Desert Tales

  Rika moved close enough that Maili could reach her.

  Predictably, Maili swung; Rika blocked her punch.

  “It’ll ache every day,” Rika whispered. “You’ll beg for it to stop.”

  “You can’t . . .” Maili looked stricken, increasingly panicked.

  “You broke mortals for sport after Sionnach told you to stop; you stabbed him; you offered me to Keenan . . . you offered them”—Rika gestured at the faeries in the street—“as pawns to him.”

  Sionnach tightened his grip on Maili’s topknot. “Do any of you want to speak for her? Ask mercy? Offer yourself in her stead? Challenge us?”

  The faeries shook their heads, and some said “no.”

  One of the faeries who was Maili’s cohort previously asked, “What terms mercy?”

  Rika gave Maili a pleading look, hoping to convey what she couldn’t in words without undercutting her own authority and Sionnach’s too. If Maili tried to adhere to the terms before her, she could end her punishment sooner; doing so only required humility and admission of wrongdoing. “Listen well to the Winter Queen,” Rika urged. “She has the power to set you free. Since she is my regent, I must listen to her decisions. If she decides you are suitably punished, you can come h—”

  Maili’s snarl cut off Rika’s words.

  At Sionnach’s gesture, several faeries stepped forward and took Maili.

  “Take her to the edge of the desert,” he said. “Rika’s queen will have an escort waiting for her.”

  And at that, Maili was led away.

  Afterward, the faeries slowly broke off into small groups. Some talked; others simply left in silence. They’d seen the punishment that their Alphas would mete out to those who didn’t follow the rules, and it was enough incentive for them to fall into order as they’d never before done. No one who was a solitary wanted to be given to a court, and no one who chose a life in the desert wanted to be sent to the Winter Court’s abode.

  After they had all left, Rika and Sionnach sat on a porch, backs to the battered building, silent and watching the crowd as the sky darkened. A coyote crept across the desert in shadow, and stars blinked to life. There were dozens of things that Rika considered saying, chastisements and compliments, but this wasn’t the time. He was her partner, and they’d found ways to set things to rights in their home. She wasn’t about to forget that he’d manipulated her, and he wasn’t liable to ignore the fact that his co-Alpha was also subject to a queen.

  “Are we all right?” he asked softly.

  “We will be.”

  They exchanged a smile and looked out together over their kingdom.

  Not long afterward, Rika walked through town alone, letting the faeries see her, making eye contact with them. She smiled; she nodded. She didn’t stop to chitchat; instead, she walked with an authority that they recognized—the sort of authority she once wore as the Winter Girl, the sort Sionnach had been asking her to exert here for years. She passed the skate park and the club. By then, faeries had gathered and begun to follow her.

  Finally, she turned and walked into the open desert. Here were the even less-human-looking faeries; they, too, were watching her. Rika moved purposefully, knowing that by now scores of faeries were trailing her at a distance. They walked, crept, and strolled across the expanse of desert like a mismatched platoon of troops marching to battle.

  And I will lead and protect them.

  EPILOGUE

  TWO YEARS LATER

  Rika watched Jayce talk to other students after his class. He didn’t know she was visiting; she’d wanted to surprise him. It was a strange feeling, looking at him this way. He seemed to laugh more freely when he was at his university campus, and as she watched him, she wondered if this was where they’d been meant to be all along: him living his normal life, the sort of life she never had, and her learning to let him go.

  “He still loves you,” a voice said.

  She turned to see the faery she’d been friends with longer than Jayce had lived. Sionnach’s smile was sad, but he didn’t have pity in his eyes.

  “I know he does.” Rika glanced back at Jayce. “He’s not going to be content to stay in a cave in the desert though. He hasn’t left me yet, but he doesn’t visit much any more. He wants his own family, to travel, more and more things I can’t give him. We talked about it last week again. That’s why I came to see him.”

  “Mortals,” Sionnach murmured. “Such confusing creatures.”

  “Says the faery who can’t seem to stop dating them,” Rika teased. “What’s the latest one’s name?”

