by S. Young
His guy, this Bran person, certainly was a resourceful dude if he could whip up a car within minutes.
Rose sat in the passenger seat stewing, her own worries magnified by the tension Fionn emitted. The thing was, he didn’t look tense. He was relaxed in his seat, and he wasn’t constantly checking his mirrors as though someone was pursuing them. Yet Rose’s pulse was racing fast and hard and her palms felt clammy, and she instinctually felt he was the cause. Beneath his cool facade, he was worried. She was certain of it.
Ridiculous, right?
That’s what she thought … until they hit the E70 highway, leaving the city behind, and Rose felt an immediate lightening of pressure on her breast. Her pulse began to slow.
Shooting an incredulous look at Fionn, she noted no change in his outward appearance or body language. But why else would she be feeling emotions that, without a doubt, felt forced upon her?
As far as she was concerned, nothing seemed unlikely anymore.
“How long will it take to get to Venice airport?” She finally felt like it was a good time to ask.
“Around four hours. If you have questions, now is a good time to ask.”
She smirked at the offer. “Something tells me you’re not the chatty type.”
“You would be correct. But you have questions and I have answers, so I’ll deal with the discomfort of conversation.”
Miraculously, Rose chuckled despite the madness that had descended upon her with incredible abruptness. Fionn flicked her a curious look.
“So … what are your questions, Rose O’Connor?”
Her scowl was immediate.
Having overheard his entire conversation with the faceless Bran, it deeply hurt Rose to discover that her mom and dad had continued to lie about who she was. Who they all were. How had they hidden that they were from a magical family all this time? With her cell gone, it would worry them when she didn’t check in, but that wasn’t a priority for her now. Yesterday it would have been.
Despite Fionn’s subtle prodding for her to ask about the O’Connors, the first question that came to mind was something else entirely. The O’Connors could wait too.
She exhaled and turned to watch the world go by. There was a lot of open space outside Zagreb. Fields of green dotted here and there with buildings passed by at high speed while she gathered her courage to speak.
“Freshman year of college, I was attacked at a party. He grabbed me from behind and pulled me into a bedroom. He tried to rape me.” It was the first time Rose had said it out loud and although she’d convinced herself over the years she was okay, suddenly she didn’t feel so okay.
She’d been a victim. That much was certain now, but that word had such negative connotations. People didn’t like the word victim. Blame somehow always found its way to a victim.
What the fuck did that even mean? If someone made you a victim, that wasn’t your fault. Being a victim didn’t make you weak. Rationally, she knew that. But how she felt about the incident from her past was anything but rational.
Feeling her hands tremble, Rose pressed them between her thighs. She’d never been good with weakness. She didn’t know if it was the athlete in her or if it was just who she was, but her mom was always trying to tell her it was okay to show vulnerability.
Rose had never felt like it was okay. She judged no one else for it. In fact, she empathized and understood when she saw someone have a weak moment.
But weakness in herself was not something she allowed.
Telling her story made her feel vulnerable.
Lost in her thoughts, it took a moment for her to realize the air in the car had begun to swell, until it was difficult to breathe. She glanced at Fionn.
His expression was as bland as his tone. “What happened?”
Despite his stoic demeanor, Rose felt his anger. She could taste the dark bitterness of it on her tongue.
Rose struggled to breathe.
“Hey, can you cool it?” she asked on a wheeze.
Fionn frowned at her. “What did I say? What’s wrong?”
“It’s … not what you’re saying.” Rose felt unbearably hot. “Your emotions … you’re angry. It’s making it hard to breathe. He didn’t rape me. I got away.”
Although the heaviness diminished from the air and no longer felt like pressure on her chest, Rose sensed his confusion.
“You sense … my emotions?” he bit out.
“Yup.”
Then, like a door had been closed on a vacuum, the air in the car returned to normal with a suddenness that shocked Rose. The energy she’d felt from Fionn … it was gone. “What did you just do?”
He glowered out at the road. “Sensing another fae’s emotion is rare. It’s also a violation of privacy.” He cut her a dark look. “I’m masking myself from you.”
Rose tried not to feel hurt by this. Why should she be? They barely knew each other.
And yet she was stung by his actions.
“You can do that?”
“As can you. You can learn to mask your energy. It takes a lot of power and can be exhausting. Finish your story.”
She blinked at the demand. “Uh …”
“What happened to the fucker who attacked you?”
“Right.” Rose glanced down at her hands. “I shoved him off and he flew across the room and smacked into the wall so hard, he took a chunk out of it. I called it adrenaline and got out of there. The next day, word was the guy died of a heart defect …”
Fionn frowned. “Do you have a question to ask?”
“Could I have done something to his heart?” She lifted her shaking hands in front of her. “I pushed against his chest …”
The radio blasted on and frantically flipped through stations.
Her companion coolly wrapped one of his large hands around her wrist. It seemed tiny in his hold. “Calm down,” he ordered. “You didn’t kill the boy. The spell that blocked your abilities was extremely powerful. Your power was locked down tight.”
