The Summer Prince (Delaney’s Seasonal Fae Courts #2)

Chapter 1

How the hell had we gotten so far off the path?

I was no field guide to the Porcupine Mountains of Upper Michigan, but didn’t everyone know not to leave the trail behind?

I’d followed after Milo when he’d suddenly had Bridge wandering after him, but so that I could bring us back to where we were supposed to be.

Not to keep going until we were all lost.

It was a nice view down into a valley at least.

“I blame you.” Bridge pointed a finger at Milo, who groaned and flapped his arms like a bird for some reason.

“You followed him,” I said to Bridge because Milo hadn’t blazed that trail alone.

“And you followed me.”

I opened my mouth to say why, but here came Zalman.

“And I followed you.” Zalman went and tweaked my goddamned nipple. I flinched and growled at the little shit because he knew I was sensitive there. Why did he always have to fuck with me?

“Alright!” Milo hollered, snatching my attention away from revenge. “You’re hungry, tired, and cranky. I get it. Me, too. So how about we look for a place to sit down, have a snack, and enjoy where we are for a while?”

“Okay, Sergeant Milo.” I rolled my eyes at him.

Milo did everything except salute. “That’s Captain Milo, thank you very much.”

I sighed, grinned, and shook my head. These dorks. I loved them all like brothers, but someday, I swore, they were going to get me in serious trouble.

“Drink your water.” Bridge gave me a glare, and I made a show out of unhooking my water bottle from my backpack. I presented it to him like a fine wine, but he was already staring down Milo. I took a drink, noting that I had probably half a bottle left.

“Huh,” Zalman said, “this looks suspiciously like a fairy ring.”

I saw Bridge get his phone out—no doubt to take more photos—as Milo headed over to the ring of dark gray vesicular basalt that had delicate little purple and white flowers growing in the spaces between the rocks.

I frowned at the flowers because they looked like rue-anemone but we should be months too late for them to still be blooming here. And weren’t they usually pink?

Milo chuckled. “I wish.”

I was looking at Milo stepping over one of the pitted rocks like he was going to go into the circle of them. I saw everything, but I couldn’t figure out what I’d seen. He’d tripped. He’d started to fall.

He’d disappeared.

Bridge rushed forward, and that got me moving. Maybe he’d seen where Milo had gone. We were close to the edge of an outcropping but not that close. Except, Milo had tripped.

“No!” Zalman hollered and lunged to try and stop Bridge.

The second Bridge stepped into the circle, he vanished, too.

Milo disappeared. Bridge disappeared. I stood there on the side of a mountain staring at a ring of rocks and flowers and took a step back. “What the fuck?” I said and realized I couldn’t quite catch my breath. I took another step away.

“No,” Zalman said again and grabbed my arm, stopping my retreat. “We have to go after them.”

“After them? After them where?” I shot an arm out at the empty place where our friends should’ve been.

“It really is a fairy ring and—”

“Jesus, Zal…” I tried to pry his fingers off my arm, but he gripped harder.

“No, listen to me! You saw them vanish. Don’t you dare pretend you didn’t.”

“I’m not pretending anything. I literally have no idea what just—”

“So why can’t the answer be a fairy ring?”

I blinked at him. He was losing it. “Because there’s no such thing as fairies.”

“And people can’t do what our friends just did.” He let go of me and squared up to the rocks. “Reality is broken, my man, and we just watched it happen.”

In a weird way, he was kind of right. Something was wildly wrong up here. There was no denying that the second both of my friends stepped over those rocks they were no longer present.

“Come on.” Zalman held out his hand to me.

I shook my head. “I can’t just—”

“Yes, you can.” He waved his hand impatiently. “Wallace Michael Frustration Crowne, we are going into that fairy ring to help our brothers.”

I gulped, heart pounding and breath coming too fast. I nodded, knowing he was right. Whatever the fuck this was, we couldn’t let them go through it alone. We’d made a pact at twelve years old to always be there for whoever needed us. This was one of those moments.

“Fucking fuck,” Zalman said as he grabbed my hand and pulled.

I stumbled and in trying to regain my footing, I went headfirst into the ring. It was like being sucked under by a riptide, and then Zalman’s hand was torn away from me. I felt his fingernails scrape my wrist before he was gone.

And suddenly, I was falling through the sky, face up and staring at the sun. The wind was whistling in my ears, and I knew right then that I was about to die.

Without warning, I hit something and tumbled end over end.

No, not something, someone. A man with pale skin, long golden hair, and huge blue eyes.

I clung to him as I realized he had large butterfly-looking wings on his back.

That wasn’t a parachute, but maybe they would stop us from crashing to the ground?

Well, they might’ve slowed us down, but we still hit. Hard.

I landed on top of him, my face smashing into his groin, and his into mine. He yelled and kicked out with both feet. I rolled off him, cupping myself and gasping for breath as pain radiated out from my balls and my nose. Through the tears in my eyes, I could see him doing about the same.

At least we weren’t dead, right?

The pain was lessening, and now I realized I had blood in my mouth.

I spat onto the grass and found a cut on the inside of my upper lip.

Considering he’d just gagged like he was trying not to throw up, I might’ve hit his nuts with my face harder than my groin hit his face.

My knees were definitely protesting, like they’d taken the brunt of my landing.

Had I seriously fallen from the sky in a sixty-nine position with some ill-equipped skydiver?

But now I had to look around and wonder where the hell I was and how I’d been up in the air like that. Because I was kneeling in a summer-baked field of dry grass without a single goddamned pine tree or mountain anywhere.

