The Mad Queen (The Fae War Chronicles Book 5)

by Jocelyn Fox

  “Lover,” said Liam with a grin.

  “Ugh. I was avoiding that word.” Tess made a face.

  “Good to see I can still embarrass you, what with all your important functions keeping the cosmic balance between the mortal and the Fae world,” said Liam teasingly.

  Tess sighed and chuckled. “Yeah, yeah. I guess a big brother can always gross out his little sister.” She sobered and stared into the fire. “We still have to talk about a lot. Like…should I reach out when I’m back in our world? I know you convinced her that I was off doing my own thing, but she thinks you’re dead. We haven’t always gotten along, but even I wouldn’t wish that on her.”

  “Are you trying to give me whiplash with a change of subject like that?” Liam raised his eyebrows. “And I don’t know. I don’t know if Mom can handle all this.” He shrugged. “I’ve been talking about it with Quinn, and I talked about it with Jess before he left. It’s heavy, and it’s kind of uncharted territory, so I don’t have a straight answer.”

  “Nothing is black and white anymore,” said Tess.

  “Nothing was ever black and white, Bug,” replied Liam, pushing back his chair and standing. “The sooner you realize that most of the world is gray, the sooner you can navigate it a bit better.”

  Tess was trying to think of an appropriate response when another knock came at the tapestry. She reached out with a thread of her taebramh.

  “Lady Bearer,” said Haze breathlessly, hovering on the other side of the tapestry. “I beg leave to enter to bring you a message!”

  “Of course, Haze,” she said aloud, more for Liam’s benefit than her own.

  The Glasidhe messenger plunged through the tapestry into the room, his aura bursting brightly around him, making the fire seem dim and the taebramh lights lusterless.

  “My lady Tess,” he said, bowing to her. He bowed quickly to Liam as well. “The Laedrek sent me to you. There is a commotion at the healing hall.”

  “What’s happening?” Tess said, already striding across the room to grab the Sword, slipping its bandolier over her head.

  “The Unseelie Queen has directed her people to remove their wounded from the hall, despite Healer Maeve’s protests,” said Haze, fluttering his wings in agitation. “The Laedrek and the Arrisyn are trying to keep a fight from breaking out. Tensions are high.”

  “Fantastic time for the High Queen to be gone,” said Tess in an undertone.

  “That’s not completely fair,” Liam said quietly.

  “Fair or not, it’s how I feel,” she replied, sliding her plain blade onto her belt. She hesitated, glancing at her well-worn breastplate, cleaned and polished but still bearing its scars from the battle in the Dark Keep and her journey into the mortal world. After a quick pause, she shook her head. Wearing armor would be a silent affirmation that she expected a conflict – which was exactly the opposite of what she wanted, regardless of whether that was how she actually felt. “No armor,” she said, half to herself and half to Liam. Then she looked up at Haze. “I’ll follow you.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Liam said.

  She nodded and then followed Haze through the tapestry, almost running down the passageway, hoping that they wouldn’t arrive too late to keep the fragile peace between the Seelie and Unseelie…or, for that matter, between the Vyldgard and the other two Courts.

  Chapter 9

  Vivian sat on the kitchen chair that one of the guys had dragged into her room to give them a seat for watching Tyr. The enigmatic Fae man seemed to be resting more comfortably now, his silver hair sticking up haphazardly at the top of the cocoon of blankets wrapped around him. Duke had surprisingly accepted her assertion that she was very much able to keep watch for a few minutes, and he’d left the room to rejoin the others in the kitchen. She could hear the low murmur of their conversation through the closed door.

  Her arm ached vaguely. She knew that Niall had done something to help her heal; a broken bone shouldn’t ache and itch vaguely on the second day after the injury. A tickling itch on her neck under the strap of her sling sent goose bumps racing down her arms. She sent her finger burrowing under the strap to ferret out the exact offending patch of skin.

  Tyr sighed and shifted. Vivian stopped moving and held her breath until he settled back into sleep. She pulled at one of her curls idly as she studied his face, taking advantage of the chance to stare at him without anyone to reprimand her. He looked a bit like Merrick, she thought, the same sharp cheekbones and beautifully sculpted face of the Unseelie. The silvery scars that laced his skin looked almost delicate, layer upon layer of white against the paleness of his face, like frost against a windowpane in the winter.

