His silken voice projects through the bar, so confident, so self-assured. “Goodbye, sweet Ivy. I’ll never forget you.”
Ivy stops, gazing back over her shoulder. Sadness shimmers inside her big starburst eyes, and it looks as if I was wrong.
She’s already so far under his thrall. Now the poor thing will pine for him day and night until she’s driven to the brink of insanity.
I never should have brought her here. Unarmed, helpless…
In the end, this tavern is a writhing nest of vipers.
And I’m the worst viper of all.
“Ivy, what are you doing? Let’s go,” I whisper.
She can’t take her eyes off Lord Valent, and again, her pupils explode, leaving nothing but a bright ring of sea green.
“We’re staying,” she intones, inhaling his red smoke.
Mumbling echoes through the bar, followed by the clinking of coins, and I spy Stannog shaking his head in disappointment.
“No. We leave,” I reply desperately now.
Ivy completely ignores me as she saunters back to Lord Valent’s side, taking her cloak off at his request. The rest of the bar watches the show unfold; it's not every day they get to see a master at work.
Ivy will belong to Lord Valent by the night’s end, and there is nothing I can do to stop it.
It looks like I failed to keep my end of the bargain.
I did not protect her.
Lord Valent orders honeyed wine for the entire bar, and Stannog begrudgingly obliges.
Now Ivy will become drunk on faerie wine, a drunkenness the likes of which she will never wake from.
Beautiful girls materialise from thin air, floating around the tavern like neat swathes of silk as they hand out shimmering goblets.
These must be Stannog’s ‘nighttime’ staff. Some of them possess bright wings of gossamer, and others bear horns and antlers, yet they all have one thing in common—they’ve shared my bed.
One with the peppered wings of a moth approaches Ivy’s side, pouring a generous amount of wine into a silver goblet, and the human tries her hardest not to stare at the large appendages sticking out from her back.
“Fermented for one hundred years for the lovely girl,” the female croons, her voice as clear and resonant as the pealing notes of a wind chime.
Ivy takes the goblet from the faerie’s long, slender fingers, and the moment it vanishes down her throat, she giggles like a happy idiot.
Just as I thought…Spiked.
The Fae female smirks, whirling back towards the bar with all the lethal grace of a feline.
On her way through the gate, I grip her wrist, whispering into her pointed ear,“Don’t.”
She bats her yellow, cat-like eyes. “Whatever are you talking about?”
“Fuck you. You knowexactlywhat I’m talking about, Mellow. Leave her be.”
As far as faeries go, Mellow was pretty average in bed. Let’s just say that desperate times call for desperate measures.
Mellow bares her straight white teeth. She’s always been a jealous, petty bitch. She must think that Ivy and I are courting. We’re not, but Mellow won’t see it that way.
“You made a mistake bringing thatdunghere, and my name isMinnow, prick.”
