Page 149 of Gemini Wicked

Neo parks his glasses on his nose, then tucks up next to her and takes her hand. The kid looks worried but trusting.

“’Tis easier said than done, believe me. Else I would have banished the kraken already.” Sparrow zips up his dragonscale with a single fierce pull and reaches impatiently for his swords.

I pass him his gear and figure I better grab mine before he’s on the wing without me.

Curtly my guy warns, “Mordred thrives on unpredictability. His dead brother pursued me like a stalker. That obsession gave me the advantage. But Mordred is far more wary and clever. Thus, he has kept his distance.”

Zara leans forward, stubborn as heck. “Well, it’s a safe bet he shows up at the ball tonight, right? In, like, his Fae form? We can predict that much.”

“Yeah, if you wanna call that safe,” I mutter.

The loose curls start floating around our girl’s shoulders and her eyes light up with ultraviolet fire.

“So we trap that fucker in front of the entire Unseelie population. We flush out his allies and snuff out this whole insurrection against Zephyr’s reign on the spot. Once and for all. We do it at the ball, where he knows I’m gonna be, where he knows he’ll have his audience.”

“Geez Louise, princess,” I breathe. “For someone who doesn’t even know the guy, that’s one gutsy call you’re making.”

Her eyes lock on mine. “Yep.”

She even pops the P.

The balls on this girl.

Just in case I needed one more reminder why I fell for her.

Xhevith’s trumpeting bellow floats through the open window. Sure, he’s projecting what he picks up empathically from Sparrow.

But it’s clear as day she’s got that dragon wrapped around her glittery finger.

My girl’s determined gaze ricochets from face to face, every one of us circling her gravitational pull like planets around a sun. Her incandescent stare encompasses all of us and pulls us in. She makes us all part of the half-baked plan this wild princess of ours just cooked up before she’s even had her breakfast.

Even Maxim, who’s just hauled ass back in here, now wearing his jeans but still looking kinda damp, doesn’t say anything beyond a shifty growl of protest and a suspicious look out the window toward Xhev’s lair.

“There’s no time to fuck around. We gotta take care of this shit tonight,” our girl proclaims like the queen she is. “I mean it. So we better get started. Because tomorrow we’ve got finals back at Icarus. That Horn of Ceres won’t wait. And neither will Cleo.”

Chapter Thirty-One

Zara

I’ve been a lotta things in my short but scandalous life.

Runaway kid.

Cat burglar.

Student witch.

Rebel queen.

But I’ve never been a fairy princess. That’s a new one.

Despite all my badassery, which I’ve been really leaning into all day to keep myself and my whole group in the right headspace, my heart thunders like a kettledrum under my dragonscale party dress as Xhevith descends from cruising altitude and wings in for a landing over Party Central.

The Faerie Ball.

In a moonless night (which is a totally different phase than the moon at Icarus), under the light of a thousand stars arranged in constellations no mortal eye will ever see, Xhev circles the tall shining spires of the Avalon Academy for Promising Royals of the Faerie Court like he’s a predator owl circling a porcupine.

I’m supposed to do an exchange program with the Avalon Academy—like a semester abroad—one of these terms.

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