12. Finnian

TWELVE

FINNIAN

“Here, Finn, you look like you could use this.” Taryn’s tone is gentle as she places a glass of whiskey in my line of sight. I accept it and down the contents before handing it back. “You know what? I’ll just go grab the bottle.”

I suppose her concern is valid but I can’t find the words to reassure her like I normally would. I haven’t said anything for the last ten minutes. I just keep reading the letter over and over, trying to process everything my grandmother wrote. That she thinks this is my purpose, my destiny. I don’t even know if I’ve ever believed in fate or destiny. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea that I don’t have control over my own life, that I don’t get to choose what I do and when I do it.

And now my grandmother is speaking to me in cryptic riddles from a letter she wrote a hundred and twenty years ago talking about how I’m supposed to save a place I’ve never been, nor am I able to go.

“Finn? I know I shouldn’t center myself in this moment, but you’re starting to freak me out. Can you at least blink so I know you’re not catatonic?”

Shoving my fingers through my hair, I pull myself out of my stupor and meet Taryn’s concerned gaze. “Sorry, I just… I don’t know what I’m supposed to make of all this.”

“I think it’s pretty amazing, don’t you?” Taryn lightly traces her fingers across the lines on the top page. “More than a century ago, your grandmother sat with ink and quill next to a gas lamp and poured her story onto these pages for you before you were even born.”

Complex emotions form a knot in my throat. “It’s hard to get my head around it, to be honest,” I say. “I’ve never been needed for anything before.”

Taryn places a warm hand on my arm. “My brother needed you. He couldn’t have found me without your help, Finn.”

I nod, keeping my eyes on the letter. “It was the first time I felt like I was a part of something bigger than myself.” Turning my head, I stare into her lavender eyes, and I swear there’s a tugging sensation in my chest coaxing me closer to her. “And I’m really fucking glad, because now you’re here.”

“Here as in out of captivity?” Her gaze flicks down to my mouth and back up again. “Or here…with you.”

Unable to stop myself, I lift a hand and brush the back of my knuckles over her soft skin, from cheek to chin. Then I gently press the pad of my thumb to her lips before I replace it with my own and seal our mouths in an unhurried, sensual kiss.

The black of her pupils grow bigger, and my nose fills with the delicious scent of her body’s reaction, which is triggering mine within the confines of my boxer briefs. It takes a Herculean effort to regain control and not let the moment devolve into something more.

“Both,” I say hoarsely.

She touches her lips with her fingers, then smiles wide. “Good answer. What’s in that?” she asks, pointing to a smaller envelope peeking out from inside the main one that I didn’t notice.

“I don’t know.” Setting the letter off to the side, I retrieve the envelope that’s about the size of a typical Thank You card and pull out a parchment page folded in half. Like all of the paper, it’s no longer a crisp white and the edges of one side are rough like it was torn from a larger page to fit properly.

On the front, in the identical handwriting as in the letter, are two words: The Beginning.

Taryn and I share a look, then I unfold it for us to read together.

Seek the home of water sprites

who play inside the dancing lights.

Skies of glass where flowers bloom,

loosened stone is parchment’s tomb.

One is done with petal fire,

two then three unearth the spire.

By the time you get this, the first battle in this war will have been lost. We cannot afford to lose another. Take care, dearest Finnian, and may Rhiannon guide and protect you on your quest.

This all just got way weirder. Not only am I supposedly Faerie’s only hope of not being decimated, but now my dead grandmother whom I’ve never met appears to be sending me on some kind of Indiana Jones scavenger hunt for a hidden treasure. I suddenly need to get up and move.

Taryn takes the torn paper from me as I stand, which frees up my hands to yank on the roots of my hair until sharp pain lights up my scalp. Before I give myself bald patches, I drag my hands down my face and start pacing in front of the couch as I try to make sense of all this.

“Taryn, just so I know that I’m not misinterpreting something here, I’m supposed to decipher my dead grandmother’s cryptic messages in order to go on some kind of quest to fulfill what she believed is my destiny to save all of Faerie—a place I’m not even fucking allowed into—from imminent destruction. Is that what you’re getting, too?”

Looking from the letter to the note and back to the letter, she nods. “Yyyyyep. That’s what I’m getting. She said this clue is the beginning, so I guess we start here?”

She’s holding the small paper up, but that’s not what my attention snags on. “We?”

“Yeah, we .”

I plant my feet and cross my arms over my chest. “No way. I told your brother I’d keep you safe until he’s able to clean house. We have no idea what Edevane is up to or who might be working for him. Galivanting all over Vegas is putting a target on your back. That’s the exact opposite of keeping you safe.”

She laughs with indignation and rises to stand directly in front of me. “First off, I want to make it abundantly clear that I’m only here to appease my brother. If I want to walk out that door, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it, and I don’t need your protection. I can take care of myself. Mystic conjurer and all-around badass, remember?”

That’s right. I almost forgot that she isn’t only a conjurer—one of the specialty lines of fae, similar to what humans think of as witches—but she’s also a Mystic, meaning she’s one of the very rare who have extremely heightened magical abilities. Only one is born every seven generations within any family line with specialty powers.

“Still, Taryn?—”

“Secondly,” she cuts in, jabbing a finger into my chest for good measure. “Just because I left Faerie doesn’t mean I don’t care what happens to the realm and the innocent Elementals who live there. My mother —bitch that she is—doesn’t deserve death. If anything, I have a much more vested interest in saving Faerie than you do.”

