by J. N. Colon
I scoffed and angled my head toward her. “Not a chance I’d ever touch that guy.”
“Right.” She smirked and tugged at my shirt. “You might want to use this to mop the drool you’re now standing in.”
I elbowed her off. “I’m not an idiot. Besides, I’m pretty sure he wants to murder me.” I peeked at him again to find those eerie eyes still glued to me. His nostrils flared wildly as he dragged his fingers through hair so dark it held blue tinge. The sides were clipped close to his head while the top fell in his sharp face.
“You might be right,” Kimber said, linking her arm through mine and dragging me toward the food line. “Just keep a good distance from Viktor Hale.”
Ah, shit.
“Viktor Hale?” His name tumbled from my numb lips.
“The unseelie prince practically runs Wayward Fae Pen.” She leaned her head toward my ear to whisper. “A few years ago, he snapped and killed his parents, King Rowan and Queen Kezia. There was no rhyme or reason behind it.”
“Oh, really?” All the moisture had evaporated from my mouth until it was drier than the Sahara.
“Some say he went crazy because both the king and queen came from long lines of royal unseelies, and all that power in Viktor warped his mind.”
My neck twisted as I studied my target. He finally turned away, but the tension in his shoulders told me he knew my gaze had found him again. How was I supposed to get close to this guy, let alone kill him?
Chances were, he’d kill me first.
Chapter 6
Kimber kept her arm linked through mine as we walked down a narrow corridor. I was a loner and didn’t care for others touching me, but the succubus seemed to know all the ins and outs of the prison. She might prove useful. Her company was a small price to pay to get closer to my goal. And I’d need help now that I’d seen the unseelie prince in all his terrifying, unstable glory. “Shouldn’t we be escorted everywhere by guards?”
“Honor system, remember? Wayward Fae Pen is a minimum-security prison. If you’re ever arrested, this is the place you want to go.” She flicked the goblin cuff on my wrist and winked. “The real dangerous creatures have these.”
“Yeah, but what about everyone else?” I hoped the unseelie prince had one. He had to be a high-risk inmate for killing the former king and queen. “What’s stopping them from rioting?”
“If we did that, we wouldn’t be awarded all this freedom.” She turned a corner, waving at a female guard leaning against the wall. Colorful swirling tattoos traced the edges of her face, but they did nothing to soften the sharpness of the guard’s slanted eyes as she watched me pass. “Warden Balfour is cool, but piss him off, and you’ll find your ass either in solitary confinement for a week or knee-deep in troll shit.”
“Troll shit?” Trolls were real?
A shiver racked her body. “Don’t ask.” Kimber pulled me through a set of double doors leading to an open common area. “This is the rec room. We get to come here for leisure time—as long as you’re good.”
Mismatched couches and tables spotted the concrete floor. No sign of Viktor Hale. Other Fae filled the space, playing games, shooting pool at the one threadbare table, watching a small television mounted to the wall, or just hanging out.
As soon as we entered, a dozen pairs of eyes landed on me. A chill wiggled down my spine from the animosity choking the air. Nearly every single person in the room either wanted to run away or throttle me.
My brows dipped. This reaction couldn’t simply be because I was new.
“There’s Barlow.” Ignoring the hate being tossed my way, Kimber towed me to a stocky guy perched on the arm of a couch. “Hey, B. This is my new cellie, Sloane.”
Green tufts of hair curled away from his face, and a wide smile pulled at the edges of his lips. “The talk of Wayward Fae Pen. Put her there, doll.” He thrust his fist at me to pound. The light Irish accent made me think of Lucky Charms.
He was kind of magically delicious.
I tapped his fist. “Call me doll again, and I’ll hang you from the rafters and turn you into an Irish piñata.”
Barlow whistled and shook his hand as if I burned him. “She’s a feisty one. I like you already.” He jiggled a small rectangular wooden box. “Care for a J?”
“A joint?” Surely you couldn’t smoke weed in here.
A throaty chuckle rumbled out of his mouth. “She’s freaking adorable, Kimber. You lucked out this time.”
