Calliope should have told me that when a fairy king says we’ll see about the fate of your life, it’s not a good thing. Even without his warning, I was smart enough to know any uncertainty about my future well-being wasn’t something to take lightly. So when the king used those words, I decided it was time to play it cool.

“Your Maj—”

“Call me Aubrey, please.” He smiled in a cool way that I was sure made the fae ladies get wet in their gossamer undies, but it only gave me a worried shiver. “Aubrey Delacourte.” The expectant stare following his introduction told me he was waiting for a name from me, although I knew he had to be perfectly aware of who I was since he’d said as much earlier.

“I’m Secret McQueen.”

“I know.”

Of course he did.

“I’ve come because someone who…belongs to me has been brought here against her will.”

“Oh?”

Fairies were notorious for kidnapping. Babies sometimes, changelings. But their real bread-and-butter was women. I’d seen true fairy women before, and it had astonished me that the men of the realm felt any need to look outside their own species until Calliope explained the reasoning to me. Fairy women were delicate, and not just in their appearance. Pregnancy was not as simple for them as it was for humans, and the gestation period for a full-blooded fairy baby was a whopping thirty months. Months. Considering how much the babies drained from their mothers in terms of food and energy, it was sadly often the case that the mothers died before babies came to term.

Human women were a heartier lot, and their gestation was only nine months. To a fairy male looking to spread his seed it was often easier to father a half-breed than it was to wait out the lengthy birth of a full-blooded fairy child.

But the human women they took to incubate their spawn weren’t always willing. Kellen had been brought over as part of an owed debt, but I had even money it was her youthful uterus the fairy had been after and not her whole person.

“Aubrey, can I be honest with you?”

“It would be a lovely change of pace for me.”

“The girl who was taken, she doesn’t belong here. She isn’t going to be a warm cavity for one of your fairy lords to put his face-hugging progeny into. She’s coming home with me.”

“Face-hugging progeny?” He looked mildly amused.

“Wrong audience for an Alien reference, I think,” Holden whispered from behind me.

On the plus side, I found my absurd outbursts tended to endear me to people rather than make them want to order an instant death. I was eternally grateful Aubrey was at least a wee bit endeared. In fact, he was regarding me in an entirely new way, his cheek resting on his folded hand as he watched me with careful interest.

“You’re an unusual woman. Unlike any queen I believe I’ve ever known.”

“Understatement…of…the…year,” Desmond wheezed, still holding his stomach. I’d probably wasted my Alien reference too soon, since he looked like his chest was about to burst any second. Worry twisted in my guts when I saw Desmond’s ashy, sweat-streaked face. He was in bad shape.

My focus was renewed. “Aubrey, I need my friend back.”

The fairy king sat up straight, leaned forward on his knees and laced his fingers together. “My, my. Real honesty. That is a welcome change.”

“Does my refreshing honesty get me any bonus points?”

“It wins you my regard.”

“And what does your regard get me?”

“It gets you a chance.”

“A chance at what?”

“Winning her back.”

Win her. Like she was a poker hand or a door prize. I hadn’t been expecting them to hand her over pretty as you please, but I was taken aback at the notion I’d have to champion my cause to bring her home.

“Win her how?” In a physical challenge I might be okay. A challenge of the wits, I’d stand a sliver of a chance. Fairies were tricksy devils, and you had to think like a crazy person in order to beat them at their own game, but it wasn’t impossible. A test of patience, though, and we’d all be screwed.

“You and your companions will stay with us a brief time. While you are here I will observe you. Once I am satisfied with what I’ve seen, you and I will come to the terms of Miss Rain’s release.”

“Are you promising me you’ll let her go if you and I can come to an agreement?”

Ah, the careful selection of the word promise. When it came to the fae, there were two words you had to take pains to use only if you absolutely must: thank you and promise. To thank a fairy meant they would hold you in their debt for as long as they chose. A thank you was tantamount to saying I owe you big time, and fairies didn’t take that shit lightly.

Promises were equally loaded, because a fairy’s word was everything. They never lied. Sometimes they would skirt the truth so expertly it would feel like a lie, but it never was. Words had to be chosen with painstaking care when speaking to a fairy. So I had picked the word promise for good reason.

