THREE #2
I didn't know how old Drake was. Such things were often impossible to tell without asking directly.
We weren't like humans. We didn't show the stages of life so plainly on our skin.
We didn't become incapable of childbearing around the age of forty.
We didn't show lines beside our eyes and mouths at fifty.
We didn't go gray and wither and dry and die before eighty.
It was a slower transition. Many human lifetimes were needed to paint even a single sliver of gray into our hair.
There were fae I had met who looked like a human forty when they had been around for thousands of human years.
Fae who didn't spend time in the human realm to age them like I had could spend two human lifetimes as a child still.
So Drake, well, he could be as young as thirty human years. Or as old as a thousand.
I could never know.
And, to be fair, he might not even know after spending so much time locked away from the world around him, making it hard - maybe even impossible - to tell the passage of time.
He definitely carried himself, presented himself, with a bit more maturity than I felt. Or maybe that was just how I was perceiving him simply because he knew more of this world than I did.
Heck, maybe he thought I was more worldly because I had spent so much time in the human realm. He certainly seemed captivated by the ideas of elephants and zombies, two things that he never would have known about if not for me.
It maybe made me feel less like a child around him to realize that.
"Well, I did kinda save you, huh?" I asked, giving him a smile, feeling a little proud of myself for that part.
"You sure did," he agreed, eyes deep, trying to show me something, but I simply didn't know him - or, to be honest, that expression - well enough to interpret it.
His hand gave mine a squeeze, making me almost alarmingly aware of it again, making me think and worry about strange things.
Like how I needed to keep myself from letting my fingers curl, not wanting him to think I wanted to actually hold his hand.
Which I didn't.
Right?
I mean... of course not.
I didn't even know him.
I didn't hold hands with anyone.
It simply had never been allowed.
Heck, I didn't even know what hand-holding was until I went to the human realm and saw it for the first time.
My gaze must have been looking at the scarred, wide back of his hand, because he finally explained, "We have to go down a steep incline. I want to make sure you don't fall."
"Oh," was about all my twisted tongue could force out, sounding airy and foreign.
"Then we're going to find a place to sit for a while. I think you need to get some food in you."
Right.
Because I was acting like such a freak.
I needed to get it together.
We weren't going to get very far if I kept getting lost in my own head.
And we had to get far.
We had to get as far as possible.
I wasn't stupid; they would come for me.
Even into the human realm my mother so looked down her nose on. For me, for what she had planned for me, yeah, she would go there. Just to drag me back. Just to ruin my life. Just to suck out the tiniest bit of hope I still had inside me.
So I needed to stop thinking about things like how scarred Drake's hand was, and focus on surviving, pushing my body harder, getting as far as possible.
"I can go for a while longer," I assured him, willing myself to believe it as well. At his dubious look, I felt my lips tipping up slightly. "If maybe we stop running so fast," I conceded.
His hand tightened, pulling me forward toward the incline that was, well, a lot steeper than I realized. My hand tightened on his this time, needing the reassurance.
"Slow is better than not at all," he told me before moving down the incline without warning, pulling me with him.
My stomach pitched even with his strong hand holding onto mine.
I couldn't help but figure it was a definite possibility that if I lost my footing, catching Drake off guard, I could send us both toppling down this never-ending cliff, ending up who-knew-where.
Under feet of snow. Was this cliff high enough for an avalanche?
If the screaming of my thigh muscles were anything to go by, it certainly seemed possible.
"Amy," Drake's voice called, sounding amused, making my head snap to look over at him. "You can let up. We're on flat land," he informed me. And, sure enough, we were.
It was right about then that I realized my hand was aching from holding his so hard. I snatch mine away, seeing red marks from the outline of my fingers on his as I did so.
That was embarrassing.
Apparently, outside of my parents' home, I lost whatever small bit of calm and collected I had managed to hold onto in that house.
"Let's just go another mile or so," he suggested, casting a look over at me that could be called nothing other than worry. That I hadn't thought this through?
That he wasn't sure I could make it?
Or that he simply questioned my sanity?
