest. I ran a hand over the skin and felt his muscles jump. He lifted me up by the butt effortlessly, pulling me towards him. I hooked my legs around him, grinding our hips together. I gasped at how good it felt, how amazing the friction was of his rough jeans felt against my pussy through the thin fabric of my underwear.

I gasped against his mouth as his hands moved confidently to the undersides of my thighs, stroking with knowing tenderness. He felt like the kind of man who would know his way around my body.

“I don’t know why I’m [not] surprised,” came a familiar, icily cold voice from the door.

“Thistle,” Sorrel said, voice strained, “In case you missed it, you’re interrupting something here.”

“Oh, I’m well aware of what I’m interrupting,” Thistle snarled, eyes flashing. He was in the same post-shower state that I’d seen him in on my first day at Edenfall High. His hair was curling slightly at his neck.

As I watched, a droplet of water went trickling down and disappeared into the neck of his shirt.

Was it weird that I wanted to follow its path with my tongue?

That one night had awoken something in me, a beast that constantly needed feeding.

“Then why the fuck are you here?” Sorrel snapped. He was clearly at the end of his patience. I could feel the bulge of his hardness at my hip and winced for him. Thistle had given him a bad case of blue balls, no wonder he was wound up tight.

Thistle crossed his arms. “I wanted to see what you two were up to,” he said.

Sorrel laughed a little then, disbelievingly. “Need me to explain the birds and bees to you, soldier boy?” he said mockingly.

“Actually,” I said, clearing my throat, “Sorrel was giving me a tour of the house, originally. Then we got…sidetracked.”

“And it just so happened to be in my bedroom,” Thistle said. His eyes lingered on the way I was clutching Sorrel’s shoulder, and the spread of my thighs. I let them fall open further, relishing the way his eyes grew heavy-lidded with lust.

I looked at Sorrel, and I wanted him.

And I looked at Thistle, and I wanted him too.

If there was a word for that, and it was probably ‘greed’.

“I think we need to clear things up first,” I said, addressing them both. “I don’t want this to get messi…er than it is. I hooked up with Thistle, the night of the party,” I told Sorrel, bracing myself for an explosion.

But none came.

“You did?” Sorrel said, sounding surprised. He looked at Thistle, who had lost some of his belligerence.

“It’s true,” he said in a low voice, “Only because she wanted to sleep with you, though.”

“What?!” Sorrel and I said at the same time.

“Why would you think that?” I asked, confused.

“I saw how you looked at him that night at the party,” Thistle ground out, glaring at me. “There’s no need to deny it. You wanted him.”

“I did,” I said, and looked at Sorrel. “I wanted you the minute I saw you. But,” I added to Thistle, “I didn’t use you to replace Sorrel. That would be ridiculous. I mean, look at you two. You’re not even remotely similar! I slept with you because I wanted to. I guess that makes me a freak, wanting two guys…but even if I’d had sex with Sorrel, I would have wanted to sleep with you too.”

“Why should I believe you?” he asked me harshly, eyes locked so firmly on mine that I thought he would burn my face with the force of his stare.

“You don’t have to,” I said, and deliberately let my legs spread wide. His eyes locked onto the place between my thighs, soaked wet with arousal, covered only by the thin material of my panties, and I heard him take a breath, “You can see for yourself.”

Sorrel looked over at Thistle. “Do you want this?” he asked bluntly. “If you’re going to be an asshole—“

“I want this,” Thistle said, the faintest hint of a rasp in his voice. I could see the outline of his hardness through his jeans, and remembered how good and full he’d made me feel when he was inside me, pinning me down with his bulk, pounding into me.

I hitched my skirt up and wiggled out of my panties, exposing myself to cool air and two hungry stares.

“I assume you didn’t bring condoms?” I asked them.

“We’ll just get creative,” Sorrel said, and went down on his knees.

“I would say that the floor’s disgusting,” I said, thighs trembling as he gently kissed his way up the side of my knee and thigh, “But this place is too fancy for that kind of—ah!”

“If you can talk and make any sense while I do this,” he said, placing a small bite on the tender flesh of my inner thigh, “Then I’m not doing it right.”

I saw Thistle staring at us, palm resting on his crotch almost absent mindedly.

“I want you in my mouth, not just standing there,” I said, feeling almost giddy with power. “I want you to fuck my mouth.”

Thistle didn’t waste any time. He unbuttoned his jeans and pulled out his cock, already standing up, swollen and pink-purple at the head. I ached from how much I wanted him to fill me, but my mouth would have to do. I arched a little as Sorrel licked a hot, wet, sloppy stripe, down my nub and towards my slit.

“Sorrel,” I gasped, fingers in his hair. “Harder, please!”

He kept teasing me, with tiny swipes that circled my clit, never touching it, only sending little probes into my hole that left me breathless and wanting.

Thistle wasn’t as patient. He stood in front of me, holding his dick, pumping it up and down and watching me with heated eyes. I knew he wouldn’t ask…something about him made me think that he’d wait until I took him into my mouth myself.

So I bent down, spreading my legs wider and letting my hands rest on Thistle’s strong thighs. He grunted when I took him into my mouth, and fell silent. I smiled around his cock. So he was a quiet one, was he? I was going to enjoy making him curse, or at least squirm. This wasn’t something we’d done that night, so I took my time exploring his reactions.

I took his head first, licking and sucking like his cock was a popsicle I couldn’t get enough of. I swirled my tongue over the tip, feeling the little veins and ridges at the head, and tasted salt. He was hard as iron, it must have been painful. I knew from his hitched breaths that he was struggling to stay in control.

Good.

I took more and more of him in my mouth, widening my jaw but not so much that I would choke. I gave a mean blowjob, but I did unfortunately still have a gag reflex. He was heavy and hot in my mouth, leaking more salty precum.

I looked up at him through my lashes and this time he did give a low groan.

“Move,” I said, but it came out as ‘Mmph’. He still got the message, fisting strands of my hair and fucking into my mouth slowly. Tears clouded my vision as he hit the back of my throat, but I didn’t want him to slow down. I wanted him to ride my mouth until my jaw was sore and my mouth got all hot and tingly.

Sorrel was still taking his time with me, pressing hard enough on my clit to make me see stars, and then going back to teasing swirls of his tongue. It was driving me crazy with overstimulation, having Thistle pistoning into my mouth and Sorrel building an ache that refused to build up to climax. I felt low waves of pleasure crash into nothing, never building to a crest that broke into something satisfying.

I pressed a finger into my hole out of desperation, but Sorrel blocked me.

“Ah ah ah,” he said disapproving, mouth shiny with my wetness.

Thistle kept fucking my mouth like a machine, and I was taking almost the entire length of him, which, if you could see him, you’d know that it was a fucking miracle.

He was huge.

His hands caressed my head, pressing me down harder, and I loved it. It reminded me of how he’d held me down that night with his considerable weight, just pinned me down and fucked me. He ran his nails over my scalp, and pulled lightly at my hair. It didn’t feel like a show of dominance, more like a reminder of what I was there for.

I increased the suction on his cock, like I was trying to literally suck the cum out of him, and when he groaned—the first sound he’d made so far—I felt a flash of satisfaction. I’d gotten a spontaneous reaction. His grip on my head tightened, as though he was holding on for dear life.

I could feel the tremor in his thighs as I held onto them through the fabric of his jeans. He was close.

I closed my eyes as he came with a gasp, shooting into my mouth. I swallowed with difficulty, suppressing a gag. This was my least favorite part. Nothing could make cum taste good.

I pulled off him with an obscene, wet, popping sound, and looked up at him shakily. I knew I probably looked like a porn star, with lips red and puffy and smeared with cum. He certainly didn’t seem to mind, judging by the way he cupped my chin and rubbed at the spot of cum on my sore bottom lip. He pushed his thumb into my mouth, and I sucked obediently.

When I was done, he pressed his face to mine and kissed me messily, open mouthed and with intent. I let out a small, shocked gasp as he did. He hadn’t kissed my mouth that first night. I hadn’t cared then. Why did he feel the need to change that now?

I didn’t have time for questions, as interesting as they were, as Sorrel had built up to a steady, persistent pressure on my clit, and had two fingers pressed into my hole, shallowly thrusting in and out. The press on my clit got so hard it was almost painful—deliciously so, and I saw stars for the first time, rocking back and crying out inarticulately.

Thistle’s palm cupping the back of my head was the only thing that prevented me from banging it on the side of the mirror. That edge was sharp, and it could have gotten messy.

Sorrel seemed pleased with my reaction, judging from the muffled sound of satisfaction he made at my flailing, and started pressing his two fingers in deep this time, pounding in and out. I could feel the waves building up now like a tsunami. I could tell that it was going to be a big one. He’d brought me right to the brink and walked it back so many times that my body was crying out for release. This might even hurt.

When Sorrel pressed his teeth against my soft clit, the mix of pain and pleasure got me there, the combination of ecstasy with an edge of hurt proving too much to resist.

Thistle held me through it, stroking my hair as I pressed my face into the crook of his shoulder, hissing as my thighs spasmed and shook. I felt like I was suffering the after effects of an electrocution, from the way my toes curled.

I heard Sorrel stand up and I stretched, feeling languid and blissed out.

“We should take care of him,” I told Thistle sleepily. He hummed in agreement.

We finished Sorrel off with a lazy handjob, Thistle’s huge, callused hand over mine, rubbing Sorrel’s prick until it was red and throbbing, leaking precome as he shuddered and shook. I liked seeing him be the one to lose control, for once, I thought with satisfaction as he spilled on our hands.

Maybe because I’d seen Thistle’s dick in broad daylight this time, and not in the shadowy confines of his bedroom, hidden away from everyone else…and maybe it was the way he’d held onto my hair and cupped my chin and let me gasp my orgasm into his shoulder…but Thistle seemed a lot less intimidating to me now.

I could almost mistake the look in his eyes for tenderness. Of course I knew I was deluding myself, but I felt…comfortable with him, in a way I never had with most guys. What was it about these two that made me surrender to inevitability completely? They were dangerous.

“What are you thinking?” he asked curiously. We were letting Sorrel recover, he seemed to get a little overwhelmed right after coming, so I was stroking the muscles on his stomach as he got himself under control. I liked the way his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat when he swallowed, and the way his hair curled over his forehead. He had a post-workout sheen, and it suited him.

I was a little envious.

He did the athleisure chic look better than I ever could. After workouts or sex, I just looked messy and red in the face, not…glowing with health. I told him so. He looked bewildered.

“This is just how I look,” he informed me, forehead creasing. I sighed.

“I know,” I said, unwrapping myself from his arms. The loss of warmth made me sad. “You’re so clueless, I don’t even resent it. Would you guys be into…well, each other? While I watched, for instance?”

“Me and Thistle?” Sorrel asked.

“Yes,” I said, and watched him flick a glance to Thistle.

Who I knew was interested, by the way. I could tell that he was definitely into dick by the way he helped me bring Sorrel off.

Sorrel seemed to find what he was looking for, and his cheeks were faintly flushed again when he looked at me.

“Yes,” he said steadily. “I would be into that.”

“Good,” I said, and stretched. I felt languid and content, but I did have to get home.

“Shit,” I said, when I looked at my phone and saw how late it was. I’d already gotten a message from Ellie, reminding me that we were all going to eat together. Tonight was one of those nights, and the Masters’s tended to be a little intense about family dinners.

“I’ll take you home,” Sorrel said immediately, and went to shower.

Thistle just lay back and watched me dress. I liked having his eyes on me, appreciative and lingering.

But my good mood was ruined when he called, “Don’t forget you’re training with Rook tomorrow!” as I was leaving with Sorrel.

That was just fan-fucking-tastic.

Somehow I would have to prevent my hands from circling his throat and just choking him, as I was so often tempted to do.

Maybe the spell book he’d left for me would tell me how to shut him up, I thought, and brightened at the idea.

Magic was fucking awesome.

18

Juliet

Annoyed as I was about Rook bossing me around, I couldn’t resist reading obsessively through the book he had given me about fae culture and customs.

It was all just too fascinating.

There were all kinds of fae, though the majority were elemental: fire, water, earth and air, and their kingdoms were divided accordingly as well. They’d lived in secret for millennia, flitting between their world and ours, until ours became inhospitable for them.

The book said that manmade metals were poisonous, and avoiding those was nearly impossible in our world now, unless you decided to become some kind of hermit in the woods. That explained why they’d largely retreated to their world, and seemed to find living in ours so difficult.

Their powers seemed to fluctuate and vary according to no rules that I could figure out. There seemed to be a loose sort of hierarchy in fae kingdoms.

At the top was of course, the ruler(s) of each kingdom. Below them were their offspring, in order of birth barring some exceptional circumstances. Consorts couldn’t inherit, apparently. The book somewhat ominously said ‘the thrones can only be inherited out of order if taken with blood’.

Fae didn’t seem to have any concept of monogamy or marriage, really. This made me think that Sorrel’s parents were co-rules more than anything else, and they might have had Sorrel for reasons of politics.

He still seemed to love them. I personally thought that once your parents threw you into a strange land and blocked the way back, to punish you for something they caused, they were disqualified from being considered good parents.

Then again, I only had one very dysfunctional parent myself, so what did I know?

The book seemed to think that fae were additionally fucked in the human world because they ‘could not master the art of untruths’, which was a fancy way of saying they couldn’t lie. I smirked and committed that fact to memory. It was going to come in verrry useful when tangling with Rook.

No wonder they didn’t feel safe in the human world, or want to stay here. I thought about the number of lies I’d told today alone…at least a dozen, and it wasn’t even unusual. I told all sorts of lies to people, mostly little white lies to make my own life easier. Like when Liv had called around nine thirty to ask where I was. She’d sounded concerned.

I remembered thinking that I’d fucked up for the first time since coming to Edenfall. I closed my eyes, felt the cold air conditioned breeze in Sorrel’s car, and tried to control my racing heart. They weren’t going to kick me out, I thought firmly and hopelessly. They wouldn’t do that.

“Are you okay?” Liv asked, worry bleeding through the line.

“Yeah, can you tell Aunt Ellie I’m really sorry and it won’t happen again—“

I could feel Sorrel listening intently to the conversation. I had no doubt that he possessed some sort of crazy fae hearing and could make out every word that Liv said. Surprisingly, it didn’t bother me, though I was usually extremely paranoid about privacy. Well, I’d had to be, in case anyone at school had found out about Lachlan. They would have called Social Services for sure, and I couldn’t be separated from Mom.

“Oh, they’re not worried,” Liv reassured me. The relief sent my head into my hands. “It’s just me, in big sister mode. Mom said you were just out having fun and that I shouldn’t bother you.”

“And yet…?”

“I just wanted to check in because I’m overprotective,” Liv said meekly. “So everything’s okay then?”

“Sure is,” I said, injecting some airy enthusiasm into my voice. “In fact, we’re driving back home right now.”

“Oh good. We’re just eating dinner now, want me to save some for you? It’s lasagna.”

“Did Uncle Mike make it?”

“We would never do that to you,” Liv assured me. I could hear her grin over the line. “We ordered in. It’s delicious, I’ll save you a corner piece.”

My stomach rumbled, and I realized it had been hours since I’d eaten.

“Sure, that sounds great,” I said, and hung up with a sigh of relief.

Being treated like an adult who could handle herself, and at the same time having someone be concerned for your welfare, was kind of exhausting, I was coming to realize. It had been a lot easier with Mom, who went around the apartment like a ghost, noticing nothing, and Lachlan who didn’t care what I did as long as I was out of his way.

Except for the few times he needed me around to be a punching bag.

Now it was after dinner, and I was flat on the bed, lying on my stomach and doing some intensive reading.

I guiltily remembered that I had some extra research I had to do before Social Studies class tomorrow, but I was putting it off until I’d sucked all the most interesting parts out of the fae book like delicious marrow.

I thought back to all the questions I’d asked Sorrel, Thistle and even Rook.

All of the answers they’d given me had technically been true. They hadn’t lied to me about any of it, because they just couldn’t. That should have made me trust them more, but it didn’t. I knew better than anyone how easy it was to twist the truth and make it seem different than what it was.

How many times had I told concerned teachers that I acquired some bruises by not ‘watching where I was going’? Because when Lachlan drove my head into the side of the door, I had kept my eyes closed, after all. Or when I said I’d just been ‘careless’ and gotten my arm bruised? The truth was, I’d ‘carelessly’ told Lachlan the woman he was cheating on Mom with had gotten our landline number and was asking for him.

The truth could be anything you wanted it to be, if you had enough of an imagination. I remembered Rook’s eyes, like banked embers, and the way he looked at me like I was just a tool to help him achieve his goal of revenge.

There had been nothing human in his eyes at all. I was sure that if Thistle and Sorrel hadn’t been in the room today, he wouldn’t have even tried persuading me to help him. It would have been threats all the way.

I flipped through the book and skimmed chapters that seemed boring.

Spells I couldn’t cast, creatures I would never see on this side of the world, and accounts of battles I never fought.

All of these things were interesting in their own way, but there was nothing in the book about hybrids.

There was one line in the genealogy section that said ‘of Eliador we will not speak, as he was lost among the Mundanes and sullied the power of his line by remaining in their world until his (probable) death’.

That gave me a good idea of how much fae seemed to hate other fae who voluntarily partnered with humans.

And that made me wonder about Thistle and Sorrel. Did they regard humans—or mundies, I suppose—in the same way? They didn’t act like they hated me, although by all account they should have been disgusted by what I was. Did that make them self-hating fae?

The stigma seemed to be in the actual procreation part, not just in the part where fae fucked humans. It was a thin distinction, but it seemed to matter.

There were stories of fae ‘seducing young mortal maidens’ in our world, and it was written in a casual way, which made me think that strictly sex/no strings attached affairs were allowed.

I thought of Thistle’s hands on me, gripping my hair with a kind of fierce tenderness, and Sorrel’s wicked tongue in my most delicate parts. I firmly pushed those memories away.

Of course they didn’t intend anything serious, I scolded myself, flopping onto my back and staring at the ceiling.

They were going back to their own world, for fuck’s sake. What was I expecting? To be able to date two hot, magical guys from an alternate world? At the same time? Because I hadn’t untangled my feelings for them, of course.

I could easily imagine falling in love with Sorrel—maybe I was half way there already. But Thistle confused me…sometimes I felt like he held humans in the same contempt as Rook, and sometimes I thought I sensed fondness in his inscrutable gaze.

It was almost cruel how much my mind could delude itself.

There came a gentle knock on my door. I raised my head.

“Come in!”

“Hey,” Liv said, opening the door and coming into view, clad in pyjamas and fuzzy slippers.

“Oh, hey,” I said surprised, and glanced at the digital clock on the wall. It was nearly midnight. “Aren’t you asleep yet?”

“I was skyping with Brian,” she said, pushing some hair out of her eyes.

“Ah,” I said, and let my head fall back. Theirs was such a normal high school romance, it made me jealous and I felt awful that I was jealous of my sweet, kind, perfect cousin. She didn’t deserve that.

“How was your study group today? I didn’t have a chance to ask at dinner,” she said, scooting onto my bed and holding a pillow close to her chest.

Where would you like me to start? Would you like to know about how my dad was probably a powerful fae who slept with my mom and abandoned her when she was pregnant?

Or how the guys the school worships are actually a bunch of exiled fae princes—oh, and one apparently dangerous soldier—trapped here because of some treaty between the kingdoms in an entirely different world?

“Um,” I said.

“I’m so glad you’re making friends,” she said earnestly. “I was afraid the kids at school wouldn’t be nice to you.”

“Really?” I asked, surprised out of my consuming worry about the guys. “They’re all so normal and nice though.”

“I’m so glad you think so,” she said, face lighting up. “What class is this study group for?”

“…AP Chemistry,” I said, cursing myself for not thinking of a convincing story earlier, when I’d had all the time to.

“Okay,” she said, seeming satisfied, and dropped the subject.

We spent about an hour talking about college applications and about how Liv secretly wanted to go out of state for college, but hadn’t brought it up to her parents yet, because she knew they’d be disappointed. I thought about their joint weeknight dinners and Saturday breakfasts with Mike at the stove, and had to admit that she had a point.

The Masters’s were the family I’d always dreamed of having…and yet somehow Liv was planning on moving away.

“Promise you won’t tell,” she warned me, yawning. I glanced at the clock, it was nearly one am.

“Yes, I promise,” I said. “I really don’t think Ellie is going to ask me to spill your secrets any time soon though.”

“You don’t know her like I do,” Liv said playfully, and groaned loudly as she lifted herself off my bed. “Oh, and we should go shopping for stuff to decorate your room sometime,” she added, looking around. “It makes me sad.”

“What’re you talking about?” I said, instantly defensive of my room. It was my own little happy place…where I could be alone and undisturbed, study in peace and quiet and now, read about a magical species.

It was tucked away on the second floor, so I didn’t hear Liv or Derek thundering up and down the stairs as they so often did. It had its own bathroom, which was something I’d never dreamed of having. It was perfect.

As she padded out of my room in her fuzzy slippers and shut my bedroom door behind her, I reached under my pillow and retrieved the book, its cracked and warped binding rough against my hand. I stared at the words, unseeing.

All I could think of was my Mom, and I wondered what she’d say if I asked if whether my bio dad had been fae or not. She probably would have laughed in my face.

I was ninety nine percent sure she didn’t know about him…but there was always that little niggling doubt that whispered in my ear that she had known all along, and just didn’t want to tell me.

I could understand why she had, if she had. I definitely didn’t have any abilities aside from being able to resist manipulation by fae…and there was no way anyone could have predicted my needing that.

It would have upset my whole world for no reason, to know that I was special but in a completely useless way.

I closed my eyes with the book on my chest, not even bothering to change into my nightclothes.

At some point, I must have fallen asleep and begun to dream.

I found myself in a room with torches softly flickering on its stone walls, lush rugs on the floor.

It was blurry at the edges. In the middle of the room was a bed, a giant four poster.

“You shouldn’t be here,” someone said behind me. I jumped and turned, and was somehow not entirely surprised when I saw Rook.

It wasn’t the same version of the boy I’d seen in the mansion hours earlier. I frowned when I noticed that this one was subtly different.

He looked better groomed, and his clothes were what you’d expect to find an elf wearing in Middle Earth.

I had to admit though, the sleeveless leather jacket was something only he could have pulled off with so much panache.

“Who let you in here?” he asked impatiently when I stood silent and slack-jawed in front of him. “Servants aren’t allowed in this part of the palace, did no one tell you? Come into the light, so I can a look at you,” he ordered. His words fell on me like a whip.

He expected to be obeyed, his tone and body language screamed, and anything other than utter compliance would be unacceptable.

Bad idea, I thought with a shiver, but I still obeyed him helplessly.

He took my jaw between his fingers and mercilessly turned my face towards the torchlight. I couldn’t read his expression in the flickering shadows, but his thumb moved to stroke my cheek in an oddly intimate way.

“Did Mother send you?” he snapped, his voice at odds with his finger, which caressed my lower lip lightly. I struggled out of his grasp and hurried out of arm’s reach. A safe distance would have been out of the room and away from Rook’s scorching gaze completely, but my legs were moving too slowly, like I was wading through honey.

I could still feel the imprint of his finger on my lip. It sent sparks to my core, and I felt the stirring of heat down below that I tried to clamp down on firmly.

“No,” I said, shaking my head in confusion like a horse trying to scatter flies. I couldn’t think clearly, nor did I remember why I was there, with him.

“To sweeten the pot, no doubt,” he sneered, either not hearing me or assuming that I was lying. “Always the beautiful women,” he said, still gazing at me with that single-minded focus.

“Well, not that I’m complaining,” he said, voice down to a murmur. “Goddamn her for knowing my weakness when confronted with a busty brunette.”

“Hey,” I said weakly, and found the backs of my knees hitting the bed and sprawled onto my back accidentally.

“A little ahead of schedule. Eager, are you?” he drawled, with an edge of amusement.

I could hear him coming closer, and my body thrummed with a heightened awareness that was both excited and a little fearful.

He came into view, this time having stripped off his jacket so his torso was bare. I tried to convince myself that my breathing hadn’t gotten faster, and that I didn’t have the sudden crazy urge to lick his abs. Which were impressive, as was the deep V of his hips and the faint happy trail that led to his crotch, barely covered by his low-slung pants.

