And they’re naked.
It’s a mix of male and female fae, both Light and Dark. Their bodies collide. Some are dancing, some are caressing each other, and a bunch of them are going at it right in front of me.
Holy shit. I’m looking at some kind of fae orgy going on.
There’s a ghostly quality to it. If I reached my hand through the scene, I wouldn’t be able to touch anything. It’s a memory. It happened once before—
—and the land remembers.
That’s what my mother told me once upon a time. In her stories about Faerie, when she spun tales about a magical world and the fairy circles that guard the veil.
I swivel, taking the seeing stone with me as I move. Beyond the faes fucking right in front of me, I see a ring of toadstools that would’ve been the perfect size for the tiny fairies that I first saw.
I’ve seen those mushrooms before.
Lowering the seeing stone, I whirl on Saxon. “It’s a fairy circle, isn’t it?”
He nods. “It was. Once. It still connects the veil to Faerie. If you step through it, it should bring you back to the Iron.”
His words crash into me like a wave. I stumble, almost disbelieving it.
The Iron. The human world.
My world.
I could go home. Jim is waiting for me. I could see him again and…
Jesus, I don’t even know if my boyfriend is still hoping I’ll come back. That he didn’t just give up on me when I disappeared into the park with my phone and a bad attitude.
That he didn’t already move on.
Not that I would blame him. I… I did, didn’t I?
Thirty. If my count is right, I’ve been trapped in Faerie for about a month. But time doesn’t flow the same way here. That’s what Rys said.
I look down at my hand. There’s a patch of pale pink skin, shiny and raw from where my ring stayed these last eight years. I rarely took it off since the day Jim gave it to me and it feels… weird now that it’s gone.
It feels even weirder that I clung to it for far longer than I should’ve.
From the moment I made a conscious decision to seduce Rys, I told myself that I wanted the chance to see Jim again. I felt like I needed to explain my actions, give him close because I know—even if I don’t want to admit it—that my inexplicable disappearance would’ve been hell on him. One day or thirty, it’s all the same. He deserved to know that I never meant to walk out on him.
We both need the closure.
I wanted to say goodbye, too. I gave up on that when I was face to face with the portal in the gate because my sacrifice meant I’d never see Jim again.
And now Saxon is telling me that it’s possible? That all I have to do is walk through this fairy circle, bring my bag of charmed apples with me, and I can pretend my time in Faerie was nothing but a bad dream for a while?
But what about Rys? To go back to Jim—to go back home again—I’d have to leave behind another guy without saying goodbye.
For some reason, the idea of abandoning Rys hurts even more than it did when I thought I was giving up Jim...
“I… I can’t. I have to wait for Rys. I said I would.”
“I told you that, if you came with me, I would tell you more about Rysdan.”
He did. I thought Saxon only said that because it was the carrot that got me moving so I didn’t bother holding him to it.
From the way his golden gaze flashes toward the spot where the fairy circle once was, I have a sinking suspicion that Rys has something to do with it.