The Prince: A Wicked Novella

by Jennifer L. Armentrout

  Then I started my routine of becoming me again—becoming Brighton Jussier.

  I bent down and got to unzipping the boots. Kicking them off, I reached up and moved my fingers through the hair, finding the extra bobby pins I used as an extra precaution. I plucked them out, dropping them in a glass tray sitting on the waist-high table in the center. Slipping the wig off, I placed it on the plastic mannequin-head stand and then peeled off the cap that helped keep my hair flat. I had no idea how to braid, so I worked with a low bun. After another half a dozen pins joined the rest in the tray, my hair was free, falling past my shoulders. A rush of blood hit my scalp and I closed my eyes, enjoying the tingles.

  Lifting my hands, I looked up as I pinched my fingers, removing the contacts that had changed my eyes to blue. I placed them in their container.

  The dress came off next, going straight into the trash. I never wore them twice. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, because even though this one was sparkly and sexy, it would forever make me think of Tobias and his icy touch. It would always remind me of the first time I saw him and why I had hunted him down.

  Undressed, I tugged on the fluffy robe and then padded barefoot back across the room to the bathroom.

  I turned on the shower, letting the steam begin to fill the space. It took two towelettes to remove all the makeup on my face, but after a handful of moments, it was my face staring back at me in the mirror.

  Blonde hair fell limply around cheeks that were pink from all the scrubbing. Faint shadows clung to the skin under eyes that reminded me of my mother. They were wide-set and brown. Someone once called them doe eyes, and I think they might’ve been suggesting that my eyes gave them the impression of a deer in headlights. Right now, that would be accurate. I stared at myself like I didn’t recognize anything about my own face. My gaze lowered, to where my lips were slightly parted and then lower still.

  Pale blue marks had formed on either side of my throat.

  Without having to try, I heard the sound the Prince had made when he’d tipped my head back. Smoothing my fingers over the faint bruises, I wondered if the Prince had seen them. Was that why he’d… growled?

  What in the hell was the Prince even doing at Flux?

  And I couldn’t help but wonder why he hadn’t struck back at me. He could’ve. I’d kicked him. Swung a chair at him. Hit him, and all he did was restrain me and then told me to leave. He’d been pissed, that much I was sure of, but he didn’t try to hurt me.

  Steam crept across the mirror, blurring my reflection as I pulled my hand away from my throat. When I’d left the room, there hadn’t been a single fae in the alcove on the second floor. The couches and chairs were empty. There wasn’t even a human in sight. The Prince had done something to the fae.

  I didn’t think he’d warned them off.

  He’d taken them out, and that made sense. The fae that frequented Flux were the Winter fae, the enemy of the Summer Court and humans, but what didn’t make sense was why he was looking for Tobias.

  I knew why I’d been there. Just like I knew I would go back to Flux, because eventually the remaining two fae would make an appearance. They always did, and I would do the same thing I’d done tonight. Watch them. Learn their habits. Strike fast and get out, hopefully without The Prince showing up. I would kill them or die trying, and there was a good chance that would happen, because one of the two remaining fae was an Ancient.

  And he’d been the cruelest, the sickest.

  I shuddered as I gripped the sink. Closing my eyes, I inhaled deeply and then held my breath a second before the all-too-familiar thought blasted forward, shoving everything else out of the way.

  This isn’t who you are.

  Stalking the fae and putting myself in ridiculously dangerous positions wasn’t who I used to be. That was who I’d wanted to be, but what I had become was some kind of twisted version of that.

  Being consumed with vengeance was something I never thought I’d experience, but I was knee-deep in it and I wasn’t coming out anytime soon.

  Who I used to be was a woman I could barely remember. I’d once thought that my life had changed when I was twelve and that my life could never be that rattled again. I’d foolishly believed that every human had a cap to what kind of tragedy they’d experience, and I’d already had my fair share. My father had died in the line of duty, as many Order members did, before I could even form one memory of the man. My mom had been brutalized but survived to never be a hundred percent the same again. I’d watched friends die in the battle against the fae, and naïvely, stupidly thought that we were free and clear, because how could anything else happen to me or my mother? We’d experienced enough tragedy to last a lifetime. God couldn’t be that cruel to deliver yet another soul-crushing blow.

