Page 20 of A Kiss from the Fae (Mistress of Magic #2)

Gabriel leaned towards her. His eyes were intense, staring at her, but not in an unpleasant way.

Close up, he smelled of sandalwood and frankincense – a subtle, woody scent that went alongside something else, something that was just him; under his slightly foppish ways, there was a quiet, strong masculinity.

‘So…this Lyr thing. Aren’t you in the least bit curious about what he wants with you?’ he murmured.

Faye saw the fascination in Gabriel’s upturned face and allowed herself to imagine how he saw her.

Her auburn-red hair was tied in a long ponytail and she wore a short, bright blue knitted dress with her ballet pumps; she’d taken off her black belted mac as she sat down.

She was taller than average, and perhaps there was a magical glamour of some kind about her that came from her faerie blood.

She had the high cheekbones of the fae, and their clear, sharp bone structure.

She knew she could enchant Gabriel if she tried: perhaps she already had.

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘But the faerie realms are dangerous. I don’t want to…

I promised Rav I wouldn’t…’ She trailed off.

Here and now, Rav seemed far away. Surrounded by so many magical books, she remembered how it had felt being in Murias.

How sweet and charged, and how full of power it was – how powerful she could be.

‘Rav wouldn’t ask you to give up your magic if he loved you,’ Gabriel said.

‘I mean, I don’t know him. I’m sure he’s great and everything.

But you know I’m right. If you’re half faerie, what, you’re supposed to deny a whole half of yourself because he’s not comfortable with it?

First rule of magic: know thyself. Faye, you can’t be a witch, or a faerie queen for that matter, without being at peace with who you really are. ’

‘It’s easy for you to say. You don’t know the history,’ she muttered.

‘Then tell me.’ His eyes challenged hers. ‘All of it.’

‘So, your friend’s still there? In Murias?

’ Gabriel hadn’t moved throughout Faye’s whole story – of discovering Murias from the faerie road that bisected Rav’s beachfront house; of going through the labyrinth to Finn’s castle; of her own enchantment there, and her eventual disillusionment.

Last, haltingly, Faye told him about the concert in Abercolme: when Dal Riada, Finn’s band, had whipped the crowd into a state of vicious, sexual fervour, and had disappeared, taking eighty humans into the faerie realm, including Aisha.

Her friend. The only thing she couldn’t explain was the bargain with Levantiana, because of the way that her throat tightened when she tried to talk about it.

Faye looked down at her hands that twisted together with anxiety. ‘Yes.’

Faye continually asked herself if she’d run away from her responsibilities towards Aisha. And if she had, could anyone blame her?

No one would blame her, because almost no one believed the true version of what had happened.

The story taken up by the papers was that Finn Beatha’s band, Dal Riada, had disappeared with several concert attendees in tow after their concert at the summer solstice – the first solstice celebration in Abercolme for hundreds of years.

There had been a fire and general panic, in which many were injured.

The papers seemed to suggest that the band were a kind of cult that had run away with locals they’d convinced to follow them.

Yet, the villagers knew, or suspected. Some of them – the ones that remembered the fae from the old lore their grandparents and great-grandparents had shared with them when they were bairns – knew what Faye had done to try to save them, and knew where Aisha and the others had gone.

And perhaps they were the only ones that had made their peace with the likelihood that the missing would be unlikely to return.

‘And you’re banished from Murias now? You can’t go back?’ Gabriel’s voice brought her back from her worries.

‘No. I’ve tried. It’s cut off to me now, unless I go back to Finn. But I can’t. I don’t want to.’

Gabriel eyed her coolly. ‘Don’t want to or are afraid to? Sounds like Finn had quite an effect on you.’

Faye breathed out a long sigh, got up and started pacing the small confines of the shop.

The smell of old leather from the antique books was comforting.

She leaned her head gently against a high shelf with her back to Gabriel.

How could she explain what Finn had done to her?

It wasn’t normal. He wasn’t human; all the usual frames of reference for relationships – he was controlling, he was emotionally unavailable, it was just a sex thing – were invalid.

He was controlling and unavailable, and the sex was incredible.

But it was so much more than that: Finn’s power was all-encompassing.

He didn’t live by the same rules of love and compassion as humans.

‘It’s hard to explain. The fae…Finn is…’ She stopped for a moment, trying to think of the best way to describe the faerie king.

‘I’ve read the legends. I know they’re irresistible when they want to be,’ Gabriel said.

‘But it’s so dangerous there. For humans, that is.

The effects of being in the faerie realm weren’t as strong for me, and I was…

Finn’s consort, so I had special treatment, I suppose.

But the humans that go there, to be lovers or to bear the half-fae children, they don’t survive.

One way or the other.’ Faye shivered as she remembered the human bones littering the floor of the faerie ballroom; of the emaciated bodies there that weren’t quite dead, but too weak to move.

She herself had danced on them without knowing, lost in her own enchantment. The thought still made her sick.

‘I bet it’s stunning. Being inside the faerie castle.’ Gabriel’s voice had a hint of yearning in it.

‘The castle’s huge. I only saw the areas Finn wanted me to. Or his sister Levantiana’s chambers,’ she said. ‘But, yes. It’s stunning.’

