by Melissa Marr
Pretty girls, cheerleaders, geek girls, everyone was lusting on him. It felt good to be the one they all looked at with envy for a change. It'd feel better if he were a normal guy, like Seth.
Along with half the students at school, Keenan's faeries watched them, unabashed as the fey always were. They seemed tired, shifting in and out of the school in small groups. Although the metal-laden building must be painful for them, they stood alert and observant, keeping Keenan in their sight at all times. They treated him reverentially. Why wouldn't they if Keenan is a faery king?
She thought, for a heartbeat, that she was going to be sick from the flood of fears and horrible images that came rushing over her. A faery king…and he's stalking me.
With no small effort, Aislinn managed to push down the rising worries as Leslie and Carla headed her way. Panic wouldn't help. A plan was what she needed; answers were what she needed. Maybe if she had answers, if she knew why he'd fixated on her, she could find a way to get rid of him.
As she watched Keenan walk toward her, Aislinn saw a fleeting image of sunlight rippling over water, bouncing off buildings, strange flickers of warmth and beauty that made her want to run toward him. He looked at her, smiling invitingly, as he followed Rianne through the crowded cafeteria.
Rianne was chattering animatedly to him, looking for all the world like they were long-lost friends. Leslie laughed at whatever Keenan said, and Aislinn realized that her friends had all accepted him.
And why wouldn't they? As much as she wished they would ignore him, there was nothing she could say. She couldn't explain why she wanted him gone. She couldn't tell them how very dangerous he was. It wasn't a choice she had. Sometimes that lack of choices, the pressures of dealing with the fey, made her feel like she was smothering, like the secrecy was a physical weight bearing down on her. She hated it.
After her traitorous friends brought him to the table, she tried to ignore him. It worked—for a while—but he kept watching her, directing most of his comments to her, asking her questions. All the while he sat on the opposite side of the table staring at her with those inhuman green eyes.
Finally he pointed at over-steamed green beans and asked something inane and she snapped, "What? Too common for someone like you?"
Where's my control? More and more, her lifetime of emotional control seemed to be faltering, sliding away.
He was frighteningly still. "What do you mean?"
She knew better than to provoke a faery, especially a faery king, but she barreled on, "You'd be surprised at what I know about you. And you know what? None of it impresses me. Not one little bit."
He laughed then—joyous and free, like the anger that'd flared in his eyes hadn't existed. "Then I shall try harder."
She shivered in foreboding, in sudden longing, in some uncomfortable mixture of the two. It was worse than the simple compulsion she'd felt to reach out toward him: it was the same disquieting tangle of feelings she'd felt at Comix when he'd first spoken to her.
Leslie whistled softly. "Give him a little something, Ash."
"Drop it, Les." Aislinn fisted her hands in her lap under the table.
"PMS." Rianne nodded. Then she tapped Keenan's hand and added, "Just ignore her, sweetie. We'll help you wear her down."
"Oh, I'm counting on that, Rianne," Keenan murmured. He was glowing—like a bright light radiated from inside his skin—as he spoke.
Aislinn could taste rose-heavy air, could feel the too-tempting warmth from him.
Her friends stared at him as if he were the most amazing thing they'd ever glimpsed. I am so screwed.
Aislinn stayed silent until it was time to go to afternoon classes, her fingernails digging small half circles— like slivers of the sun—into her palms. She concentrated on the pain of those suns, only partially visible in her skin, and wondered if she had any chance at all of escaping from Keenan's attention.
By the end of the day, Keenan's proximity had grown intolerable to Aislinn. A strange warmth seemed to permeate the air when he stood close to her, and after a few moments, it was near painful to resist touching him. Her mind told her to, but her eyes wanted to drift shut; her hands wanted to reach out.
I need space.
She'd learned to deal with seeing the fey. It was awful, but she did it. She could do this, too.
He's just another faery.
