Page 14

“Easy,” Wren purred from the shadows.

For some reason, I wasn’t at all surprised to find him standing in the corridor, leaning against the wall beside my bedroom. I still stopped on the top step and glared at him, but the pressure eased. My anger deflated like hot air from a balloon.

In the dim light coming from my sister’s room at the far end of the hall, his beautiful face was painted in a subtle shade of pink. He was a vision of calm and pretty things.

“It’s not here,” he whispered. “Your sister is sleeping peacefully, dreaming of a handsome High Fae Prince—”

I flicked his arm, careful not to break my nail on his bicep. “Of course you’d think of yourself as a Prince.”

Wren’s laughter was silent as he extended that large, muscular arm towards her room and nodded. “See for yourself.”

Oh, I intend to. I trust a faerie man about as much as I trust a human one.

Our father coming back usually meant that he’d gambled and drunk his livelihood away. It always brought him to Belgrave again to prey on my mother’s inability to stand up for herself—and her children—and my little sister’s desire to see her father through the child-sized, rose-coloured glasses that I’d handed down to her.

As I padded up to her door, I prayed that she hadn’t seen him yet. I prayed that she hadn’t felt that bubbling excitement,hopeful for her upcoming birthday to be celebrated as a complete family unit just this once.

He would be gone before then.

He never stayed long—and this time, I would make sure of it. Because with that man in the house, we were in as much danger as we would be if the caenim were in his place.

Brynn was fast asleep, like Wren said. Curled up beneath the blankets, with her stuffed animals arranged around her on the bed, she was breathing deeply and evenly. The curtains were drawn across her open window, overlooking the riverbank and pulling in the scent of brine and damp soil. Some of her washing had spilled out of the basket and onto her fluffy rug, but…

There was no sign of intrusion.

Her night light was sitting on her bedside table, casting the shapes of long-winged fairies and five-pointed stars onto the ceiling and the wall in a soft pink glow.

My cheeks heated as I felt Wren’s smug gaze fall on me from behind. He wasn’t wrong about her dreams, either. I’d forgotten that Brynn was right into her fairy phase—not the same kind of faerie, but close enough.

Satisfied that she was safe, I pulled her door partially closed and retreated down the hall to where Wren remained beside my bedroom door.

He raised an eyebrow at me as if to say,“Do you believe me now?”

I nodded, dragging in a deep and rocky breath.

Wren jerked his chin towards the staircase, the faintest crease forming between his brows.Who is that man?

No one. He’s no one.

He rolled his eyes at me when I didn’t answer and shoved away from the wall, which crackled beneath the force. “I get the feeling you don’t like faeries as much as your sister does,” he whispered.

“She likes theniceones,” I hissed. I knew that I had to go back downstairs, that I was delaying it. “Not the real kind, apparently.”

He placed his hand over his heart in mock outrage. “I’m nice.”

“Your bedside manner is dreadful.”

“Itoldyou, I’m not a—”

Wren never finished his sentence. He never got the chance.

It didn’t matter that I knew what he was planning to say, or that faeries and monsters were real, or that the two of them had torn Dante’s Bookstore apart like it was a battlefield, or even that my father had weaselled his way back into my home.

Every single one of those things ceased to exist when the cry rang out from downstairs. A cry of terror that I’d heard before too many times.

My mother.

Chapter six