“Is there anything else you decided not to tell me from the last few weeks?” she asked.
Shit. I looked at myself in the mirror, contemplating the green silk flowing over my body. Did I look like an ingénue or a girl who’d severely fucked up the best friendship she’d ever had? Neither was what I was going for. I reached to pull that one off.
“There might have been a few things,” I admitted without meeting Kylie’s eyes. “Not that I didn’t want you to know. Just that would have been hard to talk about with only texts.”
“You could have called me,” Kylie pointed out.
“I couldn’t see getting into it except face to face.” Except now here we were, face to face, and I felt even more awkward. I grabbed a wine red gown out of the pile. “I told you my mom died on the mountain... I saw it. Like a vision. It was a bunch of fae who killed her. Murdered her. They were trying to stop her from getting that power she wanted me to have.”
“The special fire that you can use to make people tell the truth,” Kylie filled in.
“Yeah.” At least I’d kept her up to speed that much.
“Why did the fae care about that?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Things have been tense between the shifters and the fae, but I’m still finding out the details there. Their attack wasn’t, like, officially sanctioned, but the fae monarch hadn’t discouraged it either. They must not have wanted any shifter to have that kind of power.”
And to be fair, the first person I’d used it on was their own monarch. To be fair to me, I wouldn’t have needed to use it on her if she’d been upfront with us in the first place.
Kylie rubbed her mouth. “Wow. So you have to worry about the fae coming after you too?”
“Not exactly. There’s a treaty—and we confronted the fae monarch, and she swore to follow it. But I guess it’s always possible they could decide to break their word.”
That was an awful thought. I’d rather not go there while we had the rogue threat right in front of us.
“Damn.” Kylie looked over at me, and her eyes lit up. Her smile looked a little stiff, but I’d take it. “And damn. Okay, forget all the other ones. That is The Dress.”
My lips twitched. I glanced down at myself, smoothing my hands over the gleaming fabric. “Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah. Anyone who messes with you in that get-up is just asking to become dragon barbeque.”
I laughed, and for a second, things between us felt almost okay. This was Kylie. My best friend, my one true friend. She’d always had my back. If I couldn’t even live up to her expectations, I didn’t have a hope in hell with the shifters.
*
“Holy cow,” Kylie said when we stepped into the ballroom-turned-banquet hall. “And I thought this place couldn’t get any fancier.”
Marco, who was between us holding my hand, chuckled. “My kin are known for being easily distracted by shiny objects. I’m no exception.”
“Well, you definitely went all out on the shiny,” I said. Silver plates glinted at every seat; crystal wine glasses sparkled. Gold embroidery shimmered in a looping pattern along the edge of the gleaming white table clothes. The crystal chandeliers overhead were all alight now, sending a sharp yellow glow over everything and everyone below.
I had a feeling it wasn’t just those lights that made the feline kin look a tad jaundiced. Tension hummed through the room beneath the clamor of voices. This wasn’t just a dinner. It wasn’t even just their first formal dinner with their new dragon shifter in attendance. It was the dinner before their alpha’s latest challenge. One that had even higher stakes than any of those before.
I nodded and smiled to the feline kin as Marco walked me up to the head table. The other alphas were already sitting in their spots around the two chairs reserved for us. I sat down with Marco at my left and Aaron at my right. Nate leaned past the eagle shifter to catch my eyes and offer a warm smile. But my pulse had already picked up again with a prickle of anxiety.
Kylie ended up at Nate’s right, which was probably the best I could have hoped for when she couldn’t sit right next to me. She grinned at the big bear shifter and immediately started gabbing away. I could only imagine how West would have reacted if he’d had to be her conversation partner through dinner instead of having stoic Alice on his other side. Kylie would have chattered my wolf shifter’s ear off just like anyone else.
Actually, that might have been fun to watch.
Several more feline kin from the prominent families joined us at the head table. I found myself facing a cheetah pair, the wife rubbing her cheek with the back of her hand like a house cat washing its face. Next to them was a pair of lions that included the woman who’d greeted me so skeptically when I’d first arrived. Coreen—that was her name. My head was getting awfully crowded with those.
Thankfully, Julius was sitting nowhere near us. I spotted his hulking form at the far end of the room, where I guessed Marco had asked his attendants to put him. And I wasn’t exactly disappointed to see Silvan stationed at a distant table too.
Marco’s kin eyed him with darting glances as they dug into their meals. They ate like cats too, with swift delicate bites. Coreen dabbed at her mouth with her napkin after every forkful.
“Is the challenge arena already prepared?” she asked after a few minutes of strained silence. It was weird how a question that ominous could be said as if it was a polite inquiry. Her tone was the same as if she were asking what we were having for dessert.
But then, Marco acted equally unfazed. “My attendants are setting everything in order right now. I suppose you’ll be there for the show.”
“The more witnesses, the more worthy,” Coreen’s husband put in with a rumble of a voice.
“Interesting philosophy,” West muttered.
Coreen shot him a hard look. Marco twitched under the table, and I suspected he’d just kicked the wolf shifter in the shin. His smile stayed pleasant.
“I’m glad the matter with the vampires up north was finally settled,” the cheetah man put in. “There haven’t been any more stirrings, have there?”
“Not of enough concern that my people up there have mentioned it to me,” Marco said. “You know what the bloodsuckers are like. No attention span for anything unless it’s actively bleeding.”
The cheetah shifter woman snickered at that. My stomach had clenched tighter. “Was there a lot of trouble because of our confrontation with the vampires when we went into the city?”
Mom had left me a trail of clues leading to the mountain in Sunridge, and we’d had to go exploring the New York City subway system to find the first one. Right into vampire territory. They hadn’t been real pleased about our intrusion.
Marco waved his hand. “Oh, just normal vamp mutterings. We sorted them out. They don’t really want to tango with the shifters.”