Taking Down the Alpha King

Boy

"REULE, DARLING."

Stepping back, I couldn’t hide the snarl that took control of my nose. “What?” I could smell my father’s intentions. The black look in his eyes was curdling my blood.

“I just had the most interesting talk with Harry.” He searched my eyes as he read my thoughts. “Yes, it’s about the fairies. And also, about that little boy you found in school.”

Crap. I wasn’t planning on keeping that a secret, but I had definitely thought about keeping that information as a bartering chip later down the line. Rolling my eyes, I huffed. “What about them?”

“Harry tells me that you and he are intending on doing some investigating. We need to dig along the tree line to find a new source of dust.” He sniffed as he heard my internal screaming. “What I do with them after they’ve finished milking is my business. Don’t intervene again.” The edge in his voice cut across my nerves. I knew I had tested him to the point of breaking, and I didn’t want to be the target of his torture.

“Yes, sir.” I grumbled. I knew all about the way he crushed their bones and liquified them. I knew the whole process of creating Fairy Dust vials versus Fairy Dust inhalants. It was cruel. One you could produce simply from natural pollen that fairies created…but the other… I shivered. It required one to take the fairy and boil it alive. “You disgust me.”

“Tsk, tsk. Now, now, Reule. This season you’ll participate in the moon ceremony. We wouldn’t want the goddess to face any interference with her matches, would we?” His lips wickedly twisted.

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“What? Trade you to someone inside the black world?” He snickered. “Don’t try me. Now, explain to me how you came to find this human with a distinct knowledge of the forest.”

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“HARRY!” The shriek I let out echoed out of every tent in the camp. “How could you?”

I heard his hooved feet scraping against the cold packed ground. “Princess! What’s got yer tail in a tucket?” The scratch of his voice grated against my skin.

“How could you let him see those things? Those private things I told you?”

Harry’s head hung low. “Reule, you know that I have no control when facing the master. When he sits you in that chair, there’s not a way in the world to keep anything private from him.” Cursing under my breath, I knew he was telling the truth. I could taste his sincerity in the air around us.

“What are we going to do about the fairy lines?”

“We’ll have to do what I was thinking. We’ll have to start digging. I thought I had found a trail of them…breadcrumbs really. There was a sphagnum growing a wee bit north of here. It’s a sure sign of them.” I closed my eyes as he spoke, wondering if I could pick up on any vibrations of them around us. The wolf inside me always had an extra sense on high alert. Whether it was her nose picking up scents that I had ignored, or finding waves of sound in the atmosphere around us, she was always investigating. I let her paws stretch out from my mind as she roamed the earth near us, looking for signs of fallen pollen.

“I’ve set a few traps along the ridge. I doubt we’ll catch anything with it being so cold. You know how they are. They’d rather hibernate than face mother nature this time of year.”

I knew exactly what he meant. In Portland, we were forced to breed pairs during the summer months to ensure that we’d have enough production fairies to make it through winter. With the sudden spring of this move, we hadn’t had time to build our stores.

“What can that boy do for us?” Harry c****d a brow as he watched my expression change from mildly observant to incredibly disgusted.

“He can tell me things he doesn’t even mean to.” I whispered into the wind. “If I feed him just enough dopamine, I’ll have him eating out of my hand in two hours.”

Harry smirked from where he stood against the peg of a tent. “Good girl. Let’s get on, lass. It’s time to eat, and my belly’s been barking for an hour yet.”

I stayed quiet the rest of the night, doing my best to put up a mental blockage around any thoughts that I had. Growing up in this pack had robbed me of privacy. I wasn’t even sure what the meaning of that word was. The only times I ever felt safe as myself were when I was with Dremelda or when I was at school.

And I hated school.

But even with Dremelda, I had to watch what I said. One slip of her mind, and everything that I had ever said would be public knowledge to my father, and he knew it. I had done my best to fill my mind with as much clutter as I could, reading endlessly book upon book so that there was always a scene to go to, or a monologue to memorize. But once my father had caught onto my ploy, he just rearranged his process, and dove in further into my mind.

I wondered if that boy from school, who had seemed so interested just yesterday, would still like me if he knew everything that I helped my father do. Scoffing at the thought, I said aloud, “Would he even believe me?”

“Believe what, dearest?” Dremelda asked distractedly.

“Nothing,” I answered as I scrambled back to my tent. I didn’t want to explain that there was a small piece of my heart that longed to be normal. What I would give to wake up and be human, and not feel the weight of the fairy world on my shoulders…