Total pages in book: 147
Estimated words: 139662 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 698(@200wpm)___ 559(@250wpm)___ 466(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139662 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 698(@200wpm)___ 559(@250wpm)___ 466(@300wpm)
On her eighteenth birthday, Mab said, and the words hurt my ears. She will become her true self. Do not try to prevent it.
Beside me, Finn drops to one knee, and I am so shocked I don’t think to follow until he tugs on my hand.
“You may rise,” Mab says without moving her lips. Her voice isn’t something I hear with my ears, but an echo in my head. “I so rarely get visitors. Come closer and let me see your faces.”
Finn and I slowly stand and take two steps closer.
The black flames around Mab retract. Only now do I see how pale her skin is—almost gray—and her lips bloodred. She cocks her head at Finn and smiles ruefully. “You have your father’s eyes, but that skin, like the desert sands, that comes from your mother. She wasn’t the one your grandparents picked to rule beside your father.”
Finn swallows, but I feel tension rolling off him. “She was a good queen nonetheless,” he says.
“Too bad she had to die so young.” Mab’s smile steals any sincerity from her statement, and one thing is clear: she might want the best for her people, might be the only one who can help us save her court, but she is not the benevolent ancestor I imagined. Child-me was right to be afraid.
I squeeze Finn’s hand, willing him to take a breath, urging him not to let her bait him.
“You look just like my granddaughter,” Mab says, those glossy red lips curving into a siren’s smile as she turns to me.
“I was told that I’m a child of Mab. Is this so? Am I a descendant of your granddaughter?”
“Yes. The beloved Queen Reé. She watched all her children and her children’s children be slaughtered by the Seelie Court, and she knew she couldn’t pass the crown to her own without risking the end of our line altogether. So she transformed her last child into a human and sent her to the human realm, where she would be safe, so that generations later, when the court needed it the most, you could return to us and save my people and our land from being completely annihilated.”
“We thought your line was gone,” Finn says. “We were never told.”
“The prophecies were there,” she says. “Didn’t you hear them? Whispers of a queen who appears as an outsider, one who will balance the sun and shadow and end the war?”
I draw in a breath. “A queen?” That was the prophecy Sebastian talked about when he justified his plans to take the throne. But he believed it would be a king.
Mab flashes that beautifully creepy smile. “It is the females in my line who have the true power. Of course a queen. Your mother was to tell you everything when you turned sixteen, and then when you turned eighteen, the suppressed magic in your blood would’ve been freed and turned you.” She barks out a sound I think might be a laugh. “If you’d never bonded with Arya’s son, you never would’ve needed that Potion of Life. Your blood would’ve done it for you without the painful death.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand. My mother was human. If she was your blood as well, why didn’t she turn fae at eighteen?”
“Because it wasn’t time,” Mab says. “Not for her or for any before her. They weren’t the promised ones. They were not you. So that which made her fae was suppressed, just as it’s been in you and your sister.”
Her words slowly settle into my bones, as if they were always there. “My mother knew this.”
“And Oberon too, the night he saved you,” Mab says. “Her blood was part of what drew him to her to begin with, though he didn’t know it then. When he was able to return home after the long night in the human realm, he wanted her to come with him. She denied him because she knew her role. She knew she’d be the mother of the next great shadow queen. She knew Oberon’s realm would need you more than she needed him. Only when you were dying did he finally understand the truth.”
Finn studies the earth at his feet and shakes his head. “He was protecting the court after all,” he says, and I can hear the relief in his voice, can tell that he needed to know this about his father.
“He would’ve had more time if Queen Arya hadn’t interfered.”
“Arya—she knew I was your descendent?” I ask.
“Gods no. The power that masked you was far too strong to be detected by a descendent of Deaglan. Her seer prophesized that the eldest daughter of King Oberon’s lover would end her, cut into her heart with her own blade. So Arya sent her nasty sprites through the portal to start that fire. They set a trap so the house would collapse just as you ran for the door. But you chose to save your sister first, and because you put her before yourself, you weren’t where they planned the worst of the collapse. Because you saved your sister, Oberon was able to save you by passing you his crown, though years earlier than planned.”