Page 17 of The Courting of Bristol Keats
Harper groaned, her eyes bright with panic. “Give it back! You have to—”
“Wait. Let me think.Let me think!” Bristol pressed her palms against her temples, her head exploding with this new reality. She circled the kitchen twice and then her gaze landed back on Harper’s pinched face. Time stood still, blurring and focusing at the same moment, and then it wasn’t Harper she was staring at anymore, but herself, ten, twelve, fifteen years ago—that familiar fear gripping her gut. Bristol, ready to run. Always ready to run. “No,” she whispered to herself, “No.” Something inside her splintered, shadow and flesh tearing in two. She couldn’t stop it any more than her next breath.
“I’m going back,” she said. “I’m going back to the inn.” Words she hadn’t even formed in her head yet didn’t surprise her when they tumbled off her tongue. The balance had just tipped. Finally tipped. She needed answers. They all did. They had to know with certainty if their father was alive or dead.Trows got him.Wherever these creatures lived, Bristol had to find it. Find them. Find her father. Make all of this stop.
This.
The insanity of their lives.
It wasn’t just Cat who was reactive. They all were. It was all they had ever known. React. Hide. Run from a monster they couldn’t even see. No more.
Obligations worked two ways. She could set ground rules, too. She could negotiate for more. Eris said it had to be her decision. Nothing was a done deal yet.
Harper’s face pinched, but before she could protest, Bristol tried to sound logical. “These fae want something from me. And now I want something from them. Help finding Daddy. It’s a smart business transaction. That’s all.”
Said aloud, the thought grew in her:I want something from them. It became a hot coal glowing in her gut. Something bold and strong. A piece of power. And she wanted more.
She went to the freezer, plucked out an ice cube, and held it to her lip.
“Wh-What?” Harper sputtered. “You can’t go back there. Look what they did to you. They’ll do worse. We should pack up and run while we can. That’s what Mother and Daddy would want us to do.”
Bristol’s hand trembled, the ice melting between her fingers. Trows had made them fearful to even build a life, to stand up for anything. The years of packing up, rushing out in the middle of the night—she wasn’t going back to that—living like prey. The unanswered questions they’d been trained to ignore burned inside her.
“Please, Bri,” Harper pleaded.
Bristol whirled and threw the ice in the sink. “Run for what, Harper? So we can spend the rest of our lives running? Over and over again? The way Mother and Father did? What kind of life is that? When does it end?”
She grabbed her backpack from the hook on the wall and threw it on the counter. “I’m done running, Harper. This is going to stop, and it’s stopping now. For all of us. I can’t—” Her throat swelled. “We can’t live this way anymore. We always thought the truth was too dangerous to know. The doubt is worse. It’s ruining us. We can’t keep looking over our shoulders for the rest of our lives. This Aunt Jasmine said she knew Daddy. I have to find out what she knows about him. About us. Ineedto know if he’s alive. This is our chance. Maybe our only chance.”
After twenty years of running, a brief stint in their world was nothing—a small price to pay for answers they desperately needed. Before Harper could try to talk her out of it, Bristol pulled out the junk drawer in the corner of the kitchen and rummaged through it for a small four-inch switchblade her father used to keep in the glove box of the van.
“I need to go now,” she told Harper. “Hopefully they’re still at the inn and haven’t disappeared like Willow did.” Her fingers found the carved ebony handle of the knife at the back of the drawer, and she threw it into her backpack. It wasn’t likely to impress the creatures she saw, but she knew how to use it, and it was at least something if things went south.
“I’ll go with you—”
“No! You willstayhere!” Bristol ordered. “Do you understand? They want my services, not yours.”
Harper’s chin dimpled with defiance for only a moment before she began skimming the pages of Anastasia’s encyclopedia again. Books were her default for comfort and answers, and Bristol was glad she was occupied while she packed.
“Okay,” she said, still searching the pages, “if you won’t change your mind, there are more things about fae you should know before you go. They have a lot of rules.”
“Then it better be a crash course,” Bristol answered as she grabbed a flashlight out of the drawer and checked to see if the batteries worked. Miracle of miracles, they did.
“Iron!” Harper’s finger pointed to a sentence in the book. “It says here that iron will protect you.”
“So will my knife.”
“It’s stainless.”
“Close enough.”
Harper pried a nail from the wall anyway, throwing the calendar it held onto the kitchen table. She slid the nail into Bristol’s back pocket. “It also says you shouldn’t eat any food in Faerie, or you’ll become bewitched and never be able to leave.”
“No food? How am I supposed to manage that?”
Harper went to the cupboard and began pulling out whatever she could find—six granola bars, four packets of instant oatmeal, dry soup mix, two cans of sardines, a box of raisins, and a bag of chips. “The book doesn’t say anything about water. You can probably drink all of that you want.” She winced, having second thoughts. “Maybe boil it first.” She filled the largest water bottle they had anyway, then ran to the bathroom and returned with Bristol’s blister packs of pills, a box of tampons, aspirin, and a toothbrush.
She sighed. “Are you going to pack my pajamas next? I can’t take everything.”
