Chapter One
Endymion
“It’s pointless. You raised me human, I should just be able to live human. I’ll forget about the wings and the veil and the…” Bain and Zephyr and their trophy-winning hotness. “I’ll just forget all of it. I even applied to the community college and spoke to the financial aid person.”
I thought my mother had lost a significant amount of hair around her temples in the two weeks I’d been home. Every conversation, whether it be about pancakes or my studies or whether or not the sunshine was coming in through the window, eventually weaved into an argument about Sciathain Academy.
It hovered over us like a rain cloud that dumped buckets of disappointment and frustration on us in random intervals.
“You can apply all you want to, Endymion.” Ouch, full first name from my dad. “But you can’t just give up on who you are because of not even three months of summer classes. That’s like giving up on Christmas because you tripped over a candy cane in late November.”
That shut me up, not because it was a good argument, but it made me laugh. All three of us had been picking at our dinner of salad and pumpkin soup until then, when my mom broke the ice with her candy-cane bullshit.
My mom often got frazzled with arguments. That’s why this was the longest standing one in our family.
“What?” I shout-laughed, and my dad waved his hands in front of him, laughing so hard he could barely breathe.
“I don’t know. You know how much I hate arguing and here we are—we’ve spent the last two weeks back and forth and I just hate it. I don’t even know where I came up with candy canes, but you get my point.”
I leaned back in my chair and let my head roll back. “Guys, I can’t even get my wings out. The crone tried—Titania tried—they’re just not working. What kind of fairy doesn’t have wings that work?”
Flashes of Bain and Zephyr popped into my head like tiny bubbles. They had been doing that since the moment I left the school. They stuck with me, seeped into my veins.
If I couldn’t make my wings come out, then I wasn’t a fairy, was I? And if I wasn’t a fairy, then there was a chance neither of them would want anything to do with a girl who had no wings.
My mom reached across the table and patted my hand while my dad sobered. She looked to him and he cleared his throat.
“Endy, you need to cut yourself some slack. Your wings will come. You are a fairy, even if your wings never decide to come out.” I blew out a breath. Not what I wanted to hear. “But just to make you feel better, you come from a people with magnificent wings. Very powerful fairies who could fly and conjure anything this side of the veil. It will come. You’ve only just known that you were a fairy for less than six months. Give them a chance.”
I was grasping at straws not to go back on paper, but inside, I wanted to go back. I wanted to face my demons and see if that power, that possibility was really inside me or if it was just an ever-unrealized dream.
“I guess after dinner, I’ll go pack my bags.”
My mom scoffed and nearly knocked her pumpkin soup over. “Endymion, you haven’t packed yet?”
I chuckled and so did my dad. “I really didn’t want to go back.”
“Well, we fairies don’t give up like humans. I won’t hear another word about it.”
Sciathain Academy, here I come...again.
Chapter Two
The first day of school already had me tangled up in knots. Even though the summer had provided a good introduction to some rudimentary things fairy-concerned.
Titania apparently thought that little summer session had prepared me for the deep waters. My classes were all about fairy spells and wing manipulation. Defense classes weren’t me using my bow on a hay bale anymore, it was hand-to-hand combat and the promise of bruises and muscle aches were set in stone.
Strolling through the stacks of the fairy library was like walking through a fashion show of sorts. Books wasn’t an adequate description; they were works of art, especially the more modern ones. The older books had their own tales to tell with their spines decked out in rich leathers and suedes, the titles embossed in gold and glimmering silver.
But the newer covers shimmered, glittered, and caught the rays of the sun like a kaleidoscope.
All I was looking for was something to the tune of being a fairy for dummies. There had to be something like that here.
“Come on, Adair. I know how you like to fuck in public.”
A voice that I barely recognized filtered through the books, seeping through the cracks between the tops of the books and the shelves. Her voice was made of plush oil and sex. She could’ve been an operator for a fairy-phone-sex service and cash in hard.
I swallowed against the growing boulder in my throat. For some reason, the scene, or what I imagined the scene was, anchored me in place. I had to hear it, no matter how much my brain argued against it.