The Faerie Prince (Creepy Hollow, #2) (18 page)

“Yeah. It’s unlikely, but it happened. Anyway, I was wondering if your parents ever mentioned her because it seems like she hated my mother and father.”

“Wait, how do you know this? Have you met her?”

With a sigh, I say, “I think I should tell you some stuff.”

Ryn sits forward. “Off-limits stuff?”

“Yes.”

“Awesome.” He rubs his hands together. “Give it to me.”

So I do. I go right back to the beginning and tell him about being kidnapped by Zell and Drake, and about deciding not to give Nate the
Forget
potion. I tell him about our time in the labyrinth, meeting Angelica, and the eye tattoo on Nate’s back. Then there’s Scarlet, and the shapeshifter I killed, and my date with Nate where he ended up handing me over to Zell, and all the things Zell said to me down in his dungeon when we were rescuing Calla. I tell Ryn everything.

Everything except Nate’s power over the weather.

I so badly want to get everything off my chest, but I can’t tell Ryn
that
. He would immediately assume it was Nate responsible for the magical storm, and he’d tell his mother because she’s part of the investigation into the murder. Then Tora would obviously find out, and I can only imagine how angry she’d be that I’ve kept all of this from her.

“Wow,” Ryn says when I’ve finished speaking. He writes something on the table and it shrinks back to a small wooden box, leaving my finished pages to flutter onto the blanket. “Have you told Tora all of this?”

“No, and you can’t tell her, Ryn. You can’t tell anyone.”

“Look, I understand that you don’t want her to be mad at you, but this is important stuff. It kind of sounds like Zell is trying to amass an army of specially skilled faeries. Don’t you think whoever’s been investigating him for years would like to know about it?”

“They do know about it. I told Councilor Starkweather everything we saw in Zell’s dungeon, remember? I’m sure she came to the same conclusion you just did.”

Ryn sighs. “Okay, so I guess you don’t really
need
to tell Tora any of this.” He looks pointedly at me. “Except for the part where you can’t sleep at night because the guilt of lying to her is eating you up.”

I narrow my eyes at him. “Thanks, Oryn. That really helps.”

He gives me an innocent smile. “It was meant to. Anyway, what you tell Tora is up to you, but since you’re sharing your secrets with me, perhaps I should share one of mine with you.” I raise an eyebrow as he rolls onto one side so he can dig in his other pocket. He pulls out a silver chain with a white teardrop pendant and says, “I may have stolen something from the Guild.”

“Ryn!” Dangling from Ryn’s hand is none other than the eternity necklace. “Okay, you can
not
guilt-trip me about keeping secrets from my mentor when you’ve stolen something this important from the Guild! What were you thinking?”

“I don’t trust the Silver Starky, remember? And she
did
lie to us. She said she’d send the necklace to the Seelie Queen immediately, but when I snuck into her office this morning, I found it buried beneath some papers in one of her drawers.”

“And why did you feel the need to sneak into her office and look for it?”

Ryn shrugs. “To see if she was lying to us.” He pushes the necklace back into his pocket. “I don’t think she was ever planning to give it to the Seelie Queen. She probably wanted to keep it for herself.”

“Or maybe she just hadn’t got around to sending it yet.”

“Or maybe—” Ryn raises a conspiratorial eyebrow “—she’s the spy Zell mentioned to you. Maybe she murdered that Seer last week. Maybe that’s why she was so insistent that we forget about what we saw in Zell’s dungeon. She doesn’t want us finding out that she’s involved.”

“No, no, no.” I shake my head. “The idea that the
head
of the Guild Council could be working with the Unseelie Court is both too preposterous and too scary to contemplate, so I’m going to go with my initial reaction: She hadn’t got around to sending the necklace to the Seelie Queen yet.”

Ryn lies back and puts his hands behind his head. “So you think I should put the necklace back?”

I hesitate before answering. What if the spy
is
Councilor Starkweather? She’ll just take the necklace right back to Zell, and then we’ll all be up against a powerful,
immortal
faerie. “I don’t know, Ryn.” I gather my neatly written pages and roll them together. “You decide. After all, you’re the one who took it.” I pack the scroll away and close my bag. I could leave now, since my report is finished, but I don’t really feel like it. And there’s something else I’m supposed to ask Ryn about. “Your mother’s worried about you,” I say as I pull my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them.

“She’s my mother. She’s supposed to worry about me.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“Believe it or not, I can’t read minds,” Ryn says, “so I actually have no idea what you’re talking about.”

I roll my eyes. “The fact that you arrived home earlier looking like you’d just been in a fight? Which, apparently, you’ve done before, and which you did earlier this week while we were at the Harts’ house.”

“Oh, that.” He shrugs. “It’s just something I need to take care of for a friend.”

I watch him closely as I try to figure out what he’s got himself involved in. There’s no use trying to guess, though; it could be anything. “Okay, just tell me this: Should your mother be concerned about you or not?”

“Not,” he says. “I’ll be done fighting people by graduation.”

“Graduation. Okay.” I rest my chin on my left knee. “Your friend is lucky to have you, you know, if you’re willing to get beaten up for him.”

