Page 33 of Fae Farewells

I trusted them with more of me than anyone else, except maybe Jack. And gods, did I miss that demon. But it wasn’t right to compare them to what I had with Jack. He had been in my life forever, as my best friend and brother.

What if all the comparisons I’d done in the last month were based on shit like that?

Why was I comparing these relationships to anything at all?

There was nothing else like the bonds between my mates and me. Every bond was different. Nothing and no one could tell us how this worked. Sure, they could guess or speculate... It still wasn’t the same.

That made me wonder what I was doing right by them, or if I cared at all. I had to care if I was thinking about it, though. Was there anything I could work on? I didn’t want to change, per se, but I could alter destructive behavior. A little. Or try to.

Communication was already on that list. And so was trust. According to Vaughn, I needed to treat them as being equal to me. He did have a point. I was on the same level as those crazy helicopter Karens making sure their kids didn’t eat sugar or, you know, act like a kid.

Fuck.

Did I really even know right from wrong?

Had I fucked up more than I knew?

Maybe I was wearing rose-colored goggles or glasses or whatever that saying was. The important part was I understood the meaning.

And I was pretty positive at least half of my actions were right, even if I didn’t go about them in the right way.

I would never be the hero.

I wasn’t the villain either.

It was okay to not be a good person. There was a middle ground between good and bad, black and white. I was morally compromised, living in the darker portion of that gray area.

I liked it... But was this truly the path I was supposed to take with my life?

Did I have to do the save the world bullshit?

I didn’t want to, not that anyone cared or appreciated the effort. It was yet another thing that was making me begin to doubt myself.

Most of these things wouldn’t normally matter to me, so why did they now?

None of it mattered as far as short-term problems went.

I knew I needed to get my shit together so I could rescue my fae, my parents, and the rest of this cold ass realm.

Though, apparently, the entire world wasn’t cold…

Again, it didn’t matter.

After all the mental tug-of-war going on, that strange presence disappeared. I could feel the last dredges of something slither out of my mental walls. But I didn’t know how long it would last, and that thought made me shiver.

“You okay, Love?” Palmer asked, tuning me back into our surroundings.

“I was just thinking—” I stopped talking, stopped walking, stopped breathing as I looked at all the damage around us.

“This used to be a village,” I whispered, appalled at what we were seeing. “Those are bones.”

“This is Anahein’s doing,” Sarge confirmed.

Instead of feeling the heartbreak to its fullest, more of that familiar anger built within me.

More frustration.

More conviction.