A House of Cloaks & Daggers (The Gift War #1)

9. Do You Get a Crown?

Chapter nine

Do You Get a Crown?

“ Y ou’re having dreams?”

“Had,” I corrected Wren, refusing to meet his gaze. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

“Aura,” my mother scolded. “Be polite to our guest.”

Snorting, I braced my elbows on the table and combed both hands through my hair. I freed a strand to curl around my finger and stared at my murky reflection in the contents of my mug. The blurry image of the girl with pink skin, red hair, and blue eyes tainted by darkness made my heart sink a little.

I was very pretty by human standards, but nothing like the High Fae, and those dark shadows around my eyes served as a cutting reminder of my own mortality. Although, a High Fae inheritance of personality traits would explain my penchant for trying to fight intoxicated men two or three times my size.

But dwelling on the confessions of my mother’s infidelity and my questionable paternity was too hard, too confronting. None of it excused the behaviour of the man who had been present on and off throughout my life. However, it did open old wounds—wounds that would flood me with guilt until I drowned or bled out.

I opted to keep my focus on the rest of it instead, though equally as damning.

“It was no accident, was it, that the caenim were following my scent?”

“No.” Wren’s tone was void of emotion. “I’ve been hunting them, and they are hunting you.”

“Were,” I amended quietly, still staring at my own reflection in the tea.

“No. Are. ” Again—such short, clipped words. “There are more of them.”

Finally, I let my eyes slide up to meet his. The gold was duller beneath the kitchen light. He looked bored.

“But you closed the portal,” I reminded him, releasing the strand of hair woven through my fingers.

Wren gave me a scornful, lopsided grin. “There are other portals, bookworm.”

I squeezed my eyes shut despite the tension headache brewing behind them. “Why would more of them come here now?”

“For you.”

“Me?” My tone was flat, but my eyes opened.

“Indeed.” His gaze drifted over my hair, my face, my chest. “That dormant magic in your veins must be rather valuable.” He squinted at me. “Though I can’t see why. We thought you were human.”

“What do you mean by we ?”

Wren clicked his tongue thoughtfully, studying a crack in the ceiling as he leaned back on his hands. “The High King of Faerie was alerted to the fact that the caenim had breached the border in pursuit of a human.” He wagged a finger at me. “Naughty. Goes against all the fine print. Breaks a lot of rules.” He waved the same hand in the air dismissively and finished with, “He sent me to deal with them.”

I sat back in my seat, hands falling into my lap. “What, so now there’s a High King of Faerie?”

He flashed his teeth at me arrogantly. “Yes. We all got together and had a meeting and decided that the High King of Faerie sounded far better than the Prime Minister of Faerie.”

“You’re so funny,” I snapped, smiling venomously despite the hollow ache in my skull.

He bowed his head to me with irreverent modesty. “The Malum have all sorts of diabolical plans, and eradicating potential complications or threats is now at the top of their agenda. Even half-bred, ignorant ones who read a lot of books,” he added, inclining his head to me again.

I ground my teeth together at the insult, anger shooting down my arms like the scrape of a hot poker, then glanced to see if my mother was hurt by the jab. I was almost dismayed to find that she was simply watching the exchange with a faint smile on her lips. It was as if she knew the High Fae’s violence, ridicule, and cruelty well and adored them anyway.

“In the worst-case scenario,” Wren went on heedlessly, “the High King might need to summon all of faeriekind to his behest. The Malum are ugly, bitter creatures, and they all smell revolting ”—he paused, pinching the bridge of his nose and making an exaggerated gagging face—“whereas the High King is the most handsome, talented, and clever person you’ve ever met. So, obviously , you’d offer your allegiance to him and fall under his protection. The Malum probably want to stop that before it has a chance to happen.”

Faerie politics made me want to throw myself into the claws of the caenim, but I kept my expression neutral as I considered the information—specifically, the threat that all of it posed to my family if absolutely any of it was true.

John had sworn, cursed, and muttered something about Malum earlier in the night after Wren mentioned a race of faeries who owned and controlled the caenim. If Wren considered them to be evil, I would spare myself the gory details. But if they are sending their beasts into the human world, hunting down anyone with faerie blood in their veins…

“It killed Jonah,” I remembered aloud. I squinted at Wren, trying to push my mother’s quietly horrified face out of my line of sight. “He wasn’t…?”

Wren shook his head. “He was a case of the wrong place, wrong time. Blasted things will eat anything that crosses their path, even on a hunt.”

I shuddered at the thought of Jonah being eaten and wished the impossibly tall caenim had gone after my father instead.

