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I rolled my eyes. How on earth did he communicate with his men if these were the communication skills he was working with? “I want to work on a fire suppression system to stop this from happening in the future. It would help if I knew what caused this in the first place.”
“Let the fae take care of it.”
And there it was. He didn’t want my help. He wanted me to sit back and wait patiently for Jaiden to do everything.
Of all the generals I was stuck with, why did it have to be Wolfe? Kier at least liked humans, Xian was determined to perfect his human flirting—or tried to, when Jaiden wasn’t around— and Radien was respectful.
Wolfe was...brash. Rude. Making his disdain for me known but not making a big enough deal about it for me to mention it to Jaiden.
Not that he worried me. Though he didn’t care much for me, his feelings toward his king were evident. There was respect and admiration there.
While Xian talked about his future mate all the time and Kier was head over heels for Mia, Wolfe clammed up even more than usual when the prospect of him taking a wife eventually was brought up.
He didn’t look at me with contempt or disgust like some of the other fae did. There was anger. I don’t think that anger was directed at me. Something about the situation made him furious, and considering he didn’t want to talk about it and I didn’t want to upset him any more than he already was, I tried to stay under his radar.
“Okay. If you aren’t going to help, I’ll start looking at the fire-suppressing compounds that are found naturally in these lands. If they don’t work well enough on their own, we can see what they can be combined with to increase effectiveness. Why did I go into physics again? Obviously chemistry would be so much more useful here. I need a lot of high-powered microscopes before I can really start digging into the atoms and their properties here.”
Wolfe stood against a bookshelf and turned to regard me, his arms crossed over his chest. “Your translator stone isn’t working.”
“Believe it or not, I get that a lot. But I like talking out problems. It’s one of the reasons I spend so much time with Albor. He will listen to me babble on for hours, even though he only picks up half of it. To be fair, he does the same to me. I like to think that if we spend enough time together, we’ll start to speak the same language.”
By now I had a good idea for the layout of the shelves. A vast majority of the collection was history-based. The sciences were broken out between chemical, mechanical, and magical. The magical section was mostly all elven in origin. Fae were born with access to the Fade. Elves could gather magic from the earth. They weren’t as strong as the fae, but there was a much bigger variety of what they could accomplish.
Hence, more literature.
I took one of the provided glowing orbs and found the section I thought was the right one. Now I’d have to go through the books one by one to find the ones most likely to help.
Though I was sure Wolfe was bored, he didn’t complain or even shift his weight in annoyance. Just stood watch over me like a statue.
I was so used to him standing stoically off to the side that when he pushed away and strode toward the window, it caught my attention immediately.
I started to follow, but Wolfe held a hand out to stop me. “Stay back.”
Before I could ask what was going on, everything went to hell. The windows imploded, glass shooting right at me. I screamed, twisting around to shield my face as the shards collided with my skin.
Most of them bounced off harmlessly, but the ones that broke the skin all added together to an intense pain.
Groaning, I pushed against the nearest shelf, making myself as small as possible.
I didn’t hear Wolfe, so I had to assume that whatever was happening was some sort of attack.
Hopefully I was overreacting. I really didn’t think I was.
Glass crunched around me, signaling that I wasn’t alone. Any hope that it was just Wolfe was crushed as more glass crunching sounded. There was more than one.
Closing my eyes, I judged the distance between me and the door.
Too far. There was no way I could outrun a fae or elf. But I wasn’t going to just sit here and wait to be found. If I could hold out long enough, Jaiden would find me. I just needed some time...
I rolled forward, trying to ignore the glass that bit into my palms and knees, throwing myself up and forward.
I made it out of the shelves easy enough. The door was right in front of me. All I had to do was make it a few more feet and—
Arms wrapped around me and locked like steel bands. A scream bubbled up from my throat, but before any sound came out, bright-blue light slammed into me. It was as if I were swimming in energy, the power flowing over me and even in me, traveling down my throat and choking me, even though, logically, I knew nothing was there.
By the time the energy dissipated, I was on the ground, gasping for air and dry heaving at the same time.
I was no longer being held back, not that it mattered. I couldn’t even stand, let alone run.
It was only when I saw all the black and gold surrounding me that I truly understood how much danger I was in.
