Page 68 of Hunted By Fae

It sags her chest, and she staggers back a step. Her heel knocks against the edge of the tub.

The look I give her is pleading, and the shame is in the flush of my cheeks.

But the look that Tess aims back at me is wary, like I am not me but that I am a stranger standing before her.

My lips part around words that don’t come.

I had so much to say, so much to tell her.

Now I have nothing, and I can only watch as she pulls away from the tub and snatches her backpack from the floor. Her shoulder knocks mine before she’s storming out of the bathroom.

The door swings shut behind her.

THIRTEEN

BEE

I don’t know how long I stay in the bathroom, staring at the door, listening to the drip, drip, drip before I finally move for the bathtub.

I tighten the tap until the leak stops.

For a while, I stand here, looking down on the murky water.

Everything Tess was wearing earlier, when we watched the dark fae march down the road, watched Ramona’s throat get torn out—it’s all in there, soaking in the water.

Some suds are surviving, speckled and glittering along the surface of the water, but enough are gone that I can make out the sweatpants floating halfway down the tub.

Ramona’s fear turned on her—it killed her. It alighted in her, sparked panic and action to work as one. And that meant she fired the rifle. Her mind perceived the threat of the moth as the fae attacking her.

It isn’t logical. It isn’t rational.

But people are strange in fear.

Those sweatpants swaying in the water steal me back to the van on the street. I held her out there, I held Tess in my arms, felt her quiver, I smelled her urine in the air.

That pure, unfiltered fear pulsed through her.

But she didn’t react the way Ramona did.

Didn’t hide as Emily did.

Didn’t act as I did.

This is Tesni’s fear.

Dissociation.

A break in the mind that snaps her out of reality. She will know what’s going on around her, what I told her, shewill know that the darkness came from elsewhere, and that the others are a race of fae. She will know all of that, just as she now knows what I am. But for Tess, knowing it is merely fact. It is logic. It is what it is.

She won’tfeelit, won’t process it.

That takes longer.

This is something I have been avoiding doing to her, pushing her over that edge—for one major fucking reason.

I don’t trust her in this state.

I dream about it sometimes, in this dark world: Someone aims a gun at her, and she just smiles, spreads her arms, then spits in their face—she welcomes the end, she triggers it.