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A collective gasp goes through the crowd. Hide. Where can I hide?
A few of the closest Fae gape at me, obviously not used to anyone disobeying. But most stare at me with a mixture of curiosity and disgust.
A Fae girl breaks off from the crowd on Winter’s side, her clear ice heels clacking loudly as she marches toward me, two other girls in tow. Everyone she passes cowers a little.
Great. Resident mean girl incoming.
Why am I not surprised? Mean girls tend to target me, probably because I can’t just fall in line like everyone else. It’s not in my nature. At my high school there was Mary Louise, homecoming queen and sometimes girlfriend of Cal and half the football team.
But compared to the Fae girl and two others stalking toward me, Mary Louise is a nun.
Crap on a stick. This is not going the way I planned at all.
The sprite hisses in fear and starts tugging at my earlobe. “Oberon’s teeth, girl. That’s Inara Winterspell. I suggest you move your ass, now.”
But her words have no effect. My brain has already decided I won’t go inside the cage—bad things are going to happen there—and even someone as intimidating as Inara Winterspell can’t break me out of my terror.
“No,” I spit through clenched teeth. “I . . . can’t.”
Memories flood my brain like poison. I was only ten when my parents died. Instead of letting the government throw me into foster care, I took to the streets. But ten was way too young to fend for myself, and I was caught up in the human trafficking that runs rampant in the Tainted Zone, especially the bigger cities.
If not for Aunt Zinnia’s help, I would have been sold to the Fae years ago.
A shiver begins deep in my torso. I cross my arms over my chest. I can still feel the bars from the cramped dog cage they shoved me in cutting my skin. Can remember screaming and thrashing and crying to get out. I half lost my mind between those steely bars.
Bile slams into my throat. No way in hell I’m going back in a cage. Any cage.
The sprite yanks hard on my ear, and I try to swat her away. She’s strong, though, and fast.
I’m so focused on struggling with this pint-sized bundle of aggression that I miss Inara and the two girls until they’re right next to me.
The sprite releases my ear and drops into a dramatic bow, her beautiful magenta hair falling over her shoulder and to her waist.
But Inara doesn’t even look at the sprite. Her icy gaze sweeps over me with disgust, her lips curled into a sneer. She’s model-tall with porcelain skin over delicate features, long silky ultramarine blue hair that tumbles artfully over one shoulder, and legs for days that end in seven-inch crystal pumps.
But it’s her eyes that chill me to the bone; her irises are an ashy-white hue, like frost.
“We have held the Selection ceremony for thousands of years,” she snarls through lips as blue as her hair, “and never once has a shadow recruit acted with as much disrespect as you do now.” She cuts her strange eyes at the sprite. “Why haven’t you glamoured her into submission?”
“I apologize, oh good and wise Evermore,” the sprite begins, giving me the side-eye. “But she just arrived moments ago and according to the new rules this year . . . we are only allowed to glamour them if they try to flee.”
“What do you mean, just arrived?”
The poor sprite is trembling. “All I know is I was ordered to make sure she made it to the Selection.”
“Ordered by whom?” Inara demands in a soft, horrible tone that scrapes down every knob of my spine.
The sprite’s petrified gaze drifts from Inara to someone near the Winter Court’s side, although I can’t see who. Whoever it is, she must find them more terrifying than Inara because she says in a quiet voice, “I don’t think I should tell you.”
Inara glares at the sprite. “Stupid sprite! I should freeze you for a couple hundred years and see if your tiny idiot brain grows any smarter.”
My sprite guide darts behind my head and nestles into the back of my neck. She’s trying to hide. We’re not exactly buddies, but I feel a sudden urge to protect her.
She’s tiny, after all. An easy target.
“Wow,” I say, forgetting where I am or what I’m talking to. “Picking on creatures smaller than you must make you feel really big and strong.”
For a split second, Inara is too stunned to say anything. Her impossibly blue lips part, a look of outrage slowly twisting them into a sneer as her friends tighten the circle around me. The sprite has gone completely still, as has the entire room.
