The man to his right was well put together, with light brown, almost blond hair, expensive clothes, and hazel eyes that cut through me. Something deep boiled underneath his expression as he gaped at me.
The third man was the smallest, with a lean body. His black hair was buzzed cut, glasses sitting on his face, framing his honey-brown eyes. Dark lines peeked out from the collar of his jacket.
Their very presence slammed into me, stealing all the breath in my lungs. No. They couldn’t be here. No fucking way.
“J-Josie?” the man in the middle spoke.
“F-Foster. W-What are you doing out here?” I stuttered out.
No. Joslyn, no. We must leave. Berry nipped at my hand in warning. He was right. We couldn’t stay. Not like this. Not with them.
Pain lanced through me as I reached down and grabbed a charm. My fingers shook as I activated it. Soft golden magic whirled around us and then we were gone, leaving behind the last three men I had wanted to see on this planet.
Tears fell as my hotel room formed around me. My legs gave, and I crumpled as a wail broke out of me, decades of pain and loss forcing its way out. They were there. All three of them.
And they saw me. Saw that I wasn’t me any longer.
They knew I was back.
Chapter Seven
~Foster’s POV~
The golden light disappeared, leaving us standing in the dark. A buzz in the air made my skin prickle. Or maybe it was because I’d seen her.
I saw Josie.
It had to be her.
Right?
I didn’t know. She was her, but she wasn’t. Her skin was no longer tan from hours in the sun, but it had to be her. I ticked off a list of attributes I remembered.
Straight black hair. Check.
Brown eyes. Check.
Plush full lips. Check.
Diamond-shaped face. No. Not a check. It was different. Her features were slightly off. It had been longer, different.
But it had to be her. And she recognized us.
“What the fuck did I just see?” Jason asked, breaking the silence. “That was her? Right? And those things? What happened? Is this some kind of fucking joke? A movie?”
No one said anything. My focus went to the spot we saw that woman—no—thing disappear. She—it—had sunk into the ground. And the lights. And the tree. And that huge dog—wolf.
“Foster, did you slip us something before coming here?” Waylon asked in a deceptively calm voice.
“Of course not,” I snapped at him. I didn’t touch drugs. With my history the way it was, I refused to touch so much as a headache medicine. Whenever I got injured, the only time the doctors could give me pain medication was when I was already out of it to stop them. Or when Jason or Waylon shoved the pill down my throat. Too many vets turned to alcohol and drugs to handle the shit they went through while serving. I stubbornly refused to even contemplate the idea. I had enough slippery slopes to manage and didn’t need that.
I turned back to the scene with a critical eye, ignoring the annoyingly loud version of me that demanded I go to her hotel room and hold her. No one would be able to pry her from my arms. No one.
But that wasn’t what I needed to do right now. The soldier in me demanded that I piece together what we’d seen, because what had happened had been impossible. It should have been impossible.
We had followed her from her hotel room, lost her in some alley, only for her to reappear as we were circling the block looking for her for the last few hours. Then we lost her in the botanical gardens.
When she re-emerged, we stuck close to her. Lost her again briefly, only to find her standing there, talking to her dog in an empty field. Then those two people showed up. We were about to step out, hoping to scare them away, but it all happened too fast.
They went from human to...not.
Then things I couldn’t understand happened.
I stared at the scene, trying to piece it all together. The version of Josie I didn’t recognize. The way the air had changed, becoming sharper. I stared at the knocked down tree. It was tall and skinny, but it had still broken once that female thing slammed into it.
A memory of shattered walls, screaming people running, wounds that couldn’t be explained.
The source of those wounds.
Something in the air stirred, sending my instincts on full alert. I whipped my head around as I tried to look into the darkness. Jason and Waylon were still talking, but I ignored them. I narrowed my eyes, wishing I had my gear with me, then I could see into the darkness. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
“We need to get out of here,” I said.
“Foster?”
“We need to leave. Now.” I shoved both of them toward the main path, away from the danger that hovered over us. My adrenaline spiked. I couldn’t see the danger, but my instincts knew it was there. “Move right fucking now.”
I shoved them hard enough that they stumbled forward before running. I stayed at the back, hand on my concealed gun, ready to defend.
I didn’t let up on Jason and Waylon until we were back at my place.
“What the fuck was that?” Jason whirled on me. “What the fuck is going on? And don’t say you don’t know. You know. What was all that?”
His eyes were wide, panic settling in.
“Foster?” Waylon asked, arms crossed over his chest. He was trying to hold himself together, but I saw the signs. His eye was twitching, his muscles bunched up. If he were sitting, his right leg would have been bouncing.
“Sit,” I said, needing to get a handle on the situation. I needed them to remain calm, because what I had to say wasn’t something I ever thought would happen.
It explained so much. Explained why I couldn’t find a single sign of Josie after traveling through the entire world. I tore countries apart, thinking she had fallen prey to human trafficking. I threw myself into missions into prisons to release detainees, scared to find her in a cell. I stalked dangerous and powerful men, thinking they had something to do with her disappearance. I learned how to write code to create programs that would be able to search through billions of faces across the world in hopes of matching it with hers.
