A human that hadn’t been controlled by the touch? They wouldn’t last for long in Faerie, and Ash had heard stories about what his fellow fae would do to be the one to take that first touch inside of Faerie without having to brave the Iron.
Though he rarely paid any attention to the mortals on the other side of the veil, he’d touched a fair amount of humans during his three centuries. Between his glamour and his charm, it didn’t take much to convince them to give him permission to touch them anywhere he wanted to. And Ash would—he had—all for the rush of power that gifted piece of soul gave him.
It had been decades since he played with a human pet, though. About the same amount of time since Melisandre had last sent him to the edge of the veil.
Nothing much changed, he concluded as he stood at his post. Fashions did, and the amount of iron humming in the air was so strong that he could just about sense it even through the thinning veil. The last time Melisandre grew annoyed at him and sent him to the borders, it had been a different post, but the view was basically the same. The greenery, and the humans milling everywhere, unaware that they had one of the Blessed Ones in their midst.
Though he stayed firmly in Faerie, Ash pulled on a layer of glamour that would keep him hidden in case any of the humans noticed the weak point between worlds. He was the only fae responsible for this post, and he knew better than to question Melisandre when it came to his punishment.
Eventually she would calm down, and she’d fall back into her “benevolent ruler” role, oblivious to the fact that many of her subjects referred to her rule as the Reign of the Damned. Until then, Ash would have to stay out of sight and hope that she was still far more furious with Raine.
He didn’t expect much to happen during his guard duty. His previous tour along the borders lasted close to two decades and in all of that time, the only interesting thing happened when a Dark Fae nearly burned to a crisp when he got caught in the Iron during the time of no shadows. Ash had wondered if it was worth rousing himself out of his ennui before crossing over and dragging the lifeless male into Faerie. He saved Ninetroir then, earning a life debt that he carried with him always just in case he ever needed to call it in.
Ash didn’t expect to be entertained during this tour, and only hoped that the Fae Queen’s grudge didn’t last as long. Until then, he would do what she commanded of him. When the alternative was a queen who took her buried aggression out on the statues that lined her garden, a fae who valued his immortal life obeyed his queen.
No matter how intolerable it was to be this close to humans.
Cloaked in his layer of glamour, Ash drummed his fingers against the hilt of his sword while watching the humans through the veil. Sound didn’t carry through, but he could see clearly to the other side of his post.
And that’s when he noticed that one of the humans was watching him back.
Ash’s fingers flexed; instead of tapping the hilt, he had the sudden urge to draw his sword. The weight of her curious stare made him react in a way he didn’t expect—or appreciate.
The human female could see him. Despite the veil, despite his glamour, her eyes were locked on him. And, for the first time in a long, long while, Ash found himself attracted to a human.
Her hair was long, as long as his, though it was such a fair color, he would’ve said it was white. Even from the distance, he could see the tops of her rounded ears poking through the soft-looking strands. Definitely human. Beautiful, too, Ash mused. He didn’t normally go for the human look, but maybe she had a touch of faerie blood in her because he’d never seen a mortal with such a lovely face before.
And she could see him. He was almost sure of it. This human could see him.
Did she have the sight?
Only one way to find out.
It was daylight in the Iron. As a Light Fae, Ash could cross over into the human world and suffer no consequences so long as he returned before the sun set and the shadows came.
Deciding this strange human counted as part of his duty to protect this entrance into Faerie, Ash started toward the border.
Even before he passed over, he knew he was too late. With his first step, she rose from the bench she’d been seated on. With his next, she was already gathering her belongings. By the time he pushed through the veil, she was gone.
Ash patted the hilt of his sword in barely stifled frustration before returning to Faerie, the white-haired beauty a mystery, but one he dismissed as soon as she was gone and he was home again.
A human, he scoffed.
He needed to find one of the courtesans and get laid if he thought he was attracted to a human.
When night fell in the Iron, Ash left his post.
He headed straight for the barracks where he had his own space, surprising himself when he joined some of the other soldiers for a meal instead of going to the nearby inn for fairy wine and a willing female. When he first realized where his portal had taken him, he thought about conjuring up another until the pretty human’s face flashed in front of him and he chose to head toward the mess hall instead.
Only because he wanted to, of course.
The next sunrise, he returned to his post, knowing that the veil would show him that same patch of nature he’d watched over the day before. While magic was fluid and one spot of Faerie didn’t quite coincide with the same spot in the Iron, the weak points were like anchors; they were fixed. Until Melisandre relieved him of his duty, he was destined to stare at the same human park.
Which meant that there was a chance no matter how slim that he might spy the white-haired female who had haunted his dreams.
He hated her for that alone. She was mortal, a nothing to someone like Ash, and it was almost an insult that she had transfixed him with only the quickest glimpse. He wanted to believe it was only the way she locked eyes with him, almost as if she could see him. That quick escape, like she was trying to run away from him, made her more than just another mortal.
