Harvest of the Gods

by Sumida, Amy

  “But why?”

  “What do you think will happen if you force the magic to create another life it cannot sustain?”

  “It would have to...”

  “Yes,” his face was soft with sympathy. “It would have to take a life, possibly that of your Wolf Prince himself. Would you sacrifice Trevor's life for that of a hypothetical child?”

  “No, of course not,” I slumped back against him.

  “It's best to leave the magic alone,” his hand was stroking over my long dark hair, I'd left it to hang loose down my back for him. I knew he liked to play with it. “Tampering with the natural order of things always has a price.”

  “We were going to try to find a fertility goddess to help her,” I thought of my determination to kill Demeter and take her power so I could help Sam. Demeter needed to die anyway so it seemed like a perfect solution.

  “Please don't do this,” his forehead came down to touch mine. “As royalty we have to make hard decisions. Sometimes the hardest is when you decide to do nothing. It's one of the prices we pay to rule. Leave this alone, let the magic work itself out.”

  “I can't give up on her so easily,” I pulled back to look at him, his deep red hair tousled, framing an angular face accented by red scales at the temples, and those bright dragon eyes staring at me in concern. “I'm going to keep looking for another way.”

  “Well,” he smiled, “if you do find a way to bring back fertility, Faerie would benefit too. The few births we've had have mostly been to lesser fey. The last sidhe birth was over two thousand years ago, it was actually that cat-sidhe you're friends with.”

  “What?” I pulled back even further, to stare at him in shock. “I thought you only started having problems since the way was closed, that's only been about five-hundred years.”

  “Five-hundred human years,” Arach chided me as if I, above all other humans, should have known the difference between time in Faerie and time in the Human Realm. He was right of course. “That's around fifteen-thousand fey years, give or take a few hundred,” he shrugged. “Time here is so flexible.”

  “So you've been waiting for a mate for-”

  “I've been waiting for you for over fifteen-thousand years,” he nodded. “Now do you see why I was such an asshole?”

  “Looks like your friends with the cat-sidhe too. You're picking up Roarke's affection for human colloquialisms,” I shook my head and smiled to hide my shock. I'd thought Odin had waited a long time for me. “You weren't so much of an asshole as a supreme egotistical bastard.”

  “Well, I feel so much better now,” he laughed and pulled me back against his side.

  “Why have there been so few sidhe births in so long?” I whispered, like I thought the land could hear me and I didn't want to offend her. Probably because Faerie really could hear me.

  “We don't know,” I felt him shrug beneath my cheek. “Now that you've given us back the power to speak to Faerie, we've all asked her but she doesn't respond. Or if she does, it's in riddles.”

  “Riddles?” I remembered the way she spoke to me and almost as if the memory called her, I felt her presence in my mind and her voice filled my head.

  Welcome home, daughter of the gods, man, and fey.

  “Thank you,” I said softly to her.

  “For what?” Arach looked down at me in surprise.

  “Oh, no,” I waved away his question, “I'm talking to Faerie.”

  “By all means,” he grimaced, pulling the sheet around us and snuggling in closer with me. “Maybe she'll give you a straight answer.”

  The Dragon King is of bad humor today

  “Not so bad,” I chuckled a bit and looked once more at the length of scales down his side that announced his arousal.

  His bad humor is a result of your sadness. You come home with a heavy heart.

  “I hoped to find an answer to a problem but have only found a greater problem here.”

  Yes, the children aren't being born.

  “Why won't you tell them how to bring back the children?”

  This is of their own doing and the answer lies within them. I've done all I can for them by bringing you here. You are the catalyst. If they want things to change, then they must first change themselves.

  “Ah, there's the riddle,” I smiled but it faded when I realized what she said. “Brought me here? You brought me here? I thought it was an accident. I asked the Aether to take me home and it took me here instead.”

  How do you think you got past the High King's magic? She was laughing at me, I couldn't hear it but I could feel it. Of course I brought you. I've been waiting years for you to enter the Aether alone and without a chant to direct you. When you finally did, I pulled you here immediately.

  “What is she saying?” Arach was staring intensely at my slack expression.

  “She says she brought me here, that she opened the tear in King Cian's wards to allow me through.”

  “I suspected as much,” he nodded and leaned down to kiss me again. I ran my hands over the hard angles of his chest, then slid them under the sheet. Nope, no bad humor there.

  Is he a good lover? I hope he doesn't disappoint you after all I've done to bring you together.

  “Oh, you're still here,” I jerked back from Arach and he gave a long suffering sigh before he leaned back so I could finish my conversation with Faerie.

  I am ever here.

  “But if you're still speaking to me it must be for a reason,” I cast a glance at my waiting dragon and wasn't surprised to see smoke drifting out of one of his nostrils.

  I feel strange of late. There are fey I can't find.

  “King Cian has opened the way to the Human Realm now,” I reassured her. “They're probably there.”

  Yes, perhaps. And then she was blessedly gone.

  “I always feel like I've missed something and I won't figure it out until later, whenever I talk to her,” I shook my head.

  “Hmph,” he nodded, “riddles. She loves riddles.”

  “Not exactly a riddle,” I thought over her words. “She's told me a few times that she wants me here to bring change to the fey. Now she's told me that it's the reason she brought me here in the first place, and she implied that the change will bring back the fertility.”

  “She did? So what's this change you're supposed to bring about?”

  “That's just it, I haven't the foggiest.”

  “Well great,” he huffed, “I'm glad that's all settled.

  About the Author

  Amy Sumida lives on an island in the Pacific Ocean where gods go to play. She sleeps in a fairy bed, high in the air, with two gravity-defying felines and upon waking, enjoys stabbing people with little needles, over and over, under the guise of making pretty pictures on their skin. She, like Vervain, has no filter but has been fortunate enough to find friends who appreciate this... or at least tell her they do. She bellydances and paints pictures on her walls but is happiest with her nose stuck in a book, her mind in a different world than this one, filled with fantastical men who unfortunately don't exist in our mundane reality. Thank the gods for fantasy.

  She is the author of several books including the Godhunter series, The Magic of Fabric, Enchantress, Feeding the Lwas: A Vodou Cookbook, and The Vampire-Werewolf Complex. She's a Tattoo artist and a fine artist and you can find her artwork on Etsy.