Page 29 of Habibi: Always and Forever

COZY FAE CABIN LIFE

PARKER

The Fae realm was a much friendlier place than the Night Court's prison menagerie.

My favorite improvement: Doyle's kitchen wasn't trying to kill us anymore.

If we got distracted over dinner, it didn't shove the leftovers down our throats at the end of an hour.

Now, the dishes emptied into the compost bin and washed themselves if we let them sit too long.

Tonight was one of those nights. Doyle was late for dinner.

He rushed off after I arrived home without my two pixie charges, Qylion and his blue-haired friend, who looked like a miniature version of Doyle.

Qylion's dark green curls framed his cherubic face, but his constant scowl and penchant for stabbing me with his needle-sharp sword usually kept me at a distance.

He and his friend had startled me when they came through the fairy circle in the basement of my father's office building asking for directions to Goblin Market.

I bought a small bottle of ground cloves for them, and they repaid me by disappearing.

When Doyle finally returned long after dark, he wouldn't tell me what he'd found in the woods between his cabin and the tree mother, a beautiful hackberry tree half a mile from his back fence. "That's a conversation for our breakfast guests tomorrow morning."

I didn't question how he knew the future. He was made of fae magic, an anthousai prince. I'd learned to trust him when I shared his prison cell in the menagerie for several months. His magic made him more mysterious, but he was still my steadfast and responsible spouse.

It amused me when others called him a playboy.

Before he met me, Doyle had courted the Unseelie Prince Drummond.

His refusal to marry the prince led to his imprisonment in Drummond's menagerie.

What felt like a single night to the rest of the fae had been thousands of years for Doyle.

I couldn't imagine being imprisoned in my ex-boyfriend's mind palace between the human and fae realms. It was bad enough I'd joined Doyle in his cell several months before our eventual escape.

Doyle kissed me on both cheeks and led me back to the kitchen table. "Sorry for the delay. How was your day?"

"I had fun at Goblin Market before the pixies ruined it."

"Oh?" Doyle took a sip of tea. "How is Joplin?"

With his scruffy beard and stringy long hair, Joplin's appearance might have dissuaded some folks from browsing his wares, but he was a sweetheart.

From the moment Doyle introduced us, we were friends.

I felt like I'd known him forever. He was raised in the fae realm, and though he and Doyle both insisted he was human, there was something feline about him. Speaking of which …

"He got a cat for the shop!"

Doyle grinned. "I told you that."

"Yes, but now I've met her, and my life will never be the same!" Catnip Everqueen was the cutest little tortoiseshell kitten I'd ever seen.

"You're gone for days at a time," Doyle reminded me. "I don't have time to take care of a cat." Time passed faster in the fae realm than it did in the human one. While I spent as close to eight hours as I could at work, days passed for Doyle.

"Cats take care of themselves!" I waved at the kitchen window, where one of our newly adopted pixies was harvesting flowers from a hanging plant. "Qylion and his family could help."

"Hmm." Doyle frowned. "Pixies rode cats like horses during the great wasp war, but we would have to train our little feline not to eat them first." He glanced around the cabin.

"Don't you have a spell for that?" I teased. For all I knew, maybe he did.

"Hmm."

I grinned. He did have a spell for that.

"Where would we put a litter box?" He squinted so hard his nose wrinkled. "I don't want that smell in my house."

"We could install a cat door and train her to go outside. Or we could teach her to flush the toilet!"

He shook his head, and his amused grin returned. "And what would 'her' name be?"

"You're the anthousai prince," I snarked. He named new flowers all the time. "I figured you would name her when we saw her."

His grin widened. "I can't resist a good name.

" He pointed his finger at the front door, and the wood cracked and split until there was a medium-sized cat door.

He waved his hand, and it vanished. "It will appear when she needs it, and it's spelled so she will come back inside right after. No chasing pixies."

I tried to contain my excitement the way I did when my father ceded ground in a work meeting, but I couldn't hide my feelings from Doyle. "Does this mean…"

"After dinner, we'll slip back to the earth realm and find you a cat."

"Us," I said. "Find us a cat."

I waited impatiently for the magical kitchen to prepare our meal, and then I shoveled the fresh produce mixed with exotic fae spices into my mouth. Everything tasted better in the fae realm, but I was too excited to enjoy it. In less than an hour, we would have a kitten!

