He groans but slowly trudges forward. I haul him the rest of the way until I’m banging on Alexis’s door.
“Not so loud,” she says when she opens it. “You’ll wake the entire building.” Her face lights up when she notices Emlyn behind me. “Oh! Are we finally doing this?”
“What? No!” I push past her as my face burns, pulling Emlyn with me so the three of us stand in a triangle in the entryway. “Aren’t you with Oliver?”
“Sure, but it’s nothing serious yet, and I’m always ready to help a friend.” She winks at me, and if I could collapse into a void, I would. “So what’s going on?”
After giving her a quick rundown of how Ellie and Caeo have been kidnapped by fae, she frowns. “Why would you possibly think that?”
I gesture to Emlyn. “Because he’s fae, and he told me.”
The temperature in the room drops about twenty degrees.
“What?” she asks, her voice cold as ice.
Emlyn takes a step behind me.
“He’s fae,” I repeat.
Alexis’s nostrils flare, and I belatedly remember the entire reason I was furious with Emlyn to begin with: because he fucked her.
She lunges at him. “I’ll kill you!”
I jump back, knocking into Emlyn, sandwiching him between me and the wall. Alexis claws at him, and I force her hands away.
“Alexis, stop!”
“Water from air, blades of ice—”
An incantation.
She can’t do that without a focal, can she?
Icicles as sharp as knives crystalize above Emlyn as she finishes. I release a counter-incantation as they fly toward him, barely melting them in time. Cold water splashes against us.
Emlyn squeezes out from behind me and bolts to the other side of the room. I throw my arms around Alexis as she lunges after him.
“Stop defending him, Reid,” she yells as I struggle to restrain her without hurting her.
“I need his help! I can’t have you murdering him.”
“Did you get some kind of sick pleasure out of it?” She snarls at Emlyn, her face twisted with rage and pain. “Were you laughing at me the entire time?”
“Of course not! You’re a person, I don’t hold your ignorance against you.”
“You murdered my parents!”
“Ihaven’t killed anyone from your realm,” Emlyn snaps. “I’mtrying to prevent another war with mortals.”
“Yeah, right,” she scoffs, still pulling against my grip.
“Fae can’t lie, Lexi,” I say softly.
“No, but they twist the truth so much, they might as well.”
“What’s everyone yelling about?” Sophie’s door opens, her typical scowl marring her face as she rubs the sleep from her eyes.
“He brought a fae here!” Alexis shouts.
