“What are these?”
“Pieces of home.” He puts me down, making sure I’m stable on my feet, and kisses me again, but the moment is over and it shouldn’t have happened.
I should know better than to sleep with strange men, even if they are fae.
He steps out and grabs the towel already hanging on the rail. Then he’s gone and I’m left aching in all the right places.
I tug the elastic out of my hair, and I stand there, face tilted to the water, wondering how my life came unstuck so fast. A few hours and everything has spun so fast I don’t know where I’m standing.
Every time I close my eyes, I see the two headed dogs in my apartment.
I see Lorcan shooting them.
Then I’m falling.
And he’s there to protect me. Because he thinks I’m fae like him. And what if I am? I think of all the times I’ve never quite fitted in. How long until a different monster finds me and I’m not so lucky?
I use a little of his shampoo—something scented like a forest—and wash my hair, knowing I’ll smell like him for a little while and not minding one bit.
Eventually I turn off the taps and step out, dry off and bundle myself up in the robe before padding out to find him. Even though the bathroom door was open, he didn’t linger and watch.
He’s sitting at the dining table, dressed in another black T-shirt and pair of jeans, wearing gloves and carefully filling up bullets—I assume they are, anyway. They don’t look like anything I’m familiar with.
“You want to prove you are fae?” He pushes one toward me. “Hold this in your hand.”
The bullet glitters.
“What does it mean if I am?”
“It means you can leave this place and live in faery.”
“Are there monsters?”
“No, they are from the outer realms. The realms that link human to faery.” He adds trying to explain all these new worlds to me.
I nod, hoping that it will all make sense soon. If the fae are real, why can’t there be different realms?
“And if I stay?” I have classes to teach and a degree to finish. But no family to miss me. I never knew my father, and my mother drank herself to death a year ago.
“Then you will be hunted by every creature from the outer realms until one of them gets you.” He stares up at me. “I can’t protect you all the time.”
I swallow. “Why?”
“Because I need to stop the monsters before they cause trouble. They hunt and kill because they need food from faery. They can eat as many humans as they want, but it won’t sustain them. They hunger for the magic in our blood, our bones, our very being.”
I don’t feel very magical. “Do you need food from faery?”
“No. We also have human blood in our veins. To breed the fae need women. All fae born here are female, and all born in faery are male. We have to come here.”
I consider him for several seconds. “So my mother was human, and my father was fae.”
“He was probably a rider.” He shrugs. “It happens.”
“Who? How do I know it wasn’t you?”
“We recognize our own, besides I’ve only been here twenty years and you are older than that.”
Not by much, and he doesn’t look any older than me. “You’ve got kids out there?”