The lighting was dim, so only when he was close enough to touch did I see the scars. Long, thin slashes traveled up his torso, gleaming white in the faint light. He noticed me looking and his expression grew ugly.

“Didn’t expect there to be evidence?” he asked quietly. “The blade’s made of iron. Mother made sure I’d have some scars…souvenirs, I suppose.”

He threw something at me in a quick movement, and it landed on the sheets next to me with a muffled thump. I looked over and was horrified to see that it was a knife, its sharp edge glittering with malice.

I didn’t understand.

“You…want me to what?” I croaked uncertainly.

“Bleed me,” he said, raising an eyebrow as though I was a simpleton. “Did you bring a bowl for the blood?”

I shook my head, numb. Why…would I--?

Why would he expect me to?

He stood with his chest thrown back, eyes trained on me. His jaw was set defiantly, and he wanted me to believe that he couldn’t care less.

But the truth was in his fists, clenched as though ready to fight a dozen enemies. Instead, there was just me. One powerless girl half his size.

I took the knife gingerly, and swallowed when I felt its cold length in my hand. It felt…evil somehow. I felt tainted just by holding it.

I walked over to him, and saw that he hadn’t moved a single muscle in that time. It gave me wary respect for his self-control. His eyes tracked me as I got closer, and flickered with an unnamed emotion as I stood barely an inch away from his body.

I could feel the heat rising off him in waves. He reminded me of powerful jungle animals I’d seen at the zoo, barely contained and ready to rip my throat out at the slightest provocation.

I met his eyes with my own, and something passed between us.

He had asked me to hurt him. That was, apparently, my job in this messed up dream.

I knew that he loathed and feared the knife in my hand.

I didn’t want to hurt him, I realized. He was a trapped animal, submitting against his will to something he’d been trained to fear. And I hated seeing him like this.

Even his usual cruel-edged barbs would have been preferable to this beaten down creature that stood in front of me now. Was this what he’d left behind when his mother had thrown him into our world? Or was this really only a dream?

I didn’t waste time thinking about it. I let the knife fall from my hand, and as it landed on the floor with a clatter, I surged forward and kissed him.

He met my lips with shocking aggression, holding me in his arms like a vice. His mouth demanded access, and his tongue devoured me hungrily. I was breathless, hot and achy, and hanging on for dear life under his onslaught.

My body was pressed up against his, and I could feel the press of his arousal on my hip, and my pussy throbbed in answer.

I gasped as he messily bit my lip and moved down to my throat. His hands tore at my dress, and I felt like I was burning up from the inside as he finally put them on my sensitive skin. There was nothing tender in his movements, instead he was like a starving man that was tearing through his first meal in a century, nipping at the column of my throat and rubbing my nipples with a rough focus that made them stand up and take notice.

“Wait,” I said, and struggled out of his iron grasp to push my wreck of a dress down my hips. It pooled around my feet and I stepped out of it, pressing my bare, naked flesh to his chest and shivering at his heat. I knew what was happening now.

“This is a dream,” I informed him, pulling at the belt that was holding his pants up. Stupid belt, stupid pants. “It doesn’t matter what I do here because I’m dreaming all of it. Including you.”

He said something, but I didn’t answer because my attention was clearly elsewhere.

I finally got his pants down, just as he impatiently brought our hips together and cupped my breast. I moaned into his mouth as he rubbed the peaks of my breasts, and I could feel the head of his cock rubbing against my lips, so close to my entrance that it was aching with anticipation.

I was soaking wet, and I knew he could feel it, because he teasingly put a hand in between our legs to stroke my folds with a finger. I pressed closer, aching for some stimulation, but he held me hips still, glaring at me, and I understood.

No moving, until he allowed me to move. I was going to play this dream’s evil game, just because I knew the climax would be worth it.

But I was going to play it my way. I took hold of his cock, rubbing my thumb lightly over the head, as it leaked pearly white liquid. His breath hitched, and I felt him waiting to see what I would do. I collected his pre-come in my hand and, making sure he was paying attention, licked it teasingly off my fingers, wet and messy and obscene.

I could hear him groan, and felt the rumble of it on my skin pressing against his.

“Tease,” he accused, and grabbed my bottom with both hands, squeezing hard enough to make me gasp, and lifted my bodily up by the ass. I found myself clinging to him like a monkey, clit pressed right up against the hard heat of his shaft. I rubbed against him desperately, trying to deepen the pressure, but his hand came up and fisted my hair around it, pulling with enough force for it to be a warning, and I took the hint and subsided.

Before I knew it, he’d toppled us both on the bed, his hand cupping the back of my head in an unexpected show of tenderness. I snorted internally. Did my subconscious think Rook was secretly a softie? I sure hoped that I was smarter than that.

I felt the ripple of his muscles against my soft breasts as he pressed against me, breathing harshly and staring into my eyes. I wriggled uncomfortably, not sure what he was looking for. His expression was intense, like he was searching for the answer to something when I didn’t even know what the question was.

I thrust my hips up demandingly, so dream-Rook understood exactly what I wanted from him. “Your cock. In me,” I said bossily, and when he smirked I knew I was in trouble.

He held my arms above my head and pinned me like I weighed nothing, while he licked and sucked at my nipples. I arched, breaths getting shorter and shallower as he tormented me. I could feel the orgasm building in me, hot and heavy, as he nipped at my breasts, combining pleasure and pain in a way that just made me want more.

More of anything.

He finally let go of my arms, and kneeled on the bed, pushing my legs up and apart so the backs of my knees hooked around his shoulder. I let out small, fluttering little gasps when he circled my clit with his fingers first, and then his tongue. He slipped two fingers into my hole, and I thrust up with my hips, trying to find some friction or pressure to build the waves of the pleasure that were coursing through me.

I was so lost in the sensations that I didn’t even notice that he’d lined up his cock with my entrance until his head was nudging at me. His cock was big and thick, definitely one of the biggest I’d ever had, and up there with Thistle’s. He pushed into me slowly, and I could see the curve of his wicked smile, as though he was eager to make me wait. He sank in inch by inch, and the heel of his hand pressed hard and flat on my clit, enough that I was seeing stars as he thrust in—

And I woke up.

I looked around, realized I was still definitely on my bed at the Masters’s house, with its prim cream-colored sheets and the fae book resting on my chest, and groaned, letting my head fall back with a thump. My pussy was still throbbing and my panties were soaked.

Ugh, how embarrassing.

If I had to have sex dreams like I was thirteen again, couldn’t I at least have come before waking up? Stupid brain.

I hurried into the bathroom, peeking through the curtain on the way. There were weak grey-orange streaks of light poking through the dark sky.

It must already be near dawn. Somehow, I’d only managed to sleep for four hours.

No wonder I felt so tired.

I slipped into the bathroom, turned the light on and faced myself in the mirror. My face was flushed and my expression was guilty, the circles under my eyes made me look like a panda.

I sighed and splashed water on my face, as the last few curls of warmth from the dream left me. I wasn’t going to go back to sleep, and anyway I had that fae book to finish.

I settled down on my bed and went back to reading. The best feeling in the world was sinking into a good book and feeling the real world falling away. And the fae world was real…which made it even better.

My mind kept drifting to Rook, because of the dream. I couldn’t shake it, so I decided to lean into it, and learn about his family.

There was an entire section devoted to genealogies and family trees, and I found Rook’s name under the House of Aurelian, at the very bottom. His family had its own page, starting at the very top from Aurelian, who had been Emperor, back when there was still such a thing.

I snorted quietly. That went some way towards explaining Rook’s arrogance.

His mother was called Isolte, apparently, and in small italics the book informed the reader that she was Queen of the Fire Kingdom. She didn’t have a line connecting her to Rook’s father, like most others in the tree did, and I wondered why.

Maybe she didn’t inform anyone of the father’s identity? Was that normal for the fae? Maybe they had different views on that sort of thing, especially when it came to royalty.

I flipped back to the index and found mentions of her in chapters of the history concerning the most recent war. That must be the one Thistle and the others had fought in, I thought, and then wondered if Thistle was in the history.

Hadn’t Rook accused him of hacking his way into the position of General? The thought made me feel slightly ill. I couldn’t believe Thistle would have done all that. But after all, I barely knew him.

About Isolte, I found quite a lot. Everything I read made me incredibly happy that I’d never met her. I even felt sorry for Rook. It couldn’t have been remotely easy, having her for a Mother.

The fair Queen Isolte, began the chapter, amassed her army of loyal subjects in preparation for the war when it became clear that negotiations had collapsed. It was rumored that King Dorian and Queen Aemilia of the Forest Kingdom extended the possibility of an alliance, which she refused.

‘I have no need of those lowborn that hide in the trees and cower from battle’, she was reported to have said, ‘for the mighty house of Aurelian has been blessed with the greatest gift of all: a weapon with power that none have dreamt of. The armies of my enemies will tremble in fear as I lay waste to the valley and turn them all to ash.’

As the war neared, many of her subjects sought shelter within the confines of her castle, for it had once been a fortress built by the great Aurelian himself, to withstand any form of attack. Indeed, at one point during the war, the Earth Kingdom’s troops attempted to starve them into surrendering, by creating a blockade that prevented supplies of food, water and medicines from getting through to the castle’s stores. This was a year-long siege that the great fortress withstood.

When the truce between the four kingdoms was declared, the people emerged from the castle apparently unharmed, but refused to speak of how they had all survived without supplies for the entire year, including the cruel winter.

The Queen famously revived the tradition of torturing traitors and seditionists by placing them on a great rack in the middle of the square, to act as a deterrent for those who would contemplate treason.

In the year 236 AU, sixteen years before the start of the war, she gave birth to a son, Ruqinian the First.

Renowned as a great tactician and warrior, the Queen won the throne from her brother, Urquhart the Third, through a one-on-one fight to the death that lasted three days and seven hours, at the end of which she slit his throat in front of a cheering crowd of nobles and courtiers…

She sounded like a bloodthirsty monster with no morals, I thought, shutting the book firmly.

I didn’t want to read anymore of her famous torture methods or how many people she’d murdered.

Well, maybe the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

But no, even with my low opinion of Rook, I couldn’t reconcile the sullen boy from the mansion with this…Prince whose mother was a violent psychopath. I felt a surge of pity for him, and chuckled at the thought of offering him any sympathy.

It would be like trying to pet a hedgehog.

For the first time, I seriously thought about what I’d agreed to do for him. I realized that I had no real idea if his intentions were good or not. I’d taken for granted that he wanted to go home, just as Thistle and Sorrel did, and that he was tired of being a nobody in the ‘Mudlands’, as he called our world.

A chill crept into my heart.

What if he was going to try and start the war again?

And tonight I was going to spend the entire evening with him, ‘training’.

I bit my lip in worry. Maybe I could get Sorrel or Thistle to come as well? I really didn’t want to be alone with him, I knew I’d blurt out some question that would rile him up.

‘Was your mother really a vicious tyrant?’ wasn’t a question anyone would take to kindly.

“Juliet,” Ellie said, knocking on my door. I jumped, and immediately stuffed the book under my pillow.

“Yeah!” I called back, sitting with my legs dangling over the side and trying to look innocent. She cracked the door open a few inches but didn’t come in, thankfully.

“Breakfast’s ready!”

“Okay, thanks! I’m going to shower now!”

I looked over at the clock on my nightstand. It was 7 am, and I’d slept so little I could feel my eyelids pulling themselves down in protest.

Worst of all, I could feel the phantom touch of dream-Rook’s hands on my body.

How was I going to be able to act normal around real-Rook when I’d just had an incredibly hot sex dream starring him?

Fuck my entire life.

19

Rook

Fuck, I thought bitterly, staring up at the ceiling.

I couldn’t sleep, not after that dream.

I could still feel her, slick and wet and open, begging me to fuck her…and I could feel the ghost of her walls, clenched tight around me like silk stretching…right before I fell out of my dream and back into this hell hole.

I could feel my hardness poking through the soft material of my sweatpants in the front, but ignored it. After letting her slip through my fingers, like hell was I going to settle for my own left hand. I waited until my erection subsided, but memories of her kept slipping through unbidden.

Like the feeling of her soft hair wrapped around my hand, as I pulled her head back, making her gasp. The taste of her throat, and the flutter of her pulse as I bit down…

It was distracting as fuck. And the worst part was that in real life, I hated her. Hated the way Sorrel and Thistle both went all googly eyed around her.

Again, unwanted memories: her, lying panting on the giant bed in Thistle’s room, hair pooled around her in inky strands, thighs falling apart as Sorrel fucked her with his mouth and Thistle with his dick in her mouth. I couldn’t erase how her body looked from my mind, pink and panting like she was being well fucked.

My fists clenched involuntarily.

Sure, I shouldn’t have snooped in the first place. That was on me. And now I couldn’t erase what I’d seen. Well done, me.

Forget her, I commanded myself, and my breaths eased. But I still felt the prickle of the scars on my chest, throbbing with a slow burn at the base. Her phantom touch lingered on them, and my body didn’t care that it wasn’t real.

I slid the door open on the weird glass boxes that mundies liked to clean themselves in. The three of us had hooted with laughter and contempt the first time we’d figured out what they were for, after acquiring the house.

“They like to bathe standing up in little sealed rooms,” Thistle said in disbelief, and turned the showerhead on for the sixth time in as many minutes.

“You have to admit, they’re resourceful,” Sorrel said dryly, a book in hand as always.

“I don’t give a flying fuck about how resourceful they are,” I said, crossing my arms and backing out of the tiled room, “There’s no way I’m using it.”

“What’ll you do about the smell?” Sorrel called good naturedly.

I ignored him and concentrated on each step as I walked away, feeling the walls closing in on me.

Stupid mundies and their tiny little wooden death traps that you couldn’t even breathe properly in…they were airless coffins, was what they were. Some rooms didn’t even have windows! And the ones that did, they insisted on obscuring the outside world with curtains.

Back home, we’d bathed in hot springs, in the open air. There was nothing like stripping off and leaping into the scalding hot water, feeling it burn your skin like it was cauterizing the scars there, and swimming down until you could see the malenderes that lived at the bottom.

They were tricksters that would try to catch unwary swimmers once in a while, but they knew to stay away from me.

And now I had…adapted, easily twisting the knob that turned the showerhead on.

The temperature of the water was as high as it could possibly go, and as it beat down on me, burning my skin and turning me lobster red, I thought I could feel it scalding away the remnants of her touch.

I wonder what Mother would make of me now that I blended in with the mundies so well that I’d might as well be one of them. I partied with them, listened to their inane gossip, and even fucked them.

God, she’d be so angry. It was the first thing that made me smile all day.

I went through the list of things we needed like it was a prayer: the ashes of a thing once beloved, blood of the opener, and a vision of the destination.

The girl had looked horrified when I recited the list. Possibly she thought we were savages. Humans tended to be squeamish about blood. And she’d looked at me strangely, like she thought I was both repulsive and fascinating.

I bared my teeth at the memory.

I was glad she wasn’t coming back with us. Not that she had any business being anywhere other than the Mudlands, but Sorrel was dangerously fond of her. She’d become his pet, and he was ready to indulge her with anything.

If she’d only asked, I knew he would have allowed it immediately.

“Of course, Juliet,” I could almost hear him telling her with a soppy look in his eyes, “Of course you can come to my Kingdom, and I’ll introduce you to my stuck up parents who’d sooner kill you and mount you on the trophy wall than play nice and tolerate you. But we’ll live happily ever after, you’ll see, sweetheart.”

Idiots, I thought contemptuously as I dried myself.

Even she would have more sense than to believe that, I hoped. Sometimes she made me think she wasn’t a hopeless idiot by human standards. Which was a low bar to cross, to be fair.

And yet, a part of me was dying to see the expression on Queen Aemilia’s face when Sorrel turned up with a Mundie on his arm.

She’d have a fit, I thought gleefully. Her ice mask would slip and start to crack under the heat of her anger, and she’d abandon the nicey- nice façade to tear at the girl with her hands like a carrion eater rather than see that hybrid girl anywhere near her precious son.

My smile faded as I remembered how much I’d resented him.

The first time I saw him had been in a tournament, back when our kingdoms hadn’t officially been at war.

This just meant that instead of openly amassing armies, each side had hundreds of spies in the other’s palace who would regularly report back about court gossip and eavesdrop on tactical meetings.

Mother didn’t tolerate this for long, of course. She had a method where she fed the spies little tidbits of information that were mostly harmless, and would wait politely to see what got through, like a cat swishing its tail in warning at a mouse that was getting too cocky.

If the spy got ideas above their station and began proactively looking for information that they weren’t supposed to know…well, she would rip them apart, much like a cat did to a mouse, and leave its carcass somewhere unpleasant for people to find.

Of course, I wasn’t allowed to compete in the tournament.

I was too precious to risk, was the official word.

But I knew Mother wanted to keep me close at all times. It wouldn’t be safe to have your most powerful weapon go wandering off on its own. So easy to stage an accident or a kidnapping, after all.

But I was allowed to spend time with the other children my age. They were for the most part either terrified or looking to earn respect through violence. It was right before the war started, so there was unease in the air, and everyone wanted to be supporting the right side before swords started clashing.

They were idiots.

They knew my Mother and still chose wrong.

They saw her iron will, and her tactical genius…they saw me, and they still believed that Sorrel’s parents, or Thistle’s armies could save them.

Anyway, that was the first time I saw Sorrel.

He was a little bit taller than me back then, so I hated him instantly. He was dressed like the perfect little prince, in a dark green tunic that matched his eyes, and grey trousers that wouldn’t show dirt. Worst of all, he was allowed to wear comfortable shoes. He didn’t seem to have any bodyguards at all, unlike me with my Nurse who was not-so-secretly a member of my Mother’s Queensguard and could kill a dozen armed fae in her sleep.

And there I was, in my tight diamond-encrusted shoes that pinched my toes, dressed like I was at my coronation in a grand silk cape lined with ursa fur and thick silk.

The high, peaked collar of my stiff velvet doublet was nearly choking me.

I felt ridiculous.

I knew I looked ridiculous.

I could see it in the eyes of the other children, who carefully avoided looking at me and instead played with each other.

Sorrel was playing some sort of juvenile game with the other children, and I couldn’t help watching them out of the corner of my eye. Nurse didn’t really…speak to me, other than when she was barking at me to eat or training me to become a deadly killing machine.

“The teams aren’t even,” one green-haired kid whined, crossing his arms and looking over at his side, which was one person short of the other team.

“It’s okay,” Sorrel said, catching my eye. “Hey, look! Let’s ask him to be on our team!”

The green-haired kid looked over at me and went white, grabbing hold of Sorrel’s sleeve and whispering frantically in his ear. Whatever he said made Sorrel shoot me a look of surprise and disgust, and he turned away, saying that they were fine playing with odd teams.

My cheeks burned, and my eyes pricked with tears, though I blinked them away fiercely. I knew Nurse was watching me carefully, and would report everything I said back to Mother.

“Why did Mother send me to mingle with imbeciles?” I asked disdainfully, standing up and twisting my arm around my cape. “Does she want me to join the drooling idiots playing childrens’ games when we’re on the cusp of war?”

I made sure that my voice carried. The children in the corner turned, but Sorrel was the only one bold enough to come forward.

“My mother says we won’t have to go to war,” he said, loud and confident. He looked twice as kingly in his rags as I did in my finery, and my anger grew hotter.

“Oh, well if your mother says so,” I sneered. “Not to worry, I’m sure she’ll be one of the first ones strung up when my Mother punishes her and all of your people for your stupidity.”

Sorrel went white as Nurse, who was enjoying herself hugely, put a hand on my shoulder.

“There now, my Prince,” she said, her forked tongue hissing with laughter, “You must be kind to those below your station, no matter how trying you find their company to be.”

“Don’t talk about my mother!” Sorrel said, face screwed up with the effort of not crying.

“Oh, what’re you going to do?” I asked contemptuously. “Go running back to her, I’m sure she’ll protect her cowardly son—“

He was on me in a flash, punching me twice and getting a painful kick in before Nurse pulled him off and twisted his ear.

That was nothing compared to the humiliation Mother forced me to endure, because of course Nurse had told her what happened, including that I provoked another prince into violence by threatening his queen mother.

“I must be sure to teach your prudence or your mouth will see our lands in flames before the season is over,” Mother said, watching stony-eyed as Nurse whipped me raw and bloody.

I hadn’t been able to sit down for a week after that particular whipping.

Even now the memory made me burn with anger, and the long thin slashes on my torso lit up with a remembered pain.

“Fuck,” I said out loud, relishing the sound cutting through the air.

Nurse wasn’t here to police me anymore, I reminded myself, pulling on a sleeveless shirt and some sweatpants. And the humans understood comfortable clothing. Even their suits were less of a pain than the silk and velvet I was trapped in back home.

I could feel Sorrel and Thistle stirring in other parts of the house, and wondered if they were friends now just because they were fucking the same girl. I wasn’t bitter, just pissed that she could just waltz in and suddenly have a connection with them for no fucking reason that I could see.

Well, other than the perfect tits and the heart-shaped ass. That wasn’t nothing, I thought, nostrils flaring, but it wasn’t enough.

Fuck all of them.

I didn’t bother with shoes as I headed outside. I was worked up enough that I wanted to run, and I did it best barefoot. The cool air brushed my face, and I began jogging in the direction of the nearest park. It had a path that led off into the forest, and the lake a few miles away as well. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to see the kelpie yet.

She might be asleep, anyway.

They kept odd hours, kelpies.

My feet pounded the pavement, and I kept running until I felt my soles burn and my breaths come out ragged, the world a blur around me. When I slowed, the sun was creeping up, and I was in the forest. I must have followed the trail subconsciously, but overshot the turn that would have taken me to the lake and instead continued on, to the deeper and wilder part of the forest.

This was where more of the other fae lived, the ones trapped on this side, just like us.

Well, not just like us. They’d chosen to come to this world, so they didn’t have anyone else to blame now that they were all slowly dying.

Most of the forest-dwelling fae were more animalistic. They were afraid of mundies and their iron and their great, smoking cities.

Why they’d decided to live here, even temporarily, was a source of mystery to me. At least in our world they weren’t being poisoned by the Mudlands.

I’d said that to Sorrel once and he just gave me one of his judgmental looks.

I could sense them all around me, staring curiously and trying to figure me out. They didn’t often get visitors to this part of the forest. Sorrel didn’t count, since he was practically their leader anyway, the twat.

“I come in peace,” I called out to them.

I wasn’t afraid of them, since they were weak and probably unused to fighting anyway. But honestly, I was tired.

Too tired to bother sparring with these primitives and their crude bows and arrows, and blunt swords that couldn’t make me bleed if they stabbed me right through the heart.

“Prince Ruqinian,” came a weak, hushed voice. From the corner of my eye, I noticed a movement.

She hopped out of the trees with surprising agility for someone who was obviously ancient. Age had made the kelpie stronger and more malevolent, but it had the opposite effect on this creature. She was old and frail, stooped like the hook of the cane that she used.

She was dressed in faded greens and browns, and in fact the only thing about her that wasn’t faded were her eyes, which were keen and glittering. Her hair looked like it was made of cobwebs, and her only ornament was a crude ring she wore on her hand. I recognized it as a version of the ruler’s ring my Mother wore…a sadder, more pathetic version. She blended into the forest almost entirely. If I hadn’t been taught to sense these things, I wouldn’t have known that I was being watched.

Luckily, Mother had a healthy amount of paranoia.

“It’s me, in the flesh,” I replied flippantly.

Slowly, others crept out of the trees, landing on the soft forest floor with no more sound than a falling leaf. They were all dressed in similar forest colors, and I saw with some surprise that there were only around ten of them.

“Where are the rest?” I asked her with a raised eyebrow. “Don’t I get a proper reception?”

One of the older women stepped forward, no doubt ready to tell me off for my rudeness, but the crone waved her off, looking at me under the hood of her creased eyes.

“Prince Ruqinian,” she repeated, and although her voice was soft it seemed as though the entire forest stopped to hear her words, “We did not expect a visit from you.”

