Page 28 of Fallen Star

“It doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice,” she says, still stroking Ghost’s fur. “Unless you want to keep fighting about it?”

“No,” I say. “I just?—”

“There’s a woman hidden in the Wandering Wilds,” Riven interrupts, speaking for the first time since this conversation started. “She’s older than both courts—Summer and Winter—combined. She knows the most ancient potions ever created. If anyone knows how to cure my father’s madness, it’s her.”

“And how do we find her?” Zoey asks, at the same time as I wonder why he hadn’t mentioned this entire part of the plan to me.

Maybe because I didn’t ask?

“We follow the stars,” he says. “There’s a map in the sky that will guide our way.”

Zoey furrows her brow, staring at Riven as if he said the stars will drop from the sky and lead us there by hand.

“A map in the sky?” she repeats. “Seriously?”

“My mother said that every star has a purpose,” he continues, sounding dreamy now, his voice softening at the mention of her.“She insisted there was a pattern—a way to find anything if you knew how to read it.”

“Do you know how to read it?” I ask him, praying he’s better at reading maps than he is at brewing potions.

His jaw tightens, and I have a sinking feeling that I’m not going to like where this is heading.

“I’ve tried. But I always end up going in circles.” He runs his fingers through his dark hair, frustrated. “I was figuring it out, but then the disappearances near the border started happening, and I got sidetracked.”

Sapphire

“Disappearances?”Zoey’s voice sharpens. “What kind of disappearances?”

“The kind where fae never came back,” Riven says darkly.

“The dark angels. They could be the ones taking the fae,” I say, even though I know that’s not what theyreallyare.

They’re more like vampire fae with black wings.

However, dark angel is a fair enough abbreviation.

“I’ve never seen one before,” Riven says. “None of us have. Only the two of you, and assumedly every fae they’ve killed.”

“Or taken,” Zoey points out. “If you never found any bodies, they could have been taken.”

“Did you work as some sort of detective back in the human realm?” Riven asks, although he’s so sarcastic that I have a feeling he wants her to sit back, be human, and let him be the prince who knows all the answers.

“I binged every CSI episode in like, two weeks straight when I had the flu.” She shrugs.

He scrunches his brow, looking clueless about what that means.

“Crime Scene Investigation,” Zoey clarifies. “It’s a television series.”

“I don’t think they get Netflix in the Winter Court,” I say with a chuckle.

“It was on Hulu, not Netflix,” she corrects me, smiling.

“If both of you can put your DVRs on pause for a minute, we can discuss things that actually matter,” Riven breaks in, reminding me that while the Winter Court is his home, he’s been to the mortal realm before. “Because now that we’re fugitives, we have all the time in the world to figure out how to follow the stars.”

“Actually,” Zoey says. “Sapphire’s weirdly good with stars.”

Riven’s intense gaze shifts to me, and heat rises to my cheeks. “Is that so?” he asks.

“It’s how she was leading us through the forest during the hunt,” she tells him.

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