INTO THE REALM OF ALWAYS LOOKING BEHIND YOUR BACK.
"Hannah? Yeah, it's Alexei. Um... I need to go away for a while. Well, I'm not quite sure when I'm coming back. You could do that, what does leasing mean? Oh, okay. Yeah. Oh, the cat? She's uh, I was- I was watching her for my sister. She'll be leaving with me. I'm sorry, Tuna is a great cat. Haha, I'll see what my sister says when I get back from my trip. Alright. I gotta get going. Thanks, Hannah. Bye."
The last shred of Alexei Morant ended with that phone call. Alize crossed through the veil back into the realm of fae, where the chill that ran down his spine was not of his own coldness. He had to stop himself from looking over his shoulder expecting someone to be there. He'd managed to stop himself from doing that.
The party of faes was glittering. He'd seen some of these faes, plenty of them, but he wasn't the only smuggler in the realm, just the best. Criminals of the realm, or faes on their last legs, some would be here now pretending that the life they had before never happened. If only he could do the same. Alize had forsaken the "free folk", accepting isolation and rotating door of roommates as his new people. Hannah has been the only one who knew him as more than their quiet roommate who always paid the rent on time.
A cup of honey slipped into his hand within the first few minutes, and he calmed the rumbling storm in his belly with the golden liquid. If he had to shake the glamour from his bones and adorn the eyes that had last looked on him in fear, he needed more than just his own strength. And the honeyed drink was sweet on his lips, urging him for more.
Alize didn't know why he was here. He knew what had surpassed the last few days. A fae he knew from days before he realized he didn't deserve warmth, Lilith Averescu, had come to him with the idea of adventure and finding the lost child of Gawain. He wouldn't be proud to admit it, but it was the idea of having a friend again that brought him to the back of the pack, though he still wasn't sure he could fight as they wanted. There was a time when blood against his chest would have made him proud, because he knew that he would make his father proud.
He didn't want to be back in the Winter Courts, but Earth wasn't that great either. It was here, in the middle of fae and humanity, that he didn't feel like an outcast. He felt like nothing. He liked the thought of that, a twelve-foot ex-ice knight feeling like nothing. Nothing was a good place to be, where he could slip into the throng of honey-eyed dancers and feel like one of them.
Okay, a full cup of honey might have been a bad idea. But he'd never danced before, not like this. Hannah and the girls she went to college with went out a lot on Friday nights, and she'd always ask for him to join. But this, the people who looked like him, this was better than "two dollar vodka-crans" that Hannah always raved about. The facade of being nothing was broken by a single world. "Forfrysning." The boy of ice flipped around, half tumbling into the gaggle of faes dancing wildly beside him, before his eyes land on a girl of shadows, skin as dark as a midnight without stars. The little fae was a dark court deserter, one too important to leave and yet her pleas touched his soul far too deeply to make her stay. "Forfrysning. You saved my life, I can't repay-"
Both of them froze at the chaos that started around them. "Oh god-"