There was a hunger in them that made me instinctively want to back away, like anyone would when confronted with a pack of starving wolves in winter. But I was—for better or worse—my Mother’s son, so I stood my ground and aimed my most disdainful look at all of them.

“I didn’t expect to visit,” I said haughtily, using the voice that sent servants scurrying back in the palace. I saw a couple of them shift uncertainly and look at their leader.

“It is considered polite to introduce yourself to royalty when you’re aware of their identity,” I added pointedly.

“I am Hitchin,” she said, looking at me with an unblinking stare. Her expression hadn’t changed through my rude response, which was…weird. I would have expected her to be calling for my blood by now.

Or maybe that was just Mother’s way.

“Our people are greatly depleted,” Hitchin said, and seemed to sag on her cane from exhaustion. “Many are gone. Taken by the one that hides in the shadows.”

“The fuck are you on about, you old bat?” I asked, huffing. “Don’t tempt me,” I added in warning to a boy—a teenager, who looked like he wanted to fight me.

“Yes, settle down Lornam,” Hitchin said sharply, and he subsided.

“We are preyed upon,” she said, “By a shadow that creeps into our houses and takes away our people. The women, the children…none are safe.”

“Is this shadow a metaphor?” I asked skeptically.

“It’s a beast,” a young girl piped up unexpectedly. I hadn’t noticed her before because she was still clinging to her mother’s skirts, but I caught a glimpse of wide brown eyes. “I saw it!”

“Hush, Nimae,” her mother said, darting a frightened look at me. I rolled my eyes, accustomed to playing the role of heartless monster.

“And how long has this been happening?” I asked.

Hitchin sighed. “Perhaps since we first came to this forest,” she said, dark eyes troubled. “We lose people. That was always the way of the forest—to bears, to accidents, to carelessness…but the numbers kept increasing, and a few weeks ago, the beast stole a child from his bed.”

“We found the bones next to the lake,” the girl’s mother said hollowly, pressing her daughter’s ears closed to shield her from the horror.

For the first time, I felt a trickle of unease drop down my spine.

“Doesn’t Sorrel come here often? What does he say?”

“He was the one who found the bones,” Hitchin said wearily. “He promised to help, and said he would bring his foster brothers, so we thought—“

“You thought he sent me,” I finished.

I had a nagging memory of brushing Sorrel off a few weeks ago, when he was desperately trying to tell me something, but then he was always trying to talk about his feelings and shit, I just didn’t have time…

“Help us,” Hitchin said, clutching her cane so hard her fingers turned white.

“No,” I said flatly, and turned my back on them and their hungry, hollow eyes. “I can’t help anyone, let alone myself.”

“What if I could offer you something in return?” she said quietly.

“You!” I said, and laughed so loudly the birds were startled out of the trees. “There’s nothing you have that I could want. Go back to your hovels. Or better yet, move. Find houses in the Mudlands—trust me, it’s easy to live there.”

“Forever?” the little girl piped up, staring at me curiously. “Do you live there?”

“I do.”

“You’ll be there forever?”

“No,” I said coldly and definitely.

“I said that I could offer you something in return,” Hitchin repeated. She didn’t seem to have paid attention to anything I said.

Fucking typical.

“Really?” I said, just short of a sneer. “All right then, surprise me. What could you possibly have to give me?”

“I can tell you how to kill your mother,” she said, looking steadily at me. I went still.

“Why do you think I want to kill my mother?” I asked pleasantly.

“I can hear your thoughts,” she said, “I can feel the burning hatred you have for her.”

“And you would help me kill her? My own mother?”

“Just because she’s your mother doesn’t make her not a raging #%^&,” she said calmly, and I saw the girl’s mother clamping her hands over the girl’s ears again—too late, she’d probably heard it all the same.

“She is a raging #%^@,” I agreed reluctantly. “But I think you’re lying.”

“I don’t lie,” she said, grey eyes implacable. “I learned the secret of it long ago, but was cursed to be silent. If you capture the beast, I will break the curse on myself and tell you what you want to know.”

“There’s no breaking that sort of curse,” I said, disappointed. For one moment, one beautiful moment, I had dared to believe that she could help me—

“There is a way to break it,” she corrected me, “But I will die in the process. And I am willing.”

“Hitchin!” the girl cried in distress, until her mother covered her mouth.

“Why would you do that?” I asked, staring fixedly at her. “Why bother capturing the beast if you’re just going to die anyway?”

“For your sake, I hope you understand some day,” she said, sighing like the rustling of leaves. “My life is a leaf in a river’s great eddy. Swept up quickly, and forgotten.”

“Cool,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “I’m not going to tell you not to do it—fuck knows, I need this. I will tell you that it’s not worth it. You’re doing it for your people, you’re their leader—it’s a nice sentiment. But they’re not worth this.”

“You think I should leave them to their fates?” she asked, eyeing me beadily.

“I’d tell you to take care of yourself,” I replied.

“You would make a poor king,” she said, drawing her shawl around herself. She sounded faintly disappointed.

“I don’t intend to be king,” I said, “I intend to turn the throne and the crown and everything she built to ash, that’s all.”

“You would leave your kingdom to burn?”

“They can have a ruler, it just won’t be me. The sun will set on the house of Aurelian. No great loss to our world, as I’m sure you’ll agree,” I said, grinning widely at her. “Though I do wonder…you know I’m going to find a way back to our world.”

“Yes.”

“Well, why don’t you want to come back with us? You weren’t exiled like we were, you don’t have to stay here.”

“We chose to stay here,” Hitchin said. “We have no quarrel with the Mudlanders, though they poison us slowly. At least here, we are allowed to live in peace.”

“We’re all running from something,” I called as I left, “But for you, it might be time to go back.”

I heard her voice like a whisper on the wind as I started jogging away, “Never.”

Capturing a slavering beast that ate little fae children wasn’t originally my top priority, I thought, as I ran back to the house, wind whipping through my hair.

But, I thought as a smile grew on my face, the expression on the girl’s face when I told her what we were doing tonight was going to be worth all of it.

20

Juliet

I went to the boys’ mansion in the afternoon on my bike. It was cool enough that I only needed to wear a light jacket, but the activity still made me warm so I stripped off my jacket and top, and rung their doorbell in just my tank top and leggings.

Even before the bell chimed, the door was ripped open, and I saw Rook standing there, glaring at me in all his bad-tempered glory.

For a moment, his eyes slipped down to my chest, and I remembered that I hadn’t worn a bra. Shit. But they snapped back up, and he grimaced with disgust before disappearing into the house.

I rolled my eyes, but my cheeks heated up a little. I was trying to act natural around him, and maintain the aggressive dislike I felt for him at the front of my mind, but my brain kept flicking back to images from the dream that I had last night. It had felt all too real.

The wide, strong sweep of his shoulders reminded me of how effortlessly he’d pinned me down on his bed, and the muscles moving in his neck made me think about how I’d hooked my ankles around them, stretching my thighs wide as he fingered me, hot and slick…

I started as he abruptly stopped and turned.

“What?” he barked suspiciously, crossing his arms and glaring down. If I didn’t know better, I would think that my presence was affecting him just as much as his was affecting me. But that was just crazy.

“Nothing,” I said insolently, matching my posture to his. Then I realized that I was just being childish, dropped my arms and looked around. We were in the living room, but it was empty apart from the two of us.

“Where are Sorrel and Thistle?” I asked, and as I saw his nostrils flare in annoyance, I knew I’d said the wrong thing.

“Not here,” he said, “But I hope you’ll be able to work through the pain of their absence.”

“Jealous?” I asked, curling my lip.

I knew I was playing with fire here, but something in his arrogant, sneering face made me turn into the worst version of myself. I guess now I knew what it was like to have a nemesis.

“Hardly,” he said, and turned away again. I was getting sick of him turning his back on me in dismissal, but I had to admit, I loved seeing him walk away.

That he always wore tight black jeans was immensely helpful.

And I didn’t have to see his stupid face. Win-win.

“Before we go, we need to take some things,” he said, walking over to two large backpacks that I hadn’t noticed before. “Weapons and supplies.”

“Weapons?” I repeated, alarm bells going off in my head. “I thought this was just like…spotting practice. Go see the pretty fairies, name things from the book you gave me, and all that. Like a quiz.”

He snorted. “If you’re under the impression that you’ll be in no danger being around us, you’re sorely mistaken,” he said, and tossed one of the packs to me. I caught it somehow, and staggered back, winded. It was incredibly heavy, like it was filled with rocks.

“Didn’t think about that when you were fucking my brothers, did you?” he asked in a sing-song voice that made me want to slap him.

“I was occupied with other things,” I said, because I knew it would annoy him. “What’s in the backpack, anyway?”

“Wea—“

“Weapons and supplies, got it. What do we need the weapons for?”

“We’re helping someone fend off some unfriendly visitors.”

“Since when do you care about that?”

“Since they offered me something valuable in return,” he said, teeth gleaming white.

“I should’ve known you wouldn’t do it out of a sense of altruism,” I muttered. “Who—hey, wait up!”

He’d left without a backward glance, and his brisk strides and long legs took him almost to the front door before I caught up.

“For future reference, smaller people have a harder time keeping up,” I said, panting slightly under the weight of the pack that I’d slung over my shoulders. He looked me over flatly, and I knew I made for a pathetic sight. I was definitely not a very athletic person. I could do long, relaxing strolls on flat ground if there was a picnic at the end to tempt me, but that was about it.

“I’m guessing you won’t be able to run,” he said, and sighed, shoulders dropping.

“That’s absolutely correct. Unless you want to carry me to the hospital,” I said. “Can’t we make the packs lighter? Let’s see…all of this stuff can’t possibly be essential!”

I refused to let myself feel bad about holding us back. He knew my size, and he knew how strong regular humans were, this was just poor planning on his part. It made me want to take him by the shoulders and tell him that he needed to think things through, like I was a gruff but supportive coach-slash-mentor figure.

Luckily, I was also very aware that he would probably bite my head off if I even brushed against him accidentally…maybe literally.

Firmly putting aside any thoughts of ‘brushing against’ him, accidentally or otherwise, I zipped the pack open and prepared to go through the contents.

“We need all of it,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s all essential.”

“Flashlight, steak knife, bags and bags of…meat? What the hell?!” I said, holding one of the bags up by the corner, revolted. They were sealed properly, thank goodness, but they looked incredibly raw, and the contents were still bloody.

“It’s to lure the beast,” he said, unfazed by my horror. “What, never eaten a steak before?”

“I usually wait for mine to be cooked, I don’t gobble them straight off the animal,” I said, dropping it back into the pack with a shudder. “All right, you’re freaking me out with talk of ‘the beast’. I’m guessing this isn’t going to be…safe?”

“You mundies and your obsession with staying alive and safe,” he drawled, conveniently bypassing answering my question. Well, the answer would probably be ‘No, you’ll probably die’, anyway, knowing him.

“Do Thistle and Sorrel know we’re doing this?” I asked suspiciously.

I didn’t entirely believe that they’d be okay with sending me on this kind of thing. Maybe it was just my reading too much into our relationship, but I knew that at least Sorrel was aware of how fragile humans were in comparison to fae.

“Don’t worry, little coward, I’ll keep you safe. Now, how did you come here?”

His eyes fell on my bike, small and ladylike with its wicker basket in the front, and painted a light blue, the color of the sky in summer.

“You’ve got to be fucking with me,” he growled, stalking over to it.

“Why can’t we just go in your car?” I pointed out reasonably.

“Unlike Thistle and Sorrel, I’m not fond of those metal death traps,” he said shortly. “I prefer to run.”

“Like…everywhere?” I said, surprised.

“Yes,” he said, and to my surprise gestured grumpily for me to get on the bike. “I haven’t gone fully native yet. You’ll need to use this to get there.”

“It’s not going to hold both of us,” I pointed out, an involuntarily smile curling my mouth at the thought of how ridiculous we would look, a grown man riding behind a girl half his size on a tiny little blue bicycle…

“I’ll be running next to you,” he said glaring, as though he knew exactly what I was thinking and hated me for it.

So that was how we got to the forest, with me on my bike, carrying an outsized backpack full of raw meat and murder implements, and Rook running next to me. I thought he’d be as fast as a regular person, or slightly faster, but that wasn’t the case.

He didn’t really seem to be exerting himself to keep up with me, and just seemed to flash from point to point. I wondered how fast he could really go if he wanted to. Maybe he would just become a blur that my eyes couldn’t keep up with.

Half an hour later, we reached a park that was almost deserted since it was nearing the evening and the sky was darkening around us.

“Maybe we should have come here in the morning,” I told Rook, rubbing my arms as a chill breeze floated through the air.

“Put your coat on,” he said absently, and I did. I’d completely forgotten that I had removed it and not bothered to wear it again, and was now very grateful for its presence.

The surroundings were almost eerie, now that there were no shouting, laughing kids running around or parents standing in groups and chatting. There was only the rustle of the wind making the swings creak and the leaves rustle.

“This seems like a great place to lure a beast to,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself.

“Whatever it is, it wouldn’t be stupid enough to come here where all the humans are. Your kind tend to be more vicious about stealing children and that sort of thing.”

I thought of how Edenfall—or any town, really—would react to news of a strange, dangerous animal sneaking into their homes at night and taking their children and had to agree.

There would be one hell of an outcry. It would definitely make the national news. Everyone would be too afraid to sleep in their own beds.

“Then why are we here?”

“The trail starts here,” he said, and I didn’t understand until we went deeper into the park, where the playground equipment vanished, and it became a stretch of grass. There was a small path, almost hidden by arching trees on both sides. I clutched the strap of my backpack tighter, suddenly grateful for its existence. If worst came to worst, I would at least be able to hit someone with it.

We didn’t speak as we started down the path. The trees crowded both sides of the path so heavily that there wasn’t even a chink of light coming through. I didn’t think it would have been any better in the afternoon either.

Rook’s eyesight seemed to be a lot better than mine, so I was fine with him taking the lead, and was careful to step where he stepped. The forest floor was soft and wet, and my shoes sank almost an inch deep when I walked. The hushed silence made the hairs on my neck prickle. There were no bugs, no birds, just a deep silence like someone had thrown a blanket over us.

“Where are we going?” I murmured to Rook, breaking the quiet with my voice. The forest seemed to swallow the sound immediately. We’d been walking for a while, and though I wasn’t tired yet I knew I would be soon. He threw me an impatient look.

“You can’t be tired already.”

“I’m not going to be able to walk forever,” I warned him, and saw him throw his head back in exasperation.

I braced myself, ready for him to come out with a cutting remark, when something moved above us in the trees. I crept closer to Rook, refusing to be ashamed of myself for wanting to stay close to the biggest, baddest animal in the forest.

“Rook,” I said urgently.

“I saw,” he said, seeming unconcerned.

“Aren’t you going to do anything?”

“No.”

A figure landed with a thump in front of us, and my hand went involuntarily to Rook’s arm and squeezed it tight. He didn’t seem to notice, eyes trained intently on our visitor who, I was thankful to see, really didn’t look like a beast. He looked like a boy, although looks could be deceiving.

“You,” Rook said as the boy straightened up. “You’re one of Hitchin’s, aren’t you? I seem to remember you.”

I had no idea who Hitchin was, but the boy didn’t look he was any kind of threat to us, so I relaxed and quickly dropped my arm from its death grip on Rook. Who looked down at me and smirked. I clenched my jaw. So he had noticed.

Dammit.

The boy looked young—maybe in his pre-teens or early teens. He reminded me of Derek. They had the same gangly build and curly hair.

But this boy wore the strangest clothes I’d ever seen. His loose tunic looked like it was made from leaves and bark, stitched together with some soft, cloudy material that reminded me of cobwebs. His long, russet-colored hair came down to his shoulders, and he was barefoot.

“My name is Lornam,” he said, chin jutting up proudly. “I’m Hitchin’s grandson, and I’m supposed to be your guide.” Then he noticed me, half-hiding in Rook’s shadow and his eyes nearly popped out of his head. “You brought a human?”

“Hi,” I said, waving awkwardly, “I’m Juliet. Who’s Hitchin?”

“Our leader,” he said, still staring at me like I was a strange and exotic zoo animal. “What do you suppose a Mundie could help you with?” he asked Rook.

“I thought I was only half—“ I started to say, but Rook interrupted smoothly as though I hadn’t spoken.

“She carries my things,” he said snootily, every inch of him the arrogant prince, “And she amuses me, like a chattering monkey.”

“I see,” Lornam said, nodding as though things had slotted into place in his head. They left me spluttering indignantly, and started walking further into the trees.

“I’m going to show you where the child was found,” he said somberly. “By the river. Only the bones.”

“That’s horrible,” I breathed, having finally caught up.

“I wonder why it left the bones,” Rook said with macabre curiosity, “It would have been easier to just let the bones sink to the bottom of the river.”

“Maybe it didn’t think of that,” I suggested, “Maybe it’s just not very smart.”

“It waited until the night of the autumn festival, when everyone was tired from the revelry, to steal the child,” Lornam said quietly. “We think it planned ahead.”

“It watched you, understood your movements, and made a plan,” Rook mused. “No—it’s quite cunning.”

I shivered. “Do you think it’s watching us right now?” I asked.

“Our backpacks have charms on them,” Rook said carelessly, “They should repel malicious creatures for a few hours.”

I was reluctantly impressed. Both that Rook had thought about it, and that he’d bothered to protect me as well as himself. “And what about the kid?” I said, glancing sideways at Lornam.

“Oh, he’s on his own,” said Rook in a matter of fact tone. Lornam didn’t seem too bothered by this. Instead, he hefted a sharp looking dagger and just grinned at me, teeth gleaming in the dimness.

“I can take care of myself, don’t you worry, hu--Juliet,” he said. On the whole, it was kind of ridiculous to see a thirteen year old boy holding a dagger and acting invincible, but I just sighed and followed them.

“I understand why Rook is stuck here,” I said as we walked, “But what are you and your people doing here? I thought the fae hated our world—what do you call it? The Mudlands?”

“Too proud to stay where they would need to obey their rulers,” Rook said, “And too proud to admit they need to go back.”

“Would you care if I stabbed him in the throat?” Lornam asked me. I was surprised and flattered.

“Oh no,” I said, flapping my hands, “Please, go right ahead. I would have done it myself, only nothing seems to hurt him.”

The kid looked disappointed, and I could sympathize.

“We left because we wanted a home, somewhere we could live without fear,” he said, lowering his knife hand, “And we stay because life is good. Hitchin is a fair leader, and everyone is treated with respect.”

“It doesn’t exactly look like you’re living without fear right now,” Rook said snidely as we struggled through some thorny bushes.

“Do you have to be such a complete dick all the fucking time?” I demanded.

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“I never knew life back in your world—our world, I mean,” Lornam said hastily. “I was born here.”

Through my red haze of annoyance with Rook, I could still find it funny that a thirteen year old thought he had to keep the peace. It shamed me into tucking my rage back in for another time.

“Do you go to school or anything?” I asked. How did they get by if they lived on their own in a huge forest with nobody else knowing of their existence, I had to wonder.

“Oh no, we would stick out there. The humans have all sort of snoops who’ll try to figure out where you live and want to talk to your parents. Don’t they?”

“They do,” I confirmed. “But I suppose you could do the same persuasion thing that Rook and his…roommates do, couldn’t you?”

“Hitchin doesn’t let us,” the kid said, with a hint of disappointment. “She says it’s wrong to take advantage, and that we should treat them with respect.”

“I like the sound of her already,” I said. I couldn’t see Rook’s face, but I did hear his small, pointed snort.

He probably thought treating anyone with respect or consideration was a waste of time, I thought, seething. I couldn’t wait till we were done and I was back in my own bed, and sound asleep.

“Here,” Lornam said, “This is where we found the bones.” He sounded subdued.

“I don’t see anything,” I said, looking around.

“They would have taken the bones away for the last rites,” Rook said impatiently. I could almost hear the implied ‘idiot’ in his tone alone.

Right, okay. I was shutting up unless I had something useful to say, even though I was frankly dying of curiosity.

“Can you sense anything?” Lornam asked curiously to Rook. “Our trackers couldn’t find a trace of anything—no smell, no aura, nothing.”

“I knew someone who could have tracked someone to the depths of hell just from a broken twig,” Rook said. “She didn’t bother teaching me any of it, though. Luckily, I learned a few tricks just by watching her.”

He pulled a bottle of something out of his backpack. It contained a glittering powder, like finely milled crystals.

“Moon dust,” he said shortly, seeing the question written in my face. “Useful to find auras.”

He took a handful, and tossed it into the air in front of us. It didn’t land in a heap, like regular dust, but gently floated in the air, creating a lumpy, cylindrical mass of glittering powder that zig-zagged until the muddy riverbank.

I touched my hand to the shimmery outline hesitantly. It was cool to the touch, and felt almost damp. But my finger came away dry.

“We lost it,” Lornam said with evident disappointment. “It can’t follow the leftover aura in the water.”

“We’re clearly not dealing with something that’s acting on animal instinct alone,” Rook said, eyes fixed at the point where the beast must have disappeared into the water. “So whatever took it went into the river,” Rook continued. “And it could have gotten out anywhere long the hundreds of miles that this river flows.”

“That’s not very helpful,” I sighed. “Well, now what’s our play?”

“We have no idea when it’ll come out next,” Rook shrugged. “We don’t really have an opportunity to capture it until we have any fucking idea of what’s guiding its actions.”

“Well, we know that it came out during the last festival when everyone was distracted,” I pointed out. “There’s no harm in waiting around at the next one to try and catch it, is there?”

“That’s in three days,” Lornam piped up. “But we’ve been thinking about canceling it this year, because of…everything that happened.”

“No, you have to go through with it,” Rook barked at him immediately. “It might be our only good chance for a while of catching the thing. Let Hitchin know I insist that the festival goes on as planned.”

“Make sure to add a ‘please’ somewhere in there,” I said to Lornam, low and pointed.

“What did you say?” Rook asked me, scowling darkly.

“I’m just saying, you catch more flies with honey,” I said, crossing my arms.

“Why would anyone want to catch flies?”

“It’s just an expression,” I said, scowling back at him. “Anyway, that’s not the point. Just try to persuade Hitchin that we need the festival to go on, please?” I asked Lornam.

“I can try,” Lornam said, eyes darting between us. “If you really think it’s that important.”

“It is,” I said at once.

Once Rook dispersed the aura outline by sprinkling water harvested in the light of the waxing moon over the powder, it seemed to almost melt and turn into a puddle of iridescent liquid. Like oil on the surface of a puddle, it gleamed with rainbow colors, but felt far nicer to touch. Pixies ate it, according to Rook, and they were a menace and infested every place they ever visited, so to my disappointment we had to cover it with dirt to make sure they couldn’t get at it.

Then we handed over the plastic bags of meat to Lornam, who promised to put it in traps around the perimeter of their village. They lived in treehouses far above the ground, I gathered from hints that had been dropped here and there, which I thought was fascinating.

Some eternally young part of me leaped with excitement at the thought of people living in treehouses. I even watched a reality show about it, so I was slightly obsessed. I was looking forward to the festival, when we would actually go to their village and sniff out the beast.

We walked back to the entrance to the trail in relative silence, just the two of us. Lornam had thanked us for our help back near the river and promised to let Hitchin know about our progress.

He hadn’t asked if we needed help getting back, and I wasn’t thrilled by how readily he seemed to fade into the foliage when we could have still used his help, but maybe he needed to catch up on his homework…whatever equivalent the fae had, anyway.

I asked Rook about it, to break up the awkward silence, and he seemed amused.

“I had a tutor,” he said, “She taught me to fight, read, and write. I had other tutors for things like strategy and history and diplomacy.”

“Doesn’t sound like they were very good.”

He laughed, a quick sound like a gunshot. “No, they were fools. Only Nurse knew how to make me obey.”

“How--?”

“First, she tried starving me. That didn’t work, obviously. Mother did it so often when I was a child that I stopped ever getting hungry. Then, she tried whipping me. That didn’t work either, you get used to the pain after a while. She couldn’t do anything more extreme to me, since I was, in a way, important to the kingdom. So she killed my horse.”

“She killed your—?”

“My horse, yes. Cornelius, he was my only way out of the palace—twice a week, I was allowed to ride into the forest and survive on my own by eating the berries that didn’t kill you. It was another test, but one that was…pleasant.”

