“That’s what we need to find out,” Tamani said, looking back at the road. “The idea of a wild faerie, with no allegiance to Seelie or Unseelie… that’s not something we ever expected to encounter. But I don’t see any convincing alternatives.”
“So what do we do now?” Laurel asked, looking up at him. Her earnest gaze was so open, so trusting; her pale green eyes blazed in the day’s dying light. Tamani didn’t realize he had started to lean toward her until he had to catch himself and pull back.
The next step would have to involve Laurel, even though he wished he could keep her out of it entirely. “Klea handed you an opportunity to befriend Yuki. Hopefully you can find out more.”
Laurel nodded. “Hopefully. She doesn’t seem to like Klea’s plan, though. I get the feeling she’s avoiding me.”
“Well, keep trying,” Tamani said, doing his best to sound encouraging. “But be careful. We still don’t know what she can do, or whether she intends to hurt you.”
Laurel looked down at her lap.
“And work on figuring out her caste,” Tamani added. Then, remembering that Laurel didn’t like that word — for reasons he suspected he’d never quite understand — he corrected himself. “Season, I mean. Just knowing that would make a huge difference. Then at least we’d know
“Okay.”
Tamani pulled his car into Laurel’s driveway and she looked up at her house. She put a hand on the door handle, then paused.
“Is Shar… Unseelie?”
Tamani shook his head. “His mother tried to raise him that way, but Shar was never much of a believer. And after he met his companion, Ariana, the last thing he wanted was to get kicked out of Avalon. Ariana and their seedling, Lenore, are his whole world. As far as Shar is concerned, no price is too high for their safety — or the safety of Avalon. Even if it means his own mother has to live and die in exile.”
“I just wondered,” Laurel said softly.
“Hey, Laurel,” Tamani said, catching her wrist just before she was out of reach. He wanted to take that wrist and pull her closer, wrap her in his arms, forget everything else. His hands started to tremble with the wanting and he forced them to still. “Thank you for coming with me today. Without you, we wouldn’t have gotten in at all.”
“Was it worth it?” she asked, her wrist limp in his hand. “We didn’t find anything out. I hoped… I thought Jamison would know something.” She looked at him, her eyes only now reflecting the disappointment she must have been feeling all evening.
Tamani swallowed; he hated letting her down. “It was for me,” he said quietly, his eyes focused on their hands, so close to being joined. He didn’t want to let go. But if he didn’t, in a few seconds she would subtly tug her hand away, and that was worse. He forced his fingers to open, watched her arm drop to her side. At least this way, it was his choice.
“Besides,” he added, trying to sound casual, “it was good for Jamison to find out about Yuki and Klea. Shar is kind of… independent. He likes to figure things out on his own before he passes any information on. He’s stubborn like that.” Tamani leaned back in the driver’s seat, one arm resting atop the steering wheel. “I’ll say hi to you in the halls next week,” he said, smiling. And with a rubber-and-asphalt squeal, he sped away from Laurel’s house, resisting the urge to look back.
He drove to his empty apartment and let himself in. He didn’t bother to turn on the lights, instead sitting silently in the shadows as the sun set and the room grew dark. He tried not to think too hard about what Laurel would be doing that weekend. Even with the privacy he tried to afford her — and not just to be polite — he had witnessed more soft kisses and intimate embraces than he wanted to think about. He suspected that every weekend would be the same, and he wasn’t sure how much more he could take.
Forcing himself back to his feet, Tamani walked over to the window that looked out on the line of trees behind the apartment complex. Jamison had told him to trust himself, and he was going to. A few days ago he’d shadowed Yuki to the small house he could only assume she lived in. The squads who would watch her full time wouldn’t arrive for another day or two. It meant he’d get very little sleep tonight, but for now, he would watch her himself.
“TOO WEIRD,” DAVID SAID AS THEY SAT ON LAUREL’S bed talking about her trip to Avalon and ignoring the textbooks spread out around them.
“I know, right? I sort of assumed being cast out for your beliefs was a human thing. Which I personally find totally ironic.”
David laughed. “I was thinking along the lines of breaking the laws of physics by traveling thousands of miles yesterday in, like, two seconds.”
“Different strokes,” Laurel said, waving his comment away with a smile. “So did you find out anything about the membrane Katya was talking about?”
“I think so,” David said. Then, in a teasing tone, “Did you?”
“Maybe? From what I read online, the thylakoid membrane is the place where the chloroplasts are. So all of the conversion from sunlight into energy happens there.”
“We got the same answer, then,” David said, smiling. “So your friend Katya said that in Summer faeries, the thylakoid is more efficient. I guess that means it gets more energy out of less sunlight.”
“Probably because their magic uses light,” Laurel said, thinking back on the “fireworks” she’d watched at the Samhain festival last year.
“And Katya discovered this because she and her friends basically drank the equivalent of glow-sticks, right?” David asked, not bothering to contain his amusement.
“Essentially,” Laurel said, rolling her eyes.
“Wish I could do something like that.”
Laurel raised an eyebrow at him.
“No, seriously,” David said. “Can you imagine how cool that would be? Like at Halloween, you could give kids some kind of glow punch before they went trick-or-treating and they would be safer.”
“Something tells me the safety of a bunch of kids was not the first thought you had,” Laurel said.
“Well, maybe it would also be fun to jump out from behind a tree at night, glowing all funky green.”
“That’s more like it.” Laurel looked down at the scant notes Katya had helped her make. “It seems like if I got a sample of cells and treated them with a phosphorescing substance, I could observe how long the cells kept their glow and could rule out Summer fairly easily.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be quite that simple,” David said, rolling over onto his stomach and bringing his head close to Laurel’s. “Katya’s friend probably kept glowing because she was still alive, so the thylakoid membrane processed all of the phosphorescent. If you had a sample, the cells wouldn’t still be living and growing. You’d have to find a way to keep the sample alive. Or test it right on Yuki’s skin.”
“Something tells me she’s not going to agree to that,” Laurel said wryly.
They both sat back, silent for a while.
“You can keep flowers fresh with sugar water, right?”
David shrugged. “Sure, I guess.”
“And when we got thrown in the Chetko River by Barnes’s trolls, Tamani patched me up and put me under this light that helped me heal. It was like… portable sunshine. What if I was able to somehow, without being noticed”—she shook her head, trying not to worry about that hurdle just yet—“get a small sample from Yuki? I could put it in a solution of sugar water and then expose it to that special light. Do you think that would be enough to keep it alive and processing?”
“Maybe. I mean, if it was a regular plant, I would be skeptical, but faeries are the most highly evolved form of plant life, right?”
Laurel nodded.
“And that light is faerie magic stuff, so it might be enough. Can you make the light thing?”
“No, it’s really, really advanced. But Tamani can probably get one for me.”
“Can you make the glow stuff?”
Laurel nodded. “I think so.”
“And will you drink some one of these nights so you glow in the dark?”
