The Rebel Queen (Outlaw 1)

How could I get him to open up? How could we heal if we didn’t acknowledge the wound?

I started after him, my boots crunching against the snow. My rage needed a place to go. I worried if I got into that car with him right this second I would say something I shouldn’t. I needed to let off some steam.

I screamed. I let it out, let go of some small part of my rage and fear, let it spread across that snowy white field.

“Mom!” Rhys’s eyes had gone wide.

I made a quick snowball and held it in my hand. Maybe if we lobbed snowballs at each other we could find some balance.

“Do not throw that, Mother.” Rhys started my way. “I am not joking. Put it down this instant or there could be hell to pay.”

“Come on. Pick one up and throw it at me. You’re mad. I’m right here and you’re still angry. Take it out on me.”

I could handle a couple of snowballs way more easily than I could not speaking to him, not feeling connected to him. Rhys had been the one to bottle things up. If I let him, he would shut me out forever.

Rhys pointed a finger my way. “Put it down. Put it down right now, Mother.”

Yeah, he should have known me better than that. I reached back and lobbed that sucker his way.

It was going to thud straight into the center of his chest. Well, it should have. Something stopped it in midair. It hit something invisible and then slid to the ground.

Rhys’s face had gone a chalky white. “I wasn’t scared of you hitting me with a snowball. I was scared of you hitting one of them.”

Before I had a chance to ask what he’d meant, I felt something grab my arm and I knew we were in trouble.

Chapter Nineteen

“Could you stop wiggling? It’s annoying.”

“My wiggling is more annoying than being tied up and staked out under a bridge?” I didn’t understand my son’s thought process.

We were bound by some sort of invisible rope, back to back, sitting on the frozen ground. It had taken mere seconds for whatever thing had captured us to get us tied up and left under the bridge, probably as a sacrifice to whatever troll would show up first.

“I find the entire thing annoying. Is this what you used to do?” Rhys asked. “I’ve heard some tales of your adventures, and you always made them sound charming. Now I wonder if most of those adventures could have been avoided if you had simply not.”

“Not what?”

“Not done whatever it is you did to piss off every supernatural creature you come in contact with,” my son replied. “Like that frost giant that Dad killed in Faery. Maybe if you hadn’t pissed Dad off you could have gotten in and out very quickly and the giant could have lived.”

Oh, I had not been the problem that day. “Or your father could have listened to me and we wouldn’t have been in the situation in the first place. Tell me something, Rhys. Are you this rude to your fathers? Is it because they’re men and men don’t make the silly mistakes women do?”

He went quiet. “It’s because I’m far more afraid of you than I am of them. I’m sorry. I should have told you that field is a known place for the invisible ones. Are you cold?”

I was still irritated with him. “Yes, I’m cold. I’m sitting on a foot of snow. And I don’t know why you would be afraid of me.”

He went silent. Maybe I didn’t want the answer to that question.

“What are the invisible ones?” I could at least find out something about our captors.

“They prefer the term Hidden Folk,” Rhys said with a sigh. “They’re a group of Fae who exist on a parallel plane. They don’t like it when you hit them. They’ve got a thing about it. It’s a good sign that they didn’t show themselves.”

I disagreed. “I wish they had. I would have liked a word.”

“No, you wouldn’t. Look, Mom, I know this is annoying, but you broke one of their rules, and this is punishment of sorts. Just stay calm and Lee will come looking for us,” Rhys promised.

“Or we can figure a way out of these bindings and leave.” A frustrating day had gotten even worse and everyone was going to blame me, but how was I supposed to know where invisible people were standing?

“Please don’t listen to her,” Rhys said in a calm voice. “She didn’t mean to offend.”

“I didn’t know they were there,” I insisted. “Are they still here?”

“I don’t know. Probably. Maybe.” He went silent for a moment. “I should have told you to be careful out here. I’m sorry. I take it for granted that everyone knows how to behave.”