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“You have got to be kidding me,” I muttered, tossing the clothes onto the bed and grabbing the next pair.
Another pair of booty shorts and another tank top.
Beneath it was more of the same shit.
“Asshole,” I snarled, tossing them to the bed.
There was no underwear to go with the clothing, and no bras either.
“You okay in there?” Mare called from the hallway.
My first instinct was to pull back, to keep quiet, but… I actually liked her.
So I crossed the room and opened the door, tossing a hand toward the bed. “That fucker gave me a bag full of lingerie instead of clothes.
Her eyes widened. “Are you serious?”
“Look.” I stalked back across the room and plucked one of the sets off the bed, lifting it for her to look at.
Mare relaxed slightly. “I totally get what you’re coming from, and it’s shitty, but the fae don’t consider that lingerie. They gave Dots a set of those too, and the fae who brought it explained that most phoenixes wear those. She’s a phoenix, like you. The constant shifting means that they’re constantly catching on fire, and those clothes are both fireproof and stretchy enough to survive shifting. May I?” She held a hand out toward me, and I tossed her the pair.
She pulled on them a bit, showing me how they stretched. “Supposedly, these outfits are extremely expensive, which is why Dots only got one. If Lian brought you a couple of pairs, he must’ve spent his own money on them. The phoenix and hellhound guys are always wearing them, either the shorter or longer version, but most of them only have one or two pairs.”
I glanced back down at the pile.
One, two, three, four…
Fuck, there were fifteen.
I didn’t even have fifteen pairs of clothes back on Earth. I had eight, so I could wash all my shit in one trip to the laundromat, one day a week.
Why the hell would I need fifteen sets of their fancy lingerie?
Maybe lingerie wasn’t the right word, if the clothes were only made small because the fabric was expensive…
“How often do they shift, though? I thought you guys never shift?” I asked.
Her expression grew sheepish. “The fae have offered to teach us, but Ana was worried if we spent that much time with any of them, we’d start to like them.”
I snorted. “Good old Ana.”
“Right?” She laughed, a bit self-consciously. “Supposedly, there’s a school that fae created for humans to go to in order to learn how to shift without getting stuck in one form or another. Blood Academy. But it’s in the unseelie land, and we belong to the seelies until the five years have passed. Ana will be at Blood Academy right now; that’s where the unseelies take us. They’re the rule-followers, from what we know, so even Ana wasn’t nervous about that part.”
Nope, I did not like that. Belonging to unseelies? Hard pass.
I must’ve made a face that said how much I didn’t like that idea.
“It’s more like they’ve got first dibs,” Dots said, stepping into the doorway and leaning heavily against the wall. Her golden hair was wrecked, and there were a few spots of what had to be drool on the collar of the gigantic t-shirt she had on, with no pants beneath it or anything. “One of the guys told me that the seelies are the ones who figured out how to break into Earth on the Winter Solstice about twenty years ago, so they made the five-year rule to buy themselves time to convince us to fall in love with them. It’s been an epic failure though; only two seelie guys have ever found their mates. And both women convinced the men to join the unseelie, afterward. So there are fifteen previously-human chicks in the unseelie court, and only five of us here.”
Fuck.
That was probably why the unseelie guy had been so interested in Calian’s new obsession with me.
“Have any of you guys shifted before?” I asked.
“Nah. We can all feel the discomfort of the wild magic beneath our skin, trying to break out, but we’re professionals at ignoring it at this point.” Mare winked at me. “I don’t think Calian sees that in your future, though.”
My gaze lowered back to the pile of expensive clothes.
