by Erin R Flynn
And clearly they still couldn’t open a portal right to that location. It amused me, wondering how far away they had had to walk from wherever they could portal in.
“Incoming,” I warned the others so they weren’t startled. I stared down the men as I picked up my knife and twirled it around my hand. “I thought I made my opinion on the matter very clear.”
They dropped the cloaking and Iolas took the lead, doing a double take when he saw Mrs. Craftsman. “I apologize. We didn’t know you were entertaining, Your Highness. I thought a calmer discussion to explain matters and discuss everything would be how to handle it.”
“So you brought ten Light and Dark Guardians, from your appearance and, I would gather, high ranked from the vast power I feel pulsing off of all of you, to pressure a young princess who doesn’t have the protection of her parents over whatever is going on,” Mrs. Craftsman cut in, leaning back in her chair, seemingly amused as she picked up her glass of wine. “After she gave you an answer, yes?”
“Not really,” Taeral defended. “And with all due respect, Mrs. Craftsman, you are the mother of one of the men Princess Tamsin is involved with. You have no more right to speak for her than any of us do.”
“You’re not wrong, but you’re stacking the deck against her and I think some adult should get to be on her side of things,” she threw right back. “She’s allowed to tell you no about—”
“She didn’t,” Iolas cut in. “She made it clear that we mishandled the situation. Which we did, and part of giving her the time she asked for was because she was right. We are sorry, Your Highness. We completely botched it all and it wounds us deeply that we scared you. We crossed several lines.”
“And yet we’re back on this topic I said I was done with,” I said firmly, trying not to growl. “I don’t have to say the exact words, ‘no, we’re not discussing this again’ or ‘my answer is no,’ for you to understand when I’m shooting something down.”
“That validly came from a place of fear yesterday and how we handled things,” one of the Dark Guardians accepted. “No matter what you decide or do going forward, it’s still our responsibility to inform you of issues you have to understand. It’s imperative you fully comprehend how important what we’ve learned is.”
I shot a quick glance at Mrs. Craftsman, not liking we were airing this in front of her, but there wasn’t like a reason to hide it. “I get it. The other fairies filled me in after I kicked you out. They also explained you’d chill and reassess that it wasn’t so out there.”
“They weren’t wrong,” Taeral agreed. “But your magic needs to be checked. We need to know, Princess. No fairy has ever made tier ten crystals before they’ve grown wings. It’s—you can be as angry at us as you want, assume everything you’ve probably been thinking, but we are alive because of your mother, saved by your benevolence and, by the gods, we will protect you just the same.”
“And you are healers?” Mrs. Craftsman jumped in again. “Are you going to be the last? The doctor at Artemis certified she was fine. Dean White, who is fairy born and a truly powerful witch who has worked for over a year with Tamsin. My son, who went through all of this with her while it happened and teaches magic. So you demand this of the last heir of Faerie and who next? Who walks all over her next?”
Well damn. At least she had my back even if she was going to poke me or put me in the hot seat.
And I agreed with her. I really did.
“She makes an exceedingly logical point,” I sighed, setting down my fork, the knife next since I was tempted to throw it at them. “And not only would it get around you walked over me, pushed me to what I didn’t want to do so others would think to—Neldor mostly—but you’ll worry people. Even if everything is fine, we are a fraction into saving fairies and you’re all panicked I’ve got issues.
“That will spread like wildfire. You want me to be queen and make me seem weak, prime for attack, or not meant to listen to. Awesome. Really. I’m doing at twenty what none of you can, and you all immediately jump to my being defective, not caring one shit about me or what I say, but only about what it means for Faerie because I’m a tool like that. So all of you are just as bad as Neldor, though not as blunt.”
They all stared at me in horror but honestly, I couldn’t think I was the only one there who saw it that way.
Taeral recovered first. “Princess, this is a huge—”
“The queens and heirs are tended to by the most talented healers in the realms,” Mrs. Craftsman informed me. “They are legendary, with a dozen apprentices at any time to tend to the royal family and Light or Dark Guardians. I would suggest your mother’s royal healer be found and unfrozen. It would be understandable that you had a full physical with him or her after all you’ve been through.”
I blinked at her several times and nodded. “Thank you. Truly.” I glanced at the other fairies. “There is your answer. Now, I am entertaining. Leave.” I picked up my fork again and focused on my food. “And if any of you just portal in or drop by like this without calling first again, unless there is an attack or true emergency, I’ll kick your asses in front of all your people and make you feel as you’ve made me feel.”
“How is that, Princess?” Taeral whispered.
“You know the answer. Don’t humiliate me in front of my company any more than you have by making me say it.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” Iolas said, the other Light Guardians immediately turning to leave and follow my orders.
But the Dark Guardians hesitated.
I focused back on them, and the look I gave the group made most people turn tail and run. “Be careful you aren’t starting trouble you won’t be able to control the fallout of. You lost your heads, and I assume you are some of the most rational from your realm. Get your shit together before we have problems we can’t afford to right now.”