I deliberately avoid thinking about the sting her words cause. I’ve always felt a sense of loss for a place that might as well be made up like the humans think it is since it’s completely out of my reach. My brothers have never understood my obsession with Faerie; they think we already live in the greatest place ever, in this realm or any other. And Taryn obviously has complex feelings about her homeland based on her reaction last night. So I’m not going to turn this into a debate over things that don’t matter.

Her lavender eyes are narrowed, practically sparking with ire, and her jaw is set with chin lifted to glare up at me properly as she waits for my rebuttal. And gods help me, the fire within her only serves to make me admire her more than I already do.

Enclosing my right hand around the finger still jabbed into my sternum, I slowly lift it to my mouth and kiss the tip. “You’re right,” I say simply, lowering our hands and reluctantly releasing her.

Her eyebrows shoot toward her hairline. “I am?”

I nod. “You are, and I apologize. Just because my grandmother was the seer who had the foresight about Faerie and thinks I have a part to play in all this doesn’t mean that no one else does.”

Stepping back, she clears her throat to hide her surprise. “Right. Good, then. So, should we put our super sleuth hats on and try to solve this mystery?”

“Let’s do it.” We return to the couch and take another look at the smaller note.

Taryn points to the last lines on the paper. “What do you think she means by us already losing a battle?”

My brows pull together as I run through recent events. “Dozens of innocent Darks were killed when Edevane sicced the New Purity Order on us. And even though we came out on top in the end, tragic and senseless deaths of our people could definitely be considered a lost battle.”

“Gods, Finn, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize…”

The anguish in her voice pulls my attention from my spinning thoughts. Her eyes shimmer with unshed tears for a fraction of a second before she blinks them back and regains her warrior composure. “He had you for six months already by that point, Taryn. There was nothing you could have done then, but you’re helping me now. We’re going to figure this out and stop him before he has a chance to hurt anyone else.”

She nods, resolute once more. “I don’t think that’s the battle Moira would be referring to, though. Her entire letter to you is about the war to save Faerie. Yes, the loss of Dark life is tragic, but in the grand scheme of things, that wouldn’t have any impact on anything in Faerie.”

“Shit, you’re right.” She begins to fidget with her Armas pendant, and that’s when it hits me. “She’s talking about the Tri-Stone.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the artifact I told you Edevane stole from our temple. It was a smooth, obsidian triangle enclosed in a glass case above the altar and supposedly a representation of the Night Court’s connection with Rhiannon and the moon. Except that’s not what it was at all. It was the spearhead from the Spear of Assal that was disguised with a glamour.”

Surprise registers on her face. “The sun god’s magical bloodthirsty spear? His son gave it to the Lights after Lugh died and it no longer worked. How did the Night Court end up with it?”

From what little Dmitri told me, Taryn left Faerie shortly after our exile, so she might know some of what happened between the Celestial Courts, but she definitely won’t know about all the shit Edevane has pulled over the last year while he held her captive. Trying to condense everything into only what’s relevant to our current situation isn’t going to be easy.

I expel a heavy sigh. “That’s where things get complicated. How much do you know about why your mother banished us?”

“Only basic rumor mill stuff. Something about an affair between King Cormac and Queen—” Her hand covers her mouth as she puts two and two together. “Ohhhhh.”

“Yeah. Not exactly a good look for Grandma Moira, the most benevolent queen in Night Court history. But everyone makes mistakes, I guess, and she remained a beloved member of the crown until her death.

“Anyway, Edevane claims that according to a journal he found belonging to his grandfather, Cormac, that Moira stole the spear from the Day Court palace during their affair. He thinks she discovered how to make the spear work and planned on assassinating Queen Aine and usurping her title as One True Queen. But to ensure no one else could use it before her, Moira broke it into two pieces, intending to hide them separately within Faerie.

“Edevane claims she told Cormac that she’d already hidden the shaft but was holding the spearhead when Aine banished us all to Joshua Tree, which is how it ended up here. And instead of relinquishing even that much to Cormac, she disguised it and told everyone Rhiannon gave it to her as a gift for our people. Maybe the battle lost is Edevane getting his hands on the spearhead.”

“That could be,” she says, then picks up the letter to look it over again. “So Moira and Cormac were lovers. Moira stole the spear from her lover, which Edevane believes was because Moira wanted to use it to kill Aine to become the OTQ. But Moira claims that she had a vision of Cormac destroying Faerie so she ‘took matters into her own hands,’ which must be when she stole the spear. There are definite discrepancies in the stories. We have to be missing some details.”

“Maybe there’s more information wherever this clue leads us. It’s the only thing we have to go on, so I guess we do as she says and start at ‘the beginning’.”

Taryn gets to her feet. “Let me change quick, then we can head over to the Bellagio.”

I stand too. “Why the Bellagio?”

“Seek the h ome of water sprites who play inside the dancing lights,” she repeats from the clue. “I’m sure lots of places in Vegas have water features that are lit up, but the Bellagio is the one most famous for lights that dance.”

Realization dawns on me. “It also has Conservatory and Botanical Gardens. ‘Skies of glass where flowers bloom.’ Taryn, you’re a genius.”

“I know,” she says smugly, heading toward her room. “But don’t get too excited.”

“Why’s that?”

“I have no fucking clue what the rest of it means.”