Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Leo and I stand side-by-side at the kitchen counter, California sandwich ingredients laid out before us.
“So why don’t you go on stakeout with Rime and Topaz?” I ask, reaching around him for the bread.
“I do sometimes.” He licks hummus off the tip of his finger. “But mostly I stay here, going over all this sh—” He waves irritably at the laptop, papers, and stacks of books covering every inch of the table behind us.
I fight a smile. “You were gonna say ‘all this shit,’ weren’t you?” Unless he’s slipped something past me in some other language, I can honestly say I’ve never heard him cuss.
His laugh is so self-conscious, I can’t help but tease him. “Ha! You were! Go ahead, say it.”
He shakes his head, chuckling down at his sandwich.
I snatch the package of Swiss cheese from his hand. “You can have this back when you say it.”
He blinks at me with those beautiful big brown eyes. “Fine. Shit.”
“With feeling.”
Looking past me at the cluttered table, he says, only slightly louder, “All that shit.”
“Very good. Here you go.” I slap the package onto his chest. “Cathartic, isn’t it?”
“A little,” he begrudgingly admits.
“And since when do you not like doing research?”
“Since I’ve been chasing dead ends for months.” He snarls at an uncooperative cheese slice that won’t separate from the rest.
“Is there no swearing in Nàdar?” Topaz and Rime certainly enjoy cussing in American English. Maybe because they can’t in their own language.
“No, there is.”
“Like what?”
“Some of us use the British curse words—”
“Like ‘bloody hell’?”
“Yeah.” He smiles as he caps off his sandwich with another slice of bread. “But mostly we swear generally, to the gods. Well, sort of gods.”
“You sort of swear to them, or they’re sort of gods?”
“Both?” Chuckling, he shrugs. “We’re animists. Our gods are more like spirits than gods.”
I have no idea what he means.
When he notices my blank look, he explains, “Everything in nature has a spirit. Animals, plants, insects.”
“So, like, a cat, or a rose, or—I dunno, a rock—all have spirits?”
“The rock is a little different since it’s an element, but yes.”
I lean a hip against the counter. “I thought you said everything has energy.”
“Same thing,” is his simple reply.
So is it a tree’s spirit I’m feeling when I wrap my arms around it? I heave a sigh and shake my muddled head. I’m going to have to ruminate on that one for a while.
Leo rummages through the pantry and produces a half-full bag of pretzels—probably the same bag we snacked from after our roll in the hay and right before he healed me.
I rub the arm Zander yanked. Sometimes I swear I can feel Leo’s magic still lingering in it. A soft, warm breeze just under my skin.
Or wishful thinking.
His back to me, Leo continues, “A living thing’s energy is like DNA, it originates with the parent spirit and is embodied in every one of its offspring.
It’s the parent spirits who are our gods.
Like, take strawberries, for instance. Strawberry plants have a mother spirit, or—” He takes a glass out of a high cabinet and hands it to me, tipping his head to the fridge.
“Help yourself to some ice and root beer.”
“Or—” I nudge him, opening the freezer to a blast of frigid air.
“Or oak trees have a father spirit. Honestly, the gender is pretty arbitrary.”
“Like Romance languages?”
“Exactly like that,” he says with a laugh. “The parent spirit is really just that: the parent, the first, the OG.”
“Oh my god.” I slam the freezer closed and whip around. “Did you just say OG?” The giggle that burbles out of me has him glancing away. But not before I catch his smile.
“I learned that one from Rime,” he says with a bashful shrug.
My heart stutters and my skin heats. I set my glass down and wring my hands to keep from reaching for him, to keep from kissing that shy grin off his perfect face. “Take off your glamour.”
His eyes flash to mine, and although he seems startled by my insistence, he does what I ask. Without question or hesitation.
The change in his appearance is abrupt but not drastic, the differences subtle. Other than his ears, his features are the same, they’re just more beautiful, more perfect, more… mystical.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
“Whatever you need.”
What I need is something to shut down this visceral desire shooting through my veins.
I was hoping for a reminder that this man is not who I thought he was.
That he’s not the sweet intellectual who read beside me in the library.
Not the guy who introduced me to tree energy and frosted animal crackers.
But the reminder isn’t working. Is it weird that Leo the faerie seems more real, more multi-faceted, even more fascinating than human Leo?
Maybe what attracted me to him in the first place were his faerie qualities seeping through the cracks in his mask.
I wrench my gaze from those gold-flecked eyes and reach for my plate, hoping to conceal my crimson cheeks. How long was I staring up at him?
