The Rebel Queen (Outlaw #1) - Lexi Blake Page 0,103

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.”

I could have told him I almost never behaved, but it seemed like that might make things worse. “If they exist on a parallel plane, how did I hit them? And how did they manage to manhandle us because I could totally feel them.”

“In the places where the Hidden Ones exist, think of them as being slightly out of phase with our plane.” Rhys’s voice had taken on an academic tone. “There are many theories as to why. I personally believe that they were Fae who chose not to leave this plane during the great retreat. When humans got to be too much, they used magic to hide from them and got caught in an in-between place. Over the years they’ve figured out how to make themselves corporeal on this side of the veil. So they technically exist in both worlds.”

I didn’t see why they would want to be in both worlds. Like pick a side, people, but I often didn’t understand the hows and whys of what any being does. “So some human accidently hits one of these guys and they get punished?”

“Yeah, but if it had been a human, they wouldn’t have tied up the offender. They would have done something more subtle. Like pushing the poor dude into traffic or tripping him so he fell off a cliff.”

“Are you serious?”

“Like I said, they’re on the vengeful side. It doesn’t happen often,” Rhys admitted. “In this case, they will honor my Fae nature and not attempt to kill us.”

I rather thought he wasn’t thinking big enough. “Baby, you’re a Green Man. You do know you rank pretty