Kerrigan pulled out a few marks from the purse and dropped them on the bar for Clover. “Meet me tomorrow. I’ll get you a seat to watch.”
“Dragons up,” Clover said with a wink.
Kerrigan left her at the bar with her loch and watered-down ale. She headed up another level and out the back way onto the streets of Kinkadia. She breathed in the clean air from the valley and turned her head skyward to take in the twinkling night stars overhead. A dragon passed across the moon, briefly shadowing it. She missed flying. Gods, she seriously missed flying.
She trudged across the cobblestones through the Dregs of the city of Kinkadia. The old familiar walkways were notoriously the worst part of the city. Primarily humans and half-Fae lived in squalor on the north side of the valley where the city was located, bracketed on three sides by an impressively large mountain range and a winding river running diagonally along the southern border.
She should have headed straight for her home in Draco Mountain, but her heart wasn’t in it tonight. The mountain had been her home the last twelve years, after she’d been left at the base of the mountain with no note or any belongings. And while she remembered enough from her time before the mountain had swallowed her up, she hated nights like tonight where it all came to the surface.
Like her horrid father who had left her behind so that he didn’t have to be responsible for raising a half-Fae.
Her father—Lord Kivrin Argon, the High Fae royal party boy, who had equally destroyed and saved her life.
And she hated him for all of it.
Her heart thundered in her chest as she picked up her pace through her dark, dank streets, accessing her favorite shortcut. A noise sounded behind her and she stopped in her tracks. Something was wrong.
Then, a rock whizzed toward her face. Kerrigan dodged the blow with a gasp. Adrenaline flooded her sore muscles and revitalized her dwindling magic.
Scales, what was going on?
A figure stepped into the center of the alley—Bruiser.
“Hello, Red.”
“You again,” she grumbled. “Didn’t have enough fun the first time?”
Bruiser had cleaned up. He wore a bright white button-up and a fancy black jacket with gold thread. She never would have guessed he could afford that. Not when he was fighting in the Dragon Ring.
But now that her senses were awake, she saw him for the distraction he was. This was an ambush. Three more men slunk out of the shadows.
“You couldn’t beat me in the ring, Bruiser, so you brought friends?” Kerrigan placed her hand over her heart. “I’m flattered.”
“Shut up, leatha,” Bruiser spat.
Kerrigan stilled at that word. She didn’t flinch. She would never let someone see her flinch away from that word again. But anger—deep-rooted fury—settled into her veins and brought forth a fount of magic from the depths of her stores.
“How original,” she said, but her voice had lost its humor.
Leatha was a word from ancient High Fae, a dead language, save for the few hundred books within the mountain. It technically meant half-Fae or, sometimes generously, pixie. But that wasn’t colloquial usage. That wasn’t what Bruiser here had meant when he called her by that disgusting word.
Here, it meant, half-breed whore or bitch.
It was not something said in polite company.
“I can’t suffer a leatha thinking she can best me,” he snarled.
Really, she hadn’t asked for this fight. But the ones that came to her, she rarely expected. Right now, the most enjoyable thing in the world would be to crawl into her bed, across from her roommate Darby, and never think of this moment again.
But no, she couldn’t allow someone to call her that. She didn’t even know how he’d found out that she was half-Fae, but he’d kill her all the same for it. She could see that in his beady eyes. He’d rather she be dead than be beat by one of her kind. She knew the type. The racist assholes who abused people on the streets just because they could… because Fae had all the power.
Today would be different. Bruiser seen her fight and thought that he was entering a match he could win. He had no idea who he was dealing with.
Kerrigan reached down into the core of her magic, and then… she unleashed.
She took on the grunts first. A wave of air crushed one into the stone wall at his back. She raised her left hand into a claw. The ground sprouted upward out of the stones around the second man’s legs, holding him in place. The third at her back rushed toward her. She snapped her fingers and set him on fire.
She stepped toward Bruiser with passion in her eyes. But he didn’t look frightened. He should have looked frightened.
Then, he thrust his hand out toward her, clutching a rock tightly in his massive fist.