Licking my lips, trying to get the bad taste out of my mouth, I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around. Tears stung my eyes when I saw Kimber curled up on a poofy chair, her nose buried in an ancient-looking book that probably weighed as much as I did. She was so absorbed in the book she didn’t even notice me moving.
“I see you’re doing a little light reading,” I croaked, then cleared my throat as Kimber jumped and squealed, the book sliding off her lap and hitting the floor with a thump.
She put her hand to her chest and took a deep breath. “You scared the crap out of me!” she scolded.
Leave it to Kimber to get all absorbed in a book that looked like it had been printed in the 1800s. Yeah, looks could be deceiving in Faerie, but Kimber was enough of a brainiac that she read stuff like Shakespeare for pleasure.
“Sorry,” I said insincerely. “Go ahead and finish your book. I’ll just sit here quietly and wait.” To demonstrate my determination, I pushed myself up into a sitting position, and found the effort left me panting. I also noticed for the first time that someone had cleaned me up and put a flannel nightshirt on me. Oh, God, I hoped it hadn’t been the Erlking! I remembered him taking off my shoes.
“Take it easy,” Kimber said, and I blinked in surprise to find her sitting on the edge of my bed. She’d been clear across the room last time I looked.
“How did you get here so fast?” I muttered, and I sounded incoherent even to my own ears.
“You’re having a kind of magic hangover,” Kimber explained. “You’ll be sleeping and spacing out a lot for the next day or so. You must have used a buttload of magic. I’ve never seen anyone have it this bad. Not even Ethan when he’s showboated himself into exhaustion.”
I rubbed my crusty eyes, wondering how much Kimber knew about what had happened. Did she know I’d killed Henry? And how I’d killed him?
“Are you all right?” I asked her, because I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers to my other questions.
“In the state you’re in, you’re asking me if I’m all right?”
“Well, I had some pretty major doubts when you were captured and hauled back here!”
She made a face. “Sorry. Right. I’m fine. Everyone’s fine. They weren’t exactly nice to us, but they didn’t hurt us or anything. We were just locked up for a while is all.”
“Does ‘everyone’ include my dad and Finn?”
“Yeah, they’re fine, too.” There was something just slightly false in her tone, and it gave me a chill.
“Tell me the truth!” I demanded.
“Well, aren’t you the cranky patient?”
“Please, Kimber. Tell me what’s going on.”
“They’re fine,” she said, sounding more convincing this time. “They had a rough time of it while we were gone, but they’re fine now.”
I swallowed hard, trying not to imagine just what kind of “rough time” they’d been having. I might have hoped Titania would be at least a little attached to my dad and might not want to hurt him. After all, they’d been together more than a century, and they had a kid. But the fact that she’d been sleeping with the Erlking told me just how sentimental she was.
“You know coming after us when you could have used the brooch to get away was probably one of the stupidest moves in the history of mankind,” Kimber said. “You might want to avoid your dad for the next year or two until he’s had a chance to calm down.”
Great. I’d come back and saved everyone, and my dad was mad at me for it. Not that I was surprised, mind you. I think it’s in the parental rule book somewhere that you have to get mad at your kids if they do something dangerous, even if it’s the right thing to do and everything turns out well in the end.
“I couldn’t just run away and leave you all behind,” I said. “I couldn’t have lived with that. Maybe coming back was stupid, but I’d do it again in a heartbeat.” And I refused to feel bad about it.
Kimber winced. “I suggest you not say that to your dad. Or to Finn. Or to the boys, for that matter.”
“But my saying it doesn’t bother you?” I had a feeling that wasn’t a good thing, and the look on Kimber’s face confirmed it.
“We’ll talk when you’re all better.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. “Kimber—”
“Don’t!” she snapped. “We’re not doing this now.” She sounded really angry, but her eyes were kind of shiny, like she was about to cry.
