Arabesque: A Wings Companion

Chapter Twenty-Seven

As soon as the sun rose, a murky light on the far horizon, they all moved out to the balcony so Rowen could photosynthesize. Tamani ordered a pot of coffee up from the restaurant in the lobby and Rowen learned what that odd bitter smell—and taste—she associated with both Shawn and Mitchell actually was.

There was no way she could ever drink such a thing.

Tamani spoke in a calm, even voice, imparting knowledge Rowen had always taken for granted. He spoke briefly of the nature of the fae as the pinnacle of the plant kingdom, of seasonal birth and how it translated into different kinds of magic—but he omitted a lot, too, like the existence of Avalon and its gates.

It was a smooth, practiced explanation, a reminder to Rowen that explaining these things to Laurel, the amnesiac changeling, had been his life's purpose since before Rowen was even a seed. Meghan sat unspeaking, her hands wrapped around her steaming mug, brows scrunched together. Shawn, on the other hand, questioned everything. He interrupted, badgered, demanded proof and clarification of everything Tamani claimed.

He didn't ask Rowen anything; only Tamani. Rowen wasn't sure if she should feel rebuffed or not. He was holding her at arm's length, that was for certain. But why? Because rejecting all this meant rejecting her? Because he was simply too emotionally involved with her to accept such world-shaking information from her lips? Or did he feel more and more deeply betrayed with each new revelation, the way she'd felt increasingly guilty over her lies?

She wanted to burst in, protest that her untruths had been necessary, that she's never expected to find herself in any sort of intimate relationship with any human. That she hadn't expected her lies to matter. Several times she had opened her mouth to speak, but the only words she could come up with seemed woefully inadequate.

But finally there was no way to remain out of the conversation. "So she can change the way things look?" Shawn asked.

She. Not you. And addressed to Tamani, as though Rowen weren't even in the room. The pain of that stabbed her like a knife. She swallowed hard as Tamani tilted his head in her direction. "You want proof of that one too?"

Everything was still for several seconds. "Yes," Shawn finally said, his voice firm. He turned and his deep-brown eyes fixed on her. "I do."

It felt like a challenge. Rowen said nothing, only blinked slowly and, almost without thought, illusioned the empty coffeepot on the table into a tall potted iris.

Meghan gasped. Shawn's hands, which had been sitting relaxed on his knees, were now clenched into tight fists. They'd felt the compulsion of Spring magic first hand—as well as its strange musical counterpart—but flashy Sparkler magic was apparently harder to explain away. As a Summer faerie, Rowen was well-conditioned to doubt the world as it merely appeared to her eyes, but it seemed the nature of humans to be convinced by what they saw.

"Do you even know how to dance?" Meghan asked, venom in her voice.

Rowen would rather have been slapped than asked that question by this human; she very nearly gave a hot-tempered reply. If she hadn't felt so weary, she probably would have. Instead, she let go of her illusion and leaned back on the chaise with narrowed eyes. "No illusion. Just a lot of hard work. Illusions aren't solid; I couldn't dance with a partner if I wasn't really doing it."

Meghan pursed her lips in a way that managed to convey both her satisfaction with that response and her basically total contempt for Rowen.

"What am I supposed to say?" Shawn asked, sounding a thousand miles away, for all he was close enough to touch. "What are we supposed to say?"