Page 5

Chapter

Five

“ W hat’s taking the boys so long?” Ruin asked me while I was puzzling out the word she’d written in her notebook.

“The boys?”

“You know, the other juvenile delinquents. They’ve been gone forever.” She looked at the door for the fifteenth time in the last two minutes.

I looked at her, cocking my head. She was a werewolf youngling who had too much energy to stay still, but she’d spent hours and hours with me pouring over the notebook and The Wolf Wore Pajamas. “What kind of games do you play?” I asked.

“Card games, board games, night games, sports, like that?”

“What are night games?”

She shrugged and leaned back on her arms. “You know, steal the moon, kick the bone, and murder in the dark.”

“What interesting sounding games. Let’s play.”

She stared at me, skepticism written all over the place. She pursed her lips. “Actually, Max said I should take you to the bathhouse to have a sauna after you’ve worn out your brain with reading.”

“Sauna? What’s that?”

“Like a steam room for lots of people. There are several rooms at the Piper, which is basically a bathhouse, only they also do laundry. They wash clothes and people.”

I frowned down at my filthy feet. “Max wants me washed?” Apparently, he’d noticed my shocking lack of cleanliness and respectability. Of course he’d noticed. Complete strangers on the street had stared at me like I was a revolting insect.

“Mostly the sauna’s to make you sweat. That’ll help detox you from the pixie dust.” She stood up and stretched, rolling her shoulders before she grabbed my hand and hauled me to my feet. “But you could also use a bath. Not to be rude, but you stink.”

I should have been offended, but she was too young, too honest, and too right. “Maybe if I don’t stink, Max will let me have my own room.”

She frowned slightly. “Yeah, he’s throwing you in with us instead of fixing you up in one of the usual fairy cells.”

“Does he trap fairies often?”

“Only when he feels it’s his duty. But once your mind’s right, he’ll let you out. I guess it’s because he’s personally doing detention, so he can’t monitor a fairy the usual way. You’re just stuck with him.” She shrugged. “For an alpha, he’s not that bad.”

“He has a lot of concern for others.” That was such a strange phenomenon, to see his soft worry for me, someone he didn’t know, but something he should have hated.

“I guess. Come on, Mindy will escort us. She’s our guard at the door. All the other openings are spelled so Max will know if we blow our parole.”

Mindy was a werewolf woman who was sitting on a gray metal chair outside the squat building, looking slightly less ominous with the book in her hands and the glasses on her nose.

“Ruin. Where do you think you’re going?” Her voice was sharper than an axe in a field of broken glass.

Ruin batted her lashes at the old, tough-as-nails woman. “Max asked me to take Princess Sparkles to the sauna. We are absolutely not going there via the owl caverns.”

Mindy sniffed and closed her book, glancing at me, lingering, questioning. “Is that right?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I was sleeping. It makes sense, though. I do stink.”

She eyed Ruin, who was still trying to look cute and adorable, but only succeeded in looking devious and wily. Mindy finally scrubbed Ruin’s head and then released her. “All right. Don’t get Princess Sparkles into trouble.”

“My name’s not…” I didn’t finish my sentence, because Ruin grabbed my hand and started running. I followed, stretching my legs and wings to keep up. When we got to a blue and white building with flickering lamps hanging every three feet around the facade, she stopped and looked at me intently.

“I don’t think a fairy’s ever been in the bathhouse before, so try not to mind everyone staring at you. And if someone messes with you, I’ll protect you.” She frowned. “But hopefully that doesn’t happen, because I’m in enough trouble with Max already.”

“Okay. No more trouble, and absolutely no messes.” I was used to people staring at me like I was an unfortunately animated pile of refuse.

She raised a brow and then went to the door, a cloud of steam escaping as she opened it. I followed her inside and then stopped, looking around while she talked to someone behind a counter in a small booth on the side. It was enormous, with layers and layers of steaming pools past the main one that filled the center of the room. It wasn’t hideously ugly, because the layers of pools were in charming patterns that reminded me of a natural fall. Oh, there were some falls from one pool to the next. The most shocking thing was how many people were in the pools, with a mixture of skin colors from the pink of raw chicken to the dark blues of a twilight sky. Ogres, goblins, vampires, and so many werewolves swam and splashed, laughed and talked, until the sound echoed off the plaster white walls. Unreal.

Ruin linked her arm in mine. “Okay, I’ve paid. I mean, I didn’t pay, pay. I just convinced the guy that Max would pay, which is so much better. This is the main pool, with mixed genders and required bathing suits. To the right, behind those doors, is the women’s bath house, and the men’s is to our left. We’ll go through the women’s bath house to get to the sauna.

