Betrayal (33 page)

Pike jumped from the tree now.  “Like what slaves?” He folded his arms and stood aside me as if the two of us could really take him.  Like I said, the friendship wasn’t fisted on too tight.

“Don’t know.  He always likes to make a wave and screwing with your court that way is just his thing.  You know this.  I’m just giving you a heads up.”

With Kinsler, everything was called a “heads up” when it pertained to the father of evil.

***

“Don’t bring her!” I told Pike.  He had one of his many females on his arm. 

“Oh, come on.  She wants to see the love nest,” he cooed in her direction.  Female in question giggled back at him.  I knew her.  That made me angrier.

He could be disgusting sometimes.  Hell, I loved a good time with a girl alright, but there was a line to cross about taking a girl in the woods and just
hanging out
.  Making out was one thing, but Pike had no morals at all.

That’s the problem.   Many of the Fey had no morals.  Tinia was cute.   Fun!  But only wanted the name.  She didn’t care about me.  Jem was the same.  They all were. 

Any girl I even remotely found interest in wanted to know what it would be like to be king and started mentioning betrothals and marriage days into any type of relationship.  That’s just it, they never developed into anything that could be called a “relationship”.

My disgusted look did nothing to change Pike’s mind, but my anger won out when he couldn’t deny that Kinsler would use it for something later as a challenge between the courts.  The girl would technically be property of both courts hence she was on neutral ground.  Kinsler could twist things that way.

He saw my reasoning and relented, sending her back to the court. 

Pike never thought with anything but his pants.

We met Kinsler at our usual, killed some of the wild, yakked about nothing, and went our separate ways.

Almost every day.

I entered the court boundary where I always did on a cool afternoon on the edge of winter.  Altheon, the court seer, greeted me at the camp side fire pit blazing and too warm.  That never happened before.  My mother was there also.

Mother
often told me to tend to one of her little tasks and today was no exception.  This one involved retrieving one of her many items from the human world.  A Fey boy who’d strayed to a lustful human who “couldn’t live without her”.  I was to remove the memories myself and bring the boy to her.  Why couldn’t our people just forget the humans existed altogether?

“Master Ian, I need to speak with you.” Altheon said after mother excused herself to “freshen up” as she purred like a python waiting to strike.  You always kept one eye open when she spoke. “Freshen up” might mean “kill you in your sleep” or “run a hot iron over your eyeballs”.

I ran through a string of worst case scenarios.  I’d just left Kinsler and nothing was said that could lead me to any sudden conclusions, but that didn’t mean anything.

“I have a rather urgent errand and then we need to talk,” the old man said to me straight faced without emotion.

I followed him to sit registering in my mind that we had privacy. 

“I need you to go with Pike to the winter court boundary, escort the Firebearer Ginera and her companion to our court, seal their identity with a shield from the summer court, and replace them in the human world before dark tonight.”

Not unheard of.  “Why?”

The seer sighed, “It cannot be revealed until the deed is completed.  If she survives, our world will change as we know it.”

Our world?  What kind of talk is that?  Prophecy talk is what it is.  “And this is detrimental to what cause?”

He offered one small hardly insignificant detail.  “Your future.”

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