“Mina!” He crawled to where he had last seen her.
“Over here,” Mina answered. She inched out from behind the dead tree. “I’m okay.”
She looked back to the tree line. The ominous figure was gone.
“Is it dead?” Brody asked, rubbing his hand up and down his left arm.
He refused to come any closer to either of the tree monsters. His cheek was swollen with reddish scratches across it from the airbags deploying. It was already starting to bruise. One of his eyes looked swollen, and blood trickled from a small cut on his forehead onto his white polo.
“Brody! You’re hurt!”
He was favoring his arm. She went to touch it, but he pulled it away.
“This will be an interesting tale to tell my insurance company.” He looked his totaled car over. “Tell me I’m not crazy.” He wiped at his bruised face and winced. “Those trees were attacking you…right?”
Mina scanned the scene before her. The ash tree had fallen over dead. It had apparently been out of the earth too long, and whatever Fae magic had kept it moving had worn off. The birch tree was quickly drying up as they watched. Within seconds, it was back to a regular looking tree.
Mina pointed at Brody’s arm.
“I’ll be fine. I just need to sit down for a second.” He looked at the mangled car, the puddles of mud, and the tree corpses. “Yeah, I think I need to sit way over here.”
He walked a few feet and almost collapsed as he tried to sit on the wet curb. Thankfully, it had stopped raining.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I was following you. I followed you to the Country Club, and then I followed the bus. I never expected dating you to be so dangerous,” he chuckled sadly.
“It’s only going to get worse,” Mina warned.
“I promised I’d protect you.” His eyes looked glassy. “I don’t go back on my promises.”
“What if I released you from that promise?”
“I don’t think I like where this is going.” He looked down at his shoes.
“A lot has happened in the last few days, but it feels like it’s been weeks.”
“I know. I feel like I’ve aged ten years.” He chuckled and grabbed her hand.
“You might have, thanks to Claire’s touch,” Mina admitted as she ran her hand over the back of Brody’s. “She took some of your youth to sustain her.”
Brody studied her, his eyes filled with sadness. He reached out with his other hand and covered hers. “Mina, what happened the night of the ball when you kept disappearing? Something changed that night, and I can’t figure it out.”
“I fell in love with someone else that night,” she admitted… to him and to herself.
“But you were only gone from my sight for a couple of moments.”
“And each of those moments felt like a lifetime on the Fae plane.”
“So he’s Fae? This person you fell in love with.” Brody didn’t seem angry. He seemed curious. Her heart swelled with relief that they could talk about this like friends.
She released a long drawn out breath, “Oh, yeah. Fae alright.”
“Does he love you back?” Brody asked.
“No.”
“Then he’s blind.”