Loose Changeling: A Changeling Wars Novel (5 page)

Kailen put his sword on my island, knelt, and extended his hand. The mouse hesitated for a moment and then crawled onto his palm. He turned around and presented the mouse to me. “This is Jane. Jane meet Nicole. Nicole meet Jane.”

I crossed my arms. “Ha, ha, very funny. I'll bet you did that soy sauce thing while I was sleeping, too.”

He only stared at me. He opened his mouth, shut it, then opened it again. “You know how some people are gullible? Well, you're pretty much the exact opposite of that. Open your eyes. Smell the liquefied hobgoblin. Read the writing on the floor. This is Jane, Nicole, and you did this to her.”

The hairs on my arms prickled. “What?”

Kailen shrugged one shoulder. “The last thing I was about to tell you. You’re not human. You’re Fae, like me, and you’ve finally manifested.”

CHAPTER FIVE

It took me a few minutes to find my voice. “I’m a what?”

“One of the greater Fae, otherwise known as the Sidhe,” Kailen answered, matter-of-factly. “A Changeling, to be exact. Looks like you turned your husband’s mistress into a mouse. Pretty impressive for a first manifestation.”

“That’s impossible.” I pushed his hand with the mouse on it away from me. “Assuming that I even believe that
you
aren’t human, I definitely am. I have a human mother, a human father, and a human sister. You’ve got the wrong lady.” I shivered and rubbed my arms. January nights were cold, and the tile beneath my bare feet was at least twenty degrees colder than the rest of the room.

Kailen only shrugged. “Well, if you’re
sure
that your mom and dad are your biological parents.” He held the mouse up to his face and turned away from me. “I’m going to do my best to get you back to your original form, okay? Don’t worry.”

I bit back a sharp retort. I mean, I did think it was strange that in a family of blondes, I’d been born with black hair. My parents had always laughed when I pointed that out and told me that I had a great-grandparent with black hair, and that these things sometimes skip a generation. Or two. On the other hand, I had the same fair skin and the same green eyes.

As if he could read my thoughts, Kailen muttered to the mouse, “Yes, I know. Crazy that she’d believe she’s just a plain old human. But what Nicole doesn’t understand is that Changelings often assume a lot of their host parents’ characteristics. Fae genetics work differently.”

I narrowed my eyes and looked at the clock. Four thirty in the morning. Well, if this didn’t constitute an emergency, I didn’t know what did. I tiptoed around the broken glass, grabbed my phone from the countertop, and dialed Lainey’s number again.

“Hey, sweetheart,” her tired voice said on the other line. “Is something wrong?”

“Hi, Lainey,” I said. “Sorry, I probably woke you up.” Kailen studiously ignored me, and relaxed against the island countertop.

I could almost see Lainey wave a dismissive hand—she always talked on the phone like the other person could see her. “Oh, don’t worry about it. The baby woke me up three minutes ago. I was awake. What’s up?”

I took a deep breath. “I know this is crazy, but do you think maybe I was adopted?” A long silence greeted me on the other end. “Lainey? Lainey, you still there?”

“I thought they would have told you by now,” she said.

I think I ruptured at least ten veins in my face.

“OHMYGODYOUCAN’TBESERIOUS.” My week just kept getting better. From the corner of my eye, I saw Kailen surreptitiously step out of arm’s reach. “So they told my baby sister that I was adopted, and they never told me? I can’t believe this!”

“Now you know how Mom and Dad are,” Lainey said. “They’re a little weird. But if it makes you feel any better, they didn’t actually tell me. I was seventeen, going through a bit of a phase, you remember. I eavesdropped on them, heard them say that you were adopted, and well, I used it to get something I wanted.”

“You blackmailed Mom and Dad?” I sucked in a breath. “Oh no—the Lexus. That’s how you got it. I knew you didn’t save all that money from babysitting.”

“They said they wanted to tell you themselves. I guess they kind of forgot.”

“Well, why didn’t you tell me later?”

I could hear her shrug through the phone, the rub of cloth near the microphone. “I thought about it a couple of times, mostly when we were fighting. But I’d given Mom and Dad my word, and that kind of means something to me now.”

Trust my sister to first have little enough conscience to blackmail our parents, and now too much of a conscience to break her word to them. “God, Lainey! I’m thirty-two years old.
Someone
should have said something.” I glanced over at Kailen, still holding the mouse in his hand. “Look, I’ve got to go. But don’t think this is over.”

