Page 4 of The Shadowbound and the False God

“I’m not finished,” she rasped, brandishing her glass. Before she could protest, Rodney took it from her hand and slid it out of reach.

“We’re going,”he insisted again. “I need to talk to you about something.”

He grabbed Aisling’s coat from where it had fallen to the ground and grasped her elbow firmly, pulling her to her feet anddraping the heavy down jacket over her shoulders. She wavered, unsteady for a moment, before she regained enough balance to pull away from him. Briar was up in an instant. He pressed himself against her hip, keeping her stable.

Aisling slid her arms into the coat sleeves and followed Rodney begrudgingly out of the bar. Another bolt streaked across the sky and shot down towards the earth, this one so bright she had to squint against the flash of white light. The cracking noise it made when it hit the ground set her teeth on edge.

“I wish they’d hurry the fuck up,” Rodney grumbled under his breath. His safety orange hair rose with the static that surged through the air, growing stronger with each lightning strike then ebbing in between. He reached up to flatten the strands back down into place, but the brush of his hand only made it worse.

He steered Aisling to his car, which he’d left idling when he went inside to find her. He hadn’t intended to stay long, clearly, and she was grateful for the warmth when she dropped into the passenger seat. Though it wasn’t enough to penetrate the chill that clung permanently to her bones, it at least warded off the goosebumps that the cold wind outside drew over her skin.

“Your place or mine?” he asked, despite already aiming in the direction of his trailer. Aisling let him go.

“I’ve got no food at mine,” she mused. She rested her forehead against the cool window as he drove through the center of town. The snow that had fallen earlier on in the month still clung to the ground in places, the once-white drifts now a dirty shade of gray, half-melted and heavy. The island seemed to long for a fresh blanket of snow to wash it clean, to hide under until the warm sun of spring brought life back to it. Aisling wished for it, too. Gray was her least favorite color.

Rodney’s trailer, though familiar as ever, seemed distant to Aisling when they pulled up and parked beside the porch steps.It felt to her as alien to her as her own apartment, and the library, and the forest, and the shore. The bar was the only place on the island that didn’t feel that way, if only because she could count on one hand the number of times she’d been there before that month. It wasn’t a part of the old life she was now so separate from. It didn’t remind her of who she was before: before she was the Red Woman, before she’d fallen in love with the Unseelie King. Before she learned how it felt to take another’s life.

And so it took her several long, long minutes to work up the courage to get out of the car. Rodney had found her too soon; she hadn’t had the time to drink all she needed to steel herself for this. The short walk up the steps was sobering enough to sap her buzz entirely.

Inside, Aisling remained with her back pressed against the door while Rodney kicked off his work boots and hung his jacket on the back of a chair. His mess made the already-small trailer even smaller, and she was an outsider amidst it all. She hadn’t been there since they’d returned. Though he was periodically able to track her down, Aisling had been avoiding Rodney just as much as she had her other friends. So here, as he stood before her under the warm trailer lights, Aisling finally took a moment to size him up. And it took every ounce of effort not to turn around and walk straight back out into the storm.

He’d had a vested interest all along. If the crueler Fae had begun crossing through the Veil, it would have threatened Rodney’s way of life, too. His adopted home. He needed the Red Woman to succeed as much as all the rest. So he’d kept her in the dark when he learned the truth about what her destiny meant for Kael, just as he’d left her imprisoned in the Undercastle before that. Rodney was as self-interested as the rest of them.

Aisling looked at him, suddenly, as she might look at a stranger. He was her best friend, and yet she felt like maybeshe’d never known him at all—not really. She thought she should hate him for it. She did, some days. But now, she just felt terribly, terribly alone.

He saw it in her eyes, that abrupt distrust. The way she, instead of moving to settle in on the sofa or take a chair at the kitchen table, rocked back on her heels and pulled her coat tighter around herself.

“Ash, I—” he started. Stopped. Cast his gaze away, toward the windowpane, then down at his feet. Aisling followed his stare. There was a hole in the side of one of his socks.

“What do you need to talk to me about?” Aisling cut him off coolly before he could finish his thought. She always hoped she hadn’t inherited her father’s cynicism, but now it reared its ugly head. She wasn’t ready to hear another apology.

Rodney took a breath, then blew it out through pursed lips. “I had a visitor today.”

“Anyone that I know?” Though she tried to keep her voice impassive, Aisling knew she hadn’t succeeded when Rodney rubbed a hand over the back of his neck and looked up at her from beneath a furrowed brow.

“A messenger from someone you know. Lyre sent a sprite with a note—he wants me to arrange for you to speak with him,” he said, pulling out a chair and dropping into it.

There it was again: that metallic taste coating her tongue. It came and went in waves, always seeming to grow stronger when she thought of the Wild. She swallowed it down hard. “Why didn’t he just come himself?”

Rodney nodded toward a small scrap of parchment rolled up on the table. “He said he’s tried coming by your apartment. Twice.”

Aisling had become so accustomed to ignoring her friends’ knocks on her door over the past several weeks that if Lyre saidhe had been there, she was inclined to believe him. She might have added another lock or two though, had she known.

“Did he say why?” Surely, if Merak had succeeded in opening the door to Elowas, the storm would have ended. As if to punctuate her thought, another bolt of lightning streaked across the sky. The trailer lights cut out, briefly, before the generator kicked on noisily outside. Rodney rolled his eyes, though Aisling wasn’t sure if he was reacting to the interruption, or her question, or both.

“No. Does he ever?” Rodney sighed, then added, “Won’t you at least sit down? Look, Briar’s already made himself at home.”

Aisling glanced toward where Briar was sprawled out on the couch, having grown accustomed to the storm so that each burst of lightning or rumble of thunder no longer sent him darting to her side.Traitor.When she joined him, perching stiffly on the edge of the cushions, he shifted to rest his chin in her lap. Rodney flashed a satisfied smile then moved into the kitchen.

“Last night’s pizza?” he asked, bent over with his head in the refrigerator.

“I’m not very hungry,” Aisling said. She wasn’t sure she’d ever get her appetite back—not while everything she put in her mouth was overpowered by the lingering coppery tang.

“It was a rhetorical question. You’re eating.” Rodney slid the pizza out of its box onto a baking sheet and put it in the oven to heat before turning back to her. “All of it. Then you’ll stay here until dinner, and you’ll eat again.ThenI will drive you home. So you may as well take off your coat and get comfortable.”

Aisling huffed and leaned forward, elbows braced on her knees. Her breath rustled a plastic bag on the coffee table. The corner of a box poked through a hole in the material, just enough that she could make out that it was hair dye. Indigo blue.

“Sick of the orange already?” she asked, reaching to pull the box out. She brandished it when Rodney looked over.

---