Nothing.
No trace.
No hits on her name, none on her credit cards or bank accounts. Nothing.
It was like after the day she disappeared, she stopped existing.
Disbelief choked at me. If what I’d seen was real, then it explained it all.
“Foster!” Jason was in front of me, shaking my shoulders. “Foster!”
“Yeah.” I choked around my response. Stepping back, I cleared my throat and shook my head, trying to dispel the man inside of me that wanted to come out swinging at the world. The same man that wanted to lock Josie in a room and keep her away from the world that had stolen her from him.
Jason moved me to a chair, our roles now reversed. He disappeared before reappearing and shoving a glass of water in my face. “Drink.”
I did.
Jason sat across from me. “Now talk.” My friend tried to portray calm, but the white-knuckled grip on his knees said he lost his shit a long time ago.
“I don’t know where to start. What to say.”
“Give us the facts. Lay it out in a way that we will understand,” Waylon said. He sat to the right of me, his expression closed off. Danger lurked right underneath the surface. He wouldn’t react until he had all the information, but he would. He just wasn’t sure what kind of reaction to settle on yet.
“You saw,” I said. “You saw the impossible.”
“Yes,” Waylon answered. “But it looks like it isn’t something impossible to you.”
The movement was jerky as I nodded. “There have been...moments while I was in the army that couldn’t be explained. You know I can’t say much about the missions I’ve been on. You know they were dangerous, but there have been incidents where I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to make it out alive.” I leaned forward and rubbed
my face. “Man, the shit that I saw.”
“And this shit, it relates to what we saw tonight?”
I nodded.
“Not much is known. We just know they are powerful and ancient. They keep to themselves for the most part, but there are parts of the world that aren’t touched by first-world countries. That’s where we found them.”
“Them being what?” Waylon asked.
Jason jumped in. “Aliens?”
I snorted. “Not aliens. If anything, I’d say they were here first.”
“Stop fucking around and tell us,” Jason said, his body shaking with suppressed anger.
“They’re called fae.”
Jason’s expression went blank. “Fae? Like pixies, elves, and goblins? The goblin king was real? Aren’t those Irish myths?”
I snorted. “Celtic myths. And yes, like those things.”
“That’s fucking bullshit,” Jason snapped. “What kind of trick are you playing with us?” He jumped to his feet. “Whatever you’re doing is fucking cruel. I know you’re desperate to find Josie, but she’s fucking cruel. Why would you do this to us?”
“Jason,” Waylon warned.
Jason shook his head, eyes wide. “No. No fucking way. If you’re saying what you’re saying... Then Josie... Our sweet Josie...”
“I know.”
“Do you?” he snapped.
“I do. More than you think. More than all those stories she used to go on about when we were in college.”
“So the fae are involved,” Waylon said, still holding his thoughts closely to himself. I couldn’t begin to guess what he thought about it all. “Even so, how did she manage to stay hidden from us for so long? And why is she appearing now?”
I looked down at the floor, pain digging into me. “Before I left the service, we were working our way to a place of interest. We ran into a woman. She was old, well into her eighties. She was lost and confused. Scared. It took us a long time to calm her down. I managed to get her information. She was only twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three?” Disbelief shown through Waylon’s expression.
“She was crazy, delirious, going on about creatures, about being abducted. I had to piece it together. But by the time I did, even I wanted to dismiss her, except I already knew about the fae, so it was plausible too.”
“What?” Jason asked. He had slumped into a chair, leaning back, legs out, looking completely defeated. “What could be fucking worse than the existence of fae?”
“Their home.”
They both gave me confused looks, not following along.
“The woman, she was taken to their home. It’s not on this earth or realm or plane, or however you want to think about it. She went to their home and lived there for...I think she said around sixty years. When I told her what date it was, she didn’t believe me. She said it was impossible for her to be missing for only three years. Time is different there. Think ten to one. Every one year here is ten years there.”
They paled.
“But Josie’s been missing for ten here,” Waylon said.
“That’s a hundred there,” Jason added.
I clenched my jaw and looked down at the floor. “I know.”
“But...” Jason shook his head. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“This woman. Did she change? Did she look like those things?” Waylon asked.
I shook my head. “She was very human. She died before we could get her to a hospital. Her heart gave out. Old age. Shock.”
“Josie didn’t look old at all. If anything, she looked younger.” Waylon raised his eyebrow as if to challenge my theory.
“Just different,” I said.
“She looked like them,” Jason whispered.
I took in a breath, and finally said what I had been trying to avoid, what I refused to believe.
“Josie’s fae.”
She wasn’t human.
Chapter Eight
I had cried myself to sleep, but it wasn’t sleepless. It was jarring and full of heartache. Special memories with the guys plagued me, taunted me, tortured me with what could no longer be.
“I’ll never let you go, Jo. Let go. Fall. I’m always going to catch you.”