At least, he told himself that as he waited to see if she would return.
She didn’t. Not that day, or the next. Hours blurred together, as they often did when he was on a pointless assignment, and the faces of the humans and their beasts were indistinguishable.
And then, right when Ash had begun to think that he’d imagined her, there she was. He’d know that striking white hair and lovely face anywhere.
She was just as beautiful as she remembered, and he decided to hate her for that, too.
He kept on the glamour he wore, the one that hid him even through the veil. Curious, he wanted to know if she could see him again; when he wasn’t convinced that he’d made her up, he was sure it was solely how she seemed to look right through his glamour that caught his interest.
Only it was nearly impossible to tell. She covered her eyes with a pair of mirrored sunglasses that shielded her gaze from him. Her head was tilted downward as she fiddled with the black device she held in her hands, but Ash arrogantly followed her every move, willing her to look his way. And she did—but could she see him?
He didn’t know.
And Ash hated not knowing.
She was an enigma. A riddle. A mystery he was more desperate to solve than he ever would admit.
Every shift at his guard post, he waited for her return. Since then, she hadn’t missed a day. Time didn’t correspond the same between worlds, and Ash only knew that his shift was over when the veil went dark. During the daylight, though, he watched and he waited and he obsessed over the female.
He tried to continue to hate her, too, but that became harder and harder as days went by.
Worse, he still didn’t know if she sensed him watching or not.
When he found himself resisting the urge to walk through the veil and confront her—something that would only incense Melisandre if he abandoned his post and she found out about it—Ash realized he needed concrete answers to his suspicions. He’d been lucky that the queen never discovered the way he crossed over the first time he spied the white
-haired female, and it wasn’t worth angering her again over an ordinary human.
But what if she wasn’t ordinary, he wondered. What if—
There had to be some way to know for sure without drawing attention to himself.
And that’s when Ash came up with it.
Kobolds.
As one of the Light Fae, Ash held dominion over some of the lower races. All he had to do was snap his finger and he could command them to do his bidding. But while brownies were fae servants, he didn’t think one of the fur-covered domestic fairies could get him the reaction he was after.
So, before he headed toward his post again, Ash created a Light Fae portal that took him from the barracks all the way to the crystal mines hidden beneath the Summer Court. In the Iron, the humans relied on their iron, their steel, their primitive technological marvels. In Faerie, magic was king—well, queen. While not every Light Fae was powerful enough to manage portals just like not every Dark Fae could manage shadow travel, even the weakest of his kind could use crystal to amplify their power.
And a majority of the crystal the fae harvested came from the mines controlled by the Fae Queen. Running for acres and acres beneath her crystalline palace and her favored garden, Melisandre ruled the mines with an—ahem—iron fist. As one of her elite guard, Ash knew exactly where its hidden entrance was located, and even though he was currently out of favor with the queen, none of his fellow soldiers stopped him as he waltzed right inside.
While his kind were in charge of guarding the mines, the actual act of mining was forced onto kobolds. Hunched, ugly, malicious creatures that came up to Ash’s knee, they were master miners. Before the veil between realms closed off during the human world’s industrial revolution—around the time Oberon went missing—kobolds were considered underground spirits who could be appeased by leaving smelted gold as an offering or by showing them respect.
In Faerie, where the ruling class of the fae respected nothing and no one, they were worked as slaves, their very existence allowed at the whim of the Fae Queen.
They didn’t call it the Reign of the Damned for nothing, Ash reminded himself. Melisandre often amused herself by hunting her subjects, cutting their tongues out for fun, and forcing them to sacrifice each other. Anything to keep her rule unquestioned, her power absolute. She was, of them all, completely untouchable.
And Ash didn’t mean in the way he longed to touch his white-haired human, either.
Nodding at Saxon, a fellow Light Fae soldier, he used faerie fire to draw a square in the space in front of him; when he could store items in a pocket, there was never a need to fill his hands. He reached inside and pulled a burlap sack out before shaking it open.
“Which one can I take?” he asked Saxon.
A few decades younger than Ash, Saxon knew that Ash was senior both in age and in time served under the queen. With a bored expression, he just pointed at the nearest kobold, knowing better than to argue.
He didn’t say thanks. It didn’t even occur to Ash to do so. He was fae, and not only would no fae ever do anything that would put them in the debt of any other being, but showing any kind of gratitude meant that he didn’t have the authority to do what he wanted when he wanted.
Instead, he pinched the kobold by the back of its neck and easily dropped the suddenly still faerie into the burlap sack. The sack was enchanted to hold it until Ash set it loose again which, if everything went according to his plan, would be sooner than later.
It was risky, but what was his long, immortal life without a little risk and amusement of his own? Setting the kobold loose in the Iron was still a far better risk than chancing his queen’s formidable temper again.