I guess that answered my question about whether she’d forgiven me. Every secret I’d kept, I’d kept with good reason. At least, what I’d thought was a good reason at the time. Looking back, I wasn’t so sure.
“Can I at least say I’m sorry?” I asked.
“You don’t actually believe words will make it better, do you?”
No, I didn’t. I’d told too many lies for my words to have much meaning. I wanted to point out that my coming back to the palace after she and the others were captured spoke louder than any words, but I didn’t. Tears burned my eyes. Maybe I saved my friends’ lives, but that didn’t make me any less of a screw-up. I wasn’t good friend material, not when I was biologically incapable of trust and honesty.
Kimber was the only real friend I’d ever had, the only one I’d had more than the most superficial relationship with. The thought that I might lose her friendship, that I might already have lost it, hurt more than the bullet wound and the bone-deep gash on my palm combined.
My throat ached and my nose got all stuffy as I fought to contain tears. I was always reluctant to cry in front of anyone. My mom cried at the drop of a hat, using her tears as a tool to get sympathy whenever she’d done something stupid or irresponsible. She cried so that you’d rush in with reassurances and tell her everything was going to be all right, so that you’d somehow end up apologizing for being mad at her when she was the one who’d been in the wrong. I was not going to be like that.
I looked into Kimber’s stony face, saw how she sat with her arms crossed over her chest in what I knew was a defensive posture, and realized I was doing it again. Hiding things from her, then justifying myself with reasoning that couldn’t withstand close examination.
Was I really trying to put on a “brave” face and pretend that losing Kimber’s friendship wouldn’t hurt me? Was that the message I wanted to send her? Was that what she deserved?
I let the tears fall, and once they started, I couldn’t get them to stop. Too much had happened, and I’d been putting on the brave face for too long. I’d hurt my best friend. I’d killed a man. And I’d abandoned Elizabeth when I could have helped her. Each decision had felt like the right one at the time, but I was far from sure now. These weren’t the kinds of decisions I should be having to make, not at my age! My decisions shouldn’t determine who lived and who died, who was protected and who was thrown to the wolves. My most earth-shattering decision right now should be which colleges to apply to in the fall, not whether letting my best friend in on a secret might get me or her killed.
Kimber sighed and gave me a hug. That made me cry even harder. This was exactly why I hadn’t wanted to let myself cry in the first place. I didn’t want to manipulate Kimber into forgiving me.
“I-I’m sorry,” I choked out through my tight throat, meaning I was sorry I was sniveling all over her, but I couldn’t get a deep enough breath to say the whole thing.
“I know,” she said softly, still hugging me. “I’m sorry, too. I can’t even imagine going through everything you’ve been through.” She was a far better friend than I deserved.
Eventually, the tears began to dry up and Kimber let go of me. She didn’t leave, though, instead sitting quietly on the bed beside me, waiting for the hiccuping to finish. I felt even more tired now than I had when I’d first woken up, the crying jag stealing the last of my energy. I think I even did one of those magic-hangover space-outs somewhere along the way, because my face went from being damp with tears to bone-dry in the blink of an eye.
“You still nee
d a lot of rest,” Kimber said, her voice startling me out of yet another daze.
I blinked and shook my head. “I’m fine,” I said automatically, despite how heavy my eyelids felt. I didn’t want to just blubber all over Kimber’s shoulder and then take a nap.
“Go to sleep,” Kimber ordered. “I’ll still be here when you wake up.”
“Really?” I asked, managing to sound hopeful and skeptical all at once.
She snorted. “You don’t think I’m letting you off that easy, do you? You’ve got lots more gut-spilling to do, and you can’t do it in the state you’re in. So sleep, already.”
My eyes slid shut despite my best efforts to keep them open.
* * *
Kimber was wrong. She wasn’t still there when I woke up.
I awakened to the unfamiliar feel of an arm wrapped around my waist and a warm body snuggled up against my back. I went from sound asleep to wide awake in the space between heartbeats, my breath catching in my lungs.
