“So mortals have been wandering into the Fae lands? What do you do with them?”
“It depends on where they end up. Faolan and I make them forget and then send them back. Other Fae families...well, they're not always as forgiving of trespassers.”
“Who sealed the doorways?” I knew I wouldn't like the answer, but I had to know.
“Merlin. The last Changeling before you. Because of the doorways' natures—halfway between the mortal and the Fae worlds, no one can affect them except Changelings.”
“So you broke the law and created another Changeling, just so you could have someone to close the doorways.”
“Nicole.” She placed a hand on my shoulder. “It's not like that. The Sidhe aren't humans. We aren’t brownies, or pixies, or goblins. We’re lucky if we have more than one or two children. You are precious to me, more than my life. What I did, I did for the greater good.”
I shrugged off her hand. “But you didn't consult me.”
My words cut her. The sheen of tears appeared in her brown eyes. “If there had been another way...”
Kailen lifted his head, sniffing the air. I ignored him. “So if I'm capable of fixing this problem, why are there monsters trying to kill me?”
“Not everyone agrees with the creation of another Changeling. They see it as political maneuvering, as a way for us to regain our status. We were once the most powerful Fae family. We might have swayed the others then, brought them to our side, and taken the issue to the Arbiter. But it took you so long to manifest. Grian and her kin sit firmly in the seat of power now, and she would rather kill the mortals that wander into our lands. She doesn't understand that the doorways may be a symptom of a larger problem.”
“Maera,” Kailen said, cutting into our conversation. “Where is Faolan?” He sat on the edge of his chair, his hand creeping toward the sword clipped onto his belt.
Maera swallowed and went still. She pressed her hands together in her lap. “Gone under a red dawn in a nettle stash. Really unexpected, Nicole.” What? It was as though she'd gone suddenly mad. She reached over and took my hand, her gaze capturing mine. “Really Unexpected, Nicole.”
RUN. I found myself on my feet, the chair tipping to the ground behind me. Before it hit, the first part of her message penetrated my mind. GUARDIANS.
Four people materialized out of the air around the table—two women and two men. They each held swords in their hands. Silver armor threw spots of reflected light against the white walls and floor. Kailen had his sword in hand before I could register that he’d moved. He took the requisite step to stand between me and the closest Guardian, a woman with a square jaw and copper eyes. Maera still sat in her place next to the table, her head bowed and her hands clasped together.
“Kailen,” the woman said. She cocked her head. Hair as brown as her skin brushed over her brow. “Well, I should be surprised to see you here, and yet I'm not. Hand over the Changeling, and perhaps we'll give you a head start.”
“That hardly seems an enticing bargain,” Kailen said. He had his arm out, hand against my arm, shielding me.
“And what did the Aranhods offer you to protect their only child? An end to your exile? A place back among our ranks? What if I offered you the same, but to hand over the Changeling? You know Grian could petition the Arbiter on your behalf.”
For a moment, Kailen didn't move, didn't even breathe. I struggled to make sense of her words. Kailen had said nothing of what the Aranhods had agreed to pay him, or that he suffered under exile at all. His grip loosened on his sword. Would he abandon me now? I tried to summon up the anger and hurt I'd felt at Owen, but without Owen in the room, the feelings slipped away from me, leaving me defenseless.
The Guardian in front of me smirked, as if she knew exactly how this encounter would play out.
“Elendoria!” Maera rose to her feet, hands raised. Each of the four chairs surrounding the table morphed into a white-haired, white-feathered griffin. They stood waist-high, claws silver as the armor the Guardians wore. They leaped in one synchronized movement, each slamming into one of the Guardians. “Go!” Maera cried out.
Kailen grabbed my hand, ducked beneath the struggling figures of a Guardian and griffin in front of us, and made for the stairs. I did my best to follow his movements, narrowly avoiding getting nicked by the silver claws of the griffin.
We half-ran, half-slid down the stairs.
“The griffins won't hold them off for long,” Kailen panted out. “Maera is strong. She'll do her best, but they're Guardians. They’re trained to fight. They'll overwhelm her.” He snapped his sword shut when we reached the bottom of the house and reached inside his pocket. He pulled out the piece of moonstone—what I'd mistaken for chalk.