“That’s horrible,” I said, with feeling. “That’s…so awful I don’t have any words for it. I’m sorry.”

“Why?” he asked, genuinely surprised. “You had nothing to do with it.”

“It’s an expression of sympathy,” I explained, “It doesn’t mean I think I’m to blame for what happened. I just meant…that sucks and I wish it hadn’t happened.”

“But it did happen,” he said, “So there’s no use moaning about it. That’s why I’m going to kill her.”

“Your nurse?”

“No, fool, my Mother. Well,” he added, “I might kill Nurse too, I’m sure she’s still part of Mother’s Queensguard, and wouldn’t be too overjoyed to see me again…well, if I have to do it, I’ll do it.”

“So you’re all right with killing your Mother but you won’t kill your awful abusive tutor?” I said, not understanding what I was hearing.

“She wasn’t the one who—oh, never mind. Some things, I don’t expect you to understand, Mundie girl,” he said. “And I don’t have to justify myself to you, of all people. Are you telling me there isn’t anyone you’ve ever known who you wish you could kill?”

I thought of Lachlan then. His big, meaty hands and his ugly, cheap looking tattoos and the smell of booze that hung around him like a shadow.

“There is someone,” I said. I didn’t want to have anything in common with Rook’s unhinged desire for revenge—but I understood where he was coming from, albeit quite reluctantly.

“See?” he said, sounding satisfied. “If you could kill him, you would. Unlike you, I don’t let sentiment get in the way.”

“I wouldn’t kill him,” I interrupted. “I’d killed whoever killed my mother.”

There was a short pause.

“This is where you tell me you’re sorry about my mother being dead,” I informed him. Twigs crackled under our feet.

“Should I be?” he asked. “I wouldn’t be if mine was killed, though I’d be sorry that I couldn’t do it myself.”

I sighed. “Never mind,” I told him, “You were brought up by savages. I’m ready to forgive quite a lot.”

He laughed, to my surprise, and started to run. He was ahead of me in a flash, and with a few more quick steps, he’d made it to the start of the trail. Grumbling quietly, I followed him, like the turtle in the story.

I wasn’t sorry to say goodbye to him, and since it was such a quiet town, I didn’t think twice about going home by myself. I assumed he would have immediately gone to whatever seedy club or bar he was usually welcome at, so packs of fawning girls and guys could offer to suck his dick.

But when I neared Liv’s house, in a part of town that had well-lit streets and wider bike lanes, I could see a movement from the corner of my eye. I jerked to a halt, perhaps surprising whoever was following me—though now I had an idea. I saw a dark blur disappearing into the trees when I turned around, but I was still able to make out the pale gleam of bare feet.

Smirking, I made it the rest of the way without incident. If he was so afraid of being seen doing something nice, I wasn’t going to call him out on it.

21

Juliet

The career counselor looked down at her shiny tablet, lips pursed as she went over what I assumed were my grades.

“Your GPA is perfect,” she finally said, “In fact, it’s better than perfect. You’ve taken college credits, I’m assuming?”

“Yes,” I confirmed. “If everything works out like I planned, I can finish college in three years with all the credits I’ve saved up.”

“Very impressive,” she said, and pushed her tablet away, looking up at me finally. “But let me be honest: it’s not enough.”

“Why not?” I asked, gripping the sides of my chair tightly. This was everything I’d busted my butt working for, it was my dream…even though I was poor and until a few months ago, hadn’t even been able to afford three square meals a day, the idea that I’d end up going to my dream school had buried itself deep in my mind and become a fact. “You just said my grades were great.”

She gave me a pitying look. That was almost worse than the news itself.

“Your grades are outstanding,” she confirmed, “And they make you a competitive candidate for most colleges. But, unfortunately, most is not all. Your dream school is at present, a reach. If that. You need to understand that there are thousands of students applying every year, and their acceptance rate is so low—“

“Just tell me what more I would need,” I said.

“You lack extracurriculars and community service, to start with,” she sighed. “Most students who are serious about getting in would have made sure to do a summer abroad—maybe in an exchange program, or building houses for people in—“

“I didn’t exactly have the time,” I said, hating how defensive I sounded. “I was busy trying to ace my classes and working two jobs in the evenings after class.”

“That time might have been better spent joining a sports team, doing an internship, or volunteering somewhere,” she said.

“Yes, but then I wouldn’t have been able to feed myself,” I pointed out.

It went on like that for a little while longer, with her pointing out that I only had good grades and good SAT scores, and me pointing out that if I hadn’t worked those jobs, I would most likely have starved or been thrown into the foster system because Mom couldn’t feed me. Neither of those was acceptable.

Still, as I glumly exited her office, I did understand where she was coming from. She wasn’t a bad person, she was just telling me how it was.

And the news wasn’t all bad. She truly believed that I’d get into any state school of my choice, with a full ride. That was better than nothing…but the thought of my dream college, with its ivy-covered old buildings and jewel-colored grass was virtually the only thing that kept me going for the last five years.

She said I still had a fighting chance of getting in or being waitlisted at the very least…but it was unlikely that they’d be able to offer me the kind of financial aid that I’d require. I didn’t say that that was just as good as not letting me in at all, and in fact I preferred to be rejected outright than have the possibility of getting in dangled just out of reach…but I think she got it from the look on my face anyway.

I told Liv all about it at lunch, and though all her friends—I couldn’t seem to think of them as anything other than ‘her friends’—seemed sympathetic, I knew they couldn’t really relate. They had trust funds set up for them, not just for college but for the rest of their lives. Most of them would never have to worry about anything other than how many designer suitcases they were allowed to take in first class on their next trip to Bora Bora.

“How was your meeting with the counselor?” I asked Liv, as the lunch bell rang.

“Fine,” she said carelessly, glancing down at her phone.

Liv wasn’t going to have any trouble getting into her first-choice school, I knew. It was a good school but Liv had the grades and everything else that was expected—cheerleading, community service, student council position—and, most importantly, her parents would pay for everything if she wasn’t offered a scholarship.

The thought followed me through school, and stayed with me even when I drove to the mansion with Sorrel. We’d gotten a few stares, smirks and whispers, but everyone seemed to have gotten used to the idea that I was hanging out with those Lockwood boys now.

As for the other things I was doing with them…well, they probably gossiped about it, but nobody really knew for sure, except for me.

And I wasn’t telling.

“Something wrong?” Sorrel asked lightly, “You’re not your usual self today.”

“No,” I said, too quickly because his eyebrow went up. “Okay,” I said grudgingly, “I got some bad news today.”

“What happened?” he asked.

“I probably can’t afford to go to college right away,” I said, sighing heavily. It felt odd to say that out loud, like I was making it true through words…which was silly, of course. “At least, not the one I really want.”

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Sorrel said, and I could feel the sincerity bleeding through in his tone. His concern and sympathy surrounded me like a warm blanket. I wanted to wrap myself up in his velvety voice and the furnace heat of his body and never leave.

“It’s okay,” I said, “I’ll probably try and work for a year or two, try to save up some money and try again. I should’ve known this would happen. You know what the funny thing is?”

“What?”

“I…don’t feel as bad as I should,” I said, laughing weakly. “I’m sad that I’m not sadder about it, if that makes sense. I feel so much more real when I’m hunting for beasts or talking to fae or learning about magic,” I admitted.

He didn’t say anything for a moment, just took my hand and squeezed it, as though to let me know that he was there, and he was listening. It was incredibly helpful.

“If I was less selfish,” he admitted, voice cutting through the silence, “I’d tell you to get away from us.”

“What?” I said, twisting to see the profile of his face. His mouth was set hard and angry, in an expression I’d never seen before. “Sorrel, what--?”

He turned back to me and immediately softened. His mouth flexed in a smile, and his eyes crinkled at the corners.

It was like watching a tiger allow itself to be domesticated…he would be cuddly and sweet and have velvety paws, but you still remembered the fangs that peeked through his mouth could tear out your throat, through no fault of his.

“I mean, we don’t belong here,” he said, stroking me cheek with a feather-light touch. He was a person who loved to casually touch, I’d noticed. He always ended up with at least one point of contact with my body…hand on waist, hand on cheek, lips on everything…

It felt like he was trying to reassure himself that I was flesh and blood. Which was kind of sweet.

“If Rook’s crazy plan works, we’ll be gone soon. And you’ll still be here. This is your home. I never meant for you to get wrapped up in our affairs—and you wouldn’t have, if not for Rook.”

“Fucking Rook,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he grinned, but turned serious again. “I think—I think we should stop what we’re doing, Juliet. It isn’t a good idea.”

I played dumb, heart trembling in my chest. “You mean helping Rook with his plan? I agree, he’s out of his mind.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” he said, looking pained. “I hate that I have to do this—“

“So don’t,” I said at once. “Don’t do it if you hate it. Let’s just…have this, all right? I don’t want you to freak out. I was just…having a thought. Obviously, it doesn’t mean I’m ready to tap out of school and just become some kind of beast hunter! That would be crazy. And not well paying.”

“Are you just saying that so I’ll stop ‘freaking out’?” he asked suspiciously.

“Damn, you’re good,” I said in fake awe. “It’s almost like I’d prefer we kept our arrangement intact, instead of you freaking out and breaking it off over some imaginary problem.”

“Just don’t get too caught up in our lives,” he said, fingers tight on the steering wheel. “That’s all I ask.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” I insisted.

Sorrel dropped the subject, satisfied.

I hadn’t thought about him and Thistle leaving…like, at all. It was stupid and short-sighted of me, because wasn’t that what I was helping them with? I guess I’d thought…well, to be completely honest, the nonsensical romantic in me decided that of course Sorrel and Thistle were going to stay here. With me. In a world they didn’t understand and where didn’t fit in, just for me. Just for this arrangement that we had, with fantastic sex and sometimes food.

The realization was depressing me, and it must have shown on my face because Thistle threw me an odd look when I walked into their enormous living room.

“Bad day, don’t ask,” I said quickly, flopping onto the couch face first. Sorrel coughed like he was trying to cover up a laugh.

Thistle sat next to me without speaking, and circled my ankle with his fingers. He slowly rubbed his thumb up and down my ankle bone, still not speaking. It was oddly relaxing, and made me feel drowsy.

“You’d better not stop doing that,” I told him blurrily. He chuckled and seemed content to do as I asked.

“Is that some kind of fae magic trick?” I asked. His touch was making me feel languid and slow, in the best way. “And if it is, can I do it too?”

“It’s not magic,” Thistle said, but he had to have been lying. There was no way I could feel this good without magic involved.

“I’m not sure if I should be offended by that or not,” Sorrel said from above me, and I realized that I must have said that last part out loud. Oops.

“Sex and epic massages are different things,” I informed him, raising my head slightly. I was careful to not move my foot, so Thistle could keep working on it.

“Only if you’re doing it wrong,” Sorrel said, bending down and capturing my lips.

“Oh,” I gasped into his mouth.

Thistle’s hands were moving more intently now, stroking up the skin of my calf, cupping the side of my knee…

“Well, this is cozy,” came a familiar, unwelcome voice. I pulled away from Sorrel and groaned out loud.

“You have the literal worst timing,” I told Rook flatly, removing my feet from Thistle’s lap and sitting up straight. “And I’m starting to think you do this on purpose.”

“I get my kicks where I can,” Rook said, looking horribly good in a black leather jacket and acid washed jeans. He was leaning against the far wall, which seemed to be some sort of unspoken norm for the guys in my life who made my heart race and my panties wet.

‘Look for someone who’s tall, dark and leans on things good’: I needed to put that on my dating profile, if I ever got one.

Come to think of it, all three of them were strangely stylish for guys who’d been dropped into our world as grown adults. Sorrel preferred a more laidback, hipster look, and Thistle tended to favor soft, fuzzy sweaters but when stripped down he looked like a construction worker who’d wandered onto a Calvin Klein photoshoot. Which was to say, pretty fucking good.

“We were talking about magic,” I said, smoothing my skirt over my thighs when I saw Rook’s eyes dropping down. He raked his gaze over me, making me feel hot under the collar, but turned away almost immediately. “What were your powers back when you were—um, home?”

“None of your business,” Rook said predictably, stalking off into the kitchen.

“What crawled up his ass and died?” I wondered out loud rhetorically, as Rook started to clatter around in there.

“My parents were from the Forest Kingdom, so I had a few useful abilities to do with the creatures of the forest and things like that,” Sorrel said, distracting me.

“You mean they were King and Queen, right? That’s what the book said, anyway. And wait, you can talk to animals?” I demanded, clutching his arm. I was close to bouncing on the couch with excitement. Sorrel looked taken aback.

“They have their own language,” he said slowly, eyes darting to Thistle who just looked slyly amused.

“Sorrel, you’re actually a real life Disney prince!” I said giddily. “How come you never told me this before? Did you have your own pony too? Did you call her Buttercup?”

“I had a war stallion, as suited my dignity as a prince of the realm,” he said solemnly, mocking me with his twinkling eyes. “But my little brother had a pony called Milly, if you must know all my family’s shameful secrets.”

“That’s a good name for a pony. I approve,” I said, laughter bubbling in my throat. “I didn’t know you had a brother! Are you the oldest?”

The air grew thick and awkward. I’d said something wrong, I sensed immediately, though I didn’t know what.

“I was third in line to the throne,” Sorrel said, and gently removed my hand from his arm, so deftly that I didn’t even notice it happening. “I’ll go make sure Rook hasn’t smashed up all the good china.”

He left me staring at his back as he went off without another word.

“What just happened?” I asked Thistle, who was fiddling with something in his hand.

It was a little piece of wood, and he was chipping away at it with a little chisel the length of my little finger.

It should have looked absurd in his huge hands, but instead he looked graceful and skilled. He was carving a little rose, I could tell from the wispy petals on the outside, the size of my fingernails, and the furled curves that he was just beginning to create on the inside.

“What did I say?” I asked again, putting my hand on his to still his quick, sure movements. He sighed, and put his chisel down.

“You probably shouldn’t ask about Sorrel’s family,” he said seriously. “It’s a touchy subject for him.”

“But not for you?”

“I never knew mine,” he said. “Orphan, remember?”

“I’m sorry,” I said automatically. “I forgot, you were a soldier—a General?”

“Oh no,” he said, mouth quirking up. “I was a simple enlisted soldier at the beginning. I came up in the ranks through pure savagery. You must have heard Rook talking about it.”

“I might have, but I don’t think I believed him, because…well, Rook,” I admitted. “So…Sorrel’s family is a touchy subject. Any idea why?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say that maybe being the one out of four to be sacrificed stung a little,” Thistle said. “Although I don’t really understand families. A lot like you.”

“I understand families,” I said defensively, and ignored his raised eyebrow. “So he’s touchy because he was the one they decided to give up. A third child. So they didn’t want to give up the heir, whoever that is, and why not the second child? Is there some significance to a second child in fairyland?”

“Second children are useful in all sorts of ways,” Thistle said thoughtfully. “You can marry them off to other kingdoms, and they’re almost as acceptable as a firstborn child. You can keep them around as a spare in case something happens to the firstborn. You can send them on diplomatic missions and nobody will feel insulted like they would if you sent a more minor noble. Yes, second children are vital.”

“They could have sent his little brother,” I mused out loud. “But he sounds like he’s—young. Maybe they didn’t want him to grow up away from home?” I guessed, and felt a spark of triumph as Thistle inclined his head. “So Sorrel was the only one they could send here,” I said. “Well, that does explain the touchiness.”

He went back to whittling his piece of wood. The rose was taking shape remarkably well, now. I could almost see the vibrantly shaded middle, and the darkening edges, soft and deep as velvet.

“I really didn’t think you’d be the most well-adjusted out of the three of you when we first met,” I said baldly. He chuckled, and kept whittling.

I sighed and stared at my hands. I couldn’t help wondering if I was doing the right thing here, helping them get home. Sorrel clearly had abandonment issues, I never really knew what Thistle was thinking, and Rook was…Rook.

I had no idea what kind of havoc they were going to wreak once they got back. And if something went wrong, if something happened to them or to anyone else, wouldn’t it all be squarely my fault for making it happen?

“What have I gotten myself into?” I wondered out loud.

22

Rook

“Don’t tell me,” the Mundie girl said, voice loose with insolence, “The beast didn’t fall for the trap.”

I gritted my teeth and tried to ignore the instinctive stiffening of my body in reaction to her voice. Damn her for getting in my head. Damn her for having Sorrel and Thistle wrapped around her finger. And damn her, most of all, for making me tell her things I hadn’t told another living soul.

It was a week after I’d taken her to visit the settlement in the forest, and the aftermath of our conversation had left me feeling…itchy. I didn’t like the way she looked at me, like she’d understood how I felt. She didn’t understand a fucking thing, I thought savagely.

I remembered the pity in her eyes when I’d told her about Nurse, and felt a wash of self-loathing again.

“Did you think it would happen in a few days?” I asked, wearing my well-practiced look of contempt. I knew she hated that expression from the way she stood up straighter and curled her lip at me. We were playing a game of who could hate each other more viciously. I wasn’t sure who was winning.

She turned away, baring a strip of smooth, soft skin above her hip where her thin t-shirt rode high and I ignored how the sight of it made me feel. Like I wanted to slither on to my knees, place the ellipse of my teeth there and just bite.

I followed her to the living room, hating that I was dogging at her heels like a shadow. Sorrel and Thistle were there as well, which I should have expected.

“I suppose we can get on with it, now that lapdog #1 and 2 are here,” I said, throwing myself onto the loveseat. Neither of them reacted, although Thistle looked me up and down, assessing me.

I curled into myself. Thistle was far too observant for my liking. I knew he knew about the nightmares, and the drugs. At least he didn’t know about the scars. That was one thing I was still able to keep to myself.

The girl, meanwhile, sat next to Thistle, on his far side and not in the space between the two of them. Sorrel’s eyes flickered and he blinked slowly as he met my gaze, trying to seem indifferent. I let him see the triumph in my eyes.

I’d scented blood in the water. There was trouble in paradise, and I was going to make sure to wedge myself in that spiderline crack, force them apart so cleanly it would be as though they’d never had the…whatever it was that they currently had.

I wasn’t a sadist, or cruel for the sake of being cruel. The girl would have to stay behind, on this side, and I didn’t want her to be around to distract them when we reached our world. Because unfortunately, I needed their help to kill Mother. And that meant I needed to have their undivided attention.

“The beast hasn’t been caught by any of our traps yet,” I said flatly to the three of them. “Which means it either hasn’t been coming around, or it’s waiting for something.”

“The festival,” Sorrel said grimly. “Just like the last time. It wants the village to be distracted so it can slip into someone’s house and…” he trailed off.

“That’s my assumption,” I said.

“Well, what if it just stopped coming around?” the girl said, ladling a heap of unnecessary optimism onto the steaming pile of shit that was our current circumstances. “I mean, that’s possible, isn’t it?”

I opened my mouth to tell her exactly what I thought of that, but Thistle beat me to it, unfortunately.

“We can assume it came around in the first place because of hunger,” he said. “The fact that it chose a target beyond the means of most predators—a fae child—must mean it has a reason for needing to consume fae flesh. But once it consumes, it can’t forget so easily the power that comes from the act. It’s addictive and potent.”

“Well, that’s all just…very horrible,” the girl said, pressing her fingers to her temple, like she was feeling the stirs of an incoming headache.

“The point is,” I said, “If it’s planning on coming back at all, it’ll be tonight. It’s probably planning on repeating its technique. So the three of us need to be there as well, ready to kill it on sight.”

“Four,” the girl said in an irritated tone, “You forgot about me.”

“I didn’t forget,” I said coldly. “I just thought you might want to stay behind, since you’d just be dead weight anyway.”

“Rook,” Sorrel and Thistle warned me almost simultaneously, as I waited for the explosion with a smile on my face.

But instead:

“Fine,” she said, crossing her arms. Her lush mouth was pressed into a thin line, but her eyes met me head-on. This calm acceptance was…not what I was expecting.

“Fine…?”

“Fine, I agree that I’d be dead weight,” she parroted, shrugging. I wasn’t the only baffled one. Sorrel and Thistle exchanged confused looks. I cleared my throat, wrong-footed by this reaction.

“Good,” I said, “Then…the three of us will go to the festival tonight and take care of things.”

“Sounds good,” she said in a poisonously sweet tone. She crossed her legs, flashing me a glimpse of thigh that left my mouth dry, and smiled wide at me. “Good luck, don’t get yourselves killed,” she added to Sorrel and Thistle.

And that was apparently that.

As evening fell, the three of us readied ourselves for the hunt. I felt a thrum of excitement in my blood, which was unexpected. I suppose it reminded me of all the grown up hunts Mother and the courtiers had gone on, that I was never invited to because of the risk that I would be cut and start bleeding everywhere, which would of course have been disastrous.

Pathetically, this was a way for me to relive the childhood I’d never had. I didn’t need anyone to tell me how stupid that was, I knew it very well already.

I wore my armor gingerly, unaccustomed to the metal buckles and puffy jackets that the humans liked to wear. Sorrel didn’t look any more comfortable and decided to wear traditional clothing instead, but Thistle looked right at home.

He filled the tiny front pouches with all sorts of things that he thought came in useful, and took longer than either of us in arming himself.

When he stuck what seemed like the twentieth tiny knife into an orifice, I’d had enough.

“I don’t dare to imagine under what circumstances you expect to need to extract a knife from that place,” I said, while Sorrel choked down a laugh.

“There’s a hidden pocket there,” Thistle said, unperturbed.

More than either of us, he looked born for doing violence. I felt a small spark of respect for him, and knew even the beast would think twice before attacking him.

We were finally ready. I was only carrying a crossbow, but I knew Thistle had taken what seemed like his own bodyweight in explosives, and had strapped a pair of swords to his back. Sorrel was bristling with all sorts of implements as well, but they were more traditional.

He was dressed in the emerald green and oak brown of his people, which I fond nauseatingly patriotic. His boots were made of supple leather, and I was sure there was some protective spell placed on them. Whether he knew it or not, he was flaunting the fact that he came from a family that didn’t want him dead, and I was…resentful.

We sped off on foot to the trail, arriving there within moments thanks to our speed. I remembered how long it had taken the girl and I to get here the other day, and scowled. She was nothing but a dead weight, and I wasn’t going to second guess leaving her behind, I told myself firmly.

We would be completely fucked if she—the only vulnerable member of the group—died messily and left us with no way to open the gate anymore, and that was the only reason I wanted her to stay away tonight.

Lornam greeted us a little further down the path.

“You are welcome to the Winter Festival of our humble village,” Lornam stuttered through the formalities, ending it with a clumsy bow.

“I did expect it to be humble, which was why I already ate,” I said rudely, and removed my crossbow from my back.

“I think what Rook means to say, is that we’re keen on hunting the beast before it does more harm,” Sorrel said, returning Lornam’s bow with one that was, even to my critical eye, good enough to present in court. Mother wouldn’t have whipped him for it, which was actually high praise.

We stomped through the silent forest, boots crunching on dry, late-autumn leaves. It hadn’t rained the entire week, so the sounds of our movements weren’t dampened by mud or mulch. Out of the three of us, it was Thistle, the largest and slowest, who didn’t make any sound at all.

“You move like a fucking shadow,” I hissed at him accusingly.

“Practice, and necessity,” came his predictably curt response.

Soon, we were climbing up the trees—which wasn’t easy, with all our gear—and navigating through the forest the same way that Hitchin’s people did, which was high above the forest floor. Sorrel was used to it, I was pretty sure his peoples’ cities were similar though on a much grander scale.

He followed Lornam unerringly, stepping on the same branches and at the same spots that Lornam stepped.

By the third time I’d almost crashed through a weak branch and threatened to fall down down a hundred feet to the hard earth, I was fed up and swearing filthily.

Lornam kept darting nervous glances towards me, as though unsure about how to respond to a prince throwing a tantrum, and I refused to enlighten him. The truth was, if I’d made a fuss on a mission, Nurse would have smacked me on the back of the head and refused to let food or water pass through my lips until I said I understood my duty.

