Touch (Touched by the Fae 3)

1

Before I even get the chance to meet my parents, I almost lose them.

The tug of the shadows is harder than I’ve ever experienced before. It takes everything I have to keep them wrapped around all four of us: me, my mom, my dad, and Nine. Once or twice, I panic that it’s out of my control, that I’m going to shade-walk too far and I won’t be able to keep us together.

Without the power that Nine gave to me when we shared our first kiss, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to.

Did he know what was going to happen? I think so. My Shadow Man has always had a tendency to keep everything locked up tight, bottled up inside, and I bet he’d been planning something like this since the minute I got snagged by the Seelie guards.

Was that why he kissed me?

He just claimed me in front of the whole Seelie Court, announcing that he was taking a half-human, half-fae woman as his ffrindau.

His soul mate.

Can he take it back? It was as a big a surprise to me as it was to everyone standing in the Fae Queen’s throne room, and regardless of what happened after Nine did it, it’s one of a hundred different thoughts beating at my brain as I struggle to move through the darkness.

Can he take it back?

I really, really hope not.

I push, telling myself that there’s no time to think about that now. This is the first time I’ve ever purposely shade-walked without it being an accident, while I was asleep, or because I had no choice. Not like I had a choice this time around, either. I definitely didn’t. Since it was between sticking around and waiting for Melisandre to turn me into a statue for her royal garden or getting the hell out of there, I went with option B.

One problem: I don’t have any clue what I’m doing.

The last time I jumped into a portal to escape someone chasing me, I landed in Faerie, almost as if the shadows knew to bring me from the human world over in order to save me. What happens when I take a portal in Faerie instead?

As the shadows thin and the darkness lightens, the space spinning like I’m trapped in a midnight twister, I grit my teeth and close my eyes, using every drop of strength Nine passed to me to keep us all together.

My hair is whipping around me, slapping me in the face as the wind carries us through the portal. I push and I push, screaming through tight lips and a clenched jaw.

Don’t puke, Riley. Don’t puke.

The air is cold, the tips of my sensitive fae ears feeling like someone’s shoved them in a freezer. I can’t tell if it’s been seconds or minutes that we’ve been trapped in this strange in-between place, probably because I’m not only clueless, but I’m lost, too.

Someone is slipping away. I can’t tell who with my eyes screwed shut, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not willing to sacrifice any of my passengers.

Somewhere safe, I think. I don’t care where we end up, so long as it’s safe.

Isn’t that how Nine said it worked? When I shade-walked in my sleep, traveling through shadows as if I were a full-blooded Dark Fae instead of having a Light Fae father and a human mom, my body always knew to bring me home.

That used to be the asylum. Then it was my nightmare of an abandoned house where I squatted until it claimed a second life right in front of me.

First Madelaine, then Carolina. No way I can go back there.

But, then, where?

The wind dies down as quickly as it began. I can see light seeping in through the cracks of my eyelids as I drag us through the other side of the Unseelie portal.

We land in a heap. My mother, my father, me, and the statue that used to be Nine.

My eyes fly open, terror gripping me that I’ve left myself blind for too long. What if Melisandre sent some of her soldiers after me? I don’t even know if that’s possible—there’s only one fae who’s left his mark on my skin so that he can follow me anywhere and he’s with me—but I have to be sure.