I glanced at him once to find his lips set in a firm, grim line. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a warning and one that he intended to enforce should I decide to disobey him. He took his orders to look after me quite seriously indeed.
I turned back to Lark. He was shaking now, his arms and legs twitching as if his body was fighting the rift, the darkness he was absorbing. His jaw clenched, his throat bobbed, but his eyes remained closed. He did not cry out even when it pulled him from his feet, lifting him a few inches off of the ground, levitating him above the powdery drifts of snow. That inky black clung to him, enveloping him, suffocating him. But underneath it all a purple glow emerged and began pulsating brighter and brighter until it shot from him in a blinding beam of light. I gasped, raising an arm to shield my eyes, as Lark dropped back to the ground, steadying himself. I blinked away the silhouette of that light and opened my eyes to find that the rift was simply… gone.
I ran forward before I could stop myself and, this time, Rook made no move to stop me. I reached Lark a moment later and, thanks to my snow-induced clumsiness, barreled into him much harder than I had intended. But he didn’t fall. He merely caught me by the shoulders and helped me to my feet.
“You did it,” I gasped, gaping up at him in awe. “I can’t believe you did it.”
“Your confidence in me knows no bounds,” he drawled sarcastically.
But I couldn’t stop smiling. This was it. This was the solution. He was the solution. For all of our equipment, all of our studies, we had never closed a rift as efficiently as this single Fae male had. I knew I had promised to take him home, to get him back to his plane, but maybe I could convince him to stay a little longer. Maybe I could convince him to shadowstep to the other rifts, to heal them all. Maybe…
A slow clapping sound from somewhere nearby interrupted my thoughts. I whirled around to find Wyn emerging from the brush, a smug grin on his lips, surrounded by a dozen soldiers who all emerged at the same time, their guns trained on us, though I noticed the barrels were shaking even worse than they had been when facing the minotaur.
“Wyn?” I asked, stunned. “What are you doing?”
Rook was by our side in an instant. Lark stepped protectively in front of me, shielding me.
“I have to hand it to you, Ren. I didn’t think you could actually do it,” Wyn spoke differently now. His voice was not the same stuttering, uncertain whimper. Now, it was oozing arrogance and that grin, I wanted to slap it right off of his face. “My superiors were right. Never trust a Half-Fae.”
My world came crashing to a screeching halt. Half-Fae. He knew. He knew what I was. He knew what existed out there beyond the bounds of our reality. And if what he was saying was true, so did his superiors. I stopped breathing. For how long had the leaders of our country, the elite of the world, known about the existence of magic, of these supremely powerful beings, and kept it from the masses? And how long had they suspected I was one?
“They knew you’d have friends on the other side,” he boasted now, his former tone of academic congeniality entirely gone, replaced by something unflinchingly wicked. “They merely waited for a situation desperate enough for you to call them. And now that they’re here, they won’t be leaving anytime soon.”
My face burned with anger and shame as a feeling of foolish stupidity washed over me.
Sixty years. I had lived at Hadley University for sixty years and I still looked like a student. I taught classes, I interacted with pupils, I attended faculty meetings and required training. I hid when the more distinguished visitors came, of course. And I lied about who I really was from time to time, donned disguises when someone I had met before came back decades later.
I should have left. I should have started a new life somewhere far away, created a new identity for myself. But I hadn’t. Because I was weak. Because I had people in my life that I cared about, connections and relationships that I didn’t want to leave behind. And because I knew my uncle would never live as long as me and I didn’t want to miss even a moment of his fleeting mortal life.
“I hate the DAA,” I muttered.
“Men,” Wyn barked and the soldiers strode forward, guns still trained on the two Fae.
Slowly, tentatively, they raised their hands. Gawking, I did the same.
They had to have a plan. They had to. Lark could summon whatever he wished into existence, could swallow up enormous rifts in the fabric of space and time. Rook could turn invisible. They could shadowstep and whatever else I wasn’t even aware of. Surely, they wouldn’t allow themselves to be taken by DAA soldiers, by the man who couldn’t even defeat a minotaur without the help of a hapless professor and a cache of C4.
“How did you know?” I called out because keeping Wyn talking felt better than doing nothing and, if they had a plan, they might need time to make it work. I could give them that, at least.
“You trust too easily, Professor Belling. I always warned you about that.”
My heart dropped into my stomach. Someone had told him. Someone had told the people above them. Someone I trusted. Someone I knew.
“Who?” I growled.
“Where’s the fun in that? How about you convince your little friends to surrender to us and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”
I had no intention of doing that but I had to keep Wyn talking. I had to stall him for as long as I could.
“Where would you take them?” I asked, pretending not to notice the way Rook glanced my way, the way Lark’s fist clenched at my side.
Wyn grinned as if he had won. I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t. The Fae behind me had barely moved. Any hope I held that they were formulating a plan was fading fast.
“Back to headquarters,” Wyn answered as if it was the stupidest question in the world. Perhaps it was. But, if he would not tell me anything about who ratted me out, I was running out of subjects to broach with this traitor. “So that they can tell us more about these rifts they seem to have no trouble getting rid of.”
“More? What more do you need to know? They’re rifts, natural phenomena.”
“Please don’t insult my intelligence, Professor.”
