The Faerie Prince (Creepy Hollow, #2) (13 page)

“No surprise there.” I turn carefully onto my back. “What did you get?”

“Some food, a blanket, a map book, and their entire first aid kit.”

“Ryn,” I groan. “You don’t think they’ll need their first aid kit at some point?”

“Not as much as you need it right now.”

“And it’s human stuff,” I add. “It probably won’t even work on me.”

“Your magic’s blocked,” Ryn says. “Right now you’re as close to being human as you’ll ever get, so this stuff might just work.” He pulls out a white plastic container with a red cross on it and begins sifting through the contents. “Antiseptic,” he reads. “Sounds good.” He leans over and begins dabbing the cream onto the many small cuts scattered across my arms. “Can you sit up?” he asks. “I saw some cuts on your back.”

The prospect of sitting up doesn’t seem that appealing, but I do it anyway. Ryn’s fingers move carefully across my back, applying the cream that will probably have no effect on me whatsoever. “I’m having a weird sense of déjà vu right now,” I say quietly. “Except last time it was
me
fixing something on
your
back.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “The poisoned glass.” He moves to my side and carefully unties the black fabric around my upper arm. Blood starts oozing from the wound again.

“I think humans get stitches for cuts this deep,” I say.

“Yeah, well, we’ll have to make a plan without stitches.” Ryn digs around in the plastic container and removes a few things. After wiping some liquid over the wound—which stings like
hell
and makes tears spring up in my eyes—he closes it up by sticking a line of tiny plasters over it. He then wraps a bandage around my arm. “Anything else?” he asks.

“Um, my hands,” I say weakly. I still feel kind of shaky after the sudden spike of pain caused by that antiseptic liquid stuff. This whole experience is making me feel vulnerable in a way that I’m not used to all—and that I do not like one bit.

“Are they burnt?” Ryn asks, taking a closer look at my hands.

I nod. “I think so. It was those vines she tied me up with.”

Ryn reads the labels on a few more tubes before selecting one. He takes my right hand in his left and squirts some clear gel into my palm. I brace myself for more pain, but instead I feel relief. I breathe out a sigh as Ryn gently rubs the cream into my palm, across my fingers, and up my wrist. He moves carefully around the metal band. I’m not sure why, but it feels strangely intimate. I’m suddenly aware of how close he’s sitting to me. I’m aware of his knee touching my thigh, and his hand carefully holding mine. I watch his face as he works, his beautiful blue eyes intent as he moves to my left hand and concentrates on smoothing the gel over it. My gaze falls on his lips. I really, really want to know what it feels like to—

Stop it!

I look away from his face and down at the ground. Ryn is my friend. My
friend
. The idea of anything more than that is so utterly ridiculous that I want to laugh out loud. And yet I can’t help wondering what it would be like if—No! I’m not wondering that at all. It’s absurd.

Stop being absurd, Violet.
I close my eyes and silently chant,
friend, friend, friend.

“Are you okay?” Ryn asks.

My eyelids spring apart and I pull my hand away. “Yes. That feels a lot better, thank you.” I force myself to look at him as though nothing has changed between us. Because it hasn’t, right? “Are
you
okay? You hit the floor so hard you didn’t wake up for a while.”

Ryn rolls his shoulders. “I’m a bit banged up, I guess, but nothing serious. I’ll just have to put up with the bruises for longer than a few hours.” He packs away the medical kit.

“And are you okay with . . . what we saw when the Queen knocked us out?” I know I don’t have to mention Reed’s name; Ryn will know exactly what I’m talking about.

“Yeah. Of course.” Ryn turns his back to me as he pulls a blanket out of the bag and pulls the zipper closed. I know he’s lying.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know if I should bring it up. I just wanted to make sure—”

“It’s fine, Violet. Don’t worry about it.” With a tight smile, he hands me the blanket. “We can sleep out here tonight and get moving when the sun rises.”

I know he’s trying to change the subject, but I’m determined not to move on until I know he really is okay. “Reed didn’t feel that way in real life. You know that, right?” When Ryn doesn’t answer I decide to plough ahead with my theory. “I know what’s going on here. You’ve built up this crazy situation in your head where you think that if your brother ever had to choose between the two of us, he’d have chosen me. And that’s just not true.”

“How do you know?” Ryn takes the folded blanket from me, shakes it open, and throws it over me. “The night that he died, he
did
choose you over me. I know he cared about you a lot, V.” Ryn’s voice goes quiet as he lies down on my left. “Maybe he did love you more than he loved me, his own brother.”

“No.” I lie carefully on my side, facing Ryn. “Not possible.”

“Oh, it’s definitely possible.” Ryn stares up at the stars. “And don’t worry, I won’t hate you for it. It isn’t your fault if the brother I loved and admired so much didn’t feel the same way about me. But I’ve spent many hours considering the possibility that he would have chosen you over me, and I think it’s true.”

“
Many hours?
” I ask in disbelief.

He looks over at me. “What? I have plenty of thinking time.”

Plenty of thinking time? What does he do, just sit around and
think
? What about assignments? Training, studying,
friends
?

I prop myself up on one elbow, trying not to lean on any bruises or cuts. “Can I ask you something?”

“Will it make a difference if I say ‘no’?”

“Um . . . probably not.”

He turns his gaze back to the sky. “Ask away, then.”

“Do you spend a lot of time alone?”

A beat of silence passes before he says, “Why would you ask that?”