She concentrated, repeating the rules and warnings in her mind like a prayer, a litany to keep her focused. Don't stare, don't speak, don't run, don't touch. She took several calming breaths. Don't react. Don't attract their attention. Don't ever let them know you can see them. The familiarity of the words helped her push back the edge of desire, but it wasn't enough to make it anywhere near comfortable to be around him.
So when they walked in to Lit class and one of the cheerleaders offered him an empty seat—a seat gloriously far away from hers—Aislinn gave the cheerleader a big smile. "I could kiss you for that. Thank you."
Keenan flinched at the phrase.
The cheerleader stared back at Aislinn, not sure if it was a joke or not.
"Seriously. Thank you." Aislinn turned away from the less-than-pleased Keenan and slid into her seat, grateful to have a respite—however brief it was.
A few minutes later Sister Mary Louise came in and passed out a stack of papers. "I thought we'd take a Shakespeare break today."
Appreciative murmurs greeted her, quickly followed by groans when people saw the poetry on the handouts. Ignoring the grumbling, Sister Mary Louise scrawled a title on the whiteboard: "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." Someone in the back muttered, "Poetry and French, oh joy."
Sister Mary Louise laughed. "Who wants to read about the 'Beautiful Woman Without Pity'?"
Utterly unself-conscious, Keenan stood and read the tragic tale of a knight fatally entranced by a faery. It wasn't the words that had every girl in the room sighing: it was his voice. Even without a glamour, he sounded sinfully good.
When he was done reading, Sister Mary Louise seemed as stunned as the rest of them. "Beautiful," she murmured. Then she pulled her gaze away to drift over the room, pausing on the typically vocal students. "Well? What can you tell me?"
"I've got nothing," Leslie murmured from across the aisle.
Sister Mary Louise caught Aislinn's eye expectantly.
So after yet another steadying breath, Aislinn said, "She wasn't a woman. The knight trusted something inhuman, a faery or a vampire or something, and now he's dead."
Sister Mary Louise prompted, "Good. So what does that mean?"
"Don't trust faeries or vamps," Leslie muttered.
Everyone but Keenan and Aislinn laughed.
Then Keenan's voice cut through the laughter, "Perhaps the faery wasn't at fault. Perhaps there were other factors."
"Right. What's one mortal's life? He died. It doesn't matter if the faery, vamp, whatever it was felt bad or didn't mean to. The knight is still dead." Aislinn tried to keep her voice calm, and mostly succeeded. Her heartbeat was another matter entirely. She knew Keenan watched her, but she stared at Sister Mary Louise and added, "The monster's not suffering, is she?"
"It could be a metaphor about trusting the wrong person, right?" Leslie added.
"Good. Good." Sister Mary Louise added several lines to the scrawl on the board. "What else?"
The discussion veered onto several other topics, until Sister Mary Louise finally said, "Let's look at Rossetti's 'Goblin Market' for a moment and then we'll come back to this."
Aislinn was unsurprised that Keenan volunteered to read again; he had to know how his voice sounded. This time he stared straight at her as he read, barely glancing at the words on the page.
Leslie leaned toward Aislinn and whispered, "Looks like Seth has competition."
"No." Aislinn shook her head and forced herself to hold Keenan's gaze as she answered, "No, he doesn't. There's nothing Keenan could offer me that I want."
Her voice was low, but he heard her. He stumbled briefly, confusion flitt
ing across his too-beautiful face. He stopped mid-poem.
Aislinn looked away before he could see how tempted she really was, before she admitted to herself how much she wanted to ignore all reason.
Sister Mary Louise stepped into the silence. "Cassandra, please continue from there."
Please. Let him go away.
Aislinn didn't glance his way once for the rest of the class. Afterward she all but ran from the room, hoping the taxi would be waiting as promised. If she had to face much more of Keenan's attention, she was afraid of what she might do.
CHAPTER 12
Folks say that the only way to avoid their fury is to hunt a branch of verbena and bind it with a five-leaved clover. This is magic against all disaster.
