The Fae Bound - Juliana Haygert Page 0,2

annoyed at me. Yes, I had been in this fucking state for hours now, and honestly, I couldn’t see myself relaxing until I was able to rescue Farrah from the Shade Fortress.

“I know you want to save Farrah, and if you’re so adamant about it, we will, but we can’t just charge into the fortress now. It’ll never work. We need another angle.”

Fuck, she was right. I knew that. But it was hard to admit it.

With a heavy sigh, I finally succumbed and plopped down on the tree trunk beside her, the full force of my failure hitting me square in my chest. Holy fuck, I had let Farrah slip through my fingers and now she was the prince’s prisoner.

There had to be something—

I slipped my hand inside my jacket and found something. Frowning, I pulled the blue stone Spencer had given to me before opening the portal for me. I stared at it.

“Do you have any idea what this is?” I asked, showing the stone to Ariella.

She took it from me, lifted up to the sky, turned it around. “Nope.” She shook her head and returned it to me. “Why? It’s supposed to do something? I couldn’t sense any magic coming from it.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Can you sense magic?”

“It depends. I never could pinpoint how it works, but sometimes I can feel magic coming from a person or an object.” She shrugged. “There must be a rule, I just don’t know it yet.”

“Interesting,” I muttered. I turned the stone around my fingers. “Anyway, an old fae gave me this stone before I came back. He told me to give this to Farrah. That it was crucial.”

Ariella frowned. “How did he know about Farrah?”

“I have no fucking idea.” I tucked the stone back into my pocket. “But if he knew about Farrah and me just like that, this means he knows more stuff, right?” I wanted to believe Spencer had some kind of super sixth sense, and he could predict something would happen. Like me taking the stone to Farrah would somehow help me in rescuing her. Otherwise, the alternative, that he was just plain crazy and came up with crazy things, was too disappointing.

“I’m afraid this Spencer guy is in the fae realm, though,” Ariella said. “We can’t get to him now.”

Fuck, that was true. “What can we do then?”

After a moment of silence, Ariella glanced at me, the wheels inside her mind visibly turning behind her blue eyes. “What do you know about Blaze fae?”

“Just that they are one of the four more powerful kinds of fae in the fae realm, why?”

“Because I’ve heard about them before. When I was looking for the demons who took my wings, I heard there was a large camp of Blaze fae near the Grand Canyon, that they had come to hide after a big war they had against the shadow fae.”

“So?” I asked, impatient about her point.

“So, if we can convince them to start the war again, but on Earth this time, we’ll have help to rescue Farrah.”

I shot to my feet. “They would do the heavy lifting for us.”

Ariella stood before me. “Right.”

A sense of purpose filled me. The Grand Canyon was far away from here, but if we got allies to help us fight, it would be worth it. Though it pained me to leave Farrah with Prince Lark, I knew he wouldn’t hurt her. She would be safe for a couple more days.

“All right, then, let’s go to the Grand Canyon.”

I started marching toward the nearest road. Ariella caught up with me in no time, and we discussed a quick plan on the way. Steal a car, drive to the Grand Canyon, search for the blaze fae. If we didn’t find them right away, we would try to find someone who had heard about them. Then we would convince them to fight the shadow fae stationed in the human realm.

But, before we reached the road, a group of women dressed in black clothes stepped in our way.

“Hello there,” one of them said, with a toothy smile. “I’m Myra from the Bonecrown Coven.”

My body stiffened. The Bonecrown witches. The ones that had kidnapped Farrah to use her in a blood sacrifice, but instead beat her up and let her to die alone in the forest.

Why the fuck were they here?

3

Farrah

If I had to measure my eternity by my first three days in the Shade Fortress, I would say I was in for a boring life. During