“Well, there’s the fact that you can quote poetry, which implies you spend a lot of time reading. You mentioned yesterday that you hang out in people’s houses watching TV when you’re not on assignment. And now you’ve just told me about all the ‘thinking time’ you have. So I was just wondering why you don’t hang out with your friends more often.”

His expression is incredulous when he looks at me. “You’re wondering why
I
don’t hang out with friends?”

“Look, we both know I have zero social life, but this conversation isn’t about me. It’s about you.”

He hesitates, then says, “Can we add this to the off-limits territory?”

“But—”

“What, you think you’re the only one who gets to have off-limits territory?” He grins, obviously seeing his way out of any future awkward conversations. “No way. If there are things you don’t have to talk about, then there are things I don’t have to talk about.”

“Fine.” I roll onto my back, completely forgetting that I’ve got cream smeared all over it. Oops. Well, the jacket is probably dirty already anyway. “Are we allowed to talk about how we’re going to find our way home?”

“We’ll have to get to Creepy Hollow the old fashioned way: on foot.” He shuffles around a bit, then reaches for the bag and places it under his head. “Bran said this assignment was local, so I’m hoping it’s close to where the human realm crosses over into the fae realm. We can check the map book in the morning.”

“Great.” Fortunately, I know exactly where the human realm crosses over into the fae realm. That’s the way I was supposed to take Nate home after he followed me into the faerie paths. That all seems so long ago. Even Nate’s betrayal is starting to seem like it happened in another lifetime. It doesn’t hurt so much anymore. “I hope local means really local,” I say, “because if we don’t get back to the Guild by the cut-off time on Friday afternoon, I’m probably going to go into a serious depression. I
cannot
fail my final assignment.”

Ryn sighs. “I think you should prepare yourself for possible failure, V. We’re already going to lose points for not being able to bring back the necklace, and we know nothing about it other than its name. If we return late in addition to all that, we’ll definitely be failing this one.”

“We did bring back the necklace,” I tell him. “It’s hiding right here.” I hold up one of the silver balls around my neck, noticing that my burnt fingers don’t feel quite so sore anymore. “And we do know what it’s for. Didn’t you hear what Zell said while you were hiding in the faerie paths? He told his mother that she didn’t deserve to be immortal and that he’d never give her this necklace.”

“Immortal? I must have missed that.” Ryn rubs a hand across his jaw. “But earlier on he was going to give up the necklace in exchange for you.”

“Well, he obviously decided that immortality was more important than having me find special faeries for him.”

Ryn rolls onto his side and looks at me. “So this necklace grants immortality. That’s pretty cool. I wonder how it works.”

“Maybe when you’re wearing it you can’t die,” I say, “even if you’re injured so badly that the magic in your body is unable to heal you. The magic in the necklace must be more powerful.”

“I wonder what would happen if your head were cut off? Do you think it would still work then?”

“That’s just gross, Ryn, and don’t even think about testing it out on me.”

A look of horror flashes across Ryn’s eyes before he shakes his head. “Do you honestly think I’d cut your head off, V? I thought we’d reached the friend stage by now.”

Yeah, and then we reached the stage where your naked chest suddenly seemed appealing, and I started applying words like ‘delicious’ to your lips and—

What. The. Freak? I slam a mental gate down on my thoughts, trying to force my brain back to neutral. I am
not
the kind of girl who thinks things like that, and Ryn is
not
the kind of guy I should be thinking them about. He’s the guy who threw my mother’s tokehari necklace away. The guy who made sure I had no friends at the Guild. I’ve seen his rudeness and condescension toward just about every Guild girl who’s ever had any interest in him, and I certainly don’t want to be on the receiving end of that.

“Uh, yes, the friend stage.” I nod. “I know you wouldn’t cut my head off.”

Ryn frowns as he watches me, as though trying to figure something out. Damn, am I blushing or something? Did I have a weird look on my face while trying to get my insane thoughts under control? I turn my head and stare at the sky, which is a lot safer than staring into Ryn’s eyes. It isn’t nearly as beautiful as a Creepy Hollow sky, but it calms me nonetheless. My gaze drifts slowly from one twinkling star to the next. “Remember when we used to draw star-to-star pictures in the air with our styluses?” I say.

“Yeah, and then we’d try and guess each other’s drawings.”

“Remember that dragon Reed spent so long drawing one night?”

Ryn nods. “And you and I were both adamant that it looked like a weirdly shaped pegasus because the legs were too long for a dragon.”

I laugh. “He was so determined to make us see a dragon, but we were both laughing so hard we could barely follow what he was saying.”

Ryn’s laughter joins mine, and it feels so natural, so familiar and comforting, that by the time our chuckles subside into silence, something feels different between us. As though we’ve finally got back to that place we were at before Reed died.

“You should sleep, V,” he says quietly. “You need rest for your wounds to heal.”

My wounds. I’d almost forgotten the pain, but now that he’s mentioned it, I become aware once more of the aching throughout my body. “Yeah, I guess.”

He turns onto his side, facing away from me. His not-so-white-anymore shirt pulls tight over his back, but I don’t imagine the taut muscles just below it because Ryn is my friend, and it isn’t right to think thoughts like that about a friend.

“You don’t want the blanket?” I murmur sleepily, realizing after a few minutes that he has nothing to cover himself with.

“No, I’m fine, thanks. If I get cold in the night I’ll just pinch it from you.”