But soon, I was distracted by a rumbling in the distance. As we neared the source of the noise, it became clear that it was the sound of many drums. The beat of the drums was punctuated by a kind of singing I’d never heard before. It sounded like musical shrieking.

“The music is very lively,” I said, trying to be polite, but it failed. Lornam threw a look at me that was both frightened and insulted, and Sorrel raised his eyebrow at me in warning. I raised mine back challengingly.

Soon, we were passing by houses that melded so well into the trees that I didn’t realize what they were until I saw a frightened pair of eyes peeking out of a clump of leaves. From then on, I could faintly make out the outlines of roofs covered in heather, and little square-framed boxes framed in wood that could have been windows.

“Do the trees speak to you here as they do back home?” I heard Sorrel murmur to Lornam.

“No, we create the houses ourselves,” the boy replied.

“Ingenious,” Sorrel breathed, and I was irritated that his observation could receive a glowing look of gratitude from the boy, whereas I was treated like some kind of insensitive asshole.

When we arrived at the center of the village, I had to admit that I was impressed. Nobody who looked at the celebrations would be able to tell that the village was waiting for an attack by an unknown enemy. This was probably the part that functioned as the town square.

It was a raised, flat area that was built in the center of five giant trees. It probably had approximately the same square footage as a Mundie department store. There were smaller, raised platforms all around it, where little knots of people gathered and talked and danced.

There were lanterns that filled the space with a glow that could be called cozy if you were feeling kind, and rickety little stalls giving away all sorts of food were set up.

I spared a thought for the girl, and imagined how annoyed she must be feeling to be missing a real fae festival, and smirked a little.

We landed on the largest platform in the center, and a sudden hush fell on the crowd. One shapely fae girl dressed in muddy colors, with her long dark hair swinging around her came forward to greet us.

“She got here a little ahead of you,” Lornam was saying.

I didn’t understand at first, but when her face came into focus, the penny finally dropped.

“You!” I snarled at the defiant girl who was standing calmly in front of us. “What the fuck do you think you’re you doing here?!”

23

Sorrel

“I thought maybe you’d forgotten that you didn’t own me, and you don’t get a say in where I go or what I do,” Juliet replied calmly, not turning a hair.

I winced, hearing the simmering anger in her tone despite her placid expression. Her fists were clenched, like she was itching to slap Rook.

We couldn’t have that. Although I didn’t give a flying fuck if someone beat up Rook—in fact, I welcomed it—we were here to do a job.

“You’re not coming with us,” I said, not letting myself phrase it like a question. I didn’t let myself be glad to see her, and I was careful to keep an indifferent look on my face. “We can’t get distracted by trying to keep you safe if we’re hunting down a dangerous animal.”

“You don’t have to keep me safe,” she said, looking at me like I’d personally kicked her puppy. But I wasn’t going to feel guilty.

I wasn’t.

I looked at it this way: I was going to feel infinitely worse if she came along with us and ended up dead.

“Sorrel means a tap on the head at the wrong angle could kill you, and we didn’t come here to babysit,” Rook said.

“I didn’t mean that, shut the fuck up, Rook—“

“Enough,” came Thistle’s deep, rumbling voice. He sounded pissed off.

I shut my mouth immediately. Thistle had that kind of effect on people. Must have been carried over from his time as a soldier. He took unquestioning obedience for granted, and oddly, we gave it to him.

“You can’t come with us,” he told Juliet, who finally deflated.

Apparently, it took all three of us to convince her when she had her mind set on something. I felt a reluctant admiration for how goddamn stubborn she was.

“But how will I know if one of you gets hurt?” she demanded.

“I’m sure someone will be along with the body,” he answered calmly.

“And if one of you dies?”

“Well, you’d better say goodbye now then,” he said, not turning a hair.

She switched to cajoling him.

“You can’t seriously be planning on not letting me come,” she wheedled. “Look, I even brought my own supplies!”

She held out a knife, the kind you’d find in someone’s kitchen. It was more like a cleaver, but I didn’t bother pointing that out.

“I’ll take that,” Thistle said, and grabbed it from her before she could even blink or protest. He put it away so quickly I didn’t even see where it went. Probably into one of his mysterious pockets.

“I trusted you,” Juliet said, shoulders sagging. “All right, fine, I won’t come! But I need you both to promise that if the beast looks like it’s about to eat you, to shove Rook in front of you and start running while it’s busy eating him.”

“I’m so glad to be part of the team,” Rook said, rolling his eyes.

“Acting as bait so your other two teammates can survive makes you the real MVP,” Juliet told him, eyes twinkling.

I noticed that she was dressed in the same greens and browns as the other villagers. Something about the clothing suited her, brought out the little lights of gold in her eyes and the streaks of russet in her dark hair.

One of the villagers must have loaned it to her. I wondered how she’d persuaded them, and grinned inwardly at the thought of her charm offensive. But she certainly fit right in with the rest of them, I had to admit. It was here that I could truly see that she was half fae.

Thistle announced that he was leaving soon after that, to check the perimeter and defenses. I glanced over just as Juliet hugged him enthusiastically. He was stoic and unmoving as ever, and only someone who’d known him for years—as I had—would have noticed the minute change in his expression and the slight dip in his chin as he rested it for a fraction of a second on the top of her head.

I slanted my eyes towards Rook, to see if he’d noticed and how he would use this to torment Juliet now, but he surprised me. I thought he’d look gloating or triumphant, ready to lay into both of them for the show of sentiment. I cringed to think of how Thistle would react to that.

But instead, Rook looked…blank. There was something lost in his eyes when he looked at Juliet, and it made me wonder. The look vanished as quickly as it had come, and I knew I was going to pretend I’d never seen it.

I didn’t believe in kicking someone when they were down.

“I’m going to see Hitchin and try to worm the secret out of her,” he snapped at me when he met my eyes. The tips of his ears were pink.

“Fine,” I said carelessly.

Juliet and I spent the next few hours wandering around restlessly. I was only paying a little attention to the stalls and music and dancing, but Juliet was like a kid in a candy store, finding wonderment in all the little trinkets and all the unfamiliar food that was being sold.

The villagers were quite accepting of her, considering that for all they knew, she was a random human girl in their midst, but she had a way of displaying non-judgmental curiosity which stripped away their defenses.

“You’ve never had a pleina fruit, have you?” I asked, spotting a cart full of the things on a nearby stall.

“What is it?” she asked, “You know I haven’t, Sorrel.”

I did know. Which was why I turned to her, fruit in hand, without a hint of the mischief I was feeling inside.

“You’re up to something!” she accused me, but with a smile pulling at her lips reluctantly.

“I’ll have you know that I’m a prince,” I said haughtily, “Any trickery or deceit would be beneath me.”

“Uh huh,” she said, not buying it.

I had the fruit behind my back, and was peeling it deftly as I’d done so many hundreds of times as a boy. The fragrant scent of it wafted towards me, smelling of summer in the royal gardens back home, fruity and intoxicating.

I brought it out in front of me, and let her see it in its peeled state. It lay in the palm of my hand like a gleaming, pulsing mound of rubies, lush and beautiful. Much like her mouth, which parted gently in an expression of surprise.

“Is it safe?” she asked, delicately poking it with a finger. It wobbled but didn’t burst.

“Quite safe,” I assured her. “When they’re unripe they can have interesting effects, but this one is quite ripe. But it’s traditional to eat it in a certain way…” I trailed off, laying the conversational bread crumbs that she would follow me by.

“What way?” she asked, eyes pools of velvety darkness, watching eagerly as I moved to pluck off a piece of the tantalizing fruit and place it on the tip of my tongue. I closed my mouth, and knew by the way she tracked my movement that she hadn’t missed my meaning.

I moved my head towards her and she immediately responded, first by tilting her head, so the slant of my mouth exactly matched hers, and simultaneously pressing her palms on my chest. She had an expression that was both mischievous like mine, and slightly scandalized.

“You want to do this here, with everyone watching?” she huffed against my mouth.

I sealed my mouth against hers in response, not moving. I would wait for her to begin, though it was killing me.

She widened her lips, flicking out a tongue and moving it against the seam of my mouth playfully. She was willing to indulge me. I let her take the piece of fruit from me, messily letting it drip down her lips as I kissed her at the same time. She was panting when we were done, chest rising and falling like she’d just been running.

“Did this work on all the girls back home too?” she asked abruptly, letting go of me and dropping her eyes. It was like a veil had fallen between us, with her on the other side. I was left behind, feet scrabbling for purchase on ground that was rapidly turning less solid.

“What?” I asked, uneasy. She’d been soft and pliant in my arms just moments ago, and now she looked…sad.

“Your fae ladies back home,” she said, forcing out a laugh. “They probably went gaga for you, huh? I read they marry young in your world. Your parents must have been disappointed that you didn’t.”

“Not really,” I said, thinking about my older, more dashing brothers. “I wasn’t very interested in anything other than sex.”

“Ah,” she said, and stepped away from me subtly. Another barrier. Clearly I was saying or doing something wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what. “So once you’re home, you can get right back on that horse.”

Before I could parse that statement, a low murmur started up around us. The villagers looked frightened, and the information was spreading like fire: the beast had been spotted.

I caught Juliet’s hand and pulled her along without thinking. I knew I didn’t want to lose her in the crowd, and it made me uneasy to think of losing her and starting a fight to the death with a slavering beast not knowing where she was.

We sprinted back through the tiny alleyways we’d been wandering through and ended up in the main square. To my relief, I saw Thistle’s unmistakable head of dark hair towering above everyone else, and he spotted me almost at the same time.

“Juliet,” he demanded without any preliminaries, almost burning me with the intensity of his gaze.

“Right here,” I called back over the crowd of people, raising my arm so he could see that Juliet was holding onto it.

“I’m here,” came her voice, clear and carrying. “Where’s Rook?”

“Damn,” I said quietly as we fought our way through the crowd and to Thistle. We were going against the current. Everyone else seemed to have decided that the night was a wash, and seemed desperate to get back to the warmth and relative safety of their homes.

“No,” Thistle said, shaking his head in answer to Juliet’s question. He didn’t know where Rook was either. Juliet looked worried, but I wasn’t.

I knew he was fucking indestructible. More importantly, he was a vicious little bastard, and could take care of himself. But it was really fucking inconvenient not having him around just when we needed him.

“Of all the times to go off to fuck knows where,” I muttered angrily, searching the crowd for any sign of my fake-brother.

“Sire!” Lornam called. He seemed to be standing on tip toe, some distance from us. His face was filled with relief. I wondered with a pang of guilt if he thought we were going to turn and run at the first sign of trouble.

Then again, I had promised weeks ago that I would help, and I’d done nothing. I’d tried, but accomplished nothing, which was the same as doing nothing, as my Mother would say. And Rook, of all people, had decided in his own self-serving way to help.

Lornam reached us, and bent double, panting and holding onto his knees. He’d been running through the crowd and trying not to get crushed, which explained his red face, shiny with sweat. But not the gash on his forehead and how his clothes were torn.

“What happened?” Thistle rapped out, every inch a soldier. Lornam seemed to hear the authority in his voice, because he straightened up immediately.

“Your brother found the beast,” he stammered, eyes wide with fear, “He’s holding it off, away from the village, but I don’t know how long he’ll be able to—“

I swore, long and soft.

“We need to get to him,” Juliet said immediately. “He might be indestructible, but he can still get tired. What kind of weapons does he have?”

“A crossbow,” I sighed.

“Not enough,” Thistle said, and drew his twin swords from his back. “Take this,” he told Juliet, and tossed his giant backpack over to her.

“Don’t I get a sword?” she said, but bent down and zipped the bag open. “What’s all this?” she asked, and rummaged through it. “Explosives,” she said flatly once she’d taken a good look inside. “What do you expect me to do with a bag full of explosives?”

“Use them,” he said simply, and walked over to her, touching her on the cheek.

The sight of them—his brass-colored hair against her darker strands, made me flash back to the day when Thistle and I had brought each other off in front of her. For her.

It made me wonder what it would be like to see the two of them together instead—her arching back like the string of a bow pulled taut, moaning as he pressed himself inside her so he bottomed out, mouth on her sweet pink nipples…

It was the adrenaline that was making my mind shoot straight to sex, I knew. Every inch of me was thrumming with anticipation. Even my mouth was salivating slightly, at the thought of a good old-fashioned fight. My older brother had explained exactly how it was to me when I was a child. But it didn’t stop my pants from tightening around me painfully.

I watched him kiss her, slow and lingering. It was soft in a way I never would have expected from Thistle, famous for being a butcher as he was.

Then she turned to me.

“You’re gonna leave me all by myself with this bag full of C4?” she murmured to me, hand on my chest. She threw me her best fake-seductive look and I chuckled.

“If you do end up blowing this place sky high, at least you’ll blow the beast up too,” I pointed out.

“There’s a couple of people I’m kind of attached to, though, so I’m gonna hold off,” she said, and stood on her toes to kiss me. She tasted of pleina fruit, sweet and so tart it made me shiver. “You’d better come back in one piece,” she said, and let me go reluctantly.

“We should talk when I get back,” I said, and touched her chin lightly, letting my lips wander down to the curve of her neck. Just to feel the silky softness of her skin, and smell her familiar scent.

And partly to get Thistle to feel as sexually frustrated as I was.

When I looked up, he was standing with his arms at his sides, glaring at me with a look in his eyes that said ‘I know what you’re doing’.

I turned to him with a cheeky smile.

“Ready to go, big guy?” I said, casually slapping his ass.

Lornam led us breathlessly to where he’d last seen the pair fighting. I whistled as I surveyed the damage. It looked like they’d manage to fell a couple dozen of the huge oak trees in the course of their battle. They’d created a large clearing, and the ground was strewn with broken branches from the giant trees, singed leaves and grass, and the fallen trunks of the trees themselves.

“No blood,” I said to Thistle in a low voice, stepping over one of the fallen trees.

He nodded. “They moved away.”

He sniffed the air, a look of concentration on his face. I let him at it. I’d never been much of a tracker, and we’d always had hounds when we went hunting.

My older sister always told me it would bite me in the ass one day. How right she was. Without Thistle, there was no way I would be able to catch up with Rook and the beast in time.

Thistle set off almost immediately, stopping now and again to inspect bits of broken branches and patches of trodden mulch that I had barely noticed.

“You’re good at this,” I said reluctantly. He grunted in acknowledgment. I thought he was going to stay silent, but to my surprise he responded.

“I got good during the war,” he said simply. “It was either do this or eat rats.”

“You never ate rats,” I said flatly. I was sure he was teasing me. But he just jerked his shoulders up in a shrug as though he didn’t care if I believed him or not.

“Where were your supply wagons?” I demanded, finally letting myself believe him.

“Blown up,” he said simply. “Before the winter. The Red Bitch set fire to our supply train before the winter.”

“And it caught?” I said, surprised.

Plenty of attempts had been made to set fire to things that year, but everyone knew it was a fool’s errand in the weeks before the winter set in. Everything was damp and cold. Too inhospitable for the flame to catch.

‘Red Bitch’ referred to Rook’s mother, the Queen. It was a nickname she’d earned during the war—through shedding enough blood to fill her entire kingdom to a foot in height.

From what I knew of her and Rook, I was sure she rejoiced in the name.

“Everything about that day was…eerie,” he said. “The horses were bolting, the fire spread like there was some strange force egging it on…”

I forced myself to laugh. “Superstitions of peasants,” I said, by no means as confident as I sounded.

There had certainly been many strange rumors about Rook’s mother and his kingdom…not least of which was how they could possibly have fought two separate enemies on two different borders to a truce, while being the poorest and worst-supplied of all the three countries.

“If you say so,” Thistle said, shrugging as though he didn’t care what I thought.

I wondered what else he’d seen that night, but didn’t ask. There were some thing that I actually preferred not to know.

“What’s that?” I asked, at the same time that Thistle jerked his head to the side. I’d heard the echo of a scream rend the peaceful night air.

“Them,” Thistle said, and began sprinting towards the sound. I followed at once, pulse thundering in my ears.

It didn’t take us long to find them. Rook was crouching, crossbow in one hand and the wicked gleam of a dagger in the other. It was dripping with blood, I noticed, but obviously not his. That was a relief. It meant he’d actually been able to wound the thing.

His arms were trembling from tiredness, and although he had dirt and mud on his body and brambles and all kinds of shit stuck to his hair, he didn’t have a cut on him. At least his mother’s binding was good for something.

“Fucking finally,” he spat at us, wiping his face with the back of his arm. But the look on his face was unmistakably one of relief.

“Where is it?” I demanded, unsheathing my sword.

“It ran just before you arrived,” he said, steadying himself on a nearby oak. “But there’s something you have to know—“

“Ran where?” Thistle interrupted. I understood immediately, and so did Rook if the rapid loss of blood from his face was any indication.

“It’s gone back to the village,” I whispered in horror.

24

Juliet

“You’re going to help me,” I informed Lornam, who was hanging onto his crudely carved bow and arrow like it was his lifeline.

“What can I do?” he almost wailed. “If your lovers don’t get him, the village is doomed!”

“Oh, come on!” I said impatiently, “You can’t give up now. We can’t sit around. What if it decides to circle back to the village?”

“You think it might?” he said, slack-jawed with horror.

“I think we’d be stupid not to consider it,” I replied, and hefted the backpack up. “Right, show me which direction they went.”

“It was a great, misshapen wolf. Wrong somehow,” he was murmuring to himself, still shuddering at the memory of seeing it as he led me to the edge of the settlement.

His people used a system of pulleys and ropes to get around, and platforms that acted like elevators to reach the higher branches. It was ingenious, and I was even more impressed when I realized they’d manage to build all this in a few years.

Lornam could have easily gotten by without using them, he was able to move through the trees almost like a bird, hopping from branch to branch with ease. But the elder and infirm, and the children of the village needed them to get by. I apparently fell into that category. Lucky me.

“And its face looked…familiar. That’s all I saw before I ran.”

“Familiar?” I echoed, “Familiar how?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding panicky. I remembered that he was just a fourteen year old boy. “I just thought…its face reminded me of something, but I don’t know what! I thought that was part of its magic.”

“It’s okay,” I said soothingly, though I wasn’t at all sure that it was. Magical beasts that wore people’s faces were a little beyond me. “We’ll set up traps and make sure it’ll blow up if it ever tries to come back here.”

We arrived at the edge of the village, and everything was silent. I could feel many eyes on us, peeking nervously through the bowery.

“Okay, hopefully there’s something other than magical explosives to work with here,” I muttered, and began unpacking the bag while Lornam looked on worriedly.

I knew he was uneasy here, so was I. I felt panicky and cold when I thought of how the boys were on their own, fighting some malevolent creature, but I forced myself to stay calm while I picked through the bag. My going crazed with worry wasn’t going to help anyone.

I laid it all out in front of us: rope, wire, paper clips, tent pegs, candle wicks, oil and matches. I frowned. It all seemed so random. But Thistle had clearly had something in mind while packing, so I just had to think like he did…

And how did he think?

Like a paranoid bastard.

Slowly, a plan began to coalesce in my mind. It wasn’t perfect, and there was a good chance the boys could get hurt if they were careless, but at least they would heal. And hopefully Thistle would prevent them from setting it off.

“A trap,” I said finally, “We need to set a trap.”

“How?” Lornam said, sounding skeptical.

“Take this,” I said, and shoved the giant coil of wire into his arms. “And make a perimeter around the village. I’m going to parcel out the explosives. Be fast!” I called after him, though I hardly needed to. He was off before I could finish speaking, a muddy brown blur that was receding rapidly.

“Fine,” I said, looking back down at my supplies, arms crossed. “Let’s do this.”

I parceled out the explosives, calculating rapidly. If I had to guess, the beast would be approaching from the same direction it had fled. I chewed my lip. We would be cutting this pretty fine. But I couldn’t see any other way. My shoulders slumped for a moment, and then I straightened.

I didn’t have any time to waste.

“Thank you for your help,” a deep voice said behind me. I jumped and turned, and found a dozen grave warrior faces looking stoically at me. They were carrying crude spears and wooden swords that didn’t look like they could pierce very much, and their armor seemed to be made of bark and wood, but I was unspeakably relieved to see them.

“We were unprepared last time, but we’ll defeat it this time,” a woman said firmly. She wore a breastplate that was slightly more ornate than the rest, and she stood at the front, so I guessed that she was their leader.

“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” I said, twisting my fingers together. “I’m sure my friends will do their best.”

“Your lover is General Thistle,” a man said, looking hopeful. “He will fight until his dying breath.”

“I’m not too fond of the word ‘lover’,” I said awkwardly, scratching behind my ear, “But I’m sure he would. Luckily, he probably won’t have to.”

“He’s a war hero,” said another guy, looking like he had stars in his eyes. Great. Somehow half these people had heard of Thistle and worshipped his badassery in battle.

“Sorrel’s pretty handy with a sword too,” I said, and immediately regretted the innuendo. Luckily, they didn’t seem to have caught it.

“You’re with both of them,” the first woman said, sounding reluctantly impressed, “I would never have thought a prince of the blood and a General would both lower themselves to bed a human-no offense.”

I wasn’t sure why people felt like they could say whatever insulting thing they felt like and not be blamed for it, as long as they made sure to add ‘no offense’ at the end. I opened my mouth to say just that, when Lornam sprinted through the trees with the last coil of wire thrown over his shoulder.

It was rapidly unwinding behind him, and I wondered momentarily if it was going to be enough.

“Right on time,” I said, relieved to see him. I’d been half-worried that he’d been too slow, but he looked fine. “Did you see or hear anything?”

“No,” he said, although his face wore an expression of unease that I understood all too well. We both felt like we were on the edge of a cliff, staring down into an abyss of danger, and our bodies were threatening to tip right off.

“Lay two of these down every twenty feet,” I instructed, and gave him the bag of explosives. They looked so innocent, like beautiful iridiscent marbles. If Thistle hadn’t told me exactly what they were, I’d never have known.

Points for prettiness. Magic: Infinity, Mudlands: Zero.

I rubbed the trigger in my hand nervously. As soon as the tripwire let me know the beast had breached the perimeter, I would trigger the explosion. I had no idea if it was going to be enough to keep it away though.

And if it did, what did it mean for the boys? I shook the thought away as I saw Lornam jogging back towards me. He was finally showing signs of tiredness, and his thumbs’ up looked like it was taking some effort.

“We’re ready,” I said, gripping the trigger tight, trying to assure myself as much as him. “Let it come.”

And come it did.

I heard its bellowing roar even before it tripped the sensors. The hairs on my arms stood up, and when I glanced to the side, I saw that Lornam looked like he was about to be violently sick on the forest floor. Even the warriors, clutching their wooden swords, looked grim. Their weapons looked like toys now.

“Be ready,” I heard the woman warrior at the front telling the rest.

Then the earsplitting shriek started. I covered my ears and flinched away before recovering almost immediately.

I pressed my thumb to the trigger, and the effect was immediate. A few dozen feet in front of us, it looked like the forest was collapsing in on itself, with the accompanying explosion that made me sure my ears were bleeding.

I found myself on the ground, on my knees and groaning, but I’d lost my hearing. Maybe my eardrums had shattered.

I reached up to make sure my ears hadn’t fallen off my head, and my hand came away coated in mud and dust. I must have looked a ruin.

Shakily, I got up from my crouched position to find everyone else slowly recovering as well. I looked around wildly, ignoring the throbbing in my entire body. It felt so impossible that I should have lived through an explosion like that and not have shattered into a million pieces, but I was somehow—mostly—intact.

“Where is it?” I yelled at Lornam, who was blinking at me, eyes huge and dazed in his pale face. My voice came out muffled, as though there was a thin layer of cotton in my ears.

“I—I don’t know,” he stammered, “There’s so much dust, I can’t see a thing.”

It was true. The clouds of dust were overtaking my vision like a brown fog and moving closer to us slowly but unstoppable. Soon we would be surrounded by it—and the beast would be nearly invisible.

“We have to spread out!” I heard the leader of the warriors tell her soldiers urgently, “We can’t let it surprise us!”

I struggled to an upright position, and staggered immediately. Something was off with my balance, and it probably had something to do with my ears. Fuck.

The dozen or so of us wordlessly arranged ourselves in an outward circle. The explosion had come from right in front of us, so I’d been correct about the beast coming back through its original exit point, though I would have been happier to have been wrong about it coming back at all.