I wasn't sure.
And maybe there were shreds of truth on all of those concerns.
I was acting a bit out of character. But then I had just escaped my prison - erhm, home - in the middle of winter without as many supplies as I should have had.
It was a shock to the system. It was making a dozen different thoughts assault me at once.
It was hard to continue to act completely within your wits when your wits were, well, flighty and, ah, witless.
As for having given it thought, well, that was all I had done. For years. For my entire life. Every time my mother would scold me about my manners, about my ineptness, about my utter lack of skills.
My half-brother and half-sister had them.
And my mother was supposed to be stronger than their mother.
I should have been in possession of skills that she could be proud of, that she could have used to her advantage.
She wondered if age might bring them about.
Which was why I was sent to the human realm so much, forcing me to age at the human rate instead of gracing me with the slowness of a fae life.
Not that I was complaining; I much preferred the human realm to being in her home.
But the plan proved fruitless for her anyway.
I never developed skills.
I remained an utter disappointment.
So she had to come up with other plans.
I was old enough now.
For the plans that came with pretty daughters with supposedly empty heads, with subservient personalities.
All I had known in idle moments was thoughts of freedom, of a life of my own, without the fear of my mother's disappointment, or - worse still - the wickedness of her schemes made for her advantage at my expense.
"Here," Drake's voice called, snapping me out of my wayward thoughts, making my head shoot up to find his giant hand holding out a handful of nuts toward me. "Eat," he demanded when I hesitated. "It's cold. You're thin. You need the fat," he added, voice a little softer.
"I appreciate it," I told him, meaning it.
"Can I ask you something?" he asked a few moments later as I slowly crushed the hard nuts between my back teeth.
"Yeah," I agreed, turning to find him leaning back against the tree, looking very much like he could win a fight against it, even at leisure like he was then, arms crossed over his broad chest.
"Why go to the human realm?" he asked.
"I have nowhere else to go."
"Your brother. Sister. I've heard the rumors about your brother's girl too..."
Right.
That Cece was a child of both Courts, that she was bound to be more powerful than any fae in history.
"My sister is still staying with Baba Yaga," I told him, my heart crushing down a bit in my chest.
I wasn't naive.
About our kind.
About the joy many got from indulging in the most horrific of acts. Against humans, but also against fellow fae.
The weaker ones.
And the females.
I knew what happened in the dungeons beneath the home I had been raised in - the lifetimes of torment inflicted on flesh for minor deeds done.
My own brother had much of the flesh of his back flayed from him there.
When the night was still enough, the compound silent enough, you could hear them down there.
Moaning. Screaming. Begging for mercy. Something they weren't bound to find.
And I knew what happened in the camps. The labor camps. Where the women and children were separated from the men who might try to defend them, to save them from the almost nightly gang rapes.
I knew about them.
And I knew my sister had been there.
I knew she had come out a shell of the woman she had been before, had taken refuge in the empowering arms of Baba Yaga and her fortress of women where no man dared step unless they sought a slow, torturous death.
Other than that, I knew nothing. My mother was evil enough to have sneered at her fate. My father had gone pale, and taken off. To where? I had no idea. And were there any correspondence from Jasper to me, it had been intercepted before I could get my hands on it.
I had no idea if she was functioning, if she had found her way out of the darkness, if Doyle had been there to prove to her that men - some men - could be trusted.
I knew that Cece's arrival at the Light court had - somehow, the details weren't given to me - led to the Princess coming out of whatever insanity had claimed her for as long as any could remember.
I longed to go there.
To see Jasper, to ask about Jade.
But those were selfish yearnings.
"My mother has made a deal with the Dark Prince," I reminded Drake.
"Seeking asylum in the Light might test the shaky alliance between both courts.
It may prove safe, but at what cost? Another war?
Generations of carnage? Over me? I would rather take my chances in the human realm.
I understand how things work there. Perhaps better than I understand how they work here. "
"They will come for you. Prince Jet, your mother. Hate the realm as much as they might, they would come. To save their pride, to get what was promised."