  I’d been so wrong.

  Thinking back to the night of the attack, I wondered if I had misjudged the reason for Mom being antsy. Maybe it wasn’t a sign that she was about to have another episode. Maybe it was some kind of primal instinct had told her what was coming that night. What if she had known that those were the last hours of her life?

  Guilt churned, flooding the pit of my stomach with acid as I walked myself back through the night. Our shouts of surprise and screams of pain had been quickly silenced. They’d swarmed us within seconds, pulling us into the courtyard of the empty home.

  They’d torn through clothing, skin, and muscle. The pain… God, it had been shattering and devastating. They hadn’t even attempted to feed on us. I’d learned later from Ivy that Gerry and the others hadn’t appeared to have been fed on either. The attack was all about pain and blood, and there’d been so much blood. It had coated my skin and soaked my hair.

  I’d fought to stay conscious, but it was all too much. The pain. The blood. The sounds. The shock of it all. I wasn’t able to hold on, and the last thing I’d felt was my mother’s hand slipping from mine. The last thing I’d seen had been her. I’d seen what they had done to her. No human could survive that.

  My chest and throat burned until the point I started to feel faint. Dragging in a deep breath of air, I opened my eyes and saw nothing but mist.

  Leaning forward, I dragged my hand across the mirror, wiping away the steam until I could see myself staring back at me.

  It was my face and my hair. No makeup or special contouring. Those were my lips and my eyes. I was staring at me, but I….

  I didn’t recognize who I’d become.

  Chapter 6

  I jolted awake, heart racing and my pulse throbbing in very interesting places as my eyes snapped open. My gaze fixed on the churning ceiling fan. Oh my God, I’d been dreaming.

  Not the usual one, reliving the final moments of the fae I’d sent back to the Otherworld, like I normally dreamt after such an event. I’d been back at the club, in that dingy room, but Tobias was nowhere to be seen. I’d been in that same chair, though, and I hadn’t been alone.

  The Prince had been underneath me.

  It had been his warm lips skating down my neck, his hot fingers skating along my sides, and I hadn’t been sitting there, holding myself immobile. Oh no, I’d been rocking against him, head thrown back, panting as I moved over him, against him, feeling things I hadn’t felt in… in what felt like forever, if ever.

  I’d woken up right when his fingers had found the clasp of my bra, and there was a tiny, stupid and utterly insane part of me that was now staring at the ceiling fan, disappointed.

  Good God, I needed help.

  Lots of mental help.

  A soft purring sound drew my attention as I willed my heart to slow down and my body to get back on the sane and safe path. I turned my head to the right and found myself eye to eye with two yellow eyes.

  Meow.

  I frowned as the all gray cat—except for its tail, which looked like it had been dipped in white paint—stretched out his little legs and yawned right in my face.

  “How did you get in here, Dixon?” I asked the cat, which was named after a chara
cter on The Walking Dead. Dixon didn’t belong to me, but he was kind of a package deal at the moment. Not that I minded. I liked the little guy.

  Dixon flopped on his side and twisted his head so he was staring at me upside down. I raised a brow and then heard a soft creaking noise. I rose onto my elbows. The iPad slipped off my chest and fell to the floor, the soft thump drawing a sigh from me. I’d fallen asleep… putting a jigsaw puzzle together.

  Again.

  Kind of lame, but it always relaxed me, helping shut my brain down so I could sleep, but I really needed to stop falling asleep mid-puzzle like a narcoleptic.

  I scanned the large dimly-lit bedroom, but the buttery glow from the bedside lamp only held the shadows back from the bed. The thin slice of slivery moonlight seeping through between the curtains did very little to cut through the darkness, but I was confident no one was—

  A lump formed under the thin bedspread near the foot of the bed, about the size of a crab. A really large crab.

