Chapter 2 #2
He kept on the glamour he wore, the one that hid him even through the veil. Curious, he wanted to know if she could see him again; when he wasn’t convinced that he’d made her up, he was sure it was solely how she seemed to look right through his glamour that caught his interest.
Only it was nearly impossible to tell. She covered her eyes with a pair of mirrored sunglasses that shielded her gaze from him.
Her head was tilted downward as she fiddled with the black device she held in her hands, but Ash arrogantly followed her every move, willing her to look his way. And she did—but could she see him?
He didn’t know.
And Ash hated not knowing.
She was an enigma. A riddle. A mystery he was more desperate to solve than he ever would admit.
Every shift at his guard post, he waited for her return. Since then, she hadn’t missed a day. Time didn’t correspond the same between worlds, and Ash only knew that his shift was over when the veil went dark. During the daylight, though, he watched and he waited and he obsessed over the female.
He tried to continue to hate her, too, but that became harder and harder as days went by.
Worse, he still didn’t know if she sensed him watching or not.
When he found himself resisting the urge to walk through the veil again and confront her—something that would only incense Melisandre if he abandoned his post and she found out about it—Ash realized he needed concrete answers to his suspicions.
He’d been lucky that the queen never discovered the way he crossed over the first time he spied the white-haired female, and it wasn’t worth angering her again over an ordinary human.
But what if she wasn’t ordinary, he wondered. What if—
There had to be some way to know for sure without drawing attention to himself.
And that’s when Ash came up with it.
Kobolds.
As one of the Light Fae, Ash held dominion over some of the lower races. All he had to do was snap his finger and he could command them to do his bidding. But while brownies were fae servants, he didn’t think one of the fur-covered domestic fairies could get him the reaction he was after.
So, before he headed toward his post again, Ash created a Light Fae portal that took him from the barracks all the way to the crystal mines hidden beneath the Summer Court.
In the Iron, the humans relied on their iron, their steel, their primitive technological marvels.
In Faerie, magic was king—well, queen. While not every Light Fae was powerful enough to manage portals just like not every Dark Fae could manage shadow travel, even the weakest of his kind could use crystal to amplify their power.
And a majority of the crystal the fae harvested came from the mines controlled by the Fae Queen.
Running for acres and acres beneath her crystalline palace and her favored garden, Melisandre ruled the mines with an—ahem—iron fist. As one of her elite guard, Ash knew exactly where its hidden entrance was located, and even though he was currently out of favor with the queen, none of his fellow soldiers stopped him as he waltzed right inside.
While his kind were in charge of guarding the mines, the actual act of mining was forced onto kobolds.
Hunched, ugly, malicious creatures that came up to Ash’s knee, they were master miners.
Before the veil between realms closed off during the human world’s industrial revolution—around the time Oberon went missing—kobolds were considered underground spirits who could be appeased by leaving smelted gold as an offering or by showing them respect.
In Faerie, where the ruling class of the fae respected nothing and no one, they were worked as slaves, their very existence allowed at the whim of the Fae Queen.
They didn’t call it the Reign of the Damned for nothing, Ash reminded himself.
Melisandre often amused herself by hunting her subjects, cutting their tongues out for fun, and forcing them to sacrifice each other.
Anything to keep her rule unquestioned, her power absolute.
She was, of them all, completely untouchable.
And Ash didn’t mean in the way he longed to touch his white-haired human, either.
Nodding at Saxon, a fellow Light Fae soldier, he used faerie fire to draw a square in the space in front of him; when he could store items in a pocket, there was never a need to fill his hands. He reached inside and pulled a burlap sack out before shaking it open.
“Which one can I take?” he asked Saxon.
A few decades younger than Ash, Saxon knew that Ash was senior both in age and in time served under the queen. With a bored expression, he just pointed at the nearest kobold, knowing better than to argue.
He didn’t say thanks. It didn’t even occur to Ash to do so. He was fae, and not only would no fae ever do anything that would put them in the debt of any other being, but showing any kind of gratitude meant that he didn’t have the authority to do what he wanted when he wanted.
Instead, he pinched the kobold by the back of its neck and easily dropped the suddenly still faerie into the burlap sack. The sack was enchanted to hold it until Ash set it loose again which, if everything went according to his plan, would be sooner than later.
It was risky, but what was his long, immortal life without a little risk and amusement of his own? Setting the kobold loose in the Iron was still a far better risk than chancing his queen’s formidable temper again.
The way Ash saw it, either the white-haired human didn’t respond to the kobold in her territory and he discovered that he imagined that she was more than just another mortal, or she did respond and the kobold would inevitably sense she could see it and attack her.
Whatever happened, he would rid himself of this bothersome fascination.
It was worth the risk.