Chapter 1 #2
Thankfully, I didn’t have long to wallow in gloom.
Only a few more moments passed before my sensitive shapeshifter hearing caught the distant wail of sirens approaching, and as they grew louder, I felt the tension in my shoulders start to ease.
Once the fire department shut off the water, I could sneak back in and begin removing the worst of it, hopefully mitigating the damage without any of our human neighbors realizing what I’d done.
“I was right,” Ethan muttered, eyes on his feet, his straight, dark hair falling across his face so I couldn’t see his expression. “I’ll never be safe. You’ll never be safe when you’re with me. And you knew it, or you wouldn’t have sent the children away.”
I folded my arms across my chest to stave off the cold and regarded him steadily, choosing my words with care. Hoping I wasn’t about to mess up, just as I always seemed to do with Logan and Ari.
Ethan was older than either of them—I wasn’t sure of his exact age, but probably in his early twenties—yet he seemed much younger sometimes.
Whether that was due to trauma from his years in the fae prison or some other factor, I couldn’t be certain, but I felt entirely out of my depth trying to help him.
He needed us—that much I knew—but most days it seemed that all we could do for him was remind him that he deserved to live.
That he deserved to have a home and a family.
Deserved to experience love and acceptance just like everyone else.
“Ethan, I didn’t send them anywhere. Kira is feeling down and needed a distraction, so she asked to have Ari over so they could watch cartoons and paint their nails and eat sugar.
Logan is… well, he’s thirteen, and that’s hard even for normal teenagers, so Faris offered to spend the weekend with him doing guy things. ”
Whatever that meant. I suspected Faris needed the distraction just as much as Kira did.
Kira was his daughter in every way that mattered, so he’d been looking grim all week as he watched her worry.
And the normally effervescent dragon shifter was trying to stay positive, but rarely smiled the past few days, even while desperately pretending she was okay.
So when she begged me to let Ari sleep over? I’d hesitated only a moment before saying yes, hoping that Ari’s chaos could help distract her from her fears.
And while I hated that the people I cared about were dealing with so much right now, I was also deeply grateful for a break—a single night without lying awake wondering if Ari was safe or whether Logan resented me.
Ari, at least, seemed happy, but Logan had been struggling with increasingly volatile moods.
Between asserting his independence, reminding us we weren’t actually his parents, and occasionally threatening to use his earth magic to get what he wanted, I was at a bit of a loss how to handle this phase.
But who could blame him? He’d had no normal childhood.
No actual parents or family to ground him.
We had no clue what he’d been through before the fae prison, and while Kes and I did our best, there was only so much parenting we were capable of.
We were both in our twenties, and neither of us had great families either, so I was only too thankful to have someone like Faris to step in and help.
A moment later, the first fire truck rolled up, and a handful of firefighters made their way into the building. As we watched and waited for the all-clear, Ethan spoke up in a flat, despairing tone.
“It’s going to happen again.”
“It won’t,” Kes said resolutely. “We’ll siphon your magic every night if we have to.”
She didn’t make that promise lightly. Taking someone’s magic was incredibly painful unless she acted as a conduit and deposited that power into an object of some kind.
And I knew Kes would never do that again—not willingly.
Far too much damage had been caused by the misuse of such magic-imbued objects, and she would far rather accept the pain.
Ethan did not look comforted. His expression went flat in response to her declaration, and while I didn’t feel like I knew him well yet, I suspected he hated relying on her strange power as much as I did.
“You’re fools to trust me,” he said quietly. “I don’t even trust me.”
The pain of that cut me to the core and brought my guilt surging back—guilt over how I’d chosen not to save him when I first escaped the fae. I’d been too afraid, and whether my fears were justified had nothing to do with the regret I now lived with.
“That’s why we’re working on finding you a new bracelet,” I reminded him. “We just have to hang on until then.”
Ethan lifted his left hand, pulling his sleeve back to expose the woven wire cuff wrapped around his wrist. “It’s like…”—his head tilted as he searched for a word—“earplugs. The magic still screams, but the screaming is quieter.”
