Chapter 11
Seren
“What do you know about Faerie?”
The wielder sitting across from me in the low-lit, rundown little dive bar on the outskirts of Boston regards me warily. He takes a long draw of his beer, and the watered-down, sour smell of it makes me ache for a tavern and an actual ale.
“I thought this was a date,” Gavin says, “not an interrogation.”
“Interrogation? We’re just having a friendly chat. Didn’t Mira tell you that I—”
“Seren.” He reaches across the space between us and lays his hand over mine where it rests on the table. “Come on, now. We’ve been doing this dance long enough to be honest with each other, haven’t we?”
My skin crawls. I fight down a wave of bile threatening to climb the back of my throat and a sharp pinch behind my sternum.
Fuck. Is this how it’s going to be now?
Because of some goddessdamned whim of fate, I’m going to feel this incredible disgust every time I’m touched by someone who’s not…
No. That’s not what this is.
Gavin has always been a bit of a slimeball. I’d feel the same way about him, regardless of having a brand spanking new m—
Again. No. Not going there.
I withdraw my hand slowly, while giving him what I hope is a flirtatious smile. It feels more like a grimace, but Gavin doesn’t immediately get up and leave, so maybe I’m in the clear.
“But you’ve got to admit, I’m a fun dancing partner, aren’t I?” Another smile, this one a little more believable, and he returns it.
We have been dancing around each other for the last few years, but not in the way he thinks.
Gavin’s a wielder—what male magickal practitioners have taken to calling themselves since ‘witch’ is too girly for them—and he always seems to have his ear to the ground for odd jobs and inter-realm drama.
The wielders have been coming up with elaborate ways to get past coven wards for years, and have been traveling the Veil long before Allie’s new bargain with the demon king loosened up restrictions for moving between realms.
“You’re never boring, I’ll give you that.” He takes another swig of his beer, and I rest my elbows on the table, leaning in close like we’re sharing a secret.
“So…” I bat my lashes. Too much? Probably too much. “About Faerie…”
He chuckles. “You’re in the hunt.”
Not a question. I shrug. “Aren’t you?”
Gavin’s a realm hopper just like me. Him and his merry band of wielder mavericks. Not the same ones who Joan and her mate Rhett clashed with in the demon realm, but of the same stripe.
“Not in a thousand years,” he says flatly. “I’ve never stepped foot in Faerie, and I don’t plan to start now.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.” Another drink. An exaggerated shudder. “Last few wielders who went in never came back out. There’s a reason this realm has so many legends and stories of the Fair Folk.”
I scoff. “Come on, it’s not like all of those fairy stories are real.”
“Not all of them. And I think this is one case where truth is worse than fiction.”
“Isn’t the expression ‘stranger than fiction’?”
“That, too. Believe me, Seren, you want to stay far, far away from that realm.”
“Oh, please. Just because you’re too chicken to—”
“I mean it,” he says, and it’s as serious as I’ve ever seen him. “Especially after what that damned queen is rumored to have done with her human consort, there’s absolutely no way anyone from this realm should—”
“Human consort? Like a lover? Or a spouse or something?”
He nods. “Yeah. A wielder, apparently.”
“What happened to him?”
“No one really knows. But there are stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
Gavin arches a brow. “Use your imagination.”
I pause for a moment, mind running over the patchwork mythology I’ve picked up over the years and my own first impression of the fae realm.
None of it inspires much confidence a fae queen’s human consort would have fared well in Faerie.
“Capture, imprisonment, enthrallment by making him drink the fae wine?” I guess.
“Ah, so you do know a bit about how Faerie treats its human guests.”
My mind races, and something kicks up in the bottom of my gut. Not the same feeling I get when Callum is around, but something more familiar.
Something that wants me to hunt, to seek, to find.
A human consort might know a thing or two about a fae queen’s heart and where to find it.
I sit back in my seat, fold my arms over my chest. “Got a name?”
“For the fae queen’s wielder? No, I don’t. Besides, he disappeared half a century ago.”
Alright.
Well.
That’s not super helpful.
But the little nudge of sensation in the center of my chest doesn’t ease up.
