Desert Tales: A Wicked Lovely Companion Novel

CHAPTER 4

Inside the town of Silver Ridge, everything was faded. In the desert around the town, the colors were the beautiful hues of cactus and desert wildflowers, vibrant skies and impossibly rendered clouds, shimmers of serpents and flutters of birds. Silver Ridge, however, had a weathered tone. Sand and heat consumed everything here, but even so, the town had a beauty all its own. The buildings were a strange mix, as if architecture from various times and places had been thrown together in a weird hodgepodge.

Rika remembered when Silver Ridge was only a speck of a possibility, when adventurous miners came here in search of fortunes, when their families put down roots, and when the mishmash of people became a town. The peculiarity of knowing the town’s history so well comforted her as she walked. She’d watched this small outpost of humanity grow in the great expanse of nature; she’d walked among them and drawn portraits of their faces as they came, aged, and died. She felt protective of the mortals who lived there now, but several in particular evoked a fiercer sense of concern.

She stopped midway into town, not wanting to get too close to the railroad tracks that stretched like a line of beautiful poison on the earth. Steel, because it was created from iron, was poisonous to faery. Humans—without knowing why they gravitated toward the steel—often lingered here at the edge of the tracks. A few decades ago, they’d created a park of sorts, filled with metal sculptures and benches, but even before that, mortals had clustered here since the tracks had been installed.

On the edge of the rail yard were faeries who had been stopped by the metal as if it were a wall they could not climb. They watched the mortals: Jayce, Del, and Kayley. Del no longer wore his bandana, and Rika noticed that his blue mohawk now had white tips. It suited him, his vibrant hair against his suntanned skin, but it struck her as being so different from Jayce. Del’s mohawk with its ever-changing color was much like his carefully chosen clothes: proof that he put time into looking like he didn’t worry over his appearance. By contrast, Jayce truly didn’t pay much attention to the way he looked. He had a splash of color in his dark dreads, but that had been a whim. Rika knew; she’d watched. Everything about Jayce was as real with or without an audience; she admired that about him.

Rika passed the faeries, putting herself between them and the mortals. She could go closer to the dangerous metal than the other faeries could because she’d been mortal first, but she still couldn’t walk all the way up to it. Being even this close to the steel made her queasy and weak. Fortunately, the nearby faeries couldn’t approach it either, but sooner or later, Jayce would have to leave the protection of the railroad tracks and thus become vulnerable.

Although she wasn’t convinced that they would actually harm him, she couldn’t risk it. She made a noise, not quite a word but the start of one, before she realized what she’d done. Much like seeing him fall and reacting without thought, she’d done the same thing now. The result was the same as well: she’d begun talking to Jayce when he could see her. By her choice, she’d broken her own rules on keeping him at a safe distance.

Before she could think of how foolish it was, Jayce turned his head and saw her. “It’s you. . . .” He smiled and took a hesitant step toward her. “Where did you come from?”

Rika didn’t move. She opened her mouth to speak, to find some answer that was true. She settled on, “Out there.”

She made a vague gesture northeast, toward the desert, or more accurately, much farther away, across an ocean to a land where it grew cold, where there were seasons and so much greenery that her heart ached a little to think of it. Home. She couldn’t stand being there now, not after so long with winter’s pall on her, but she still remembered the beauty.

Jayce left Del and Kayley, moving farther from the safety of the railroad tracks. “You look like you’re not feeling well.”

When she didn’t answer, his arm went around her. He led her toward a wooden bench. Farther still from the tracks. Palm trees, looking battered and still proud despite it, cast narrow shadows.

“I knew we should’ve had you checked out. I couldn’t figure out how you vanished, where you were hiding. I looked in the caves where we were. I—” He stopped himself nervously before continuing, “I almost thought you were a dream, but Del saw you too.”

She stared at Jayce. Bruises shadowed his cheek. His ripped shirt had been replaced, but this one looked tattered too. A steel chain-link bracelet hung on his left wrist. Fortunately, since he held her with his right arm, the steel wasn’t likely to brush against her and injure her.

