“Ready?” he asked, but he looked away from me as he spoke.
“If I said no would it make a difference?”
He headed for the door, motioning me to follow. “You don’t want to keep the queen waiting.”
? ? ?
The drive was far too short. I used most of it texting Holly and Tamara and letting them know I’d been summoned to Faerie. They were both aware of my ongoing struggle with the Winter Queen’s attempts to add me to her court and that I wouldn’t have chosen to visit there. They also knew time and doors worked a little funky in Faerie, so Tamara was understandably pissed. I reassured her I’d do everything in my power to make it to the rehearsal dinner and wedding, but I didn’t promise. I couldn’t. I didn’t know why I’d been summoned or if the queen planned to let me leave Faerie without a fight.
Falin parked the car, and I was out of time to text. I left my phone and purse in the car—technology didn’t tend to work in Faerie anyway—and moments later was bustling down the sidewalk of the Magic Quarter, feeling very overdressed in the ornate gown. Of course, that all changed once we reached the Eternal Bloom.
As the one and only fae bar in Nekros, the Bloom had a reputation as a tourist trap. A handful of unglamoured fae were contractually required to frequent the main bar so they could be seen by the mortals. It was good PR and mortals catching sight of fae reinforced the belief Faerie magic required. That said, there were never more than three or four fae at the bar at any given time, the menu was overpriced and limited, and aside from the opportunity to stare at unglamoured fae, the bar itself was rather mundane.
The VIP room was different. Hidden through a door humans couldn’t perceive unless they knew to look for it, the VIP area was a pocket of Faerie. The fae who worked the mortal side of the bar were doing just that, working. They were required to be seen, so they put themselves on display. Most of the fae on the VIP side were there to relax. They let down their glamour because it felt good to be unconfined, and a single glance around the room revealed shapes both beautiful and monstrous of every shape, size, color, and element. The food was served in magnificent feasts unlike anything I’d tasted elsewhere. Granted, it was Faerie food and if you tried to smuggle any of it out, the food transformed into toadstools that quickly rotted away. And the bar itself? Well, despite the fact I’d been in the bar at least once a week for the last few months, entering still took my breath away.
The furniture was deceptively simple; all wood but without nail or seam as if each piece had been carved from a single trunk. The room was much larger than what should have been possible for the building to contain. Not that the confines of the rest of the building mattered. The roof was missing, the sky of Faerie stretching above the bar. The sun was up now, high in the sky above, but the branches of the giant tree growing in the very center of the room shaded the bar, making it comfortable.
The tree itself was possibly one of the most magical things in the room, as well as one of the more dangerous. The amaranthine tree, which gave the Eternal Bloom its name, held flowers of every sort and shape on its many branches, but as I’d learned on my first trip to the Bloom, studying the flowers could lead the unwary to be hopelessly entranced. And that was hardly the only danger in the bar. It was a magnificent place, but a potentially deadly one.
I sighed as we passed through the threshold. The relief I felt wasn’t quite as profound as when I’d stepped into the pocket of Faerie at my father’s mansion, likely because that pocket had been created by my magic pulling chunks of reality into Faerie, whereas the Bloom was a space where Faerie and reality both bled over and mingled, but it was still an intense change. Falin spared me a momentary frown, and then led me past the fae scattered among the tables. They fell quiet as he approached. Most of the fae in the bar were independents and Falin was not only an agent of the winter court, but the queen’s knight. Her assassin. Her bloody hands. He wasn’t popular, not even among his fellow court fae.