  Vivian glanced over to the little desk at the foot of her bed, piled haphazardly with books from school, her favorite novels, and perched atop it all, her faithful laptop. She wanted to write, to put down on the page the things that had happened over the past days. Maybe that would make everything more manageable…but she sighed in frustration and experimentally flexed the fingers of her left hand. A bolt of pain shot up her forearm and she bit down on a squeak. All right, that was what she expected a broken bone to feel like. No way was she going to manage typing with her left hand, and she winced at the prospect of pecking away at the keyboard with only one hand. It would have to be longhand until she was out of the sling. Some of the best writers still copied everything by hand, she reminded herself firmly.

  With a mental note to retrieve one of her half-empty journals from the stack on her desk at some point, Vivian turned back to Tyr. He looked almost angelic, his face slack in sleep, his full lips almost too beautiful for a man. Vivian sighed quietly, her right hand drifting back up to pull one of her curls straight and release it to spring back into a spiral. The Exiled seemed desperately romantic to her, a tale of unjust punishment and dogged survival, beauty ravaged by necessity. She wondered if Tyr and Corsica were lovers, though she hadn’t seen any evidence of anything other than a close friendship or a bond like between brother and sister. Had Tyr or Corsica ever taken a mortal lover in the centuries they had been in their world? She frowned. Molly was half-Fae. If the Exiled had taken lovers, perhaps there was more than just Molly. But then again, Tess had said that Mab thought Molly was the fulfillment of a prophesy. Why would one half-Fae child be any better or worse than any other, if all Mab wanted was for the kid to fight the evil spirit that had been threatening their world?

  Vivian let her thoughts wander, digging into the details of the tale that Tess had told, trying to understand why the Sidhe didn’t want to interact with the mortal world. Perhaps there wasn’t any real reason, or perhaps it was simply that modernity had killed the imaginations of most people, and no one believed in the Fae world anymore. Was it really as simple as that?

  “Clap your hands and say I believe in fairies,” she murmured to herself, drawing one leg up onto the chair and leaning her chin on her knee. After a few minutes, she pulled out her phone and checked for any new messages.

  She’d managed to keep her phone shielded for the most part from the supernatural auras of the Sidhe. Evie, one of her managers at the coffee shop, texted her every couple of days with updates when Vivian didn’t stop by the shop. She worked days and Mike worked nights, when the coffee shop also served cocktails from the Roaring Twenties. The bar menu hadn’t changed in the nearly ninety years that Adele’s had been in business; some people thought it was only a publicity stunt meant to impress the tourists that trickled in after a night on Bourbon or after wandering the French Quarter, but Vivian took a certain kind of pride in keeping the menu that her great-grandparents had created and her grandparents had maintained with such care. During the day, Adele’s served coffee with chicory, café au lait and thick slices of homemade pie, along with egg cream sodas in the summer and hot chocolate in what passed for winter in New Orleans.

  Along with being the day manager, Evie also cooked most of the pies. She’d been a pastry chef in a tourist trap restaurant right off Frenchman S
treet when Vivian’s grandmother had poached her almost ten years ago. Vivian smiled at the memory of a younger Evie letting her crimp the raw, doughy crust of a pie with the tines of a fork, Evie’s larger hand guiding Vivian’s small, freckled one surely. There was a limit to Evie’s indulgence, though: during the morning and lunch rushes, Vivian had been more likely to receive a firm swat to her rear to get her out from underfoot than a patient tutorial on pie crust crimping. But Evie had become a sort of surrogate mother to Vivian, taking her to crawfish boils during Mardi Gras season and laughing her big-bellied laugh at the neighbors’ skeptical looks when she told them that Vivian was her daughter. It became almost like a joke between them, since the color of their skin was exactly opposite: Evie shining-dark and beautiful, Vivian pale and freckled and prone to sunburn. Or at least that’s how Vivian thought of it.

