Page 13 of Fairies Don't Fall

“Vervain?” She scoffed. “Such a pansy name. You need a guy with a good name. Like Torment. Or Calumny. There’s a wolf up north with that name. He’s hot.” She looked around like someone might hear her while her cheeks pinked up. “Not that I like him. You can think a guy’s hot and not like him.”

I nodded, although I had no idea what she meant by hot. Probably not their body temperature, although Max was quite pleasantly warm when he touched me. Why did thinking about him make my heart beat faster? I put a hand on my shoulder where he’d held it so much and smiled at her. “Yes. And you can like someone and not think they’re hot.”

She gave me a skeptical glance. “If you say so. Now, listen. This story is so dumb, but the words are simple. You’ll pick up reading in no time. And then Max will stop growling at me for letting the jerk talk me into bad decisions. Again.”

She started reading, and I followed along as well as I could, filled with a growing sense of connection to the girl intent on teaching me so we could diss Vervain and gain Max’s approval. Would Max think more highly of me if I could read? I frowned and focused more intently on the words, ignoring my pounding head as I tried to understand the shapes on the page.

Chapter

Five

“What’s taking the boys so long?” Ruin asked me while I was puzzling out the word she’d written in her notebook.

“The boys?”

“You know, the other juvenile delinquents. They’ve been gone forever.” She looked at the door for the fifteenth time in the last two minutes.

I looked at her, cocking my head. She was a werewolf youngling who had too much energy to stay still, but she’d spent hours and hours with me pouring over the notebook and The Wolf Wore Pajamas. “What kind of games do you play?” I asked.

“Card games, board games, night games, sports, like that?”

“What are night games?”

She shrugged and leaned back on her arms. “You know, steal the moon, kick the bone, and murder in the dark.”

“What interesting sounding games. Let’s play.”

She stared at me, skepticism written all over the place. She pursed her lips. “Actually, Max said I should take you to thebathhouse to have a sauna after you’ve worn out your brain with reading.”

“Sauna? What’s that?”

“Like a steam room for lots of people. There are several rooms at the Piper, which is basically a bathhouse, only they also do laundry. They wash clothes and people.”

I frowned down at my filthy feet. “Max wants me washed?” Apparently, he’d noticed my shocking lack of cleanliness and respectability. Of course he’d noticed. Complete strangers on the street had stared at me like I was a revolting insect.

“Mostly the sauna’s to make you sweat. That’ll help detox you from the pixie dust.” She stood up and stretched, rolling her shoulders before she grabbed my hand and hauled me to my feet. “But you could also use a bath. Not to be rude, but you stink.”

I should have been offended, but she was too young, too honest, and too right. “Maybe if I don’t stink, Max will let me have my own room.”

She frowned slightly. “Yeah, he’s throwing you in with us instead of fixing you up in one of the usual fairy cells.”

“Does he trap fairies often?”

“Only when he feels it’s his duty. But once your mind’s right, he’ll let you out. I guess it’s because he’s personally doing detention, so he can’t monitor a fairy the usual way. You’re just stuck with him.” She shrugged. “For an alpha, he’s not that bad.”

“He has a lot of concern for others.” That was such a strange phenomenon, to see his soft worry for me, someone he didn’t know, but something he should have hated.

“I guess. Come on, Mindy will escort us. She’s our guard at the door. All the other openings are spelled so Max will know if we blow our parole.”

Mindy was a werewolf woman who was sitting on a gray metal chair outside the squat building, looking slightly less ominous with the book in her hands and the glasses on her nose.

“Ruin. Where do you think you’re going?” Her voice was sharper than an axe in a field of broken glass.

Ruin batted her lashes at the old, tough-as-nails woman. “Max asked me to take Princess Sparkles to the sauna. We are absolutely not going there via the owl caverns.”

Mindy sniffed and closed her book, glancing at me, lingering, questioning. “Is that right?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I was sleeping. It makes sense, though. I do stink.”

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