Page 10 of Faerie Fate (Fae Academy for Halflings #7)

Chapter Seven

I curled up in a tight ball, protecting my sensitive stomach. That’s where he’d target to cause the maximum amount of agony, either with his boots or his claws. And when he was done showing me exactly what would happen if I tried to run again, he’d probably get started on making those pups.

Whether I was willing or not.

I covered my head with my hands, crunching my body until I was as small as possible. Breathing heavily, the sobs caught somewhere between my ribs.

This was it.

“Tavi, thank the goddess I found you!” Mike brushed his hand over my head.

His scent pushed itself into my nostrils like salt and citrus and sweat. Magic . A huge rush of relief crashed over me with the touch. He didn’t hesitate before grabbing me by the elbows and hauling me up, clasping me tightly.

His moss-green eyes scanned my face. There was something raw and fierce about the way he looked at me, the way he latched onto the blood stains on the front of my neck. His eyes widened and something sharp and furious pooled in their depths.

The scar.

I ducked my head to break eye contact.

“I thought I’d lost you. I had no idea where you’d gone and this place is bigger than I remembered,” Mike said in a rush. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“ Mike . Please. We’ve got to go. Now .” His name was a plea, and whatever he saw on my face forced him to make a decision on the spot. “He’s coming,” I managed to get out. “We have to do something.”

The bond flared. Brighter than it had been before, and rage crashed through me, obliterating the last bits of sanity I claimed as mine. Kendrick was awake. Immediately furious, and the pain only made him worse.

Terror stiffened every bone in my body until they threatened to break from the sheer tension. “He’s coming!” The words ended in a scream and I fell apart, barely noticing when Mike grabbed my hand. My fingers were stiff, cold.

I got this. I got you. Trust me, Tavi.”

He drew in a breath but didn’t hesitate. His magic pulsed, a corona of power filtering out through him and surrounding us in a shower of green sparks the same color as his devastatingly deep eyes.

My feet rooted to the ground while the rest of me swam. Unsteady. The world became a blur outside of those sparks.

“Hold on. This won’t be pleasant.”

His voice was in my ear and in the next blink, we stood bathed in sunlight. The previously empty hallways, deadened in silence, now filled with the steady march of clamoring feet and the low hum of voices. Somewhere in the distance, a bell rang.

I reeled as bile rose and burned new pathways in my stomach. “What happened?”

Mike clung to me, shaking, sweat trailing down his temples and plastering his hair to his skin, curling the strands.

“Sorry, I did it sloppily. I only wanted to get you out. I think—” He broke off, pressing one palm to his forehead and scrubbing.

“I think I took us back a couple of weeks. I wasn’t being calculated about it. ”

“You…you manipulated time.”

That was his inherent power.

I’d never actually seen Mike do it, not up close and personal, but he’d tested for it during our second year at the academy. And it might have been a rush job but he’d brought us back to the school well ahead of Kendrick coming to take it over.

Mike and I clung to each other, my muscles tensed. His voice lowered when he said, “We should be fine.”

Should be.

Like he wasn’t sure.

Hysterical laughter trickled out between my clenched teeth, growing steadily louder until several of the students navigating the halls turned to stare at us.

Mike pressed a warning hand to the small of my back and gently guided me out of the hallway toward one of the window alcoves.

We’d sat there before, when we were between classes, or not studying in the library as we’d liked to do.

Back in the good days, when my greatest worry was making sure the potion from Barbara held in my shifter side.

Now I looked out on the great lawn below us, bathed in sunlight.

The same lawn where we used to play Capture the Scroll with Persephone and the others.

Back when the only issue I had to worry about was whether or not Persephone was trying to get her hooks into Mike, the way she manhandled him like she was some kind of real threat.

I shook my head. It felt like a millennia ago.

Mike had taken us back in time to the middle of the school day. Several students walked past us and the side-eye from the younger ones prickled against my skin uncomfortably. We were out of place in our cloaks, and I angled away from them to hide the bloodstains on my shirt.

“We have to warn them,” I told Mike in an undertone. “They have no idea what’s going to happen.”

Or how many of them would die.

He grabbed me before I had a chance to stride off after several students who were deep in conversation. “No, we can’t. Changing time has devastating consequences. My training included all the information about ways it can go wrong, and not only kill me but everyone I know. You understand?”

