Page 109 of The Alpha and the Baker
Oh, I’d gotten a swear out of them? It seemed that I really had gotten under their skin.
“You think I’m going to lose?” I asked.
“Of course you’re going to lose! You brought cupcakes—simple, stupidcupcakes—to a bake-off againstfairies.”
I took a deep breath, thinking it was funny that my calm was pissing off the woman when my heart was pounding so hard I wanted to throw up. But I reminded myself I needed to stay cool and take as much time as I could.
“If I have lost, I have already lost—there’s nothing in this moment I could say to change that,” I said slowly, carefully. “But I need to remind you, we haven’t made our final judgment yet, so until then, I have just as much a chance to win as any of you. We all promised to be unbiased, yes?”
“You—” she cut herself off with a sharp cough, and it was hard for me not to smirk. Oh yeah. Idefinitelyhad gotten under their skin. Good. “Fine! If no one has any objections, we should give our final judgments.”
“Agreed.”
There was a chorus of concurring answers in the fairy group, interspersed with throat clearing or a couple of them drinking from flasks they pulled out of appearing and disappearing pockets, until finally all were staring at me.
“All right then,” I murmured, the weight of everything threatening to crush down on me. But I thought of Cas, and his sense of purpose. I thought of Gammy McCallister and the necklace of hers I was wearing right now. I thought of AbuelitaRamirez and the protection pouch.
And I thought of my mother. Her gentle smile. The way she would always tell me how proud of me she was. Her laugh. Her smile.Everything.
Despite everything, I knew deep in my heart that no matter what the fairies did, I would never lose that.
“Let’s start the final judgment,” I said with a finality that felt like a shockwave.
It seemed that it was time for me to lose.
Felicia
Quality Ingredients
“How dowe want to do this?” I asked. “Pieces of paper? Show of hands?”
“Paper,” Slicked-back said, but at the same time two others answered as well.
“Show of hands.”
“Stones in front of our favorite.”
I blinked at them, smiling slightly. There was that discord I wanted. Fairies were so into contracts and the rules that I’d guessed the finer details would trip them up, so it was satisfying to know I was right.
“Shall we vote on the best way then?” I asked as innocently as I could, but not innocently enough, because Slicked-back practically snarled at me.
Well, he started to snarl. He coughed twice, then finished his snarl, but close enough.
“You mock us!”
“I have no idea what you mean.”
“All these delays and distractions! You are prolonging the—” he cut himself off with another few coughs, and I swore it was actually making him blush. “You—you!”
His growing tirade cut off instantly when a groan sounded from the ground beside us. Almost like they were one entity, all the fairies’ heads jerked in the direction of the noise. It was just a child, his eyelids fluttering slightly.
“He’s waking up!”
“Put him back to sleep, Obererion!”
“I will, I just—” He started coughing, and a different fairy knelt next to the kid and waved their hand over the kid’s face.
“Sleep, young one. Dream of happy things and pleasant memories.”