  What in the holy hell?

  I watched the lump work its way up the bed, stop every couple of inches, and then start moving again. I waited until it was near the top and then leaned over, gripping the bedspread and ripping it back.

  The crab let out a surprised shriek as I revealed the actual owner of the cat. Tink was… well, he was not of this world. Obviously. He was a brownie, a creature that stood about twelve inches tall, had a major addiction to sugar, TV and film, and Amazon Prime. He’d gotten trapped in this world several years ago while trying to close one of the doorways to the Otherworld. Ivy had found him in St. Louis Cemetery with a broken leg and wing. Instead of putting him down, like all members of the Order were required to do at the time, she’d felt bad for the little guy and taken him home, helping him recover.

  What Ivy hadn’t known was how crazy powerful Tink was, and that his current state, when he was about the size of a Ken doll, was a size he chose to be. Tink was what I liked to call giant-sized when he wanted to be. Ever since he’d come to stay with me, he’d been this size. Why, I had no idea.

  Tink used to freak me out. I like to think a flying brownie would freak any normal person out, especially because he was the only brownie ever to be seen in our world. But not only had he grown on me, he was the reason I hadn’t bled out on the sidewalk alongside my mom the night I was attacked.

  It had been Tink—full-sized Tink—who had found us.

  And since then, since I returned home from the hospital, it was like I suddenly had joint custody of Tink. Not that Ivy or I really had custody of him, but he spent the same amount of time with me as he did with her nowadays.

  “What are you doing, Tink?” I asked.

  The brownie was still flat on his stomach, mid-military crawl. One gossamer wing twitched. Vibrant blue eyes were wide and blond hair a spiky mess. “Hi?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Tink.”

  He sighed heavily, as if I was the one who had disturbed him, and pushed up on his small arms. He rose onto his knees. “I woke up.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I was bored.”

  “All right.”

  “Then I went downstairs to finish watching Stranger Things, but someone turned the TV off. Not going to name names or anything—”

  “You know it was me, and you could’ve turned the TV back on.” I didn’t even bother pointing out that I knew he’d watched both seasons at least eight times. If I did, it would’ve started a conversation about how he was comparing the upside down to the Otherworld, and I really wasn’t in the mood for that conversation at the moment.

  “I could’ve, but then I was like, that requires effort. You have no idea how long it takes these little legs to get down all those steps.”

  “Couldn’t you just fly?”

  “That’s a lot of work.”

  “Couldn’t you just become people-sized?”

  He cocked his head to the side. “But I’m cuter like this.”

  All I could do was stare at him.

  Tink stood and started stomping up the bed, toward Dixon. “So, anyway, then I was like, I wonder what Brighton is doing.”

  I didn’t even want to know what time it was, but I figured it was either really late or really early. “Sleeping, Tink. That’s what I was doing.”

  “But your light was on.” He lifted his hand, and Dixon reached out with a paw the size of his head. “So, I thought you were up. Dixon and I decided to visit you, because we’re good friends like that.”

  Sighing, I lay back down.

  “Guess what?”

  “What?” I asked, scrubbing my hands over my eyes.

  “I rode Dixon in here, like I would ride a mighty steer charging into battle.”

  Lifting my hands, I looked over at him. I really had nothing to say to that.

  Tink flashed straight, sharp teeth. “Ivy always gets mad at me when I do that, but Dixon likes it and I like it.”

  “The world is your oyster, Tink.”

  “Any-who-boo, we waited up for you.” He caught Dixon’s paw with both hands and shook it. “You were late. Super late. So, we went to bed.”

  “You don’t have to wait up for me. I told you that.” I rolled onto my side, facing him. Tink was still shaking Dixon’s paw. For the hundredth time since he showed up at my doorstep a week ago with Dixon in tow, I wondered why he was still here and not in Florida. “Can I ask you something?”

  “You can ask me anything, Light-Bright.”

  I grinned at the ridiculous name. “Why didn’t you go to Florida with Ivy?”

