Page 6 of Fae Unashamed

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CERRI

The last time I approached Beryl’s restaurant at the edge of Lake Onondaga, I’d felt my impending doom approaching. I’d been weak and foolish at the time, convinced that I could barter my way out of this fight because I’d still believed that Beryl could be a reasonable leader.

Now, I approached as an entirely different version of myself. With my chin high and determination in my core, I shoved my way through the front door and strode towards the door at the back of the dining room. There was no host at the front to stop me anymore.

I’d taken him from her. Tal was now my right hand man, and while he wasn’t here with me, I knew that she would still seethe at the thought.

A lock of my silver-white hair fell from the bun I’d pinned it in. The strands grazed my cheek and bounced with each step down the spiral staircase. A feeling like walking through spiderwebs crawled across my skin as I entered into Beryl’s domain. Her power crackled in the air with an ominous and threatening charge.

I looked back at Ness, right behind me. She’d donned a pair of leather leggings and a cropped leather jacket in preparation for a possible fight. She also looked like a badass enforcer in the outfit, too. I didn’t want to remind her that she was pregnant and, if a fight broke out, I was going to shove her ass through the in-between.

This was such a bad idea, but we needed to get our people back. Beryl could have been hiding them in any pocket realm. It would have taken me months to sift through my dreams to find the right pocket realm, and even then, there was no promising that I could take it back.

Tal had warned me that I had very few options when I explained our predicament. He’d given me one course of action that could lead to our eventual victory. Though it was risky, I knew that if I didn’t at least try, then we would find ourselves between a rock and a hard place later on.

I was to plant a seed of arcana here, just like I’d done with the Seelie Castle. I just had to do it in front of Beryl without alerting her. That would be easy. Right?

Beryl and I locked gazes from across the room. She’d felt my presence from the moment I’d stepped foot in her restaurant. I noticed a slight tension in her shoulders. She looked me up and down like she was looking at a ghost, one that she didn’t particularly appreciate seeing again.

I smiled in greeting. She, too, grinned, the split of her bloodred lips revealing rows of shark teeth in an attempt to intimidate me. I almost rolled my eyes at her glamour, though I did note that it was strong here, as strong as a glamour in a fae domain.

Beryl waved her hand in the air. “To what do I owe this visit? I assume you have not come to deliver yourself upon a silver platter to me, niece.”

I cringed at her use of such a familial term. Though we were blood related, I really didn’t want to think of her as myaunt—damn, I had before. There was no denying that we were caught in the middle of a very ugly family feud.

“You took my friends and family,” I said as I shoved arcana through my feet and into the ground.

The ground hated me, like an old lover that had festered with resentment while I was gone. It remembered my family and how we’d failed. There was so much blood in the ground that pulsed with Unseelie arcana that I could barely find the core of untamed magic that should have been here.

“Give them back,” I continued.

The ground pulsed once. Twice. Three times.

Was I the only one who could feel it? Beryl’s expression didn’t change at all. I knew that I had to be stealthy about this. I fed my arcana into the ground one thread at a time so that it was nothing more than the barest trickle.

“Who said I took your people?” Beryl leaned back in her lounge as if she were an innocent little girl.

I fought the urge to roll my eyes.

How had I planted the seed the first time? I thought back to the day I’d been trapped in Beryl’s version of the Seelie Castle domain. She’d plunged her hand through my heart and nearly killed me. I’d been bleeding out on the ground, my blood seeping into the ground.

Beneath me, the blood of friends and family pulsed again. There was so much of it, but my arcana could barely pull itself together. The threads were frayed and frazzled, spread too thin.

A hand slithered over my shoulder. Gaze sliding sideways, I caught a glimpse of a deep gray hand. A face with four, red-sclera eyes on either side blinked at me with a sharp-toothed grin. More hands slid over my shoulders.

A…spider fae? She had long white hair that hung limp in the air like spiderwebs. There was a beauty about her that was almost frightening.

“Can’t we gut her and feed her to the ground right now?” the spider fae asked Beryl. The spider fae’s fingers dug into my body.

Behind me, Ness snarled. “Release Cerridwen.”

The spider fae’s hands suddenly lifted as if pried off my body. I would have thanked Ness, but this was a dangerous place to be throwing around gratitude. The fae always made the wordsthank youvery tricky, and there was no knowing what the magic in the air would do to the words.

“If you gut her, she will grow another head like a hydra.” Beryl’s lips curled in derision.

I almost laughed. She was still perturbed that I’d managed to come back from Delphine’s fatal blow. Delphine had been blackmailed into helping Beryl. The assassin had caught me off guard and delivered a wound that should have been the end of me—had I not been in my own domain.

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