Page 90 of Samhain

“I saved your life,” he said. “Now you owe me.”

I was so confused. I didn’t know what he meant. He saved my life? I hadn’t asked him to do that.

“Owe you?” I repeated.

“Yes, Little Thistle,” he said. “You’ll come to owe me quite a bit before we’re through.”

“Who are you?” I asked again, tears making my eyes burn, my heart racing at the thought that he planned to leave me here alone.

“Rest now.” He pressed his warm, soft lips to my temple, and the world went dark around me.

When I came to, I remembered none of my encounter with the man in the black jacket. I lay in the grass ten yards away, staring into the lifeless gaze of my mother, hanging upside down in the car, her head bent at a wrong angle.

I wanted to cry.

I wanted to scream.

I wanted to yank them from the wreck and pray to a cruel, unyielding God to bring them back to life. Just bring them back. But unconsciousness took me again, and when I opened my eyes the next time, I was in a hospital bed with the entire world praying for my safe recovery.

When I woke, I was back in the room at the bed-and-breakfast in Killwater. Ivy and Carter slept across the room with Poppy between them, huddled together in the moonlight, their chests rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm. Lex was on the couch, his arm bent over his eyes, deep breaths humming from his torso.

What day was it? What time? Where were we?

I checked my phone.

November 13.

I gasped and covered my mouth with my hand so I didn’t wake anyone.

Twelve days.

We’d lost twelve days in those woods. Bleeding hell, it was a wonder Ivy and Lex could even sleep. They’d wanted to be back by the fifth at the latest. We’d overshot our landing by more than a week. My brain had gone fuzzy like I’d spent the last twelve days on a bender and sobered up on a stranger’s couch in a country I’d never been to before. That wasn’t too far from the truth.

I got out of bed and walked across the room, picking up Lex’s smokes from the coffee table and lighting one as I went to my perch by the window to overlook the trees. After what had happened, they didn’t hum the way they had when we’d gotten here. Instead, their silence deafened me with an aching tinnitus that almost screamed with its quietness.

Had I used all my magic on the thistle bushes? Or was the forest still healing from whatever the king had done to it?

I didn’t know, and as I inhaled deeply on the cigarette, I decided I never wanted to know. I never wanted to come back here. I hated this place and all its wretched mystery.

I took another inhale and pinched the bridge of my nose, remembering the dream, the one with the king, the one where he saved me from the car accident and told me I owed him a life for a life. But it wasn’t a dream, was it? It felt more like a memory. It had to be a memory.

I knew it deep in my gut. That was the truth. That was how I’d made it out of the car alive. That was how I didn’t have a scratch on me. All this time, I’d been right. All this time, the world had tried to gaslight me into thinking I’d survived the wreck by circumstance. I must have been awake, they told me. I must have crawled out. I’d insisted I hadn’t. I never would have guessed it was because a fairy king saved my life. If he hadn’t, I would have been crushed in that tin metal can along with the rest of my family.

And now you owe me one.

You’ll come to owe me quite a bit before we’re through.

What was that supposed to mean? Owe him what?

A life.

What life? Mine? Why didn’t he take it when he had the chance? And more importantly…what would I tell the others?

The thought filled my stomach with sawdust. They already had enough to worry about with Poppy and what to do next. They didn’t need this drama. They didn’t need to know I might be accidentally in an arrangement with the demented king of the fae.

Was I? Did it count if I’d been a child and hadn’t consented? What were the fairy rules around entering into an agreement without the full knowledge of all parties involved? I hadn’t asked for him to save me. What choice was there if I was never given one to begin with? He had been cast out of the human realm at the time. How, then, could he have been there to save me?

It wasn’t real, my rational brain said, reaching for any straw of doubt, any seed of dissent that could explain this away. He planted it there when he made eye contact with you. He’s manipulating you. It’s not real. I wanted to scream that it felt real. It explained everything I’d never been able to figure out, everything I’d always wondered.

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