I crossed my arms against my chest. “Not too keen on being called adorable either.”
Kimber elbowed him. “Stop pissing off my new friend, or she’ll leave me for someone else.”
Doubtful. No one else wanted me around.
Barlow lifted his free hand. “My apologies, Sloane.” He pushed the box at me. “Not a joint. It’s a juniper stick.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Kimber grabbed a vibrant green stick about three inches long from the box Barlow held and lit the end with a lighter from the table. A faint pink mist plumed out of her mouth.
“Are they cigarettes?”
“Those filthy tobacco smokes? Not even close.” Barlow took one, lighting it. “These taste like candy, and they don’t destroy your lungs.” He flashed a set of pearly whites. “Or your teeth.” The cloud of smoke swirling out of his mouth smelled like pine. “They’re magic.”
“No, thanks.” I wasn’t going to smoke some magic Fae shit. Revnick had already sprayed me with pixie dust in the car. I didn’t trust it. “What kind of Fae are you, Barlow?” I dropped into the cushion at the other end of the couch.
He took another pull of the juniper stick. “I’m a leprechaun.”
I nearly choked on my own spit. “Shouldn’t you be a lot smaller? And where’s your pot of gold?”
Barlow’s eyes began to glow an electric green, the pupils shrinking to tiny pinpoints.
“Ixnay on the oldgay,” Kimber muttered.
“I miss me gold.” Barlow licked his lips as he scanned the rec room. “There must be some—”
Kimber smacked him across the face. “Snap out of it, B.”
Barlow shook his head until his gaze cleared. “Thanks, my little sex kitten.” He turned to me, shooting a wry smile. “Never mention that to a leprechaun, especially one like me.”
Kimber folded onto the couch between us. “Barlow has a bit of an addiction to the stuff. He’s here because he held up a couple jewelry stores.”
“Duly noted.” Were leprechauns light or dark Fae? I glanced at Barlow from beneath my lashes. Definitely dark.
“I thought I smelled a foul stench, succubus.” A girl sauntered by, long violet hair cascading around her shoulders. Her lips twisted into a snarl.
Kimber flashed a bright smile. “You must be smelling yourself, Tiana. Or maybe Faolan peed on you to mark his territory.”
Black suddenly eclipsed the girl’s green irises as she flipped Kimber off. “Bite me.”
“You’d like that.” Kimber blew Tiana a kiss.
The other girl scoffed before she turned to me. “I can’t believe they let something like you in here. You would have been better off at Morghead Penitentiary with the real psychos.”
“The only psycho I see is you,” I snapped. What was this chick’s problem? She’d never even met me.
“You won’t last a week here.” She flashed one more sneer before marching away.
“What’s the deal with the daemons lately?” Barlow left the arm of the couch and plopped down on the cushion next to Kimber, his solid frame jostling us.
“That was a daemon?” I expected horns or at least claws.
“Don’t let Tiana’s good looks fool you.” His gaze followed her across the room to a group of intimidating Fae where all the males sported large frames roped with muscles. Most of the females weren’t much smaller. They could easily kill someone with their bare hands. “She’s turned into a real heathen.”
“We used to be best friends.” Kimber stabbed her juniper stick into a glass gob
let where it fizzled into a puff of smoke and disappeared, leaving nothing behind. “A few months ago, most of the daemons started hanging with shifters.”
“And that’s unusual?” Wait a minute. Shifters?
“Oh, yeah.” Barlow reached forward, grabbing a pad off the chipped coffee table in front of us. He flipped it open and pulled a pen from his mop of green hair.
Where the hell had that come from?
“The Fae are divided into light and dark. At the top, you’ve got seelies on light and unseelies on dark.” He drew a line down the page and began writing types of Fae. “Directly below the unseelies, daemons are the second most powerful. Below seelies, elves are the second most powerful on light and then fairies. Pixies are below them and then nymphs.”
“Succubi and incubi are below daemons.” Kimber smiled proudly and motioned for him to include her species.
