by May Dawson
“I don’t want to fight with you either,” he said. “But you and I have some stuff to work through, and I don’t want to walk into the fucking Fae labyrinth tomorrow without having said goodbye—”
I grabbed his shirt in one hand, pulling him close to me, surprising us both.
“You don’t get to say goodbye to me,” I said, full of fury. “You don’t get to hurt me and make me miss you, even though you were right there, even though we didn’t have to go through all that, and then go fucking die, Tyson. You are going to make it through that fight tomorrow and then you’re going to begin making it up to me.”
His lips parted, about to fire back, but I used my hand fisted in his shirt to yank him down to me. I kissed him hard, until both of us were breathless. His hands skimmed my sides, then settled on my hips.
His lips nudged mine open at the same time as his knee slid between my thighs, pushing my legs open. My lips parted, letting him in.
He picked me up in one easy movement and set me on top of the stone ramparts. I clung to his shoulders with my hands, keenly aware of the breeze teasing my hair, which fluttered away from me. There was a long drop behind my back but I didn’t give a fuck right now. Tyson stood in front of me, limned by moonlight, and the world felt strange and dangerous and sweet.
“I’m still mad at you,” I muttered, holding his cheek with one hand as I pressed my lips to the curve of his cheekbone, to the sharp line of his clean-shaven jaw. God, I’d missed every part of his face, of his body.
“I’m still kind of pissed at you, to be honest,” he admitted, yanking my shirt open.
“You’re mad at me?” I broke away from him to stare into those gorgeous eyes. “Why the hell are you mad at me?”
He let out a laugh. “Are we really going to get into that now?”
“Yeah, I think we are,” I said, and at the same time as we fought, my fingers were moving on his belt buckle. I undid his belt expertly, reached in and drew him out. “I missed this.”
“Assuming I survive tomorrow, you and I have all our lives to piss each other off,” he reminded me, and then his lips claimed mine, rough and punishing. His hands went to my waist, unfastening my jeans, and I rolled my hips up so he could yank them down my hips. My ass came down again on the cold stone.
Before I could say anything, he added, “Yes, I’m aware that if I don’t survive tomorrow, you’d chase me all the way to hell to keep yelling at me.”
He cut off my response with another kiss. My thighs tightened around his waist, reeling him in close to me.
He pressed his cock against my wet, throbbing heat, and I rolled my hips up, seeking more of him. He wrapped his arms tightly around me, burying his face in my shoulder, pressing kisses to my throat.
I found his narrow hips with my hands and drew him toward me, wanting more of him, aching for him. He slid forward into me, slowly, inch-by-inch, and my lips parted as I took him in until he was buried deep inside me.
“God, I missed you,” he muttered.
“I missed you too.” I kissed him again, running my fingers through his hair. I wanted to touch every part of him, to have him as close to me as I could. He was buried deep inside me, his tongue dancing with mine, and I still wanted more—somehow.
There on the edge of the ramparts, high above the dangerous Fae kingdom, the moon shone brightly down on us as we began to move together. He pumped into me over and over, as my hands fell to his shoulders, my fingers tightening on his broad, powerful muscles. Desire washed through me every time he slid deep inside me, like a river rising higher with every movement.
Then I finally shattered around him, calling his name, and the forest far below seemed to go still as the two of us screamed out against the night. The moon’s glow was all I saw as the world went bright with pleasure.
He stopped, his chest heaving as he came inside me, pulling me tight against his chest. He buried his face in my hair as if he couldn’t get enough of me.
“You know I never stopped loving you,” he said softly.
“I know.” I cupped his cheek, studying his face, and the affection that lit his eyes. I’d made my own terrible mistakes with these men, and they’d always forgiven me, just like I’d always forgive them. “That was what made it so infuriating. But I never stopped loving you either, Ty.”
There were still cracks between us that had to be fixed, but they were only cracks. I whispered, “There are some things we can’t break…no matter how hard we try.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
All night long, I dreamt of my wolf.