I looked at her and nodded when she seemed to be waiting for a reaction from me. It was just so incomprehensibly bizarre to see all those people that close together and not killing each other. “Everyone seems very relaxed,” I said, frowning at an enormous guy who had tan skin and a beard, but a little ogre on one shoulder, grabbing his hair before he jumped off into the water. No, that was a little girl ogre. You could tell by her pink, ruffled suit in a bright unicorn print.

“Sure. The bathhouse is pretty chill. Max makes sure of that. He’s pretty strict. No fighting allowed here, or you’ll end up banned, humiliated, and fined.”

“Is he a good alpha?”

She scoffed at me. “He’s the best. Obviously, because the Singsong pack is the best.”

I smiled slightly. Her loyalty was incredibly cute. “Obviously.”

She sniffed and grabbed my hand, dragging me through two sets of double doors, into a room full of females, most of whom weren’t wearing anything at all. It would have been a fascinating study of biology if Ruin hadn’t yanked on my arm, dragging me to another side door.

“Don’t look directly at anyone,” she hissed once we were through. “It’s like you’ve never seen naked people.”

“I have.” I frowned after I said that, because had I really? Fairies tended to always have something covering something, like leaves, or flowers, or spiderweb, or silk. The Queen, before she’d been slaughtered with her court, had always worn very elaborate outfits that people sewed together with needles. I hadn’t kept up that tradition, much to Vervain’s dismay. He lived to be dismayed.

“Yeah, okay. Here. Take off your…” She gave me a skeptical look. “Whatever, and put on this towel.” She handed me a white fluffy thing.

I stared at the towel for a long moment, then at Ruin, but she was already kicking off her shoes and pulling her top over her head. I frowned at my own clothes, which were gauzy bits of this and that stuck together with my spit. I chewed on my shoulder strap until it unraveled, and then everything was falling off me in a pile of dirty, worn rags. They were dingy gray and smelled like sour milk. But what would I wear after I bathed? The towel was the obvious solution. Yes, that would do nicely. My skin was all healed up, with only a few silver lines where the owl had clawed me the deepest.

When I licked the towel and pressed it together to hold it in place, I looked up to find Ruin staring at me.

I pointed at her. “I thought we weren’t supposed to stare.”

She frowned. “Yeah, you’re just so weird. Why did you lick your towel? Are you hungry?”

I laughed, shaking my head. “It’s an adhesive. That’s how all of my clothes stay on.”

“Glue spit?” She peered at me with more interest. “That has some possibilities. You could spit in someone’s hair, and it would be doubly offensive.”

“Yeah. I guess so. Now what?”

“Now, we sweat. Prepare to glisten like a racehorse.”

She pulled me through the dressing room filled with people in various stages of nudity that I tried not to notice, but some of the skin was so interesting, with elaborate marbling, or some werewolves rippled with muscles that seemed sculpted. I focused on the back of Ruin’s head and avoided looking right or left. I couldn’t help but notice that the others stared at me, like Ruin had, even though I wasn’t supposed to stare at them. Yep. Light creatures did not belong down in the bowels of Song.

She opened another door that released a cloud of piping hot steam, then pulled me inside and closed the door behind us. The room was hot, burning my nose, but no one else was in there, so no one could stare at me. Ruin took a dipper out of a bucket and poured it over coals in a grate, letting out another hiss and a cloud of steam.

She climbed on a wide slatted bench, then another, and another, until she was on the top level of the fairly small room. She lay on the bench, so I lay down on the one beneath her, breathing in the intense heat that wrapped around me like a hug.

“Now what?” I asked.

“Now we melt.”

“How long?”

“As long as you can take. Are you a tough fairy? I saw you fight those owls. It was something.”

“I’m pretty tough.”

She turned her head to give me a skeptical look. “We’ll see. I’ll give you five minutes.”

I shook my head and closed my eyes, trying to relax and channel the heat into my extremities. The heat started to feel really, really good.

The door opened along with a gust of cold air and a group of three women.

“Oh, look, it’s the runt and the alpha’s most recent crack whore fairy.”

Ruin sat up and glared at the woman with golden hair and eyes. “Runt? You’re just jealous because Max hasn’t ever run away from me screaming. Then again, I haven’t ever dropped my towel in front of him, just hoping to be noticed like a pathetic…” She trailed off while the woman smiled, but with a growl in her throat as she focused on Ruin.

She was a dangerous werewolf, not soft and concerned, like Max. I sat up and moved so I was between them. I smiled at the woman, trying to placate her. “Ruin, it’s normal to drop things. You shouldn’t make it sound like an insult.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed as she looked me up and down, her sneer showing what she thought about what she saw. It wasn’t good. I was so devastated, I dropped dead immediately. Not really. She was the kind of werewolf I would happily kill if it wasn’t against Max’s rules.