  “I’ll let you know after the next party.” Sionnach draped his arm over her shoulders.

  Together they watched Jayce. He looked older after only two years, and his interests were changing so quickly. He’d been her first relationship in decades; truth be told, he was her first healthy relationship despite her having lived for well over a century. What she’d had with Keenan was a cruel game: he’d merely played a role so he could steal her mortality, and she’d spent years convincing other girls not to love him. Admittedly, the whole thing was because of a curse, but that didn’t change reality. Jayce, however, had loved her for who she was. Theirs was that innocent first love she’d wanted forever ago. It just took a while to find it.

  And the manipulation of a fox faery.

  After several more moments of comfortable silence, Sionnach asked, “What are you going to do?”

  Rika shook her head. “Miss him, I suspect. Hope he meets a mortal girl who makes him happy.”

  Sionnach nodded. “Sometimes, their changes are enough to make a faery stop wooing mortals.” He shot a sideways glance at her that she pretended not to see and then added, “I think about it, too.”

  “What?”

  “A family,” he murmured. “Things are calm now that the courts aren’t all in a mess.”

  “Someday, maybe.” She’d grown used to feigning ignorance with him.

  Of course, he’d grown just as accustomed to trying to be as blunt as possible without overtly saying what he really intended. “I could learn to like living in caves.”

  “True,” she agreed blandly.

  He laughed and flicked her with his tail.

  “Shy?”

  Once he looked at her, she asked, “When you first pushed me toward him, did you have another reason? Aside from luring me out of hiding?”

  Sionnach removed his arm from around her shoulders, but that was it. He was silent. More than a minute passed before he answered, “Most foxes mate for life, but sometimes a fox faery has to use a bit of . . . strategy to help his mate get ready for that.” He stepped in front of her and looked directly at her. “You were still mourning your mortal life, and I didn’t know how to give you what you needed to heal. Then, I saw Jayce. I watched you become more alive, and I knew that what you needed was to be with a mortal, to be the mortal you should’ve been if Keenan hadn’t picked you.”

  Rika realized that her lips had parted on a gasp. She’d known for a while that Sionnach had feelings for her, but not like this. “But you date mortals. A lot of them,” she objected.

  “I like them, and I got lonely while I was waiting for . . . my plans to work.” He looked strangely embarrassed then. “It took ages just to get you to see me as a friend, then finally as my partner as Alpha. If I’d walked up to you years ago and said, ‘Hello, do want to have a litter of my kits?’ you’d never have let me any closer.”

  There was no way to argue with that. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to run now. All she could say was, “You don’t do commitments.”

  “Because I chose my mate a very long time ago,” he corrected gently.

  “Oh.”

  He started to step away from her, but she grabbed his arm.

  “Wait,” she said. “I can’t do this now.” She took a breath before adding, “Not now.”

  The hurt in his expression was replaced with his familiar mischievous grin. In a falsely solemn tone, he asked, “Tuesday?
Or maybe Wednesday? I could wait a bit longer. Really, what’s a few days after decades?”

  Rika shook her head at him, but she was smiling. “And here I’d planned on trying to convince you to . . .”

  “To?” he prompted.

  “Distract me with your wit and charm,” she offered.

  “Just that?”

  And Rika laughed before admitting, “For starters.”

  “Finally getting started sounds good,” he said as he caught her hand in his.

  Excerpt from Wicked Lovely

  Read on to discover how

  WICKED LOVELY

  began:

  PROLOGUE

  The Summer King knelt before her. “Is this what you freely choose, to risk winter’s chill?”

  She watched him—the boy she’d fallen in love with these past weeks. She’d never dreamed he was something other than human, but now his skin glowed as if flames flickered just under the surface, so strange and beautiful she couldn’t look away. “It’s what I want.”

  “You understand that if you are not the one, you’ll carry the Winter Queen’s chill until the next mortal risks this? And you’ll warn her not to trust me?” He paused, glancing at her with pain in his eyes.

