The swarm rose to the top of the tree line and then spiraled off into the distance, as silently and quickly as it had appeared. I raised my hand, waving as they vanished. It had been a moment frozen in beauty, a time when the world had stopped for a moment to let us breathe. We crossed to the stream, but for the longest time, we kept quiet, not speaking, simply marveling in the beauty that could spring out of nowhere, unexpected, and then—in a flash—be gone.
As the sun rose, the vision vanished and I gave in to the pull of sleep. My dreams that day were filled with fire and dragons, and butterflies . . . and beneath everything, a foreboding sense that something bigger was coming—something that would put all our battles to shame.
*
When I woke and joined the others in the kitchen, I found out that Iris and Bruce had returned to their house and they were over there now, getting resettled after a few weeks in Nerissa’s condo. As long as Telazhar was gone, there was no reason for them to worry too much over the rogue portal in our backyard, especially since it still led to the Realm of the Elder Fae.
As I entered the kitchen, Delilah and Shade were at the table, along with Vanzir and Roz. Hanna was humming a tune as she made dinner for the others—she was pummeling a mound of biscuit dough into submission with a rolling pin. Trillian was tearing lettuce for a salad.
“Where are Camille, Smoky, and Morio?” I glanced around.
“Camille and Smoky are still back in the Dragon Reaches. Morio went out to check the land with the guards.” Delilah was leaning against Shade, looking relaxed for the first time in weeks. “What do you think about September?”
I stared at her. “I have no clue how to answer that. September is . . . a month?”
She grinned. “I mean for a wedding?”
Shade winked at me and I suddenly understood. “Oh my gods—you mean you’re finally going to do it?” Another beat and it sank in. “The autumn equinox!”
“Yes! It seems perfect, and . . . why wait? If there’s one thing I’ve learned lately it’s that anything can happen at any time. I want to get married before . . . in case . . .” She quieted down, then shook her head. “No, I refuse to look at it like that. I want to get married because I want to get married, damn it.” She brought Shade’s hand to her lips and kissed it as he draped his arm around her shoulder.
“I think the autumn equinox is perfect.” And it was.
“By the way—Supe Community Council emergency meeting tonight at nine thirty. That’s the earliest they could make it in order to notify as many people as they could. Topic is the escalation of hate crimes. We need to go. It’s not something we can just blow off.” Delilah switched into business mode without a blink of the eye.
“No problem. I’m good with that.” It felt odd. We weren’t ready to go on patrol, we were just sitting around the table as usual.
Just then, there was a knock on the door. Trillian moved to answer and, a moment later, his voice exploded in an excited flurry of his native language. I wasn’t sure what to call the Svartan tongue. The next moment, he strode into the kitchen, dragging another figure behind him. Delilah let out a shout of glee as I jumped to my feet.
“Darynal! You’re alive!” Delilah lunged forward, wrapping the Svartan in her arms. “That’s for Camille because she’s not back from the Dragon Reaches yet.” She hugged him again. “And that’s from me.”
“I opened the door and damned if he wasn’t standing right there!” Trillian’s smile was a mile wide, relief flooding his voice. Darynal was his blood-oath brother—they were closer than kin—and we had given him up for dead, lost in the Shadow Lands. But here he was, in the flesh, looking safe and unharmed. Trillian turned back to Darynal. “We all thought you were dead.”
“There were times I thought all was lost. Taath and I went our separate ways. I have no idea whether he survived, but given what I saw of him on the scouting trip, if anybody could make it through, he could. But . . . then again . . . luck plays a huge factor down there. We got lost in the Fens and that was the last time I saw him. He wanted to keep going. I wanted to turn around and retrace our steps. We argued and he refused to listen to reason.”
Darynal was a mercenary like Trillian, one of the best trackers and scouts around. He was good-natured for a Svartan, and we had all come to like the man. And that was saying something because the Svartans weren’t all that much of a likable race on the whole. They were an offshoot of the elves who had taken a slightly more sinister bent. But then again, like most of the Fae—hell, like most other races in general—when you really stopped to look at it everything came down to the individual. Society did not always make the man.
“When did you cross over?” Trillian pulled out a chair, and Darynal gratefully slid into it.
“I found my way to Elqaneve . . .” He trailed off, staring at the table. “I can’t believe the destruction. So many lives . . .”