Page 6 of Never Nix Up (The Arun Nixes #2)

6

Finn

T he liquid tastes like arse. Properly disgusting. And I’d be more focused on that if it wasn’t for the fact that there’s some kind of glittery shit on Chlo’s face, and when I look at Hazel, she’s got it too.

“Not me,” says Vi, lifting her blonde bob to show me underneath. “I’m scale free.”

Scale…? “Vi, did you give me liquid LSD?”

“No!” she scoffs, and then her face turns serious. “Though that might actually be a little more believable.” She looks over my shoulder to where Hazel is standing, hands on hips, and angry. My sweet, shy Hazel is fuming .

“What the fuck were you thinking?” she asks. She’s not speaking loudly, but each word is over-enunciated to the point where I think I could cut myself on those sharp edges. “That wasn’t your decision to make, Vi.”

Chlo is looking similarly frustrated, but when Vi looks at her, she melts. “Probably could have been handled better.” Her ears are. No, Wait.

“Are your ears pointed?”

Hazel tries to take my hand and get me to sit down but I shake her off because she too has pointed ears. “Don’t touch me.”

All colour fades from her face, until the glittering scale things stand out more, vividly blue against her skin. They’re the same colour as her eyes.

“I didn’t mean…” Her voice trails off and she looks lost, more lost than she did earlier, drunk on exhaustion.

“They’re fae,” says Vi, looking more than a little displeased with me. “It changes very fucking little, so don’t snap at Hazel like that.”

“Fae?” My head is spinning and if I get overwhelmed by dealing with customers in the bakery, right now I feel like my head might explode.

“River nixes, to be precise, and most of them want nothing to do with humans like us.”

“Like us? Vi, you handed me some magic potion to drink.”

“It’s best taken with tea,” she admits, as if that somehow makes this whole scenario better.

It doesn’t.

“So what, you’ve all been lying to me?”

“Not lying,” says Chlo. “Just not telling you the whole truth.”

Hazel isn’t saying anything. She’s pulled herself into the corner of her booth again, and is trying to shrink back into the cushions. I feel like a fucking cad, but I don’t know what I don’t know. I don’t know if this is true—if this can possibly be true—or if I simply am high as fuck right now.

“Hazel…”

Her flinch feels like a knife in my gut.

“Hazel, look at me.” I kneel on the edge of the booth bench, and wait for her to look up. She’s hiding behind a curtain of pink wavy curls, and it feels like an age before she lifts her head. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. That wasn’t okay.”

Whatever rage had fuelled her before has gone now, and she looks completely drained. “I couldn’t tell you. We’re not supposed to tell humans about us, and she …” Her voice trails away before her face sets. “There’s a goddess. The Goddess of the River Arun, and I kind of sort of work with her. And I can’t hide anything from her.”

I can feel Chlo and Violet freeze at that, and Vi slides into the booth opposite Hazel. “You can’t?”

She shakes her head. “And she’s pushy, Finn, really pushy. If she knew how much I like you then she’d…”

“She’d what?” I ask with a laugh. “I don’t work for her.”

Chlo clears her throat. “It’s complicated.”

“No it’s not,” says Vi, tartly. “She tried to make Chlo have sex with me, to do sex magic so that she could gain all the energy. And I wasn’t having that.”

Hazel cracks a smile for the first time since the truth’s come out. “I still can’t believe you spoke to her like that.”

“Someone had to.” There’s something very territorial about the way that Vi kisses Chlo, and I find myself smiling.

“She’d want to us to get together,” explained Hazel. “She draws energy from me already, so I doubt she’d need sex magic, but it’s dangerous.”

“You did just kiss me,” I point out, resolutely ignoring Vi’s squeak of delight.

“Yes, and I shouldn’t have.” Hazel looks determined again, and not in a way that I like. There’s a stubbornness there that suggests that she might not be kissing me again any time soon, and that’s not something that I like the sound of. “The Goddess’s protection covers me, but unless she’ll extend it to you, then you’d be in danger.”

“In danger? From who, if not this goddess?”

“From my family.”