She darted through my dreams, bright-eyed and sleek, and left footprints in the snow. I caught glimpses of her black-rimmed blue eyes watching me from the tall, whispering trees of a Fae forest, and as I turned to face a Ravager with its drooling mouth and sharp claws, I heard her snarl behind me as she bounded to my side.
I woke with a jolt.
Tyson slept next to me, his arm cocked beneath his head, his chest rising slowly and evenly. I traced the dark lines of the tattoo across his naked chest with my fingertips as I tried to lull myself back to sleep. I couldn’t shake the feeling I dreamt of my dead wolf for a reason, and grief tightened my throat all over again. I would never stop missing her.
I’d asked Tyson if he was sure he’d sleep well enough with me in his bed and a hard day coming, He’d claimed he always slept best with me.
There was still a distance between us, even when I lay here on a narrow bed with him with our bodies pressed together, but it was nice to be close to him, to breathe in the faint, comforting scent he carried on his skin and to study his face in the tiny sliver of light that trickled in through the window and the open door that led out into the stone hall.
There was a faint sound in the hallway—barely audible—and I glimpsed a tall, lean figure. Silas. I would know him anywhere.
By the time I eased out of bed and slipped out without waking Tyson, the door at the end of the hall that led to the battlements was closing softly behind him. I followed him up the stairs and stepped out into the moonlight.
Silas stood outside, his hands in his pockets, his posture straight. I was about to say something to him when I heard a soft whirring sound, and then Raura dropped lightly to her feet in front of him.
My heart suddenly hammering, I stepped back onto the top step, letting the door close. My heel hung over the narrow, twisting stairs, and I couldn’t help thinking that I could easily plunge down the stairs. I didn’t have my wolfish grace anymore.
But more than that, when Silas met with another girl at midnight, I already felt like I was falling.
Shining red-and-yellow wings, like iridescent butterfly wings, folded up with a soft whispering sound and disappeared into her back.
“I wondered how you planned to get up here,” Silas said. “Must be handy.”
“It is. Can’t you fly, wizard?”
“I don’t have that in my arsenal. I wish I did.”
“Arsenal? Do you have to think of everything as a weapon?”
“Pretty much.” He made no move toward her, even though she sounded flirtatious, and my cheeks tinged with embarrassment. Maybe I shouldn’t have doubted him.
“Well, are you going to kiss me?” she asked cheekily.
“What?” Silas sounded scandalized.
She let out a bubbly laugh. “I just asked for the sake of your…whatever she is.”
Her eyes fixed on me, and Silas twisted to follow her gaze. I bit my lip, then pushed the door, which was just open a crack, wide.
“Hey,” I said. “I thought you might need someone to talk to so I followed you up here… but I guess not.”
My lips twisted wryly.
Silas raked his hand through his hair, his expression changing. “Maddie… I came up here to talk to Raura to get more detail about the Feddlewig.”
“Right,” I said, as if that’s what I’d thought all along.
Silas frowned at me. Still laughing, Raura boosted herself onto
the stone rail along the ramparts. If I pushed her off, would her wings pop out in time to save herself?
“So tell me all about the Feddlewig,” Silas began, “and then tell me everything you know about the Huntress.”
Raura smiled. “Oh, she’s a very clever girl.”
“Mm, I’m sure.” Silas said.
The two of them traded knowing looks, and I wondered how the hell Silas had managed to bond so much with this random Fae over dinner.
“The Feddlewig is simple,” she said. “Simply terrifying to an outsider, but I’ve killed two myself. They don’t belong here—they wander through the rips. So we have to kill them, when they aren’t being useful.” She shrugged at the reminder that being useful meant used to terrify trespassers.
“Do you have any monsters of your own here in your lands? Or are they all imports?”
“Oh yes,” she said. “Carnivorous boar. Goblins. Sentient plants big enough to eat a goat.” She flashed me a smile. “The Fae ourselves.”