Doyle took his sweet time savoring every bite and making sexy noises. "I'll never take a delicious meal for granted again," he mumbled into his napkin when he finished.

My chair scraped the floor as I stood. In two steps, I rounded the side of the table, grabbed his arm, and pulled him to his feet. "Let's go!"

"So impatient." He grabbed me around the waist and lifted me off my feet, but he didn't fly any faster than we could have walked.

I squirmed until he finally let me down by the front door. Once outside, he hoisted me off the front porch and flew me to the fairy circle with a little more urgency.

When we reached the circle, he set me down beside it. I raised my foot to step over the mushrooms but stopped when he tugged on my arm. "According to Mother Thera, cats don't like anthousai."

"We'll find one that likes you," I promised. "If not, we'll find a fae creature who fits through the cat door."

He laughed at that, and we were off to the human realm to adopt a cat.

* * *

DOYLE

Mid-afternoon sunlight from the floor-to ceiling windows covered the main floor of Parker's office building in gold. While Parker had been in the fae realm for hours, only thirty minutes had passed since the end of his workday in the human realm.

When we stepped out of the revolving door, a blast of chilly wind slapped me across the face and stole my breath.

I had been spoiled for too long in the menagerie.

I forgot what seasons felt like. It was now full autumn in the American Midwest, and the winds howling between the buildings reminded me of the Wild Hunt.

In my cabin on the edge of Summer, I claimed four seasons, but winter was always milder in my yard than it was beyond the boundary fence. The Fae Wilds belonged to all courts and experienced all seasons, sometimes all four in the same day.

"I'll take a week's vacation at the end of October," Parker said. "I don't want to miss a single moment of our little kitten growing up."

"I could spell him so he stays a kitten forever."

Parker stopped walking, jerking me to a halt by our clasped hands. "You will not." He was so cute when he glared up at me and wagged his index finger in my face. "And it's 'she,' remember?"

"Okay," I conceded. "Not a kitten, but she could live forever, like you and me."

He blinked, and his expression softened. "Oh. Yes. That … that would be wonderful."

"We need to find the right one first," I said. "I won't grant immortality to a cat that hates us." The cat would love Parker either way. Of that, I was certain.

Cats didn't like anthousai. They blamed us for the wasp war and the deaths of so many of their pixie friends. All cats left the fae realm when the war ended. Some black cats returned to the Autumn Court years later, but none had graced the Summer Court since.

Parker squeezed my hand, and we jogged the rest of the way to the three-story brick building that seemed out of place between two skyscrapers.

A sandstone path led us toward glass double-doors.

Stretched across the glass was an opaque purple logo of a cute cat in a heart above the words, "Minneapolis Kitten Hospital. "

Parker pulled the door open and held it for me to enter first.

"Are the cats sick?" I asked as I stepped inside.

"No. Think of it as a maternity ward for unhoused cats and an orphanage for their babies."

"Still sounds terrible," I said. "They should come back to the fae realm. The pixies worshipped them like gods once." Now, cats were more likely to eat our pixie friends.

Parker stopped in the vestibule between two sets of glass doors and leaned in. "Pixies, but not anthousai?"

"You don't need to whisper," I said. "Anyone who overhears us will think we're talking about mundane human things."

Parker gave me the wicked side-eye I'd come to love in our time in the menagerie. "They're going to think we're fucking weird, you mean."

"Why?"

"You don't know the first thing about mundane, human," he gestured, as though he could grab the right word from the surrounding air, "anything!"

"True. You're the only human I spend time with, and you're far from mundane."

He shook his head.

"To answer your question, no. The anthousai do not worship cats." My stomach twisted with the lie, so I said, "We worship all of life."

"Maybe you should start." Parker smirked as he held the next glass door open for me, unaware of my momentary pain. "They might like you more."

"They might," I had to agree.

"Hello!" A woman in nurse's scrubs greeted us at the main desk. "What brings you in today?"

"We're hoping to adopt a kitten," Parker said.

She looked pained. "We don't have kittens at this time of the year. We had one late summer litter, but they all have been adopted. We've got some less than a year old. They're almost fully grown, but they play like kittens!" She smiled hopefully at us.