  If Evie was her surrogate mother, Mike became her slightly eccentric uncle. He had a collection of quirky bow-ties in all colors and patterns, and he wore one with a crisp white shirt and three-button vest every night as he smoothly ran the shop, the sun setting and darkness bringing with it a different crowd, the conversation swelling and receding like ocean waves, the tide high on Friday and Saturday nights, quieter during the week. As Vivian grew older and sometimes stayed at the shop past dark, quietly doing her homework in a corner, Mike would bring her a cup of coffee in a chipped cup that he reserved especially for her. She loved the delicate pattern of vines and flowers on the cup, and its hairline crack and tiny chip only gave it character in her eyes. Every evening after the sun had set, Mike switched the music playing in Adele’s to throaty, smoky New Orleans jazz. Vivian grew to love the sounds of King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bichet’s clarinet and Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.

  Her great-grandparents and her grandparents had made judicious investments in the bustling city of New Orleans. The second floor of the brick corner building which housed Adele’s was rented out as various incarnations over the years, now as three studio apartments; and then her grandparents had built this house almost fifty years ago. Vivian only remembered vague watercolor impressions of her parents, but she supposed that the greater part of her grandparents’ practicality and work ethic had influenced them, because they’d had a very detailed will that established her trust fund and the guardianship of her grandparents… She gingerly pushed her mind away from the subject of her parents, like a gondolier poling his boat away from a bridge pillar. Looking back at her phone, she read Evie’s latest message.

  Need to meet with Mr. Evans to go over this quarter’s books. Numbers look good but still need your signature. When can you come in to review?

  Vivian sighed. It seemed ungrateful to resent her responsibilities at Adele’s, and at her core she loved the coffee shop, she really did. It was a historical landmark in the city and it was part of her family’s legacy. It helped her feel like a part of her grandparents still lived, even though she felt their loss most keenly when she sat down to review the accounts as her grandmother had done for decades, or when she went over the weekly purchase order as her grandfather had done every Friday afternoon for as long as she could remember.

  “Better just bite the bullet,” she murmured to herself as she slowly typed a reply to Evie: Tomorrow at 8?

  After she sent the message careening into cyberspace, she stood up and deposited her phone in her desk drawer, hoping that would keep it safe from the strange interference that followed the Fae. With her good hand, she tried to slide a black-and-white composition journal out from under a stack of books. The books swayed precariously. She let go of the journal and tried to stop them from toppling over, but only succeeded in launching the tower of books in the other direction. The hardcover books banged against the wall and one landed on her foot. She swore under her breath and hopped away from the desk and the carnage of the book pile. Almost as an afterthought, she reached back and snatched the journal. Another small book toppled down onto her big toe and she growled in frustration. Then, in the middle of the awkwardly hopping transit back to the chair, thinking vengefully about donating useless books to a secondhand shop or maybe even selling them at a yard sale, Vivian realized two things in quick succession: that Tyr was awake, propped up on his elbows; and that Tyr was watching her intently, a slightly bemused look on his face.

  “Oh. You’re…awake,” Vivian said.

  He nodded gingerly. His facial expression stopped short of a wince, but Vivian still read the discomfort in his face.

  “Does your head hurt? Should I go get one of the others?” she asked, setting the journal aside on her bed and wondering what she was supposed to do. Should she sit back down in her chair and loom over Tyr? Should she sit on the floor next to his cocoon of blankets so he could look at her without straining his neck? Or should she just give up and let one of the others handle it?

  After a frozen moment of indecision, punctuated by the throbbing of her book-assaulted toe and a sharper twinge from her arm, Vivian walked around to Tyr’s other side and sat down on the floor.

  “You know,” she said slowly, “it’s going to be a lot more difficult to talk with you now that Corsica isn’t here.”

  At the mention of Corsica’s name, Tyr’s eyes darkened and he pulled his lips back from his teeth in something like a silent snarl.

  “Sorry,” Vivian amended. “I won’t mention her again.” She pressed her lips together. “Do you want me to get you something to write with? Or…sorry, something to drink first?”

  Tyr nodded once, slowly, to her last suggestion.

  “Okay. I’ll be right back.”