I knew without having to look that it was Ethan. Maybe it was just a natural guess—who else would be cuddled up on the bed with me?—or maybe there was something about the feel or the scent of him that gave him away. Whatever it was, I was lying in bed with him, his whole body pressed up against mine, and the sensation was both exhilarating and terrifying.
I held absolutely still, not wanting the moment to end. As long as we lay still and quiet, there were no complications, and I could just enjoy the warmth and comfort of his body. If he knew I was awake, he might go and ruin things by giving me his version of the lecture on why I shouldn’t have come back.
I wondered why he was in my room and Kimber was gone. I imagined my dad was insisting I be under twenty-four-hour guard, but I wouldn’t have thought Ethan would get a shift. There was no way my dad would trust Ethan that far. He was the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse.
Ethan shifted behind me, pressing closer, nuzzling my neck. “I know you’re awake,” he murmured against my skin, and the feel of his lips made me break out in goose bumps.
So much for lying still and quiet.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, then wanted to bop myself for it. It was pretty obvious what he was doing as he brushed light kisses all the way up the side of my neck. I wanted to rephrase the question in a way that made sense, but my thoughts were too scrambled.
The hand at my waist slipped under the edge of my nightshirt, touching the sensitive skin of my lower belly. Cue more goose bumps. And I had to remind myself to breathe.
“You freed me,” Ethan whispered right in my ear as he worked his hand farther up under the night shirt.
Right, I remembered in a flash. I’d made a new deal with the Erlking, and so Ethan and I were free to …
But surely he didn’t mean to take advantage of that freedom now. I was still recuperating. And I wasn’t ready to go from doing nothing but some heavy kissing to going all the way.
Ethan’s hand stilled on my stomach. “Don’t tell me you think I’m such an asshole that I’m planning to jump you here in your sickbed.”
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Guess my trust issues were showing again. Then again, Ethan was a teenaged boy, and I knew he’d earned his reputation as a player fair and square.
I squirmed around so I could face him. He was as gorgeous as he’d been the first time I’d met him, the blue stag gone from his face, along with any sign of the hideous burn. His eyes weren’t the same, were older and wiser and more serious, but at least he was free. I reached up and touched his face where the mark had been, marveling at the softness of his skin.
“When I wake up and find you in my bed with your hand up my shirt, you can’t blame me for making certain assumptions,” I said tartly.
Ethan grinned at me. “I didn’t put my hand up your shirt until after you were awake,” he reminded me, and I couldn’t stifle a bit of a laugh as I rolled my eyes at him.
“A technicality.”
His grin faded as he leaned down to brush a soft kiss on my lips, pulling back quickly before either of us could catch fire. “I know my reputation,” he said. “And I know I earned it. Once upon a time, I probably would have tried to take advantage of the situation. But I’m not that guy anymore.”
Maybe I was veering too far to the other end of the trust-o-meter, but I believed him. “So putting your hand up my shirt isn’t taking advantage?” I asked, but I smiled to let him know I was teasing.
“All depends where that hand ends up, doesn’t it?”
Right now, it rested right at the bottom of my rib cage, the thumb stroking idly back and forth. The touch was hot and soothing all at once.
“So what are you doing here, really?” I asked. “I can’t believe my dad or any of the rest of the crew would leave you alone in a bedroom with me.”
He made an exaggerated face of innocence. “I can’t imagine why not.”
“Ethan…”
“Kimber was here to watch over you,” he said. “I threatened to do something unpleasant to Keane if she didn’t give us some alone time. She threatened to do something even more unpleasant to me if I didn’t behave like a gentleman.” He shuddered theatrically. “You won’t tell her about the hand-up-the-shirt thing, will you? Because I think we’ll both end up missing the parts she removes with a rusty spoon if she finds out.”
