Starkeeper of the Fractured Crown

My fingers stumbled writing that name. It was stupid, the fear I felt at just the name, but it was there, trickling down my spine, warming my neck. So, I wrotedown ‘High King’ instead.

“Trick sent him on a mission to the Fae Court to inspect something that had been happening there at the time. The Rains didn’t know about it. Sutten, I believe, had been the High King at the time.”

Sutten Rain. Good, fair, but unrelenting. He had been a lot tougher than his granddaughter, Penny Rain, was. A lot harsher, but not cruel. Never cruel.

“My mother specialized in shadow magic, just as Penny’s husband does. You know about that, right?”

I nodded, writing almost as fast as he was talking. “Yes. There are several different kinds of Fae,” I started, mostly because I was in that state of mind. Information. Studying, preparing for something I couldn’t put a finger on. “They all have their basic magic. Glamor, Jumping, all that, but they also specialize too. Earth, water, shadows, healing, and wind. And then there was the Unseelie Court, which resided on the Southwestern side of the Fae Court when it still existed.”

Cole was quiet a moment, but I didn’t mind, it gave me the second I needed to catch up. “Right,” he finally said and then cleared his throat. “My father, he was a bad man, but Trick didn’t realize that at the time, or at least that’s what he told me. He was still young, still learning, and it hadn’t been too long after the Fall, everything was still temperamental, and he was still healing. So, he sent my father and a few others to seek out and kill the creatures out there that were similar to Ryker.”

I looked up at that, my brows furrowing. “Wait, there were others?” I hadn’t read about that anywhere, itseemed like an important fact to just leave out of the history books.

Cole smiled. “There’s probably quite a bit you don’t know about the world, Talons. You’ve gathered a lot, you know more than anyone I’ve met, besides Nick, but you can’t know much about us with what Trick and Raphael have done.”

Instantly my gut twisted. “What did he do?” I asked, my tone clipped.

He didn’t seem surprised at the bitterness in my voice. “Raphael destroyed all of your books, Trick collected all of ours that remained outside of the Fallen Court, and put them in our library. The Hall of Death. Did you know about that?”

Did I know about that. What a stupid question. I knew abouteverylibrary in this world.Especiallythe great ones. “How many were there?”

Cole’s brows lifted. “Books? Um…” His face twisted. “There had to have been bill—”

“The creatures,” I half laughed. “The things you were hunting.”

“Oh, whew,” he breathed out causing my smile to widen. “Had me sweating there for a minute.”

I rolled my eyes.

He laughed. “Countless,” he went on, bumping his knee against my leg. “We still get reports from time to time, other than the demons. They all came from the same place, you know? But none of them are as serious as Ryker was.”

Interesting. “Okay, go on.”

“So, they were doing theirjob,” he continued. “They had found three of those creatures, killed them silently, no ruckus, no mess, but on the way out, he spotted her, my mother, and he decided then that he had never slept with a Fae, so…he did. He didn’t get permission, consent, anything, he just took what he wanted, and that was it, which is why I don’t like…certain things in the bedroom.”

And yet he hadn’t abandoned his High King after everything he had done. Cole’s father raped his mother and now his High King was going to rape me. I wondered what he would say if I told him. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it and I didn’t know why. Part of me hated myself for it. The other part of me, even knowing how horrible it must have been for his mother…

“Gods, you’re so fucking disgusting.”

He looked away, his expression hardening as if he had heard my putrid thoughts. “I could never do anything like what he did. I’m not like him. I don’t ever want to be compared to him, not in any way, shape or form.”

Guilt filled me, that self-hatred, and I shoved it down as far as it would go, trying to rid myself of every ounce of feeling I had before he could smell it on me.

“Worthless, fucking piece of shit. Thinking like that? His mother suffered.Sufferedand you fantasize? You’re so fucking horrible.”

I swallowed, my grip tightening around my pencil.

“When Sutten found out about what my father did,” Cole went on, having no idea what thoughts had just whispered through my mind, “my mother was already three months pregnant. Fae only carry for four months before birth. Sutten wasn’t a cruel man, and he didn’tneed trouble between the Courts, so as soon as she had me, he took me from my mother’s arms and dropped me at my father’s doorstep.

“Trick didn’t find out for two decades. That man hated me. He hated what I was, hated that I existed.” Cole swallowed, the anger and resentment clear. “But when Trick, Lora, and Rose found out, they didn’t hesitate. I remember the day they came. I remember hearing the door explode open, hearing my father shout and snap, demanding what they were doing, and then I remember seeing shadows slide under the steel door, down the splintered wooden steps, to my blankets below.”

Those cruel things that had burned my skin without leaving a mark.

“I watched them slither like snakes over to me, and I was terrified. Terrified because I had no idea what they were. No idea who they belonged to, but when they stopped in front of me, watching me like a snake might watch its prey, I realized something; what could possibly be worse than what I was going through?”

I knew that feeling all too well. I understood exactly what he had felt in that basement. The anger, the loneliness, the hatred. I understood it completely.

“The door opened a moment later and there wasn’t a big terrifying man standing at the top of the stairs, but a woman. A woman with beautiful golden blonde hair and burning light green eyes. She was wearing the same armor you found me in, and she had the most beautiful snow-white wings I had ever seen.