Page 59 of Threadbound

The creature stared at him, its mouth open, its inhuman eyes wide.

“What?” Jamie demanded, having to look up at it even once he was back on his feet.

But whatever-it-was didn’t answer him, instead letting out a little shriek and scrabbling its way up the rock a few feet before disappearing—as far as Jamie could tell, anyway—into a crevasse in the crag face.

Jamie stared at the dirt and stone for a few more minutes, waiting to see if the creature would return and trying to decide if this was confirmation that fairies were real or further evidence that he was losing his mind. He honestly couldn’t decide which was more likely.

Then, with a sigh, he looked back down at his bloody hands and knees. His rhythm was off, but he definitely didn’t feel any better than he had when he’d left his apartment, so, with another, longer sigh, he turned back toward the rising pathway up the crag and continued running, ignoring the twinging in his knees.

Back in his apartment,Jamie paused, sweat making his shirt cling to his skin and stinging the open cuts on his hands and knees as it dripped into the wounds, and stared at the dish sitting on his windowsill. He could see the milky line where the liquid had been this morning—and where it now was not. It wasn’t empty, but it definitely wasn’t full, either.

And now Jamie was second guessing himself all over again—first the whatever-it-was on the crag, and now the milk he’d put out for the bookies—no,bookas—had been partly drunk. And not by a neighborhood cat, because Jamie’d closed the window when he left.

It wasn’t nearly hot enough in his apartment for that much to have evaporated in the last two hours, and the door had been locked when he’d come through it. Not that locked doors probably meant anything to bookas. Or, at least, Jamie didn’t think it would. But what did he know?

Shaking his head, Jamie went to take a shower, hissing when the hot water hit the open scrapes on his skin. He then spent far more time than he wanted to picking little bits of gravel out of both his palms and knees, and then only managed to find enough gauze and tape for his hands.

He sighed, used tissues to blot the blood on his knees until they were no longer bleeding quite as badly, then put on shorts and shoes and headed down the block to the closest Boots to pick up more bandaging supplies.

The cashier spent far more time cooing over Jamie’s injuries than he’d really wanted to deal with, particularly since he wasn’t interested in what she was trying to get him to do—namely, ask her out for coffee or give her his number. Once he escaped, he took his bag full of first aid supplies home, patched up his knees, and then put on khakis to go to work.

Trixie asked him what had happened to his hands, and he admitted that he’d tripped and fallen on the trail while running, but he wasn’t about to mention the ugly little creature that had been the cause of it.

“Are you getting enough sleep?” Trixie asked him.

Jamie shrugged. “Probably not,” he admitted. Because he hadn’t been sleeping terribly well—nightmares about monsters attacking him, attacking Bran, attacking Trixie and Rob, and nightmares about finding Bran dead in his shower, his bed, and his chair, both in man and bird form, had been keeping him from getting a full eight or even seven hours pretty much every night for the last two weeks.

Trixie frowned, her blue eyes worried. “Jamie…” She bit her lip, and Jamie knew that what she was about to ask him wasn’t going to make this any easier. “Did you and Bran fight?”

“No,” he answered, and that, at least, was the whole truth. “He’s just… at home. Recovering.”

“And he hasn’t called or texted?”

Jamie sighed. “He doesn’t like phones.” He didn’t actually know Bran’s opinion on phones, but Bran was in the fairy realm, wherever that was, and Jamie was pretty sure that cell service didn’t reach from fairyland to Edinburgh.

“He doesn’t like phones,” Trixie repeated. “Jamie…”

“I know, that sounds insane.”

“It sounds,” she replied, her tone pitying, “like he’s taking the piss.” Like he thought Jamie was stupid and was mocking him.

“I know it sounds like that, but I’ve literally never seen him with a phone,” Jamie replied. Which was completely true.

Trixie’s expression told him that she thought Bran was a liar. “You seriously think anyone can survive in the twenty-first century without a mobile?”

Jamie shrugged. “I wouldn’t need one if it weren’t for you and Rob,” he told her. Although he had gotten it so that if his half-siblings needed him, they could call or text. Not that they had phones of their own, but he’d made Billy and Nora memorize the number—complete with country code—in case they ever needed him. They hadn’t called him once.

“But youhaveme and Rob,” Trixie retorted. “And Bran has to have someone other than you—no offense. You’re pretty great and all, but if he doesn’t have other mates, then that’s a bit of a red flag, y’know?”

Jamie sighed. She wasn’t wrong—assuming Bran had been human, of course. Did fae have friends? Maybe, but if Bran did, they probably weren’t in Edinburgh. His family—assuming Bran hadn’t lied—was there. He’d talked about having a father who was some sort of herbal healer—and the herbal part made a lot more sense now that Jamie knew that Bran’s father, presumably, also wasn’t human.

That did make Jamie wonder if it was possible for fairies—fae—and humans to intermix. For there to be people walking around who had fae blood. If it was possible that maybe his mother had been one of them—probably in the distant past, given the stories Nell had told him about his grandparents and great-grandparents. But if there had been some sort of fairy blood in the Weaver family, that might explain why his momma had believed in fairies. Why she knew to put out milk and honey for the bookas. Even if she’d never called them bookas.

Or maybe they wouldn’t have been bookas in Tennessee? Jamie had no idea.

“Jamie?”

He blinked, then shook his head. “Sorry. Daydreaming.”

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