Page 62 of Faerie Fate
“All the time,” I admitted.
“You think we’ll ever get to run again?”
I blinked back tears. “Do you want me to be honest or do you want me to lie? Because there’s gonna be a big difference between the answers.”
“I don’t care. Dealer’s choice.” She sounded as exhausted as I felt.
“I think I’d do a lot of terrible things to be normal again but I’m not sure it will ever happen.”
She waited a beat before saying, “Yeah, I’m in the same frame of mind. It’s never going to get better.”
“You regret coming back into my life?” I asked, meeting her eyes.
“Nah. I can’t say it’s been the time of my life, but hey, it’s exciting.”
“That’s one word for it.”
I was the first to look away. What the hell did I say to her? There was nothing perfectly packaged to soothe her nerves. Nothing I’d deliver flawlessly to help alleviate the strain in the room. Which only amped up when Mike popped around the corner.
“I can’t figure out her wards,” he said with a shake of his head. “I kinda thought…” He trailed off.
“What? Because she’s your grandma, you thought you’d be able to find a way through?” Bronwen asked. “Where would we go, anyway? We need a witch.”
I looked at Mike like he was a stranger and not the man I’d shared a bed with. Not the one I’d felt pulled toward from the first moment I met him.
The fae didn’t age the same way humans did. They usually looked the same as humans until they reached about thirty and then they stayed thirty. For centuries. Only revealing their true years when they got to the tail end of an extremely long existence.
Mike had filled out in some ways and went leaner in others. His awkward handsomeness had become something he wore well, rather than the embarrassment of a slightly crooked smile and nose to slightly too-wide eyes.
“What would you do if you figured out the wards?” I wanted to know.
“No clue. Learn something? Soothe myself by realizing we have a way out if we need one?” Mike’s tone was curt. He seemed to realize this and checked himself immediately. “I need to feel useful.”
Nerves. That had to be what it was. Everyone was on edge and worried about our friends and family back home.
“Youareuseful,” I reminded him. “You brought us back. We have a halfway decent chance of accomplishing our goals now.”
Noren slunk through the kitchen and pressed the tip of his nose against the window. He huffed out a breath and fogged the glass.
“Do you see something?” I asked Noren.
His ears flicked at the sound of my voice but without his hackles raised, it had to be more of a patrol thing. Or maybe hewas reacting to the anxiety bubbling up between the three of us. That grew thicker as the hours passed.
I caught Noren standing at the window and staring off into the distance multiple times, like he sensed something was off. Mike and Bronwen noticed it too.
Bronwen shivered, running her palms up along her forearms. “It’s just weird, isn’t it? How she found us in that tavern? And how she happens to be your grandma?”
“Weird is an understatement,” Mike muttered. He flung himself on the couch with his arm over his face and his knee bobbing up and down.
“I’m not sure if trusting her was the smart thing to do,” Bronwen continued.
She’d taken to pacing the length of the front of the cabin and joining Noren at the windows. Without options, without choice, I stood in front of the fireplace against the opposite wall and let the warmth sink down beneath my skin.
“She left us no choice. She snapped her fingers and boom,” I reminded Bronwen.
Mike shifted to stare at me underneath his arm. “Maybe if we’d gotten better at protection spells, she wouldn’t have been able to work her powers so easily against us.”
“In all our training sessions, we never did practice any kind of blocker for spellwork. Physical blocks, sure.” But I had half a mind that none of it would have worked.
