Page 65 of Into The Green

"When you had your hand on his throat... your face was pure rage."

"That's what I felt," I admitted, knowing I could trust them with that, hoping they could help me understand it. "I don't know how to explain it..."

"Like it was a part of your blood, your marrow, like it was seeping outward and completely overtaking your whole body, until it was all there even was to you..." Jasper explained for me, making me start. "Cece, you weren't there," he said, shaking his head a little. "I don't know how to explain it, but you were just... gone. All there was was the rage."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you're not just a silly changeling and it means I want to know who the fuck your parents are and why they would stick someone with those kinds of powers in the human realm, completely fucking unaware of what they were capable of."

"That's... not helpful at all," I said with a snort.

"Maybe, at least now that we know she can do that, it can be an asset," Doyle suggested.

"I don't want her to fucking use that. If you could have felt what that was like, you wouldn't ask her to do it either," Jasper spat.

"Jasp... it's the fucking camps," Doyle said, and there it was again, the hollowness in his tone, the darkness in his eyes.

"Doyle, what are the camps?"

"They're... they're fucking hell on Earth, sweetheart. They're the worst possible place anyone in any realm could be."

"But how..."

"I grew up in the camps, Cece," Doyle cut me off.

"What... how?"

"You met the nymphs," Doyle said with a humorless laugh. "I think you can see that they don't exactly have the ability to be attentive mothers."

"But what about your father?"

Doyle sighed, sitting down, reaching into his backpack. "You get how they, we," he corrected, "work. The longer we are in The Green, the more uncontrollable our sex drive."

"Yeah..."

"My mother grew up in The Green. She never left. She was just a sex drive in human form. She wasn't exactly discerning about who she slept with. No one knew who my father was. All anyone knew was there was a screaming, filthy, hungry, naked baby in the meadow with the nymphs. So a couple of Light fae happened by, picked me up, took me in. When I was eight, they were brought up on some bullshit charge and sent to the camps. You know how in North Korea, the work camp so-called criminals have to pay three generations deep?"

"Ah... yeah," I said, stomach twisting at the stories I had heard.

"They must have gotten that idea from the Dark fae. My adoptive parents got brought in, so did my mom's dying father, and so did I. It didn't matter that I wasn't really theirs. It didn't matter that I was a kid. We all got dragged in and separated and put into different parts of the camp." Jasper walked over, clamping a hand on his friend's shoulder for a moment, picking up on things I couldn't, more than was being said.

It struck me then how hard it must have been for Jasper, what kind of emotional strength it must take just for him to live with everyone's emotions moving through him as well. Maybe that was why he was so guarded, so hard to know at times, because he was trying to not let all the anger, sadness, joy, pain, frustration that wasn't his own to completely take over him.

"The work camps are supposed to be for criminals, but over time, they started getting loose with the rules and just dragged random, helpless people in to work as well. There's a rather high... casualty rate at the camps."

"They work people literally to death," Jasper picked up when Doyle couldn't go on. "And if you're young and strong and don't die from the work, the hunger, the thirst... the guards like to have fun with you."

I swallowed the bile that rose up in my throat. "Doyle..."

"The beatings aren't so bad. You almost get used to them after a while. It's watching others get the same treatment, or in the women's cases, worse, that really fucks with you, that eats away at your soul."

"Did you eventually... work off your crimes?"

"I waited until the guards were busy terrorizing a field full of women and made a break for it like a fucking coward when I was fourteen."

"Oh my God, you weren't a coward," I said, moving over to him, wrapping my arms around him, wanting to block out the images his memories formed in my head, trying to not think about Jade in a similar situation. "You were a kid. You didn't do anything wrong."

"You don't know what it was like, sweetheart. You can't say it wasn't cowardly. For fuck's sake, I could have at least tried to take someone with me."