“Always,” I said, nudging her leg again.
Callie nudged me back, softer this time. “We’ll figure this out. We have to. I just need to rest my eyes for a minute,” she mumbled, shifting to get comfortable.
I didn’t bother replying. She was already sinking into sleep, her breathing slowing, her shoulders relaxing into the rough wood of the hunting blind.
I waited a few moments, listening. Callie and Bethany were out.
But Faelan wasn’t.
At first, I thought he was asleep too, but something was off. His chest rose and fell, slow and even, but his body felt too still. He didn’t look at peace. He looked…stuck.
I moved closer without thinking and scanned his face, watching for the smallest change. A leaf had settled against his cheek, caught in the tangle of his beard. It was small and delicate, too fresh to have fallen there on its own.
I hated that something so innocent could steal Faelan from the world. Or, let’s be real. From me.
As I brushed the tiny leaf away, his eyes opened—slowly, like the weight of sleep still clung to him.
I stilled, and my breath caught.
The green glow in his irises was softer now, like light filtering through deep forest canopy. It wasn’t human. It wasn’t anything I knew how to name. I swallowed, trying to ignore the way my skin prickled under his gaze. “How are you?”
Faelan didn’t answer right away. His eyes weren’t on me. They drifted past, as if he could see through the roof to the sky, or maybe into infinity. He wasn’t watching the world; he was watching it move on without him.
Finally, when I thought he wouldn’t (or even couldn’t) reply, Faelan said, “You’re a stubborn woman, Samantha. You fight, and you push, and you refuse to let things slip through your fingers, even when they were never meant to be held. But some battles can’t be won. You think if you won’t accept this, it can’t be real, and if you push hard enough, the land will release me.But the land doesn’t bargain. It only moves forward, always forward…and I am already a part of it.”
No. “We’ll fix this,” I insisted, because giving up wasn’t an option.
He didn’t argue. He just let the words hang between us, neither accepting nor rejecting them, the way you do when you don’t believe something but haven’t got the heart to say so.
That silence was worse than anything he could have said.
Even in the short amount of time since we’d returned to the shack, Faelan’s hair had grown wilder, thick with ivy and tiny white blossoms, the kind that clung to the edges of spring before fading into summer. He looked more like the forest than the man I’d met, like something that had never belonged anywhere but here.
Which was so wrong…because he should have belonged anywhere he damn well wanted to be.
His hands rested open against the earth, fingers loose, no longer gripping or reaching. He wasn’t fighting the process—he had already let go.
Something inside me blanched at the sight. “I don’t care what you think,” I whispered, shifting closer, “I’m not leaving you like this.”
I didn’t know anything about magic, but maybe things didn’t need to be complicated. Maybe it was like a fairy tale, some old, quiet spell that could be unraveled with something as simple as a touch.
I leaned in before I could talk myself out of it.
My fingers brushed his jaw, tilting his face toward mine. His beard felt different now, more like fiber than whiskers, but his lips were warmer than I expected, softer, and poignantly human.
I kissed him.
For a breath, nothing happened.
I pressed in a little deeper, willing him to change, to shift back into the man I had met, the man I had been with.
The man who hadn’t belonged to the land more than he belonged to himself.
But when I pulled back, his skin was still green, his ears still pointed, the flowers in his hair still blooming like they had taken root.
My kiss hadn’t worked.
Because this wasn’t a fairy tale, and I was no princess.
