Page 43 of Wanted: A Roommate Who Isn't Evil

He did not realize right away that his mother had gone quiet as he studied the glimmers in the heavens. One star was bigger than the others. Luc leaned forward a little to try and press the image into his memory before the clouds returned and stole it away.

“You know, some fairies say your father came down from a mountain after a great battle, too.” His mother bit her lower lip. “Isn’t that funny?”

Luc did not find it funny, but he offered her a smile anyway. “Is that why some fairies call him the Mountain God?” he asked. “Because he came down from a mountain just like that fox of legendin the tale?”

This time, his mother didn’t seem to be joking around. “Yes,” she said.

Luc sighed and gazed out at the heavens one last time, wondering if he should thank the sky deities for the small gift of stars. “I like to study the stars,” he told his mother, changing the subject. “Maybe I should paint them before they go away.”

“You have always been a curious childling,” his mother said, her smile returning. Then she added, “You are cunning too, like your father, Luc. Perhaps you should study people instead.”

A whiff of sugar plums brushed Luc’s nose, stealing his focus. He gazed at those plump, syrupy fruits. How he wanted to taste one—just one bite—before he was allowed. There were so many lovely things to be distracted by tonight.

His mother’s laugh reminded him he could do no such tasting until morning, lest he break the sacred tradition.

“Morning is just a few hours away, Luc,” his mother said as she stood from the chair. “Try to get some sleep before then. I’m sure you’ll dream of sugar plum fairies.”

Two weeks after the Great Yule Morning, Luc’s father returned from a long trip where rumour claimed he had engaged in the revels of the Army and had forgotten about his duties at the Shadow Palace. He had not even returned for the Great Yule Morning. Luc had been forced to eat at the Queene’s dining tablealone, since his father was absent and the Queene forbade his peasant mother from sitting at her table.

When his father marched into the Shadow Palace, he went straight for Luc’s mother and met with her behind a closed door. That was the day Luc’s parents had made a bet, and a bargain, for their son. It was the same week Luc’s mother had lost him and been banished from the Palace forever.

The day after her exile, Luc found a note hiding beneath his pillow. It was a blank piece of parchment with a ripple of wetness in the corner just the size of a fallen tear. He knew how to read it—his mother had left him notes like this in the past to be silly. It was a note only his breath could unlock, and no one else’s.

Luc breathed on the parchment, and a set of clear words filled the page for just a second before they dissolved again:

WHEN THE TIME COMES

KILL HIM OR RUN FROM HIM

BUT DO NOT BE RULED BY HIM

She left nothing else behind.

Nothing but Luc.

18

Mycra Sentorious

A layer of frost coated the classroom desks the day the Brotherhood of Assassins came. They swarmed the Sisterhood’s training castle like bugs in navy and black-shelled skins, taking hostages and killing those who fought back. The entire resistance rang out with the sounds of fairy roars and buzzing fairsabers.

Mycra Sentorious stood stone-still as they rushed into her classroom. As they tossed over desks and dragged her sisters away. She took in the faces and movements of the males, counting their attacks, catching their habits. Finding their leader.

“Mycra!Help!” Quiver screamed back as the fair girl was pulled into the hall and enchanted vines were slapped onto herwrists. Quiver tried to fight—she kicked, she screamed, she bit.

Mycra calculated. She could save Quiver. She could save one or two others and help them escape. But that wouldn’t stop their enemies from taking over the castle and rounding up everyone as hostages.

However…

Taking down their leader might be enough.

Mycra climbed onto the nearest desk and leapt over the feud in the hallway. She sprang off the far wall, drawing her half-spear as she came down, and driving it through a male assassin in her way. She raced towardhim—the young, deadly-looking fae wearing the signet ring of the ward Prince. She dropped two more male bodies, sweeping down the hall like the deadly siren of the seas she claimed not to be, and she brought her spear down upon his fairsaber.

The leader looked up at her, his cold, turquoise eyes calm and focussed. He was unalarmed, even as he took her in and calculated every inch of her worth. He stabbed suddenly, and Mycra dodged. When he swung his arm toward her, she blocked and prepared a strike of her own, but she wasn’t ready for the weight of faestone to knock her upside the head. Mycra slammed into the wall, going dizzy for a spell. She pushed herself up in time to see Rosa waging war upon the males at the end of the hall. It was her against three. And suddenly Mycra no longer cared for the male leader.

She spun away from the ward Prince and stabbed her way toward her mentor—barely seeing the bodies fallat her own feet.

“Rosa!” she shouted. “Hang on! I’m coming!”

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