Page 22 of Beltane

“We believe the king has Jon and Kit,” I added, remembering how Abigail had screamed. I never wanted to hear that sound again. “He took them before I pushed him out of Mount Vernon.”

“How did you do that?” Finn’s emerald-green gaze almost glowed with its intensity.

Lex and I looked at each other before I cleared my throat. “That night we met with you, I connected to the king’s mind. I can see his memories, feel his emotions.”

Donnelly snorted and shook his head. “I fucking knew it. I smelled him on you.”

“What does that mean?” Lex asked, rubbing his eyes, clearly exhausted.

Donnelly’s lips curled into a smirk, but he didn’t answer the question.

“There’s something else.” I scratched my neck, composing myself and straightening to face our fairy friends. “Poppy can travel through time. She took Lex back to see his brother when he was still alive.”

Siobhan didn’t say anything, just pursed her lips and glanced at Finn. He met her gaze with some kind of wordless communication before glancing to Donnelly, who sat motionless, assessing me as I talked. Of the three, he intimidated me the most. Sure, Finn was huge and Siobhan probably knew how we all died, but Donnelly had an eerily stillness that told me he’d seen the worst of his realm and lived to talk about it. Whatever he had to do to get to theFianna,I figured it was dark and dangerous, something he wouldn’t talk about openly.

“I thought she could hone her skills and use them to our advantage,” Lex confessed. “I only partially accounted for her stabbing us in the back.”

“Well, she hasn’t. Yet,” Siobhan said. “We don’t know why she took Lizzie and Edward. Did she seem upset?”

“Terribly,” Miri said. “She was sobbing.”

“She’s playing her own game,” Donnelly said. “She lied to us when we asked her what she knew.”

That rubbed salt in the wound. I should have seen this coming. I should have listened to Lex when he told us to watch out for her, but I’d been blindsided by my love. Just like the king, Poppy had used my affection against me, and it picked at a scab I didn’t want to examine. I’d spent most of my life protecting my siblings, the urge to provide and protect ran in my molecules. I wouldn’t dampen who I was just because it could be perceived as a weakness.

“There’s more.” Miri shifted uncomfortably in her seat, crossing her arms over her chest. “Alberich tricked me. He’s inside my head. He…” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He’s warping my memories, doing things to me and making me forget them.”

Carter grabbed one of Miri’s hands and I gripped the other, sending my love through our shared connection. We weren’t complete without her. We needed her the way the sky needed the sun, and I wanted to make sure she knew that. There was no me without her, and there never would be.

Siobhan didn’t say anything for a long moment, just hung her head and pressed her fingers into her eyes. Finn’s hard expression turned even more stony as he cleared his throat and took a deep breath.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he finally said. “The king is…mercurial and apparently, he’s getting more aggressive. There’s no sacred boundary he won’t cross.”

Siobhan leaned toward Miri, her deep brown eyes desperate for more information. “What do you mean when you say he’s doing things to you and making you forget them? How so?”

Miri told them what she meant, how she knew that something had been altered because it reminded her of the way he’d tampered with her parents’ deaths. “He can manipulate me, and I can’t trust myself.”

“I told you it needed to be the four of you.” Siobhan sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, obviously reeling from the information we’d dumped in her lap. “You were vulnerable because you were separated.”

“We’re together now,” Lex said, his hazel eyes narrowing. “And we’re all playing on the same team for once. Isn’t that right?” He glanced at me before focusing on Miri, who nodded and curled her arms around herself again.

“What about Poppy?” I asked. “You once told us she was the key to everything. What exactly is she supposed to do?”

“Remember the prophecy, the one that started all this?” Siobhan looked between us as a conversation with her sister, Ashley, came to the forefront. Back when we’d gone to Faerie for Samhain, she had explained the reason Alberich feared Poppy so much had to do with a vision that their seer had about the changeling. According to them, she was the key, the one who would bring peace to the realms by reuniting the humans and the fairies.“Which fairies? Which humans?”Ashley had said,“Prophecies are notoriously vague.”Alberich had thought it meant that she’d destroy the veil, and Faerie would be overwhelmed by humans intent on destroying them. Once he found out what she could do, he wanted her killed.

“It’s coming true,” Siobhan said. “If we reunite the king and the queen, and she contains him, we will have ended the war between them.”

“Or he’ll kill her outright and put our heads on spikes,” Lex said.

“He can’t,” I said, recalling what else Ashley had told us that day. “One cannot survive without the other. Where she is light, he is dark.”It confirmed what Finn had said about them.“He’d never be able to kill the queen. They’re equals in every way.”They needed each other for balance.

“If he kills her, he’ll end himself, too,” Carter said.

“He’s too narcissistic to do that,” I added.

A long time ago, he’d tried to escape the fairy realm and a powerful fae had cursed him to keep him in Faerie. Lex had believed the queen knew who had done it and perhaps had been there when it happened. After all, she had supposedly been impacted by the same curse, as tied together as they were. Whatever impacted him affected her.

“We need to find the queen,” Siobhan said.

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