The front door opened for us before we reached it. “We have to go back now?” I gasped out. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Guardians on one side, the Void on the other. Though Kailen told me it became easier, I dreaded returning to that place.
“Hurry!” Kailen said, pulling on my hand.
The clash of metal against metal behind us suddenly stopped. Foreboding tugged at my heart, spurring my legs to move faster. Better the Void than the slice of a Guardian's sword. A bright white light flashed from the house, illuminating the trees in front of us and washing out the shades of the bark, turning everything so bright it hurt to look at it.
“Don't look back,” Kailen said. He stopped in front of the trunk of a tree, wide as the two of us standing side by side. The light faded.
“What was that?”
“Questions later,” he said as he drew an arch onto the tree's trunk. He dropped the moonstone in his pocket and clasped my hand. I barely had time to draw in a breath before we plunged forward and through the doorway, into the void.
I didn't scream this time. The dark closed in around me, as smothering as a thick blanket. Keep moving. I remembered our momentum from our plunge through the doorway, and my legs moved beneath me in response.
I stumbled and fell face-first into a rack of coats. “Mmph.” I shoved back, the cloth sliding away from me as the coats swung on their hangers. Kailen's hand left mine and he struggled to right himself.
My eyes adjusted to the light. A single bulb lit the small room, showing stained concrete beneath our feet and two rows of coats, one on top of the other. A coatroom. The faint hum of music reached my ears, and someone in the distance spoke in sonorous tones, their words muffled through multiple walls. I recognized the place—a theater, just down the street from where we'd parked the car. I'd dragged Owen here a couple times on date nights.
“Sun and stars,” Kailen said beneath his breath. “Things are worse than I thought they were. I know that woman, the one with the Guardians. She’s one of Grian’s. Grian has Faolan and Maera under her boot. She really wants you dead, Nicole.”
In the confined space of the coatroom, I was forced to stand closer to him than I would have liked. “Can we just get out of here?”
We both moved at the same time, and I tripped over his feet, my breasts brushing against his chest as I tried to sidle past him. Kailen caught me by the wrists, helping me back upright. He didn’t give me more space; he held me close, my hands an inch from his shoulders. “A little more slowly, perhaps,” he said, his voice husky. His breath brushed against my neck, lifting the hair there. The calluses on his palms rubbed against the sensitive skin of my wrists, and I suddenly wanted him to press me against the wall, to lean into me.
I sniffed the air, suspicious. Did he think he could just touch me and make me forget about what had happened? That wouldn’t work with me. I'd seen his hesitation, the temptation the Guardian had set before him. My fingers curled into fists, and I wrenched my wrists from his grasp. I wouldn’t be that stupid again. “Well, I guess Grian is my problem. You did the job you set out to do. You brought me to the Aranhods.”
“Nicole,” he grabbed my shoulder before I walked out. “I promised to protect you.”
“I'm not dumb,” I said
. “I saw the look on your face, your hesitation. You were going to take that deal. You were going to let them kill me.”
He didn't let go, taking both my shoulders and turning me to face him. “I'm not made of stone. I was tempted, yes. But maybe you should think about judging me by my actions, and not just my thoughts.”
I looked into his hazel eyes. What was he thinking about now? My gaze ran over his high cheekbones, his nose, and settled on his lips. My resolve, so strong only a moment ago, weakened. How much did I really care about looking like an idiot? “Stop it.”
“Stop what?” His grip on my shoulders had loosened, but he didn’t let go.
“Stop using your magic on me, the way you did when we first met.” If this was what it felt like to be under the influence of his elicitation, maybe it wasn’t so bad. My heartbeat hammered in my ears, rising with the music’s crescendo somewhere to our left.
“I’m not.”
