The Faerie Guardian

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Seventeen

I throw up in the kitchen sink when I get home. Then I lie down on the floor and consider never getting up again. Filigree doesn’t seem impressed, though. He shifts into gorilla form, carries me upstairs, and throws me, fully clothed, into my bathing room pool. A minute later, he scurries back through the door as a squirrel and drops a handful of nuts beside the pool.

I want to thank him, but I’m too tired to get the words out. I slowly peel my clothes off underwater. The ache around my neck eases, but I still feel shaky. I guess that’s what happens when your life is almost entirely drained out of you.

I wait until I’m dried, dressed, and lying on my bed before I let myself think. I killed someone. Again. That’s two someones in two nights. I breathe deeply and tell myself to get over it. I do this all the time. It’s my job. I fight bad people. Sometimes I have to kill them.

But I’ve never killed anyone who looks exactly like a person I care about.

That’s the big problem: I can’t get the image of a dead Nate out of my head. I sit up. As weak as I am right now, I have to know he’s okay. I draw a doorway onto my wall and take the few steps through the faerie paths into Nate’s bedroom. He’s there. Breathing. Alive. I kneel beside the bed and lift the bottom of his T-shirt without waking him.

The eye is gone.

*

I managed to push the dead shapeshifter into the Stuff I Don’t Think About box, which meant I was able to sleep last night. And all morning.

I wake up to find two amber messages from Honey, as well as a large amount of food, probably carried into my room during the night by Filigree. Honey’s first message asks if I enjoyed my suspension so much I decided to continue it for a few days. Her second says she made some excuse for me during training.

I spend the afternoon practicing blocking the dead-Nate image out of my mind and trying to figure out if I should tell Nate about last night. Eventually I decide I probably should. Lying is bad, right? And so is hiding the truth. But I don’t have to tell him tonight. It would be selfish to spoil the special date he has planned. Next week seems good. Next week I’ll get Nate over here, and Tora, and I’ll lay everything out for both of them.

Right now, though, I have to do my very best to get excited for this date.

*

Though the weather in Creepy Hollow is perfect this evening, it’s raining again in Nate’s neighborhood. I stand at his window and watch the raindrops beat against the glass before running down in rivulets. Behind me, Nate’s bedroom door opens. I turn quickly, checking that my glamour is in place, just in case it’s one of his parents.

“Hey,” he says, then stops. “Wow. I think I’ve only ever seen you wearing black.” He walks closer. “You look even more beautiful in pink.”

As it happens, the dress I’m wearing is actually black. It’s the same one I wore to the Council hearing and then forgot to give back to Raven. Which was fortunate, since I couldn’t very well go on a date in my ordinary clothes. I decided, though, that something as important as a first date warranted a color change. Having never tried any magic to alter my clothes before, it took me several hours of fashion disaster before I amber-messaged Raven and asked her how to do it.

“It’s cerise, actually,” I inform him, as though I’m an expert now. “But thank you.”

“I see you haven’t lost the boots, though.” His lips twitch as he attempts to hide a smile.