“Pissed off?” She snorts right into the phone. “Try furious.”
“What about Aaron?” Surely he was shocked.
“He wasn’t as mad as I was. You know him, he’s so?—”
“Even-tempered?”
“I was gonna say Spock-like, but yeah. He thought Leo had good reasons for keeping it a secret.”
Good reasons? And what the hell would those be?
“Have you been talking to him?” I ask.
“Yeah.” An awkward little laugh. She understands what I really want to know:have you forgiven him?“But I’m not in the same place you are.”
Place, huh? That’s a nice word for it. What she means is, she didn’t end up in his bed.
“He shouldn’t’ve lied,” she says. “Especially to you. But to be fair, he was in a tough spot. I mean, how do you come out and tell someone you’ve just met that you’re a faerie?”
Maybe the same way youdon’ttell your best friend you fucked said faerie. Or that you’re psychic.
God, I’m such a hypocrite.
“Look,” Avery says. “I’m not trying to pressure you. I understand if you never want to see him again, but?—”
I wipe my forehead with the cuff of my sleeve. “But what?”
“They really need our help.”
Right, the mission. The whole reason the fae are here in the first place.
“Why do they need us?” I ask. “They’re faeries. Don’t they have their own powers or whatever?”
“They do, but not the right kind.”
The “right kind” being our clair-abilities.
“All these months, Leo’s been training us,” I say, although I’m sure Avery’s come to the same conclusion. Maybe Leo’s even admitted it to her.
“Yep.” Avery doesn’t sound humiliated about it. Not like I am. “And you wanna know how he found the three of us?”
I’m not sure I do.
She barrels on, “By making himself invisible. That way, only someone who has the Sight could see him.”
“The Sight?”
“Being psychic.”
“Oh.”
Wait a minute?—
I put it all together. Leo went to O-Chi, where he knew there’d be tons of people, and glamoured himself invisible. Then he watched and waited until someone saw him—the someone who turned out to be me.You’re exactly what I was looking for, he said. And I thought he was flirting with me.
Turns out I was selected at random.
Ignoring the anger gripping my chest, I ask Avery, “What do they need us to do?”