I barely registered the words before he leaned down and brushed his lips over mine. For a moment, I was too surprised to feel anything but shock. And then I felt everything, from the sensation of his mouth against mine, to the way he pulled me in close, the hard muscles of his body pressed to me. Maybe it was because we’d only just narrowly escaped death, or because I did find Kailen attractive, or because I just hadn’t been kissed with that sort of all-consuming passion in a very long time—but instead of pulling away as I should have, I sank into his embrace, my hands creeping up his chest and over his shoulders. I clung to him, drowning in the scent of him, the taste of him. He responded by deepening the kiss, his fingers moving to my lower back. I curled my fingers in his hair, moved my hips toward his, felt him respond by rocking into me.
I wanted him.
And then I surfaced, remembering who he was, who I was, and what had happened in my life a mere three days ago. I pulled away with a gasp, my thoughts tangled, my emotions even more so. I couldn't look him in the eye. “I can’t do this right now.” I hadn’t even formally separated from Owen. He sat waiting in Kailen’s car, his mousy mistress at his side. My Fae heritage had made things worse than they already were. If I did this, if I threw Kailen into the mix, I’d make myself a knot so tangled even Alexander the Great couldn’t undo it.
Kailen’s arms dropped to his sides and he opened his mouth to speak.
Someone to our right cleared her throat. I snapped my head and saw a middle-aged woman, arms crossed, glasses midway down her nose. “I’m not sure how you got back here without me seeing you, but you’re not supposed to be here.”
“Sorry,” I said. Evidently I’d recovered quicker than Kailen. “I was cold. My boyfriend was just getting his jacket for me.”
The woman narrowed her eyes, her arms still crossed over her chest. It took Kailen showing her his identification and matching it to the name scrawled in permanent marker on the jacket’s tag for her to be convinced we weren’t in the coatroom executing some elaborate coat heist. When we couldn’t produce ticket stubs, she expelled us from the theater with some satisfaction.
We walked down the street, a respectable distance between us. And, because awkward silences made me uncomfortable, I cleared my throat. “You write your name on the tag of your coat?”
He shrugged, his gaze straight ahead. “It's just a habit Penny got me into.”
“Penny?”
“Penelope...my wife.”
Apparently, sometimes awkward silences were best left silent. Those few words made me remember a host of other things. Among them: Kailen was over two hundred years old, and I was thirty-two. If that wasn't an insanely insurmountable age gap, I didn't know what was. Divide the older person’s age by two and add seven, right? If the younger person’s age is that number or older, then you’re fine. Anything below it, and the pairing is creepy. I think we broke that rule several times over. The kiss? An aberration, an impulsive action borne of an intense situation.
We turned the corner. Kailen's car appeared before us, parked next to the sidewalk. Owen still sat in the backseat, though he appeared to be in animated conversation with no one. Passersby glanced at him and then quickly hurried past.
I opened the passenger door to a chorus of squeaking.
“Well, what was I supposed to do?” Owen said. He looked up. “That didn't take long at all.”
Kailen slid into the driver's seat. “Time passes a little differently in the Fae lands.”
I sat down and buckled my seatbelt, still shell-shocked by everything that had happened. Monsters had tried to kill me, Anne had been murdered, and the protection of my biological parents was nonexistent. They couldn't even protect themselves. “What now?”
Kailen leaned back in his seat, his head tilted back, hands at the wheel. He sighed. “I don't know.”
Owen started to laugh. “You're the answer-man. Oh, Nicole is Fae. We have to go to the coffee shop. This is how you use your magic, Nicole. Now we have to drive over here. Why don't you wave your sword around some more? Maybe that'll help.”
Kailen glared at Owen in the rearview mirror. “I could wave it around in the vicinity of your neck,” he said. His voice could have chilled icicles.
“We can’t stay here,” I said, breaking in before their argument went any further. “The Guardians are after me now, in addition to the beasts the other Fae families have sent to kill me. If we stay in one place for too long, they’ll find us.”
Kailen gave me an appraising look. “What would you suggest?”
“We find a place we can lay low—and get something to eat. I don’t know about you, but I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’m not in the mood to get along with anyone. We go back to my house.”
“Our house,” Owen piped up from the back. “I haven’t signed off the title to you, and I’m not so sure I feel like it anymore.”