Aubrey knew it too because his beautiful face lost the amused mask it had previously shown and was now tightly drawn with displeasure.

“I said, do you promise—?”

“I heard you.”

We stared at each other while he considered my question. Then he smiled again, and as before, I didn’t like the gesture one bit. Something told me I was going to be played at my own game. “Yes, Miss McQueen. I promise I will release Miss Rain should you and I come to an agreement of terms. Does that make you happy?”

“Right now it does. I don’t think I’ll be saying the same thing when it comes time to discuss terms, though.”

Aubrey’s smile didn’t flicker for an instant.

Oh yeah. This was going to hurt me way more than it hurt him.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The rules to coexisting with fairies, as taught to me by Calliope:

1) Do not say thank you, EVER.

2) Do not accept gifts. Accepting a gift is acknowledging the fae has given you something, therefore one day they may call upon you to give them something. Nothing comes for free with a fairy, so unless you want them to take your firstborn one day, don’t let them give you anything shiny.

3) Do not eat anything the fae offer you. As much as this one might suck, same rules apply as in number 2. Food is trickier, though, as it was commonly used as a way to bind humans into the fae realm. Once you ate with them, there was no turning back.

4) Compliment them as much as possible. Fairies are more sensitive than a Hollywood starlet who has gained weight. They cannot get enough of hearing how beautiful, clever and marvelous they are. The more you compliment them, the more likely they are to do what you want.

5) Last but not least…spend as little time with the fae as possible, especially on their turf. Everything is different within their borders, from the phases of the moon to the laws of physics. Time itself functions differently in a fae reality.

This last rule was heavy on my mind when a hob—a brownie—guided Holden, Desmond and me to our assigned chambers in the palace. Obviously the shifting-moon-phase issue was getting to Desmond and was acting as both a gift and a curse. A curse because he was clearly in a monumental amount of pain, and a gift because in spite of how close he was to the brink, the weird phases of the moons were keeping him from shifting forms.

At any given moment though I knew his tenuous hold would break.

We were on borrowed time, and the man in charge of doling it out was a fairy king who wanted to play with my head. Hopefully that was all he wanted to play with, because my uterus wasn’t going to be any good to him.

The hob left us in the dark foyer of our room, and I didn’t take any time to investigate the space.

“Desmond, are you—?”

“Don’t ask,” he grumbled.

“I have to ask. Are you okay?”

He slumped onto the floor as if the effort to hold himself upright had become too much. In truth he’d probably been fighting to stay on his feet this entire time. He wasn’t lying down, but rather propped himself against the wall and kept his arms around his midsection.

“He looks peachy,” Holden observed.

“Thanks,” Desmond said, and his voice was so quiet I couldn’t tell if he meant it sarcastically or not.

I crouched on the floor in front of him, cupping his clammy face in my palms. He was boiling hot and icy cold all at once, a sure sign his body was fighting against the werewolf’s natural urge to escape. Wolves ran hot, so the feverish cold was his human side struggling to stay in charge.

“You could—”

“No.”

I chewed on my lip and raked my fingers through his wet hair. “Why are you fighting it so hard? It’s hurting you.”

“I need to be here for you.”

“You’d still be here for me if you were…” I let my hand drop away. “You’d still be here for me.”

He shook his head sternly. “Dominick told me what happened in Louisiana. The way you responded to the change. What if me changing gives your wolf permission? What if she doesn’t care how badly you need to stay human? You of all people should know how hard it is to stay in control once the wolf has the power.”

My jaw felt slack. I hadn’t told Desmond about my experience at Callum’s compound. The way my wolf had pushed me out of the driver’s seat and made up her own rules. He was right, I had almost no control when I was in my wolf form. Maybe it was something all new wolves experienced, but I never had before. The way he described it to me, though, was exactly the way it had felt when I’d been running on four legs through the woods.

So far my wolf had been on her best behavior. But if Desmond was in wolf form, would her attitude stay the same? I couldn’t be sure. I’d already been worried about what would happen during the full moon in Manhattan, but there were no rules here to govern the shift the same way we could in the human world. Desmond might not be a pack king—whose wolf form could force those in his pack to change into their animal selves—but he was my soul-bonded mate. Would that impact it somehow?