Barlow sighed dramatically but did it regardless. “And then way down here on the dark are shifters.” He jotted them near the bottom of the page. “They don’t have any magical powers except changing into animal form. It makes for some lethal fighters, but…” He shrugged.
I was sensing a lot of snobbery existed around Fae.
“Daemons and unseelies are usually thick as thieves. Really good ones.” Barlow chewed on the end of the pen with a pensive expression. “But a few months ago, the daemons in Wayward Fae Pen began chilling with the shifters. They started backing them and taking their side in everything.” Barlow didn’t elaborate on what everything was, but I had a feeling a complicated world existed in this prison. “And Vik, well, he’s not too happy about that.”
The name had my head snapping up. “Vik?”
Kimber scoffed. “The guy you were drooling over in the cafeteria.”
My nose crinkled. “I was not drooling over him. I wanted to know why he was trying to murder me with his eyes.”
Barlow snorted. “He does that a lot. Don’t take it personally.”
How could it be personal when the guy had never met me?
“Viktor pretty much runs the prison.” He gave a shrug and drew a crown over the word unseelie on the list. “He’s only seventeen, but he’s the freakin’ unseelie prince. He’d be the king if he wasn’t stuck in here.”
My head spun. The brooding, terrifying guy I encountered in the cafeteria was a teenager? Isadora said her brother had been a minor at the time of the murders, but she never told me when it happened. Somehow, I expected someone much older.
I shook the chills from my shoulders and returned to the conversation. I needed as much information as I could get. “Viktor doesn’t like shifters?”
Barlow wiggled his hand in the air from side to side. “Not all of them. He can’t stand the dochars, especially their alpha here, Faolan. He took charge of all the shifters once the daemons sided with them.”
“What are dochars?” I asked as Barlow wrote more information on the diagram. The leprechaun turned out to be pretty helpful.
“You have your regular shifters that can walk around Earth in animal form, like wolves, bears, foxes, deer, and panthers. Then you have ones like dochars.” Kimber pulled another lollipop from her pocket. How did it fit inside of those tight pants? “They’re probably the most dangerous. They shift into something that’s a cross between a panther and a dragon.”
“D-Did you say dragon?” My voice rose a couple of octaves as giant, fire-breathing monsters with black fur and whiskers came to mind.
“Relax, dol—uh—Sloane.” Barlow quickly corrected himself. “They’re the size of a panther and have very cat-like movements, but their bodies are covered in black and red scales. They have more of a dragon-like head. No fire-breathing.”
“They do have some nasty claws,” Kimber added.
At least these dochars couldn’t burn me alive or eat me whole. I examined the diagram as Barlow and Kimber added more Fae. Brownies and sprites landed under the light side. Gnomes, trolls, and leprechauns were added to the dark.
“Now that you’re exposed to all of us and have your magic, you should begin to sense what other Fae are,” Kimber said.
I ran down the types of Fae on the paper. “Where am I on this list?”
“That’s a difficult question. Not easy to pinpoint.” A rough voice had my head lifting, meeting a pair of eyes the color of a setting sun. “Seelie-daes would go somewhere around here.” The guy leaned over, dragging his finger between daemons and seelies.
“What does that even mean?” I glanced at Kimber and Barlow, but their gazes were cast on the ground.
“It means you’re an unnatural combination of seelie and daemon, a seelie-dae.” A cruel smirk twisted the guy’s lips. “The union is cursed and usually results in a faeling, a creature practically human with no magic. The powerful light and dark cancel each other out. But every now and again, you get a thing like you.” He motioned his large hand around the room at all the seething glares. “That’s why everyone is giving you the stare down. They can sense your strange mix of light and dark.” He jerked his chin to my face. “The eyes are a dead giveaway. Violet from the seelie and a ring of emerald from the daemon.”
Heat crawled up my neck and into my cheeks. The Fae queen hadn’t exactly been honest with me. She left out a big detail—that I was apparently a Fae mutt. “Light and dark don’t mix?”
“Oh, they mix.” The guy came around the other side of the table to sit right in front of me, his knees brushing mine. He towered over my body even from his lowered position. “The offspring of any other combination of light and dark end up being either one, not both like you.”
