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Fey let her legs go, putting her face in her hands in frustration.
“Am I wrong?” Lilith challenged.
“You’re not wrong,” Joy said calmly. “It’s not our job to question where the Queen sends us.”
“It’s treason to question it,” Lilith reminded them. “We took our oath to obey the Crown, unquestioningly. And you both sure as fuck sound like you’re questioning.”
“I can’t help but think something is going on here,” Fey said. She felt exhausted. It must be past dawn by now, and she hadn’t slept at all. “I feel like we’re walking into danger, and we won’t even realize it until the snare closes around our neck.”
“That’s your problem, Fey,” Lilith sneered. “Always thinking. You weren’t inducted into the Blades to think.”
“That’s enough, Lilith,” Joy murmured. She still stared at the wall half lost in thought. “There’s no need for cruelty.”
“I’m not trying to be cruel,” Lilith insisted. “I just?—”
“I said that’s enough.” Joy turned to her at that, her eyes blazing. The air in the room surged, and the photos Joy had hanging on her walls, photos of her and Alice, shook. Lilith stopped.
The air stilled, but their conversation hung heavy in the room, too many emotions floating around them. Too many questions.
“I’m sorry,” Lilith said, finally. “Fey, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean?—”
“It’s fine,” Fey insisted. “Really. You’re not wrong. We’re not supposed to question our orders, we’re not even supposed to talk about her. But here we are. Trying to piece it all together with what little clues we have.”
“I just—” Lilith huffed a breath. “I don’t like this. I don’t think any good will come of it, trying to unravel this. I think we should stop this, stop trying to figure any of this out. I’m scared of where it will lead us. Scared of what it will do to us.”
Fey sighed.
“I’m scared too.”
Chapter 27
The day passed in a fuzzy, exhausted haze. Joy was called on for another assignation and took Willow along with her. Lilith disappeared shortly after, and Fey couldn’t help but think she was finished helping them. Lilith could live without knowing why Alice had died.
But Fey couldn’t.
So, she spent the day in the training gym, pushing her body to its limits. After her night with Alastair, her muscles had been pleasantly sore, but she didn’t want to feel pleasantly sore today. She wanted to hurt. She wanted her body to match how she felt. She wanted to be distracted.
By the time the afternoon rolled into the evening, her muscles were a quivering mess. Finally, blissfully lost in the agony of pushing her body too hard, Fey went to the Med table on shaking legs and selected a bottle from their stock.
This wasn’t the first time Fey had used training to escape her thoughts and emotions, and she’d learned the perfect combination of elixirs to dull the pain just enough that she could fight, if necessary.
She didn’t want to take all the pain away, but a little something to relax her muscles so she could move again, a little something to dull the screaming in her limbs to a mild protest—that was the balance she was looking for.
Fey sighed, breaking the seal on the elixir bottle and preparing to pour it into the basin before her.
Then she stopped. Stopped, and looked at the contents of the bottle, really looked at it, for the first time in years.
She’d never bothered learning the art of making healing elixirs. Never gave much thought to how they worked, how they were made, despite being a Water Witch. That gift seemed so far outside of her own skills, so distant from what she was capable of.
Sana, head of the Water Coven, was the sort of Witch who concerned herself with healing elixirs. And Fey was no Sana.
It was easy to take them for granted. Easy to not think twice about the healing droughts delivered to their training room each week.
But tonight, her mind swimming with thoughts and fears, Fey stared at the bottle in her hand. The contents were a crystalline white, with opalescent magic swirling inside, circling within the bottle like a storm. Others on the shelves were blue, green, any color imaginable, all full of magic waiting to be released.
An elixir.
That’s what it was—that’s what they’d found in the warehouse. It hadn’t been drugs, hadn’t been a weapon.
