CHAPTER FIVE #2
“Oh, ye of little faith.” He started off in the direction of my apartment as though he knew exactly where he was going. “It’s near the water, right? The tall one that looks like it might collapse at any moment?”
“Good to know you’ve honed your stalker skills—”
“I’ll take that as a yes.” He scoured the surrounding area for a moment until he seemed to find what he was looking for. “Climb that,” he said, pointing toward a rather large tree along the boulevard.
“Is that where we’re going to have this private conversation instead?” He ignored my incredulous tone, taking my hand and leading me over to the towering oak. With a flick of his wrist, one of the branches reached down and plucked me right off the sidewalk. “Hey!”
He shrugged ambivalently as the tree hoisted me higher. “It seemed the path of least resistance.”
Once in the treetop, I clung to the rather flimsy limb like my life depended on it. Yael appeared beside me moments later, and I wondered if he’d shimmied up the trunk or had the tree do the work for him. I hadn’t bothered to look; I was too scared of heights to care at the moment.
“Good, you’re already holding on tight.”
“Why?” I asked, doing nothing to hide the rising panic in my voice. “Why did you just say that?”
The only answers I got were the sound of wood snapping as the tree bent all the way to the ground and the wind blowing my long ponytail into my face as we launched into the air, branch and all.
I screamed as we sailed over the rooftops, headed toward the tallest one.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” he admonished between my outbursts. “We’re almost there.”
And we were. My rooftop was coming nearer at an alarming pace, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Yael had factored our landing into his little stunt.
Turned out, he had not—at least not mine.
As the branch made contact with the tarred roof, it snagged on a vent and catapulted me forward.
With nothing to catch hold of or break my fall, I prepared to hit the unforgiving surface at full speed.
Eyes closed tightly, I braced for the crash.
But instead of slamming into concrete, I fell into something far less bone-crushing. I opened my eyes to find myself in Yael’s arms as he grinned down at me like the maniac he was. “You were supposed to hold on tight—”
“I was holding on tight,” I snapped at him before wriggling out of his hold.
“I guess it’s a good thing our work together doesn’t require your strength, then.”
“About that working together,” I said, hands balling into fists at my sides, “do I get out of this deal if you happen to, I don’t know… maybe die unexpectedly?”
“I suppose you would, but I don’t think I have to worry about that—not where you’re concerned, anyway.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“That’s a strange way of saying ‘thank you for breaking my fall’—”
“Because I wasn’t. Now, you have about three minutes to make whatever cryptic point you need to so I can run back to work.”
Any amusement his face had held fell away in an instant.
“My sister, Jemma, disappeared not long before the fae king was usurped. By the time I realized she was actually gone, that shift in power had occurred and I’d lost my status, leaving me with no means to locate her.
It’s only now that the fae king has been restored and his kingdom stabilized that I have been able to begin my search. ”
I wanted to be unmoved by his story, but the harsh cut of his face combined with the tension in his voice as he spoke of his sister overrode my knee-jerk reaction.
Even I could understand how awful it would be to have someone you cared about ripped away from you without a trace and be powerless to find them.
“You said you needed answers; who do you need them from?”
“I know of only one person who was with her that evening, and he will not speak of those events—not willingly, anyway.”
“And that’s it? I just get this asshole to tell you what happened that night and then we’re done?”
Silence.
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly? What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”
“After that, we go wherever the information takes us until we locate Jemma.”
“Wait a second… let me get this straight. Are you saying that we’re about to go on a mystery-solving goose chase through the Devil’s Playground—the most dangerous neighborhood in Seattle—all the while exposing the fact that I have the Siren’s Song to some of the most depraved supernaturals that exist? ”
He pondered my assessment for a moment, then nodded. “Essentially, yes.”
“Nope,” I said, turning away from him to head for the rooftop door, “I’m not doing it.”
“Let me ask you something, little mermaid,” he said as he followed behind me. For the first time, that name didn’t make me bristle. “What does revealing your magic matter if you’re going to be returning home once we’re done?”
“Because I’ll never make it home if some psycho finds out about my magic before then and decides to make me his little compulsion pet—or sells me off to the highest bidder.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
I wheeled around on him and thrust my finger into his chest. “The fuck it won’t, Yael. You have no idea how dangerous that power is for the one who possesses it.”
“We will be discreet.”
At that, I scoffed. “Says the guy who just flung us over town on a tree in broad daylight. Not sure that screams ‘discreet’, but okay.”
His expression hardened for a moment, darkness flashing in his green eyes before it disappeared entirely. “There is no way out of this bargain, Myra, but I give you my word that I will do all I can to keep your secret as safe as I possibly can.”
“Which doesn’t mean much if you can’t at all.”
The ambivalence in his shrug was maddening. “Then I guess you’ll just have to trust me.”
Trust… I hated that word even more than I hated him.
“I don’t trust anyone, Yael—especially not entitled fae elites—so what you’re basically saying is that I’m fucked.”
He eyed me up and down as the corner of his mouth curled ever so slightly. “Not yet, but we still have a few minutes.”
“No, I think we’re definitely done here.
” I yanked the door open and descended the stairs as fast as my legs would carry me until I reached the street below.
Sprinting through the Devil’s Playground, my mind reeled, trying to find a way out of the mess I was in.
I couldn’t escape the deal I’d made, but I definitely couldn’t go through with it either.
There was no way to know how long it would take to get the answers Yael needed, and there was definitely no way that would end well for me.
But even if I could get out of the binding pact we’d made, that would only leave me back where I started: with no shot at getting to the queen.
My options were shit, and that fact made my blood boil, driving my pace faster as I rounded the corner to The Riff Raff.
The Siren’s Song would once again prove to be my doom.