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And she’d killed aredcap. They were particularly violent small fae that reveled in battle and bathed in blood. Hilda must have poisoned him. I couldn’t see any other way she could have done away with him.
I shook myself. There was a task at hand, and I wasn’t focusing.
“You’re not right,” Hilda said to Addie.
I slammed down my spoon. “Hilda!”
“What? All of your friends are a different flavor of monster. It’s interesting, especially considering that you’re supposed to be the prophesized Seelie princess.” Hilda looked me up and down. “Though I suppose you’re anything but Seelie anymore. You rebelled a little too far from Beryl’s curse and ended up in the flavorless void.”
Addie crept up to Hilda and slammed both hands down on either side of Hilda making the small woman startle. She slapped her hand over her heart and said a prayer to a fae god who wasn’t listening.
“You scared the piss out of me, creature,” Hilda snapped.
Addie didn’t react to Hilda’s name-calling. Instead, Addie grinned and let her eyes fill with the blue-light of undeath. It was an eerie sight to behold and made my skin crawl. Our arcana had existed on the opposite spectrum until recently.
Her dark hair slipped free of her sleek braid and wavered in the wind of the afterlife. She was a Reaper and, more importantly, the great-something granddaughter of the Norse goddess of the underworld. But, to us, she was a sweet woman who’d blossomed recently.
“You have no reason to fear me, little soulless one,” Addie whispered.
Hilda wrinkled her nose.
I rolled my eyes.
While the two of them bickered about who should fear who—or shouldn’t fear, I guess—I started work on a potion that could undo the threads of Faust’s bargain. Rhoan had been right. He was safe in Faust’s hands for the time being. The pookah man wasn’t going to kill Rhoan any time soon. Faust wanted tobreakRhoan, and I knew that wasn’t going to happen either.
He had a reason to live. Once I saved Rhoan from his bargain, then we would have a taste of the happily ever after that my friends had been flaunting. It was enough of an incentive to keep us both working.
But, halfway through my potion recipe, I stopped and tapped a word on the yellowed pages of the original Cerridwen’s journal. There was an ingredient listed that I’d never heard of before. Wrinkling my nose, I re-read the ingredient’s properties and wondered if it could have been a codename for something that I was actually familiar with.
“Nightsmane,” Hilda said over my shoulder.
I startled and whacked her with my spoon. Her head snapped sideways from the impact. I slapped a hand over my mouth before I could rush to apologize. Hilda slowly twisted to glare at me as she rubbed at the spot on her jaw.
“I came to help you, lassie, and this is how you treat me?” She grumbled.
With the wooden spoon, I gestured to the scars on my throat. “How else did you expect me to react when you snuck up on me?”
She scowled but didn’t argue. Perhaps she understood. I mean…if she’d killed her husband, there had to have been a good reason. I wasn’t about to question it, either.
“What’s nightsmane?” I asked, changing the subject back.
Hilda raised a brow in disbelief. Then she sighed. “I guess you really don’t know anything, little mutt child. You never got the chance to live in the fae realms.”
Don’t punt her. Don’t punt her. Don’t punt her.
Somehow, I managed to smile though it had to look condescending from the outside. “What. Is. Nightsmane?”
“I just told you! It’s from the fae realms.” Hilda paused, finger to her lips. “Well, I guess I wasn’t as clear as I could have been. It’s a rare herb from the fae realms. No one has seen Nightsmane in the wild in at least two centuries.”
Dramatic, I threw myself face down onto Cerridwen’s old journal. It smelled of fire and herbs while I fought back tears that would have smudged the pages. If this herb was nowhere to be found, then my mission would be delayed even further.
I just wanted one damn thing to go my way. As it was, everyone kept pulling me in different directions. No, not everyone. Though I blamed Ness for needing help, I knew that it’d been Beryl behind it. She’d orchestrated the kidnapping so Rhoan would be alone.
I should have brought him with me, but I hadn’t trusted my glamour to hide him completely in the mortal realm. I sighed and banged my fist on the counter.
“What are you throwing a fit over, girl?” Hilda scoffed.
I raised my head so I could glare at her.
