Gimmicks and Glamour by Lauren Melissa Ellzey

Author:Lauren Melissa Ellzey [Ellzy, Lauren Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Caris leaves me on the bed and starts rummaging through her dresser drawer. Shockingly, she unearths a knife from beneath her clothes.

“What’s that?” I ask, trying to affect the casualness of someone encountering a random photo album or secret pack of cigarettes.

Caris turns the hilt over her palm. “Insurance,” she says simply.

The glint in Caris’s eyes foretells that we won’t be simply chatting with Wolf. Luring him out isn’t where this afternoon will end. She wants to stop him in his tracks. While I’m fed up with faerie mischief, the knife is less comforting and more terrifying. I’ve always known that faeries are dangerous, but watching Caris run her fingers down the knife’s hilt confirms my worst fears.

“What are you going to use that for?”

She raises an eyebrow. “It’s for you.”

The only weapon I’ve wielded is a tennis racket. Sure, I’ve shoved a few classmates in the school restroom, the ones who dared to put me down for kissing a few girls at a handful of parties, and the idiots that made jokes about me missing school to pick cotton with my dad. But knives are different. Its menacingly sharp edge could actually hurt someone.

“You keep it,” I say.

“Don’t be ungrateful. The blade is made of iron. That’s more effective than anything else a human could use against the fae.”

“Then why do you have it?”

Caris sits beside me on the bed. “This isn’t the only weapon I have.”

A lifetime of avoiding assassination isn’t anything like the stories about princesses that I read under the covers when I was a little kid. While I’ve been waking up to my phone alarm and packing school lunches in the kitchen, Caris has most likely been running scared. Even so, she calmly places the knife into my jacket pocket like she’s passing me a note in the hallway.

I hand the knife right back to her, careful to keep the blade off her skin. “It’s yours, so you keep it.”

Her eyes light up in amusement. “Stop being cute. Wolf is nothing like me. Unseelie are the most unpredictable foe you could face. He’ll use your hesitancy against you.”

“That’s why you’re coming with me, right?”

“Is that why?”

If Caris answered me this way just two nights ago, I would have thought she was being carelessly coy or poking fun at me for personal entertainment. Now I see through the illusion. She’s avoiding my question because she doesn’t want to answer honestly. Realizing this doesn’t make her well-crafted response any easier to decode, though.

So then why is she coming with me to take on Wolf? After all, she mentioned that the Unseelie Court that decimated her kingdom couldn’t hurt her anymore, all thanks to a spellbinding treaty. That makes Wolf my dilemma. Yet here she is, knife in hand, preparing to patch up my problems. But faeries don’t fix anything. They start the fires.

She hops off the bed, then urges me by the elbow. As we head out, we find Tim and Tina watching a basketball game. The roar of the crowd fills the room.

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