Page 72 of Hunted By Fae

An incredulous look steals her face, but she watches.

I lift the marble, pinched between my fingertips. “Earth is round.” I lift the button, “and it touches this world.” I push them together. “See how the marble presses into the button and covers so much of its centre? But the rest of the marble is untouched by the button. The part of the marble, the part ofearth, that touches the button—”

“Is the button your world?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“So the part of this world that’s touching the fae world… that’s Norway, Britain, Ireland… That’s where they said the blackout was coming from on the radio. It changed a few times, but it was all in that part of the world.”

“Northern Europe,” I confirm.

She pushes off the window frame she was leaning on. “That’s where the bridges are?”

The corners of my mouth tuck into my cheeks. “It’s not like we can swim across the Pacific to the shores of Britain.”

Tesni raises her chin—and that hollow stare chills me. “If we did go across the Pacific, we would end up in Asia, not Europe.”

Still, she studies me. Piecing everything together.

She sags with a huff. “That explains a lot, actually. You never know things like that—things we learn in primary school.”

I set the button-marble combo down on the counter, then reach for the stove and turn the dial. The bubbling of the saucy pasta is well overdone.

The flames disappear.

“And like, you didn’t know what Art Attack was… or a Polly Pocket… or Pokémon. You didn’t know what Pluto was… or NASA. And like, that time we were at the zoo, and you were staring at the tiger like it had fallen out the sky. And the monkey, and you like, fell back, and knocked your head on the sign?” She chokes on a bitter sound, a scoff. “I just always thought you went to a really shit school… or you were homeschooled and didn’t want to admit it.”

A smile twists my lips. “Are you sure you don’t hate me?”

Tesni rolls her eyes. “Of course I fucking hate you. But it’s temporary. It’ll go away.”

The grin I give is lopsided.

Tesni’s way of giving me the reassurance I need, when she herself is so determined to shut down.

If I didn’t know her, it might hurt me.

But I see what they don’t.

I see that she’s trying.

Tesni doesn’t try for people she doesn’t give a shit about, and she sure as hell isn’t going to worry about their feelings.

I dish the pasta under her pensive stare.

“How did they get here?” she asks. “I mean, if the bridges are only in Northern Europe… how the fuck are the dark fae in Canada?”

I have no answer.

I don’t know how that happened, how the warriors got onto this continent from the other, if they have boats that they took from the shores of the bridges, or swam over oceans, I just don’t know.

Boats would be the obvious idea.

But how would they get their boats through the bridges to this world? And I don’t see a dark fae figuring out how to operate one of the high-tech ones here.

I don’t have the answer.

So I shrug.