“I don’t understand, Princess,” one of them admitted.
“I have councils fighting over me. I’m not adding light and dark fairies to that mix.” I held up my hand to hold them off when they tried to argue. “You don’t have a female heir, the dark queen is gone, and you’re all freaked out. I get that. I also don’t care like you do, so I’m not losing my head. You’re going to signal people the wrong things if this is how light and dark finally come together.”
“Namely, to bully and put pressure on the only living heir like she’s a pawn you can all fight over or do with as you want,” Mrs. Craftsman agreed. “You’ll end up with no heir if you stay on that course. You’ll get her killed or Tamsin will take off. My son worries about that all the time.”
They actually left. I was shocked at how they were acting but given how they were, I was pretty surprised they did leave. Funny how relative things could be at time.
And the answer to Taeral’s question was—like shit. I would make them feel like shit. Maybe not emotionally, but I’d do it at least physically.
Seemed fair to me.
“Before you rightfully say something to the doc’s mom about how she shouldn’t have admitted he worries you’d take off, we all do,” Izzy muttered, breaking the awkward silence.
I shrugged and focused on my food. “I wasn’t going to. I think about it all the time and there’s no way the fairies don’t know that. Those guys especially are powerful and understand magic and reading people at a level it would take me decades to catch up to. I might have more raw power for my age or be able to focus it in a way they can’t because of my bloodline, but they best me.”
“Your Highness, they would never—” one of the Light Guardians started to argue.
I didn’t hide from him how tired I was. “Would you ever have thought Neldor’s mother would kill every fairy and doom all fair folk? Not in a million years, right? She was honorable and a good leader from what even light fairies say. Everyone can be pushed into the darkness and to do crazy things. Everyone.”
“You’re incredibly jaded for one so young,” Mrs. Craftsman muttered as she reached for her wine
glass.
“That doesn’t make me wrong.”
“No, no, it does not, and it’s smart you understand the world so well. It simply saddens me that you’ve had to, given your age. I didn’t learn it until I was a bit older than you and not so deeply as you have. It will serve you well given what you face. It upsets me as a mother how fast you’ve had to grow up. Your mother must be devastated.”
I nodded, but stabbed my next bite harder than needed.
It was also how I ended up after dinner on the beach alone writing an angry letter to my mother, cloaked and with a few barriers up. As much as I wanted to go be with my friends and enjoy our next round of binging, I couldn’t… My mind was too all over the place.
We’d switched from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to all the Avengers movies, the whole MCU since I’d never seen any of it. And I loved it. Everyone had been all about me seeing it, but I didn’t want them to have to repeat it. It was Hudson who promised it would be fun watching the whole thing from start to finish now that the big finale of that part of the MCU was done.
I had no idea what that meant, able to get some of the pop culture references without seeing the movies, but I agreed, glad we had a new plan for break. Except I was messing it all up again. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t deal with seeing Julian’s face right now after how things had gone with his mother.
And I didn’t want to.
I didn’t want to deal with any of it. I wanted to scream at my dead mother about all the crap I was putting up with and how I was tired of biting my tongue to preserve her fucking legacy. I wasn’t even sure why I did it.
I was an idiot who had always longed for family? Probably.
“She’s this way and she’s fine,” Craftsman bitched from behind me. “Just let the woman be.”
“With all due respect, Dr. Craftsman, but we can’t protect her if we have no idea where she is,” one of the fairies replied.
“She doesn’t need your damn protection!”
“No, apparently she just needs it from your mother,” a different fairy snarked.
Oh boy.
I dropped my cloaking so they could sense and find me, but kept the barriers up. I really didn’t want to get into the drama, and I needed this angry bile out of me. I couldn’t keep letting it fester.
“Thank you, Princess,” the dark fairy who had been closest to me said quietly. “We’ll give you space. We understand you needing it. You were upset though, and that’s distracting.”
“You’re right, but sometimes the barriers and cloaking just happens when I’m upset. So it’s not always a conscious choice to ditch you guys.”
“And tonight?”
“Tonight, I needed a little less fairy hovering in my life.”
“Again, that’s fair, but thank you for letting us find you.”
I nodded and focused back on what I’d been doing until I felt Craftsman against my barriers. I lowered them, not so much inviting him to join me, but not wanting there to be an issue that I had a barrier up against him.
It made sense in my head.
He didn’t ask me for permission before joining me since he was probably fairly sure what my answer would be. He sat down behind me, scooting closer so his legs were on either side of my body.
And didn’t say a word.
Perfect. After several moments of that, I realized he really had come to simply be with me when I was upset, and I felt some of the tension leaving my body. Not all of it, but a bit, and that was better. I kept writing out my thoughts and a few minutes later, I was leaning against his chest, knowing he wouldn’t read over my shoulder.
Well, he couldn’t read it anyways since I was writing in a form of Faerie. Yeah, a form. Apparently my magic was on its own level, more than I’d thought or told people, because I could combine languages. Languages I didn’t even know.
