“I beg your?—”
I grabbed Nicolai’s arm and hauled his demi-royal butt across the room to a niche by the bathrooms that was out of earshot of his creepy friends. “You need to tell me what’s going onright now.”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Magnus is too prim sometimes. He worries you’ll be shocked. Clementine and some other girls are in the group chat, if you’re worried about that. It’s not misogynistic, just colloquial. And verbose. People talk too much.”
I barreled on like my words were tumbling off a cliff. “Are you fae? Are you guysfey folk?Are all of you people actually frickin’fairies?”
He frowned, shifting uneasily back on his heels. “That’s a rather vulgar term for queer people, don’t you think? But no, I’m not gay. I went to boarding school with these wankers, but surely that doesn’t count.”
“No!Are youfaelords and have I been sucked into—the Summer Court, I’m guessing because we’re in scorching Las Vegas inJune?”
Nicolai blinked, and blinked again, and then his eyebrowsfurrowed hard as his lips parted. “I thought I spoke English better than this.Whatare youtalkingabout?”
“Do you have wings?”
He patted his upper ribs below his armpit with his free hand. “My trainer works hard on my lats, but it’s an aesthetic thing as well as core and upper torso stability. It prevents lower back pain caused by computer hunch. Is that what you’re talking about?”
“No.That’snotwhat I’m talking about.And that tattoo all down your side and arm. Is that a bonding tattoo where you bonded as a dragon rider? Or a mark as a revolutionary against the government? Or is it a magical seal that correlates to your powers or your position in a court, or when you made a vow to someone? It kind of looks likewingsand the head of a bird with a beak.Is it a griffin?”
“My tattoo is meant to be abstract, but it’s a rather ill-advised double-headed eagle. One head is on my pec. The other, on my back. Other than that, I don’t know what you mean.”
I barreled on because he wasdodgingmy questions. “Are youplayingwith me? Is that why you were weird about not knowingmy nameuntil the wedding ceremony last night?”
Nicolai shook his head. “I wish I knew what I was thinking last night. I don’t remember any of it. What did I say?”
“You’re not giving me straight answers.You’re answering my questions with another question, or you’re waffling around.Tell me why you didn’t want to know my name last night until during the ceremony when we were married.”
He shook his head. “I was absolutelymortallast night.”
Mortal? “Aha!So you aren’t ‘mortal’now?Are youimmortal?I knew it.I knew it.”
He tilted his head. “Mortal means I was intoxicated.Drunk.Deaddrunk. Dead,mortal.Get it? It means I was hammered. Battered. Positively trollied.”
My hands were shaking so hard that my arms were vibrating. “Butdoes it?Or did you just slip and give yourself away,trickster?”
Clementine squeezed into our little alcove away from the throng. “What’s going on?”
I rounded on her. “Are you guys Fae High Lords from the Summer Court?”
She blinked her tilted eyes at me without changing the expression on her face. “I beg your pardon?”
Another question for a freakin’ question.
I pointed at the Omnia kinetic chandelier, the frantic gyrations of its interlocking rings visible outside our little niche, as it spewed tumbling light over the whole nightclub and us. “That’sthe Cauldron,right? That enormousroundportalout there, circles and rings that spin around each other likeeldritch magic,that’sthe actual Cauldron!”
Clementine pivoted her whole body to glare at the kinetic chandelier and then back at me, her long hair flying behind her like ribbons as she spun.
Ribbons! Were those magic ribbons that grew out of her head that purred and had minds of their own and turned into fae wings? Was she the silver version of a gold-touched fae?
She turned back to me and then flipped her moonlight-silverhair behind her shoulder. With a finger-flip and bored eye roll, she pronounced, “That lighting fixture is not magic. It’s tacky.”
“You’reserious?You’re trying to explain all this away by just calling ittacky?”
“It’s tragically vulgar, but it’s not magical.”
“It looks like magic! It looks like a big magic Cauldron, like if you dip someone in it, they’ll turn into a fae!”
She blinked her grey-blue, tilted eyes that absolutelylooked like they could paired with pointed ears. “Do you mean like inACOTAR?”