“Yeah,” he says quietly, watching me from his comfortable position on the blanket. His eyes appear bluer than normal in the light cast by the glow-bugs around us. They’re dangerous, those eyes, because I keep finding myself captivated by them, even though I really have
no
business whatsoever being captivated by anything about Ryn. I can’t help it right now, though. Something about the way he’s watching me causes warmth to spread out from the lowest part of my belly right up to—

Friend, friend, friend,
I remind myself quickly. I drop my gaze just as an unexpected
whoosh
sounds nearby. I jump to my feet, ready to face the threat, and find a branch blazing with blue and green flames above Ryn’s head.

“Whoa!” Ryn rolls over and springs up, a glittering knife in his hand. The fire vanishes, leaving wisps of smoke rising and curling in the air. Ryn’s eyes dart around as he searches the forest. “I can’t sense anyone’s magic except ours,” he says.

“Me neither.” My muscles, tensed and ready to fight, start to relax. “So where did those flames come from?”

Ryn lets his knife disappear before running a hand through his hair. “Probably just Creepy Hollow being creepy.”

I suddenly feel stupid for thinking it was anything more than that. Odd magical stuff happens all the time in Creepy Hollow. I’m just on edge because of the crazy, evil Unseelie faerie who happens to be after me. “Yeah, it was probably just some weird, pyromaniac creature hiding in the trees.”

I resume my position on the blanket, and Ryn sits next to me with his back against one of the enormous gargan branches. “So, speaking of graduation . . .” he says.

I slide my hand into the top of my boot and remove my stylus. “We were speaking about graduation?”

“We were. And I was wondering which lucky graduate gets to spend the evening with you.”

I draw random, lazy patterns in the air, watching a faint path of silver trail after my stylus. “What do you mean?”

“You haven’t forgotten about the ball, have you?”

My hand freezes and the looping silver pattern vanishes.
The ball. Dammit.
I’ve spent so much time focusing on the graduation ceremony itself that I actually managed to forget about the ball I’m supposed to attend afterward. “Crap,” I mutter.

Ryn laughs. “You’ve got to be the only girl who’s overlooked the part where you get dressed up and have fun.”

“And who are you going with, Ryn? I don’t see anyone lining up to invite you.”

“That’s because the combination of my good looks and charm is so dazzling that most girls prefer to admire me from a distance.”

“Right.” I resume my random pattern-drawing. “Or it could be because you act like a total jackass in front of most people.”

“I love,” Ryn says, “how your need for complete honesty overrides any concern you might otherwise have for my feelings.”

“Wait, you have feelings?” I allow my mouth to hang open in mock horror. “Wow, sorry, I had
no
idea.”

“I know a lot more about feelings than you’d think.”

“Well, you certainly know how to
hurt
them.” The moment the words leave my mouth I know I’ve gone too far. “Sorry, sorry, that’s all in the past, I know.”

After a pause, Ryn says, “Yeah, whatever.” He picks up his stylus and transforms my silver pattern into floating drops of water. “Feelings aside, I was thinking perhaps you and I could go together, since neither of us is interested enough in the ball to bother with the stress of trying to find a date.”

I cross my arms. “And what makes you think I want to attend the ball with a jackass?”

“Because no one else is lining up to invite you?”

“Nice, Ryn. How could I possibly say no to an invitation like that?”

“You can’t.” He swirls the water droplets into a mini whirlpool in the air. “When someone as charming as me invites you to a ball, it’s impossible for you to do anything but lift your hand delicately to your forehead as you faint away, uttering the word ‘yes’.”

I glare at him. “My fainting days are over, so don’t count on that happening again.”

“Oh, but you were so good at it,” he says with a laugh. I aim my stylus at him, and he hurriedly says, “Okay, okay. All I need is a simple answer to a simple question: Will you be my date?”

“Fine. We can go to the ball together. But it isn’t a date.”

“No. Of course not. It’s simply a convenient arrangement that suits us both.”

“Yes.” I watch the whirlpool spinning for a few moments before closing my eyes and groaning. “Ugh, I
really
wish we didn’t have to attend that part.”

“Why? That’s supposed to be the
fun
part, V.” He nudges me with his shoulder.

“Maybe for some, but for me . . . well, it’s just not my thing. Dressing pretty, decorating my hair, painting my face with fancy makeup spells.” I sigh. “I can kick butt at every single exercise in the training center, but I can’t kick butt in there. In a
ballroom
.” The word almost tastes bad. “That’s for pretty girls like Aria and Jasmine.”

Ryn spins the droplets into a ball of water. “You did a pretty good job at the Harts’ cocktail party.”

“That was part of an assignment. Of course I could do it then.”

“And at Zell’s masquerade.”

“Again, that was like an assignment.”

Ryn sighs and shakes his head.

“What?”

“No matter what I say, you’re going to disagree with me, so this is where my comments end.”

“Good.”

“But there is one other thing.” He waves the ball of water toward me until it’s hovering over my head. With a flick of his stylus, the swirling liquid drops through the air.

I gasp as the cold water hits my neck and travels down my back. “What the freak, Ryn?”

His grin is wide as he says, “Told you I’d get you back.”

“Raven!” I stand on tiptoe and wave as Raven turns around, her deep brown and magenta hair sliding over her shoulder. She peers through the throng of people filling the main lane of the Creepy Hollow Shoppers’ Clearing. I shout her name again. When she spots me, she smiles and waves. I hurry past open stalls, shop fronts built into trees, and busy faeries getting their shopping done. “Hey, thanks for waiting.”

“Sure.” She greets me with a hug. “I don’t often see you here. Shouldn’t you be hitting a punching bag or practicing backflips or something?”