He clears his throat and does the same, gesturing to my root beer fizzing in its glass on the counter. “Don’t forget your drink.”
I follow him to the dining room and wait for him to clear a space on the table before I set down my dishes. “So then, weaving is a bond with the god-spirits?” I ask, taking a seat across from him.
“Yeah.”
“Like a marriage, almost?”
“A lot like that, actually.” His expression is both solemn and wistful. “It’s a sacred bond. Once we’re joined—”
“‘Let no man put asunder?’”
Confused, he tilts his head.
“I thought you knew the Bible.” I chomp a pretzel and smugly smile. Then gulp. I’m pretty sure that’s from the Bible. Shit, is it? “It’s from wedding ceremonies,” I hastily add. “‘What God hath joined, let no man put asunder.’”
“Ah.” His nod is slow. “Then yes, that’s fitting. The weaving bond is eternal and unbreakable.”
“You can’t divorce your species?”
“No. Never.”
That’s lovely, but intense. I take a bite of my sandwich, working hard to chew and swallow the thick whole-grain bread. Leo’s weaving ring winks at me, catching the overhead light. I study it, noting how its rustic simplicity perfectly suits his large, graceful hand.
I ask, “Can I see your ring again?”
Blinking, he sets down his sandwich. “Sure.” He pulls the band from his finger and hands it to me across the table.
The ring is cold on the outside, warm on the inside. It looks so humble, sitting in the center of my palm, but I can feel the energy humming inside. Strength and wisdom, wholeness and harmony.
I fold my fingers over it. “What am I feeling when I hold this? You or the hawthorn?”
His eyes drop to my fist. “Both.”
“I didn’t feel anything coming off the necklace,” I point out. Although I wish I had. Imagine the stories in those bones and shells. But I don’t normally feel objects, do I? Except— “I can feel trees.”
“Because they’re alive and have spirits.”
“Okay, then what about crystals?”
“With crystals, you’re feeling elemental energy, not emotions.”
Still thinking, and unwilling to relinquish the ring just yet, I lift my glass with my non-dominant hand and take a sloppy sip. Licking the sticky sweetness off my lips, I state, “So I feel emotions in things that are alive and in things that are magic.”
He has to pause and think a moment. “Right,” he finally declares, punctuating the word with a bite of sandwich.
“And that’s why you think I’ll be able to feel the weapon? Because it’s magic, or because it has a spirit in it?”
“All the above. The problem is, we don’t know what’s in it.
” He rubs a hand along his jaw as his gaze falls to the empty expanse of table between our plates.
“It has to be something more than the belladonna she wove with, and that’s if it’s even a weaving ring.
We’re just assuming it is based on what it was reported to do, and because it was referred to as a band. ”
“Oh.”
His restless hand reaches to the back of his neck. “But whatever it is, you’ll feel her.”
Her? “Ember?”
He nods, his worry reaching for me like thin branches pulled by the wind.
Reluctant as I am to let his ring go, I open my hand and offer it back to him. “Will you tell me about the hawthorn tree?” I watch him slide the band back on his finger. “Like, how you knew it wanted to weave with you.”
“You want my weaving story?”
“Yes.”
He hesitates, fidgeting with his ring as though he’s not sure where to start.
I prompt him, “How old were you?”
“Fourteen. But I’d been visiting the tree almost every day for a year.”
To make him more comfortable, I break the intense eye contact and take another bite of my sandwich.
He adds, “And the days I didn’t, it felt like there was a piece of me missing.”
“Where is the tree? I mean, is it in your backyard or in a park or what?”
He shakes his head. “It’s one of thousands of trees in the Reed River valley where my clan lives. About a half mile from my home.”
Okay, so it sounds like the fae don’t live in neighborhoods with cookie-cutter, split-level houses and quarter-acre yards. At least the Stag clan doesn’t. “So how did you know?”
“Well, hawthorn berries don’t usually arrive until summer and they don’t turn red until the fall, but one day in April, my tree had grown a cluster of bright red berries, right there among all the blossoms. All I did was touch them gently—” He turns up a hand and points to his palm.
“—And the whole cluster dropped right into my hand.”
I stare at him, unable to conceal my fascination.
He smiles shyly and adds, “I had my weaving ritual two weeks later.”
For the moment, I’ve given up on eating. I push my plate aside and rest my chin in my hand. “What does the ritual involve?”
“It’s fairly simple, really—”
Nope, he’s not allowed to gloss over it. “Rime said it’s the biggest moment in a faerie’s life.”
“It is.” He laughs softly. “But you don’t do much other than stand there. It’s the priestesses who do all the work.”