Bad Fae | romantasy | Bad Fae #1

Chapter Seventeen

Once I began, plants came easily to me. I could grow them, control them, craft them out of nothing, make them bloom and die over and over again. It felt like such a simple thing; simply will it and it would happen. Within a week, I had mastered it. At least to the extent I needed it.

The shadows...not so much.

It was as though the shadows were teasing me. Showing me what I was capable of and then refusing to give me access again. Then again, Dain was shadow. I wouldn't put it past him to be withholding that power from me for his own amusement. Not that he seemed to notice I'd been playing with power. If that was even something sidhe could do. I assumed so because all power was glamour and even I could sense when glamour was being used. But knowing it was being currently used was one thing. Could Dain tell that I'd been using it after the fact?

Either way, it would make far more sense that the shadows just knew it would annoy me to be unhelpful because Dain revelled in annoying me, and they were doing their own thing.

When I wasn't training with Phin or Dain, or steadily making my way through the library with Ninleyn, Venali tried to help me wield shadow again, but they either wouldn't let him, or I'd never really had control over them in the first place.

And there was Myrrh. An odd blip in the sense of normalcy I'd developed over the previous few months. It still surprised me when she woke me up, helped me dress, helped me get ready for bed. She didn't really speak to me. I didn't know if she thought my human taint was beneath her or if she thought she was beneath whatever she believed me to be to Dain.

"Tell me what you feel," Venali said, his finger trailing over my stomach as we lay outside in the dappled sunshine.

I smiled at him, knowing that wasn't what he was talking about. "It's like everything inside me is bigger."

His eyebrow rose cheekily, and I laughed but didn't regret my words.

"Your high opinion of yourself aside..." I said pointedly and he grinned. "No. It's like I've been in a cell my whole life, rock close on all sides, and now I'm...outside. The air spreads far and wide in every direction, I can breathe, but the earth is firm beneath my feet. I feel centred. Grounded. Like I'm actually alive now."

His smile widened. "The fae in you feels everything more keenly."

"And the mortal in me?" I asked as I crawled to straddle him.

His hands went to my waist as he relaxed back onto the grass. "I feel like the only appropriate answer here is a comment on how the mortal in you will feel my fae in you more keenly."

"But?"

"But I couldn't think how to put it more eloquently than that, which seemed...unseemly." He shrugged coyly and I laughed.

"Aren't you fae supposed to be master wordsmiths? You're how many millions of millennia old and you couldn't come up with an eloquent dick joke?"

Venali rolled us so he lay over me, his knee between my legs. "Perhaps I'm rendered stunned into silence by the beauty and poise and elegance in front of me?"

"Perhaps you're full of shit," I teased.

He dropped his lips to mine as he murmured against them, "Perhaps you need to learn to take a compliment."

"Is that what you've named your cock? Because I thought I took that quite well."

"Oh, Yana. You undo me."

I wrapped my arms around his neck as I looked into those silver eyes. "And here I thought the fae couldn't lie. Or are you falling in love with me?" I sassed and the smile in his eyes shone brightly.