The bracelet Ethan wore now had originally been made for Kira—intended to keep her and the rest of the world from finding out that she was actually a bronze dragon shifter. It blocked her from using her shifting magic, and we’d hoped it would do something similar for Ethan.
And it had proven marginally effective. Thus far, it had at least prevented his magic from controlling him. But he still needed Kes to drain his power from time to time to keep it from overflowing, and as we’d just seen, the bracelet was no barrier to his subconscious mind.
“We’re trying to hunt down whoever made it,” I told him. “That’s just been a little… trickier than we thought.”
For one thing, the bracelet had been commissioned by Kira’s treacherous Aunt Jaida, who’d nearly cost Kira, Morghaine, and so many others their lives. She’d died in the same battle as Elayara, so it wasn’t like we could ask her.
Also, we suspected the bracelet was the work of a fae metalsmith, and things at the Fae Court were not exactly safe for outsiders at the moment.
About a week ago, someone had attempted to overthrow Dathair, High King of the Fae, who also happened to be Draven’s father. Draven and Rath—his half brother and heir to the fae throne—had rushed to the fae enclave in Colorado, only to find that Dathair had been poisoned and was now in a coma.
Since then, Rath and Draven had remained locked in a desperate and delicate struggle both for Dathair’s life and the future of the Fae Court—a struggle that had huge implications for the future of all Idrians on Earth.
Last we’d heard, at least three different court factions were jockeying for position and power, which, among the fae, could mean anything from words to poison to blades in the back in the dark.
Thus, the cancelled wedding, Kira’s fear for her mate’s safety, and our inability to pursue a new solution for Ethan.
“We’re going to figure it out,” I promised. “Don’t lose hope yet. It’s only been a week.”
Easy to say, so much harder to do.
As I had every reason to know.
It had been exactly a week since I’d last seen Callum.
Only one week since the king of the shapeshifters told me he had feelings for me—that we were forming a mate bond, and that he wanted me to share his life.
And one week since he returned to the Shapeshifter Court to deal with the potential threat posed by the upheaval among the Fae.
If that were the only challenge we were facing, I might have felt more at ease.
But only a few weeks ago, the shapeshifters had labelled me a potentially dangerous criminal and demanded that Callum summon me for questioning.
He’d refused, leading them to insist that he take “administrative leave” as a sort of punishment for his insubordination.
Never mind that he probably could have eaten them all if he’d wanted to. That wasn’t the kind of king he intended to be, which meant we had to deal with this challenge the right way.
Even if the “right way” seemed to mean that I’d barely heard from him since he left.
“A week,” Ethan said softly, “can be an eternity.” He looked at me, the curtain of his hair parting to reveal dark eyes glimmering with a hint of gold. “And it might be all the time we have.”
I wasn’t sure whether the shiver that shot down my spine was from the portentous certainty in his words, or the sudden itch between my shoulder blades that suggested we were being watched.
I’d felt that same itch on a near-daily basis lately. Given the hour, it was probably just our angry neighbors, but I still threw a glance into the shadows surrounding us, alert for any sign of potential danger.
Kes, of course, noticed me looking around. “What’s wrong?” she asked, shuffling nearer as if for protection.
I was all set to say something positive and encouraging, but that’s when a small group of residents began slowly converging on our position.
All of them human, I was pretty sure. They were clustered tightly together—with one woman slightly out front—and their expressions suggested they weren’t feeling very friendly.
“I don’t know what you freaks did,” the woman spoke up loudly, “but we’ve had enough. You’re a danger to the rest of us, and we’ll be lodging an official complaint with management in the morning.”
I knew her—at least by sight—as her apartment was across the hall from mine.
She was around forty and a little shorter than me, with weathered skin and long, heavily bleached blonde hair pulled up in a classic messy bun.
No matter the time of day or the weather, she always seemed to be wearing yoga pants and mascara, though the rest of her outfit could vary.
Tonight it was a flowered bathrobe and fuzzy clogs that probably cost as much as I made in a day.
