The Fox’s Tale

“Okay, yeah, figured that part out with all the Crown Princess this and Crown Princess that was coming out of Lucas’s mouth,” replied Grant.

“She’s also destined to become the queen of both faerie realms.” Lee piped up. The team looked at him in surprise. “What? I’m one of her bodyguards. My whole family serves the Sinclairs in some capacity.”

“You knew she was a Fae all this time?” Matt asked; his eyes narrowed in suspicion. Lee shrugged. “You could have warned the rest of us!” Matt protested.

“I wasn’t allowed to,” said Lee in an apologetic tone. “Strictly prohibited, and like hell was I going to cross that line.”

Everyone made grunting noises of understanding and I sighed. “At any rate, somebody wants in on the power she’s set to inherit. They’ve been trying to hurt her since she was a baby. They killed her mother trying to get to her.”

“But Mrs. Sinclair just left the room ten minutes ago.” Sam asked, confused.

“Dude, did you miss the part where Jones called her ‘my daughter?’” snapped Scott.

“Oh. My bad. Shit, no wonder she’s so good at basketball.” Sam stopped talking.

“We think,” I continued, “that it’s a plot to usurp both thrones. It started out with just trying to trap Ellery’s mother into marriage to the culprit, but that didn’t go as planned and they’ve been trying to stop us from being together, again we think, so that she will have to marry this psycho.”

“That doesn’t make any fucking sense. Ellery would never marry anyone against her will, and she certainly wouldn’t let him rule.” Andy looked utterly confused.

“The thing about Faeries is that the females mark the males that they want as the father of their children. Once she does that she can’t have anyone else’s kids.” My teammates all started staring at me and I was acutely aware that I only had on pants.

“She hasn’t marked me yet! I have to mark her first and there’s all this shit that comes with that. Bottom line is we’re too young to have kids, but the longer we wait to mark each other the more opportunities someone has to come in and mark her themselves and force her to mark them. Then their kids would inherit.”

“They also seem to be pretty hell bent on killing you,” said Matt.

I brushed that off. “Nah, they just don’t want me to mate with Ellery.”

“No dude, their orders were to kill you and take Ellery prisoner. We were the extras.” This time it was Nick who spoke.

“How do you know that?” I demanded.

“Mary,” they answered in unison.

Lee elaborated. “The guy Ellery left alive was just a minion of minions as she put it, but apparently, whatever Mary can do with the living is even more terrifying than what Quinn can do with the dead.”

“Kill the fox, capture the faerie, and the rest are collateral. The person who hired them made that explicit. They had to bring proof that you were dead.” Scott delivered the news as gently as he could.

I sat there stunned, unable to speak, as my mind replayed all the times in my life when I had been hurt or almost hurt in some weird way: the kelpie incident at Lake Inglewood, the food poisoning where I was the only victim, when I fell from the monkey bars at school and broke my arm.

There was a car accident that had injured my father instead of me when I was twelve, the coyotes at Cumberland, the crap that went down at the Twelfth Night Ball, the silver mist at school, Levi’s assassination attempt, and now this.

“You okay, Xander?” asked Matt.

“Yeah.” My reply came out thick, and I cleared my throat. “Yeah. It’s just….” My thoughts drifted to how the High Council was pushing for the marking ceremony to be sooner rather than later, and then to the book of Faerie Lore and the section on Others.

It stated that if one half of the couple lost their Other before they marked them that they were frequently granted another. The final words in that chapter flashed in my mind. ‘The pain of losing one’s Other is often fatal, unless the marking ritual is incomplete.’

“Holy shit, there are two of them.”

“What do you mean there are two of them?” asked Scott.

I stood up and started pacing. “Two different types of attacks with different purposes. One where they want me dead; and one where they want it to seem necessary for me to mark and impregnate Ellery as soon as possible. Someone wants my future kid and someone wants my wife!”

I stormed back and forth across our apartment ranting. “Well, they’re not getting either. I will kill every last one of them if I have to.”

“Kill who? Who do you think is behind this?” asked Lee.

“Alexander.” Aurelia stood outside the bedroom doors. “Fitzgerald has asked me to remind you to remain calm. I am leaving so that Ellery’s powers are not amplified. I only remained as long as I did to enhance his abilities.”

I took a few deep breaths and tried to calm down. I thought of Ellery coaching me through the free throws during tryouts and settled down.

“Aurelia,” I said, catching her before she left the apartment. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but none of us would be here if you aren’t who you are.”

She smiled. “So she finally breathed fire did she? Good for her.” She spotted my jacket on the back of a chair. She stroked it and looked at me. “And this has also served you well, has it not?”

“That’s not, it wasn’t,” I stumbled over my words, horrified that I might have been wearing her childhood dragon skin.

“No, not mine. My younger brother. You can thank him at your wedding.” She nodded once and slipped out our front doors. I sat down determined to remain calm while I waited for the green light to join Ellery. Unfortunately, my resolve was tested almost immediately.