Chapter 14 The Fae High Lord
the fae high lord
LEXI
Nicolai slipped his fingers around mine and lifted my arm to press the back of my hand against his chest, where his heart tapped against the bird bones leading from my wrist to my fingers. He said to Magnus, “I didn’t tell her about you. There was no reason to.”
Magnus’s furtive glance at me felt a little insulting. “You thought there was no reason to tell her about us, and yet you married her?”
Us.
Not him.
Not just Magnus.
Not just Nicolai.
Us.
All of them.
“I didn’t think there would ever be a reason to tell anyone about all of us until recently.” Nicolai’s frown verged on a snarl. “Events happened that convinced me Lexi was the one.”
The One, what, exactly?
The Chosen One?
“And what was that?” Magnus demanded of him. “What was this magical event that convinced you, of all fucking people, to get married?”
Magical event?
Magnus had actually said a magical event.
I’d heard him.
Magical event.
He kept haranguing Nico. “Do you two have a kid? Did you have a child with someone who doesn’t know about what your family is like?”
“We don’t have a child,” Nicolai told him, his voice steeled. “She knows who I am. And I know exactly what it’s like to grow up in my family.” His tone was even more grim.
Magnus stared at the ground, his irritation shifting to chagrin. “Sorry. My big mouth.”
Their family? Us?
The possibilities rolled in my head.
Clementine had said that Nicolai’s ex-girlfriend was Lady Hanna-something.
Lady? As in My High Lady?
Nicolai sucked in a deep breath, his chest expanding under where he was pressing his hand against his dress shirt. “It’s all right.”
My world was spinning as fast as that weird kinetic chandelier was contorting and flailing over the crowd boiling on the dark dance floor far below.
Weird was just another word for magic. Weird women. The weirding way.
In that dragon-college book, the fairy tales were the real history.
What if all those spicy romantasy books were real lore from history disguised as fairy smut?
We’d arrived via that gray elevator that had taken forever to carry us up only eight floors.
The elevator ride had been so long that we might have traveled between realms.
The wall padding in that freight elevator had been a shimmery gray, almost silvery, almost like the color of liquid mercury.
Or quicksilver.
And now—everything.
What if all those new romantasy books published over the last few years were trying to tell us something?
Like that the fae realm was real?
Or that all the magical worlds were real?
Were these fuckers fae high lords? “Nicolai? Sidebar, please?”
“I beg your—”
I grabbed Nicolai’s arm and hauled his demi-royal butt across the room to a niche by the bathrooms that was out of earshot of his creepy friends. “You need to tell me what’s going on right now.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Magnus is too prim sometimes. He worries you’ll be shocked. Clementine and some other girls are in the group chat, if you’re worried about that. It’s not misogynistic, just colloquial. And verbose. People talk too much.”
I barreled on like my words were tumbling off a cliff. “Are you fae? Are you guys fey folk? Are all of you people actually frickin’ fairies?”
He frowned, shifting uneasily back on his heels. “That’s a rather vulgar term for queer people, don’t you think? But no, I’m not gay. I went to boarding school with these wankers, but surely that doesn’t count.”
“No! Are you fae lords and have I been sucked into—the Summer Court, I’m guessing because we’re in scorching Las Vegas in June?”
Nicolai blinked, and blinked again, and then his eyebrows furrowed hard as his lips parted. “I thought I spoke English better than this. What are you talking about?”
“Do you have wings?”
He patted his upper ribs below his armpit with his free hand. “My trainer works hard on my lats, but it’s an aesthetic thing as well as core and upper torso stability. It prevents lower back pain caused by computer hunch. Is that what you’re talking about?”
“No. That’s not what I’m talking about. And that tattoo all down your side and arm.
Is that a bonding tattoo where you bonded as a dragon rider?
Or a mark as a revolutionary against the government?
Or is it a magical seal that correlates to your powers or your position in a court, or when you made a vow to someone?
It kind of looks like wings and the head of a bird with a beak. Is it a griffin?”
“My tattoo is meant to be abstract, but it’s a rather ill-advised double-headed eagle. One head is on my pec. The other, on my back. Other than that, I don’t know what you mean.”
I barreled on because he was dodging my questions. “Are you playing with me? Is that why you were weird about not knowing my name until the wedding ceremony last night?”
Nicolai shook his head. “I wish I knew what I was thinking last night. I don’t remember any of it. What did I say?”
“You’re not giving me straight answers. You’re answering my questions with another question, or you’re waffling around. Tell me why you didn’t want to know my name last night until during the ceremony when we were married.”