“I know I’m stronger now, but I was strong before the spell broke. I was on track to become an Olympian. Gymnastics. My coach used to comment on my remarkable strength … I never thought anything of it … until now.”
“Your strength is different. The spell would have been concentrated here”—he let go of her wrist to gesture to her temple—“as your abilities come from the mind. It would make it hard for the spell to suppress your physical strength completely. Why didn’t you make it to the Olympics?”
Rose was surprised by his curiosity. “At sixteen I qualified as a Senior Elite and made their National Team. From that moment on, I was an Olympian in training. But that summer, my mom and dad sat me down and told me they’d adopted me. That the aunt and uncle I’d been told had died in a car accident when I was a baby were actually my birth parents. I had questions. A lot of questions. But they didn’t have a lot of answers.
“At the time, they said it was because nothing had changed. I was their kid.” She glared out at the passing scenery. “Now I know they couldn’t give me answers without telling me the truth. Anyway, my whole life I’d felt different, but they tell you that everyone feels that way, right? I just focused on gymnastics to distract me from …” She trailed off, feeling weird about telling this stranger something she hadn’t told anyone.
“To distract you from?” When she didn’t reply, it was Fionn’s turn to sigh. “Who am I going to tell, Rose? I’m over two thousand years old and don’t exactly maintain friendships that involve gossiping on our coffee breaks.”
Rose chuckled. “A bit of a loner, huh?”
“Pot, meet kettle.”
“True. Maybe it’s what we are. Because we’re not supposed to be here in this world.”
He grunted.
“If I finish my sentence, will you tell me how it’s possible a man who was once human is now fae?”
Fionn seemed to hesitate but then nodded.
Satisfied, Rose continued, “I focused on gymnastics to distr
act me from the feeling I’d had my whole life. The feeling that some piece of me was missing. When I discovered I was adopted, I thought that was the reason. Confused, thrown off course, I quit gymnastics. But the feeling never went away. Not until last night.”
Fionn frowned. “When the spell broke?”
“Exactly.”
They were quiet a moment as they drove. Rose studied him surreptitiously but somehow knew even as she did it, he was aware of her study.
His head brushed the roof of the car. He’d pushed the driver’s seat back as far as it could go, and he’d dumped his coat in the back seat along with his garment bag. White shirtsleeves had been rolled up to his elbows revealing thick, muscular forearms with veins and a dusting of fair hair across them.
His waistcoat was buttoned down a strong, flat stomach, and his long, big-knuckled fingers flexed around the steering wheel now and then. He wore a chunky, Celtic-looking silver ring on the middle finger of his left hand.
Rose felt an unwelcome flip of attraction low in her belly, and not for the first time.
Every second she stared at him, she found something new to like.
Like the hard, angular edge of his jawline beneath his stubble and the contrasting softness of his lower lip. He had an exaggerated curve in the middle of his bottom lip that made a woman want to trace it with her tongue.
Fuck.
Rose looked away and immediately felt him studying her in return.
She could not develop an attraction to her would-be mentor.
“Was that your only question?”
She turned back to him, saw the coolness in his startlingly beautiful eyes before he looked back at the road, and sighed at her own nonsense.
It wasn’t arrogance when Rose said she was used to attention from guys. She’d never considered herself particularly stunning, but she’d always been comfortable with her body and with sex, and she’d often wondered if that was why she received so much attention. Now she wondered if it was her fae-ness giving off a “vibe.”
Anyway, Rose knew when a guy was into her.
Fionn Mór … was so not into her.
It was probably a good thing. Getting involved with a man who was over two thousand years old sounded complicated.
To say the least.
She bit back hysterical laughter at the thought and concentrated on finding out more about her mentor. “I want to know your story. If I’m to trust you, I need to know the background so I can work out why you’re helping me.”
He smirked. “You don’t think I’m helping you out of the goodness of my heart?”
She decided if she wanted honesty, she needed to give it in return. “No, I don’t. Your motives are as yet unclear.”
Fionn flicked her a quick look. “You’re astute, Rose.”
“Well …?”
His big hands flexed around the steering wheel. “How to condense such a tale into the length of a car ride …”
“Just start at the beginning.”
“At the beginning … Well, in the beginning I was just a warrior, raised in the time of clan warfare and of the invading fae. They didn’t come in legions; they appeared in our world as individuals and sought to make mischief at best and to torment and kill at worst. They stole our children, killed our livestock, and rape wasn’t excluded to women.”
Rose sucked in a breath, wondering at the legacy she belonged to and whether she wanted to know this stuff.
“They weren’t all bad.” It sounded like those words had been dragged out of him. “I know that now, after my time on Faerie, but it was the worst of the stories that met our ears when I was human. I was raised to fight.
“I’m going to tell you something that you must never tell anyone.” The look he pinned her with was dark. A little scary.
“O … kay.”
“There are only two things that can kill a fae here on earth. The first is pure iron. And it has to pierce the heart to succeed.”
The fairy tales of her youth came to mind. Stories about faeries and how they were allergic to iron.
It was all true.
