Page 15 of Welcome to Fae Cafe
“Of course I have my gun. Why would you ask me that?”
Kate took another look out the window. “Just making sure.”
Lily brushed a hand down her rain-covered face, smearing her makeup. “Go get some sleep, Kate. We’ll figure this out tomorrow after your class,” she promised.
Kate waited in the staircase to her apartment until she heard the soft ring of the café bell. She raced back to the windows to watch Lily walk to the end of the road and turn left toward the station.
Kate’s skin tingled with a strange sensation, as though ants were crawling over her arms and legs. It was like a cool wind had slipped beneath her clothes. Like ice and heat and air and steam all breathing over her at once. It felt like…
It felt like she was being watched.
When she ascended the stairs to her second-floor apartment, she imagined turquoise eyes in the stairwell.
When she brushed her teeth, they looked back at her in the mirror.
When she climbed into bed, they were all over her sheets.
At midnight, she finally gave up on sleeping and climbed out of bed. She went to the window and peeked out at the quiet city. It wasn’t raining anymore, but the roads glistened with moisture beneath the streetlights.
Kate saw a head of orange-red hair slip into the alley across the street. She pushed her curtains aside and cracked open the window, letting in the sounds of yelling. There were two voices—one high and one low. And crying.
An anguished huff escaped Kate; her fingers tightened around the windowsill. “She’ll be fine,” she told herself. “It’s not my problem. This istotally notmy problem.”
She moved to close the window and drown out the noises outside, but her hand hesitated on the lever. Her gaze slowly dragged to the shadowed alley beside the breakfast diner. It was too difficult to see what was going on from her vantage point.
“She’ll call the cops if she needs them. Probably.” Kate nodded to herself. “She has hands. Fingers to dial.” She bit her lip too hard and sealed her window shut. “She probably has a phone…”
She turned toward her bed, stealing a wary glance at her own phone glowing with a clock that told her it was too late for her to do anything about anything, and anything she could do wouldn’t do anything to help anyway, and… anything, anything, anything.
Her clock changed, telling her another minute had passed.
“Argh. Unreal,” she scolded herself as she grabbed her phone and fled her bedroom. Her apartment floor was cold, but she kicked aside her shoes as she pushed through the front door into the stairwell.
“Yeah?” Lily answered on the first ring as Kate jogged down to the café.
“Good, you’re up,” Kate said, pushing out the café door and embracing the cold night.
“I’m still on duty.”
“She’s in trouble, Lil.”
“Who’s in trouble?”
“The redhead across the street!”
Lily moaned. “Aw, Kate! Go back to bed!”
“That lowlife guy is back, and it sounds like they’re having a big fight…” The phone slipped from Kate’s shoulder and clattered to the sidewalk, but she left it and raced in bare feet across the road into the alley.
6
Prince Cressica and All the Human Foolishness
Cress felt the whispering magic of the Ever Corners calling him back to the Silver Castle. He felt the Queene’s icy gaze across the gate. But more than anything, he felt the loss of Whyp deep in his faeborn soul; a hollow, crushing pain worse than hunger.
Things could have gone terribly wrong when Cress had uttered Kate Kole’s false name. Had he not sniffed his human target’s affection for the light-featured human officer outside, he might have been overtaken by the fairy-killer himself as Whyp had. An assassin of fairies, it seemed Kate Kole was. That meant it was assassin against assassin, and only one of them would survive in the end.
The balcony outside Kate Kole’s dwelling was covered in dirt from dry, abandoned plant pots. Cress remained there through the night, glaring at his short hair in the reflection of the glass doors and listening to the human’s restless breathing through the walls. Hoping someone might show up and say the human’srealname.