I laughed and blushed at the same time. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
To show his appreciation of my restraint, he bent down and kissed me until all my thoughts and fears retreated.
* * *
I don’t remember falling asleep again, but I must have, because when I next opened my eyes, it was dark out and Kimber was back on guard duty. She was reading another huge tome—its binding green instead of red, so I knew it was a different book—this time sitting on the bed beside me with her back propped up against the wall. I tried to be quiet about it as I sat up and yawned, not wanting to startle her as I’d done earlier.
I felt better. I was stiff and achy from too much time in bed, but my mind felt a whole lot clearer. My stomach rumbled loudly, reminding me that it had been at least twenty-four hours since I’d last eaten.
Kimber put her book aside. “Sleeping Beauty awakens,” she said.
I responded with an unladylike snort. I didn’t want to know what I looked like right now, but I figured I was more likely to break mirrors than win over Prince Charming. I rubbed at my gritty eyes and tried a tentative stretch. I really wished the Fae had coffee, because I sure could have used some.
“How are you feeling?” Kimber asked.
“Alive.” That was the best I could say about my condition at the moment.
“Oh, good. I wasn’t looking forward to dragging your corpse down to the caravan in the morning.”
“Huh?”
“We’re leaving. First thing in the morning, whether you’re up to it or not. I’m not quite sure if Titania kicked us out, or if your dad just decided it was time to go. Strangely, people don’t seem to want a one-woman killing machine around.”
Well, that answered the question of whether my friends knew what I did to Henry. I guess if I were an immortal Fae, I wouldn’t want to be around someone like me, either.
“Your dad hired some locals to provide horses and supplies,” Kimber continued. “We don’t get a royal escort this time.”
I grimaced. “Considering what happened the last time we had a royal escort, I’d say that’s a good thing.”
“Couldn’t agree more. Now get out of bed and get washed up and dressed. You need to stuff some food down your gullet and regain some strength. After that, your dad wants to talk to you.” Her grin was almost evil. “I think you’re grounded until the sun explodes.”
I had a feeling that once we got back to Avalon, I was going to be spending a lot of time in my safe house. That would get old fast, I knew, but right now, I’d have liked nothing better than to be curled up in my own bed.
“There’s no place li
ke home,” I murmured under my breath, and wished for some ruby slippers.
My knees almost buckled when I got out of the bed. Kimber reached out to steady me, but my knees firmed up before I did a face-plant.
“Wow,” I said. “I’m worse off than I thought.” And tomorrow, I got to go horseback riding. Oh, joy.
“You’ll feel better after you’ve eaten. The magic hangover is hitting you extra hard because you’re half-starved.”
My stomach roared in agreement, but I wasn’t quite ready to get moving yet. Kimber was acting like her normal self, but I couldn’t help wondering if she was just being nice to me until I got better.
“So, um, are you still speaking to me?” I asked.
She crossed her arms over her chest and narrowed her eyes at me. “Yeah, I’m still speaking to you. I’m going to be speaking to you a lot over the next few days.”
She looked angry and implacable, and I knew her words were meant to be something like a threat. But I had to fight off a smile anyway. I’d happily listen to as many stern lectures as she wanted to give, as long as she stayed my friend.
chapter twenty-seven
I avoided going to see my dad for as long as I could. I mean, yeah, I wanted to see him, wanted to assure myself with my own two eyes that he was okay. Facing his anger was a whole other question.
I followed Kimber’s directions to a little sitting room where every horizontal surface that wasn’t a seat was covered with bowls of fruit, or pastries, or bread. There was also a vast selection of different teas, and a steaming pitcher of water. Even not being a tea fan, I made myself a cup, wanting some liquid to wash the food down with.
While my tea was steeping, I put together a plate of the most recognizable of the fruits along with a thick slice of bread and some kind of turnover. When I sat down on one of the chairs with my plate on my lap and reached for my tea, I saw that the water pitcher was still filled to the brim and steaming.