“Few people know the truth of that,” Fionn continued. “Then again, most of the supernatural community believe the origin story is a myth.”
“Origin story?”
“That vamps and werewolves evolved from fae interference in the human world.”
“They did?”
He nodded. “We learned that iron hurt fae, and we began to hunt them.” Grim satisfaction crossed his features. “We were making progress in the war against them, and I led the way. My father-in-law was king of where Donegal is now, but when he died, I took the mantle. I destroyed so many fae, the entire upper half of Éireann—Ireland—fell under my kingship. It was the largest kingship on the island at the time, made up of five of the ten provinces making me rí ruirech — a king of overkings. They called me Rí Mac Tíre.” If he’d been any other man, he would have sounded wistful, but Fionn was frustratingly unemotional.
“What does that mean?”
“It means ‘The Wolf King.’”
She eyed him, a small smile curling her lips. It suited him. “Why?”
“Because I had a wolf as my loyal companion. Cónán.”
“How very badass.” She grinned. She could absolutely picture Fionn roaring into battle with a wolf at his side.
The image was also more than kind of hot.
“Together we killed many fae. Cónán would help me weaken them, then I’d stab them in the heart with an iron blade. One day we killed a royal prince. Of course, I didn’t know who he was when I was killing him … but for his death, Aine, the Faerie Queen, led an army into our world. She wiped out half my people.”
Rose drew in a breath, knowing there was no way he could be as undisturbed by this memory as he seemed to be. “I’m sorry.”
“One of her captains killed Cónán. My men had fallen. And the queen took me to my knees with her power, as if I were a mere babe.”
Jesus, she couldn’t imagine anyone powerful enough to take Fionn to his knees.
He hesitated a moment. “We made a bargain. Her army would go back to Faerie, my people would be spared, but in return I’d give myself to the fae as a slave.”
“Oh my God.” Rose reeled at the idea. Forty-eight hours ago, she’d never imagined she’d be sitting in a car beside a fae, talking casually about things that had until now been relegated to fantasy novels and movies in her mind. But now that she was, now that it was real, Fionn was real. And once upon a time, this huge, powerful being had been a human—an enslaved one. “Fionn.”
He seemed to jerk slightly at his name but his expression never changed as he kept his attention on the road. “I was there for six years. I met all manner of fae. Some weren’t all bad but all of them were superior. They don’t see humans as equals because they aren’t. The fae are higher up the food chain, and that is that. Think of how humans are with animals. How they raise them for slaughter or raise them as pets. In the latter case, no matter how much affection a human has for them, people consider themselves their owners. Masters over them. That is how the fae view humans.”
Rose curled her lip in disgust. And this was what she was? “I’ll never think like that.”
“Because you were raised as human. Just as I was.”
She nodded, feeling melancholy about her origins. Speaking of which … “Vampires and werewolves, they’re evolved from fae?”
“From fae and humans.”
“What did that vampire do to me last night? One minute I was standing in front of him, the next waking up in your hotel room.”
“He broke your neck.”
Rose gulped, her hand automatically curling around her throat. “What?”
Fionn’s expression was formidable. “Worry not. A broken neck will not kill you. Obviously. It also will not kill vamps and werewolves. Which leads me to the second thing that can kill us. A werewolf bite. Unless he or she is your mate, a werewolf bite will kill you. So t
ake care around them.”
Holy. Crap.
Iron and werewolves. Okay then. Just two things in the whole world that could kill her. Just two.
At her continued silence he asked, “Do you still want to hear the rest?”
It would take a lot longer than a few minutes to process that she was practically unkillable! But Rose nodded anyway, afraid if he didn’t tell her now, he never would.
“For centuries, since the gate had opened, there was an unexpected evolution between fae and humans. It’s complicated—I can break down the fae hierarchy now or we can leave that for later?”
“Just tell me everything.”
She realized then that the car was slowing and turned from watching her companion to the road. They were approaching a large toll booth.
“To enter Slovenia,” Fionn explained.
“Do you need my passport?”
He shook his head. “Not anymore. Now that we know you’re on radar, we don’t want anyone to track you.”
“So how are we getting through without ID?”
Fionn didn’t respond, but she had her answer when the car pulled up to the window and the guard asked them for ID. Fionn stared intently at the guard, no words passed between them, but the guard reached out as if taking hold of a passport, flipped through two invisible items, handed them back, and then gestured them ahead as the barrier lifted.
What the ever-loving fuck?
“What just happened?” she asked as they drove into Slovenia.
“One of your talents is the ability to make humans see whatever it is you want them to see.” Fionn’s stare was stony. “It’s a dangerous talent, Rose, and you must utilize it sparingly. Only use it to ensure your survival.”
Holy crap.
She swallowed, thinking of the way the guard’s face had relaxed, going blank. Mindless. She shivered. “I don’t think I want to use it at all. Have you done that to me?”
He cut her an even darker look. “Fae can’t use it on fae. Now where was I?”
9
Before Fionn could continue his manipulation of Rose, a crawling sensation tickled down his spine. His pulse raced while a feeling not unlike dread filled his gut.