At first I thought I didn’t notice the shape growing larger. It was a dark silhouette against the surrounding brown dust, a large boulder-shaped thing that I almost didn’t think was alive.

“Fuck,” I said, and my voice broke just as its head peered through the darkness and its malevolent eyes met mine.

“It’s here!” I called, waving violently to the rest of them. Even as they swarmed closer and got in front of me, I knew it wasn’t going to be enough. I closed my eyes, one hand tightening on the smooth, round explosives and the other tightening on the trigger.

I was suddenly very relieved that I had decided at the last minute to keep a few back, and not sacrificed all of them to the perimeter defense.

It started lumbering towards us, first slowly and uncertainly, as though it had trouble seeing, and then its nostrils flared—my heart thudded in my chest when I saw that. I knew it had smelled us. The wind was blowing away from us, carrying our scent right to it.

We were somewhat prepared for it, but when it came into view a murmur of dismay and shock went around. I didn’t know what I’d expected the beast to look like, but it was a huge, lumbering animal with the body of a mutilated wolf.

Its joints were twisted, and it limped along like all its limbs had been repeatedly broken and reset. Strange lumps bubbled along its fur, some of them had been cut open and seemed to be leaking some sort of pus. I somehow repressed the urge to vomit.

But the worst part of it was undoubtedly its face.

It had a human face on its thick, wolf’s neck, and the face it wore was Hitchin’s. I felt Lornam sag next to me, and I knew this was what he’d been unable to tell me earlier. Somehow, this beast had her face…and it was so twisted and wrong, I felt my chest tighten from pain.

But there was no time to dwell on it. Whether it was counting on us losing morale once we saw its face, I didn’t know, but it was certainly having an effect on the little group.

A few of them scattered and fell as the wolf-creature took a great leap and fell on them, and it was lucky they were fast, or I was sure it would have ripped some of them apart with its great claws, each of which was the size of my hand.

“Assemble!” the woman who was in charge of them yelled, and I felt a renewed respect for the cool way she seemed to take everything in stride. They fell into a formation they had clearly practiced before, and moved so quickly they became a blur before my eyes.

But with each thrust of their blunt swords it was clear that they would never be able to do enough against the wolf.

None of their strikes seemed to be having enough effect on it. They were barely slowing it down. Only when one of them threw some kind of powder in its eyes did it react. It closed its swollen eyes—strange to see that expression of mingled pain and rage on Hitchin’s wise, grave face—and began to howl so loudly and viciously that the hairs on my arms stood up.

For a moment, I dared to believe that it might have done some lasting damage—its eyes were probably its weakest point, after all. But no dice.

Scarcely a moment later, it bounded up, shook off the two people who’d climbed on its back to try and strangle it, and went straight for us, enormous maw open wide.

But that gave me an idea. I turned to Lornam, who was watching his people being cut down like they were toy soldiers, and he said helplessly, “We have to do something!”

Normally, I would have asked him what he expected a barely-pubescent boy and a part-fae with no powers to do, but in this case the part-fae had some grade-A explosives.

“Get me a clear angle to its mouth!” I told him, “I’m going to try and stuff these down his throat.” I waved the tiny, sparkling marbles in front of his face until he understood.

He bounded forward and yelled something to the leader, who darted a quick, surprised look back at me. Maybe she wasn’t expecting a powerless human to be any help. But then she nodded and called out to her battalion, and they quickly fell into formation.

I immediately saw what they were trying to do: they spread themselves into a V shape, harrying the wolf-thing on both sides with non-lethal attacks until it was in prime position for me to aim the explosives at the inside of its throat.

I watched them work, feeling hopeless. Their puny, blunt spears and swords didn’t look like they were annoying the wolf more than a mosquito bite would trouble a human. Small, irritating, but ultimately forgettable.

But the thing was dragging itself to the center, very slowly. I didn’t like the way it was lowering itself onto its forelegs. The muscles in its legs and haunch were tightening, ready to spring forward, tumbling everyone like tiny bowling pins as it aimed straight for the village.

The warriors seemed to have had the same idea, because the woman from before sprinted forward, hand in the little pouch of powder she’d used to devastating effect earlier.

“No!” I shouted, but it was too late. She’d already aimed straight for its eyes and nose and thrown an even larger amount at it than before.

It felt like we were all frozen with fear and anticipation, standing still as everyone—even the other warriors—followed the arc of the powder until it reached its target.

The effect was immediate. The wolf-thing, its eyes and nose already inflamed from the previous attack, roared with anger and pain.

The sound seemed to shake the very floor of the forest, and I wished I had something to steady myself on.

Its angry, reddened eyes—still so odd and sickening to see Hitchin’s face with that expression—fixed on the tiny little toy-sized warriors in front of it, and I knew it had decided to finish them off.

They were too much of a liability.

“Lornam!” I screamed, just before its huge paw thudded onto the ground barely a foot from him. He rolled out of the way and stumbled over to me. As he came closer I saw that sweat was dripping down his face, and he was breathing heavily.

“Are you okay?” I asked, concerned. “You should get out of here and evacuate the village.”

“The elders are already doing that,” he said, his forehead creased with determination, “And I can’t stand back and watch them die.”

“Okay, same plan as before,” I said desperately, even as the battalion was forced to scatter and regroup repeatedly, avoiding the wolf’s claws and crushing weight each time.

Without another word, Lornam headed into the fray, making me feel completely useless. There weren’t any other weapons in the backpack, I’d already checked. My nostrils flared as I imagined Thistle carefully removing anything that had even a remotely sharp edge from it, and pocketing all the good knives and daggers.

What the fuck was the use of handing me this thing if I wasn’t able to do anything with it? My fists clenched. Sure, I wasn’t invulnerable like the boys were, and I could definitely bleed and die, but that didn’t mean I wanted to just stand back and let everyone else do the hard stuff.

Okay, I thought, breathing in deep.

Fine.

This clearly wasn’t going to be the walk in the park that I was expecting it to be. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t do anything about it.

I quickly ran forward, careful to crouch down and not attract its attention. I dropped a dozen of the marbles down on the ground and ran back, several meters. There was a straight line between the wolf-thing and me now, and the explosives were somewhere in the middle.

“Hey, ugly!” I called, jumping up and down and waving my arms, “Come and get it!”

One head came up, jaw dripping with saliva and eyes screwed up with hate. The skin around its teeth furled back, until all I could see was the pinks of its gums and the flash of its white fangs as it growled so loudly I thought I could feel it vibrating through my body.

I swallowed and tried not to wet myself. Fuck, this was so beyond anything I could reasonably handle.

“Yeah, you!” I shouted again. My voice audibly cracked in the middle of speaking and I winced. So much for bravado.

Luckily, the wolf decided I was the new and shiny thing it wanted to play with. Maybe it could smell that I was clearly human, and thought I’d be easy meat.

Well, it wasn’t wrong.

“Get him while his back’s turned!” I shouted desperately to the fae warriors, who blanched with shock and horror as it started running towards me.

Crap, it was moving faster than a thing its size had any right to. Its huge paws swallowed up the earth, and I almost missed when its body stood over the explosions I’d planted.

I pressed the trigger and watched with satisfaction as the ground itself seemed to explode under it. I heard its yelp of pain and grimaced. I was never one for hurting puppies, but this guy really needed to die.

“Is he down?” Lornam asked, relief in his voice.

The dust was only just beginning to settle when I started to say, “I think so—“

But I’d spoken too soon.

It flew out at me, its belly bleeding but its savagery had only seemed to have increased.

I threw my hands up in front of my face but already knew it was useless. Nothing could help me, I thought desperately.

Oh god, Ellie and Michael and Liv and Derek—my new family would never know what happened to me…

Time seemed to slow to a trickle.

I lost my footing and felt gravity seize me.

I was falling backwards but so slowly it felt like I was sinking through honey.

There was a part of me that was seeing the jaws of the wolf closing in on me, and saw the leaves and dirt and twigs stuck in its matted fur, and smelled the reek of carrion on its breath.

And a completely different part of me that noted completely irrelevant things, like how I hadn’t finished my summer courses and been able to apply to colleges, or how I hadn’t gotten Sorrel and Thistle and Rook home like I said I would, and how I’d promised Liv we’d go shopping this weekend.

I heard shouting, and I heard someone calling my name, but it was like my ears were stuffed in cotton. I didn’t turn. My body felt like ice.

My first thought was: This is going to hurt like a bitch.

And my second was: At least I get to see mom again.

This is it, Juliet, I told myself. This is how you die.

25

Juliet

And then I was shoved aside, landed on the ground with a hard thump that send judders up my spine, and collapsed in a sprawl. I spat out a mouthful of dirt and leaves and looked up.

“Ugh,” I groaned. My body hadn’t taken the impact well. Everything hurt. The pain flooded my body, like hot knives raking down my legs and spine. And I was having trouble breathing, like my chest was being compressed.

Then I noticed the warm body that had landed on top of me. That explained the trouble breathing, at least. I brought my arms up to shove at them, and immediately recognized the winter pine scent that was so close to me.

“Sorrel!” I said, and instead of pushing him away, threw my arms around him and tucked my face into the crook of his neck. My hands closed on something wet and warm and slick, and I frowned. His breathing was strained in my ear.

“We have to talk about how you keep throwing yourself into near-death situations,” he said, and his words had the same, toe-curling warmth as always but there was something off about it. Then I brought my right hand up and understood.

“You’re bleeding!” I said, horrified. “It got you when you were pushing me away!”

He didn’t deny it, and let me push him away. I looked up, finally remembering to wonder what happened to the wolf, and saw Thistle and Rook. The sight of them capably dealing blows that were doing significant damage to it was a huge relief.

“I tried to blow it up,” I explained, “But it didn’t work.”

“I know,” he said, and tipped my chin up. His eyes were heart-stoppingly serious. “I need you to be careful. If anything happened to you—“

“You wouldn’t be able to get home, I know,” I interrupted, and held his wrist for a second before pushing it away.

“That’s not what I meant,” he snapped, and ran his head through his hair in apparent frustration.

“Okay?” I said, nonplussed. “But did you see its other head? How did that even happen?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, eyes clouding over.

“Well, you should go help them,” I said, just as Rook’s body flew what looked like twenty feet, to come to a thudding stop on the ground near us.

“I should see to him,” Sorrel said, undecided. He looked over at Thistle, who could definitely have used the backup.

“I’ll make sure he’s okay,” I said, pushing him gently. “Go help Thistle.”

“We need to talk once this is over,” he said, and to my surprise planted a kiss on my lips. It wasn’t sexy or R-rated, but filled me with golden warmth anyway.

“Be careful,” I muttered as he left, and immediately felt stupid.

He’d already been clawed by the thing. If anyone knew the damage it could do, it was him.

I sighed and crawled over to Rook, who still wasn’t moving. My body was screaming at me to fill a bathtub with ice or Epsom salts and have a good soak, get the aches and pains out, but unfortunately that wasn’t on the cards.

“Hey,” I said, and moved to touch his shoulder when he spoke.

“Am I dead? Or do I only wish I were?”

“The second,” I said, and poked him on the shoulder. He cracked an eye open and glared at me. At that moment, he reminded me irresistibly of an angry cat.

“Makes sense,” he said, gritting his teeth and getting up on his elbows, “Only in this living hell would I have a grubby human girl waking me up. Heaven would be much more…pleasant.”

“I think you mean hell,” I said sweetly, and slapped him heartily on the back, ignoring his wince. “Now get back in there and kill that fucker! Go on, this is no time to be a slouch!”

“I hate you,” he said whole-heartedly.

Finally, he staggered to his feet and joined the fray.

If I thought I could just sit back and watch them handle the beast, I was wrong. Sorrel was moving slowly and kept his front to it to avoid any more painful injuries to his back, and it kept walloping Thistle with its tail and sending him hurtling into the trees, rendering him useless.

I struggled onto my feet and hobbled over to the backpack, grabbing fistfuls of the marbles. We were lucky Thistle had decided to pack so many, I thought, shoving them into my drawstring purse until they were full to bursting.

Rook whirled around when he saw me approaching from the corner of his eyes.

“You’re not supposed to be here!” he snarled, as anger, fear and frustration passed through his face.

“I brought a present,” I said, and held up the drawstring purse. “Explosives. Stuff them down its throat,” I explained in short bursts, my breaths coming out in small wheezes. Understanding filled his face immediately.

“We need to get close enough—“

“Just use that thing,” I interrupted, pointing to his crossbow. “The three of you can probably finish it off after that.”

He looked down at the crossbow and then met my eyes. I felt the corner of my mouth twitch upwards, reflecting the expression on his face.

“If you weren’t a Mundie girl,” he said steadily, “I would kiss you right now.”

“If you weren’t an asshole,” I replied seriously, “I would let you.”

“Get them out of the way,” he said and I knew immediately that he was talking about the villagers. The three boys would heal no matter what happened to them, but I was willing to bet that most of the regular, less powerful fae wouldn’t be able to walk off getting exploded.

I rushed into the fray and dragged them away one by one, explaining the plan. Their leader agreed with me at once, and soon joined in getting her people out of there. Rook had probably been keeping an eye out for our progress, because as soon as the last member of the battalion was a good distance away, I saw him tie the pouch to his arrow.

He let the arrow loose with a twang, just as the wolf’s jaw was open wide and about to take a chunk out of Sorrel’s shoulder. It howled in pain and shut its mouth when it felt the arrow piercing the roof of its mouth, but that tiny scratch wasn’t the point.

This time, as I pressed the little trigger button, I knew that if this didn’t work, nothing would.

The explosion was muffled this time, maybe because it was within the wolf’s body, but the bag of marbles had done their job. Steaming viscera was raining down on us, as well as the unmistakable scent of charred meat and hair. I gagged and clapped my hand over my nose, carefully breathing through my mouth.

As the dust cleared, I saw its huge body lying prone on its side, guts still steaming from the explosion.

I ran forward to where Sorrel was standing, prodding the body with the toe of his boot. The smell was far worse here. I wasn’t sure how long I was going to be able to stand it without throwing up.

Sorrel’s clothes were soaked in blood and guts and other bodily fluids, but then so was I, so I wasn’t too squeamish to nudge him in the side as I got close enough. His head snapped up.

“You’re okay,” he said, scanning me up and down keenly.

“Yep,” I coughed through dry, dusty lips. “It’s finally dead.”

“Thanks to you,” Thistle said, approaching from the other side of the body. He seemed entirely unconcerned, like he’d done this a million times before. Sweat and dirt covered him head to toe, but he’d somehow managed to avoid most of the blood rain. There was a gash in his leg that was knitting itself up right before my eyes. “Here,” he added, and passed me a bottle of water.

“Thanks,” I said gratefully. Somehow I didn’t realize that I’d gotten so thirsty. I drank greedily and wiped my mouth with the back of my arm. “Wait, where’s Rook?”

“Gone to get proof,” Thistle said, sounding grim.

“Proof?” I asked, but I saw Rook climbing over the wolf’s body, dragging something along behind him and I understood.

“That’s…Hitchin’s head?” I said. I felt sick. My knees felt wobbly. I really didn’t want to see her severed head. Or anyone’s, for that matter.

“Her people need to know what happened to her,” Sorrel stead, steadying me. I thought of Lornam, and how betrayed he was going to feel.

“I’m not sure that’s going to help much,” I said.

“Let’s get this over with,” Rook said with a scowl as soon as he was within earshot. If I didn’t know better, I would have said he looked upset. Well, maybe he was. Maybe Hitchin had made a strong impression on him when she was…not a slavering monster’s head.

I thought of her gentle eyes and the aura of ancient wisdom and knew that I was grieving as well. Maybe none of us had known her all that well, but it still didn’t make any sense to me, what she’d become. I wondered if any of her people were going to have any explanations for it.

Slowly and almost wordlessly, we began the trek back into the village. All of us were tired, including the battalion of warriors, and I knew none of us could find the words to express the horror of what we’d see back in the clearing. Even Lornam was subdued, and my heart ached for him when I remembered that Hitchin was his grandmother.

I saw Rook squeeze the back of the boy’s head and drop it quickly, and felt my heart clench with something that wasn’t quite fondness. Well, so what if he was growing on me, like fungus? It was just…nice to see him express a normal emotion that wasn’t hate or snark.

Instead of going to the town square, the battalion leader led us to a building that was, by the village’s standards, quite large. The inside consisted of a single large room and was plainly furnished with a few scattered cushions and mats. By the raised dais in the front of the room, I guessed that it was some kind of town hall meeting room.

The rest of the day passed in a blur. I know that all of us trooped into that room and various members of the battalion went to tell the village elders what had happened, and to retrieve the people who had been evacuated.

I think everyone was too tired and heartsick to be overjoyed that the threat was gone. What I remembered most about that meeting was the pale, wan faces of the villagers, drawn with disbelief and shock.

“How could this happen?” I remembered one woman standing up, arms thrown wide. There were long tear tracks on her face. “Hitchin was our leader! She was the essence of our people!”

“I think I know,” said another woman with long, brown hair and familiar eyes. Hitchin’s daughter, I realized through my haze of tiredness. “She must have bargained with a dark creature for power.”

“Why would she need it?” demanded Rook, “I thought you were all doing fine before the beast came.”

That turned out not to be true.

Apparently, the ground and water in the forest was slowly being poisoned by the town nearby. I felt sick when I realized they meant Edenfall. We were poisoning the fae. They couldn’t last long outside their world. I listened numbly as they admitted that they were all slowly dying—even the little ones were developing sicknesses and coughs that wouldn’t go away…so Hitchin, a month ago, had gone to a facilitator who introduced her to someone with power.

“But how did she become…that thing?” Rook asked.

“Whatever she bargained with must have extracted a price,” another elder spoke up somberly, “I’ve heard of some that possess the bargainer’s spirit for a short time. But I don’t believe she knew it was attacking the village itself, or she would never have made the bargain in the first place. I believe when it possessed her, it consumed her spirit. She wouldn’t have known what was happening.”

“You don’t know that,” Rook said harshly, “Maybe she was fine with killing one or two to preserve the rest of the village.”

“Or maybe she just put her trust in the wrong sort of creature,” Sorrel said pointedly. Rook’s ears went pink. I knew the four of us were thinking about his contract with the kelpie then.

“At any rate,” the woman continued, “I’m glad for it. She died not knowing what she’d done, a small mercy considering everything she’s done for us. We thank you for you service. But we must now bury our dead and mourn.”

Their dead? I remembered a couple of fae from the battalion had been badly wounded. It sounded like they hadn’t made it after all. Thistle took the hint and got up, bowing. He said something flowery and pretty, about how we were glad to have been of service and that they could call on us at any time.

I was half-dozing on Sorrel’s shoulder when Sorrel moved and quickly lifted me up like a sack of potatoes. I would have protested this treatment, but I was too tired. I closed my eyes and the world went black.

26

Juliet

“Well, that was a disaster,” Rook said bitterly.

“Mostly thanks to you,” Sorrel grumped back.

He was sprawled out on the bay window seat in the breakfast nook that overlooked the garden. Perfectly manicured grass and bushes that were shedding their brown leaves rapidly met my eyes. I wondered, not for the first time, who the hell was paying for landscaping and maintenance around here.

Maybe Thistle hired someone and paid them in diamonds and rubies the size of eggs. I swallowed a chuckle and bent my head deeper into my giant cup of coffee as I listened to the boys argue amongst themselves.

Half-hearted morning sniping seemed to be normal for them, so I didn’t bother to butt in. Besides, it was only Sorrel and Rook who seemed to have the energy for anything more than a murmured ‘Morning’ before diving for the coffeepot. Thistle and I were both of the opinion that anything before ten a.m. just shouldn’t be allowed.

“Fuck you,” Rook snapped.

I sighed. Thistle wordlessly poured me more coffee.

“I honestly love you,” I said seriously, and the entire room seemed to pause weirdly.

Thistle darted a half look at me and then looked away. I thought I saw the faintest rose tinge to his ears, but maybe I was imagining it. Rook was openly glaring at the two of us, while Sorrel suddenly tried to look busy clattering around in the pantry.

Rook lowered his voice and murmured something to Thistle with an ugly look on his face. It sounded like, “lying is like breathing to them,” but I wasn’t sure if I heard right.

“Huh?” I said, confused. There were some strange undercurrents to the conversation that I wasn’t quite understanding.

“I’m making pancakes!” Sorrel announced loudly, slamming the pantry door closed. I jumped in surprise.

“I’m leaving,” Rook said flatly, and walked out of the room. Not before dropping his mug in the dishwasher, which was so weird and considerate that I found myself blinking for a moment.

“Who taught you guys how to use the dishwasher?” I asked the two remaining fae.

“I read the manual,” Thistle answered seriously.

“You read. The manual.” I repeated, narrowing my eyes at him. Was he making fun of me? But no, he looked completely serious and a little confused. I sighed. “That’s such a hilarious mental image, I’m so sad Liv would never believe me about the school QB reading dishwasher manuals,” I said sadly to my coffee cup.

“Thistle collects them,” Sorrel called from the stove. “We have a drawer full of them. The Ikea instructions have their own special shelf.”

“You’re a fuckin’ weirdo,” I told Thistle affectionately. “I’m giving you advance warning, I’m going to take pictures and send them to the entire school.”

“My reputation will be ruined,” Thistle said in his gravelly voice. I burst into laughter.

“I’m the one who figured out the microwave,” Sorrel said, crossing his arms. “Don’t I get credit?”

“That’s very impressive,” I agreed, “But how many things did you set on fire first?”

“Just one,” he said, “The microwave itself.”

“Well done,” I said, and stretched luxuriously. “Man, this is nice. I could really get used to being waited on hand and foot. But I need to go, or Liv and Aunt Ellie will start to worry.”

“Where did you say you were going to be last night?” Sorrel asked.

“I told Liv I was staying at your place, and asked her to cover for me with Aunt Ellie, who probably thinks I’m staying with a friend. Technically, we are friends, but I think she’d want that friend to be more of a…”

“Girl?” Sorrel suggested.

“Yep,” I sighed.

“You’ve got to love overprotective family members,” Sorrel said, rolling his eyes.

“I’ve never had one before,” I said brightly. “Mom was always too doped up to really know what was happening, and Lachlan was…well, himself. So this is new for me. I’m trying not to freak her out too much, and be totally normal.”

“How’s that working out for you?” Thistle said, mouth twitching.

“I helped kill a giant, slavering possessed wolf-thing yesterday. That sums it up, really,” I deadpanned. “What crawled up Rook’s ass and died, anyway?”

Sorrel and Thistle exchanged confused looks.

“It’s a saying,” I explained quickly. “I didn’t mean that something literally…no.”

“Humans have such interesting expressions,” Sorrel chuckled. For a moment he reminded me of the near-immortal fae prince he was, instead of the teenage American boy he pretended to be. “What happened yesterday is probably giving him second thoughts. I know if I’d been the one to make an impulsive bargain with a dangerous creature, I’d be shaking in my boots right now.”

“That thing gave me the creeps,” I shuddered, thinking about the kelpie’s all too knowing eyes and its multitude of razor-sharp teeth. “Does he even know how to break its curse? We’re going to be in a lot of trouble if he can’t fulfil his half of the bargain.”

“Leave that part of it to Rook,” Thistle said. “His deal, his mess.”

“I agree with Thistle. Plus, we haven’t even figured out how to open the gate yet. All we know so far is that you’re the key.”

“I’m not a huge fan of that metaphor,” I confessed. “So I’m the key, but where’s the lock? And how do I turn myself? It’s all very confusing.”

“Magical theory’s a bitch,” Thistle said calmly, “It’s why I prefer to hit things with swords. Much simpler.”

“You’ve got the right idea,” I agreed, and got up. “All right, time to go back to my loving family.”

“I’ll take you home,” Sorrel offered, but I shook my head.

“I’ll bike home. Plus, you two were nowhere near me, remember?”

I put my mug and plate away—force of habit, since I didn’t trust dishwashers—and biked home slowly. I breathed the cool morning air and tried not to think about what happened yesterday. But every now and then, my mind would drift and I would remember something horrible, like the scream of a fae whose leg had been ripped off by the wolf, or the smell of its charred meat, or the sticky blood on Sorrel’s back.

