Chapter 16

Sixteen

WESLEY

T his was the beast that had broken free from the Winter court ice and devoured the fae, ripping me free from that nightmare and into this one. I shoved Finn behind me and stared up at the dragon wondering if this was where it all ended. Other than the nightmare of the slime eating the forest, I hadn’t had a vision in ages.

Where had the man the dragon had been gone, the werewolf king as Sebastian thought of him. Turned to darkness? I met the dragon’s gaze with defiance, unwilling to become a slave again to another nightmare will not my own. The Summer king could make demands, but I learned to avoid him, which would negate any commands he wanted to give.

A trick of the modern fae or something more? Perhaps running from them would have always saved me from their madness.

“You brought me here,” I told the beast. “Now you try to kill me? Why not end me in the Winter court like you did so many others? What do you want from me?”

The heat of its breath warmed my face like a late summer breeze, thankfully without any stench of death or rot. It could have opened its jaws and swallowed us both whole. I glared at it with defiance, tired of the cat and mouse game.

The dragon growled a nearly undistinguishable word, “Mine.”

“Uh,” Finn said. “Did that thing talk?”

“Fae,” I said again. Maybe? My lifetime of visions fed me glimpses of this monster, and the man trapped in stone, but I couldn’t recall anything specifically pointing to the beast being fae. “Are you fae?” I asked the dragon.

“Yesss,” it hissed, and then “No.”

“Well, that’s clear as mud,” I grumbled.

“Mine,” the beast growled again.

“Articulate. The mortal is mine. Okay? How about you let us go and we’ll all have a better day.”

The beast narrowed its gaze, focus on Finn who huddled behind me. The cabin crackled and snapped with the fire eating away at it, heat blazing at our backs. Contained to the cabin, as none of the brush touching it caught.

“Mate…” A dark ripple of shadow slid free from the dark, a leathery wing with hooks on the edges reached for me. I flinched, taking a half step back, which made Finn stumble and wrap his arm around me from behind to steady us both. The dragon snarled, and I expected an attack, but it huffed and reared back, then vanished into a poof of shadows as if it had never existed.

My heart raced, the final word of the dragon weaving a thousand ideas, none of them good. Of course, fate sought to fuck with me. Centuries of doing their bidding and now they had mated me to the Autumn king?

“Bitches!” I screamed. “Heartless witches! Manipulating my life like this. I don’t want it!” The forest stood in silent eeriness around us. The crackling fire of the fallen cabin snapped and popped in the otherwise soundless woods.

“Did that thing say you were its mate?” Finn asked.

“Yes,” I said as I ripped myself out of his grasp, and stalked away from him. With the cabin gone, once again I’d have to find shelter or change forms. If there had been any glimpse of daylight or warmth, it vanished with the departure of the dragon, leaving the sky overcast with clouds. Rain spit down on us, landing in large fat droplets warning of a downpour. “Dammit!”

Finn followed close behind. I wanted to be away from everyone and everything. Cry in the rain or run from the nightmare, but it wasn’t fair to him. This was my nightmare, my curse. Why was he even here?

“And why won’t you fucking show me anything?” I shouted at the sky. Centuries of brutal visions, to now being blinded to my own future.

I found the stream as water began to rain sheets around us, the chill etching through my skin and deep into my core. “I’m going to change,” I told him, pausing to glance back. His wide eyes made me freeze. The sound of his racing heart muffled beneath the rain. “It’s fine. My other form generates more heat.”

“Mate…. Not like the Australian mate?” Finn asked hesitantly.

“Like bound by the hags of fate to be tied to a monster!” I yelled at the woods, which didn’t answer. Bad enough I’d served Winter for a time, survival forcing me to bow and simp for Zephyr who treated me like he preferred to have me shackled at his feet. My dreams of saving the Summer king and finding a final peaceful rest away from the nightmares had shattered.

The man in stone should have killed me. I wanted it, if I couldn’t have peace and freedom, why stay? Why continue to run much as the Summer king had? At least he’d gotten his perfect match in the end. Was it too much to want a happy ending of my own?

That had been the elementals twisting his fate. Who had more power, the hags of eternity with their disastrous weaving or the elementals? Or did they work together?

“They cursed me to see everyone’s future but mine, and then tied me to a nightmare. Is it too much to hope for freedom if I can’t have love? Even if that freedom is an end to my life? Can’t they saddle another poor bastard with the curse of the Stag and my fucking Vision and save me the trouble?”

Finn flinched at my shouting, the two of us drenched from the rain. “You can see the future? Like you saw we’d be here?”

“No. I never saw you at all.” Ever. And wasn’t that strange. The moment he’d entered this world and across my path I should have gotten some inkling vision of his fate, especially if it were meant to be short and gruesome. My sight specialized in that nasty nightmare. “The last vision I had, beyond that dream of the woods dissolving around us, was meeting the dragon, and that’s already happened.” I gazed at him, young and handsome, but ordinary to my sight, a thousand unanswered questions about him. “Who are you? Why does this world want you? I know why it wants me. That thing thinks I’m its mate.”

“You don’t get a choice?” Finn asked.

“About what?” I demanded. Did I ever have a choice about anything?

“The mate thing. Is it because you’re fae? Can’t you tell it no and walk away?”

“Since we’re both trapped in this world, the answer seems to be no.” I turned away from him and stripped off my shirt. “Don’t look at me. I’m going to change and find us some shelter from the rain. Stay close if you want to keep warm.”

When I glanced back, he had turned away, giving me the illusion of privacy, but a shiver ran through his lean form. I had to get us both someplace safe for a while. I shifted into my Stag form, pawed at the ground to bring attention back. He glanced my way and hesitantly approached.

He snatched up my discarded clothing, then reached careful fingertips to my flank, my back higher than his head, and sank his fingers into my fur. A soft breath slipped out of him as he pressed himself to my side. His chilled body ached like an ice cube, but I let him lean into my warmth, and guided us toward the spot I’d slept when I first arrived. The field of clover stretched between a thick canopy of trees, and a layer of moss above eased the flow of rain.

Finn said nothing as I guided him to a narrow opening in the root of a tree. He climbed in, and I blocked the opening with my body, settling down outside as a barrier and heater all at once. The blaze of my renewing fae energy would last for days as long as I munched on the clover around us. He would need food and water. Once the rain stopped, I’d search for another way to help him escape before the world killed him. There was no reason my nightmare end had to be his.