She sneered, baring her teeth. “You think because the Alpha gives you some attention he’s interested? He always takes in pathetic fairies out of some misguided notion of his duty, but he’ll never actually see you as a woman. Not that there’s much about you that’s noticeably female. You have no curves.” The contempt rolling off her was surprising after Max and Ruin treated me like I wasn’t their immortal enemy. She would love to rip me apart and eat me alive. The feeling was mutual, but that didn’t mean I had to be rude.

I shrugged. “That’s true. The fairy ideal is quite linear, and even for fairies, I’m not the kind that attracts males.”

Ruin gasped and grabbed me, pulling me beside her. “Where’s your pride?” she hissed at me.

I was so confused. What did pride have to do with anything? We were trying to avoid conflict so Max wouldn’t be disappointed in us. My pride had sailed a long time ago, at least as far as attractiveness went.

The werewolf woman smiled a very sharp smile. “I’m so glad you know your place,” she purred, then nodded towards the door. “Get out. Leave Song and never return.”

That wasn’t going to work for me. I had to hang around to hopefully stop the werewolves from being exterminated. I crossed my arms. “There are no males to attract in the sauna, and Lord Max specifically asked Ruin to bring me here. I’m not going to disobey the alpha.” Unless I wanted to and hadn’t accidentally bound myself to his will.

With a snarl, the woman’s arm shifted into a monstrous furry beast as she reached out to swipe me across the face. Ruin pulled me back and took the blow instead. It was hard enough that she sprawled on the bench and then rolled off it onto the one below. With a cry, I turned to help Ruin, but the aggressive female grabbed my hair, yanking me back.

I know that I was there to save werewolves in general, but this one in particular needed to die. And I knew just the fairy to do it. How nice that this werewolf didn’t know how to grab a fairy in a way that didn’t get her killed.

My claws came out, three-inch spikes that I hadn’t seen since the war. I spread my wings, flipped back, and kicked her across the face while I twisted, landing in a crouch, one hand gripping the edge of the bench, before I launched at her again. She tried to punch me, to claw me, but she was so incredibly slow, and she’d hurt Ruin, who was just a kid, and someone I knew and couldn’t help but like.

The other women tried to interfere while I had the werewolf pinned down, my claws deep in both sides of her neck. I’d decapitate her. That would be a fairly clean death. I brought my wings up, slashing at them with the razor edge I usually kept covered. But now all my spikes and blades were out.

The werewolves were so shocked. I smiled pleasantly as I pressed deeper into her neck, until with a gust of cold air, the door opened and a large man strode in wearing nothing but a towel to camouflage his ridiculously muscled body. His face was bare, without a beard, but his eyes were burning at me, golden hot.

His voice was a low rumble. “Princess Sparkles, please release the werewolf, if you would be so kind.” That was Max’s voice, but what happened to his beard? I’d never seen a warrior wolf without a beard, and it was shocking, so shocking I almost forgot what I was doing.

Decapitation. Right. “Lord Max, she attacked Ruin.”

He frowned with that bewilderingly bare face. “I don’t care. You’re going to make a huge mess in the sauna. It will smell like blood for the longest time if you continue to cut off her head with your bare hands. If you must kill her, do it somewhere that is easier to clean up. The wood slats will soak in the blood, and there are so many cracks and crannies you’d have to clean out.”

His logic was absolutely impossible to deny. I sighed and yanked my claws out of her flesh and stood. The second I was on my feet, Max grabbed me and carried me out of the sauna against his bare chest, growling at the woman’s friends who were still nicely sliced up from my wings.

“Stop the bleeding and get her out. You know that Dominia’s banned from the bathhouse.”

Was she? That made me feel better for some reason. Max had me wrapped up tight in his arms, like he was worried that I’d struggle to get away. I wouldn’t. The closer I was to him, the easier I could keep him safe.

“Where are we going?” I asked into his neck.

“Shower,” he growled.

“How did you get a rain shower in the undercity?”

He huffed. “Sparkles, I’m taking you to the indoor rain shower to wash off the blood before you get it all over everything. Blood-letting is specifically forbidden in the bathhouse.”

“I’m sorry. No one told me about that law.” Except that Ruin had mentioned it earlier. I blinked at his chin. Without the beard, he looked like such a different person. I tried to raise my arm to touch the strong jawline, but my arms weren’t going anywhere. “I should have just knocked her unconscious without breaking through her skin. What about burning her alive on the sauna’s hot coals?”

“Also forbidden. If it involves violence, it’s not done in the bathhouse.”

I nodded. “Ah. Then she shouldn’t have tried to hit me. Ruin got in front of me. I hope she’s okay.”

