“Well, thank you for letting us know—however you know and suddenly have a contact in the council—but you know the way out,” Mel said firmly.
Which he didn’t take the hint of. He cleared his throat and I could feel his eyes on me. “So it did go well with the wolf shifter elders? The three councilmen you met with were nice?”
The tension went through the roof, and I was waiting for someone to explode. I finished the cream puff I was eating, closed the box, and wiped my hands off. “I’m going to bed. I assume you can relock the portal?”
“I only broke your lock for me. It’s still in place for everyone else.”
“Good to know. Good night, everyone.”
Craftsman cleared his throat again. “Could I stay in my—”
“We’ve long since packed up your stuff, Julian,” Mel bit out. “I texted you several times saying I was going to drop the boxes off or I’d dump them off the Vogel’s mountains. You don’t have a room here anymore, nor deserve a place here.”
I changed where I was going as he tried to argue that and Ray jumped in, heading down to the portal to Faerie instead of up to my room. I felt someone following me, stopping when I reached the room. “I need a bit.”
“Please don’t go where I can’t follow when you’re this upset,” Darby whispered.
“I won’t be long or do any magic, I promise. I just need to be home.”
“Your home is here, with us,” Lucca argued. “I know we’re still super new and not even able to be official, but you know it’s right.”
I gave the best smile I could at him. “And yet, I bet it’s never hit you that you’re actually mated to an alien.”
His eyes went bug wide, Darby not reacting since we’d already had this conversation. Lucca couldn’t seem to find words at first. “What?”
“I’m from another world, Lucca. I’m from Faerie. It’s another dimension or in this one—I don’t know, but it’s another world and even if it’s not up in the sky that humans can’t see in a telescope… It still makes me an alien.”
“It actually took me a while to wrap my mind around that as well, but she’s not wrong,” Darby muttered, rocking on his heels as he rubbed the back of his neck. “Damn sexiest alien I ever thought to picture, that’s for sure.”
“Thanks. I’ll be back in a little bit. Promise.” I activated the portal and went through, peace filling me as Faerie pulled out the excess energy from me.
There was a bit of something extra though, and as much as I wanted to figure out what… I just couldn’t. Not right then and maybe not for a bit. I was overloaded. I was making progress and doing the best I could. I was doing all I could without killing myself.
That had to be enough for the moment. It just had to be.
And there was progress. With Dean White’s help, I was covering area faster, and we’d reached another portal.
Faerie was huge, but after doing more research, I learned it wasn’t as big as Earth. It was almost three quarters of the size with a lot less population, and learning that helped me on not finding anyone yet. It also explained how the portal at school and the one at my house came out to the same spot.
I didn’t get all the semantics until I was reading about a video game that had a Nether dimension that had to have a portal to it. I looked it up and read that it was a smaller dimension and eight blocks on the “overworld” equaled to one there, so GPS coordinates were divided, and portals close together would sync to the same ones in that smaller dimension.
That was when it clicked. Logically, that made perfect sense, and I could settle it in my head. It was hard at first because I would go back out at whatever place I wanted, but I could go out the portal at school when I went in from home. I simply hadn’t tried to do it.
But finding a new portal in Faerie was huge. I had no idea where it came out, and I wasn’t stupid enough to even try it, but that meant I was making massive progress. And even better, Faerie wasn’t giving me away by changing the portals to look alive again.
I lay down on the ground and stared up at the night sky, thinking over what Craftsman had said about his council. I tried my best to ignore the rest, and that he had dropped everything to come over. I also wanted to believe Zack and Ray but my thoughts went to doubting Craftsman’s intentions.
“Stop it,” I rasped, sick of crying over the man and angrily wiping tears away.
Once I could push him from my mind, I focused on the situation at hand and came to a few decisions.
A few good ones.
Or so I hoped.
6
“If this is what you want,” Darby sighed after I went over my idea with him.
“I don’t know about this, Tams,” Mel worried.
“I think it’s—” Craftsman started to say.
“No one asked you,” Mel snapped. “And you should have already left.”
“I needed to see she was okay.”
She snorted. “Now you care.”
I ignored all of that and focused on Darby, handing over the number we already had gotten through our research, letting him use my phone as it was the most secure. “Just apologize for the time, and you know what to do from there.”
He nodded and typed in the number, clearing his throat as it rang.
“Hello?” a female voice answered hesitantly.
“Good evening, this is Darby Moore, and I apologize for the time,
