Page 7 of My Faire Lady

My hair falls around my shoulders, and I narrow my eyes. “You told the sprites to make her trip into me, didn’t you?”

“My conversations with the sprites are very confidential,” he says, a master of wordplay and misdirection—unable to lie.

I steeple my fingers over the bridge of my nose. “No more meddling, please. We have more important things to worry about, like the fact that we could lose this place. She won’t call, I’ll never see her again, and nothing could even happen between us. I’m tied to this place. You and I both know that.”

He eyes the drawer housing my postcards. “If you could leave, would you?”

“Of course not. Even if my blood wasn’t tied to the magic, I couldn’t leave all of you. You’re my family.”

Setting the plate on the coffee table, he fixes me with a knowing look. “You’re an adult now, Scarlet. Twenty-seven. When your mother was your age, she wasn’t in charge of the grounds yet. She had the luxury of seeing the world and finding someone she loved—someone who agreed to return here with you. You never had that opportunity.”

“I don’t want that opportunity.”

He rests a hand on my shoulder, and I stop myself from jerking away. It’s strange, having a father figure that hasn’t aged past twenty-two.

“I don’t need to read your thoughts to know you’re lying.” His blue eyes sparkle in the low light. “You have magic flowing through your veins—woven into the air you breathe and the steps you take. It’s easy, when you have that power, to think you can control everything that happens in your life. But fate works in strange ways, Scarlet. And if the magic is leaving this land, perhaps it’s not the worst thing that could happen.”

My mouth falls open, and I twist in my chair. “It is entirely the worst thing that could happen. We don’t know what would happen if the magic left. Creatures could get sick, or they could all be at risk of being discovered.” I lean toward him, gritting my teeth. “They could die.”

Even the mere thought of the land losing magic drills a hole through my chest—thins the oxygen in my lungs.

He shakes his head and blows out a long breath. “Your ancestors did everything they could, but that was a thousand years ago.” Standing from the couch, he collects his plate, then mine. “Our kind survived solely because of what the Murrell witches did during the war on magic, but maybe it’s time you put yourself first. Most of us are nearly immortal, and we’ve lived dozens of lifetimes. Some of us are tired. But this life is the only one you get.”

“It’s not that easy,” I say between clenched teeth.

“But it is.” He pauses at the door and looks over his shoulder. “She’s going to call.”

I lift a brow, and my hand curls in my lap. My thumb traces over my knuckles, cracking them one at a time. “How do you know?”

“I may or may not have sorted through her thoughts.” His face splits into a guilty half-moon smile. “She’s worried about a lot of things, apparently. You mortals are always so worried. But at the forefront of her mind, all she could focus on was the way your arm felt around her waist.”

Heat blooms in my chest, but I shove it back, burying it with the other emotions this life cannot allow. “She’s not going to call.”

“I can’t lie, remember? And I would never get your hopes up for nothing.” He shrugs and wraps a hand around the door handle. “Her name is Lottie, by the way, and she was fascinated by your eyes.”

The door clicks shut, and my tongue turns to cotton—a lead weight in my jaw.

Lottie.

Nesbit weaves around my bedroom door and hops onto my bed. It’s not even eight in the evening, but my eyelids hang heavy, my mind exhausted from the mental toll of the day. Tomorrow, I’ll come up with a plan to save the faire—to make enough money to pay the property taxes. Somehow.

The government issued letter stares at me from the desk, but I pull the string on the lamp and send the room into darkness.

Laughter bubbles under the crack in my window, filling the empty slivers of my body as I stand from the desk and pad toward my bedroom. The four poster bed greets me, and as I settle beneath the sheets, the laughter turns into songs, chanties, ballads in languages far removed from present day. This place is my home, the creatures my family.

A small part of me craves adventure, but I can’t sacrifice everything the Murrell line fought for.

My thoughts quiet and wander to wide brown eyes, the challenge on her pursed lips as she mocked Boden. And before my tired eyes flutter shut, I ease myself out of bed and grab my phone from the desk. Crawling back under my duvet, I tuck it beneath my pillow.

4

Ishove another fistful of popcorn into my mouth while Kelsey sits on the ground, her back curled as she applies another coat of red nail polish to her fingernails.

“Do you ever wish you had gone to college?” she asks over the horror movie we’ve watched hundreds of times.

I swallow, but the popcorn goes down dry. “What do you mean?”

She blows on her nails and turns to me. “I know you didn’t go so you could take care of grandma, but she passed last year.”