Ash & Ichor [Friends with the King of the Underworld rewrite]

t h r e e

//song: smother - daughter

I looked at him from across the roof of my car. 

He was still watching her.

I swallowed the milkshake I still had in my mouth. I ignored the brain freeze that followed. "Please tell me you're joking."

He turned towards me with a frown. "Why would I be joking?" He placed both straws from his milkshakes into his mouth.

I looked back at the group and watched as they all filed back into the car they had been leaning against. One of the men was watching us intently, purposely staring at Damien as he moved to the driver's door.

I thought back to high school when Leah tormented me. I would walk through the halls with a paperback novel in my hands. I'd often do the same when I walked home from school.

Leah would knock the book out of my hands and toss it in the mud or persuade the boys to do it for her. She was horrible.

"What do you mean she's a dark faerie?"

He turned away from the car as the loud engine of the Mustang roared to life. "Well, the city is very close to my world. The veil is thin here. A lot of faeries come to the human world to live here. Maybe she did too. She's not of the human world, Em. Her power feels like mine."

I turned away from him and leaned against my car, flabbergasted.

A girl that I had grown up with-- that I'd seen grow up-- was one of the fae. She wasn't human after all. Briefly, I wondered who else in my sleepy town in the middle of nowhere wasn't human either.

"That would explain a lot," I whispered to myself.

Damien had always said that he wasn't the exception to being kind to me, I was. He was dark as well, whatever that meant. Yet for everything he had ever said about himself and his 'true nature', I'd only ever seen him treat others with respect.

I turned back to look at him. "Do you think she knows?"

He shrugged. "I don't know." He looked resolutely at the car as it drove out of the parking lot. "I need to meet her."

The look on his face stopped me. I hadn't seen him with such an expression in months. He was amused. Actually amused.

My heart skipped a beat. I hadn't seen him this excited since...

Since before his father died almost four months ago.

He had disappeared for over three months–far longer than I'd ever gone without seeing him. He wouldn't answer his phone. He never sent a text. I thought something terrible happened to him.

But it wasn't him. It had been his father. A victim of a terrible accident while Damien was away training with the Underworld Army.

Damien had no one else.

It didn't even occur to me that something could happen to his family and not him.

He had appeared again during my winter break.

My parents had gone out for date night and I stayed home alone watching television. Our dog, Woof, curled up on the couch next to me for warmth under the blanket we shared. It'd been snowing heavily that night which prompted me to turn on the fireplace in the living room.

I had been starting to doze off during my favorite movie when Woof started barking at the slider door. I jumped to my feet in fear. My mind jumped to the worst conclusion, and I gripped the fireplace poker over my shoulder as a weapon.

Damien had been standing in the threshold of the slider glass door half in shadows in the cold.

I ran to him, ready to unleash a tirade of comments at him for making me worry about him, but when I saw him up close, the words died in my throat.