Page 55 of Welcome to Fae Cafe

“Oh, just stop.” Kate rolled her eyes. “I know you were all out there watching me.”

She carried the milk over to the fridge. Shayne perked up at the sight of it and scrambled to sit. His legs dangled over the counter’s edge, and his bare heels thudded against the cupboards.

“I don’t know if my friend is going to be here next week for the café’s opening day, but we’re going to go ahead with it either way. I owe some people a lot of money,” Kate told them. “I’ll convince Lily to come back later.”

“What’s so important about that human friend? Why must you keep her?” Shayne asked as he dragged over his milk mug and eyed the fridge.

Kate thought about answering, but she turned to Mor instead. “Tell me why your Prince keeps trying to kiss me,” she demanded.

“He’s trying to enchant you,” Mor blurted, then chomped his mouth shut and flexed his jaw.

“How many more games is the Prince going to play before he gives up?” she asked. None of the fae spoke, so Kate put her hands on her hips. “Tell me when he’ll give up!”

All at once three voices spoke,

“Never.”

“Never.”

“Never.”

Kate tossed her sweater on the hooks to dry and wrestled a hand through her wet, tangled hair. She stared at Freida’s intricate knitting pattern on the sweater’s sleeve, and a beat of frustration moved through her. She had to wait six more days to meet with the knitting club when she had so many new questions about the Prince. Or…Cress, as he’d called himself.

Cress.

For a moment, her mind’s eye filled with his turquoise eyes going soft, his lips parting, and his tone changing as he stepped in and asked her to kiss him—

She smacked her warm forehead. Kate couldn’t decide if she was flattered or repulsed. Maybe a shameful bit of both.

“Were you telling the truth when you said that if you go home, you’re going to get killed?” she asked the assassins puttering about. She rubbed her stinging skin, realizing she smacked herself too hard.

“Yes,” Shayne said. “But only if we fail.”

She nodded. “I’m sorry that’s the fate waiting for you. But I don’t plan on offering myself as a sacrifice. In fact, I’m changing my orders. I don’t want you to just protect me from the Prince, I want you to protect me fromeverything. If he—or anyone else—is trying to trick me, I want you to give me a heads up. If someone tries to kill me, I want you to stop them. And since that means you can’t go back to where you came from”—she glanced at the bookshelf behind the counter and pulled three novels from her collection: all popular fae fantasy books— “you might as well get reading. You should really know how humans perceive a fae if you’re going to live among us.” She walked around and smacked a book against each of the fae’s chests. Dranian lifted his book in disgust.

“Human literature,” he grumbled. “How preposterous.”

Thirty minutes later, three assassins sat around the café sipping warm pumpkin spice lattes and flipping the pages of their novels quietly.

Kate wandered up to her apartment and closed the door behind her when she was inside.

For a moment she stood in the silence. The rain picked up again, and in the distance, thunder called her name. She wondered when the fall thunderstorms were going to stop. They’d lasted longer than ever this year. Kate craved cool snow, clear skies, and a storefront filled with happy people sipping piping hot drinks.

She sank to the floor and hugged her knees to herself, sorting through the sounds of the storm to hear Shayne’s question in her mind,

“What’s so important about that human friend? Why must you keep her?”

18

Kate Kole and The Week Lily Baker was (Unofficially) Adopted

When Lily Baker was led into the grade seven classroom of Sir Joseph Elementary, Kate put her gaze on the floor like the rest of the students. And there was only one real reason for it—Lily Baker looked like trouble.

Kate didn’t want trouble. Her best friend Holly had just moved to British Columbia, and since then, Kate spent most of her lunch hour reading quietly at her desk or out beneath the maples in the playground. She could have tried to make new friends, but all the girls were mean and loud and demanded that you pick a side in the class that was divided right down the middle between Sophia Cuthbert’s friends and Layla Meeb’s friends. The two sides hated each other, which was why Kate had never bothered to pick one.

Occasionally, Kate played soccer with the boys, but she couldn’t keep up with them. And she didn’t like being the only girl on the field.

“I heard she just moved into the youth home down the road,” Sophia Cuthbert whispered a few seats away as she nodded to the new girl at the front. A few snickers bounded through the room from people who were loyal to—or afraid of—Sophia.

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