— Folk Tales of Brittany by Elsie Masson (1929)
When Donia walked into the library, she saw Seth. Aislinn's friend, the one who lives in the den of steel walls. It wasn't quite late enough to see Aislinn, but if Seth was here, perhaps Aislinn was meeting him again.
He didn't seem to notice anyone around him, despite the mortals and faeries who were all noticing him. And why wouldn't they? He was lovely, tempting in ways so different than Keenan: dark and still, shadows and paleness. Don't think of Keenan. Think of the mortal. Smile for him.
She took her time, moving slowly and carefully with a casual hand for support on the vacant tables she passed, a moment's pause to catch her breath at the new book display.
He watched.
Let him speak first. You can do this. Her gaze—hidden behind dark glasses—lingered on him for a breath or two. He sat at one of the handful of computer terminals, a pile of printouts beside him.
When she was beside the desk, she smiled at him.
He folded his pile of papers, effectively hiding what he'd been researching.
She tilted her head, trying to see what he was reading on the screen.
He clicked on something on the screen and flicked off the monitor. He pointed at her. "Donia, right? Ash didn't introduce us last night. You're the one who helped her?"
She nodded and held out a hand.
Instead of shaking it, he lifted it and kissed her knuckles. He has my hand. It didn't burn like Keenan's touch.
She froze, like quarry before the Hunt, and felt foolish for it. No one touches me. As if I still belonged to Keenan. Forbidden. Liseli swore it would change when the new Winter Girl took the staff, but that was hard to believe sometimes. It'd been decades since anyone had truly held her.
"I'm Seth. Thank you for what you did. If anything happened to her…" For a moment he looked fierce enough to rival Keenan's best guards. "So, thanks."
He still had her hand; she trembled as she pulled it from his grasp. He's hers, just like Keenan is now. "Is Ash here?"
"Nope. Should be on her way from school soon." He glanced past her to the clock that hung on the wall behind her,
She stood, indecisive for a moment.
"Did you need something?" He stared at her, as if he would like to ask her a different question.
She pushed her dark glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. Looking past him, where several of Keenan's girls stood listening, she smiled wryly.
"Are you Ash's…" She waved her hand in the air.
Somberly he prompted, "Ash's what?"
"Beau?" she said, and then winced. Beau. No one uses that anymore. The years sometimes blurred, the words and the clothes and the music. It rolled together. "Her boyfriend?"
"Her beau?" he repeated. He poked his tongue at a ring in his bottom lip, and then he smiled. "No, not really."
"Oh." Catching an unusual scent, Donia sniffed slightly. It can't be.
Seth stood and picked up his bag. He stepped close to her, a handsbreadth from her, as if he were trying to make her step back, asserting some sort of male dominance. That doesn't change over the years.
She stepped back—just once—but not before she caught the slightly acrid scent of recently handled verbena, not overpowering, but there. It is. In his bag. Underneath it were the slight scents of chamomile and Saint-John's-wort.
"I look out for her, you know? She's a wonderful person. Gentle. Good." He slung his bag over his shoulder and stared down at her.
"If anyone tried to hurt her" — he paused, scowled, and continued—"there's nothing I wouldn't do to keep her safe."
"Right. Glad I could help with that the other day." Distracted, she nodded. Verbena, Saint-Johns-wort, what's he doing with those? They were chief among the list of herbs thought to give a mortal faery sight.
Then he left, trailed by several of Keenan's girls. I wonder if they'll notice what he carries in his bag. She doubted it.
Once the door swung shut behind Seth and the Summer Girls, Donia sat down at the terminal and pulled up his search history: Faeries, Glamour, Herbs for Seeing, Summer King.
"Oh," she whispered. That couldn't be good.
When Keenan got to his loft on the outskirts of the city, Niall and Tavish were waiting. They lounged as if they were relaxing, but he didn't miss the assessing looks they gave him when he walked in.
"Well?" Tavish asked as he muted the television, silencing the weather report about a freak hailstorm.
Beira must have heard I spent the day with Aislinn. She often snarled over any progress he made with the mortal girls, but she couldn't—by rules of the contest—actively interfere.
