Page 56 of Fae Games

With a choking splutter, Prince Caulden lowered himself on the woodpile and gestured for me to sit at his side. I sent Pokeweed a silent apology for potentially ruining his beautiful, gossamer dress and perched on the end of the wood.

After Prince Bradwell sat, the hag slumped down on her seat and rubbed her gnarled hands. “Dear me. Dear, dear me! What a dark web of intrigue we have here!”

“My Lady?” asked Prince Bradwell.

“None of that High Court etiquette if you please. It’s Mistress Catha or Baba to you.”

“Can you help me find two people?” I asked. “One of them is a high faerie in the Dark Fae Prison, and the other is my sister. She’s a human, and—”

“You don’t have a sister.” She folded spindly arms under her ample breasts.

“That’s because I was cursed into becoming a half-blood,” I said.

“You’re not a half-blood, either.”

“Mistress Catha,” said Prince Caulden, his voice smooth. “This is rather confusing. Until about a week ago, Unity was a human girl living in Doolish.”

She leaned down to the floor, picked up a mug from the foot of her armchair, and slurped its contents. “I see that.”

“Yet, you say she is not a half-blood?”

After balancing her mug on her chair’s overstuffed arm, the hag rested her forearms on her lap and looked into my eyes. “That curse you absorbed turned you into a full faerie. A powerful one, if you can ever unlock your magic. But it also wiped your sister out of existence.”

My throat thickened. “But I saw her with four dark faeries, and they took her away.”

“One moment.” She closed her eyes and sucked in a deep breath. “Right. Oh, deary me!”

My stomach dropped to the dirt floor. This couldn’t be good. Prince Caulden gave my thigh a soothing pat, but it did nothing to stop the cold dread inching up my back.

“What do you see?” asked Prince Bradwell.

The hag leaned back in her seat, nearly getting swallowed in its cushioned back. “Four strapping lads with huge bat wings, howling over the loss of their big brother?” She tapped her wrinkled face with those terrible, spindly fingers. “Four furious lads looking to slake their fury on a girl trembling like a newborn fawn that’s lost its mother?”

Terror exploded through my insides, grabbed me by the throat, and choked off my air. This was exactly as I had imagined. A quartet of the darkest faeries taking turns to hurt Sicily.

I could only rasp, “Yes.”

“The curse wiped her out of existence before the first blow,” said the hag.

Everything stilled, including the yellow flame on the wax candle. The shadows around the hovel stopped flickering and crept toward us, making every fine hair on my body stand alert.

A shudder traveled down my spine, and I whispered, “I don’t understand.”

“She disappeared.” The hag spread her eyes wide, jostling the mug, which remained on the arm of the sofa but sloshed pungent liquid over the floor. “Poof!”

Prince Caulden wrapped an arm around my shoulder, bringing me into his strong, hard body. “She never suffered?”

“As I said, she went before they could do anything.”

I rubbed my temples. “She’s dead?”

“She never existed.”

“Then why do I remember being human?” I asked.

The hag raised both shoulders. “The human girl you used to be also never existed. But if I were a vengeful dark prince who blamed you for my impending and excruciating death, I probably would curse you to remember the sister I took away.”

My insides crumbled along with the last scrap of hope that I would ever see Sicily, and a surge of grief rose from my crushed heart to the back of my throat and the backs of my eye. I lowered my head, letting tears roll down my cheeks and fall onto the fabric of my gossamer dress.