I’d gone into that ring of stones and fallen from the sky? I looked up. Just poof! and I was involuntarily skydiving? Had that fucking fairy ring tried to kill me?

And where the hell was Zalman? I looked down at my wrist and saw fresh scratches.

“What the fuck?” the dude I’d landed on screamed.

“Same, dude. Same.”

“What?”

“What what?”

I glanced over at him with confusion only to recoil a bit at the look of impending homicide on his face.

He was literally turning red. But then I saw that he had blond hair like Bowie in Labyrinth but that couldn’t hide his pointed ears.

Or the wings. Well, wing and a half. The one of his left looked broken.

“I think your wing’s broken there,” I said and pointed as I sat back on my heels.

He looked over his shoulder before letting loose a freakishly high-pitched scream. The wings fluttered fast like a hummingbird’s for a moment before they stopped. He leaned to the side and gagged again.

Pointy ears and wings.

I’d landed on a fucking fairy.

Smacking a hand on the brittle grass as a wave of vertigo hit me, I closed my eyes and tried to take deep breaths.

I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t hurt. Er, not hurt badly.

I wasn’t alone. Granted the company could’ve been less hostile, but I understood why he wasn’t happy with me.

I opened my eyes to see him looking like he was doing some deep-breathing, too.

If that had been a fairy ring and this was a fairy, maybe he knew how to send me back. I just had to make nice.

“Hey,” I said gently, “I’ve got a first aid kit in my pack. How about we get your wing stabilized so it can start to heal properly, hmm?”

Blue eyes stared at me as he gulped convulsively for a few seconds. Maybe his wing hurt more than getting smacked in the face and the balls did. I felt bad for landing on him.

I took my backpack off as I edged closer to him. “I’m really sorry about making you crash. No wings,” I said, hooking a thumb at my back, “so I don’t know what I was doing falling from the sky.”

He nodded as he looked up. “How were you up there?”

“I think it was a fairy ring.”

“But those are all closed.”

“Are they?” If I could keep him talking, maybe he’d stay calm through what came next.

He nodded slowly. “The curse cut us off completely.”

I took the first aid kit out of my pack and found the slim rods for temporarily setting a bone. “There’s a curse on this place?”

“Yes. Barriers all around us.” He eyed the rods. “What are those?”

A curse with barriers? Maybe he’d hit his head. I focused on answering his question. “Well, I assume—and tell me if I’m wrong—that we should get your wing standing back up and brace it so it stays that way.”

He made a sound like a man resisting the urge to puke.

“You need to hurl, just aim that way.” I pointed away from me.

He sucked in a few breaths, in through his nose and out his mouth, so I figured he was trying to stay calm.

I tucked the rods between my fingers and twirled another finger around it all. “Ordinarily, I’d tape it up like this for a broken arm or sprained ankle, right? But since we can’t do that with your wing, what do you think about taping the rods to either side of the wing? Think that’ll work?”

“I don’t know what tape is,” he said a little breathlessly.

“Oh. Well, okay, it’s this.” I set the rods down and got the tape out. It was medical grade stuff, so easy to tear and pretty sticky. I tore off a piece to let him examine it.

He tested the stickiness and gave a nod. “There’s a dust coating my wings, so um, maybe wipe that off first?”

I smiled, glad he was calm and participating. “Sure. I’ve got some wipes in here that should do the trick just fine.”

They were alcohol wipes, so I moved around behind him to check for a break in…

the skin? I didn’t know what fairy wings consisted of, but I could see that the stiff thing that had broken was encased in something skin-like that hadn’t broken.

The wipe wouldn’t aggravate an open wound, then, but I still had to straighten up his wing to wipe it down.

I took a deep breath and told him, “I have to straighten your wing to wipe it off and then attach the rods. You do whatever you need to when it hurts, but try not to move. Okay?”

He nodded. “This isn’t my first broken wing. It’s usually a wavy break,” he said while his hand made a surfing the waves motion. “If you can notch it back together in the right place, that will provide some stability.” He sounded breathless and definitely like he knew this was going to be bad.

“Okay! Okay, that’s great.” I gave his shoulder on the opposite side of the broken wing a squeeze in both appreciation and support. “I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“Go.”

I did, straightening the broken part upward.

He gave a little scream, but didn’t move.

I felt along the break as I tried to position it and could actually feel that I needed to turn it a tiny bit.

Trying to ignore the fact that this was torturing him, I fitted the two pieces together and found that it did stay upright.

It looked like a good breeze would knock it over again, but it let me use both hands to open one of the wipes.

“You’re doing great,” I encouraged.

“The fuck I am.”

I bit my bottom lip so I wouldn’t laugh and carried on wiping the multi-colored dust from a few inches of his wing on both sides.

It was like a super fine powder in yellow, green, and blue that clung to the tiniest little feathers I’d ever seen.

For a moment, I wished I knew more about butterfly wings.

But once I was done wiping, they were ready for the rods and tape.

“I’m going to hold a rod against it now,” I warned him.

He nodded, his head down. I saw a shiver go through him.

I pressed a rod to one side with a couple fingers and used the rest to help tear off strips of tape.

I went for speed and taped it down in a few spots before getting the other rod in place.

A few more strips on that one, and then I taped the rods to each other.

It looked a little rickety, so I added more tape. He hadn’t made a sound the whole time.

“Okay, I think we’re done,” I said. “How’re you doing?”

When he didn’t say anything, I scooted around to find that he’d passed out at some point. I winced in sympathy and braced a hand on his shoulder so he wouldn’t fall over and make all of this so much worse.