Page 5 of Fae Reckoning

“Yep. We wouldn’t be here without her. Well, I guess we probably would be, but not as fast. The dragon was homed in on you. He barely let us stop for quick breaks. It was like he could feel you.”

I already knew the black dragon had been the one to find me. It was one of the first questions I’d asked.

“Never seen anything like it,” Xeno added. “Never heard of anything like it either, and you know how the protectors in Nightguard like to talk.”

“Yeah, almost as much as they like to fuck, and just as noisily.”

Xeno chuckled, sounding much more like the friend with whom I’d grown up. “Ain’t that the truth? They’re horny, little fucking gossips, the whole bunch of them.”

“Especially if they insist they aren’t.”

His eyes crinkled as he grinned at me. “Especially then.”

“Do you miss them? Nightguard, I mean?”

“Sometimes. But I missed you more.”

I took his arm and resumed walking toward the others. Roan was right: the sooner we moved on, the better.

“You know I won’t be going anywhere till I’m sure you’re safe, right?” he asked.

A part of me wanted to object, but a greater part of me understood it wouldn’t matter if I did, and that I’d do the same for him. “That means you stay till she’s dead.”

“Dead as a dragon’s fucking dinner.”

“Crispy charred.”

“Hell yeah.”

We walked in companionable silence until we cleared the trees and the rundown cottage came into view at the end of the long, winding dirt trail. Such a contrast to the excessive opulence of the queen’s court.

“Really, everyone was worried about you,” Xeno eventually said. “Even Finn.”

I gulped, before asking, “How’d he die?”

It was one of many questions I’d been meaning to ask but had been too raw to hear its answer. It was much easier to focus on the wins, like finding Ramana. We’d had too few wins and far too many losses.

Xeno sighed. “It was stupid, the way he went.”

Knowing that made Finnian’s death somehow worse. He and I had never become true friends, but we’d been well on our way. He was the first fae to be kind to me, the one to treat my wounds when Dougal ordered me shot through with arrows for escaping.

“Or maybe not exactly stupid,” Xeno went on, “butcertainly avoidable. On our way to you, we were attacked by more umbracs and all sorts of other awful creatures with too sharp claws and teeth, all poisonous of course.”

I frowned. “Of course.”

“Finn fought ‘em all off bravely and helped us all heal from our injuries along the way. He was really good at the healing stuff.”

I considered asking Xeno if his wings had recovered from the brutal shredding they’d received in the first umbrac attack. When I’d last seen them, they’d been a tattered shadow of their former magnificence. I didn’t know if anyone, dragon shifter or not, could recover from that level of damage. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know yet.

Scant feet from the trail, we passed a squat tree dotted with a riot of so many shockingly blue blossoms that I drew Xeno to a stop to admire them. Peril was constant; flowers this magnificent were not. The petals were a midnight blue around the edges that faded into a sunny sky-blue center. Their perfume was sweet and crisp and?—

“Owwww!” I yelped and jerked backward straight into Xeno. A flower was attached to my face, digging in. I hissed as it clawed at my nose and cheeks, hooking what felt like barbed suckers into my flesh. My vision blurred as I tried to focus on what part, exactly, of the flower was attacking.

I tugged it off my face with a hard yank that, judging by the sting, took little bits of flesh with it,just as Xeno sliced the vicious bloom from its stalk. I held it gingerly by its stem, far from my face while I caught my breath.

“Fuck,” I accused in the tree’s general direction, taking several steps away from it for good measure. “What the sunshine! Is there nothing in this awful Mirror World that doesn’t want to kill me?”

Xeno kept his dagger out, but sidled beside me to study the monstrous fucking thing.

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