Page 26 of Faerie Fate (Fae Academy for Halflings #7)

Chapter Seventeen

M y heart lurched, my skin prickling with discomfort.

I stared after Kit and waited for the wards to snap and fry us but nothing happened. One second passed, then two, but the magic held.

Abandoning breakfast, I went into the room to check on Poppy. She hunched over the cauldron, staring at the murky depths as some purple liquid curdled at the bottom.

She didn’t look up at my approach.

“To take a page out of your rhetoric, I’m fine,” she began at once. “Did Kit threaten you?”

“He had a few choice and colorful things to say, sure.”

She worked her lower jaw back and forth before sniffing.

“I work for him as a bounty hunter. Not because I want to, but because he owns me.” Poppy straightened but her fingers remained curled on the lip of the cauldron.

“He enslaved me many years ago through magic. I have to do whatever he says, whenever he says it.”

Poppy stilled and stopped talking. She rolled her neck while I waited, my gaze on her pale skin and the dark circles above her cheekbones.

“He’s a sick and twisted man. He likes causing pain and enjoys the feeling of having someone with more power than him beholden to his whims.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She continued like I hadn’t interrupted. “I’ve never been able to break the bond. As powerful as I am, it remains. Permanently.”

With a grimace, Poppy drew back the long sleeves of her tunic, and across her skin, thin delicate silver chains stretched, encircling both wrists.

They reeked of magic and the first electric energy spike before a lightning strike. Did Poppy have some kind of counterspell on her clothing to keep from smelling it? The silver bands wrapped over her skin like barbed wire and kept her lashed to that absolute asshole.

Poppy breathed in deeply, holding the air in her lungs as she waited for me to finish my surprised perusal.

“Nothing will cut them or remove them. I’m chained to him forever,” she finished. “So how do you think I’ll be able to help you ?”

The hairs on my neck and my forearms prickled. “We’re not going to let that happen.”

I hadn’t seen much of Kit but I knew he was a bad person. Whatever happened in Poppy’s life to bind the two of them together, it ended. Now.

Poppy let out another one of those laughs I’d gotten so used to hearing from Barbara. “It’s sweet you think you can do something about it, Tavi, but I’m serious. There is no breaking this spell. I’m magically castrated in some areas. My power belongs to someone else.”

She stared at me like she was humoring me by even having this conversation. And she was right.

“Help me unlock my witch powers, and I’ll help you break this bond,” I replied. “If my mom is correct, then I’m going to have the strength of fae magic, witch magic, and shifter magic. I’ll be strong enough to help you.”

“No one has all three,” Poppy argued automatically.

“There’s no way to find out unless you help me.”

There was no guaranteeing I’d have witch powers, true, even if I took my mother’s word for it. She claimed a witch helped her conceive, and so I was going to be born with that magic. But the spell she’d been given hadn’t done anything for me.

The tiny kernel of hope in my heart trembled as though I couldn’t bear for it to be false after all.

“I’m not sure you will have that kind of power,” Poppy said, her lips pursed and twisted to the side. Skeptical dimples rose in the wake of the gesture. “But we can try.”

She spoke like she was agreeing only to appease me. I guess the gods agreed, then, huh ?

I bounced, the tips of my fingers tingling. “You mean you’ll help?”

Poppy lifted one lazy shoulder and slid her sleeves back down with the opposite hand to cover the wires of the bond between her and Kit. The same kind of unwilling, horrible tether I had with my own K-named prick.

“Do you have the journal with you?” Poppy asked. “The one from your mother?”

“You mean the one I carry in my pocket?”

I reached into my waistband. I’d shrunk it to fit and the journal remained small as I held it out to Poppy, who scowled at the cover.

She tapped the fingernail of her index finger to the center of the cover and the journal reverted to its normal size.

“Your mother filled all these pages?” she questioned, gingerly taking it from me.

“She said she communed with Faerie herself,” I clarified.

Poppy grunted, studying it from every angle before glancing up at me. “You’re lucky the gods agreed. Now get out. I need to read it alone and prepare.”

I hastily backed out and closed the door behind me. The tension in my chest loosened in some places and knotted in others.

My breakfast food had congealed. Rather than waste it, I set it down on the floor for Noren. Bronwen rested with her back to the sink and the copper spigot.

“Well?” she finally burst out when she couldn’t take it anymore. Her arms practically vibrated as she threw them in the air. “What did she say? Who was that guy?”

“That guy was a seriously bad boss,” I replied, “but it’s not my story to tell.”

Anxious, I scratched at my neck, my fingers brushing against my scar. I let my hands drop down to my sides.

“Poppy said she’d help me unlock my powers. Hopefully she finds some answers in the journal.”

My mouth was dry. Maybe she’d figure out what Livvy and I did wrong the first time. We’d gotten the ingredients. The spell began to work, but then—poof, not a damn thing.

“Where’s Mike?”

Bronwen cleared her throat. “He decided to walk around the wards and see if he could feel them. See where that Kit dude came in or whatever.” She looked like she wanted to go outside too. Like the last thing in the world she wanted to do was be trapped in this cabin. “I don’t like this.”

I met her eyes. “Which part?”

“Everything. This is kinda fucked when you think about it. And right now, we’re not only stuck inside his granny’s wards but we’re three hundred years in the past and we’re in even deeper doo-doo than we were before.”

“I wouldn't say we’re necessarily in deeper shit, but perhaps a different kind of shit.” The clarification helped.

“I think you have shit blindness, Tavi. We’ve been through so much it’s blurring together for you.”

I grinned at her. “You’re probably right.”