He shook his head. “I was absolutely mortal last night.”
Mortal? “Aha! So you aren’t ‘mortal’ now? Are you immortal? I knew it. I knew it.”
He tilted his head. “Mortal means I was intoxicated. Drunk. Dead drunk. Dead, mortal. Get it? It means I was hammered. Battered. Positively trollied.”
My hands were shaking so hard that my arms were vibrating. “But does it? Or did you just slip and give yourself away, trickster?”
Clementine squeezed into our little alcove away from the throng. “What’s going on?”
I rounded on her. “Are you guys Fae High Lords from the Summer Court?”
She blinked her tilted eyes at me without changing the expression on her face. “I beg your pardon?”
Another question for a freakin’ question.
I pointed at the Omnia kinetic chandelier, the frantic gyrations of its interlocking rings visible outside our little niche, as it spewed tumbling light over the whole nightclub and us.
“That’s the Cauldron, right? That enormous round portal out there, circles and rings that spin around each other like eldritch magic, that’s the actual Cauldron! ”
Clementine pivoted her whole body to glare at the kinetic chandelier and then back at me, her long hair flying behind her like ribbons as she spun.
Ribbons! Were those magic ribbons that grew out of her head that purred and had minds of their own and turned into fae wings? Was she the silver version of a gold-touched fae?
She turned back to me and then flipped her moonlight-silver hair behind her shoulder. With a finger-flip and bored eye roll, she pronounced, “That lighting fixture is not magic. It’s tacky.”
“You’re serious? You’re trying to explain all this away by just calling it tacky?”
“It’s tragically vulgar, but it’s not magical.”
“It looks like magic! It looks like a big magic Cauldron, like if you dip someone in it, they’ll turn into a fae!”
She blinked her grey-blue, tilted eyes that absolutely looked like they could paired with pointed ears. “Do you mean like in ACOTAR?”
“Yes!” I practically shouted at her, relieved to be understood and yet terrified that my suspicions were being confirmed.
Her faerie eyes closed, tiny tiny lines appearing at the outer corners, and she touched her temple with one slender, manicured fingertip as if in excruciating pain.
“No, Lexi. We are not fae, nor dragon riders, nor angels, nor vampires with neither black daggers nor sparkles, nor Greek gods, nor werewolves, nor shadow daddies. We’re just rich. ”
Clementine must have an interesting bookshelf.
I flapped one hand at Nico, who stood six-four or more, who loomed over me just like everyone else did at this party. “Then why are you all so tall?”
She sighed. “The prevailing rumor is that our boarding school put something in the water, but it’s probably optimal nutrition and that our ancestors had their pick of tall genes to procreate with.”
“And you’re all so beautiful.”
She swung her hair behind her shoulder again. “Naturally.”
“It’s not natural. All of you. Every single person, their face and their body, is perfect.”
“Oh, that. Yes. We’ve all had a little tuck-tuck and a little nip-nip.
It’s perfectly normal.” She touched one eyebrow.
“I’ve had a brow lift and my nose trimmed a little.
A little lip filler but not too much. It migrates.
Lipo around the waist. And of course, preemptive Botox to prevent wrinkles. That’s very important.”
Nicolai frowned. “You had work done, Clemmy?”
Clementine rolled her eyes. “It was the summer after I graduated from Le Rosey, and trust you not to notice all that effort.” Back to me. “Nico is one of the few natural beauties around.” Back to him. “You haven’t had anything done, have you?”
He shrugged. “I got a tattoo.”
Clementine rolled her eyes. “That hardly counts.”
The air rushed out of me like a hurricane. “Okay. Okay. You swear?”
“We are not fae. We are not magic of any sort. Magic does not exist, as far as I’m aware. I promise.”
I bent over and braced my hands on my knees, breathing hard. “Okay. Okay.”
Maybe I should have been reading billionaire romances instead of spicy fantasy series. I was more prepared to cast a spell or wield a sword from my reading than to fit in with rich people and not make an utter, terrible fool of myself by thinking they were fae.
Clementine plucked my champagne glass from my fingers and sniffed it, then crossed her heart with her other hand. “Have you been keeping an eye on your glass? There’s a lot of ecstasy at these parties. Are you seeing odd colors that sort of smear when you move your eyes?”
“No one roofied my drink.”
“And how many of these have you had?” she interrogated.
“I don’t know. Four? Plus some of those vodka tonics?” I estimated.