“That was a little different,” Wren murmured thoughtfully. I shot him a startled look, but he was staring at his boots, clicking his heels together. “With your mother, I think it was confused. Her scent is very similar to yours, and they’re blind.”

The blood rushed to my head. I felt dizzy, sick, and on the verge of tears.

If they come back and get confused again…

“When John told me to go, he didn’t mean…home.” My shoulders sagged as the blood rushed down, all the way to my feet, leaving me light-headed and empty.

“No. Not this home, at least.” Wren raked a hand through his hair haphazardly. “I suppose it will save me a trip now if I’ll end up needing to come back for you eventually, seeing as though you can’t take care of yourself ,” he admitted, apparently coming to the same conclusion that I was and not caring at all that it was strangling my heart. He hopped down from the machine, as silent and graceful as a cat, and strode over to the back door as if something in the darkness had caught his interest.

I turned back to my mother, lower lip trembling as I opened my mouth to utter words I was struggling to even form in my mind. Brynn stirred in her arms, turning her rosy-cheeked face towards mine, wide blue eyes sparkling with mischief.

“Aura,” she whispered, the knowledge of all that had transpired glowing on her face. Out of everything she’d been secretly listening to, she had managed to find the one potentially nice detail and run wild with it in her imagination. “Are you a fairy princess?”

At that, my mother’s mental wall crumbled. Tears streamed freely down her cheeks, though she smiled as she stroked my sister’s hair and gazed at me with love, sadness, and regret.

“I am,” I replied, my voice steady despite the thickness in my throat. I bent my head towards her conspiratorially and grinned. “And you know what? Fairies love even harder than humans do. I loved you before, but I love you even more now. Both of you.”

Brynn beamed at me, a little gasp escaping from her lips. “Do you get a crown?”

“I’m not sure,” I answered, and I felt the tears welling up in my eyes. I resisted the urge to blink, trying to balance the moisture on my lower lids. “Maybe you can make one for me.”

She nodded eagerly. “Yes!”

My mother’s hand began to shake as it continued to stroke my sister’s head, and I noticed the tears dampening her hair.

The back door flung open, and I jumped, but it was only Wren—who, for some reason, had taken it upon himself to step outside to inspect the washing line.

Not the washing line , I realised with no small amount of horror.

My washing.

“I’ll be right back,” I whispered to Brynn.

I stood up, chair legs grating against the linoleum floor, and pressed a kiss to the top of my sister’s head. Then my mother’s.

She didn’t say it, though I knew she was thinking it too. I saw it in her eyes as she watched me walk away. And I saved that look, committing it to memory for when I would need it most.

Wren was inspecting a pair of skimpy red lace panties when I stepped outside, closing the back door behind me. He didn’t look up at me as I approached, and when I snatched them out of his hands, he simply moved on to the white lace bodysuit hanging next on the line.

“Stop it,” I seethed, swatting him away as his fingers moved to unclip the pegs.

He deflected my hands with his elbow, angling his torso away from me as he held the lace up to the moonlight. “Have you made your decision?”

I have.

I saw the look on my mother’s face. I felt my heart writhe in my chest in reply.

I had made my decision, and I dreaded it with every single fibre of my being. Wren’s obsession with my underwear only lessened the blow slightly, though the heat of my embarrassment and anger had evaporated the tears in my eyes.

“I’ll go with you,” I whispered. “But you have to make them forget.”

He peered at me over one broad, muscular shoulder and elegantly arched an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

He was still holding my lingerie up to the light, so I took advantage of his distraction and reached around to swipe it out of his grip. He lowered his arms to his sides but didn’t turn his body back towards mine.

“I thought you were being snarky earlier, but I’ve seen what you can do, so I don’t want to hear any bullshit about you not being a bloodsucker or anything else. Make them forget the caenim, and the Malum, and everything that’s happened tonight.” I hesitated, feeling the increasing speed of my heart beating in my chest. “Including me.”

Finally, he turned around. “Are you quite sure?”

“Yes.” No, no, no, no. But…beasts with teeth and tongues for eyes and political faerie assassinations and portals and who knows what else . “It’s safer this way, as long as you can remove my scent from the house.”

His eyes were glowing like rays of sunlight through the dark, and they studied me with that same predatory intensity from earlier in the night. “You catch on quickly. Perhaps you are part-faerie, after all.” He sighed. “If I refuse?”

I rolled my eyes. “Then I guess I’ll just have to stay here and pine after you until the day the Malum come to claim me.”

