Forsaken Fae: Book Three (PAPERBACK, LGBT)

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ONE

“PERHAPS, IN the end, it does not matter.” The quiet words, spoken against the side of Len’s neck, broke the preternatural stillness inside the hollow tree trunk where he and Albigard were being held prisoner.

Len’s knees were screaming in protest after an hour or more spent awkwardly hunched around Albigard’s trembling body. They’d been dumped here after their audience with the Fae Court had gone spectacularly wrong, culminating in Albigard lying to his father to prevent Len from being used as a hostage against him.

Apparently, the Fae prohibition against intentionally misleading another was more than just some strange cultural code of conduct. When Oren had questioned him, Albigard insisted dismissively that Len was of no importance to him, and held no value beyond his potential utility in containing the Wild Hunt. The moment the lie had passed his lips, Albigard lost his magic—leaving him teetering on the verge of physical and emotional shock. He’d barely managed to hold himself together long enough for the guards to portal them back to this cell and restrain him against the wall with magical bonds.

Len had managed to calm him down enough to pry out of him exactly what had happened. Since then, he’d been plastered to Albigard’s side as tightly as he could manage… at a loss for what to do beyond holding him.

A Fae who intentionally misleads another is no longer Fae, Albigard had told him ages ago, when this mess had first started. Len had dismissed the words as some kind of stupid, old-fashioned proverb.

And—hey! Look where that had gotten him.

“Of course it matters,” Len told him, refusing to move or let go despite his imminent need for knee replacement surgery. “I told you. We’ll figure something out.”

The irony of spouting such blatant bullshit under the circumstances wasn’t lost on him. For one thing, Len had absolutely no idea how to reverse the loss of a Fae’s magic caused by lying. And for another, Albigard wasn’t wrong. If he ended up being sacrificed to the Hunt, whether or not he had magic when he died wouldn’t make a whole lot of difference to the end result.

Yet somehow, saying yeah, you’re probably right about that seemed like a dick move. Call it human cultural conditioning, but Len couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“What did your dad mean when he said you were keeping pets again?” he asked instead, because while that was probably a horrible choice of conversational gambit as well, it was still better than the alternative.

Albigard sagged in Len’s grip, as much as the invisible force pinning him to the wall allowed, anyway.

“Over the centuries, I have occasionally taken humans as vassals for various reasons,” he said.

“Yeah,” Len replied. “I’d kind of noticed.”

Fae held alarming amounts of power over human beings, simply by virtue of their magic. Human myths held repeated warnings against accepting gifts from the fair folk—and with good reason. As Len had learned firsthand, doing so gave the Fae in question a connection to your soul. Depending on their particular abilities, they could use that connection to track you, or to draw power from you to bolster their own.

Albigard already held such connections with both Zorah Bright and Vonnie Morgan—the first, a vampire who was currently deceased, and the second, a human with natural magic of her own. When Len had voluntarily accepted a gift from Albigard, it had been because that was the only way to power their escape from the Wild Hunt after they’d been cornered inside a dead pocket realm.

To date, Albigard hadn’t abused the bond or given Len cause to regret the decision. Of course, that might have had something to do with the fact that Len was an untrained necromancer, and utilizing the animus that he attracted from the dying was physical agony for a Fae who normally depended on living things for power. But even so—

“I don’t get the impression that collecting human vassals is all that unusual for your people,” Len said. “So that still doesn’t really explain the ‘pet’ remark.”

“It is not unusual, no,” Albigard agreed. “However, I have generally resisted using those humans as mindless foot-soldiers to increase my status and power on Earth. That part… is, in fact, somewhat unusual.”

Len’s stomach twisted as he took the words on board. He’d seen human military commanders grovel in front of Unseelie operatives who secretly pulled the strings of power on Earth. He’d felt the pull of Fae influence on his own thoughts, even though his necromancy gave him a measure of resistance to Fae magic.

“Oh,” he said. “Right.”