“Do you know who would? Got any wizened old wielders who might tell me about—”
“Seren,” Gavin says, resigned this time. “If I knew you’d only invited me here to pump me for—”
“Who says I did? Maybe I was just as excited about this date as—”
“Absolutely not a date.”
Gavin’s expression hardens. Not harsh, exactly, but like he’s allowed just about as much of my bullshit as he has patience for.
I let out a breath. “Fine. Not a date.”
“Figured,” he says good-naturedly, despite the confirmation that I am, indeed, here to pump him for information. “All you coven witches have never cared much to fraternize with wielders.”
“Not a coven witch,” I point out, irrationally irritated by the remark.
He’s not wrong.
Witches, particularly coven witches, and wielders have always been like oil and water. Maybe it’s our different approaches and ethos when it comes to magick, or maybe it’s whatever goddessdamned reason our forebears decided we couldn’t just coexist and practice together.
Whatever the reason, we’ve always given each other space.
Well, as much space as two communities of magick-users in a wider world that doesn’t know about our existence can give each other.
“And since this isn’t a date,” he says, “I’ll tell you again that it would be really, really stupid to go anywhere near this.”
I shoot him a smirk. “In all the years we’ve been doing this dance, you haven’t gotten to know me that well, have you?”
He raises his hands in an unmistakable ‘hey, don’t come running back to me when you ruin your life’ gesture. “Fair enough.”
After he finishes his drink, he leaves, giving me at least enough courtesy not to warn me off the hunt again.
Maybe he’s getting to know me, after all.
Not that it matters, and not that I’m keen on connecting with him again after this.
Despite how thick he’s always laid it on, tonight I feel like the slimeball.
I did get him here under the impression I was open to a date.
Mira, a mutual acquaintance of ours who runs a traveling tarot booth, mentioned a few months back that he’d been asking about me, that he hadn’t seen me around lately and was wondering where I’d been.
I’d all but forgotten it until I started making a list of every last person I knew who might have even an inkling about Faerie or its queen.
I hadn’t hesitated for a second before I had her set us up.
Now, though, as I leave the bar and step into the bracing spring evening, I can’t stop the wave of regret that washes over me.
Maybe using Gavin like this was a bridge too far.
Maybe I should have thought it through a little more.
Goddess, I hate feeling like this.
I hate second-guessing, hate regret. I hate those rare times when it turns out I do possess the capability for caution and restraint, and it throws all the rest of my behavior under a guilty spotlight.
But Gavin’s long since left the bar, and I don’t even have his number to text or call and apologize. We’ve always handled it that way, letting happenstance put us in each other’s way rather than making any attempt to subvert fate.
At least before tonight, when I got his hopes up by luring him here.
It’s probably not as big a deal as I’m making it in my mind. Gavin seemed fine. Maybe a little disappointed, yeah, but I’m sure he’ll be alright.
But I still feel like a jerk.
Even more so when I think of someone else I’ve been treating with less consideration than they deserve.
Someone else who just wants to talk, just wants me to slow the hell down for a minute and give him a chance.
I can’t think about Callum right now.
Outside the bar, the stars are shining brightly above, and the moon is a waning crescent. It’s quiet, only a few other people around, and it gives me too much room alone with my thoughts.
On the walk to my car, I think about everything Gavin told me. About the wielder, about the danger, about how I would very, very much like to know how a human man found himself in Faerie and if he might still be there.
My thoughts are a tangle, moving faster than I can sort through them.
But, if I close my eyes…
The strands of my magick fan out in familiar tendrils.
There, just behind my eyelids, only… not quite. Formless, indistinct, gone if I look at them too long or too hard. A wisp of candlesmoke in the night.
With an idea, a place to start, the very barest suggestion of where I might begin searching, they gain clarity. Pulsing and tangling until they’re almost real, strong enough to let me know what I’m seeking isn’t in this realm.
Gavin’s warnings about Faerie ring in my ears. Callum’s obvious unease with me taking part in the hunt plays on a loop in my mind.
But neither will stop me.
Maybe it should.
Maybe if I were a better person or had even a teaspoon of self-restraint in me, it would.
Right now, though, with those strands tangling tighter, tugging me forward, a picture forms in my mind.
A stone arch.
Swirling ether.
Skeletal trees reaching into a burnt sky.
I open my eyes, and the path in front of me is clear.