  She slipped into the kitchen and grabbed a large, sturdy plastic cup from the cabinet. Duke, Ross and Jess were at the table eating. Ross and Jess both glanced over but then turned their attention back to their food. Vivian deposited a handful of ice cubes into the glass and filled it with water, tossing in a few mint leaves and a wedge of lemon from her ready stores on the top shelf of the fridge. Ross occasionally teased her about her additions of herbs and fruits to her water, but it was a sisterly joke. Almost as an afterthought, Vivian also grabbed a cold can of ginger ale, hugging it to her side with her good arm. If Tyr didn’t drink it, she certainly would. Sometimes a girl needed a break from mint-and-lemon water.

  Realizing that she wouldn’t be able to open the door with her one good hand occupied with the cup of water, she’d left her bedroom door slightly ajar. With a silent congratulation to herself on her foresight, she nudged the door open with her foot. Tyr had maneuvered himself to sit with his back against the side of her bed, his injured leg stretched out to one side. He opened his eyes and looked over at her. For some reason, meeting his blue eyes sent a shiver down her spine. It wasn’t the little thrill of heat that crackled through her when she met Niall’s gaze. Perhaps it was something closer to what a rabbit felt when it locked gazes with a hawk. Tyr frowned.

  You do not need to fear me.

  Vivian almost dropped the glass of water when she heard the voice in her head. It wasn’t her own internal voice, it was something distinctly other and distinctly male. She lost her grip on the can of ginger ale and it thudded to the carpet, rolling a few slow turns before settling next to the chair. Vivian swallowed hard and forced herself not to break eye contact with Tyr. Her voice came out thinner than she wanted, but it wasn’t a squeak and it wasn’t a whisper. “Was that you?”

  Tyr nodded slightly. Yes.

  The feeling of someone else inside her head sent goose bumps down Vivian’s arms. Yet again she wondered if she should go get Niall or Ross. If Tyr could speak in her head, what else could he do? Could he control her? She pressed her lips together.

  No. Controlling you like this would take much more power than I have ever had.

  Peripherally, Vivian noticed that her grip on the glass of water had tightened, her bones pressing whitely through the thin skin of her knuckles. The large bandage on her forearm reminded her that not long ago, Tyr had drunk her blood.
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br />   Your generosity saved my life.

  Vivian wasn’t sure why she decided that she needed to throw Tyr out of her head, but it was like flipping a switch. It happened quickly and violently, with a feeling like clenching a muscle and then a sensation of tearing him out of her mind, throwing him back into the empty space between her body and his. Tyr gave a strangled gasp and slid limply to one side, like a puppet with cut strings.

  “Oh, shit,” said Vivian, leaping forward. She hastily set the water down on the empty chair after spilling half of it down herself. “Please don’t be dead,” she pleaded as she got down on her knees and gingerly felt for a pulse on Tyr’s neck. She sighed in relief as she felt a heartbeat beneath her fingers. At least she didn’t kill him telepathically. She grimaced and tried to decide if she should try to move him to a more comfortable position, but he stirred and she scuttled backward, tangling herself in the blankets on the floor.

  Tyr blinked and sluggishly pushed himself upright again. His blue eyes looked slightly unfocused. A drop of dark blood slid down the side of his face.

  “Oh, you’re bleeding again,” Vivian said, biting her lip. He didn’t seem to hear her. She took a deep breath. “Sorry. I didn’t know…well, you were in my head and I didn’t expect it and I just kind of felt like I needed to know that I was still in control, and I’m sorry if I hurt you – ”

  Tyr held up one hand. She trailed off in confusion when she noticed that he was smiling. Not grinning, not showing teeth or laughing, sure, but there was a hint of a smile on his lips and it confused the hell out of her.

  “I just smacked you three ways to Sunday. With my mind,” she added in a disbelieving tone. “And you’re not mad?”

  Tyr leaned back against her bed and raised his eyes deliberately to hers, making a gesture of invitation…or permission. Vivian took a deep breath and concentrated on unclenching whatever peculiar muscle had thrown him out of her head. When she was fairly certain she’d relaxed enough, she met his eyes.