Seeking the Fae (Daughter of Light #1) - Leia Stone Page 0,44

recoiled. Illusions were pesky things. They looked like one thing, and felt or smelled like another.

“He’s not friendly,” I told the mom, and she yanked her daughter back, shooting me a glare. I dove and grasped onto Bashur’s collar just in time for him to start digging up a beautiful red tulip bed.

“Bashur!” I scolded him, trying with all my might to yank him back and away from the pretty flowers he was currently murdering.

When I finally got up to his face, I reached out for his muzzle and yanked him back.

“What the—?” His nose was covered in dirt and he held a leather-bound book in his mouth.

My stomach dropped when I saw the book. It jogged a dozen memories within me. When I was younger, my mother would write in a book like this all the time. Like a journal. Then one day she just stopped. I asked her why and she simply stated, “It’s complete.” I never really thought about it again until now. My fingers caressed the spiral on the spine. It was hers. I couldn’t help it; I had to open it, just to get a glimpse of her perfect scrolling handwriting. But when I split the spine, I frowned as I gazed upon blank pages. Flipping through them, all I saw was blank after blank.

But this was hers … I knew it, and clearly Bashur had smelled it. It must be some magic illusion ink. I’d have to deal with it later.

Her words came back to me now. In her final dying moments she’d asked me to find her journal and I’d barely given it any thought. Until now.

“Good boy, Bashur! You’re getting a treat when we get home,” I told him, and he licked my hand, depositing a large string of drool on my palm.

Yuck.

Elle looked down at the book in my hands. “Is that?”

She’d seen my mom working on it many times over the years.

I just nodded. “Let’s head back.”

With that, we headed back for the apartment and on our way to Australia. The journal pushed to the back of my mind as I focused on getting the next crystal.

After stashing the journal in the bedside table in New York, I grabbed Bashur and Elle and we positioned ourselves in front of the front door. Checking my watch, I saw that it was just about one more minute until an hour had passed. When the clock ticked, I pulled the door open and Mara was leaning against the hallway of her home, inspecting her nails.

“Hey, kids. Did you find it?”

I grinned. “Yep, it’s in Gold Coast, Australia.”

Her eyes lit up. “Oh, Gold Coast is lovely.”

We stepped inside and I shut the door behind me as Bashur jumped up on Mara and licked her face. “Did he hold his pee and mark ten different things?” she asked.

Elle and I grinned. “Yep.”

Mara rubbed the space between his forehead, and I found myself enjoying our little crew. I could get use to this life. Hunting for crystals was dangerous no doubt, but life was more enjoyable with good friends. And I seemed to have found two of those.

We went into Mara’s office and strapped into the chairs as she did her thing working the dials and knobs at her huge command center to take us to Australia.

After a spin cycle and a jog down the hallway, we were standing at her back door.

“You might have to do a lot of exploring to find where it is. I’ll set a timer for two hours and send Bashur if you haven’t checked in.” Mara tinkered with her watch and I nodded.

Patting Bash on the head, I stepped out of a small beach condo and breathed in the salty fresh air. The ocean was by far my most favorite place on Earth. Just the vastness of it was so humbling. Faerie was such a small and restricted place since the Dark Times; I’d grown to love the fresh open sea.

“How do you pay for all these places?” I asked in wonder. I knew that a beachfront home was no small purchase.

Mara smiled. “When the Dark Times happened and the Fae fled to Earth with their halfling children, we sent out a small band of loyal Fae to live and earn money on the Earth world. We call them the guardians. They are fully devoted to the cause of finding and returning the crystals and restoring Faerie.” She gestured to the house. “They fund all of our endeavors.”

Whoa. This life