The urgency of his tone brought my attention back and I shook my head. “They can’t defend themselves, though.”

“Trust me, I get it. It’s awful, and it sucks to feel like no matter what you do, with all this power you still can’t change what happens. But trust me. We have to keep a low profile.”

He slowly drew me back to him and I wrapped my arms around him, burrowing my face at the crook of his neck and drawing his scent into me.

“Thank you for coming for me,” I murmured, snuggling closer.

He rested his chin on top of my head. “I’ll always come for you. I lost you for a little bit, but I told you I’ll always find you and I meant it.”

The familiar tang of his magic grounded me and when I closed my eyes, it was only the two of us, like the mate bond didn’t really exist, and my throat hadn’t been slit.

Eventually the noise of the students rushing toward their next class faded away and there was only the sound of Mike’s heart. The strong lines of his body lent much-needed support.

Two weeks prior to the attack, I reckoned. At least I had this sweet reunion with the prince I halfway thought I’d never see again.

“We’ll have to go back for my mom.” I drew in another deep breath, crushing Mike’s cloak with my grip. “We just left her there with him and no backup.”

“We will,” he said, solemn and assured. “But you sounded so panicked. I had to get you out of there. You’re still shaking. What happened?”

I had a feeling I’d be shaking for a long time. My nightmares were real. And they were out there walking and talking and slicing. “You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Did you…did you find him?”

Find him? The laughter threatened to erupt again so I swallowed it all down and forced myself to take a step away from Mike to look at him. Unfortunately, that meant he saw me right back, this time in the blinding spotlight of the sun.

His gaze dropped automatically to the blood spattering my skin. And beneath it the scar, puckered and angry.

“What the fuck is that? Tavi, what happened?”

I held up a hand. “Don’t flip out.”

His lips tugged into a straight line, his chest heaving, and the hand reaching out behind him for the steadiness of stone went white-knuckled. “Flip out? I left you for a few hours and it looks like someone tried to decapitate you.”

Close enough .

My mouth dried. “He almost succeeded. Kendrick found me, and h-he slit my throat. For the bloodletting. The mate bond,” I explained dully.

Mike no longer sounded assured. When he pried his lips apart, with great effort, his voice had gone dark. “What did he do to you?”

“He cut himself too, and the second our blood mixed, he forced the mate bond. I feel him. Inside me. He’s always there in my head, something I can’t escape.” I tapped my temple. “He’s not as present right now. Probably because we went back in time. Or not. I’m not sure.”

Mike loomed over me and his normally easy demeanor twisted into something awful, scary, and powerful.

For a second, an image of his father, King Tywin, superimposed itself over Mike’s familiar features until he no longer resembled his mother but the monster.

The one who killed my uncle with his rules.

“What does that mean?” he asked, seething. “What happens now? How do you break the mate bond?”

“I don’t,” I whispered.

There was no going back. Kendrick had tethered our souls together.

There was no way I knew of to destroy a bond once it grew between two souls.

I always thought—not that I’d told him—that Mike and I were the ones fated for a bond.

That it would have happened naturally between us even though it was extremely rare.

Unheard of for it to happen between a pure-blood Seelie fae and a halfling shifter.

A girl could hope.

Yet now my hopes were dashed, absolutely and irrevocably destroyed.

Mike dropped his hand from me to scrub his face again, wiping the expression off his features. Fury trembled through him and turned his once soft hold to iron. “He hurt you?”

“He had Nurse Julie heal me before I died.”

I wasn’t weak enough to reach for him. To pull him back to me and force him to hug me when his disgust was right there in the open. Disgusted with me, of course, because I was broken. Undesirable.

I was bound to an enemy and there was no coming back from it.

I nodded, more to myself than to him, resolved to the twisting dynamics between me and Mike. “Apparently I might be scarred for life, but at least I’m alive,” I hurried to say.

“Are you in pain, Tavi?”

“Not anymore.” But how could I tell him about the tether I always felt? The one binding me to Kendrick even in a different time? Like a serpent coiled around my heart, ready to crush it to dust.

Mike glanced sharply away, sucking in a breath. His profile was gilded by sunlight but the distance between us was back. “Fuck.”

“ Fuck is an understatement.”

He snorted. “This really isn’t the time for jokes.”