Page 4 of Threadbound

Trixie was a concerts-and-club kind of girl, and every year for the past three years she’d dragged them to some late-night, usually expensive and always very loud venue that left Jamie’s ears ringing for two days. There wasn’t a schedule for Trixie’s “event”—she’d look at the venue calendars and pick one, and Jamie never knew when it was coming.

It didn’t matter. It also didn’t matter that Jamie didn’t really get the appeal of Trixie’s concerts, either. The people at them were fascinating—sometimes he swore they were barely human, dressed in leather and rubber and metal studs and feathers and who knew what else. There was beauty to their costumes—he wasn’t sure what else to call them—and sometimes he even took inspiration from them for some of his macramé designs.

The three of them had all started their graduate work at the same time and met at a new student mixer because they hadn’t meshed with anyone else.

It was an odd, kind of sad way to start a friendship, Jamie supposed, but it worked for them.

Jamie was very much an introvert and didn’t mind spending most of his time on his own. And if he needed help, he knew he could call either Rob or Trixie, and they’d figure it out. They’d done as much for each other a handful of times over the past three years when one or another of them had changed apartments or acquired a couch that was too big to move alone or when they were sick and needed someone to bring tea or soup.

It wasn’t a glamorous life, but it worked.

Sure, Jamie had days or, more often, nights when he would stare out at the lights of the city or the dimness of the distant stars and feel a kind of impossible emptiness somewhere inside his chest, but… who didn’t?

He had friends, a job he liked well enough, and a career path to follow. No one was threatening him or beating him, and he got to make his own decisions.

And it was a far sight better than Jamie’s life had been back in Maynardville, so he was content.

Mostly.

Bran mac Cairnwas anything but content.

He was a Sluagh prince, a powerful fae in the Court of Shades, and he was stuck babysitting a Lugh-cursed half-breed human.

Well, notbabysitting, exactly, since it wasn’t like he was responsible for feeding or taking care of the damn thing. But the half-breed was bound to him. Tied to his soul by their shared first moment of breath. Their lives were intertwined—whether Bran liked it or not. Which he most definitely did not.

Especially since he was supposed to convince the half-breed to complete the binding begun the instant they had both been born. To come with him back to Elfhame and perform the ritual that would even more permanently link their souls together.

There was very little Bran wanted to do less.

But the magic of Fate would not—could not—be denied.

The connection between themitched. Not like a healing wound or a rash from getting too close to something he shouldn’t have. But the irritation, the constant awareness, the need todosomething…

It was also painfully clear that the half-breed had no idea there was anything missing or amiss in his life whatsoever. He was oblivious to the sensation—at least Bran assumed he must be, since he blithely went about his stupid mortal existence without seeming to have a care in the world. It was as though Dunatis himself had set up a wall around the man protecting him from harm or discomfort. Or awareness that there wasanythingbeyond the tangible, boring, mundane world he lived in.

Bran ruffled his ink-dark feathers, perched on one of the larger branches of a tree in the park across from the library where the stupid half-breed spent a great deal of his time. Bran didn’t actually object to the half-breed reading books—he was fond of books himself. That was in fact one of the few things that didn’t irritate him about the half-breed.

There were so many that did.

For one thing, the man slouched. He was tall enough to stand head and shoulders above most of the humans around him, but he folded in on himself as though hiding from the world. It was a marker of weakness. Of cowardice.

Bran hated both.

The whole reason he was supposed to bring the half-breed back to Elfhame was because his own power was flagging—without it, he risked not only his own safety, but the balance between the courts of the Sidhe and Sluagh.

As though the damn balance weren’t already horribly off-kilter, which was a not-insignificant part of the problem. If it had been just about his own strength, Bran could have dealt with it. But other people—his family—were relying on him. On his power.

Bran shuffled a little on his branch, uneasy.

His power needed his bondmate, but his bondmate was pathetic. And so veryhuman.

Humans were… well, as far as Bran was concerned, humans were pretty much entirely useless. Noisy, smelly—very smelly, and not usually in a good way—and destructive. Not that destruction didn’t have its place—all things did. But humans were wanton in their exploitation of the world around them, unconcerned by and uncaring for the other lives trapped or ruined by their constant bustling consumption.

They paved over grass, polluted the water, and filled the air with horns and noxious gasses. And what was done in Dunehame, this world of humans, had ramifications in Elfhame. And vice versa, of course. But his people weren’t blundering about destroying the world just to create more cars and televisions and cellular phones.

Bran didn’t particularly want to think about the consequences of having a half-human as a bondmate. How would the half-breed’s human blood corrupt Bran’s magic? Did the half-breed even have magic at all? Not all half-breeds did, and with his terrible luck…

Bran sank deeper into his own feathers, working himself into to a good sulk.

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