  She nodded.

  “If she refuses me, you will tell the next girl and the next”—he moved closer—“and not until one accepts, will you be free of the cold.”

  “I do understand.” She smiled as reassuringly as she could, and then she walked over to the hawthorn bush. The leaves brushed against her arms as she bent down and reached under it.

  Her finger wrapped around the Winter Queen’s staff. It was a plain thing, worn as if countless hands had clenched the wood. It was those hands, those other girls who’d stood where she now did, she didn’t want to think about.

  She stood, hopeful and afraid.

  Behind her, he moved closer. The rustling of trees grew almost deafening. The brightness from his skin, his hair, intensified. Her shadow fell on the ground in front of her.

  He whispered, “Please. Let her be the one. . . .”

  She held the Winter Queen’s staff—and hoped. For a moment she even believed, but then ice pierced her, filled her like shards of glass in her veins.

  She screamed his name: “Keenan!”

  She stumbled toward him, but he walked away, no longer glowing, no longer looking at her.

  Then she was alone—with only a wolf for companionship—waiting to tell the next girl what a folly it was to love him, to trust him.

  CHAPTER 1

  SEERS, or Men of the SECOND SIGHT, . . . have very terrifying Encounters with [the FAIRIES, they call Sleagh Maith, or the Good People].

  —The Secret Commonwealth by Robert Kirk

  and Andrew Lang (1893)

  “Four-ball, side pocket.” Aislinn pushed the cue forward with a short, quick thrust; the ball dropped into the pocket with a satisfying clack.

  Her playing partner, Denny, motioned toward a harder shot, a bank shot.

  She rolled her eyes. “What? You in a hurry?”

  He pointed with the cue.

  “Right.” Focus and control, that’s what it’s all about. She sank the two.

  He nodded once, as close as he got to praise.

  Aislinn circled the table, paused, and chalked the cue. Around her the cracks of balls colliding, low laughter, even the endless stream of country and blues from the jukebox kept her grounded in the real world: the human world, the safe world. It wasn’t the only world, no matter how much Aislinn wanted it to be. But it hid the other world—the ugly one—for brief moments.

  “Three, corner pocket.” She sighted down the cue. It was a good shot.

  Focus. Control.

  Then she felt it: warm air on her skin. A faery, its too-hot breath on her neck, sniffed her hair. His pointed chin pressed against her skin. All the focus in the world didn’t make Pointy-Face’s attention tolerable.

  She scratched: the only ball that dropped was the cue ball.

  Denny took the ball in hand. “What was that?”

  “Weak-assed?” She forced a smile, looking at Denny, at the table, anywhere but at the horde coming in the door. Even when she looked away, she heard them: laughing and squealing, gnashing teeth and beating wings, a cacophony she couldn’t escape. They were out in droves now, freer somehow as evening fell, invading her space, ending any chance of the peace she’d sought.

  Denny didn’t stare at her, didn’t ask hard questions. He just motioned for her to step away from the table and called out, “Gracie, play something for Ash.”

  At the jukebox Grace keyed in one of the few not-country-or-blues songs: Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff.”

  As the oddly comforting lyrics in that gravelly voice took off, building to the inevitable stomach-tightening rage, Aislinn smiled. If I could let go like that, let the years of aggression spill out onto the fey . . . She slid her hand over the smooth wood of the cue, watching Pointy-Face gyrate beside Grace. I’d start with him. Right here, right now. She bit her lip. Of course, everyone would think she was utterly mad if she started swinging her cue at invisible bodies, everyone but the fey.

  Before the song was over, Denny had cleared the table.

  “Nice.” Aislinn walked over to the wall rack and slid the cue back into an empty spot. Behind her, Pointy-Face giggled—high and shrill—and tore out a couple strands of her hair.

  “Rack ’em again?” But Denny’s tone said what he didn’t: that he knew the answer before he asked. He didn’t know why, but he could read the signs.

  Pointy-Face slid the strands of her hair over his face.

  Aislinn cleared her throat. “Rain check?”