The way Ash saw it, either the white-haired human didn’t respond to the kobold in her territory and he discovered that he imagined that she was more than just another mortal, or she did respond and the kobold would inevitably sense she could see it and attack her. Whatever happened, he would rid himself of this bothersome fascination.
It was worth the risk.
3
Callie avoided the park for more than a week before she realized that she was being ridiculous.
It was one thing for her to lock eyes with the golden male before quickly sliding her gaze away, as if it was just a coincidence. It was something else entirely for him to step through the veil, his intent to approach her as obvious as the layer of glamour he wore over his stunning shape.
Only it couldn’t be a glamour, she told herself repeatedly. Because even when she was trying not to consciously see things, she did so anyway. Consider it more than two decades of practice or something like that. No matter how one of the faerie folk—and, from her research, she was sure she’d narrowed down his kind—glamoured themselves to appear, she always saw them as they truly were.
But that was the thing. Glamour was a lure, a way to trick unsuspecting humans close, to make them believe what they were seeing instead of hearing the clanging warning bells that said that anyone from Faerie was dangerous. If she focused, she could just about make out the image they protected, but since it often left her with a migraine, she didn't usually bother. Why, when it didn’t matter?
Callie’s vision showed the truth. And the truth was that, as ethereal and alluring as the fae—because fae, he had to be fae—are, the handful she’d seen always had something exaggerated about them to make them seem almost alien. From their long, slender fingers, to the eerie perfection of their features, plus their oversized eyes… they were gorgeous, but they were also predators.
And she was tempting fate by returning to the park.
She had to, though. She managed to sell her photograph to Buster’s client while also side-stepping his offer of a date. To her surprise, the older gentleman took her rejection with a smile, then actually showed some interest when she mentioned her idea of creating a summer version of the photo he bought from her.
The male fae was there upon her return, but she was prepared for it. She wore a pair of sunglasses and a floppy summer hat so even if she found it difficult not to sneak glances over at him, she was hoping he wouldn’t be able to tell. And since the hours passed as she worked and he stood like a motionless statue on the other side of the veil, she figured she pulled it off.
The first round of photos were good when she developed them, but they weren’t of the same caliber as the spring shot. Since part of photography relied on luck as well as skill and preparation, she had been expecting that. So, the next afternoon, she went back to the park.
And the next.
A thunderstorm rolled in, closing out the week, and while she thought about seeing how the tree would look backlit by the purple clouds and the lightning streaking across the dark sky, she remembered the charred remains of her tree and decided that maybe she should wait out the storm.
On Monday, feeling the pressure after the gentleman came to check on her progress, Callie went to the park, determined to get the shot that would get Buster’s client to start talking about a possible showing again.
The first thing she noticed was that, while the shimmering patch of space that marked the veil into Faerie was still there, the fae male was not. For the handful of hours that she worked, she kept one eye on that patch. She blamed it on how careful she’d been to avoid him during her previous trips while secretly wondering where he had gone—and what had he been doing there, watching the human world, in the first place.
Then, because he wasn’t there acting as her silent shadow, Callie threw herself into her work. She lost track of time as she set up, using a point and shoot digital camera to get an idea if the shot might be successful before replicating it with her professional piece. She played with angles, shutter speeds, aperture, anything to bring her vision to life.
She didn’t know when he winked into sight. At first, she thought it was a stray sunbeam that blinded her before she lifted her head and saw that, instead, it was the blinding, dazzling male standing closer than he ever had before. He was still in the same spo
t as always, but perspective was a funny thing and Callie was a trained photographer. He was definitely closer—and he was carrying something.
She noticed all of this in a blink of her eye before she turned away, lifting her camera again, anything to keep him from noticing her in return. Ignoring him, she decided to use his shine—the only part of him that would show up in the photo as Callie knew well from experience—to highlight the tree. So consumed with getting the perfect shot, she didn’t see what happened next.
But she sure as hell heard the shrieking sound that nearly blasted her poor eardrums.
Callie nearly dropped her camera. Only an ingrained instinct to never, ever drop her two thousand dollar camera had her clutching it tightly as her head jerked up in time to see a… a thing racing away from the hazy patch of space.
It was a dark blur, with skin the color of mahogany and a leather tunic stretched over its misshapened, hunched body. It loped on all fours with teeth that belonged in the mouth of a shark jutting over its jaw. The glamour overlaying the creature made it appear like some kind of oversized mutt, but Callie knew better. It was a nightmarish creature straight out of Faerie and it was coming right at her.
There wasn’t even time to scream. Adrenaline coursing through her, her brain shouted at her to run while her legs stayed firmly planted on the grass as thing aimed at her.
Just when she thought that this was it, right as her life was flashing before her eyes, something amazing happened—amazing because she never in a million years would’ve expected it to.
The golden male burst out of the veil, a brilliantly shining sword held in front of him as he arrowed after the snarling monster.
Glamour Eyes: a Rejected Mates Fae Romance (Wanted by the Fae Book 1) Page 2