I let myself into the house, half-expecting to be bombarded with questions, but it was completely silent. It was Saturday, I reminded myself, everyone was probably still in bed.

I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before. Every time I’d almost dozed off, I’d immediately started awake, plagued by nightmares. I supposed that I would get over it at some point. But in my opinion, that couldn’t happen soon enough.

I texted Liv and Aunt Ellie to let them know that I was home, and padded into my room. It was just as I’d left it, unmade bed covered in books and all. I noticed that my fae book hadn’t been moved either, and felt grateful to Aunt Ellie for her principle of ‘never go into a teenager’s room without permission’.

I tried to fall back asleep but couldn’t. All the caffeine I drank in the morning was coursing through my blood. I was more coffee than girl now.

Damn it. I had no choice but to stay awake and worry about keeping myself and my friends alive.

I flipped the fae book open to the last page I’d been reading and stared down hopelessly.

I needed to open the gate, but I didn’t know how.

According to the book, all major spells had three parts: the ash, the blood, and ‘the Knowing’.

Fae magical theory was complicated, but it basically required sacrifice. Lots and lots of sacrifice.

For the ash component, you had to destroy something that belonged to you. By burning it, to be exact. That showed the magic that you were prepared to pay the price for power. Which wasn’t ominous at all, nosirree.

The ash left over would be used to draw the runes on the body of the caster, who was of course me.

Then there was the other component, which took the form of blood. Because of course it would be blood. I should have guessed.

If I ever made up a spell, I was going to make sure not to include blood anywhere in it, I thought wrinkling my nose in distaste. It was messy and smelled awful.

But the blood was the second portion of the sacrifice. Giving up your blood was part of the exchange. Give the magic something, and it would give you something in return. Apparently, more minor spells let you give up lesser things, like hair or nails.

The third part, unfortunately, was where things got tricky. For opening the gate into the fae world, I had to be able to visualize it. I couldn’t open it blindly, or it would open into anywhere. We could end up in space, without air, or drown at the bottom of the sea, or be crushed under the weight of a mountain. You get the idea.

It was an exact and finicky process. One that I didn’t have the tools for.

It was something I’d mentioned to Rook, and got only a glare in return, like he thought I was being purposely uncooperative.

We would have to ask the kelpie. She seemed to think we could open it, and I was sure she knew a way to get past this. Maybe a loophole I didn’t know, or a way to bypass a restriction.

“Juliet!” Liv shrieked, and bounded into the room.

I closed the book with a thunk and fell back onto the bed in surprise.

“Hey!” I stammered. “When did you get home?”

She nearly fell down laughing.

“The look on your face!” she cackled, bent over and clutching her thighs. I noticed that she was wearing regular clothes and shoes, like she’d just gotten back from somewhere.

“Very funny,” I agreed sarcastically. “Where were you, anyway? I thought you were still asleep. It’s still early.

“We went for a morning hike,” she said cheerfully, stripping off her shoes and hoodie. I could see sweat matting her hair to her cheeks, which were rosy from exertion.

“That’s so outdoorsy of you guys,” I said, not sure whether to smile or wonder if there was a reason they hadn’t taken me with them. No, that was stupid, I scolded myself. Sometimes my insecurities got the better of me, and they needed to be beaten down. Of course they hadn’t taken me with them, I hadn’t even been around!

“Aunt Ellie wanted to pick you up from ‘Evelyn’s house’, but I told her you’d want to sleep in,” she said, answering the question I hadn’t asked.

“You’re a lifesaver,” I said gratefully.

“So?” she said expectantly, looking at me.

“Uh…what? Do I have something on my face?”

“No, I want to know how your night went with the dishy Lockwood boys,” she said, waggling her eyebrows playfully.

“Oh, them.”

“Yeah, ‘them’. Forgive me for wanting to know about my cousin’s crazy night with the hottest guys at school,” she said, and rested her chin on her hands, like she was ready to be told a story.

“Okay, so it was hot,” I said, fanning myself with my hand. “It was so nasty. We did things I never even knew were possible.”

“What.” She said, leaning in, eyes huge.

“Yeah, they taught me things…” I shivered theatrically. “I’m going to feel them in me for a long time.”

“Are you—“

“They took me to their murder-sex dungeon,” I said, more loudly, “And had their dirty, dirty way with me—“

“Oh, screw you!” she said, as I fell back laughing until I felt tears at the corner of my eyes. “You really had me going there. Did nothing happen at all?” she said, suddenly going from annoyed to wheedling.

“Yeah,” I sighed, and thought about telling her how I’d set off several high-intensity explosives and killed an angry magical child-eater, before quickly abandoning the idea. Some things you needed to build up to.

“It was low key, we just watched a movie, and I fell asleep. In the guest bedroom,” I added, seeing her eyes widen.

“Ah, you’re no fun,” she pouted. “If you had to abandon me on a Friday night, I wish you could’ve at least gotten some good sex out of it.”

“Oh, me too,” I said. “But Rook was there, so anything physical was off the cards anyway.”

“He’s not part of your little arrangement?” she asked, and burrowed under the covers next to me.

“Nope,” I said, shuddering at the thought of touching Rook…intimately. “That’s honestly such a horrifying mental image.”

“Are you sure?” she said, raising her eyebrows. “He doesn’t look all that horrifying to me. I kinda dig the white hair, personally. I don’t know how he gets his roots to not show,” she mused, “That color is so hard to maintain.”

“Liv, I don’t think he dyes it,” I said, giggling at the thought of Rook in the bathroom, angrily dyeing his hair, surrounded by a variety of bottles and brushes.

“No way, that is not a color found in nature,” she declared. “But it doesn’t matter, I would climb him like a tree in a fucking heartbeat.”

I made a face. “Really? It would be like trying to fuck a porcupine.”

“Well, don’t knock it till you try it,” she said, and we both laughed. “Well, two Lockwood brothers is better than none, anyway. The big one though, I think his dick would scare me. Is it, y’know, proportional?”

“Liv!” I said, scandalized.

“Hey, you can’t blame me for asking,” she said, unconcerned. “Come on, tell me! It’s the question America wants answered!”

“More like my nosy cousin wants answered,” I grumbled. “Isn’t Brian—y’know?”

“Brian’s average,” she said, “Which is perfect for me. I don’t want a ten inch dick.”

“Uh…” I said, “Thistle’s...is not average. It’s very far from average.”

“Ha!” she cackled, “I knew it!”

“Okay, but shut up about it,” I warned, “I don’t want everyone at school talking about this.”

“I won’t tell. Cross my heart,” she promised. “Did it hurt?”

“I don’t understand the sudden need for oversharing!” I said, and buried my face in a pillow to conceal my red cheeks. I didn’t think I was particularly prudish, but talking about this stuff made me a little uncomfortable for some reason. Way more than actually doing it did.

“I’m curious!” she said, giggling. “Who wouldn’t wonder about the Lockwood boys. I mean, they’re so mysterious!”

“Ugh, I hate that I’m actually answering you,” I said and peeked over the cushion. “Well, I don’t actually know since we only did…other stuff.”

“Ah,” she said thoughtfully. “Do you just not like penetrative sex or--?”

My mind flashed to the dream I had when I’d almost gone all the way with Rook, for some reason. It didn’t really count, since it was only a dream, but my stupid brain went there immediately. I could almost feel him entering me, thick and throbbing, with me slick and wet and ready…I swallowed.

“I usually wait to do…that. I like to keep my hook-ups casual, which means oral and hands, usually,” I explained. It felt weird telling someone else about my unspoken code, but Liv was…Liv. She was one of the most non-judgmental people I’d ever met.

“Wait, so are you a--?”

“Virgin? Yeah,” I said. I didn’t mind saying it out loud. I knew some people didn’t like to say they were virgins, but for me, it was a relief. If I said I wasn’t, maybe I’d eventually have to mention that my first time was a rape, and that would suck for me and for the person I was talking to.

People didn’t really know how to talk to someone who’d been assaulted. They got nervous and either treated me like I was made of glass, or acted like they wanted to be my therapist.

Saying that I was a virgin made it all easier. And whether it was true or not didn’t really matter. It was the truth for me. I wouldn’t call that experience my first time. It gave it a weight it didn’t deserve.

“Wanna watch something?” I asked lightly, grabbing my laptop and flipping it open. Liv didn’t react to the change of topic visibly, and just brought her knees up under the covers and turned on her side.

“Sure,” she said, and we watched a few episodes of HGTV before Ellie called us downstairs for lunch.

I spent the rest of the day doing chores and helping Derek with his homework. I grabbed a few spare minutes here and there to make sure I’d read through the spell directions in the fae book correctly, and to gather everything I needed for tonight.

For the ‘ashes’, I opened the old shoebox that had been my trusty companion since I was eight. I faithfully stored relics in it until around four years ago, and it held almost everything that was of sentimental value to me.

I slowly went through all of its contents, feeling wave after wave of nostalgia. There were letters from my penpal in my then-sister school when I was eight, until we’d moved and I had to start at a different one, there was a little mug I’d made for Mom in pottery class, there were the journals I’d kept for years, and my middle school graduation photo, with Mom faded and blurry but smiling so wide I thought her face would split open. I was scowling, because my gown was hot and itchy and I wanted to go home. But Mom had acted like it was the best day of her life, I remembered. With a sudden lump forming in my throat, I put it aside.

Then I found it: an old flower pressing.

It used to be a deep, blood red when I was a baby, according to Mom. But it slowly started dying—too slowly, because I remembered its first petal fell after my seventh birthday. So we decided to press it between the pages of a book, so Mom would always be able to look at it.

Now it was shades of brown and burgundy, delicate and papery in my hands. I hadn’t thought about it in so long, and as a kid I never thought to ask and had just accepted how it didn’t wither for years, but now I knew it must have been magic keeping it alive for so long.

Magic from the fae world, when a man stepped through a hole in the air and took her back to his home.

I brought it up to my face and caught the elusive scent that always made me think of her. It didn’t smell like any other rose I’d smelled. It smelled richer and wilder…like something from a place where magic existed.

It gave me a pang to think about burning it, but I didn’t have anything else to use. And my hand had somehow found it unerringly, like it had known what to look for without my prompting. If that wasn’t its own kind of magic, I didn’t know what was.

I had everything I needed for the spell, except the last and most crucial part: the ‘knowing where to go’. I opened my beat-up old backpack and slowly began figuring out what I would need for tonight.

Mom and I hadn’t always had a roof over our heads, so for a while I took to carrying everything I needed for life in my backpack, sort of like how a turtle carries its home on its back. I found four energy bars, a bag of trail mix, a bag of toiletries like the ones they give away on airplanes, tampons, a torch, an empty thermos, a pack of face towels, and deodorant.

“Wow,” I whispered to myself quietly. I’d forgotten how much I needed to carry with me once. Just a few months in Aunt Ellie’s house was all it had taken me to grow used to the idea that I was always going to be warm and comfortable with a full belly.

Objectively, I knew I wouldn’t need most of this stuff for a simple trip to the lakeside. It would take a few hours at most to get the gate open—if I could—and say goodbye to the boys. The thought of that made the hook in my chest tug so violently that I felt vaguely nauseous.

You’ve only known them for a few weeks, I told myself sternly. There’s no way you could get attached to them so soon.

But I was.

There was no denying it.

I could feel them burrowing their way into my heart. I could picture Sorrel’s face without trying, his velvety voice and his eyes like the deep forest. And the flex of Thistle’s shoulders, and the tilt of his jaw as he considered me, eyes hooded and mysterious.

Somehow, they’d become important to me. Not just because of the physical attraction. I could have found that anywhere. But the way they’d slipped into my life so easily that it was hard to believe they hadn’t always been around.

I would even miss Rook. His cruel mouth and his merciless ways meant something to me.

Fuck it, I thought resolutely, placing the dried flower in its careful wrapping on top of everything else, and zipped it closed. I hoisted it onto my shoulder, and the weight of it made my shoulders and back adjust automatically to accommodate it.

I went downstairs to the living room, where Ellie and Michael were enjoying a glass of wine in peace and cuddling. I almost hated to disturb them, they looked so peaceful.

“I’m going to the lake with some friends,” I announced, clearing my throat in advance. I pretended not to see them springing apart like guilty teenagers caught necking.

“Have a good time,” Ellie said, smiling. “What time will you be home?”

“We’ll probably crash at Emily’s parents’ lake house,” I said, rapidly making it up as I went along, “So I’ll probably be back tomorrow morning. Or later tonight, if I’m not feeling the crowd there.”

“Okay, have fun!” Mike called after me. I waved and let myself out. I knew Liv and Derek had gone grocery shopping, furnished with a list by Aunt Ellie. I toyed with the idea of calling them for a moment, but abandoned it.

I knew myself. I knew I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye without acting suspicious and tipping off my too-perceptive cousins that something was up. So I took one long look at the big, friendly house behind me before setting off.

Later, I would come to regret not saying goodbye. I never gave them the smallest sign that anything was out of the ordinary.

At that point, my past and my future parted neatly and silently, like a shell peeled off an egg.

Later, I would lie awake at night and wonder what would have happened if I’d just told them the truth.

Maybe they would have stopped me from setting off on that cold October night, into a future I never saw coming.

27

Juliet

I decided to walk the four miles to the lake. It wasn’t a small distance, but I was used to walking with my backpack, and without Rook to complain about how slow I was, I easily made it there in under an hour. When I reached the little hillock that overlooked the lakefront, I paused to drink it in.

The lake was huge and black, spread out before me like a velvet blanket. The fat white moon hung in the sky, tipping the ripples and wavelets of the lake in silver icing. The air was cool and calm. Wind rustles through the grass.

Everything was calm, but a prickle on my skin told me to be alert.

There were three figures outlined in the moonlight, tall and broad-shouldered and confident. One of them must have heard me, because I say their head turn a fraction.

“She’s here!” I heard a voice say, and all three figures shifted slightly, postures becoming expectant.

“We thought you weren’t going to show up,” Rook said, voice devoid of emotion as I came close enough to make out their faces.

“Only you thought that, actually,” Sorrel corrected.

I smiled weakly. Their usual arguing fell flat in the face of the emotion in the air.

Rook’s hand shook ever so slightly as he pulled the glowing cigarette stub from between his lips.

Sorrel was standing with his feet wide apart, hands on his knife belt, and jaw clenched so hard I was afraid he’d grind right through bone.

Thistle was the only one acting normal. Or so I thought.

He gave me a look that warmed me to my core, disguised a feather-light touch to my cheek as a grab at my backpack, and barely paid attention to my grunt of surprise as he hoisted it onto his own shoulders.

He was fussing, I realized with a jolt. That was apparently how he expressed anxiety. Well, you learned something new every day. Until a minute ago, I would have laughed at the idea of Thistle being nervous about anything.

What did they call him? The Butcher of Something. I didn’t expect a guy like that to even understand the concept of nervousness.

“You guys ready to go home?” I said, bouncing lightly on my toes and rotating my neck. I ignored the weird look Rook threw me. The loss of the backpack’s weight was a relief, I had to admit. I’d apparently gotten soft from my time at the Masters’s. Old me would have been appalled.

“I might have been happy, if I weren’t leaving you,” Sorrel said seriously. Part of me—the thirteen year old—was thrilled, and the other, grown-up part was dying at how cheesy that was.

“Oh, come on,” I said, and felt the same hook tugging in my chest. Sorrel grimaced, like he’d just felt something painful as well.

“I know you don’t do well with declarations of affection, sweetheart,” he began, “But do you remember what I told you, right before I went down on you?”

“Uh,” I said, brain momentarily short-circuiting. I hadn’t forgotten that both his fake-brothers were still in earshot, although he apparently had. Or didn’t care.

“I think it was actually ‘you’re like a dream I once had’,” he said, and let his hands skim down the side of my face.

It was tender, yet remote. Like he was saying goodbye to something he never thought he could have.

I caught his wrist, and glared. “If you’re going to say goodbye, don’t half-ass it,” I said, and his mouth quirked in a smile.

“As you wish,” he murmured, and pulled me in for a kiss that I felt right down to my toes. The heat from his mouth washed over me like warm honey, and there was something in it that tasted completely of him. Of the forest, and its dark secrets, and its golden light.

It was a heated promise. One that I wasn’t sure he could afford to give.

“What—“ I said, voice embarrassingly high. I cleared my throat and tried again, “Sorrel, you know there’s no way we can—we’re from different worlds! And I mean that in the most literal sense possible.”

“If there’s a way to there, there has to be a way back here,” he said, and his jaw was set in a stubborn line that made me remember he’d been a prince for nearly his entire life. He hadn’t gotten used to people telling him things he wanted were impossible.

“You can’t quote The Princess Bride at me,” I said, nudging his shoulder with my forehead. “That’s not playing fair.”

“I don’t want to play fair,” he said simply, hand cupping the back of my head. It made me feel safe, which was as unexpected as it was unfamiliar. “I’m playing to win.”

“My turn,” Thistle said, clearing his throat. I chuckled and turned. Sorrel had let me go without needing a nudge. Neither of them tried to hold me back or contain me in any way. I was only sorry it had taken me so long to notice.

“C’mere, big guy,” I said, and opened my arms wide. In a flash, he was close enough that our chests brushed, and he’d lifted me in his arms like I was as light as air.

“I’m going to miss you,” I whispered into his ear. I felt his breath hitch with something—surprise, maybe? I turned my head so I could look him straight in the eye. “What, you thought I wouldn’t miss the hell out of you?” I asked, hurt.

“I wasn’t sure if—“ he stopped, and growled with frustration. Looking at him, a beast of a man, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh at how obviously tongue-tied he was, or ignore it.

“Use your words,” I teased, settling for a little bit of both.

“I know how I feel,” he ground out, “But I didn’t know about you. You already have the other guy.”

“The ‘other guy’ has no problem sharing,” came Sorrel’s amused drawl from a few feet away.

I blinked at him. “You think I like him better? That’s ridiculous,” I said, shoving at his shoulders indignantly. He put me down and I stood in front of him with arms crossed and my chin up, glaring at him. “I. Have feelings. For both of you,” I said, making sure to enunciate the words slowly and clearly.

“But you—you’re a human,” Thistle pointed out, forehead wrinkled.

“Half,” I said immediately. “And we have arrangements like you guys do as well, all right? It’s not…conventional, but it happens.”

Don’t ask me why I know so much about polyamorous relationships, I prayed, or I would have to admit the hours of frantic googling and trying to reconcile having feelings for two guys at once.

“It could also be the fae in you,” Rook said, sounding faintly interested in our conversation for the first time. I wasn’t sure what he’d been doing while we were having our little moment of drama. Rolling his eyes and cursing us, probably. “It predisposes you to the types of configurations we see more often back home.”

“I…guess,” I said cautiously. I wasn’t sure how to deal with this version of Rook who was just being a regular person, not lashing out with hate and sarcasm. I guess that was what happened when you were this close to being able to murder your mom for revenge.

“I don’t know if I believe that you’ll be able to come back,” I told Sorrel honestly, “But if you do, promise you’ll come back together.”

“Promise,” he said, grinning broadly.

Thistle just nodded, eyes flicking towards me and then away immediately. His cheeks had the faintest hint of color, I realized. His eyes were slightly wider than normal. If I didn’t know him so well, I would never have noticed such small changes.

But they made a world of difference. By his standards, he was practically catatonic from shock.

I reached up impulsively and kissed him too. It was a quick one, compared to what I’d planted on Sorrel, but he responded immediately, threading his fingers through my hair and stroking the nape of my neck in a way that made my knees weak.

“Okay,” I said, as we separated. “That was—“

“Good?” Thistle suggested, giving me one of those playful, heart-stopping smiles that made him look like he should have been cast as a lead in a romcom.

“Very good,” I agreed.

“Don’t I get one?” Rook said from behind us.

“No,” the three of us said at once, and I grinned. I was going to miss this. Take away the physical attraction, and the sparks, and the feeling in my chest, and this still remained. The camaraderie. The feeling of invincibility, whenever I was with them.

Like they were carrying a little bit of fae magic with them even now, and some of it to me transferred to me.

But it was time for that to end. I ignored the throbbing pain in my chest and nodded curtly at Rook. “Time to call her.”

“Come on out!” Rook called, and tossed something into the water. It landed without a splash and sank so soundlessly I knew there must have been some kind of magic involved.

“What was that?” I whispered.

“Something to put her in a generous frame of mind when she comes out,” Sorrel whispered. His eyes were unreadable.

“Meat, in other words,” Thistle grunted.

Meat, I thought, and didn’t know what I’d expected. For all that they were magical and from a different world, fae seemed to have simple needs. We’d carried bags of meat when Rook and I went into the forest, trying to lure the beast out, I remembered.

In retrospect, I was glad it hadn’t come out then. The two of us wouldn’t have been a match for it, although I was sure Rook would slit his own throat before admitting it.

“Did you hear something?” I whispered. The wind was picking up, and my hair stirred uneasily around me.

No one had time to respond, because something was rising from the depths of the lake. It was enormous, the size of an SUV, jet black like a void, and evil looking.

It was the kelpie. I gulped with fear. If I hadn’t understood why Sorrel and Thistle had objected to making a deal with her, I sure did now.

Rook was mad for even thinking about it, was the only thought I had.

It smiled, and I fought the urge to run. Something primal in me screamed to get away, or I would be eaten or worse. There were worlds of promised pain in its red eyes, glowing like embers. Its teeth were giant, clustered needles dripping viscera.

Maybe that meant she just ate, and wouldn’t be tempted right now.

“Well, well,” she purred, teeth whispering against each other as she stepped onto the shore, “I was wondering when you’d turn up again. Come to pay your debts?”

“I never renege,” Rook said calmly. From the way he stood, with his arms at his side and his face flat and bored, anyone would think he was at a particularly dull garden party. My respect for his nerve increased marginally. “But we have a problem.”

“Oh?” she said, sounding displeased. Again I fought the urge to take off. “That’s not what I like to hear. Royal or not, I expect payment.”

“We’re having some trouble with the half-mundie,” Rook said, and took me by the arm.

I didn’t utter a word of protest as he dragged me to the front and let the kelpie look me over.

“Is this the one?” she asked, looking me up and down. Goose pimples broke out on my skin, and I knew it wasn’t because of the cold.

“Yes,” Rook said.

Contempt leaked out of his voice. I closed my eyes for a long moment, and reminded myself not to believe a word coming out of his lying mouth. He had one face with the three of us, and another for everyone else. This was all an act. He didn’t really think I was a defective object…probably.

“Doesn’t it talk?” the kelpie asked, circling me. I stood still, petrified as I felt its breath on my head, ruffling my hair. It smelled stinking and hot, and I fought the urge to bend double and vomit on the grass right then and there.

“It talks,” I said, clenching my fists and fighting not to breathe through my nose, “What would you like to know?”

“What the problem is, for one,” she said, voice sharpening. Clearly she didn’t like that I talked, even though she was the one who asked. “And we’ll get to the matter of your parentage later.”

“I can’t do the last part of the spell,” I confessed to the still evening air. “I can’t…visualize where I’m supposed to send them—I mean, all of you.”

“Useless,” she sighed, and became a woman right in front of me. I gaped at her in mute astonishment. I’d never seen such easy magic, since the boys were forbidden from using theirs.

“Oh, don’t drop your jaw, this is nothing,” she said impatiently. “Have you ever done anything with your powers before?’

“No,” I said admitted meekly.

She was beautiful, tall and curvy with skin like freshly fallen snow, and hair like dark honey. She wore a dress that pooled around her feet like molten gold, and shimmered when she walked.

I looked around to see how the boys were reacting, but when I turned I saw that they just looked tense and unsurprised.

“Well, when I asked you to find her, I didn’t think that she’d be defective,” the kelpie woman said, and in a movement so fast my eyes didn’t catch it, she moved closer to me and had me by the throat. I choked and scrabbled at her fingers, but they weren’t flesh and bone.

Her ‘skin’ was cold and unyielding as stone. Easier for a butterfly to gouge a rock.

“Stop!” Sorrel said, and I heard his breath hitch as he abruptly fell silent.

“I don’t need your opinion, little prince,” she jeered. “You and that stupid giant would do better to be silent while the idiot prince and I have a little chat.”