"Not great." Keenan was loath to admit it, but Aislinn's resistance was wearing on him. "She doesn't react as they usually do."
Niall flopped into an overstuffed chair and grabbed a controller for one of the game systems. "Did you ask her out?"
"Already?" Keenan picked up a half-eaten slice of pizza from the box on one of the geode tables scattered around the room. He sniffed it and took a bite. Not too old. "Isn't that too soon? The last girl…"
Niall glanced up from the TV. "Mortal habits change faster than ours. Try a casual 'friends' approach."
"He doesn't want to be her friend. That's not what the girls are for," Tavish insisted in his usual stiff manner. He turned and held out a hand for the box of leftover pizza. "You need protein, not that. Why you two insist on eating mortal food is beyond me."
Because I've had to live so long among them? But Keenan didn't say it. He handed over the pizza and sat down, trying to relax. It was easier here than most places they'd lived. Tall leafy plants dominated every possible space in the loft. A number of birds flitted through the room, squawking at him and retreating to nooks in the columns that supported the high ceilings. It made the room seem open, more like being outside. "So casual's what they like now?"
"It's worth a try," Niall said, his attention still on the screen. With a muttered curse, he tilted to one side and then the other in the chair—as if that would make the onscreen image move. It was hard to believe he could speak more languages than a faery would ever need: give him a toy, and he was hopeless. "Or perhaps try aggressive—tell her you're taking her out. Some of them like that."
Tavish returned with one of the green concoctions he was forever insisting Keenan drink. He nodded approvingly. "That sounds more fitting."
"Well, there you have it: sure wisdom on which to try" — Niall paused and shot a grin at Tavish—"casual."
"Indeed." Keenan laughed.
"How is this amusing?" Tavish sat the green protein drink on the table. His lengthy silver braid fell over his shoulder as he moved; he flicked it back with an impatient gesture, a telltale sign that he was agitated. He didn't let his temper slip, though. He never did anymore.
"When's the last time you dated?" Niall asked, still not looking away from the screen.
"The girls are more than adequate company—"
Niall interrupted, "You see? He's rusty."
"I am the Summer King's oldest advisor, and" — Tavish stopped himself, sighing as he realized that he was only underlining Niall's point—"try the boy's advice first, my liege."
And with the impeccable dignity he wore like a comfortab
le cloak, Tavish retired to the study.
Keenan watched him go with more than a little sadness. "One of these years, he's going to strike you for your belligerence. He is still summer fey, Niall."
"Good. He needs to find some passion in his old bones." Mall's humor fled, replaced with the cunning that made him every bit as important as Tavish in advising Keenan these past centuries. "Summer fey are made for strong passions. If he doesn't loosen up, we'll lose him to Sorcha's High Court."
"The search is hard on him. He longs for what the court was like under my father." Feeling every bit as somber as Tavish, Keenan let his gaze drop to the park across the street.
One of his rowan-men saluted.
Glancing back at Niall, Keenan added, "What it still should be."
"Then woo the girl. Fix it."
Keenan nodded. "A casual approach, you say?"
Niall came to stand beside him at the window, staring down at the already frost-laden branches, more proof that if they didn't stop Beira's ever-growing power, it wouldn't be many more centuries until the summer fey perished. "And show her a exciting night, something different, something unexpected."
"If I don't find her soon…"
"You will," Niall assured him, repeating the same words he'd been repeating for almost a millennia.
"I need to. I don't know if" — Keenan drew a steadying breath—"I will find her. Maybe this one."
Niall merely smiled.
But Keenan wasn't sure either of them believed it anymore. He wanted to, but it became more difficult each time the game was played out.
When the Winter Queen bound his powers—making him unable to access much of summer's strength, freezing the earth steadily—she'd also begun crushing the hope of many of his fey. He might be stronger than most faeries, but he was far from the king they needed, far from the king his father had been. Please let Aislinn be the one.
CHAPTER 13
Everything is capricious about them…Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love.