  “Sure.” Denny began disassembling his cue. The regulars never commented on her odd mood swings or unexplainable habits.

  She walked away from the table, murmuring good-byes as she went, consciously not staring at the faeries. They moved balls out of line, bumped into people—anything to cause trouble—but they hadn’t stepped in her path tonight, not yet. At the table nearest the door, she paused. “I’m out of here.”

  One of the guys straightened up from a pretty combination shot. He rubbed his goatee, stroking the gray-shot hair. “Cinderella time?”

  “You know how it is—got to get home before the shoe falls off.” She lifted her foot, clad in a battered tennis shoe. “No sense tempting any princes.”

  He snorted and turned back to the table.

  A doe-eyed faery eased across the room; bone-thin with too many joints, she was vulgar and gorgeous all at once. Her eyes were far too large for her face, giving her a startled look. Combined with an emaciated body, those eyes made her seem vulnerable, innocent. She wasn’t.

  None of them are.

  The woman at the table beside Aislinn flicked a long ash into an already overflowing ashtray. “See you next weekend.”

  Aislinn nodded, too tense to answer.

  In a blurringly quick move, Doe-Eyes flicked a thin blue tongue out at a cloven-hoofed faery. The faery stepped back, but a trail of blood already dripped down his hollowed cheeks. Doe-Eyes giggled.

  Aislinn bit her lip, hard, and lifted a hand in a last half wave to Denny. Focus. She fought to keep her steps even, calm: everything she wasn’t feeling inside.

  She stepped outside, lips firmly shut against dangerous words. She wanted to speak, to tell the fey to leave so she didn’t have to, but she couldn’t. Ever. If she did, they’d know her secret: they’d know she could see them.

  The only way to survive was to keep that secret; Grams taught her that rule before she could even write her name: Keep your head down and your mouth closed. It felt wrong to have to hide, but if she even hinted at such a rebellious idea, Grams would have her in lockdown—homeschooled, no pool halls, no parties, no freedom, no Seth. She’d spent enough time in that situation during middle school.

  Never again.

  So—rage in check—Aislinn headed downtown, toward the relative safety of iron bars
and steel doors. Whether in its base form or altered into the purer form of steel, iron was poisonous to fey and thus gloriously comforting to her. Despite the faeries that walked her streets, Huntsdale was home. She’d visited Pittsburgh, walked around D.C., explored Atlanta. They were nice enough, but they were too thriving, too alive, too filled with parks and trees. Huntsdale wasn’t thriving. It hadn’t been for years. That meant the fey didn’t thrive here either.

  Revelry rang from most of the alcoves and alleys she passed, but it wasn’t ever as bad as the thronging choke of faeries that cavorted on the Mall in D.C. or at the Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh. She tried to comfort herself with that thought as she walked. There were less fey here—less people, too.

  Less is good.

  The streets weren’t empty: people went about their business, shopping, walking, laughing. It was easier for them: they didn’t see the blue faery who had cornered several winged fey behind a dirty window; they never saw the faeries with lions’ manes racing across power lines, tumbling over one another, landing on a towering woman with angled teeth.

  To be so blind . . . It was a wish Aislinn had held in secret her whole life. But wishing didn’t change what was. And even if she could somehow stop seeing the fey, a person can’t un-know the truth.

  She tucked her hands in her pockets and kept walking, past the mother with her obviously exhausted children, past shop windows with frost creeping over them, past the frozen gray sludge all along the street. She shivered. The seemingly endless winter had already begun.

  She’d passed the corner of Harper and Third—almost there—when they stepped out of an alley: the same two faeries who’d followed her almost every day the past two weeks. The girl had long white hair, streaming out like spirals of smoke. Her lips were blue—not lipstick blue, but corpse blue. She wore a faded brown leather skirt stitched with thick cords. Beside her was a huge white wolf that she’d alternately lean on or ride. When the other faery touched her, steam rose from her skin. She bared her teeth at him, shoved him, slapped him: he did nothing but smile.