Bad Fae | romantasy | Bad Fae #1

Chapter Twenty-Five

Dain might have been obsessed with corrupting me, but he was equally driven by the urge to prove to Feyrith that I wasn't a threat to the Túatha. And that meant I had to learn to fully control the darkness inside me. I had to learn not just to play with plants but bend the shadows to my will. Reliably.

My training was not going well.

"Come, Yana. It is inside you. It shouldn't be this hard," Dain huffed.

I glared at him. "Oh, my apologies. I haven't had thousands of years to perfect my skill!"

"And we do not have thousands of years, Yana. We have now. Is your refusal to be better anything to do with not calling the second part of your debt?" he asked snidely.

I threw my hands towards him. The shadows made barely a flicker against him. His rueful, derisive smirk grew.

"Perhaps it was stupid of me to think you could ever amount to anything," he drawled.

My heart flinched and I ignored it. It didn't matter to me if I meant nothing to Dain, if I disappointed him, if I would never be anything to him.

Tug.

Not his.

Mine.

A lie.

The knowledge was enough to do what his taunts had failed to do; it made me angry. Pure fury rippled through my body. At him. At this creature I hated so much, but that had made me care.

I threw my hands at him again and the whole room was plunged into shadow. I heard him clear his throat atrociously politely, and the shadows were gone again. He was looking at me with his head cocked to the side, his hands in his pockets.

"What?" I snapped, feeling horribly naked under his gaze. And not in a good way.

"What were you thinking?" he asked, his voice calm and quiet.

I swallowed. "How much I hate you."

There went that wicked grin. "You're always thinking how much you hate me. This was..." He stretched his neck like he could feel it against his cheeks. "Mm. Not quite a lie. What else? This was something else."

"You're insufferable," was the only thing I could think to say. I was too busy praying, to any deity who might listen, that my greatest fear wasn't suddenly that he would know that I cared. Cared about what he thought. Cared about whatever twisted relationship dwelt between us. Cared that I might think it was more than it actually was.

Cared that I was the only one who did care.

"And yet..." he breathed, and my heart thudded in my chest.

He knows.

Then his attention was snapped off me and it looked like whatever he was on the precipice of finding out vacated his mind. His eyes glazed somewhat, then he shook his head and looked at me again.

"Be better," he growled.

I flailed. "How am I supposed to be better? Every single one of you fae are far more powerful than me. Nothing I can do makes a dent in any of you. How am I supposed to practise like that? I don't know what I'm doing wrong, much less what I'm doing right, if I can't do anything."

He nodded, like he was thinking. "Then we find you someone weaker," he said simply, then snapped his fingers and my feet followed as he walked out.

"Dain," I huffed pointedly, and I felt the geas command weaken and fall away.

"I couldn't be sure you would follow," was his flimsy excuse.

"Why?" I asked, suddenly suspicious. "Where are we going?"