A bark of laughter escaped me, and the caribou exhaled before shifting its position and resuming its breakfast.
Me too, friend. Me too.I pulled back on the bed and squared my shoulders. Of all the things I’d expected Kai to say, that wasn’t even in the top ten. “That’s ridiculous. Nice try, but I’m gonna call that shit.”
“Shit? How would that be shit?” He stared at me without blinking. “It’s neither shit nor ridiculous.”
I reached for another biscuit, more for something to do with my hands than because I wanted another. Also, to keep myself from punching him. He thought I was an idiot? “My mother and Aunt Maureen would have told me. They told me everything. Sometimes too much.” Between their horror stories about men and intimate positions I never wanted to think of them in, I’d begged them to keep information like that to themselves.
He set his jaw and kept his eyes locked on mine. “I know the signs, Hannah. You're fae.”
And the sky wasn’t blue. Did he expect me to blindly believe him? For being so smart, he underestimated me. “I’m human. I’ve always been human, and I always will be.” I folded my arms, then winced at how the change in position pulled at my bruised muscles. Dropping my arms, I lifted the furs around myself and pushed my hair back so he could see my ears. “My ears are round, dumbass.” Dropping my hair, I rolled my eyes, but an unsettling feeling spread through me, as if I were trying to understand how this might actually be true.
He shook his head. “I know you aren’t human. Perhaps your family simply did not tell you.”
“So, you have some fae-sensing magic that alerts you to one another? Because where I come from, people don’t just forget to mention they aren’t human. You don’t even know my mother, my aunt, or my absent, deadbeat sperm donor.” My sperm donor was one of the worst humanity had to offer, at that, although things might have been better if he had been a literal sperm donor whom she had never met.
“Sperm donor?” His brows furrowed. “How is that even possible? You have to have sex to bear a child, so a penis isn’t optional.”
We might understand each other’s words, but we didn’t speak the same language… clearly. “They had sex, but he didn’t stay.” Still, I liked how confused Kai looked right now. How far did their medical science go here since everything looked roughly medieval? We humans didn’t really know about eggs until the 1700s. “But where I come from, there are sperm banks and donors, and sperm can be medically placed with a woman’s eggs to fertilize them.”
“Humans lay eggs?” He ran a hand through his hair. “I’ve heard enough for now. My point is, I may know your family. And you do not have to be full fae to carry the powers of your bloodline, especially if you are from a powerful lineage.” Hespoke these words as evenly as if he were telling me that I had qualified for a great deal on car insurance or debt consolidation.
One of the logs in the firepit shifted and sparked flames, and I startled.
My tongue thickened in my mouth as my brain struggled to wrap itself around all this. An uncomfortable little whisper in the back of my mind and the twinge in my gut said it could be true. There had always been odd things about my family. But maybe I was just trying to make sense of them and imagining connections where there weren’t any. “What proof do you have?” For once, I couldn’t come up with a sassy response.
He turned back to the fire and put more logs on it. The burned wood shifted, and the fresh wood crunched against the charred logs and the metal grate. “Your appearance, for one. You share all the features of the fae of both courts. The gold in your hair is especially lustrous, which is a feature shared by both the Day and the Aurora Fae, though the Aurora are best known for that trait. And your eyes are the right color as well. There is also the strikingness of your beauty. It is exceptional, a trait shared by the royal and noble houses.”
I stiffened a little, trying to smile and play it off. “You’re laying it on too thick now.” I couldn’t hide the dark amusement that colored my voice. The joke didn’t land, though, not even with me.
He narrowed his eyes. “I would presume you have received a great deal of male attention from the humans in your realm.” As he said that, one of his fists curled at his side. He straightened, a muscle ticking in his jaw.
My eyebrow lifted. “Well…some. Yes.” I pressed my lips into a tight line, not wanting to say more than that. It never went well. Not for me, Mom, or Aunt Maureen. Our lot was heartbreak and disappointment if we were lucky. Bruises,beatings, and obsessive stalkers if we weren’t. And I was rarely lucky.
His upper lip curled for just a breath. He then snatched up the poker and stirred the coals. Smoke spiraled into the ceiling vent, and the thick woody scent permeated the air.
Exhaling, he focused on me once again. “You always smell of magnolia and apricots, even when you’ve been sweating and bleeding. Fae scent presents above all other scents of their bodies. And I have not known you long enough to determine this, but I would presume you are one who rises with the sun and who feels loss and sorrow in the dead of winter and at night. True sunlight does not bother your eyes nearly so much as it does other people, even when it is blinding.”
“It’s called SAD—seasonal affective disorder.” My scowl deepened, and my fingers curled into the deep, soft fur blanket. “Lots of people have that!” And he was right about the smell, though it was never overpowering. I never needed perfume or deodorant, which was nice. “And I—I don’t always smell like that. It’s just…I don’t smell bad.”
The violet in his eyes deepened, and the ring thickened. “And then there’s your healing. The Day and Aurora Fae do not heal as swiftly in the cold and dark as they do in the light and heat.” He gestured to our surroundings. “The difference in the way that your leg and hand healed before you were exposed for a long period to the cold. The physical cold slows your healing as well, which was why you were in such bad shape last night.”
I refused to admit it, but the speed at which my first few injuries had healed had taken even me by surprise. But that didn’t mean he was telling the truth.
“And beyond that, there’s the way in which you arrived. You could not have entered a portal, nor used a magical dagger to open a portal with your blood, if you were not fae. And for your blood to work at all, either the blade and the mirror had to beenchanted to respond to you, or you had to be of a line for whom the blade and mirror work automatically. The only thing that keeps me from saying you are from a royal line is that you lack the ring around your pupil.”
I blinked, trying to slow my racing thoughts. “Ring? Oh…like yours?” He did have a band of violet that was always changing size. “That means you’re royalty?”
“Royal blood, and a powerful fae.” He nodded, as if he still could not fully accept that I might not be royalty. “But it is possible that your absence from our realm has muted your abilities and powers. You need time to rest, recover, and draw upon your abilities.”
“I don’t have any abilities,” I snapped.
“You do.” He stared at me, unrelenting as the stones around the firepit. “And youarefae.”
His confidence grated on my nerves like sandpaper. I wanted to throw something at his infuriatingly composed face and continue arguing with him, but the words caught in my throat. Because deep down, in a place I didn't want to examine too closely, something stirred. A recognition I couldn't name. He was making me even more confused and unsettled.
The biggest problem I had with accepting what he’d said was that it would mean Mom and Aunt Maureen had hidden something vital from me. We’d always been so open with each other, and if this was true, they—and especially Aunt Maureen—had betrayed me. They’d been my rocks for my entire life… well, until a while ago.
My heart fractured.
