“You don’t have to do that. It’s okay. Go on. Have a couple.”
Right. Let me just stuff my face with chips while Carolina watches.
I set the bag aside. “I’m fine.”
That girl is stubborn. Before I can even move them out of her reach, Carolina purses her lips, grabs the bag, and pops the chips open. Then she puts the bag on the floor again and nudges them toward me, careful not to get too close.
“Just because I made a mistake, it doesn’t mean you have to go hungry. Please.”
What’s worse? Turning away her gift because it makes me uncomfortable or stuffing my face in front of her knowing that it’s impossible for Carolina to snack on a chip? In the end, I eat a couple to make her feel better, then I do the same thing I’ve done since that second morning.
I talk. And I talk. And, hell, I don’t shut up at all.
I know. It surprises me, too.
It’s been three days since I’ve been hiding out in the Wilkes House. I’ve done most of the talking, which is tough since Carolina doesn’t really want to hear about my past experiences with the fae—she just wants to focus on how I’m going to fulfill my role in the prophecy.
I can’t help it, though. Being back in Acorn Falls, squatting in this house… it’s like I’m dealing with Madelaine’s death and my first real brush with the fae all over again. I spent six years talking to my doctors, stubbornly refusing to discuss the mother who abandoned me and the sister I saw die.
There’s something about Carolina. She doesn’t talk much at all, and she gets it. Really gets it. It’s such a relief to be able to tell someone about the shit I’ve seen and actually have them believe it.
But I also want to know more about my new… I don’t know… partner in crime, I guess. I want to know Carolina’s story. About the Dark Fae who tricked her into eating faerie food and how she found out that the fae were real in the first place.
She, uh, doesn’t want to share any of that with me.
I quickly pick up on her reluctance. I can’t tell why exactly, but every time I try to change the conversation around to her instead of me, Carolina becomes wary and kind of apprehensive. She tends to fiddle with her fingers in her lap, staring down at the floor, gulping n
ervously as if the words burn. She rubs her throat a lot, the haunted look in her dark eyes even more noticeable on the rare occasions that she lifts her gaze to watch me looking at her curiously.
We spend a lot of our time together rehashing the few lines of the Shadow Prophecy scrawled on the piece of paper that Carolina keeps in her pocket. We talk about Black Pine, too, and some of the doctors and patients that we both knew. I almost want to ask her about Jason, especially since Carolina told me how she’s got this strange sense of knowing when someone has been touched by the fae, but I wimp out before I do.
Bringing up the Fae Queen? That’s okay. Carolina wants to know what my plan is, how I’m going to use my newfound Shadow powers to take on Melisandre. It’s a good thing that I’ve regained my ability to lie because, yeah, none of that’s gonna happen.
I wait for her to ask me about Nine or, hell, even Rys. She doesn’t. Just like how she can’t bring herself to discuss her mistress—the Dark Fae who tricked Carolina into doing her bidding—she doesn’t want to know anything about the two fae males that I’m hiding out from.
Instead, at my urging—okay, my nagging—Carolina eventually tells me how she drew the attention of her mistress. Last year, when she was on the edge of turning twenty, she started to notice that some people she ran into had a weird hazy glow around them. If she looked closer, she explained, it was almost like she could see a whole other person.
Glamour. Carolina can see through glamour.
Not all that well, though. Like any skill, she’s gotten better over time. She might not have recognized that the pretty woman who offered her an apple was a Dark Fae back then, but she admits that it only took a couple of days before she suspected that the blonde tech, Diana, was wearing a glamour.
So she was from Faerie. I freaking knew it.
Some of the other stuff Carolina tells me is stuff that I already know. The fae’s inability to lie is one, how they rely on glamour and charms and compulsions is another. Plus just how much power the fae can steal with a single touch once permission is granted.
Which, you know, is usually a given when a gorgeous fae chooses to charm a human. According to Carolina, it’s close to impossible to refuse a fae once they’ve set their mind on you.
That makes me think of Rys. Of how Madelaine couldn’t, and how I might not have been able to if it wasn’t for Nine’s lessons. Of course, then I think of Nine, and how even now there isn’t much I wouldn’t do for him.
So, yeah, she’s got a point.
She also tells me things I didn’t know, like she’s running a fae school for a single student: me. Like glamour. Despite the way I can slip through shadows when I’m unconscious, or how I can twist them and pull them and turn them into blankets without realizing it, I’m a sucker for glamour. Apart from picking up on notably fae traits—pointy ears, bright eyes, super good looks—I can’t see through the glamour.
That worries me, so I choose not to focus on it.
Oh, and then there’s faerie food. That’s a biggie. Nine was right. It seems like food from Faerie is the epitome of forbidden fruit. It can give you energy and strength when you’re inches away from passing out, heal nearly any wound, extend a human’s life so that they’re almost immortal—but, from the second you take a bite, you’re cursed... unless you have a Dark Fae guardian willing to suck the poison out before it takes hold.
Once it does? Part of the curse is that you can only eat faerie food for the rest of your very long life. Nothing else will ever satisfy you again. Without the magicked fruit, your body will just give out.