Bronwen moved beside me and brushed her knuckles against the top of my hand. “You ever think about how good it would feel to be back on pack land? To run free without any kind of thought about courts or rival packs or zombie curses?”

“All the time,” I admitted.

“You think we’ll ever get to run again?”

I blinked back tears. “Do you want me to be honest or do you want me to lie? Because there’s gonna be a big difference between the answers.”

“I don’t care. Dealer’s choice.” She sounded as exhausted as I felt.

“I think I’d do a lot of terrible things to be normal again but I’m not sure it will ever happen.”

She waited a beat before saying, “Yeah, I’m in the same frame of mind. It’s never going to get better.”

“You regret coming back into my life?” I asked, meeting her eyes.

“Nah. I can’t say it’s been the time of my life, but hey, it’s exciting.”

“That’s one word for it.”

I was the first to look away. What the hell did I say to her? There was nothing perfectly packaged to soothe her nerves. Nothing I’d deliver flawlessly to help alleviate the strain in the room. Which only amped up when Mike popped around the corner.

“I can’t figure out her wards,” he said with a shake of his head. “I kinda thought…” He trailed off.

“What? Because she’s your grandma, you thought you’d be able to find a way through?” Bronwen asked. “Where would we go, anyway? We need a witch.”

I looked at Mike like he was a stranger and not the man I’d shared a bed with. Not the one I’d felt pulled toward from the first moment I met him.

The fae didn’t age the same way humans did. They usually looked the same as humans until they reached about thirty and then they stayed thirty. For centuries. Only revealing their true years when they got to the tail end of an extremely long existence.

Mike had filled out in some ways and went leaner in others. His awkward handsomeness had become something he wore well, rather than the embarrassment of a slightly crooked smile and nose to slightly too-wide eyes.

“What would you do if you figured out the wards?” I wanted to know.

“No clue. Learn something? Soothe myself by realizing we have a way out if we need one?” Mike’s tone was curt. He seemed to realize this and checked himself immediately. “I need to feel useful.”

Nerves. That had to be what it was. Everyone was on edge and worried about our friends and family back home.

“You are useful,” I reminded him. “You brought us back. We have a halfway decent chance of accomplishing our goals now.”

Noren slunk through the kitchen and pressed the tip of his nose against the window. He huffed out a breath and fogged the glass.

“Do you see something?” I asked Noren.

His ears flicked at the sound of my voice but without his hackles raised, it had to be more of a patrol thing. Or maybe he was reacting to the anxiety bubbling up between the three of us. That grew thicker as the hours passed.

I caught Noren standing at the window and staring off into the distance multiple times, like he sensed something was off. Mike and Bronwen noticed it too.

Bronwen shivered, running her palms up along her forearms. “It’s just weird, isn’t it? How she found us in that tavern? And how she happens to be your grandma?”

“Weird is an understatement,” Mike muttered. He flung himself on the couch with his arm over his face and his knee bobbing up and down.

“I’m not sure if trusting her was the smart thing to do,” Bronwen continued.

She’d taken to pacing the length of the front of the cabin and joining Noren at the windows. Without options, without choice, I stood in front of the fireplace against the opposite wall and let the warmth sink down beneath my skin.

“She left us no choice. She snapped her fingers and boom,” I reminded Bronwen.

Mike shifted to stare at me underneath his arm. “Maybe if we’d gotten better at protection spells, she wouldn’t have been able to work her powers so easily against us.”

“In all our training sessions, we never did practice any kind of blocker for spellwork. Physical blocks, sure.” But I had half a mind that none of it would have worked.

Oxana the Sightless aka Poppy aka Barbara was a very strong witch. And who were we? A bunch of unlucky twenty-somethings, one of us with a blood curse.

“There were a lot of things we should have done and a lot we shouldn’t,” Mike offered. “Now we’re here.”

“Here. Like this is the best place to be.” Bronwen tossed her hands in the air.

“This place doesn’t even have running water.

I don’t know how you guys feel about having to go to the bathroom in a chamber pot, but I really hate it.

Magic has to count for something, and with all her powers she couldn’t put in a toilet? ”

“It’s not like she spends much of her time here.” Mike sounded ready to defend Poppy at all cost.

The family bond, I reminded myself.

It didn’t help.

Sooner or later, they were going to realize that Poppy’s trustworthy nature—or not—wasn’t the real problem. It was me.

They wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me, and when they realized it, all the anger lurking beneath the surface would boil over and burn me. The kind of burns a person never really recovered from even though the scars wouldn’t show on the outside.

I braced for impact when Bronwen said, “We don’t know anything about her, Mike. It’s not like she’s been super forthcoming with her story. She knows everything about us but the exchange of information wasn’t exactly equal.”

“She’s my blood,” Mike insisted like it made all the difference.

“She might be your blood in the future, but right now we know she’s a bounty hunter.

” Bronwen held up a finger to count off her points.

“We know she lives in a cabin in the woods and makes crazy prophecies about the fate of our entire world.” Another finger.

“And we know she works for a douchebag with a cowlick.”

Those were good points she made.

I stepped away from the fire, intent on interrupting before the argument progressed further, no matter how badly the three of us wanted to have it out. To do something that would ease the constriction in our heads and chests.

I never got a chance. Poppy banged on the wall between her spell room and the living room.

“Tavi!” Her voice filtered through. “It’s time.”

Oh god, okay.

At once I didn’t feel ready for it. I didn’t want to move or speak or do anything besides catch my breath.

“Good luck.” Bronwen was the foreboding voice of doom, and Mike kept his face covered. Unable to look at me.

Noren was back at the window with his ears pinned to the top of his head, troubled. And my feet weighed as much as any anchor as I went back into the kitchen to meet my fate.