“Hawk girl! Fly! Now!” he shouted and pushed her with all his mental might. She cursed at him, but Bas was already shifting into his dragon form. He let out a roar of fire, and the dark, creepythingthat was trying to sink its claws into them let out a screech of fury and fled.
“Fucking parasite,” Bas growled, fire dripping from between his fangs.
Bas turned to tell the woman everything was okay, but he was alone. She was gone. He let out a furious roar of frustration that she had slipped through his fingers once again. Only a gold and black feather remained to prove she had been there at all.
2
Bridget Hawkyns had experienced a lot of bad dreams in her twenty-five years of life. She had learned to control them, but there wasn’t any controlling this.
One minute, she was arguing with the hot Irish stranger who kept on rudely turning up in her mind library, and then next, there was a dark creature, a push, and she was on a bare wooden floor with blood pouring from her brow.
This was a nightmare she recognized because she had lived it. Now, she just had to let it play out before she could break free and wake up. She tried to steady her breath through her cracked ribs.
“You aren’t going anywhere, you ungrateful, brown bitch,” her stepfather’s voice hissed through the ringing in her ears.
She had been trying to leave. She was almost eighteen, so legally, she was old enough. But he would never let her go. He needed her to look after the house and the baby. Free labor and someone to kick about.
His manicured hands gripped her around the throat. “It hurts me to have to do this to you, but you need to learn to respect the head of the house.”
These were words she had heard from the first time he had hit her with his fists when she was thirteen. He had been married to her mother for three months and had already slapped Bridget around harder than a parent should.
Her mother had never intervened, already too enamored of the powerful, rich man whom she had met at yet another party.
He was agood man,her mother had told her, who wouldtake care of them from now on. Bridget had to be good to him at all times, or he would leave, and it would be her fault. It didn’t matter that her new white stepfather hated that his new white wife had a light brown child. Her mother ignored Bridget’s bruises, and if she acknowledged them at all, it was her fault. Always her fault.
Some nights, when Bridget lay curled under her bed, hiding, she had thought her mother was worse than him. Bridget remembered being loved a little bit by her at one time. But that was before George and the perfect white baby he had always wanted.
That fateful night, baby George had been crying in his crib as George the elder had laid into her. Bridget’s arm snapped under his polished shoe, and her vision had gone white. There was screaming, and she realized it was her.
Then her stepfather had been ripped off her, and something huge and powerful had stood over her. It looked like an ancient Celt from one of the history books that she read at school. He had black braided hair and was covered in blood and woad. He looked down at her and then at the screaming baby.
“He is not your father,” the man had said in heavily accented English.
George the elder was struggling in the man’s grip.
“No shit,” Bridget had whimpered through a busted lip.
An equally wild-looking woman joined them and lifted the baby from the crib.
“This is the one that is owed,” she said and placed baby George into a sling made of fur. She noticed Bridget climbing up off the floor, and she looked back at her stepfather. “You dare hurt a child this way?”
“Justice is owed,” the wild man declared and offered a knife to Bridget.
“You stay away from me, you little bitch. I’ll fucking kill you all!” George the elder had screamed.
“You are dead either way,” the woman said coldly and nodded to Bridget. “Justice.”
“Justice,” Bridget repeated and stabbed her stepfather in the chest.
Bridget joltedout of the nightmare, her heart pounding. Her mouth tasted of her stepfather’s blood, and she quickly downed the stale water by her bedside.
Some people liked to say that the world ended when the fae returned to England. For Bridget, it began. It had been years, but whenever she had the dream, her arm throbbed where it had been broken that night.
“Fucking asshole,” she grumbled, rubbing the ache which she knew would ease up when the memory’s claws on her did.
It was a nightmare only up until the fae had kicked in the door. These days, there were memorials for the people who had died in the invasion, but the only time Bridget had wept was when she had been sitting in a lawyer’s office two weeks later when she was told that she was the sole heir of her stepfather’s considerable fortune. She was the only survivor in her family that night. The fae had killed her mother and hung both parents from a tree next to the Thames River.
For the lawyer’s benefit, Bridget had wept and pretended to be heartbroken over the death of her beloved stepfather. Really, they were tears of joy. She hoped George knew that the ‘brown bitch’ had gotten his money.
