Page 58 of The Fae Menagerie
"It's not here!"
"We already knew that."
"They say it sometimes appears when you most need it, and this is fucking necessary!"
I couldn't contain my frustration any longer. "You want to be rid of me that badly?"
"No!"
His instant and overloud response shocked me to silence.
"I don't want you to leave, but you must." Doyle hugged his shoulders and his wings closed in around him. When he glanced up, he looked even more scared than when the basilisk had attacked.
"What's wrong?"
"My grandmother."
He placed the last armful of library books back on the shelf, and I led him to the table with cane-backed chairs. They were the most comfortable seats in his enclosure, apart from his bed.
I watched thoughts flit across his face while I waited for him to speak. Finally, he sighed and dropped his elbows on the table, burying his face in his hands. "My grandmother expects me to follow her lead and refuse my fated mate. If I don't …" he made a sound suspiciously like a sob, "she'll murder you."
"That's nothing new. Aidan's been trying to kill me since I got here." I wasn't wrong, but I could tell that was the wrong thing to say.
"Aidan couldn't care less about either of us. Grandmother's been pulling his strings the whole time."
"Behind Mother Thera's back?"
He laughed at the name, which had been my intention. "Mother blames my grandmother for my father's death. Beyond that, she also blames Grandmother for their match, her unhappy marriage, and my roguish behavior."
While I knew wars had two or more sides, I'd been reading up on Doyle's family history and agreed with Mother Thera. His grandmother seemed to be to blame for the start of the war between the light and dark courts, which led to the infestation of wasps that almost destroyed the pixies and anthousai alike and killed Doyle's father.
"The coin has to be around here somewhere," he muttered.
"I don't believe in fate," I reminded him. "Or luck."
"Then what would you call it?"
I couldn't answer him, so I approached the problem from another direction. "The probability is high that the coin fell into another enclosure, or maybe outside in the menagerie park."
He snorted. "Can you build me an algorithm that tells me where it is?"
"Maybe, with the right tools." I'd wished for my cell phone countless times over the last several months. It had been charging in its dock on the corner of my desk when I was forcefully pulled to the basement. Which … now was not the time to question why my father had built his headquarters atop a fairy circle in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota.
"Whether or not you believe, we can't change the inevitable. Aidan will report to Grandmother at the end of the month. When she finds out, she'll kill you." He hid his face again. "Both of us, probably."
"Doyle."
He glanced up at me from between his fingers.
"I don't care."
"What?" He dropped his hands to his lap.
"I'm going to die, anyway. At least I'll die knowing I've lived a little. If you would have killed me the day we met, like Bret wanted, I would have missed out on," I waved my hand between us to avoid describing my feelings. "This."
He stood and rushed me, pulling me out of my chair and holding me in his arms, even his wings tucking around my shoulders. "I don't want you to die, Parker."
"Then let me live."