“Are you real, Rika?” he asked quietly.

“I’m real,” she assured him. That part she could say with certainty.

“Are you sure? You seemed almost like a dream earlier, vanishing when I looked away.” He was flirting, but there was an undercurrent of something else there. He might not consciously know that she wasn’t human, but an instinctive wariness in him tangled with a desperate hopefulness she’d seen when he drew his more fanciful images. Jayce caught her gaze as he said, “A beautiful girl shows up, saves me, and vanishes into the desert. . . . It’s either a dream or magic.”

Rika couldn’t speak. He thinks I’m beautiful. She should be thinking about the fact that he was implying that she’d vanished, but it was his compliment that made her stare back at him in wonder.

“You did save me, you know. I’m not broken anywhere. Just bruises,” he said in a voice so low that it felt like it was only the two of them in the world.

They were not alone though: not only were there faeries, but Del and Kayley also stood nearby. Del was watching them. Rika could see the couple in her peripheral vision. Kayley spoke to him, but his attention was fixed on Jayce. Despite the twinge she felt at their protective gazes, she was grateful that Jayce had such good friends.

Jayce turned to look over his shoulder, noticing that Rika was looking past him. “They’re okay.” He looked back at her and smiled. “Are you always this shy?”

Without having quite meant to, Rika nodded. She wasn’t used to talking to people. Months would pass when her only conversations were with Sionnach or with Jayce—who until today didn’t hear her because of faery glamour. When she had been the Winter Girl, she hadn’t exactly been beset by social invitations either. She spoke to whichever mortal girl Keenan tried to seduce, to Keenan, and to his advisors and court members. None of them had been faeries she could call friends: they all wanted Keenan to succeed; her job was to thwart him. Those were the terms of the curse that had ensnared her when he’d picked her for the test. If she’d been his missing queen, she would’ve freed him, been beside him for eternity. If she had refused the test, she’d have been his subject—one of the flighty Summer Girls who frolicked and danced. When she took the test and failed, she’d been cursed to carry winter and sworn to attempt to convince the next girl to refuse him. Even though she’d risked everything for Keenan—and lost—she’d been cursed to have to work against him as he tried to find the missing Summer Queen. Her situation hadn’t exactly made her popular.

She forced herself to look only at Jayce. After an awkward silent moment, several heartbeats too long, Rika blurted, “I’ve watched you climb before.”

What a stupid thing to say!

Jayce smiled though. “I wish I’d seen you then . . . maybe you wouldn’t have run away earlier.”

Tentatively, she said, “I don’t need to run right now.”

Despite how awkwardly she’d handled everything, he still seemed interested. “So do you want to walk”—he gestured at the benches—“or sit? We’re probably both too sore to walk too far.”

Faeries clustered closer, surrounding the bench. They didn’t speak, chortle, or react. They just pressed too near, their bodies brushing against hers and his, making Rika tense. She should tuck him into some safe steel-walled house. But I want to talk to him. She shouldn’t do it, but still she said, “Stay. I want to just stay here with you.”

“Later,” Jayce called to Del and Kayley. Then he put a hand on the small of her back. “There’s a quiet spot out this way.”

At the feel of his hand against her—even though there was a shirt between her skin and his hand—she hesitated, and then, shakily, let him guide her to a bench. Lingering with him felt more dangerous than anything she’d done since becoming a faery. There had only ever been one other boy she’d trusted, and he’d stolen everything from her. The fear and the memories of that mistake rushed back so intensely that she felt paralyzed and stopped mid-step.

“You said you didn’t need to run; remember?” Jayce said. She nodded and took another tentative step.

Behind them, faeries whispered. A number of them vanished in different directions, and she was silently grateful that they weren’t going to challenge her here. Maybe Sionnach was wrong about the threat; maybe the faeries had better things to do. She didn’t know, and just then, she didn’t care.

All that mattered was that she was with Jayce. They walked toward a bench, and she realized that he still had his hand on her back. He was touching her, and they were alone together.