Chapter 49
Ash
Sometimes when I look at the sky and see the colors on the horizon visibly change, I like to think it’s Faerie reacting to my moods. Or maybe Faerie just has moods of her own.
I’m not sure.
But when a golden dragon crests over the Dark Forest to circle the tavern and land… I swear Faerie reacts.
The sky deepens its colors, as though every heart of Faerie desires to witness this moment.
And I’ve lost the ability to breathe.
Impossible breathing. Impossible desires.
I step toward them. Toward where Vanessa settles on the ground, sending shockwaves through the open space.
The others move around me. The goddesses. Dagda. My guys.
It’s all just white noise.
On her back are Pepper and Sabina. One having the time of her life and the other making a face.
When Vanessa transforms, gasps ripple through the Fae.
I’m halfway toward them before I know I’ve moved.
Time slows as I take them in. Pepper in ripped jeans, a band shirt. Nirvana. And her hair cropped short. She looks the most dangerous of the three. She is dangerous. But the most? That’s up for debate.
Sabina looks exactly like Artemis. Bow strapped to her back, her long blonde hair in a braid over her shoulder. She fits in here minus the ears. And she’s wearing what I’m pretty sure Peter Pan would have.
And Vanessa. The most disarming. Wearing a white knit skirt with bright pink and orange patterns. Her long brown hair kisses her ass. A knit tube top, also orange. Hexagon sunglasses. She’s also using a toothpick to fish something out of her teeth.
No shoes.
They’re staring at me as much as I’m staring at them.
“What the fuck, Ash?” Pepper steps closer, her eyes wide. She blinks and they’re all black before they fade back to normal. She grips my hair. The hair that’s nearly down to my ass. “What the fuck?”
I laugh.
It’s the most honest thing. It’s perfect and it’s her.
“You’re like a—” Sabina snaps her fingers.
“Poison Ivy.” Vanessa dances around me.
“Nessy, you have—” Sabina stops when I stare at what I swear is a bone in Vanessa’s teeth.
“Another?” Vanessa rips it out and tosses it. “I ate a bird.”
“It was not a bird.” Pepper pinches the bridge of her nose as though this conversation has already happened and she is fucking over it.
Vanessa glares at her, her pupils slitting.
“Nessy, baby.” Sabina pats her arm. “It was in fact a bird-shaped human. So you are both right.”
“Are those real?” Vanessa leans in too close before grabbing my arm and bringing it to her eye. The thorns under my skin reach upward until a bloom forms beneath her chin.
“Yes.” I withdraw them.
“You are so fucking badass.” Pepper flicks the tip of my ear.
“Ouch.” It stings, but you know what—I’d probably flick her ear, too, if she had pointy ears.
“I apologize.” She blushes. “They’re pointy.”
“Touch, don’t flick,” I say.
“You were always tall, but why do I feel like you now have a foot on me?” Sabina scowls. She was always the shortest, and it annoys her.
“I don’t know, actually.” We all stand in this awkward little circle, no one moving. Gods, I want the puppy pile of hugs. Tears burn the back of my eyes. “I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Bring it in. Bring it in.” Sabina grabs us all, and though one wouldn’t think she’s strong, she is.
I get my puppy pile.
We fall in a tangle of limbs. The hug just escalates that quickly. One minute I’m standing, reaching for them, and the next we are on the ground laughing. Legs tangled, heads on shoulders, and fingers threading through hair.
Sisterhood.
There’s an old ache in my heart. One that never quite eases. It pangs gently right now. Right in the center of my chest, at my heart.
Some wound whispers, you don’t deserve this.
So I hug them a little tighter.
Behind us, everyone moves away, giving us space. Leaving us in this little protective snow globe of old hurts and present happiness. The two colliding in a storm that no one could have predicted.
“So—” I start, because how does one exactly ask how their journey through a foreign world was? Even though oddly enough their own journeys have taken them on a similar ride.
Pepper leans back, the dual sun on her face. “This place is weird. Everything keeps trying to kill me.”
“Everything is alive in a way that Earth isn’t,” I whisper back, lying in the field of clover.
“Well, it’s gorgeous,” Sabina says, pulling a piece of clover from between her teeth. “But yeah. I shot seven things on the way here. Three of them were already dead.”
“How do you shoot something that’s already dead?” I ask.
“Aggressively.” She shrugs.
“The sentries were the worst,” Vanessa says, stretching her arms above her head. Her fingers are still slightly scaled at the knuckles. “The little ones that hide in trees? Delicious but they give you heartburn.”
“You cannot keep eating the wildlife, Nessy.” Pepper doesn’t open her eyes.
“They attacked first.”
“Did they?”
“They were thinking about it. I could smell the intent.”
Pepper makes a sound that’s half laugh, half surrender. The kind of sound you make when you’ve been arguing with someone about their eating habits for three solid days and have accepted defeat.
I missed this. Gods, I missed this so much my chest aches with it.
The clover beneath me hums. Soft. Responsive. The Wild Court magic in this soil recognizing something in my blood and reaching up through the roots to say hello, we’ve been waiting.
“So.” Sabina rolls onto her side, propping her head on her hand. The movement is casual. The look in her eyes is not. “Three men, huh?”
And there it is.
“News travels fast.”
