Fragile Eternity (Wicked Lovely 3)

Quinn said, “We’ll be here.”

She nodded and went inside. For a few moments, she stood there, but the familiar sounds of her classmates’ voices were disquieting. These were the people she was to protect, but unlike her fey, they had no idea that she stood between them and a potential war that could devastate the earth. She watched them and listened to snippets of conversation that were so far removed from her now as to be in another language. This was the world she had never truly belonged to—the world her friends lived in, a world where economics exams and prom were life or death, a world where a fight with a boyfriend was even worse. She paused. Some things were the same. Seth being upset is still that important. She might not be prom bound, but the faery revels offered her more than enough dancing. Econ still mattered—in very practical ways. And Seth…he was everything.

The best time to see him was now. Without another moment’s hesitation, she turned and walked right back out the door she’d just entered. She’d go see him. Maybe he overslept. Or maybe he didn’t want to talk. So he can at least listen. She wasn’t going to let this fester. She’d go to him. They’d talk it out. He was essential to her.

So she ran—through the streets, across the railroad yard, and to his door. She heard the guards trailing behind her, but she didn’t stop to speak to them. Let them think I’m impulsive. All that mattered was reaching Seth.

A few minutes after she’d left the school, she turned her key in Seth’s lock and pushed it open. “Seth?”

There were no lights on, no music playing. The teakettle sat on the burner. Two unwashed teacups were on the counter. It looked like Seth had gone out suddenly. He didn’t usually leave his cups or dishes unwashed.

“Seth?” Aislinn walked back to the second train car and into the bedroom.

It was early morning, and the bed was already made. He’d left too quickly to wash his cups, but not too quickly to make his bed. She leaned over the side and plugged her phone into the spare charger. As the phone came to life she saw the voice mail notice. He had called.

She was relieved—until she heard it: “I’m leaving tonight, and—” He stopped, and Aislinn could hear another voice faintly—a girl—but couldn’t make out what she said. Then Seth’s voice was back. “And I’ll call…later. I just need to go now. I don’t know when…if—I need to go.”

Leaving? She replayed it twice more. It still didn’t make any sense.

He sounds excited.

She absently ran her hands over the new comforter they’d picked out and listened again. Aislinn heard the voice, whispering very softly in the pause in his words.

He left.

She’d trusted him with secrets that she’d never shared with anyone. When Keenan and Donia were stalking her, she’d opened up to Seth. She’d broken every rule she’d lived by, that her mother and Grams had lived by.

Tears were stinging her eyes, but she blinked them away. “What just happened?”

She couldn’t stand being in the bedroom, in the space that was just theirs, any longer. She left the room and went to check Boomer’s heat rock. The snake wasn’t coiled in his terrarium.

Boomer’s gone.

“Seth’ll be back.” Aislinn looked around the empty house.

Aislinn wanted to run, but it was Seth she ran to when she was lost—and he was missing.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

She couldn’t make herself leave yet. She washed her hands and then cleaned the couple of dishes. It wasn’t as if she really thought he’d walk in the house while she stood there washing his teacups; she just couldn’t bear leaving. When she went to put them away, she discovered that the other dishes were all gone, except the two teacups and the teapot she’d bought him. Why did he take everything? Why didn’t he take the teapot I got him?

Something is wrong. It wasn’t like Seth to just vanish.

She looked around and found broken dishes in the trash. Someone had broken them and cleaned up. If not for Boomer’s absence and the excitement in Seth’s voice, she could believe that he was in danger.

He took Boomer with him.

Her emotions felt too close to the surface, and since she’d become the Summer Queen, that wasn’t something she could let happen, not with emotions like these. She’d seen the result of Keenan’s mood swings—miniature tropical storms trapped in small spaces, a sirocco on a city street—and she’d helped contain the consequences of those emotional upheavals. Her presence calmed him. Even after nine centuries as Summer King, he still slipped, but his storms weren’t the overwhelming nightmare she felt pulsing inside of her.

She didn’t have the control to deal with any of those emotions on her own.

Outside the train, a mist wafted like the fog coming in from the sea, but there was no sea near Huntsdale. The fog was her fault. She felt it, her confusion and fear and anger and hurt swirling faster and faster.

Seth left.

She walked to the door and pulled it closed behind her.

Seth is gone.