I looked behind me, and there was Ruin, grinning. “I’m good,” she reassured me.

Max was moving fast, and the next thing I knew, we were in a small room with a glass door. He opened it, put me in and closed the door while I stood there, dripping blood from my fingers and staring at him.

“She doesn’t know how to use a shower,” Ruin said.

“You can explain it to her,” Max said.

She shook her head and edged away from him. “No way. I don’t shower with other people. That’s weird.”

He sighed, opened the glass door, stepped inside with me and pulled a lever embedded in the wall, sending a rush of raindrops down on me.

I looked up, and the rain came from a metal circle. I reached up to touch it, and the blood on my fingers started running down my arm towards my elbow, then dropped down to the floor, where it circled towards a drain and disappeared.

Max grabbed a bottle of something, squeezed it into his hand and then put his hands on my head, wiggling his fingers to massage my scalp with the stuff that smelled like lavender.

“What are you doing?” I asked him, blinking to get the drops of water off my lashes.

“Washing your hair with shampoo. While I do that, you wash with this soap and washcloth,” he said, nodding at the little shelf embedded in the wall. The shower room was white tile with blue trim. I took the white washcloth and the soap and stared at them for a long time.

“Wet the soap, rub it on the cloth, then rub the cloth on your body. Keep your towel on.”

I nodded. “Ruin explained how rude it is to drop your towel. Don’t worry. Fairy saliva is very sticky. It won’t fall down.”

He gave me a sharp look. “Fairy saliva is very sticky? You keep your clothing on with spit?”

I nodded. “Otherwise, you need needles to sew things together. And weaving. And cutting. It’s such a long process to make something.”

“You could just go shopping,” Ruin said through the glass door. “Max, she doesn’t have any clothes now, not that you could really call that gauzy stuff clothing anyway. I guess she can wear my clothes. She’s a little taller, but not much. You’re so small,” she said to me matter-of-factly.

I nodded. “And unappealing to males. Why is commenting on my smallness not a matter of pride, but the lack of male attraction is?”

Max cleared his throat. “You’re washed well enough. Ruin, you shouldn’t tell people they aren’t attractive. I hate having to say that. It’s like you were raised by wolves.”

She snickered and shook her head, then pointed at me. “No, she said that. It’s Vervain’s fault. He made her lose her confidence.”

“Vervain?” Max looked down at me, a frown between his brows.

I reached up and touched those dark brows. Still the same while his jaw was so different. “I was having a conversation with the aggressive werewolf who drops towels. I thought if I showed her my belly, she would back off, and there would be no fight. It’s not about Vervain.” I touched his jaw, and the skin was so silky, so smooth, so warm. I pulled away, feeling burned. “His jaw is like yours.” It was. Without the beard, Lord Max looked similar to the most stunningly attractive male in all of Fairyland. “When will your beard grow back? You shouldn’t look so…”

He raised a brow. “Delicate and fairy-like?”

“Pretty.” I cleared my throat and shifted, feeling uncomfortable with the weight of his hand on my head. It was too warm, and he was too massive, and I was in a towel that did nothing to camouflage my complete lack of feminine charms. He was so aggressively male. No wonder the woman had dropped her towel. Oh. That’s what it was about. Of course it was. Werewolves were always hunting down a mate if they were single. Max must be hunted all the time. Maybe he shaved his beard so the werewolves didn’t think he was as attractive. Pity that made him more so towards me.

“You should get a mate, so women stop hunting you,” I said.

His eyes glowed brighter for a moment before he pulled my head under the stream of water. Then, when he pulled me back, he had more goopy stuff to stick in my hair.

“Conditioner. It’ll make your hair silky and soft instead of tangled and coarse. I already have a mate.”

Ruin gasped. “I knew it! What happened to her? Did she die in a fight with your best friend, or what?”

He glanced through the glass door at her. “The moon is my mate. If I ever feel for a woman half of what I feel for the moon, maybe she can be displaced.”

She snorted in disappointment. “The moon is your mate? And the owl god is your greatest competition, right? You’re such a lunatic.”

“I feel for the moon that way, too,” I said, wanting to defend him for some unknowable reason. Maybe because he was still massaging my scalp and it felt really, really good. Also, I did love the moon more than anything else.

“Really?” Max asked, cocking his head.

His gaze was so disturbing. I cleared my throat. “Yes. I’m a midnight fairy, you know, so the moon is like liquid energy for me. I bathe in moonlight and it dissolves not only dirt, but all the cares of the day. At least it used to. But it’s still nice. So, you should definitely have the moon in your woods.”

“In the caverns.”

I shrugged. “You have my promise. May as well use it.”

“I have your promise, yes. We’ll see what you make of it.”