“It’s easy. They run their mouths and I close it for them.”
“They don’t matter. You do. We do. It’s us. And if we have to fight against the world, then we will. And we’ll fucking win.”
All their sweet promises echoed through me. Our love had been real, had been sturdy. We did fight against the world. And we did win. We were on our way to happily ever after, but then it was torn away from me. No way was it possible for our love to survive through the realms.
One particular memory slammed into me the hardest. We were in high school. Best friends, too shy to admit our feelings.
I had settled into my normal lunch spot, pulling out a book.
“What are you reading?” Foster came over with a small smile. His plate was piled high with food. He always ate more than his weight. The football and wrestling made sure of that.
“Did you know there are no female leprechauns,” I said. I held my book up so he could see it was another mythology book. I was always reading them.
“That sucks.”
I snorted. “How so?”
The others joined us, settling around. “What’s going on?” Jason asked.
“Foster says it sucks that there are only male leprechauns.”
“Oh, that does suck,” Jason said.
I giggled. “Why?”
“That’s lonely.”
I hummed in response, not really agreeing or disagreeing.
That got into a weird debate about compatibility, if leprechauns could even date anyone outside of their species, especially since they didn’t have females.
“I don’t care,” Jason said. He smirked. “All I can say is thank fuck compatibility isn’t an issue. Right, Josie.”
“What do I have to do with it?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
Jason smirked. “If there were only one person in the entire world I’d be compatible with, it’d be you.”
“What the fuck?” Foster glared hard.
Heat flooded my face.
Jason shrugged, not caring that he had opened a can of worms that no one was prepared for. “Stating a fact.”
“That’s an opinion,” Waylon said. He was focused on his food, frowning hard at it like it had managed to offend him somehow.
“I don’t think so.”
I woke with a cry, my pillow soaked. That had been the moment everything changed. It wasn’t a fast change, but if I had to point to a moment that led to our relationship, it would have been that one. It had been decades since I thought about my time with the guys. I had pushed it so far down that my brain had tried to purge some of them.
Berry made a mewling sound before licking at my face, his rough tongue taking the tears away. I’m here.
I snuggled into him. “I know. You’re always there for me.”
I refuse to go anywhere.
“Good. I can’t lose you. I can’t lose more of my loved ones.”
Want to talk about it? I can pretend to listen and understand.
An involuntary snort escaped me, and I giggled. “Berry, we both know you can’t do either of those things.
True. But it does not hurt to try.
“But it does hurt,” I whispered, pressing my face into his neck. He smelled of fresh magic, my nose tickling in response. “It always hurts when it comes to them.”
Jahandi was right. This is dangerous for your heart. You know nothing can happen, right. You have to return to Faerie. There is no other option. It would be unfair to you and to those men if you try to do anything with them.
“I know. I do know. Doesn’t make it easier. I didn’t think they’d be here. We grew up in this tiny little town in Idaho. How the heck did all three of them make it here?” Moaning, I rolled onto my back and scrubbed at my face. My eyes were crusty. It was still morni
ng and I’d managed only three hours of sleep. I needed more to restore my energy. The city was going to break me at this rate, and I hadn’t even been here for forty-eight hours. “Fate is playing a cruel joke on me.”
She can be almost as cruel as Faerie. The only difference with her is that she has a real purpose to what she does.
“And what’s her purpose this time?” I snapped. “To dangle what could have been over me.”
I cannot speak for her. You can only keep moving forward to find out.
I huffed before forcing myself out of bed. I didn’t have time to dawdle. I needed to focus on my assignment. Laikynn was my number one concern, not the fact that the guys were so close to me.
“Work. We need to work. We need to focus.”
I am always focused.
Smiling, I patted his head before climbing out of bed. It was way too big, even with Berry there to help take up space.
I went to the phone and dialed the front desk.
“Hello, this is Thomas. How may I be of service?”
“Thomas, this is Joslyn.”
“Hello, Ms. Naevana. How may I assist you?”
“Where can I go to get a cell phone?” I tried to act embarrassed. “I dropped mine in the tub last night. Tried reading on it while taking a bath.”
“Oh! If you tell me the make and model, I can have it arranged for one to be sent to you. We have a special deal set up with a vendor.”
“Really?” I stared at the phone. Was it really that easy?
“Of course.”
“Oh, okay. Whatever latest product there is.”
That led to a conversation about brands, most of it I didn’t understand. He promised to take care of me before hanging up.
“That was over the top, wasn’t it?”
Faerie caters to all your needs. This is no different.
“There is a difference though.”
You are a queen. There is no difference.
I rolled my eyes and ordered room service before taking a shower. By the time I got out, Berry was at the door, his long tongue hanging out.
“What is it?”
I smell food.
I rolled my eyes and opened the door. Zack stood there with a cart of food. Ever since my arrival, I had been ordering an insane amount of food. Ham was my favorite, with bacon a close second. Human food. Food I hadn’t tasted in so long.
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