“You’re never boring, I’ll give you that.” He takes another swig of his beer, and I rest my elbows on the table, leaning in close like we’re sharing a secret.
“So…” I bat my lashes. Too much? Probably too much. “About Faerie…”
He chuckles. “You’re in the hunt.”
Not a question. I shrug. “Aren’t you?”
Gavin’s a realm hopper just like me. Him and his merry band of wielder mavericks. Not the same ones who Joan and her mate Rhett clashed with in the demon realm, but of the same stripe.
“Not in a thousand years,” he says flatly. “I’ve never stepped foot in Faerie, and I don’t plan to start now.”
“That bad?”
“Worse.” Another drink. An exaggerated shudder. “Last few wielders who went in never came back out. There’s a reason this realm has so many legends and stories of the Fair Folk.”
I scoff. “Come on, it’s not like all of those fairy stories are real.”
“Not all of them. And I think this is one case where truth is worse than fiction.”
“Isn’t the expression ‘stranger than fiction’?”
“That, too. Believe me, Seren, you want to stay far, far away from that realm.”
“Oh, please. Just because you’re too chicken to—”
“I mean it,” he says, and it’s as serious as I’ve ever seen him. “Especially after what that damned queen is rumored to have done with her human consort, there’s absolutely no way anyone from this realm should—”
“Human consort? Like a lover? Or a spouse or something?”
He nods. “Yeah. A wielder, apparently.”
“What happened to him?”
“No one really knows. But there are stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
Gavin arches a brow. “Use your imagination.”
I pause for a moment, mind running over the patchwork mythology I’ve picked up over the years and my own first impression of the fae realm.
None of it inspires much confidence a fae queen’s human consort would have fared well in Faerie.
“Capture, imprisonment, enthrallment by making him drink the fae wine?” I guess.
“Ah, so you do know a bit about how Faerie treats its human guests.”
My mind races, and something kicks up in the bottom of my gut. Not the same feeling I get when Callum is around, but something more familiar.
Something that wants me to hunt, to seek, to find.
A human consort might know a thing or two about a fae queen’s heart and where to find it.
I sit back in my seat, fold my arms over my chest. “Got a name?”
“For the fae queen’s wielder? No, I don’t. Besides, he disappeared half a century ago.”
Alright.
