Page 12 of Hellish Fae
She is so dramatic.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say. “I’m living my best life in the Bin.”
Everyone in the room takes a disdainful moment to slide their gaze down my three-day-old dirty shirt and hot pink panties that are feeling smaller by the minute.
I roll my eyes. As if they’re so much better than me. Half the room isn’t even wearing shirts, for faefuck’s sake. Is there some sort of shirt shortage I don’t know about happening in the fae realm?
“Anyway,” I say cautiously, “what exactly would we do together while joining forces? Play house here in your tree fort?” I glance from the wooden cup on the table to the wooden chairs and the vines tying everything together.
“We’d go back, Ari,” she says. “We’d go back to court where we belong. We’d have a life. The life we were meant to live.”
I swallow. It hurts my chest so badly to realize no one’s called me Ari in a long, long time.
Her words and the sting of that sentimental name my mother used to call me hits me all at once.
She wants to go back. I do, too. Just being a tiny distance inside the fae realm makes my heart pound to life with happiness that I’d forgotten about.
I guess... I guess I forgot what happiness felt like.
It’s all great and wonderful and let’s just close the book of my life right now and say the fairytale is done, and we all lived happily ever after.
Except I don’t trust Corva. No one should. These three fallen are so fucking obtuse for thinking she’s helping them.
Poisoning them is what she’s really doing.
She’ll do it to me, too
And I’m about to let her.
5
A Crow’s Nest
I’ve agreed to stay.
For now.
It’s late in the day. The dim evening sunlight sweeps through the carved windows, and the more stairs I climb in this place, the more elaborate it all becomes. There’s a damn training room on the sixth floor. When I peer nervously out the window, I recognize the large room and the dozens of wooden practice swords on a rack. Three real swords hang near the door. Two glitter with golden magic like it’s blessed by the gods. They’re the swords Zav and Damien wore today. The third… it’s black and ashen. My stomach twists as I look at the three odd blades and their similarities but also their harsh differences to the third.
I don’t understand it.
Forcing myself to look away, I find the room to be very large with a soft blue mat spread across it. Armory is piled in the corner. Balance beams and padded mats are all around, teetering on the thin branches in the top of a tree. The space literally sways when the leaves outside rustle in the breeze.
The mortal realm and their housing inspectors would have a heart attack over the layout of this house. It’s completely ridiculous.
And I love it.
I travel higher up, and soon the smooth carved walls fall away entirely, but the stairs beneath my feet keep circling the tree trunk high into the bleeding evening sky. I can feel the faint sunlight on my face, and the cool wind against my lips is exhilarating.
Until I reach the top step.
I stop dead in my tracks. Three men as carved as this house are stripping down to just their tight black underwear. The thin material hugs their lean waists as they talk quietly among themselves on the platform. At its center, is a circular platform with wooden floorboards. It’s a standing area among so much netting casting out from it at all sides, attaching to other branches of nearby trees. A dresser with drawers on all sides, rests there on the little standing space. Everywhere around it is just thin strings. Nearly unseen threads slice from the center circle out to the branches of the surrounding trees. It’s like a web of sorts. The ties here and there holding it all together can be seen if you study it hard enough.
It’s just another bizarre creation in this mysterious house my sister built for herself.
And her demons, it seems.
“She must be powerful. Why else would someone like Corva want a bratty little girl like her?” Zav whispers with a growl.
