This is too, too weird.
I mean, hell. I didn’t know what to do when she was crying. Patting her on the back seemed a little awkward, and pretending that she shouldn’t be upset was just cold. I had an urge to apologize, but since I didn’t know why I should be apologizing or even how to say that I was sorry, I got up and acted as if I didn’t notice her sobs.
I don’t blame her. I’d be crying, too, if I woke up one morning and discovered I’d lost twenty years of my life in the blink of an eye.
Even now that she’s sitting cross-legged at her mate’s side, absently patting his hair as she silently watches me move around, I refuse to turn around.
Nine is standing where I put him a few feet away from us. I glance at him, wondering why Melisandre’s magic held through the portal when it came to him but not the other two. Could it be because the spell was fresh? I don’t know, and I’d give every damn thing I have to know the answer to that so I could bring him back to me.
Not that I have much. I’ve got the clothes on my back, a pair of strangers that I suddenly feel like I’m responsible for, and that’s about it. I don’t even have the nail on a length of string that was my only protection against the fae. When the Fae Queen threatened my head for bringing the small piece of iron with me into Faerie, I had to remove it before she called on one of her Light Fae guards to do it for her.
I tiptoe around the disaster of a room.
I have no freaking clue where I am.
Traveling through a portal, crossing over from the human world to Faerie and back… I’ve often compared it to being in the middle of a tornado. Based on the level of destruction in this room? It’s like I brought it in here with me.
Wherever here is.
Callie’s soft, gentle voice cuts through the heavy, awkward silence.
“If I knew we were having guests, I would’ve straightened up. Then again, it didn’t look like this the last time I was here.” She exhales, a sound that could be a sigh or maybe a stifled chuckle. “Ash told me he would buy us time. I’m glad he’s alive but, man, that couch was super expensive.”
And now it’s been ripped apart.
Wait—
I couldn’t have heard her right. “What? You know that couch?”
It’s so not about the couch.
Her voice is a little scratchy, rougher than before when she says, “This is our home. ”
The our hits me dead in the chest. I rub the spot beneath my tits with the heel of my hand. “Really?”
“Me and Ash. We live here. Or… lived here, I guess. Twenty years ago.” She keeps saying it like that, disbelief mixed with sadness, and a touch of wistfulness thrown in for good measure as if thinking about all she’s missed while she was trapped by the Fae Queen. It makes me squirm every time she mentions it. “It’s still here. Ash was right.”
I glance over my shoulder at her, daring a quick peek. “I don’t get it.”
A small smile tugs on her lips. “He brought as much magic to this place as he could. When he was sure that the queen would be coming after our family, he spent more than a year putting up the wards, concealing us as best he could. Her soldiers might hunt us down, but they wouldn’t find it easy. Humans? Impossible. And now… look. It’s still here.”
It is. It also looks like someone—or a couple of someones—ransacked the place. Based on the slashes covering the poor couch, the pieces of hacked-at wood, the broken glass… they used a knife or something just as sharp to destroy it. Frustration that they came all that way only to find their prize missing?
Probably.
Slash marks…
My stomach tightens as I remember the diamond blades on the Fae Queen’s soldier’s swords.
How lovely.
“Why would they have come all the way here?”
She hesitates. I hear the hum as she searches for an answer and turn, giving her my profile. She’s nibbling on her bottom lip. Her shadowed expression is locked on my face.
Duh.
“They were looking for me.”