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“It won’t fucking pass. Tell me what’s wrong.”

She wheels toward him and clutches his arms. “I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“Do you have a fever?” Cove tries to soothe. “Aches or pains?”

“No, but something’s…not right.”

“That’s it. I’m calling for Cypress,” Puck says, then punches his arm toward Elixir. “Are you going to just stand there?”

But he knows Elixir isn’t a doctor. He can brew curatives like a chemist or a potioneer, but he can’t analyze ailments apart from venom or poison-induced ones. Few Faeries can since illness isn’t a regular concern. The centaurs are the ones remotely capable of identifying maladies to the most accurate degree.

I approach the huddle. “Faeries can be cursed, poisoned, wounded, or incapacitated through bargains. But they don’t get sick. Not in the way humans do. And there are no other mortals presently dwelling in this realm.”

“There’s no way you could have been exposed to a contagion,” Puck agrees, stroking Juniper’s cheek. “So what’s causing this?”

After a pause in which Juniper’s baffled countenance transfers to her sisters, some sort of realization flashes in Cove’s teal eyes, which bloat to the size of saucers. “Oh, Fables,” she gasps.

Lark is right behind her. “Holy shit,” leaps off my mate’s tongue.

I’m at a loss, so I merely shrug when Puck and Juniper swing their heads toward me for clarification.

“Okay, that doesn’t help,” Puck snaps to the females, his glare jumping from them to the water Fae who’s busy compressing his mouth. “How about you, chatterbox? You want to fill us in on why my woman just lost her breakfast?”

At last, Elixir sighs and rubs the bridge between his eyebrows. “Because she’s pregnant.”

PART 2

PUCK

12

Don’t get me wrong. I fancy a good jest, especially if I’m the one responsible, and especially if it’s graphic. Except nobody in this band is laughing.

I stare at Elixir, waiting for him to deliver the shitty punchline. But it doesn’t come. Not that I’d expected it to from my broodingly-monosyllabic-prick of a brother, who wouldn’t know a wisecrack from the hole in his sculpted ass.

Mischief is the guilty pleasure of randy woodland Faeries, not his lot in The Deep. All the same, I couldn’t have heard him right. This has to be some tacky attempt at a prank.

Either that, or it’s a truly fucked-up version of sarcasm, seeing as his announcement is the kind of news I’ve only ever imagined hearing. It’s the kind of reality that isn’t possible. Not for me and Juniper.

But again, humor and banter are hardly Elixir’s expertise. Even if it were otherwise, he wouldn’t stoop so low to make a mockery of something like this.

Apart from a doe traipsing through the forest about fifty feet away—probably Sylvan, from the sound of it—silence crams the forest. In my periphery, everyone gawks at Elixir, who finally turns to face me. His eyes are the sort of gold that glows in the dark, but it’s his pupils I’m more interested in. Frankly, they’re what keep me from balling my fist and ramming it into his face. Those orbs are the lethal black of a basilisk’s skin, and they’re as sober as any Fae who can’t lie. Because like an idiot, that fact had escaped me for all of three seconds.

He’s incapable of bullshitting. He’s serious.

Because she’s pregnant.

No. Not a chance.

For obvious reasons, my brother’s got to be wrong. For all his acute senses and mastery of perception, he’s made a mistake.

Juniper can’t be pregnant. I would’ve known. After living with this woman for well over two months, I would have sensed it. I would’ve seen it on her face, scented it in her blood, and heard it in her voice.

Right? Wouldn’t I have?

Or not. Only fated mates can read each other that way.

Because she’s pregnant.