I ignored him, though the blood pounded through my veins a little faster.
“Bad idea.” Kailen shook his head. “We’ve already been attacked there once.”
“Which is why they’ll look everywhere except there,” I said.
“That’s…ridiculous,” Kailen said. “But it might work.” He started the car. “Fine. We’ll go. But if I get even the slightest sense that we’re in danger, we leave. Got it?”
I settled into my seat, relishing the prospect of a bath in my own bathroom, a night in my bed. And something to eat—I hadn’t eaten since our breakfast that morning. Plans on how to fight back against the Guardians and the other Fae families could come later.
I already felt calmer by the time Kailen pulled up to my house. We parked in the garage so as not to broadcast our presence. I ducked out of the car and went to the kitchen first, resting my hands on the countertop, and breathing in deep. The garage door opened and shut behind me as Kailen and Owen followed.
“I’m sorry it’s been so long,” Kailen said in a low voice. “We’ll get you back to your human form soon. I promise.”
Jane squeaked.
Owen sidled past me, and as though he’d never left, opened the refrigerator and started to pull things out. A package of raw chicken, two zucchinis, half an onion, turned facedown on a plate. I let him, too exhausted to protest or question him. The black spots still covered my carpet, oily and giving off the faint scent of overripe trash.
“I’m going upstairs,” I announced. “Take a bath, get changed.”
“Let me check it first,” Kailen said, handing Jane off onto the back of my beige microsuede couch. Even her mousy paws on my pristine furniture didn’t stir me to protest. I nodded my acquiescence to Kailen and waited. He swept up the stairs and came down a few minutes later. “It’s clear,” he said.
I’d spent only a day away, and yet my house felt as foreign as it felt familiar. I peeled off my work clothes in my room and went into the bathroom to start the water for a bath. The steam rose, warming the chill sensation in my limbs. I turned and saw myself in the mirror.
I swallowed back a scream.
No wonder Anne had thought I’d g
otten a tan. My skin had darkened two shades. I was slightly taller, thinner. The rosy cheeks I’d shared with my sister had disappeared, now approximating Maera’s color. I leaned in close, my fingertips nudging at my cheekbones, which seemed to have risen a little overnight.
Did I still even look like me? Anne seemed to have recognized me, but how much had changed since this morning? How much still would change?
My eyes—still green, like those of my adoptive mother. I closed them tight and reopened them, just to check. No hint of change. Not yet.
Slightly relieved, I went back to the tub and stepped into the water. The heat of it seeped into my bones, making me sigh with pleasure. I took my time as I washed my hair, sinking my head halfway below the surface, the only sound the swooshing of water as I moved my hands. Finally, I let the tub drain and dried off. The smells of chicken and cream had wafted through the vents. As angry as I was at Owen right now, I had to admit he knew how to cook.
When I came back downstairs, I found Kailen sitting on the couch, flipping through a magazine. Owen stood in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on some chicken Alfredo pasta. Sauce spattered the countertops and the backsplash, interspersed with bits of parsley. He’d somehow managed to use three bowls, two spatulas, and five spoons in the process.
Kailen didn’t even look up from his magazine. “I offered to clean. And I explained a little of what’s going on. He knows I’m your bodyguard now, and not your boyfriend.” He glanced up quickly, hazel eyes meeting mine, and then back down.
I knew what he thought about. The kiss we’d shared, back in the coatroom of the theater. It occurred to me that maybe he was just as unsure of what to make of it as I was.
We sat in the dining room as Owen served dinner. He’d placed Jane’s portion in the lid of one of the pasta sauce jars. “Thank you,” I told him as he set my plate in front of me. It took an effort, but I hadn’t said the words to him in longer than I cared to confess. He spared me a smile. No one spoke for a while, just lifted forks to mouth, or in the case of Jane, placed snout in food. I ate until I sated my hunger, then set my fork down. “So I have several Fae families trying to kill me, the Guardians trying to kill me, and Maera and Faolan unable to help me. I need to know my options, if I have any, and I need to know them now.”
Loose Changeling: A Changeling Wars Novel Page 10
