Desert Tales: A Wicked Lovely Companion Novel

the desert.

“If you hate it, don’t visit.” Rika glared at him, embarrassed that he’d seen her tears even though he didn’t remark on her wet cheeks.

A coy smile came over him. “No chance of that. You’d be even more miserable without me.”

When she didn’t answer, he dropped down beside her, cross-legged, and rested his elbows on his knees. He folded his hands under his chin and stared at her. “What with all of these new habits, are you going to go out roaming with me next? Venture out visibly? . . . Or are you going back with the pretty boy now that he’s not so impotent?”

“No. No. And NO.” She sighed and looked away. Tears blurred her vision again, and she wished that she could pretend to be unmoved by Keenan’s visit and her subsequent encounter with Jayce. She’d spoken to Keenan often enough over the years to be beyond her emotions, but knowing that he’d finally found his missing queen had stirred up old hurt. There truly had been a mortal who wouldn’t suffer for having been chosen by him. Rika simply hadn’t been her.

Without knowing the specifics of what she’d been worrying over, Sionnach knew Rika well enough that he caught her face in his hands and made her look at him. “Temper suits you better than self-defeat, princess.”

She couldn’t speak. It wasn’t often that Sionnach was serious. Often, he’d cajole or tease when she was sad, but rarely did the fox resort to seriousness. She’d heard the shift in his tone just now. He continued, “The Summer King doesn’t deserve your tears. He never did.”

“I know,” she said, but she was still crying.

One hand cupped her face. With the other, Sionnach caught a tear on his fingertip as it slid down her cheek and then licked it from his finger. “Not ice. Not now. Not ever again.”

But I’m still cold, she thought.

She couldn’t say those words, couldn’t admit that she could feel the chill too strongly when her memories washed over her, so she said, “I hate it when he comes here.”

“Me too.” Sionnach lowered his hand from her face and scooted back just a little. He teased, but she’d never taken his teasing or his assurances as something more. Tonight was no different. The fox’s seriousness faded, and his smile grew dangerous. “But, it’d be silly of you to be here pouting while irritable faeries break that mortal you keep watching. . . .”

“What?” she gasped.

Sionnach shrugged, but his eyes twinkled with trouble. “They’re mad at pretty boy, mad at you, so they’re in a mood. You know how they get.”

“But—”

“You saved the mortal,” Sionnach reminded her. “You can’t be surprised that they felt petulant about it.”

“Why didn’t you stop—”

“Your mortal shouldn’t be my concern.” He widened his already enormous eyes in a beguiling look. “You should have enough time . . . if you go now. He’s at the railroad tracks.”

“You’re such a pain.” She shoved him backward, any flash of tenderness she felt for him thoroughly quashed.

In that faery-quick way, Sionnach rushed to the mouth of her cave alongside her. Then he stopped, going no farther, but as she raced past him, he murmured, “You needed a distraction, princess.”

CHAPTER 4

Inside the town of Silver Ridge, everything was faded. In the desert around the town, the colors were the beautiful hues of cactus and desert wildflowers, vibrant skies and impossibly rendered clouds, shimmers of serpents and flutters of birds. Silver Ridge, however, had a weathered tone. Sand and heat consumed everything here, but even so, the town had a beauty all its own. The buildings were a strange mix, as if architecture from various times and places had been thrown together in a weird hodgepodge.

Rika remembered when Silver Ridge was only a speck of a possibility, when adventurous miners came here in search of fortunes, when their families put down roots, and when the mishmash of people became a town. The peculiarity of knowing the town’s history so well comforted her as she walked. She’d watched this small outpost of humanity grow in the great expanse of nature; she’d walked among them and drawn portraits of their faces as they came, aged, and died. She felt protective of the mortals who lived there now, but several in particular evoked a fiercer sense of concern.

She stopped midway into town, not wanting to get too close to the railroad tracks that stretched like a line of beautiful poison on the earth. Steel, because it was created from iron, was poisonous to faery. Humans— without knowing why they gravitated toward the steel—often lingered here at the edge of the tracks. A few decades ago, they’d created a park of sorts, filled with metal sculptures and benches, but even before that, mortals had clustered here since the tracks had been installed.

On the edge of the rail yard were faeries who had been stopped by the metal as if it were a wall they could not climb. They watched the mortals: Jayce, Del, and Kayley. Del no longer wore his bandana, and Rika noticed that his blue mohawk now had white tips. It suited him, his vibrant hair against his suntanned skin, but it struck her as being so different from Jayce. Del’s mohawk with its ever-changing color was much like his carefully chosen clothes: proof that he put time into looking like he didn’t worry over his appearance. By contrast, Jayce truly didn’t pay much attention to the way he looked. He had a splash of color in his dark dreads, but that had been a whim. Rika knew; she’d watched. Everything about Jayce was as real with or without an audience; she admired that about him.

Rika passed the faeries, putting herself between them and the mortals. She could go closer to the dangerous metal than the other faeries could because she’d been mortal first, but she still couldn’t walk all the way up to it. Being even this close to the steel made her queasy and weak. Fortunately, the nearby faeries couldn’t approach it either, but sooner or later, Jayce would have to leave the protection of the railroad tracks and thus become vulnerable.

Although she wasn’t convinced that they would actually harm him, she couldn’t risk it. She made a noise, not quite a word but the start of one, before she realized what she’d done. Much like seeing him fall and reacting without thought, she’d done the same thing now. The result was the same as well: she’d begun talking to Jayce when he could see her. By her choice, she’d broken her own rules on keeping him at a safe distance.

Before she could think of how foolish it was, Jayce turned his head and saw her. “It’s you. . . .” He smiled and took a hesitant step toward her. “Where did you come from?”

Rika didn’t move. She opened her mouth to speak, to find some answer that was true. She settled on, “Out there.”

She made a vague gesture northeast, toward the desert, or more accurately, much farther away, across an ocean to a land where it grew cold, where there were seasons and so much greenery that her heart ached a little to think of it. Home. She couldn’t stand being there now, not after so long with winter’s pall on her, but she still remembered the beauty.

Jayce left Del and Kayley, moving farther from the safety of the railroad tracks. “You look like you’re not feeling well.”

When she didn’t answer, his arm went around her. He led her toward a wooden bench. Farther still from the tracks. Palm trees, looking battered and still proud despite it, cast narrow shadows.

“I knew we should’ve had you checked out. I couldn’t figure out how you vanished, where you were hiding. I looked in the caves where we were. I—” He stopped himself nervously before continuing, “I almost thought you were a dream, but Del saw you too.”

She stared at Jayce. Bruises shadowed his cheek. His ripped shirt had been replaced, but this one looked tattered too. A steel chain-link bracelet hung on his left wrist. Fortunately, since he held her with his right arm, the steel wasn’t likely to brush against her and injure her.

“Are you real, Rika?” he asked quietly.