The urge to punt the little fae ferret made me clench my fists at my sides.
“Seelie…Court?” The leshy tilted his head curiously.
“Seelie? Seelie?” Echoes darted around the garden from the pixies now fluttering in the air. “Seelie!”
Their excitement tasted like sugar. It filled the air and coated my tongue. They drifted up, their wings humming and flickering with brilliant color, like rainbow-dipped fireflies. The pixies had no sense of personal space. They touched down on my shoulders, in my hair, and on my purse.
One touched my cheek with her tiny little hands. “We have to hide. The Unseelie like to snatch us up and eat us like little snacks.”
“That’s why we ran when you came over,” another said.
Their weight tugged at my hair like how their words tugged at my heart. I bit my lower lip and thought of the letter in my purse. Freedom was a few carefully chosen words away. I was this close to getting what I wanted, but these pixies threatened to shatter my rose-colored glasses.
“The Unseelie…eat you?” I asked, my voice cracking nervously.
“We lost Nixie and Pike this week alone,” the one on my purse said.
I covered my mouth with my hand. Looking to the leshy, I found him studying me. There was a wry, disappointed twist to his lips. His eyes were dark, perhaps hiding his doubt. He must have been thinkinghow could this little blonde girl be a princess?
But they’d been cursed to forge their own court. They couldn’t remember a time when things were safe.
My heart clenched. Neither could I, really. No point of my life had ever been safe. Alvin had been a dark figure with an aura of violence. Sometimes, I wondered if I survived only because he’d been distracted by Ness’s prophecy. Otherwise, he would have let me loose in the woods and hunted me like he’d done to those human girls.
I backpedaled. I had to get out of here. My world was crumbling again. If I didn’t run, the ground would fall out from under my feet, and I would plummet into the hard truth. I didn’t have it in me to face it yet. When I spun, I crashed into the fence and nearly tumbled over it. I had just enough coordination to clumsily throw myself over it again.
The pixies held onto me while I ran down the road. One by one, they fell off. They fluttered behind me. Their confused voices filled the air. They cried out for me to come back, but I couldn’t. Not right now.
Instead, I slammed into the deli door and crashed through into the shop. The smell of bread and sliced meat comforted me while the dust of the shelves tickled my nose. A man behind the counter looked up.
His glamour, an illusion wrapped around him to hide his appearance, rippled and disappeared to reveal Beryl’s right-hand man. He cocked his head and looked me up and down before his attention flicked to someone else.
I recognized her white hair before she even had time to turn around.
A curse slipped out of my mouth. I lurched towards the exit. She moved at the same time and slid between me and the door. Heart in my throat, I spun and lurched right into a shelf full of chip bags.
The man behind the counter sighed, mumbled something, and time stopped. My feet lifted from the floor. Weightless, I twisted and drifted through the air. No matter how I moved, I couldn’t get my feet back on the floor. I couldn’t even swim through the air.
Behind me, the assassin woman also struggled in the air. She flailed rather ungracefully with a scowl on her face. Her dark eyes flicked to the man behind the counter. He grinned in response.
I understood why Beryl had taken him as her second in command. He wasn’t the most loyal of subjects, but he was powerful. He’d stopped a fight from breaking out in his shop with barely more than one word. At least, that’s what I thought he did.
“Let’s not destroy my boss’s place. All right?” he said as he wiped his hands on his apron and tugged it over his head.
When he stepped out from behind the deli counter, his outfit changed. He wore a sleek blue-silver suit made of silk. Tiny fae details were embroidered around the cuff and along the lapels. He twisted his head from side to side, cracking his neck almost menacingly.
His gaze settled on the assassin woman. Her lips curled in a snarl. She was almost feral in the way she moved. Once he let her go, she would attack. Even I could tell that much.
I slid my hand into my purse and gripped a tiny bottle hidden in a pocket. I’d learned a long time ago to never go anywhere without emergency potions. This one would create a big gas cloud. It would make everyone else in it cough just enough to buy me time to slip out unnoticed.
This fae man could deal with the assassin on his own.
Though, I wasn’t sure why he’d stopped her. Beryl paid this assassin to kill me. Since he was Beryl’s second in command, he could get in big trouble for openly disobeying her like this. The man really had little regard for his life.
But as he moved, I noticed the way the light rippled over his suit. The silk seemed to shift. It moved from a dusky silver to a bloom of lavender then on to pink and finally daylight blue. Gold shimmered across his shoulders.
My feet touched the ground. I pulled the potion from my purse and raised my arm to throw it. The man appeared behind me and snatched my wrist to keep me from throwing the potion.
“Princess,” he warned.