But despite self-identifying as a monster, she told us everything she knew about the Feddlewig—and about how to defeat one. I wondered why she was so very helpful.
“Now tell me about the Huntress,” Silas said. He rested his elbow on my shoulder, and I glanced at him, eager to have a private conversation.
“Take it easy, wizard.” Raura’s gaze fixed on me as she said, “You were trying to win Tess over tonight. How did that go, anyway?”
I’d spent most of dinner chatting with the girl who hated us. It had been pretty one-sided.
“Not that great,” I said.
“Tess’s got a half-blood parent,” she confided cheerfully. “So she has to hate humans extra. Especially since she’ll probably never be able to marry.”
“What?” I demanded.
Raura shrugged. “She can be a knight, though. So it’s not bad.”
“But why can’t she marry?”
Raura scoffed as if we didn’t understand anything. “She’s one-quarter human. That’s far too human for anyone’s tastes. Then she’d have children who carried human blood instead of magic.”
“Are you going to be a knight?” I asked.
“I’m trying.” Suddenly she looked far less good-tempered.
“Why are you here?” I asked. Most of Fenig’s Fae knights seemed to be orphans, but Denys had mentioned her father.
“We’re supposed to be at Rift’s Edge,” she said. “That’s the keep where we usually stay. Turic claimed there were more sightings at the city and he needed us here. But I wonder…” She chewed her lower lip. “He wants something from the Delphine. And Fenig is the High Delphin’s daughter. So by forcing her to stay here—”
She broke off, flashing me a bright smile. “Well, you don’t care about our problems.”
“We might,” I said, especially when we might have to be allies to get out of here with the shield. But it sounded as if we couldn’t be Raura’s ally and Turic’s at the same time. We’d have to choose—and carefully.
“Is Turic still overtaxing the people?” Silas asked.
“And murdering the ones who can’t pay? Oh yes,” she said. She shrugged, her mannerisms glib, but there was a spark of fury in her eyes. “Everyone needs a hobby, I suppose.”
“What do you want?” I asked. “Are you going to try to overthrow Turic?”
She laughed at that, but her eyes widened. “Of course not,” she said. “I wouldn’t dare stage a coup.”
Silas gave her a knowing look. “But the Huntress would.”
“The Huntress sometimes makes Turic’s life difficult,” she said. “And she might occasionally steal the collected taxes and give them back to the people. But before she could stage a coup, she’d have to convince the people she can win.”
“What would that take?” Silas asked.
She shook her head, staring out at the stars blinking into existence above the trees. The Fae world was so dark at night that the stars seemed to shine brighter, nearer, than they ever did on Earth.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not easy to convince people to believe in a hero, in a world like this. And if people don’t believe in heroes, they can’t believe in themselves.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Tyson
The next morning, there was a big breakfast spread on the tables in the dining hall: baked eggs in ceramic dishes, spicy sausages, more fresh-baked bread and cheese, and shiny, glistening fruits I’d never seen before.
“But should you eat something you’ve never tried before twenty minutes before you go into a fight?” Penn asked me dryly as I laid something like pomegranate seeds on my tongue, except the seeds came in shades of green and gold.
I shrugged. “Tastes like grape.”
“You think everything tastes like grape,” he grumbled.
“Cheer up, little brother,” I said. “If I die, you get my stuff.”
My joke just made his lips tense, his eyes somber. Too late, I realized it had been years since I’d called Penn little brother.
I used to call him little brother as a joke—and an affectionate nickname. I was always getting him out of trouble—and I was a year older—and we were as close as could be. But I’d stopped using it when I couldn’t deny that Penn would be my alpha one day.
From the look on his face, he must have cared that I’d stopped saying it, even though we never discussed it.
And we weren’t going to discuss it this morning, either. I wiped my mouth with my cloth napkin and then threw it into the basket at the end of the table. “Are we doing this? Can we get going? I’d like to smack that spider and move on.”
The Delphin smiled at my bravado, but Fenig looked worried.
