Tabitha - Royal Rebel, Kiana Dreamfairy [best adventure books to read .TXT] 📗

a vacation. She didn’t have the patience or the deviousness required to be a successful leader of the Fae, and she had no intention of developing either. Her parents might both have been sidhe—the noble race of Faerie—but she swore that sometimes she wished they’d been goblins or trolls or pixies or sprites or even a dryad and a satyr. Any type of Fae under the sun or moon would have been fine with her, so long as it wasn’t a member of either high court. Sometimes, she reflected, life as a Faerie princess pretty much sucked.

Thinking about it only steeled Tabitha’s resolve to screw the rules and seize the opportunity for her much needed vacation. In the human world, she’d be able to blend in for a little while, to be a nobody. She wouldn’t stand out, and with most of her magic drained from her by the unfamiliar surroundings, she wouldn’t have been able to make much in the way of waves if she tried. It sounded perfect.

She took one last careful look around, set Squit down on the ground beside her, and shouldered her small travel bag. Grinning, she flicked the imp and the pixie a jaunty wave.

“Take care, little friends,” she called, hurrying toward the shimmering Faerie gate and into the simple, predictable world of the humans.
Chapter III

Hex IceFly hadn’t gone laid in at least three months. He knew very well that this hardly qualified as an emergency, but he did consider it symptomatic of a larger issue. Not only had he not had sex in all that time—which was not inconsequential for a bachelor werewolf in his prime—but he also hadn’t gone on a date, gotten an uninterrupted night of sleep, watched an entire ball game, or take a day off. Considering all that, was it any wonder his mood edged toward cranky as he stalked through his 3am park partrol?

Technically, this wasn’t even his patrol, a fact that only contributed to his case of the grumps. As the second in command of the Patrol on the Forest Grounds—Hex had been in charge of the lead of Manhattan. That meant he got to assign shifts and theoretically give himself one off day now and then. Tonight should be his night off to get some rest. Unfortunately, the leader of the Faerie Squad who was supposed to be on duty seemed to be just a little bit pregnant, and her husband was not willing for her to leave their home.

IceFly could sympathize with the sentiment; his own instincts would have been driven him to react the same way if he’d had a mate. Something attached to the Lupine Y chromosome turned them into raging Neanderthals where the safety of their mates was concerned, but he was still single. He also still had an entire city to patrol and a security force already stretched thin to cover it.

He growled and stuffed his hands into his pockets as he stalked through the park, his sharp gaze constantly sweeping the surroundings for anything unusual.

You’d think by now he’d be used to the whole over-whelming thing. It had been like this for nearly six months, ever since the Council of Others and its equivalents from around the world had entered into secret negotiations with the humans. The delicate nature of the talkds necessitated an atmosphere of peace, no matter how tense, if the two sides were going to reach an agreement that didn’t lead to bloodshed on either side. And when you were negotiating with vampires, shape-shifters, Others, and human politicians, Hex reflected, bloodshed was always a possibility, no matter how hard he and his pack worked to prevent it.

The Council’s negotiations would alter the course of the future, for the Others, who had finally taken their first step out of hiding, and the humans, who now needed to acknowledge that so many of the things they believed to be safely fictional actually did walk among them. It meant asking the humans to discard centuries of fear and superstition to allow what many of them considered to me monsters to enjoy the same rights and legal protections as anyone else. So in contrast, beefing up Other security to be sure no one got out of line and did anything to frighten the humans into another Inquisition seemed like a wise course of action.

The Council had put the Clan in charge of making sure that the Others kept themselves in line and did nothing to frighten the humans into breaking off the talks. Since Hex was pack beta and his day job happened to be as head of security at the largest club for the
Others in this half of the world, it fell to him to coordinate that security force. Which was why he was currently on his third patrol in forty-eight hours instead of facedown in his mattress.

Heading north at the fork in his path, Hex considered all the changed he and his kind had faced over the past months. No one had really been prepared. Sure, Others had been debating about the Unveiling on and off for most of the last century, but that had a theoretical sort of thing, an “imagine if” approach to the future. It hadn’t prevented the shock of learning a few months ago that a radical sect called the Light of Truth had gathered enough evidence to take the decision out of their hands and reveal their existence to the humans whether they were ready or not.

That news had convinced the Council of Others that the time had come to take the first steps in claiming an open place in the world around them, hence the secret negotiations. Even the most optimistic members of the Council knew better than to break the news to the human public without first gaining some assurances from their governments that the rights of the nonhumans would be preserved. Optimistic did not equal foolish.

For their part, the Others were prepared to make certain none of their kind did anything stupid, like attack a human. Or even be seen within ten feet of one who happened to be dead, injured, or mildly inconvenienced. The last thing they needed was for the humans to abandon the bargaining table. Hex figured he was currently doing his best, and the best of at least three other people to boot.

Thankfully, things were staying pretty quiet—quiet enough that twenty-four-hour patrols probably weren’t strictly necessary, but you just never knew when that one problem you wanted to avoid would rear its ugly head.

Or scream bloody murder.

Before a sharp feminine cry had even faded from an “eek” to an echo, Hex had whipped around, pin-pointed the source of the sound, and launched himself toward it, sprinting through the trees in a blur of speed and swear words.

Chapter IV

Tabitha stepped out of the other side of the gate and into an inky blackness, sighing in irritation. Darn it, on of these days she was going to have to get a handle on those stupid time changes. She stepped forward into the dark, muttering to herself, and promptly tripped over something immovable laid directly in her path. It might help her vacation relaxation plan if she didn’t go stumbling around blindly and walking into things like an idiot. She paused for a moment to let her eyes adjust from the bright daylight of Faerie to the dimness of a Manhattan night, or at least one in the depths of the city’s wildest park.

It only took a few seconds before she could see almost as well as she could have in the middle of a sunny afternoon. Hitching her bag higher onto her shoulder, she scanned the area around her and stepped over the fat tree root in front of her bare feet. She headed toward the park entrance, confident she knew where she was going. This was the same gate she’d used on her other trips to the human world, so at least things looked familiar. And she knew exactly where she wanted to go—straight into the East Village to see if any of her favorite bands were playing. Some frenetic music in an overcrowded human club sounded like the perfect way to spend her evening. She couldn’t thing of much else that would be as drastically different from a night at the Fae courts.

At this time of night, her path through the woods peared deserted, but Tabitha didn’t plan to jeopardize her vacation by taking chances. She made a subtle gesture with her hand and stirred up a little of the magic inside her to cast a small glamour. She had planned ahead and brought a small reserve of magic with her from Faerie in case of emergency. She could have spared her reserves and tried to gather up some the scarce fragments of Fae magic that managed to linger in the human world, but such scraps were few and far between here, and what magic did exist in this world was almost completely inaccessible to her. No one had eve really explained why that was—why the Fae couldn’t tap into the magic inherent to the human world and why the rare mortal witch who had visited Faerie over the last couple of millennia had found it equally impossible to harness the magic of that world. Something in the molecular fabric of the two worlds made their force incompatible. Like oil and water, Tabitha and the magic of the mortal world didn’t mix, but she didn’t expect to use much magic during her trip. That had been one of the reasons she’d opted to come here. She could afford to tap into what she’d brought with her.

The little shimmer that accompanied the spell barely registered in the darkness, but it made a