It was late and everyone else had gone to bed. But after taking a warm shower to calm me down and putting on my “jammy-britch” as Kaitlyn and Megan and I called our long, soft nightgowns, I found I still couldn’t sleep. I had put on my warm pink fuzzy robe and slippers and come back out into the common room, intending to make some tea or hot chocolate.
There I had found Lachlan and Bran sitting on one of the faded blue sofas in front of the fire and talking in low voices. They had both looked up and seen me at the same time. Without speaking, they had moved apart, making room for me between them.
I had taken their silent invitation to sit and then, somehow, the words came pouring out.
“I mean, those guys were talking about…about taking me away with them,” I said, feeling sick. “And who knows what they…” I swallowed, having a hard time forcing the words out. “What they would have done to me after they got me out of the diner? I mean, it’s not like Joey could have stopped them and nobody else would have either. If you two hadn’t come along when you did…”
“Hey, Emma, it’s all right,” Bran soothed. He reached out to cup my face and brushed something away from my cheek—which made me realize I was crying.
“I…I’m sorry,” I told them both, sniffing. “I’m just so…so tired of this! It used to be my dream, being noticed by guys and having everyone think I was pretty. But now it’s turned into some kind of a nightmare. I wish I could just go back to being plain old Emma who was invisible to everyone!”
“You can never go back, little one,” Lachlan said gently. “I’m sorry—but once the geas was stripped away, it took every bit of your anonymity with it. You shine—even amongst the Fae—and people cannot help noticing it.”
“Can’t you put it back somehow?” I begged him. “Can’t you make me look dull and uninteresting again?”
He shook his head.
“It’s hard to explain but since you’ve had such a powerful spell removed, another spell in the same category won’t stick to you anymore. I’m afraid I can’t hide your beauty, Emma.”
“But this is dangerous!” I protested, pointing at my face. “It could get me killed!”
“Not as long as Lachlan and I are around,” Bran growled with a menacing frown. “I would have killed both those mortals tonight just for touching you but Lachlan stopped me.”
“I thought it might be better to try magic before violence—though the two do sometimes coincide,” Lachlan said dryly.
“But that’s the thing—I don’t want to have to depend on the two of you always being around,” I said. “Not that I don’t want to have you near me—actually I do—I really, really do.” I cleared me throat, feeling my cheeks get red with the admission. “But it’s just not always going to be possible. I mean, not out in the regular world—the human world—anyway.”
The truth of what I was saying—and the awful things I had barely avoided—hit me all over again and I felt like I was going to really start crying in a minute. Not just a few tears but ugly crying, where you sob your heart out and look like crap while you’re doing it.
But I didn’t want to cry—crying wouldn’t help. What I wanted was to find a solution to this problem once and for all. Suddenly I remembered what Avery had said at lunch earlier that day.
“I want you to Mark me,” I said to Bran and Lachlan. “It’s the only way to keep all those idiots away.”
“You do?” Bran frowned. “But which of us do you want to Mark you?”
“Yes, which one?” Lachlan asked, frowning as well.
Bran looked at Lachlan.
“I don’t like to say that I was here first, but I was here first, old friend.”
“And I was the one who lifted the geas from her and paid the price of pain to do it,” Lachlan pointed out, glaring at Bran.
“You wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t have called you,” Bran growled, narrowing his eyes.
“And you would be lost if I hadn’t!” Lachlan snapped back. “You never could have removed Emma’s geas without me! You—”
“Stop!” I put a hand on each of them, gripping Lachlan’s left knee and Bran’s right. “Don’t ever fight over me,” I said in a low, intense voice I hardly recognized as my own. “The three of us need to be together—I need you both.”
At that moment, I felt…something run through me. A low, electrical tingle I’d never felt before.
Bran and Lachlan seemed to feel it too because Bran let out a low, shaky breath and Lachlan shook his head, a look of respect in his emerald eyes.
“Your power, little one,” he said hoarsely. “It is…immense.”
“I feel it too,” Bran murmured. “It is unlike any Fae power I have ever felt before.”