Page 41 of A Kiss from the Fae (Mistress of Magic #2)

Faye sat on the side of Gabriel’s single bed and held the mug of herbal tea to his lips.

‘Drink up. It’s good for you,’ she instructed.

‘What is it?’ Gabriel sat bolstered by pillows, too weak to hold himself up.

‘Valerian for the pain. Turmeric, Yarrow, St John’s Wort.’ Faye tipped up the cup gently so he could drink without having to lean forward. ‘Penny gave it to me.’

The coven had carried Gabriel’s body out of the oak grove, and Manu had called for an ambulance on his mobile phone.

Ruby had noticed Mallory was gone. Did she go home?

Ruby had asked, like a child awoken from a dream.

Sylvia had said, I’ll explain. But not now.

Ruby and the others had exchanged glances, but no one had said anything.

Did they understand anything of what had happened?

Had they seen it? Faye thought not. She wondered what the High Priestess would tell them.

How she’d explain Mallory being taken. I had no choice.

It was Gabriel for Mallory, and she isn’t one of us.

How callous that sounded under the streetlights. How unreal.

No one said it, but Faye could hear it, nonetheless – all their thoughts were the same. You have caused nothing but chaos since you came. You’re not one of us. They feared her. They thought that she could banish and return people to faerie on a whim. Perhaps they were right.

Faye wanted to tell them there and then what had happened: that she’d screamed at Sylvia not to do it.

That Sylvia was as much a pawn in the games that the faerie kings and queens played with humans as anyone else.

But it was too much. There were too many of them, and she could hardly breathe from the grief over Aisha that still crushed her chest. Yet now, there was also a blinding relief that Gabriel was still alive.

Faye had taken him home; back to his flat above the shop. Sylvia had lain her hand on Faye’s arm after they had got him into the cab. I’ll make it right , she’d said, desperation in her eyes. Faye had nodded. What else could she do?

Gabriel lay back and closed his eyes.

‘Can you talk about it?’ Faye returned the half-full mug to the bedside table and kept her eyes on it, away from his.

It hadn’t been her fault, his time in Murias, but she felt responsible, nonetheless.

It was too recent, too raw, this nursing of someone that had been lost in faerie.

She told herself that Gabriel had wanted to go, unlike Rav.

But it made no difference either way when you saw how close to death humans came in the faerie realm.

She remembered Aisha’s face under the ice-glass ballroom floor and closed her eyes in horror.

‘Yes,’ he said. His voice was cracked as if he’d forgotten how to speak.

‘What happened? Did you…go willingly? Or did you get taken with me? By accident?’ Guilt weighed on Faye’s heart. She couldn’t bear it that she’d endangered another friend.

‘I wanted to go.’ Gabriel coughed, and she waited for him to catch his breath.

‘I planned to go. When Finn came, I jumped into the wave with you. When I woke up, I was in her bed. I didn’t want to leave, either.

’ He lay back on the pillows and closed his eyes again.

‘I told you. What life did I have here? Whole days go past and I don’t see a soul in that bookshop.

I don’t have anyone special in my life.’ His eyes met hers and she saw the pain in them.

Faye looked away, not knowing what to say.

‘You would have died there,’ she said quietly. ‘Sylvia…saved your life.’ She didn’t explain how. It was a bargain that should never have been made.

‘I didn’t want it saved!’ Gabriel’s voice cracked again, the shout lost in his throat, but Faye felt his anger, nonetheless.

‘I wanted her. Levantiana. I still want her.’ He tried to sit up, but his muscles were wasted and wouldn’t let him.

‘I’ll go back. When I’m strong enough. She’s calling to me. ’

Horror spread its fingers over Faye’s skin as she recognised the dull shine of a possessed soul in Gabriel’s formerly bright eyes. Was this how she’d been with Finn? Had she been this lost, this willing to sacrifice her humanity to the power of faerie?

‘You can’t go back. You won’t survive there,’ Faye repeated. ‘Aisha died. I saw her.’ Her voice broke.