“Good luck,” Nat said.
He’d been quiet the previous night at dinner, watching me curiously, answering in one-word answers no matter how much I tried to draw him out. But I knew from my reading how hard it was to be a shifter in the Fae world. This kid’s life was hard, and it would be even harder if he hadn’t been rescued by Fenig.
“We don’t need luck,” I told him with a wink.
He grinned and hugged me, a sudden lunge to my side, and I hugged him back, feeling a sudden tightness in my chest. Well, hell, now I had to survive. Otherwise, I’d have made him an empty promise about what it meant to be a shifter.
The training yard that had been full of kids training for battle was empty this morning as we passed through it. “Go away, Nat,” Tess told him, pointing toward the keep. “You’re late for lessons.”
She seemed to be the orphan-wrangler, not that she was very nice about it. But she did seem to care about all of them, and our gazes met when he’d headed off.
“I wouldn’t want him to see you get eaten,” she said sweetly.
“Tess,” Fenig said, her voice warning.
We walked deep into the forest, which felt peaceful and quiet, until Fenig paused.
“It’s time,” Fenig said. “You’ll start here. Reach the end of the labyrinth and escape the Feddlewig.”
“Survive,” the High Delphine promised, “and we’ll help you with your quest.”
Maddie kissed me fiercely, and I hugged her tightly. I didn’t ask her what the kiss was for; we both knew.
Arlen stepped up to offer me a sword and shield. As I took them, he wished me good luck, his voice curt.
Fenig pointed to a cave in the distance—which no doubt was the home of something with too many eyes—and then the Fae took to the trees. Some of them flew, others bounded up into the branches with supernatural ease. Maddie and the guys joined them, but I didn’t dare look at where they might be. I couldn’t afford to be distracted.
Then with an audience, I went to meet the Feddlewig.
The ground rumbled beneath me, but thanks to Silas, I knew what to expect. Stone slowly rose from the ground, walls forming between the trees. I watched the stone wall to my right grow up until it shadowed me, standing eight feet tall.
But the stone hallways
were narrow; I could bound to the top if I needed. Silas, Maddie and I had talked about the possibility I could run along the stone walls, but they were narrow; the odds were good I’d lose my balance, especially now that I’d lost my wolfish grace.
My heart pounded in my throat. The walls around me felt oppressive. Sheathing my sword, I ran and planted my feet on one wall, bounding up onto the other. I crouched on the edge of the stone wall, looking out at what seemed like an endless sea of stone walls. Damn Fae and their magic. There were two exits to the labyrinth. The one far behind me, through the trees, ended in the mist. The other ended at the cave.
And something was moving in the mouth of the cave.
My mouth went dry as the Feddlewig emerged from the cave, its mouth sweeping back and forth low above the ground. Its furry body hung at the base of eight legs, and swayed with every movement of legs as long as thick as young trees. Dark brown fur coated its body.
“That is just unpleasant,” I muttered. Whatever world this overgrown spider thing was from, I had no intention of ever visiting.
I dropped back into the labyrinth and move steadily toward the feddlewig. Cutting off its legs was supposed to be the most effective methodology for fighting the thing; it could move pretty well on six or seven legs, but once it was down to five, it really lost its ability to change direction and became vulnerable.
I was not excited about any part of this, but at least I had a plan.
There was a gasp from the crowd—and then delighted laughter from some.
The delighted laughter of a fairy was a thing to shrivel one’s hopes and dreams.
I bounded up on the wall again, bracing myself on a cold, narrow strip of stone.
It was not just one Feddlewig.
Another one emerged from the cave, then another.
There was a new sense of dread rippling through my body, but resolve overrode it. I had a mission. I needed to reach the end. And I needed to kill any Feddlewigs that hunted me.
Unless I hunted them first…
“Such a fun game,” I muttered as I headed through the labyrinth, stopping at regular twists and turns in the labyrinth to bound up the walls to get a better view.