I looked up at him, eyes wide. “Fairies are real?”
“They are. But they’re not very nice. And you’re unlikely to ever see one unless you really piss them off.” He stiffened. “Don’t you fucking dare try to piss them off for a video.” I laughed, and his arm around my shoulders curled up, nudging up beneath my chin and tightening across my throat. He brought his mouth close to my ear, and said, “I mean it, Rae. Do not piss off the fae.”
“I won’t,” I choked out, still smiling because how the hell could I resist smiling with his muscles tightening around my throat? He relaxed his hold, leaning back a little more comfortably against the tree. A few minutes passed in silence as we smoked together, the high relaxing me against him.
After several minutes, I said, “So...how old are you?”
“I’m not sure,” he flicked down the stub of the joint, crushing it beneath his shoe. “I don’t have any memories beyond the 1700s. My kind don’t give much attention to age.”
“You’re immortal then?”
He shrugged. “Old age and disease won’t take me. I could grow bored and fade away as some of my kind do. Or I could be ripped apart — that would kill me. Crush my skull and I probably wouldn’t be able to heal. I’m immortal if I’m careful, and if I wish to be.” He smirked. “I’m not very careful. Living forever isn’t so terribly important.”
“What’s important then?”
“Freedom,” he said softly. Crickets had begun to chirp, and a few stray raindrops made their way through the trees to splatter against my face. The darkness had moved in close now, like a cold blanket wrapping around us. From inside the cabin, the darkness seemed sinister in the way it filled the windows and was barely beaten back by the porchlight. But standing in it, calm and quiet, wasn’t sinister at all.
The dark was peaceful.
“Leon,” I said, after several more minutes passed in silence. “You said the God demands a life in return for my ancestor’s. What...what does that…” I didn’t know how to finish the question. I knew what I needed to ask, but I didn’t want to ask it.
He understood. “Three survivors, three sacrifices. The Deep One promised power to those who fulfilled Its demands. It’s been asleep a long time, It’s weak. But with three souls, It will be free, and the human world will come under the rule of an ancient God once again.”
It sounded so fantastical, so impossible. But I’d heard that voice calling in my dreams. I’d seen things, felt things.
“The Hadleighs already sent me after you,” he said, and my stomach twisted into a knot. “That was Kent’s last command: bring you to him, alive. Make your disappearance look like an accident. Leave no evidence that you’d been taken to be murdered. Your family would have had a funeral without a body.”
He said it so calmly, but there was something like anger in his tone. It didn’t take much to imagine how truly horrifying it would be to be hunted by Leon, truly hunted.
I never would have escaped.
“Why didn’t you do it?”
“Kent had lost the grimoire. I didn’t have to do shit he said anymore.”
“But if he’d had it...would you have come after me?”
He stiffened a little, and was silent. Then, finally, he said roughly, “Kent tried and failed to sacrifice a girl before. Juniper Kynes. He got Jeremiah and Victoria to lure her into the woods. Drug her. When she ran, he sent me after her.” His teeth clipped together, again and again: a slow, irritated click. “I lost her in the woods. There were consequences for failing to fulfill Kent’s orders, so I did everything I could to hunt her down. But she escaped me.”
I couldn’t imagine being able to escape him. It seemed impossible. “She got away? Did she live?”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” he said. “I’m shocked she managed to fight off the Eld all these years. Kent considered her a loss, and they went after her brother instead. That one was successful. Marcus is sleeping with the God now.”
I shoved out from under his arm, staring at him in horror. “Marcus? The boy that got stabbed on campus?”
He nodded. “The first sacrifice. Two more to come.”
“Did you kill him?” I whispered, the knot in my stomach pulling tighter and tighter.
“No.” His voice was firm, his eyes bright in the dark as he shoved his hands in his pockets. “Kent would never allow a demon to perform a