“Ash. A dragon flew us over a tavern where three very large, very intense Fae males were standing in the doorway looking like they were about to commit murder on our behalf.” She raises an eyebrow. “It wasn’t subtle.”
“Ah.” I scratch my nose. “That tracks.”
Pepper opens one eye. “Which one’s which?”
I could deflect. I could redirect. I could do the thing I’ve spent years doing, which is fold the real answer into a smaller answer and hand over the version that doesn’t cost me anything.
I don’t.
“Kieran is the one who looks like winter. Dark hair. Ice-blue eyes. He’s Unseelie royalty. His father is the king we’re about to dethrone.” I pause. “He’s also the one who defied his entire court for me. Twice.”
Sabina whistles low.
“Finnian is the scholar. Curly hair, amber eyes. Seelie, but he committed treason to be here. He’s been studying me since before I knew what I was, and not in a creepy way.
” I reconsider. “Okay, marginally creepy. But in the way where he memorized my heartbeat and uses it as a baseline for my emotional state.”
“That’s deeply creepy and deeply romantic,” Vanessa says. “Continue.”
“Orion is the Wild Court guardian. Red hair. Built like he was designed to carry things. Including me. Specifically me, on multiple occasions, over his shoulder, without asking.”
“I like him already.” Pepper’s eye is still just the one, open and assessing.
“He’s also the one who lost his Treasure—a magical artifact that lived in his chest—stolen by the god who is in fact making a pot of BBQ for Vanessa.” My voice goes quieter than I intend. “He blames himself for that.”
“That sounds delicious.” Vanessa eyes the door to the tavern and licks her lips.
“And you?” Sabina asks, gentle in the way she gets when she’s about to say something that will gut you. “How are you with all of it?”
“I’m—” The word fine rises like a reflex. I watch it come and let it pass. “I’m in love with three men who haven’t said it yet. And I haven’t said it either. And we’re about to start a war.”
It all sounds way too heavy when I say it like that. But I can’t take it back.
“Ash.” Vanessa sits up, removes her hexagon sunglasses, and looks at me with those dragon eyes that see heat signatures and lies in equal measure. “Have you asked yourself why none of you have said it?”
I stare at her. “We’ve been a little busy running for our lives.”
“Sure.” She puts the glasses back on. “That’s one reason.”
I hate when Vanessa does that. Drops something precise and devastating and then just…puts her sunglasses back on like she didn’t just perform surgery.
The worst part is, she can see potential futures just like Finn can.
Pepper sits up. The dual sun catches the short crop of her hair and for a second I see the woman from the dream. The one who turned her back. But this Pepper is here. In the flesh. On Fae soil. She came.
“The brooding one keeps looking over here,” she says.
I don’t need to look. The silver-blue bond tells me.
“Kieran.”
“He looks at you the way Jasper looked at me before he figured out I wasn’t going to bolt.” She picks at the clover. “Like he’s already grieving something that hasn’t happened yet.”
Oh. I swallow even though I want nothing more than to turn around and look at Kieran over my shoulder.
“And the big one—Orion?—he keeps starting toward us and then stopping. Like he’s fighting himself.” Sabina hides a smile, her fingers twitching toward her bow like she wants to shoot him.
“Don’t,” I warn her, and her fingers stop twitching. “He can’t help it.”
“Mmhm.” She doesn’t sound convinced. “And the third one? Finnian?”
I glance toward the tavern.
Finnian isn’t hovering in the doorway like the other two. He’s sitting on the bench outside, legs crossed at the ankle, reading something. Or pretending to read something. The stillness of it is deliberate. The careful distance of a man giving me exactly what he thinks I need.
Which is space.
And he’s right. I do need this. I need my cousins and the clover and the feeling of being known by people who loved me before I had thorns or pointed ears or bonds on my wrists.
But noticing that he’s right—that he read the situation before I did and adjusted without being asked—does something complicated in my chest.
“He’s the one, isn’t he?” Vanessa doesn’t phrase it as a question.
“They’re all the one. That’s the whole point.”
“No, I mean—” She waves a hand. “He’s the one who sees you the clearest. The one who already knows what you’re going to need before you do.”
I don’t answer. Because she’s right. He is the one.
“That’s the scariest one,” Pepper says quietly. Not looking at me. Looking at the sky. “The one who knows you. The others can fight for you. Bleed for you. But the one who knows you?” She picks a piece of clover and rolls it between her fingers. “That’s the one who can actually hurt you.”
A flutter of nervous energy bubbles in my chest. All teeth and hardness.
I want to argue. I want to say they all know me and none of them would hurt me and it’s different from what you think.
But Pepper has five mates. She’s not speaking from theory. She’s speaking from scar tissue.
“We should go meet them,” Sabina says, pushing herself up. “Before the brooding one actually manifests an ice storm. I can feel the temperature dropping from here.”
I sit up. Brush clover from my hair—the silver-pink strands that still catch me off guard when I see them in my peripheral vision.
“Pepper.” I say her name and nothing else.
She looks at me. Full on. Grey eyes without armor for exactly two seconds.
“I’m here, Ash.” She stands, brushes off her jeans, then offers me her hand. “I showed up. Don’t make me regret it.”
I take her hand. Let her pull me to my feet.
It’s not forgiveness. It’s not the light left on.
But it’s her hand in mine, and right now that’s everything.