A tear rolled down Gabriel’s cheek. ‘She loves me, Faye. And her love is…so powerful. Like the ocean. She took me to the deepest places in myself, Faye. You must know how that feels. To want and be wanted so intensely. To be devoured, over and over again. There’s no point being alive if I can’t have that. ’

He cried, letting the tears wrack his weak body, unable to stop them. Faye held him, knowing that he was as addicted to Levantiana as she had been to Finn; knowing that he’d go back to her if given the slightest opportunity.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she repeated over and over again as she held him. ‘Gabriel, I’m so sorry.’

And as she held him, she thought of Mallory, and her stomach twisted. Lyr had promised that Mallory would be safe, but he couldn’t be trusted any more than Finn or Levantiana.

Gabriel’s desperation was one she knew all too well: it was the lust of the human for faerie.

His darkness resonated with her own shadow.

They had both known the desolation of having been loved so intensely that they would die to remain in the dream – if a dream was what it was – and had felt the deep despair in waking.

The difference was that Faye had power in the fae kingdoms, and Gabriel didn’t.

It was as though, for a moment, she saw herself and Gabriel standing on opposing sides of a flat, black lake, as glassy and perfect as the obsidian wand she carried in her pocket.

And in her vision, they were reaching for each other, both alone in their sorrow and desperate to be held.

Yet, though there was sorrow there for both of them, there was also kinship now, in a way that there hadn’t been before.

‘Gabriel,’ she said softly, feeling the weight of his confusion and sorrow break like a wall in an earthquake. She held him to her as he sobbed desperately. ‘I’m here. I…I understand. What you feel. I know.’

Faye closed her eyes, and the vision of the black lake reappeared. Yet, even though Gabriel was in her arms, he remained standing at one edge of the water, now looking away from her. And she knew that no matter how loudly she called him, he wouldn’t wade across to her. Not yet.

‘What did you…what was the bargain? To get me back?’ he asked against her shoulder.

Faye sat back and put her head in her hands.

‘Lyr took Mallory. I tried to stop it, but he had control of me. It was Sylvia who agreed to it.’

‘Mallory?’ Gabriel’s hands were on his knees now – a posture that implied he was keeping himself upright with a force of will.

Despair ordered his body like a slumped puppet; he had no strength for the demanding weight of the human world which pulled him down.

Faye knew that he craved the flowing moments of Murias, even though it was while under their spell that he’d been so horribly tortured.

‘She’s a…friend…of Rav’s. She’s in Falias with Lyr.’ Faye felt dizziness overcome her and shook her head to clear it.

‘Falias?’

‘Yes.’

‘With Lyr,’ Gabriel repeated dully. She wondered how much he was really taking in. He was dazed, confused. Half of him was still lost; he might never be whole again.

Faye nodded.

‘I’m sorry. I…’ She didn’t know what to say.

Gabriel said nothing, staring blankly at his knees.

He had lapsed into a kind of waking fugue.

She spoke to him, nudged him, called his name, but he was gone again, blank and absent from the human world in everything but his already-starved body.

How long had Levantiana kept him there, in faerie time?

How long had he suffered at her hands, and how long had the pressure of Murias impacted his body?

She settled him back on the pillows and sat back in the chair by his bed. It seemed fitting to Faye that she should be with Gabriel in his dark night of the soul, watching over him while his spirit tried to free itself from Murias.

The light from the bedside lamp was dim, but she didn’t put the overhead light on for fear of disturbing whatever rest Gabriel could get. Instead, she sat in the near-darkness and thought about Mallory.

It might already be too late for her; if Mallory returned, would she be like Gabriel?

Would she be mired as deep in the despair of leaving the faerie realm?

Or was she, even now, calling out to return to the human world, frightened and alone?

She couldn’t stop thinking about Aisha, and every time she did, the grief crushed her.

She closed her eyes. Over and over again she weighed up every offer, every possible way, but every time, she came up against a faerie king or queen that sought only to manipulate her. Lyr was no different.

But she also needed something for herself, and she was frightened of the kind of help she might need. Because it had been two months without a period, and she was sick still, every day, long past the point where she should have recovered from being in the faerie realm.

For the first time, Faye placed her hand on her flat stomach and dared to imagine that she might be pregnant. Worse: that the bargains she’d struck with Levantiana might have to be fulfilled.