“I’d never traveled until the evacuation,” I admitted. “If not for that, I probably would have died in the town we were born in.”
“We?”
“Wayne and me.”
“Wow. So high school sweethearts?”
“Yeah. We got married right after graduation. And after that, there was always some reason not to leave,” I said.
“That’s a shame. There was so much world to see. Not so much, now.”
In all honesty, traveling had never interested me. We’d been so busy working and saving so we could fix up our house. If there had been any idle time, I’d spent it on researching items to create a perfect nursery. So many hours wasted.
I closed the door on that bitter thought even as my fingers twitched on the bag of baby clothes. If I had any hope of having children of my own, I would have left these in the basement regardless of how much food I might be able to trade for them. While I put a very high value on the clothes due to what they represented, I knew not everyone saw them in the same light, which meant I would need to take what I could for them and let them go to someone who might someday have a use for them.
“So which of the fey should I talk to about trading?” I asked.
She glanced at Solin. “Do you know?”
“Who wishes to exchange food for baby clothes?” Solin asked.
It’d been a conversational tone, not a yell. So I was completely unprepared for the number of fey who swarmed from everywhere like cockroaches in a kitchen as soon as the lights are turned off.
I stumbled back a step, crashing into one of them.
His grey fingers curled around my upper arms. Heart jackrabbiting in my chest, I tilted my head to look back at my captor and met the unblinking gaze of the fey who’d carried me.
His vertical pupils narrowed. My grandparents had a cat with eyes that did the same thing just before it pounced on its prey.
My throat closed, and my vision tunneled, a sure tell that I was going down.
Oblivion cushioned my fall.