‘The High Queen? What was she like? They say that the faerie queens are too beautiful to be described.’ Gabriel’s eyes were wide like a child’s.

Faye remembered the rapt and dreamy eyes of Levantiana’s faerie lover as he danced in her arms, and the tortured gaze of the Frog Queen’s partner through his mask.

She’d take everything from you , she thought, looking at him.

She’d dance and kiss and love every ounce of your moon-cowed, human adoration and leave you to die when she’d drunk her fill.

And you’d let her do it, because dying would be so sweet.

‘She is a beauty. Golden-haired, tall, strong; her eyes are the same as Finn’s.

Like the ocean,’ she answered. Gabriel didn’t have to know about the horror of loving a faerie queen, and Faye didn’t talk about why she’d been in the faerie queen’s chambers in the first place, the magic she’d learned there from Levantiana.

‘They’re both beautiful beyond description.

But they’re also remorseless. Cold. Selfish.

They’re only concerned with fulfilling their own desires. ’

‘The Charge of the Goddess says, I am what is attained at the end of desire .’ Gabriel was talking about a part of Wiccan ceremony that Faye knew had become ubiquitous: a call to the goddess, the symbol of feminine power in the universe.

‘Desire isn’t a bad thing. It’s the condition of being human. ’

‘Of course not. They’re fae. They are doing what’s natural for them, like cats hunt mice. It’s not our job to place human morality on them. But it’s sensible for a mouse to know a cat will toy with it and kill it when it gets bored; the mouse knows to avoid the cat if it wants to live.’

‘To be a faerie queen’s lover, though.’ Gabriel sighed wistfully. ‘What a way to go.’

‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ Faye frowned at him. ‘It’s not something worth wishing for. Really. Believe me.’

Gabriel made a dismissive sound. ‘Men like me – magicians, or ones that fancy themselves as something like it – have been obsessed with other worlds and the delights we might find there for hundreds of years. Come on, Faye.’ Gabriel picked up a dusty grimoire and waved it at her.

‘What is there for me here? Old books? If the opportunity arose, I’d take it.

What’s a life worth unless you live it?’

‘But that’s just it, Gabriel! You’d die there,’ Faye exclaimed.

‘The fae are savage, amoral creatures. If you’d seen what I have…

’ She shuddered. Gabriel was so na?ve; she wished she could tell him exactly what Levantiana had forced her to agree to.

Faerie queens might become a lot less desirable for him.

‘But I haven’t, Faye. That’s the point.’ He put the book back on the desk and sighed. ‘Anyway. If you need to get Aisha back – and the rest of them, I suppose?’ Faye nodded. ‘Finn will let you back in. You just have to be his lover again.’

‘That’s not a choice. It’s too dangerous; I might lose myself. And it would ruin my relationship with Rav; I’m not going to be unfaithful to him. Plus, he doesn’t want me to be involved at all with the faerie realm. He wants to leave that all behind us.’ Faye sighed.

‘But you can’t leave it behind. It’s who you are.’ Gabriel frowned.

‘I know, I know.’ Faye began pacing again.

‘As we speak, Aisha’s been there how long? Hasn’t Rav been helping you think of ways you could get her back? I mean, I know he’s not a witch, but maybe he has some ideas?’

‘No.’ Faye looked out of the plate glass panels at the front of the shop through the backwards lettering, the simple, traditional font that spelled out Fortune’s in gold letters.

It was raining now and the strip of grey sky she could glimpse above, between the close terraces on either side of the small street, framed her mood.

No. Rav wanted to forget it all – his own self-preservation was more important.

‘Okay, then. Couldn’t Lyr help you in some way? I mean, he is a faerie king too. He’s as powerful as Finn, right?’ Gabriel asked.

Faye sighed and paced along the far wall of the shop. ‘In the realm of earth, though. I don’t see how he could help in Murias.’

‘But he’s trying to make contact with you.’ Gabriel raised an eyebrow. ‘He appeared to you in the ritual. And you said just now, in the rose garden, you saw the fae creatures. You were drawn there. It wasn’t by accident.’

‘I didn’t ask for any of that,’ Faye muttered, knowing she sounded like a child. ‘He doesn’t care about me. The fae don’t have feelings like us. Lyr wants something from me.’

‘Don’t you think you should at least find out what that is, though? You make a bargain with him. You give something, you get something.’

‘Meaning…he gives me access to Murias? I don’t know if he has the power to do that.’ Faye reached over and rustled a biscuit out of a packet on Gabriel’s desk.

‘Worth a try, right? At least that way you’re not…’ He blushed and looked away. ‘You know.’

Forced to become Finn Beatha’s lover again . Faye filled in the rest of the sentence in her head. Would she do it to save Aisha?

If she submitted to Finn Beatha, she might well die herself. At the very least, she would become too weak to return to the human world, and if she was under his control, then she would lose the independence and power she had started to build by using the faerie magic.

‘You’re right…We should at least ask Lyr if he can help.’ She pushed her doubt to one side; there was fear there, too, but she ignored it. ‘Can you help me?’

‘I would be honoured.’ Gabriel bowed. ‘I am at your service.’