I moved to put Ethan behind me, facing her with what I hoped appeared to be calm confidence. “What happened was an accident,” I told her. “And it was handled quickly. You were never in any danger.”
Okay, maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t.
Maybe I’d made a mistake thinking Ethan was ready to live this close to so many other people.
I’d wanted so badly for him to feel accepted, I might have rushed it a bit.
But this woman didn’t need to hear a litany of my crushing self-doubts. Nor was she likely to listen.
For the past few months, tension had been rising between Oklahoma City’s human and Idrian residents. For the most part, they’d always gotten along—mingling peacefully on the streets and in places of business, while generally not bothering each other or harboring any particular animosity.
But all that had begun to change, particularly since the events of the Symposium back in October, and I knew it was a source of grave concern to the city’s Idrian population.
For one thing, they were vastly outnumbered by humans.
Yes, they had magic, and most were powerful enough to defend themselves in a fight, but that wouldn’t matter if the humans decided they no longer wanted to share territory.
Either the Idrians would be wiped out, or there would be a terrible, bloody war, with heavy losses on both sides, and no one wanted that.
Well, almost no one.
“Never in any danger?” the woman echoed. “We know what you are. You could have burned us to death in our beds without even trying. I’ve never understood why our city doesn’t do more to protect us from monsters like you, but you better believe I will be telling the police everything I know.”
Which was exactly nothing. She knew literally nothing about us as her neighbors, but someone or something had been fanning the flames of prejudice for months.
Posting supposed “news articles” about Idrian violence against humans, spreading misinformation about magic, along with bizarre conspiracy theories about the Idrians’ plans to take over Earth.
Okay, so there had been a few Idrians with precisely that plan in mind. But they’d been dealt with. The vast majority only wanted to live in peace here in their new home, and they’d managed it for over fifty years.
But it seemed there would always be someone with more to gain from war than from peace.
And who stood to gain in this case? My bet was on Blake Masterson, who wasn’t an Idrian at all.
And given his threats after he crashed the Symposium, mistrust between humans and Idrians was exactly what he was hoping for.
“We will, of course, take responsibility for whatever damage we’ve caused,” I assured my neighbor, still trying to project as much calm as possible.
The greatest danger here was not from the humans, but from Ethan, and my first priority was to prevent him from feeling threatened. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be working—I could feel his tension mounting, while Kes, too, had begun to fidget nervously at my elbow.
“I’m very sorry for the inconvenience,” I continued—with genuine remorse—“and you have my promise that this will never happen again.”
“That’s not good enough.” The woman seemed to gain confidence with every passing second, no doubt feeling protected by the mass of people at her back.
If they charged us, could I stop them? Probably.
Without hurting anyone? Probably not. Unless I chose to use my siren magic against them, and I had no idea what that would do to a human.
Not to mention, such an action would feel like a gross misuse of my power, possibly even justification for them calling me a monster.
But the bigger question was, if they grew violent, could we prevent Ethan from responding with deadly force? His magic had a history of lashing out when he felt threatened, and when it did, people died.
Without turning my head, I murmured to Kes, “Need you to drain his magic,” and thankfully, Ethan seemed to agree. He held out his hand—already trembling, either with nerves or with the effort of restraining himself—and Kes took it.
“Why don’t we wait for the police to arrive, and then you can share your concerns with them?” I suggested, keeping my posture open and relaxed, even as I braced inwardly. Preparing for the worst, while trying very hard not to look or sound like a threat.
“And give you a chance to disappear?” the woman scoffed. “We’re going to make sure you’re held accountable, even if we have to…”
“Have to what?” The new voice rumbled like a spring storm, loud enough to cut through the sounds of the fire truck’s engines, the muttering of the crowd, and the anxious racing of my pulse.
It held an unmistakable undercurrent of authority, along with a warning that even the humans couldn’t possibly miss.
But my shoulders sagged with relief as the tension drained from my body. Everything was going to be okay.
Faris Lansgrave had finally arrived at the party.