Page 57 of Welcome to Fae Cafe

Heat rippled through Cress’s legs. He sprang from the branch and landed between his mother and the beast. The animal lurched back with a shriek as Cress raised his fists, feeling the low pulses of power growing in his veins.

“I’ll kill your crossbeast,” Cress promised the Queene who blinked down at him with large silver eyes. “And you,” he added, “if you don’t leave this instant. I don’t care how important you are.”

He brought cold wind up from the ground to prove it. It rippled through Cress’s long hair, brushing itself along his frost-coated eyes.

The Queene dismounted her crossbeast, but he didn’t bow or lower his gaze as his mother had, not even when she appeared over his childling frame.

The silver-haired woman stared at Cress in silence. Her gray eyes twinkled with the same sheen as the fluttering leaves above. Her stare was potent, and heavy, and hot as flame.

“I want him,” she said to the males on reindeer.

“Please!” Cress’s mother begged. “He’s too young—”

“I will pay you for him fairly.” The Queene finally tore her gaze from Cress and put in on Cress’s mother. An ounce of respect was in her tone for the first time. “You have a powerful child. I can give him a better life than this; one of faeborn riches and glory. I can be a worthy mother to him. I want him.”

Cress’s hands tightened to fists, and he glanced back to his mother’s tear-stained face. But he took in her quivering lip, the straw house at her back, and the dying garden in the yard. He thought about the cupboards that had grown empty and the well that had dried up.

His mother looked at him, and in her eyes, Cress saw that she was tempted—not because she wanted him to leave, but because she knew she could not give him a good life.

But Cress did not need a good life. Cress just needed his mother.

During quiet, candlelit dinners, his mother had whispered stories. Some of them were about this Queene. Most of them were dreadful. He realized she could not say no.

Cress brought his stare back to the gray-eyed female standing over him. “Mother,” he called back, “what do you need to be happy? Gold? A house?”

Cress’s mother did not reply.

“Give him to me, or I will let him fight my crossbeast as he wishes,” the Queene threatened over his head.

“That’s not necessary,” Cress said. “Give my mother everything she wants from this day forward. Give her safety, a large house, a fruitful garden, pretty clothes, and true happiness. And I will come with you in exchange for that.”

The Queene’s wide smile returned. “A fairy bargain. Smart boy,” she said, seeming to think it over. “I shall do as you wish on one condition: You must never speak to your faeborn mother again. I shall be your mother from this day forward. Youronlymother.”

Cress heard a sob escape his mother. He thought of all the years she had fed him crushed grains, taught him how to play the old harp with missing strings, and how she had warned him of every fairy trick she knew.

Cress chewed on the inside of his cheek. “This bargain seems fair.”

“Get off your deer, Chimestar,” the Queene called back at one of the males with her. The male obeyed. “You will walk back. The boy will ride with us.”

“Wait,” Cress said.

The Queene and her males paused as dark clouds rolled in overhead, shadowing their faces. One or two of the reindeer staggered back toward the woods when ash formed at Cress’s feet and clawed its way over the ground toward them.

The Queene lifted a silver brow.

“If you betray my trust in regard to my mother”—Cress’s bright eyes narrowed and the wind changed directions, thrusting back the Queene’s silver hair—“I will kill your crossbeast and ensure you lose whatever power it gives you.”

For a moment, dead silence filled the yard.

Then, the Queene’s loud, crazed laughter rang through the forest.

20

Kate Kole and The Thing that Happened to Grandma Lewis

The ground was muddy from melted snow; it stuck to the soles of Kate’s boots. The air was humid, the sky was gray, and the trees were naked. Kate laughed as she tore through the sparse woods behind Grandma Lewis’s house. Lily cackled as she tried to keep up, glancing back at Greyson howling threats as he chased them with a stick in his fourteen-year-old fingers.

“I’ll get you for that, Lily Baker!” he shrieked, kicking up mud with his rainboots. He tried clawing clumps of dirt out of his hair where Lily had lobbed a handful.

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