“You see the future?”
She drooped even more. “Yes. Don’t you?”
“Uh. Well. Sort of. I always kind of thought the visions were hallucinations.”
Brow notched, Anna let out a little laugh. “Why?”
He smirked, finally resettling into himself. “Because I mostly see them when I’m fucked up or being fucked.”
Her laughter morphed into an impatient sigh. “You love that, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Using words as a defense mechanism.”
A grin worked its way to the surface. “This isn’t defense. It’s offense. You may find this hard to believe, but words are the best weapons. They hurt far more than pointy objects, and the scars run deeper.”
She considered him for a long while, her blue eyes slicing deep enough to cut. But he didn’t flinch. He didn’t even blink.
“It’s true what they say about you,” she finally said. “You’re dangerous.”
“So are you. Where did you even come from, a pixie with Morgan’s magic?”
Her stormy emotions thundered. “I don’t know.”
“David?” said a voice beyond his sphere of focus.
He blinked and brought his attention to the newcomer. Autumn stood outside their alcove, wearing a shroud of anxiety and a dim smile. Her cherry hair was pulled into a thick knot on top of her head, messy, like she’d thrown it up in a hurry.
She glanced back and forth between them, a notch deepening in her brow.
“Yes?” he said, already aware by the apprehension coating her emotions that whatever she had to say, he wouldn’t particularly like it.
“Your—ah—your—mother just arrived.”
For five full seconds, David wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly, and for the next ten, he was certain it was a joke. But her expression was dire and her smile was the weakest version he’d yet seen, and David shoved down a rising wave of sick.
His mother had arrived.
The one who’d abandoned him to that hellish existence with a psychotic father. The one whose idea of protecting him was throwing him to the wolves.
Ice crept through his veins, refreezing the parts Anna had warmed.
“She wants to see you,” Autumn said into the thick silence.
“What if I don’t want to see her?”
Her smile fell. “You have to, David. She’s the one who will coronate you.”
A slow breath entered his lungs. This realm didn’t want him coronated. They wanted him muzzled, his power cut off at the knees. What difference would it make if he wore the Sovereign crown on his head? It was all one huge joke.
“David,” came Anna’s soft voice.
He shifted his gaze, catching on that sky blue the way thorns caught on silk.
“You should talk to her,” she said.
David said nothing. What words could encompass the sheer dread that surfaced at the thought of his birth mother?
