Page 13 of Renegade Queen

It was only then that I realised my mouth hung open in surprise. How could it not? It wasn’t every day you saw a woman floating in the air.

“I…” and I had nothing else to follow up with.

What the fuck was the appropriate thing to say in this sort of situation?

“Still not wrapped your brain around the whole magic thing yet?” she asked.

Alyssa slowly lowered to the ground before taking a step closer to me. Everything in my body wanted me to step back. But I held my ground. It wasn’t like this was a test or anything, but I could see a vulnerability in her eyes, and something about it bothered me.

“This is… what were you doing?”

“Bathing in the moonlight.”

She made it sound so obvious that I started questioning my own sanity for not understanding what was happening here.

“It helps recharge my magic,” she filled in. “Without access to Nymeria, it fades over time.”

“Nymeria?”

“It’s the name of the land in the fae realm,” she explained. “Can’t call everything fae; it would get confusing.”

I felt the corner of my mouth tick up with a repressed smile as I scrambled with what to say. I wasn’t the one out of our group to stand around chatting up women. I was the one who stormed into places demanding explanations. In other words, I was the fuck-up who pissed everyone else off, and the others tended to get what we needed as they fixed the mess I’d left behind. Story of my fucking life.

“Will you help us?” I blurted out, feeling weirdly awkward about the whole thing for the first time in my life.

“Help you kill yourselves? No.”

She turned around, reached out toward the plants nearest her, and ran her fingers through the leaves. I heard her sad sigh as she wandered through them, touching each of the plants as if trying to reassure them.

“I’ll go,” she eventually said. “But the rest of you will need to stay behind. If I can find Damon, I’ll bring him back. But you need to prepare yourself for the worst.”

Yeah, there was no way that was going to happen, but at least it was a step in the right direction.

“Why did you leave? If you need to be in Nymeria to keep your magic charged, why would you come here?”

“It wasn’t exactly voluntary.”

“So, you’re a criminal, then?”

“If merely existing is against some law, then yeah, I suppose I am.”

She was so relaxed in this place, walking amongst her plants, and part of me resented her for that. I wanted to see her fire. I wanted her to push back, to shout, to feel. This wasn’t the woman who’d told the general to go fuck himself in the bar last night.

“So going back there isn’t exactly going to be safe for you either?”

I didn’t know why it bothered me. Currently, I was going to lie to myself and pretend that it was because she wouldn’t be able to see the mission through to the end. If Alyssa was running for her own life, then how the hell was she going to go about saving Damon? The fact that I was so concerned about that pissed me off. She was an outsider. She wasn’t part of our family. So why was I considering her safety and putting it over the mission to get my brother?

“It wouldn’t be safe for me, but I know my way around. I have enough magic to protect myself if needed, and I can at least slip through without raising any suspicions.”

“You all keep saying that, but what do you mean?”

“You’re human,” she started.

“I’m aware.” I couldn’t stop it from slipping out, and at first, I winced at how much of an ass I could be. But then she glanced over her shoulder at me and smiled, and I felt it. This was going to get messy.

“Nymeria is full of magic, and everyone who lives there can sense it. It’s like a background hum that you don’t even notice. Until it isn’t there, and then it’s like the silence is screaming at you. It’s a void that turns into a physical ache. Plus, humans smell weird,” she tacked on the end.

I was like a moth to her light at that point. She looked so beautiful moving between her plants as she taught me about a world I never even knew existed.

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