Page 4 of Fae Unleashed
We stood, leaning on either side of the kitchen island, and quietly sipped our drinks. I wanted to ask him about his history with Delphine. I wanted to ask what happened the day Beryl attacked the Seelie Court. Nothing came out of my mouth. I grew restless until I had to turn away and start making food.
The rhythmic chopping of vegetables helped settle my mind. When I scrambled eggs in a bowl, it allowed me to vent a bit of the frustration that’d been building in my muscles. I breathed a sigh of relief. This couldn’t have been the healthiest coping mechanism, but it was all I had for now.
I couldn’t really afford therapy when I had to replace floor to ceiling windows every couple of months.
“You…” Rhoan started and stopped.
I glanced over my shoulder at him. His attention was on my back. His brow furrowed, a dismal light in his eyes as he grimaced. I stopped what I was doing.
Rhoan came around the kitchen island. With a gentle fingertip, he pulled the back of my tank top aside. His fingertips grazed my skin and made me shiver, my breath rushing out from between my lips.
My excitement soon died.
“You have an Unseelie mark on your back,” Rhoan said quietly, like there was someone in the room who could overhear us.
Though my stomach dropped, I gave an unaffected shrug and asked why it mattered. Inside, I was freaking out. A part of me knew why it mattered, but I wanted to act like it didn’t. I wasn’t going to become Beryl, no matter what anyone said.
Rhoan’s expression was still bound by grim thoughts. I shrugged away from his touch. The fabric fell back over my now-sensitive skin. I was too aware of my shoulder and the mark. It burned like a mark of shame.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I told him as I poured the chopped vegetables into a frying pan.
“While you’re right, not everyone is going to see it that way.”
I spun on him. “Why does everyone make so many cruel judgements? Are the fae really that mean? Do they take one look at a person and assume they know everything about them on sight?”
The way he lifted his brows and tilted his head told meyes, they really do.I cursed under my breath and buried my face in my hands. Rhoan gently grabbed my wrists and pulled my hands away.
“We’ll break this curse. I’m sure there’s a way. After you finish cooking, go read those books you took from the Seelie castle. The castle gave them to you for a reason. The answer has to be in there.”
With a sigh, I nodded in agreement. My hands shook as I stirred the eggs into the sauteed vegetables, but it wasn’t like I needed a steady hand for this. When I turned inward, I could feel the red-tinged blossoms swaying in the garden of my arcana. Beryl’s blight spread, but it didn’t destroy. It just…changed me.
So, I poured the food onto the plates with shaky hands. Rhoan said nothing when he scooped some of his eggs off the counter and dumped them back onto the plate. He quietly grabbed hot sauce from the fridge and handed it to me.
I looked up at him doing his best to be steady as a rock. He avoided my gaze, but I could see the steel set of his jaw and how it reflected in the way he moved around me. The man refused to show just how bothered he was by this mark. He kept it all under wraps, perhaps to show me that everything would be all right.
Curled up with the second book I’d taken from the Seelie alchemical laboratory, I said a quiet thanks for Rhoan in my life.
3
CERRI
Ihadn’t been able to get anything out of the book. This book wasn't nearly as helpful as the one I'd used to craft an antidote for my shifter family after they'd ingested poisonous fae wine and food. That’d been full of my biological father's well-researched notes, but this second book was written in a code that my biological father hadn’t been able to crack. It seemed that whoever had written the second book wanted to keep their secrets all to themselves.
Which left me rather annoyed at work two days later. I’d spent most of my mental energy on dissecting the books. Now that there was a line out the door at the café, I was struggling to keep up. I’d broken two blenders and dropped an entire coffee on the floor.
The blight in my arcana threatened to spread further and further. Half of my attention was on keeping the blight contained so it couldn’t feed on the anger festering inside me. I found myself pulled in too many directions. There wasn’t enough of me to go around.
Customers asked me to rush. The bell over the door chimed again and again. Another cup slipped out of my grasp.
I wanted it to all stop. Every part of me clenched tight. My teeth ground against one another. If I didn’t scream soon, I would combust and turn into a pile of ashes.
Or, my arcana would go feral.
The door opened. The chime of the bell shook my skull. I dropped what I was holding and pressed my hands to the sides of my head as I hissed in pain. Then…all the light in the world vanished.
The light returned, but I was on the floor in a puddle of coffee. The café had emptied. Instead of people, the interior was filled with red leaves and flowers. They covered the walls and hung over the front counter.
Audra was going to kill me.