Or for all I knew, all fairies could. Honestly, I seriously knew dick about what I was and my own people. And the idiots wanted me to lead them. Well, at least the light ones did.
Worst. Idea. Ever.
“You good?” he asked when I closed the journal and tossed it at my feet. He sighed when I snorted. “I’m sorry about Mum and—”
“It’s fine. Really.”
“No, it’s not.”
No, it wasn’t, but it wasn’t unexpected. I was going to get a lot from people with my dating multiple men. I’d long since understood that. The stakes were higher now.
I simply didn’t want to be in the middle of this stuff. I felt like I’d been through the wringer. “It was nice of her to help. Thank her again for me.”
“That doesn’t make up for how she grilled you. I don’t know what got into her, but I made it clear she couldn’t do it again.”
I nodded. I wanted to cut him off and leave it alone but I knew the moment I said that, he would do it just because it was what I wanted. So even if it was valid to say I’d had enough for the night and I didn’t want to discuss it, I kept my mouth shut so my lover didn’t just cave to whatever I wanted, making me feel guilty like I was abusing him again.
How messed up was that?
“It’ll be okay, I promise,” he murmured. I didn’t react until his lips brushed my neck, and then I flinched away. “You are mad.”
“No, I’m really not.” I pushed to my feet and grabbed the journal.
He moved closer and grabbed my hand, kneeling before me. “Please don’t leave me, love. We’ll figure this out and it will be fine. It was too soon, and I’m sorry I didn’t hear you that the timing was off.”
“Julian, I’m not just going to end things anytime there’s a hiccup,” I mumbled, pulling my hand away. I opened my mouth to say I wished he would stop this before what I felt for him fizzled out and died, but that would set him off. “I wish you’d have more faith in me than that.”
“I do. I truly do, love,” he promised as he jumped to his feet. He slid his arm around me and led us back to the cottage. “You have too much going on. It’s overwhelming. I just don’t want the crazy to get you and anything with us to add to it.”
“We’re fine, Doc,” I whispered, hoping like hell he couldn’t tell it was a lie. All I had wanted for so long was to have Craftsman back. I did, but not the way he was. He’d changed.
And so had I. I wasn’t sure the people we were now were meant to be together.
7
The next several days were spent eating way too much, completely lounging, and binging like I’d never binged before. Honestly, by the time we were done with the MCU, I was ready to get back to my life, but they lured me back in with some of the stuff on Disney+ that I’d heard about and none of us had seen.
But after that, we were all done.
What we weren’t done with was the fallout with Shurr and the vampire council. He was constantly saying something crazy, or the news was playing another clip or report from a “trusted source” near him. People knew Dean Collins and his mate were gone, our people slipping tips that Councilman Ozorio and Melvin had been in contact with him that night.
Something Ozorio and Melvin weren’t happy to hear about the other, from what we knew.
All of it was popcorn-eating time and watching the fireworks, but it was nice to get back to my life as well. The vacation was great, but there was too much to do where I could fully relax.
So the Thursday before classes started I was in Faerie, standing in a section I never had been before, in the middle of a battlefield… With lots of people who were going to die when I unfroze them. The amount of death of the war had been something I’d been glossing over while focusing on saving as many as I could, but things were different.
And it was time to see what we could do to save our people by more than unfreezing them.
I’d also done a lot of studying and learning since Iolas had told me there was actually a fairy rune to help with that. When he’d made a comment about Mrs. Diaz getting us all the supe new footage to aid the fairies coming out of the magic, I had wondered.
Turned out I was right, and fairies could practically download information from each other or certain mediums. However, there were a huge list of rules and ridiculously rigid circumstances for it to work.
Yeah, great, there was still a way for it to work. Sign me up.
Seriously.
I had specifically looked into the heir’s connection with Faerie and journals from royals on their experiences. I only had my own with Craftsman but this was bigger. Faerie was pretty much wired to do whatever it could to help her people though, so it tracked that it would give us aid to save fairies, no matter if light or dark.
Hell, from what I’d learned, the world would be happier that I was asking to save both. Cool.
I was up to thirty fairies at a time now, having switched to using the large reservoir to focus my power when I did it. I filled the reservoir on my off days and then used the magic in it to help me unfreeze fairies. It was a good system and was growing my strength and potential by leaps and bounds.
Clearly, if I’d already unlocked making tier ten crystals.
But after a lot of work and coordinating, we were going to try and save as many as we could who had been seriously injured before they were frozen. We had two or three healers by each person I was focused on, many more fairies who could heal gathered and ready to jump in if needed.
And then there were the ones who were going to try doing the idea I’d suggested about joint light and dark power gathering. Paths had been made to both royal libraries right after I’d brought it up, people diving into the research, finding lots that brought more to my conclusions.
Now we were going to try and put it into practice.
I thought it was stupid to try it when we were going to try something else, too many variables making things risky. But the others assured me Faerie would see so many working hard and together for one purpose and respond positively to it. Sometimes, I wasn’t sure if the world was meant to be where we lived or what we worshiped.