Page 115 of Hunted By Fae
I can’t complain.
At least I’m not stuck out there.
This brewery gives shelter from the snow, the ice, the winds, and I just have to wait it out, wait for Tess to find me.
As I do wait, I fish through my backpack for something to eat. I pick out a protein bar and salted trail mix.
For a while, I nibble.
No appetite fuels me.
I eat because I am stopped, and I don’t know when I will be able to stop and eat again.
This is one of our rules, our ways.
I toss aside a wrapper and watch it flitter to the blood-stained floorboards. My head tilts as I eye the dried blood streaks before I realise they are drag marks.
I trace them to the edge of my boot before a yawn rises through me.
Weariness is crawling over me with the weight of a woollen blanket.
Fighting the lull of my lashes, I unscrew the lid of the water bottle and down the whole thing in loud, ugly gulps. I toss aside the plastic.
The bottle bounces off the floorboards before knocking off the side of my boot.
The fae in me—in my blood—curls my upper lip at the abomination that plastic is. And maybe a part of me understands the dark ones, their invasion, this war they have declared on humanity.
I get it.
But I’m a selfish kinta, and their invasion is a fucking inconvenience. Might have been nice to have a little heads up from Eamon, then maybe I wouldn’t have travelled my ass to another continent before the dark came billowing through the skies.
I would be safe in Licht, away from the dark ones, away from this massacre I’m trapped in.
I shouldn’t think of it.
I squeeze my eyes shut against the intrusion.
Dad.
All it does to think about him is swell a thickness in my throat and bring a weight down on my heart. But he burrows into my mind, reminds me of him every quiet moment.
Dad…
A human man who lives in the human realm. But before that, he was in a bargain with my fae mother—and I am an obvious result of that bargain.
Sagged against the bar, I let myself wonder if he made it back to the light lands when the darkness first invaded. He knows some bridges around London, he could have left behind his second wife and fled to safety in my mother’s home.
If he didn’t, he’s dead.
No question, no doubt. Dead.
But if he did make it to the village I was raised in…
The next wonder is if my mother offered him sanctuary. Their bargain is ended, it ended the morning of my sixteenth birthday. He delivered his side of the deal, gave her two children, twins, one halfling male, one kinta female. If it wasn’t for my brother, my dad’s bargain would not have ended with my birth.
A kinta isn’t a suitable babe.
But their bargain is ended, and I can only hope that maybe my mother softened to my dad over the years he stayed with her in the light lands. Maybe for us, her children, she would have opened her door to him and given him the sanctuary he needed to escape the war waged on the human realm.