Did my parents toss me out on the street when I was a baby because I was a mutant freak?
“A lot of people here don’t like your presence,” the guy continued, that terrifying smile remaining in place. He dragged his hand through locks of black and deep red. My hair was like a flame while his was like fresh blood. “I could keep you safe, though.” He studied my body as he licked his lips. “I could protect you, if you wanted to make a deal.” His fingers reached out, brushing over my collarbone.
I’d been posed with many a deal like this at group homes and foster houses. I never took them because I knew the price. And I sure as hell wasn’t willing to pay it.
A rush of anger filled my belly and I shot to my feet, slapping his hand away. “Touch me again, and maybe you’ll find out how I ended up here.”
Barlow cursed and Kimber let out a squeak.
“Faolan is not the kind of guy to threaten, cellie,” she mumbled through a tight smile.
Just perfect. I had to get on the alpha shifter’s bad side my first day at the prison. He could turn into some panther-dragon monster and rip my face off. “I don’t give a damn who he is.” My body stiffened in anticipation of an attack.
The other inmates stared in our direction with unhinged jaws and pale faces as tension pulsated through the room.
“Well, look at the little girl getting all puffed up.” A rugged guy sauntered over, his smile downright feral.
I could tell he was a shifter without even sensing it. He moved like a wild animal on the prowl. Several scars cut into his harsh face only making the thick muscles bunching under his clothes and the tattoos inking his shaved head all the more intimidating.
“I’m assuming you don’t need the help of your beta.” He was talking to Faolan, but his pair of unfathomable obsidian orbs never left mine. It was like staring into two bottomless pits.
“Nah, Henrick.” Faolan stood slowly, hard muscles flexing around his thick body. “I like a challenge.” A growl snaked between his teeth as his pupils elongated into diamonds.
Air siphoned from my lungs. The sharp, cold claws of fear slid down my spine. These creatures were not human no matter how much they appeared to be. Faolan could end my life, and I had no way of fighting back. A punch from me wouldn’t do much, and the goblin cuff kept my powers at bay. I might as well have been a lamb led to slaughter, waiting on the lion—or, in this case, a
dochar—to tear my throat out.
Still, I wouldn’t shrink back. I hadn’t even flinched. On the outside, I was as cool as a cumber. My insides were another story.
A savage smile stretched Faolon’s mouth unnaturally wide. He licked his lips. “Challenge accepted, seelie-dae.” He pivoted and marched away, Henrick following in his wake.
Son. Of. A. Bitch. I was definitely at the top of his shit list now.
My lungs filled with air just as a pair of glacier eyes raked over me. Viktor Hale stood at a table, his tattooed arms crossed over his broad chest. He still looked like he wanted to kill me, but something else swam under that icy exterior. Surprise maybe.
How long had he been there? He clearly saw me stand up to Faolan. Having a common enemy could be my way in. People bonded over that kind of thing all the time.
“You really know how to make a first impression, don’t you, Sloane?” A nervous laugh tumbled out of Barlow as he stood and shoved a juniper stick behind his ear. “I’m not sure if I should be scared for you or just scared of you.”
Kimber lifted off the couch and grabbed the stick from behind his ear. “Piece of advice, girlie, don’t make any more enemies.”
“I’ll try.” I’d probably fail. “Why aren’t you guys treating me like a leper?”
“I don’t discriminate simply on race or sex. Besides, you smell like a good time.” Kimber winked.
“Kimmie, you only have sex on the brain.” Barlow chuckled and then tapped his chest. “I’m a leprechaun. I get shit from some of these elitist seelie and unseelie pricks, so I know how it is.”
My attention swiveled across the room again, finding Viktor now sitting at the table playing cards. Would the prince treat me like a freak and toss me aside like most of the inmates here?
I choked back the nerves knowing I had to try for Jilly. “I’ll be back.”
Kimber cursed as I walked away. “That girl is playing with fire.”
Good thing fire was my power. If only I could access it—and control it.