Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WENDY
A woman, face glistening with tears, races out of the front of the warehouse. She doesn’t look back and within seconds, she’s disappeared around the next building.
Roc appears in the open door, a cigarette in his hand.
He’s covered in blood. It’s splattered over his face and it’s turned his hands red.
This is the Roc I know well. The one more at home with carnage than deskwork.
There is the hint of a smile on his face.
“All is well, Wendy Darling,” he calls. “But perhaps you should come in through the back door.”
Asha and I share a look. One thing that could be said for Hally and the Everland Court is that most of their cruelty was psychological. I was spared from the gore of violence or war. Asha was not so lucky and I know she shielded me from it as much as possible.
I don’t have a weak stomach, but it is my wedding day. So if I can avoid seeing limbs torn from bodies, I think I will gladly take it.
Vane, though, he goes in the front door to join his brother, while Asha and I make our way around to the back of the warehouse where the others have gathered.
Asha is in ahead of me, with the fae brothers bringing up the rear.
In the late sunlight, their dark, pearlescent wings glitter like abalone shells.
Inside the warehouse, there’s a short hallway that widens into a holding area.
When I come in, I find Smee crouched beside James, who is unconscious on the floor.
“What happened?” I race to him and drop to the floor. He’s breathing, thank the gods, and I don’t see any wounds.
“He kept talking about seeing a light, and then all of a sudden he was knocked off his feet,” Smee tells me as she undoes some of the buttons on his shirt. “He was unconscious when he landed. So it wasn’t the fall that knocked him out.”
She runs her hands over his chest, then over the back of his neck and his shoulders. “I don’t feel anything broken or swollen. They did use fogshade on him so it could be—”
James gasps and lurches upright. “Bloody hell!” He grasps at his chest, tearing his shirt open as if searching for something. “Where did it go?”
“Where did what go?” I ask.
“I think he’s talking about the light,” Smee says, and as she says it, her expression changes, her mouth popping open, her eyes widening.
“What? What is it?” I ask.
Smee pokes at James’s face, checking his eyes.
“Smee! Stop doing that!”
“What did this light look like?” she asks, pulling up his eyelid. He bats her away.
“It was tiny. Like the size of a berry. Dense and bright. It hit me.” He presses his fingers to his sternum. The skin is unmarred. No bruising, no burns. Nothing.
The twins come into the room. Bash’s wings pull inward, folding against his body as he sits on an overturned crate. His brother stands beside him, arms crossed. And then I hear the faint tinkling of bells.
I know that some fae can speak to each other in a language no one else can understand, and when they do, it sounds like the chiming of bells.
“What are you two saying?” Smee asks.
“Oh, nothing,” Bash answers with a grin.
“Kas,” Smee says.
Kas is about to answer when Vane and Roc come into the room.
“Time is ticking,” Vane says, a pocketwatch open in his hand. “We have seventeen minutes to get back to the cathedral and to the wedding. I have a carriage waiting for those of you stuck on the ground.”
He means me and James. The rest of them, even Roc now that he has the Darkland Dark Shadow, can fly.
“I’ll ride with you two,” Roc says as he drops his cigarette on the stone floor and crushes it beneath his boot. “I’m not taking any chances.”