“What is this place, Corva? Last father knew, you were living with a group of angry pixies along the Iris River.” My hand lifts in the least casual way from where it’s pinned at my side, and I skim my fingers along the carved wooden table that’s built right out of the floorboards.
She scoffs, but her smile is still wide. “Pixies are hardly any fun at all. Fallen angels, now those are fun.” Her haunting voice sends a shiver down my spine, and it seems to do the same to the tense men surrounding us.
“Seraphs,” Damien corrects. Because angels like titles. Even if he’s no longer a seraph. “She’s using us as well as helping us,” Damien answers without the mischievousness of my sister.
He gives away answers too freely.
He’s too trusting. Which must be why he and his friends are mixed up with a dangerous fae like Corva.
Because dark fae, they don’t give anything away for nothing.
“How is she helping you?” I turn to him and his sweet honey-colored eyes.
I’m already mourning him in a way.
Damien the Fallen. He was a good man. A kind man.
A stupid, stupid man.
It’s then that Damien’s sharing suddenly dries up. He glances to the woman behind me before shifting his gaze to Zav.
Neither of them answers me.
“She helps slow the demon process. Her magic and runes prevent us from fully becoming demons.” The rumbling words of mystery man number three throw me off guard. For a moment, I stare dumbfounded at him.
He’s massive. All rolling muscles and smooth planes. Intimidating, but something about him isn’t frightening. Not the scarring runes that line the center of his chest, nor the darkness that clouds his pale green eyes, nor even the stark leathery wings that shadow him from his wide shoulders.
Perhaps it’s because of that sinful smirk that’s tilting his lips as he studies me the way I’m studying him.
“You do realize, you look like something a demon shit out the morning after a hellacious hangover?” I say.
Like you’re one to talk, Catherine whispers.
The cunt.
“Yes, I look like a demon,” says the big one. “But I’ve been a fallen for a hundred years, and look at me. Thanks to Corva’s help, the process has slowed.”
A hundred years.
My eyebrows lift slowly and that taunting sexy smirk of his only intensifies.
“You’re almost cute when you shut up for longer than a second, Crow,” he says to me.
My lips suddenly curl at the demon shit.
“Crow?” I snarl.
In two big steps he’s in front of me, stealing all the light behind him with his massive stature. When his lips part with quiet words, his dark tone strums through me like a song that touches me in all the right places.
“Call me demon shit, and you’re bound to get the favor returned. ‘Crow’ is much more affectionate than what I wanted to say to you, I promise,” he whispers, his big fingers flicking the inky feathers at the tip of my right wing.
The candlelight glints against something on the back of his arm, and I barely catch sight of jagged metal slicing right from his skin. The weapon startles me, but in an instant, he’s slashed it down the front of me.
The slamming sound of my heart fills my ears. But it calms as the tightness around my arms loosens. The metal bindings around my body fall and burn out like embers in the night, fading away to literal ash before my eyes.
Nothing but powerful dark fae magic could have done something like that.
My breathing calms, and my big eyes stare at the odd onyx metal that lines his forearms like fish fins.
“She cursed you,” I whisper. A sinister giggle follows my words. “She cursed you with iron blood.”
“I didn’t curse him. It sounds dirty when you say it that way. It’s just a test,” Corva says innocently.
The massive man in front of me is staring blankly down at me, his lips so thin, I can tell he’s biting back all the things he wants to scream at my sister.
“He’s a demon who’s hated by the fae world. So you gave him the one thing fae can’t stand. The one thing that’s like poison to us: iron. Iron magic, to be exact. He’ll be an outcast among us for the rest of his life. He’ll be more hated than any other demon.” He truly will be a monster. My mouth drops as I finish that thought. “You . . . you wanted to know what they’d do to him, didn’t you?”
“Do to him? Don’t be silly. I gave him a gift. Something to protect himself. Fae can’t even so much as lay a hand on him without feeling the singe of his blood.” She shrugs her small shoulders at me.
And it’s just like all of her whisper wind pleas with my father. All careless recklessness that doesn’t make a single ounce of sense.
I shake my head at her, and I know I should just shut up. It’s not safe to be on her bad side. And I need an ally here, now that I’m back.
I need a friend more than anything in this realm. And Corva is a powerful friend. So powerful, she broke my father’s barrier magic preventing me from returning . . .
“She sent us to capture you,” the iron blood demon confirms, laying it all out there with a contemptuous sort of rage hidden beneath his handsome features.
My head turns slowly until I’m looking at her big black eyes once more. When I was a little girl, her unnaturally large eyes used to scare me. She still secretly scares me, but for more realistic reasons.
“That’s all you wanted from them?”
She wanted me?
Why?
To join her in her misery?
“Because you and I need each other, sweet sister.” Everything she says drips with contained maliciousness.
“I don’t need anyone.” My shoulders square, but I’ll admit they’re sore from being pressed into the bindings she made for me.
“Maybe,” she says in that eerie singsong way of hers. “Imagine if all of the children that father exiled joined together. Imagine if we didn’t do as we were told and lie down to die?”
She is so dramatic.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say. “I’m living my best life in the Bin.”
Everyone in the room takes a disdainful moment to slide their gaze down my three-day-old dirty shirt and hot pink panties that are feeling smaller by the minute.
I roll my eyes. As if they’re so much better than me. Half the room isn’t even wearing shirts, for faefuck’s sake. Is there some sort of shirt shortage I don’t know about happening in the fae realm?
“Anyway,” I say cautiously, “what exactly would we do together while joining forces? Play house here in your tree fort?” I glance from the wooden cup on the table to the wooden chairs and the vines tying everything together.
“We’d go back, Ari,” she says. “We’d go back to court where we belong. We’d have a life. The life we were meant to live.”
I swallow. It hurts my chest so badly to realize no one’s called me Ari in a long, long time.
Her words and the sting of that sentimental name my mother used to call me hits me all at once.
She wants to go back. I do, too. Just being a tiny distance inside the fae realm makes my heart pound to life with happiness that I’d forgotten about.
I guess . . . I guess I forgot what happiness felt like.