Lainey breathed out a crackling sigh. “Sorry, honey. I know I did wrong. Just don’t tell Mom and Dad I told you, okay? Please?”

I hung up.

Kailen backed up a few more steps. “I’d say ‘I told you so,’ but I imagine that might make you a bit violent.”

I glared at him. “This is
your
fault.”

He looked over at the clock on the microwave. “Clearly, Nicole’s mental capacities and ability to reason don’t work so well this early in the morning. It’s that or yes, it’s my fault that you’re adopted and not actually human. What gave it away? The fact that I was nowhere in the vicinity when any of this happened?”

I shivered again, more violently. The quilt I had draped over my shoulders didn’t seem to help much against the cold. I clenched my teeth. “You don’t have to be a smart-ass about it.”

He cocked his head at me and let Jane off on the kitchen island. “You’re cold, aren’t you?”

“No.” Well, I was, but I wasn’t really in the mood to admit it to him.

Kailen stepped forward and put a hand on my arm. He was warm, much warmer than my arm. “Feel that? One thing about the Fae is we’ve got body temperatures a few degrees higher than humans.”

My teeth chattered. “F-funny that my doctor n-n-never mentioned that.”

“You hadn’t manifested yet. Now that you have...well, you’re going to start noticing some changes.” He said it with a straight face, no smirk, no raised eyebrows, nothing.

I pulled the quilt tighter around my shoulders with one hand and used the other to push Kailen away. “Yeah, th-that’s n-not creepy at all,” I said.

He looked studiously at one of the cupboards. “I can help you regulate. You’re going to experience some flashes of cold until your body gets to its new normal. Usually one of your parents would do this for you, but they’re not here and—” He stopped, as though he’d already said too much.

“Regulate? How?”

Finally, he met my gaze and held out his arms, welcoming me into a hug. “I promise I won’t try anything this time.”

It felt like I’d plunged into a lake of near-freezing water, then crawled out in my sopping wet clothes. “Excuse my language, b-but are you fucking serious?” I glanced over at the countertop. The mouse sat on her haunches at the edge, her whiskers twitching and her head turning from me to Kailen, watching us. Nope. Not creepy at all. If that was my husband’s mistress, she must be getting a kick out of all this. But did I even care what she thought? “F-fine,” I muttered.

Kailen wrapped his arms around me. He was deliciously warm—like sitting with my face to the fire. The chill began to leave my bones. It had been a long time since I’d been held like this. I hadn't realized how much I'd missed that sort of contact, the comfort of someone's arms around me, the warmth of their body against mine. The muscles of his chest tensed as he shifted, getting us both comfortable. My palms pressed flat against his shirt.

The heartbeat beneath my fingertips quickened; his breathing sped up.

Not that I was unaffected. I trained my eyes on the ceiling, trying to think about anything except how he still wasn’t wearing pants. But you know how telling someone not to think about a purple rhino just makes them think about a purple rhino?

And then what he’d said finally wriggled its way to the front of my mind. “Wait. Won’t try anything
this
time?”

He took several breaths before speaking, his voice a rumble in his chest. “I’m just doing a job. Don’t take it personally or anything, okay? Swordplay is my specialty, but I’m also good at eliciting certain, uh, emotions from others.”

I stiffened. “So you were using magic to seduce me? Why didn’t you slip me a roofie while you were at it?” Was he using his magic
right now
?

Kailen’s arms dropped away from me. I felt warm enough to move normally again. “I said don’t take it personally. What was I supposed to do—explain to you that you were a Changeling and that there were hobgoblins after you? It was the quickest way I could think of to get you away from the danger.” He picked up his sword from the countertop and snapped it shut. “Are you always this combative? I come here, save your life, and you’re telling me how I should have saved it.”

“That's not—” I stopped myself. When I thought about it, maybe Kailen had a point. He had saved my life, never mind the means he'd used to do so, and I hadn't exactly been nice or grateful. I took a deep breath and tried not to look at mouse-Jane on the counter. “I'm sorry. This has all been extremely upsetting for me. It's not every day you find out you're adopted.” I couldn't bring myself, quite yet, to say not human. “They have a support group for this sort of thing in the Fae lands?”