“Don’t kill her,” Rook said. I was so surprised I actually stopped struggling for a moment.

“Kill ‘her’?” the kelpie said contemptuously, “You’re begging for its life now? Your time here has made you soft. I’ll snap you like a twig.”

“We came so you could tell us of another way to open the gate,” Rook said, and I could hear the strain in his voice. I wanted to cry out, and tell him to run, but my throat was held in the vice grip of her fingers.

I could see stars exploding and bright lights dancing in front of me.

Loss of oxygen, I thought hazily. I was going to pass out really, really soon.

“We can still use her,” Rook was saying, voice tight. “She might still—“

“She’ll make an adequate meal,” the kelpie interrupted. “That’s the only use I have for her now. It’s just as well. Food’s been getting scarce around these parts. Thanks to you four, no doubt.”

“It was you,” Rook said. For the first time tonight, there was real horror in his voice. “You’re the thing that Hitchin bargained with?”

The kelpie shrieked with laughter, a sound that seemed to pierce my ears and made me twitch feebly with agony.

“Oh, that old hag!” she said carelessly. “Well, she wanted power…and her village was so ripe and ready for the taking.”

I felt disgust crawl through my flesh at her words.

“But how? We killed the beast,” Thistle grunted. It seemed that he and Sorrel were breaking through the enchantment.

“I am the beast, and the beast is a small part of me. Or was, technically, since you killed it. I joined my power with that dried up old stick’s, promising to keep the village safe from outsiders. But I never promised to keep it safe from me,” she gloated.

“You’re disgusting,” Sorrel managed. His voice was thick and raspy, like it had been dragged on hot coals. My heart clenched to hear him in pain.

“I am what I am,” she said flippantly. “I have power, and you don’t. That’s just the way of things, I’m afraid. People with power get to do what they want to people without it. Do you think you’d all be standing around here talking to me if your little friend here—“ she gave me a shake “—could do it for you instead?”

“Leave her alone!”

“Mm…let me think. No. I’m going to kill the three of you—I won’t be sorry, I hated both your parents and if I knew yours, I’m sure I would have hated them too. And I’m going to make your little friend here watch me do it. Then I’ll eat her, and drain her of all the sweet power she doesn’t know how to use, and clean my teeth with her bones.”

“I’ll kill you first,” Rook said, and I heard the cold, shuddering scrape of steel as he drew his sword.

“Your little toothpick can’t touch me,” she said, and flicked her finger carelessly. I heard a thump as it flew out of his hands and landed somewhere to my side. “Give up now, and I’ll make it a quick death.”

“I don’t think so,” Rook said, and in front of my eyes there was a thunk as something embedded itself in her chest, and flowers bloomed over her heart. Dark roses, huge and blotchy, dripped from her dress.

Not roses, stupid, I told myself dizzily. Blood. Rook had used his crossbow. Always a paranoid bastard, he’d showed up well equipped with weapons tonight.

She pulled the embedded stave out without flinching, and I knew I would remember the wet, gurgling sound it made as it was dragged out of her chest with a liquid pop.

“Now you’re just being a contrary shit,” she snarled, seeming truly annoyed for the first time. “I take it back. I’m going to make it slow and painful, just for your insolence. You wait here,” she called to me, and flung me to the side.

I groaned, but no sound left my lips. My throat felt raw and when I touched it, I could feel deep marks like blisters. Her skin was poisonous to me.

My eyes fluttered as I fought to stay awake.

I could hear her shrieking with triumph as she beat the three of them down.

The wolf had only been a small part of her power. Now that they were fighting the real thing, she would be nearly invincible.

And then she would kill me.

But before that, she would kill them.

My head swam, but I tried to collect my thoughts.

Lights were glinting above me in the velvet blackness. I felt a cool touch on my cheek, wiping away the wetness on my skin.

“Oh Juliet,” Mom said, voice filled with ancient sadness. “Don’t cry, baby.”

“Mom?” I said. My heart filled with warmth and light.

And I was eight years old again, sitting by the window of our crappy old apartment, listening to her weave words into something that lived and breathed in front of me.

“Hey, sweetheart,” she said, and tucked my hair behind my ear.

“I missed you,” I blurted, tears filling my eyes again.

“Don’t cry now,” she insisted, pulling me close. She smelled exactly the same, like jasmine and sunlight and the forest in spring. “This isn’t a place for tears.”

“Where are we? I thought I was…somewhere else. In a bad place.”

“You still are,” she said heavily. “You’re having a hallucination.”

“So you aren’t real?”

“I’m whatever you need me to be,” she said, and smiled down at me. “Why are you so small? You haven’t been this tiny in almost a decade!”

“It’s how I remember being when I was here,” I said simply. “This was the place where you told stories, remember?”

But I looked at my hands, and I made myself big again. She was so slight and frail that I moved away so I wouldn’t crush her. I realized that I would be two inches taller than her if we were standing, and didn’t know how to feel about that.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I guess I had a growth spurt,” I mumbled. “I’m taller than you now.”

“Well, I always hoped you wouldn’t be a hobbit like me,” she said fondly. “You must have your father to thank for those extra two inches. So,” she said, looking around, “You called this the story place?”

“This is where you told me that story of how you went to fairyland with the fairy king,” I said. It was exactly the same as I remembered it. Books on every available surface, and two racks of air-drying clothes (we were too frugal to pay for the coin-operated washer dryer in the basement), and all the cleaning equipment from Mom’s job.

But it was all a little fuzzy around the edges, and the place where we sat was the brightest. The rest of the room seemed dimmer, and more blurry.

“I remember now, that was your favorite story. Do you want me to tell it again?”

I frowned. Something was wrong.

Someone was yelling. I could feel a tug in my chest, like someone wanted me to go back.

“I think someone might be in trouble,” I said restlessly. “Someone I care about.”

“You can’t help them yet,” she said gently. “But let me tell you a story.”

“Will that help?”

“Stories always make things better,” she said seriously. “Now, what story would you like me to tell?”

“There’s only one,” I said, “Tell me how you met a fae king and went to fairyland.”

She smiled.

I listened to her tell it, the same way I remembered. It was imprinted in me, so I knew every word and every rise and dip of her voice as though I was saying it with her.

“What did it look like?” I asked, towards the end.

She was about to describe the fae city to me, but I wanted to know what she’d seen first, before everything else. It felt important.

“We ended up in a clearing in the heart of a wild forest, older than time itself,” Mom said softly. “Next to us was a river, chuckling quietly over clear, smooth stones. Its magic kept it warm even in the depths of winter, and it was only two feet deep, so you could bathe in it and never feel cold. The trees dropped all sorts of fruit if you asked nicely, and the circle of birchwood trees around the clearing’s edge guarded us at night and dropped pine for us to sleep on, and branches to make fire. At the northernmost tip of the circle, there was a pile of stones to mark the way to the king’s city. We lit fires the first few nights, before the king took me to his city. The nights smelled like secrets, and the sparks of fires that wanted to burn forever, and clear air that knew the winter was almost upon the forest.”

“It sounds beautiful,” I said. “Too bad I’ll never see it.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said, and smiled.

It lit up her face, but she looked like there was some secret sadness holding her back.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, touching her cheek softly.

“Just me being selfish,” she said, blinking her eyes rapidly. “I’m going to miss you.”

“Why? I’m right here?” I said, confused.

“Do you have your ashes?” she asked abruptly changing the subject.

“The—yeah, I haven’t burnt it yet. What’s the point,” I said, low and bitter. “That witch is going to kill us all anyway.”

“I never taught you to be a quitter,” she said sternly. “Now, how’s your body doing back where all the ruckus is?”

“Not so hot, Mom,” I admitted. “I think I might be dying. Is that why I’m here? Because I’m already dead?”

“You’re slipping away, but you came to me first because you’re a sensible girl,” Mom said briskly. “It’s not your time yet, silly.”

“But it hurts back there,” I protested, feeling very much like a child trying to hide behind her mother’s skirts.

“The hard things always do,” she sighed, “But you have important things to do.”

“Can’t someone else do them?” I said, trying not to sound like I was whining. By the way Mom narrowed her eyes at me, I didn’t think I succeeded.

“Remember your friends,” she said. “Can you hear them?”

I tried to listen.

I heard shouting, and a groan of pain that was all too familiar.

A thump announcing a body that was thrown to the ground.

The crack of bone and a muffled scream.

“I can hear them,” I said, trembling. “They’re…they’re going to die, Mom. I need to do something.”

“There you are,” she said, smiling. “I knew you couldn’t leave them behind. Listen carefully…”

When I opened my eyes again, I realized it must have been a minute since I’d fallen unconscious, at the most. The kelpie was still fighting the boys, who were holding out against her without losing outright. But Sorrel was already limping, and Rook was preserved only thanks to his curse.

The kelpie displayed powers I had no idea even existed.

Her arm grew and stretched like rubber and turned into a huge, snapping snake once she’d wrapped it around Rook’s torso. He stabbed it with the point of an arrow and it seemed to evaporate.

She snapped her fingers and a murder of flapping, cawing crows flew down and tried to peck out Thistle’s eyes. He swung at them with his swords, two-handed, and they fell down in a cloud of feathers and blood.

“Sorrel!” I called. He was on the ground, sitting right where his knee had buckled.

“Juliet?” he said. “Thank god you’re not dead! We’re in a little bit of trouble here.”

He had a gift for understatement.

“I know, I can help,” I said, and struggled onto my hands.

I could feel bone scraping against bone in my ankle, making a sound that chilled me.

“Can you pass me my backpack? It should be right beside you. I think I’ve broken my ankle.”

“I see it,” he said, and limped towards me, dragging it behind him.

I unzipped it, praying that the kelpie wouldn’t notice the two of us while Thistle and Rook were keeping her busy. I found the pressed rose still pristine and wrapped in tissue with a wave of relief.

“Now what?” he said. “We need matches or something.”

“Hold on,” I said, and tried to concentrate on my various hurts like Mom had told me to.

I could feel the insistent throb in my ankle that told me it was very definitely broken. My hip was bruised from being tossed on the ground like I was a sack of potatoes and from rocks and sharp branches digging into my skin.

I tried to imagine gathering up all that pain until it was a small, pulsing ball in my hand. In my mind it looked like a sphere of obsidian, streaked with gold and copper and silver. I tried to touch it but it threatened to break apart and return to its original form.

The ball was power. I could feel it thrumming and waiting to be released. Maybe because it was part of me, I knew that it would be overkill to use the entire thing just on the flower.

I felt like it could have felled a tree.

But I didn’t get to choose my hurts.

I held the rose in front of me, trying to hold the ball in my mind at the same time. It was hard, dividing my concentration between two things at once and being mindful of both equally. I wish I’d been able to practice it before.

I could feel Sorrel’s eyes on me, barely holding back from demanding what the hell I was doing. I was grateful for his silence. Even a word out of him and I would have been too distracted to hold the ball in my mind. It would have burst out of me like a rocket out of a bottle.

Slowly, I aimed the ball at the rose. It sat there so innocently, a red so deep it was nearly black, with streaks of pink and brown and lighter colors. The petals weren’t velvety soft anymore, but brittle like old paper.

“Burn,” I said, and the ball left the palm of my hand with a pop. I watched in amazement as it took the form of black flames edged in gold.

It was almost entirely silent as it roared towards the flower, and somehow missed my flesh and blood hand that was holding it. In a fraction of a second the rose had turned to ash, tickling my palm as it dropped down softly like curled black feathers.

“What in holy hell,” Sorrel breathed.

“I think this might be good?” I said timidly. The pain wasn’t gone. I’d only swept up the greatest waves of it, and there were smaller strands that still nudged at me, reminding me that I was hurt. “I can do things with…pain.”

“How did you--?”

“I had a dream,” I explained, “When I was unconscious. My Mom told me I could.”

“Your dead mother?” he said. I didn’t know if it was simple disbelief or whether he thought the fall had knocked something loose in me.

“Yeah, I don’t really get it either,” I said heavily. “On the plus side, I finally have the last thing I need to open a gate for you three.”

“What kind of dream was this?”

“I’m guessing a magical one. Don’t tell me if that’s weird, I want to keep believing I’m normal.”

“Juliet, you’re most definitely not normal,” he breathed. “What do you need to open the gate?”

“Your dagger.”

He gave it to me.

“Now just—“

“I see you there, my little rats,” the kelpie’s voice crooned.

I froze, naked fear on my face. Sorrel’s jaw clenched.

“Conspiring to kill me, are we? My wee feelings are hurt!”

Not for the first time, I wondered if she was a little bit crazy. I looked over, to see Rook panting on the ground, held down by some sort of metal crowbar that was wrapped around his neck and digging into the earth like an anchor. His body was thrashing wildly, trying to get free.

Thistle spat something dark and globby on the ground and stood up. I saw that his hands were trembling slightly as he got into position.

“I’ll distract her,” Sorrel muttered out of the corner of his mouth.

“Okay,” I whispered back, and watched him get up helplessly.

He’d healed at least. He wasn’t limping anymore. Besides, I did need time. I would get them all home, I told myself firmly, and tried to believe it.

“A knight in rusted armor,” she said delightedly. Her cackling voice made me want to claw her eyes out.

“Come to challenge me? Hoping I won’t see the mouse trying to cheat me out of dinner? No,” she said, voice hardening. “You will stay right there.”

Her arm shot out, becoming smooth and brown and pointed at the end like a stave, and I didn’t even have time to close my eyes before it punched into me through my ribs.

I let out a feeble gasp, more from surprise than anything else, and felt the stars wheel above me as I crumped. I heard twin bellows of rage.

“Not so fast,” she told Sorrel pleasantly. I heard him grunt in pain, and knew he must have rushed towards me, trying to help.

She withdrew her arm, which tore out of the ragged hole in my gut. The sound was sickening, but surprisingly I didn’t feel pain.

You’re in shock, I told myself. You’d better hope for pain because it’s the only thing you can use.

I just felt cold at first, and then prickles on my fingers and toes.

I looked down dispassionately at the wound, which had sprayed blood when the stave left my body, but was now bleeding more sluggishly. I reached down to touch it, and saw that it was warm.

I only had a little time, I knew.

Then I finally felt it. A wave of pain so sharp and encompassing I sobbed out loud. I wanted to dissolve into the ground, to shake apart, and to die. Anything to escape it. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move.

But I had to.

With an incredible effort, I managed to block out every irrelevant sensation and narrow down my concentration to the greatest source of pain. It was my gaping stomach wound, obviously.

Maybe it had punctured a lung. That would explain why it was so hard to breathe. I could hear myself, and I sounded like one of those inbred pugs with the flat noses. Poor bastards.

This time, the ball was smaller and more solid looking. It was still jet black with shining spiderweb cracks running through it like molten lava. It pulsed hot and slow, feeling somehow friendly, like it was going to help me.

But I was so weak. And the ball wriggled in me like a thrashing snake, slippery and almost impossible to hold on to. All I wanted to do was surrender myself to the cool, welcoming darkness. It was hard to remember why I shouldn’t.

Because your friends will die if you do, Mom’s voice thundered in my head.

Oh yeah.

The ash had coated my hand, soft and velvety. I touched my abdomen and felt the ash mix with the blood there, still warm. That was the second part of the spell. Maybe the only good part of getting stabbed was that it put my spell ingredient in easy reach.

I drew a circle in the air with shaky fingers.

To my delight, the outline glowed bright but died down immediately. Dammit.

I tried again but it spat sparks and went away. I knew I could do it. I just needed to concentrate. But I could hear the kelpie buzzing like a gnat in the background, and knew she was hurting my friends. I wish she’d continued hurting me instead. At least I could have used that.

This time I used four fingers of my hand like a paintbrush, and pressed back against the air.

I couldn’t explain it, but for the first time I felt resistance.

Like I was trying to tear through something.

Go on, I thought desperately. Go through whatever it is that’s in the way.

And with the slightest shimmer in the air, I felt my hand go through like it was peeking through a tent flap, and knew the cool breeze of a different world.

I let my head sink back in relief. I’d done it.

I’d really done it.

I heard the bubbling hiss of her magic near me, and knew I couldn’t rest for long.

The ball of magic hung in my mind, looking like it was about to burst and spill liquid gold.

But I couldn’t use it yet.

I moved with difficulty, and sat on my folded knees. At least I was upright now. I ignored the whistles and gurgling sounds that my breaths were making.

Either it wouldn’t matter, or the boys would find a way to fix me.

I reached up and pulled at the edge of the flap I’d created, widening it. It felt odd as it ripped, and reminded me of a dress unzipping.

I looked through to the other side but saw only the sheet of golden sparks. It looked like we’d have to step through it without knowing what lay on the other side.

I found that I could manipulate the shape of the portal by pinching and widening the air between my fingers. If I pinched my fingers so they touched, I thought that the portal would close.

I found this out the hard way when I closed it right when a sparrow was flying through inquisitively. The portal closed, not waiting for it to make it all the way to the other side, and half its body fell to the earth, like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

But it gave me an idea.

“Hey, big ugly!” I yelled.

Or tried to, anyway.

My lungs weren’t really up to it, so it came out as a pained whisper instead.

I hadn’t caught her attention, she was still whaling on the boys and giving them no respite. I could see Rook’s body lying on the grass, twitching feebly.

Shit. Even I didn’t want him to really die.

I picked up a rock and threw it at her.

That made her turn and narrow her eyes at me, and she noticed the open portal almost immediately.

“I did it,” I whispered shakily. “I opened it for you. So go ahead and leave us all alone!”

“My, my,” she purred, looking delighted. It stretched the harsh contours of her face and made her look positively demonic.

“However did you manage?”

“Amazing what I can do when my friends’ lives are at stake,” I said sourly.

She laughed and suddenly she looked very different. Her face softened, her eyes became larger, and her dress changed into a soft tunic and boots. She looked a decade younger. She held her hands loosely at her sides like she wasn’t about to attack immediately.

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” she said as she walked towards me, eyes fixed on the shining circle in the air.

At first I didn’t know who she was talking to, but then I saw Thistle, dagger in hand and about to launch himself at her. I shook my head at him, and he looked at me in confusion with a little bit of anger mixed in.

She eyed the portal for a few seconds. When it did nothing, she waved her hand in front of it, and frowned when it flashed a bright blue.

“I don’t know how, but you’ve done it,” she said reluctantly. “That’s a functioning portal.”

“Just go through it and leave us alone,” I repeated, hand resting carefully on my abdomen.

I felt exposed sitting in front of her with my open wound. She was the predator, and I was the prey, weak and wounded and almost begging to be killed.

“Relax, I’m not going to hurt you,” she crooned, and patted my head. “You’ve actually given me what I wanted.”

I flinched away violently.

“Don’t touch her,” Thistle growled.

She rolled her eyes. “What will you do? Bore me to death again?” she asked, and chuckled. “But never mind. I don’t want to fight anymore. In fact, I’ll give you something for being so cooperative.”

She waved her hand and looked satisfied.

“There,” she said, “Don’t say I never paid you back.”

She stepped through so she was partly through and partly still on our side. She looked back with an odd expression on her face.

“How odd, it tickles—“

And I pinched my fingers together, closing the portal instantaneously.

Her scream was cut off as the portal closed at the exact middle of her body, slicing her in half with a sound like a buzzsaw cutting through wood.

I watched, not breathing, as half her head and bisected body fell onto the ground with a wet splat.

It lay, unmoving.

I looked up and met Rook’s eyes.

“She’s gone,” I said, clearing my throat in the ensuing silence. “But I really do know how to open a portal, so I can send you home.”

“Where did you learn how to do that?” Sorrel demanded, scrambling up from where he’d fallen.

He came over and pressed his hand over mine, which was covering the hole in my stomach. “Don’t talk if it hurts.”

I laughed and then winced. I couldn’t feel a lot other than pain at the moment. And there was a slow trickle at the corner of my mouth that tasted an awful lot like blood.

I held my hand in the air with my thumb, index and middle fingertips touching. Then I opened them wide. I was getting better at controlling them already, I noticed.

“There,” I said faintly, as the light from the new portal bathed golden light on their faces. Faces that were gawping in amazement.

“We can’t leave you here,” Sorrel said, as I moved myself to a more comfortable position on the grass. I just wanted to get warm again.

My arms and legs felt like they were blocks of ice. I curled my head into the crook of my elbow.

I was so tired. I just wanted to sleep and never wake up…

“Juliet,” Thistle’s voice said. It sounded faint. He must have moved away. I hummed in response.

My body felt like it was made of lead. I wouldn’t have been able to lift myself off the earth if I wanted to.

And I really, really didn’t.

I fell asleep at some point in the next few minutes, and completely missed everything important that followed.

I missed Thistle and Sorrel picking me up and carrying me through the portal.

I missed them setting up camp and lighting a fire.

I missed them roasting a rabbit and digging up wild carrots for dinner.

And I missed seeing the looks on Thistle and Sorrel’s faces when they remembered they could use their fae powers again.

That one I did really regret not being able to see.

They spent that entire night healing me. Sorrel sang me into a deeper sleep while Rook heated the tip of his sword and cauterized my wound. Thistle covered it with a poultice and wrapped it in clean bandages.

The next morning when I woke, lying against the side of a tree, they were gone.

Instead, there was the pointed tip of a silver spear held threateningly to my neck.

I slowly followed the length of it with my eyes and met the unamused gaze of a fae soldier in silver plated armor who was holding it to my throat.

And I had no doubt that he was ready to use it.

He was surrounded by fifty other soldiers on horseback.

There wasn’t a single other sound in that clearing. Not one bird chirped, nor did any blades of glass rustle.

Even the wind was completely silent.

All of the soldiers were armed to the teeth, and none of them looked happy to see me.

“The Silver Legion demands your life in payment for the crime of trespassing in our forest,” growled the man holding the weapon less than an inch from my throat.

When I swallowed, I felt the cold edge of it on my skin.

“Any last words before I rip your soul from your body, criminal?”

I cleared my throat, and tried not to look like I was about to die from fear.

“I’m here to see the King,” I said, as commandingly as I could manage. “He’s my father, you see.”

Untitled

Juliet’s story will be continued in Glitter and Gold, available September 2018!

Also by T. S. Bishop

Renegade Witch (An Urban Fantasy Reverse Harem Romance)

A witch on the run. Her three gorgeous protectors. Demons invading Chicago.

And the truth about her past that could destroy everything.

There's always been something strange about me, everyone always said. So they avoided me, gossiped about me. But they didn't know about the demons. Because only I can see them.

Instead of letting my foster parents lock me up in an institution because of my 'hallucinations', I ran away from home and I've been living on my own in Chicago ever since.

And I was doing fine selling cheap magical trinkets on the black market to get by, until dangerous men with knives and guns decided to kidnap me and throw me in their murder dungeon.

Attracting the wrong kind of attention was never part of my plan. And even more dangerous than the men who kidnapped me are the men who saved me...

Adrian, the most inhumanly gorgeous boy I've ever seen in my life helped me escape and introduced me to his two equally attractive friends who needed me and my so-called abilities.

Turns out, I might be a witch.

And only I could help them save Chicago from the demons. If I could remember to focus on the mission and stop myself from falling for them...

Then there's the rude, beautiful boy in a prison cell who I keep dreaming about...I'm not even sure if he's real but there's a connection between us that I can't explain.

My life just got really complicated. With secrets from my past snapping at my heels, demons invading the city, and my enemies two steps ahead of me at every turn...

My name is Sophia Landry, and I might not be getting out of this one alive.

Renegade Witch is a TRUE slow burn Reverse Harem Romance with one badass witch, her harem and plenty of action, steamy scenes and jaw-dropping reveals to keep you turning the pages!

Click here to read it for free with Kindle Unlimited!

Acknowledgments

A note from the author

Hello there, dear reader!

If you made it this far, I’m guessing you finished reading Ash and Roses, Book 1 in the Fae Kingdoms Series. Writing this book and planning out the series has eaten up my entire life over the past few months, and I hope you enjoyed reading it!

As an indie author, reviews are essential to getting the word out about my books to other people. They’re also a way for me to hear from my readers, which is hugely important to me as a writer. If you could leave a review for Ash and Roses on Amazon and/or Goodreads, I would greatly appreciate it.

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