I scrambled to check my email, and I had to wait another thirty seconds for his message to show up. When I opened the attachment, I stared at the picture for a minute before tears pricked my eyes. Leaving home had been hard enough, but leaving without saying good-bye to Remy had killed a little piece of me. After a lot of pleading on my part, Roland had agreed to leave a small note in the cave for me. Remy could not read human writing, and I knew how to write a few dozen troll words, so my short message translated to, I miss you. Sara. On the cave wall, written in Troll was, I miss you too, my friend.
“Well? What does it say?”
I translated the writing for Roland, and he huffed loudly. “That’s it? You made me freeze my ass off climbing down a cliff twice to find out if he was still your friend? Hell, I could have told you that and saved myself the trip.”
“You don’t know trolls, Roland. They have very different ways, and the elders are really strict. If they told Remy to stay away from me forever, he would obey them.”
He sighed again. “Sara, I might not know troll ways, but I saw you with Remy. Meeting him is not something I’ll ever forget. No matter what happened back then or what orders he got from his elders, that troll will never stop being your friend.”
Roland was usually playful and goofy, and sometimes I forgot how insightful he could be. “I think I just needed to hear it from him. Thanks for doing this for me. You’re the best.”
“I know. I get that a lot.”
I rolled my eyes and laughed. “Good to know some things will never change.”
He laughed with me. “What can I say? Women love me.”
“You’re hopeless, you know that? One of these days, you’re going to meet someone who doesn’t fall all over you, and I hope I get to meet her.”
“I have met her, and she broke my heart back in elementary school.”
“Oh, don’t start that again.” I closed my eyes, still embarrassed by his and Peter’s recent confessions that they both had crushes on me when we were kids.
“I bet your face is red right now,” he teased.
“Stop it or I won’t tell you about what happened today.”
“More exciting than my day?”
I told him all about the hellhounds, the menagerie, and the wyvern. He whistled and told me I had to send him some pictures. “I’m not sure if I’m allowed to do that, but I’ll ask. Maybe you can come visit me and see them yourself.”
“Yeah, a werewolf visiting a Mohiri stronghold, that should go over well.”
“You never know. Stranger things have happened.” I picked at the label on a bottle of Coke on my desk. “So, any special plans for the big birthday next week?” I felt a pang of sadness at the thought of not being there for his eighteenth birthday. It is a huge milestone for a werewolf because they are considered an adult at eighteen, and they are included in hunts and start doing patrols with the other adult wolves. It was bittersweet for both of us. We were excited for his coming of age, but sad that we wouldn’t be able to celebrate his birthday together. My own birthday was a little over a month away, and it was hard to imagine him and Peter not being here for it.
“No big plans. I think I have to work the next day anyway.”
“You have a job? Who are you, and what have you done with Roland?”
He groaned. “And what’s worse is I’ll be working for Uncle Max at the lumber yard. Every weekend.”
“Didn’t you always say you’d rather work at a fast food joint than for Maxwell?”
“I have no choice. I gotta make some cash if I’m ever going to get some new wheels, and the lumber yard pays good money.”
Guilt settled over me. Roland’s pickup had been ripped up by a pack of crocotta trying to get to me. He loved that old truck.
“I know why you’re quiet all of a sudden, and you better stop it,” he ordered. “That was not your fault. Besides, one of the guys in the pack might sell me an old Mustang he has in his shed. It needs some work, but my cousin, Paul, said he’d help me fix it up. You remember him; he’s the mechanic. I just need to get enough for a down payment and it’s mine.”
I smiled at the excitement in his voice. “I wish I was there to see it. You never did finish teaching me how to drive.”
“Forget it! I saw what happened to the last car you drove.”
“Hey, that was so not my fault, and I got away from the bad guys, didn’t I?”
“They must have lots of cars there you can practice on, and they can afford to replace them.” He made a sound like a snort. “I bet Nikolas could teach you, if you don’t kill each other first.”
My hand jerked, almost knocking over the bottle of Coke. I pushed it out of my reach and glared at it. “I haven’t seen him since he dumped me here and took off.”
Roland was quiet for a moment. “I’m sure he has lots of work to catch up on and he’ll be back soon.”
“He can stay away for good for all I care.”
“Come on, you don’t mean that. Nikolas is not such a bad guy, and coming from me, that’s something.”
“I don’t want to talk about him.” My face heated up, and my palms prickled as resentment flared in me at hearing my best friend defend him. I knew I was overreacting, but I couldn’t stop the angry hurt that came every time I thought about Nikolas leaving the same day we got here. After everything we went through, he couldn’t even be bothered to say good-bye.
A soft hissing pulled me from my silent rant. I looked at the Coke bottle a few inches from my hand, and gasped at the brown soda bubbling up as if it had been shaken. My hand closest to the bottle was crawling with blue static, and sparks leapt from my fingers to the bottle that looked ready to explode.
I jerked my hand back and tucked it under my other arm, and almost immediately, the soda began to settle down. What was happening to me? Whatever it was, it was getting worse.
“Hello? You still there?”
“Yeah, sorry.” I tried to keep the tremble from my voice. “I got distracted for a minute. I need to tell you something.”
“Okaaay,” he said warily. “You haven’t been selling troll parts on the black market have you?”
“Roland!”
“Sorry.”
I sucked in a long, slow breath. “You know how my friend Aine said my Fae powers might start to grow? I think it’s happening – or something is going on anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s like my power is on the fritz or something.” I described the little flare-ups I’d been having, including the strange cold spot in my chest. “I almost made a bottle of Coke explode a few minutes ago, just by touching it.”
“Hmm.” He was quiet for a minute. “Maybe it’s tied to your emotions.”
“What do you mean?”
“You haven’t been very happy since you went there, and you got mad when I mentioned Nikolas. Faeries are supposed to be, like, happy all the time, right? Maybe being negative screws with your Faerie magic.”
I snorted. “Great explanation.”
“No seriously. Or it could be hormones. It’s not that time – ?”