  “Because she was with Ren.” He rolled his eyes.

  “You like Ren. Don’t play.”

  “He’s tolerable.”

  I searched his face. “And Fabian went down to Florida. Wouldn’t you want to be with him?”

  “I went down to Florida with him last September, and I decided after thorough exploration that Florida is the Australia of the United States. The place scares me,” he said, and I snorted at that, because it was sort of true. “He’s not going to be down there forever. He’s coming back.”

  I wondered if there was something wrong between him and Fabian. “Is everything okay with you guys?”

  “Of course.” Tink dropped Dixon’s paw and pinned me with a look that said he couldn’t believe I’d actually asked that question. “Fabian not only thinks that I’m the most amazing creature to walk this world and beyond, he’s so in love with me, it’s adorable.”

  My grin grew as I reached over and scratched Dixon behind the ear. “That’s good.”

  “Speaking of love, how was your date?” He changed the subject as he plopped down on the pillow beside mine and crossed his legs, leaning back against Dixon’s fluffy belly.

  “Date?” I almost laughed right in Tink’s face. As if I ever had a date. Kind of hard meeting people when you were a member of the Order, knew that fae existed outside of Disney and fairytales, had a twelve-inch brownie who sometimes was people sized and often crawled into my bed when he was Tink sized—wait. His brows lifted. “Oh, it wasn’t that good. Nothing to write home about.”

  Tink folded his arms. “You lied to me. You didn’t have a date.”

  “I—”

  “You went hunting instead, didn’t you?” His little mouth pursed with irritation. “You went hunting for one of those fae who hurt you, but you didn’t want me—the most awesome of awesome company to ever be blessed with—to tag along.”

  “Tink—”

  “Not only am I freaking awesome, I am also pretty damn badass. If you go out there hunting those fae, you take me with you. I can help.”

  “Tink—” I tried again, no point in lying. He knew what I was doing. He was the only one to figure it out. “I know you’re awesome company, but the moment they saw you, they’d know what you were. That would kind of throw a wrench into everything.”

  “Oh, yeah, and you ending up dead or worse would also throw a wrench into everything.” Tink leaned away from Dixon. “What you’re doin
g is dangerous. If Ivy knew—”

  “Ivy’s not going to know. Neither is Ren or anyone else,” I told him. “Look, I get that you’re concerned, but I don’t want you out there, putting yourself at risk. You’ve already done so much,” I told him, meaning it. “You saved my life.”

  Tink shook his little head as he stared at me, gaze somber. “I didn’t save your life. I found you. That’s all I did.”

  “You still saved me.”

  “No,” he said, louder this time. “It wasn’t me who saved you.”

  I opened my mouth, unsure of what to say. The way he said that struck me as odd, but before I could say anything, he spoke again.

  “Did you find who you were looking for?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you take him out?” Tink asked, holding my gaze.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  Tink smiled then. “Good.”

  Chapter 7

  Miles, the leader of the New Orleans branch of the Order, called first thing Monday morning with a request that both confused and interested me.

  The Summer fae had requested a meeting with the Order, but Miles couldn’t spare any of the essential members to go see what they wanted.

  Since I was not considered an essential Order member, I’d been assigned the task to figure out what they could possibly want.

  Tink was passed out in the living room next to Dixon, so I didn’t bring him along with me. Granted, I could’ve woken him up, but the fae treated Tink like he was some kind of golden calf to be worshipped, and Tink’s head was already overinflated, adorably so.

  So, that’s where I found myself Monday morning, staring at the beam of sunlight that shone through the large windows of the office inside Hotel Good Fae, keeping the room nice and toasty despite the chilly March temperatures outside.

  That’s what Ivy called this place, and it did remind me of a hotel—a really glitzy, mammoth hotel. To humans and even to the Winter fae, Hotel Good Fae appeared to be nothing more than an abandoned power plant on St. Peters Street.

  Based on the old maps I’d found in my mother’s past research clutter, I suspected all the strange markings of places that couldn’t or shouldn’t exist were more well-hidden communities.