He parted his lips, tongue skating over the edge of his top teeth as he stared into the kitchen through the glass door and considered. “I have one condition.” With preternatural speed, he snatched the white lace negligee from my hands and held it up to me. “You let me keep this.”

“That’s my mother’s,” I lied.

He gave me a crooked smile. “No, it’s not. I said that your scents are similar, not that they are the same.”

I truly was horrified, even as something heated and clenched in my lower belly and my toes curled in my boots. “You’re disgusting.” Looking away from him, I rolled my shoulders back. “Fine. Just…be nice about it.”

Wren shrugged, stuffing the lace into his pocket beneath a dagger. “I really can’t imagine why you don’t seem to think I’m nice. Wait here.”

I did as he asked, holding in the word that my mother and I had both heard coming.

Goodbye.

I turned my back on the door as he slipped through it and tried not to quaver at the enormous amount of trust I was bestowing upon such a cruel, apathetic creature.

Wren had saved my life and the life of my mother, but it was only to win my loyalty for his High King. It was dumb luck that he was tracking the caenim while they were stalking me and that he’d been ordered to eliminate them. Any glimpses of kindness he’d shown me in between insulting and degrading me had been the acts of a trickster. After all, he’d had no interest in me—or in shielding me from long-term danger—when he thought I was entirely human.

Maybe he pities me a little bit .

He had such a low opinion of humans and half-humans. Perhaps my father’s act of cowardice had stirred some deeply buried semblance of sympathy that I’d been born to him, whether by blood or name.

It didn’t matter.

Even as I glanced over my shoulder when Wren finally exited the townhouse to check that my mother and sister were still alive, the voice in my head whispered words of solace and relief. Brynn was yawning in our mother’s arms. I turned away before they rose from their seat at the kitchen table, but not before noticing that there were suddenly only two chairs.

The washing line, too, had been magically cleared of all my clothing. I knew that Wren hadn’t used his powers to fold it and put it away in my bedroom.

No, it was gone. Like it had never existed.

Like I had never existed.

“If it makes you feel any better,” Wren purred in my ear, pointing towards the gap in the fence, “there are such things as nice faeries. We call them sprites.”

“I thought sprites were supposed to be wicked and cruel,” I mumbled, trudging in the direction he urged me to walk. When I ducked my head beneath the upper beam and slipped through to the other side, I was not at all surprised to find Wren waiting there as if he’d simply walked through the wood.

“Well, they can be, I suppose,” he mused. “But I think they’d be quite taken with your sister. They’re nice to the people they like.”

I huffed a humourless laugh. “And you?”

“I’m nice to everyone.”

“Right.”

Through the waist-high grass on the slope by the river, we slipped deeper into the night, skirting around the fringe of the housing estate away from the town bridge. Crickets and frogs clicked and croaked along the water’s edge, falling silent as we passed them and then picking up their songs as we continued to walk. The moon was low in the sky, a crescent in shades of grey, white, and yellow. Stars shone brighter the further away from Belgrave’s township we went, and with Wren walking a few steps ahead of me, there was no trace of that golden light.

He was a being of shadows, darkness, and steel as he led me away from home, his hair gleaming like quicksilver beneath the moon, the weapons along his belt shifting with each long stride. I knew he had adjusted the length of his steps so I could keep up, but I had no intention of quickening my pace for him.

We must have walked for hours before I decided to say something; it was only then I noticed the stars were beginning to wink out and the sky was lightening into teal above us. Belgrave was nothing but a smear of colours and shapes on the horizon. Purple and jade rooftops, yellow brick buildings, and smudges of black, brown, and white. I turned in a circle and tried to name the field in which we were standing, to recall which Belgrave family to whom it belonged. It was so familiar.

“Where are we going?” I asked Wren at last. The first light of dawn cracked over the horizon and bathed the endless long grasses and wheat stalks in the same gold of his eyes.

“To Faerie,” he answered simply.

And even though I already knew the answer, had already made my choice, it still sent a wave of dizziness rolling over me to hear that word spoken so confidently out loud.

Wren can’t lie .

Although, perhaps he was a kook. Perhaps he had stared at the flame in Belgrave’s insignia for too long and lost his wits.

Auralie’s father was from the Court of Light, too.

The words rang out in my head as I circled back to Wren and reminded myself that he was real. That this was real. And when my eyes fell upon him again, I realised that it didn’t matter whether my mother could lie or if Wren was a raving lunatic. Because he was standing a few feet away from me, the tall stalks only passing his knees where they nearly covered my waist, waiting for me to join him.

At a wall of glass.