Kailen gave a halfhearted chuckle and slid his gaze away from mine. He fiddled with the sword, as if not quite sure what to do with it now that the danger had passed. “Apology accepted.”

I narrowed my eyes. What exactly was he hiding from me? I wasn’t normally a suspicious person, but the I’m-not-telling-you-everything wafted from Kailen the way sulfur did from an egg gone bad.

He turned and scooped up Jane, and then he glanced at his watch. “Well, now that we’re all wide awake we'd better get out of here.” A whirring sound emanated from the watch face.

I headed back toward the stairs.

“Where are you going?” Kailen said.

“Getting out of the kitchen. I'm going back to bed. I can clean up the mess in the morning, before work.”

He stood there, blinking, Jane in one hand, sword in the other. “You're serious.”

“What?”

Kailen glanced at his watch again. He tucked the sword into the waistband of his boxers, strode over, and took my arm. “We're going upstairs. You're going to pack a bag in fifteen minutes or less. Then we are leaving.”

The calluses he’d earned from wielding his sword rubbed against the sensitive skin of my upper arm. “This is my home. I'm not leaving.”

He cocked his head to the side. “Ah. You don't like being bossed around, do you? Let me be clear then. My magic is telling me that something is on its way here, something also not human. The smell of dead hobgoblin is known to attract a number of very unpleasant beasts. We have time, but not a lot. Someone knows where you live and knows what you are; otherwise the hobgoblins would not have shown up in the first place, smack dab in your living room.”

That pulled me up short. If they knew where I lived, might they also know where I worked? “Are hobgoblins ever little, very fast, and giggle a lot?”

Kailen gave me a long look. “Definitely not. But there are other Fae who match that description. Why?”

Maybe I wasn’t going crazy. Maybe the weird happenings in my office had an explanation behind them. Maybe I should listen. “No reason. So who’s trying to kill me? Why?”

“I’ll tell you after we leave.”

I gritted my teeth. “Let's make a deal. You stop trying to boss me around, and I'll consider what you have to say.”

Kailen shrugged. “Fine.”

Twenty minutes later, I had a bag packed. Just the essentials—clothes for the next day, toiletries, and a couple of books. Like hell I would pack a larger bag. I'd worked hard to get this house. There was no way I was going to let it go, hobgoblins or not.

Kailen had pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. He looked more approachable this way and less forbidding. He led me out the front door. Parked in my driveway was a black BMW Coupe. I paused on the doorstep. “A car? We're not going to blink in and out of existence? No winged beasts? No white steed?”

He shook his head. “Very funny. The Fae world has been disconnected from this one for a long time. The Fae Families aren’t very familiar with technology, and they don't know how to track it. Magical means of travel—they'd know exactly where we've been and where we're going.” He opened the door on my side first. I slid inside and placed my bag on my lap. I was reminded, in a flash of emotion, of my first date with Owen. He'd opened the door for me—the one and only time he ever had. I'd teased him about this for years afterward. I sank into the leather seat and tried to relax.

“Where are we going?” I asked when he got inside.

He placed a hand over Jane, curled up on an old sweater on the dashboard. "Rest," he whispered. "We'll fix this." She squeaked and then went to sleep. He started the car and pulled out of the driveway. “A hotel. Nothing dingy, don't worry.”

We sat in silence for a while after that. The streets were empty this early in the morning, the asphalt damp with accumulated dew. The only sound was the revving of the engine and the soft click of Kailen's shoes against the pedals. Streetlamps passed in an orange blur.

“So why are monsters trying to kill me? Is it just because I’m Fae?”

He glanced at me and then back at the road. “It’s because you’re a Changeling. It’s complicated. The Aranhods want to protect you, but there are other families that see you as a threat to their positions in the hierarchy.”

“Me? Who thinks I’m a threat?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Well, you can tell them I don’t give a damn about their hierarchy.” A thought occurred to me. “If the Fae aren't familiar with this world, how do you know so much about it? You live here. You're a lawyer. Or at least you told me you were.”

Kailen's jaw clenched. I wondered, for a moment, if he would answer me at all. “I
am
a lawyer. Family law, mostly. As to your question, I once—” He stopped, cleared his throat. “I once was married to a mortal woman.” He blinked several times, let out a long breath, and said no more.