A red brick burst into pieces and three fae assassins jumped in surprise. Cress inhaled as he gathered his bearings. He pressed a hand over his chest to check the wild temper of his heart, looking around at his brothers as if to ask them what happened.
Brick chunks littered the tavern table between them. One sank to the bottom of Dranian’s cup of warm beast milk, and the fairy scowled.
“You fell asleep.” Shayne folded his arms and leaned back in the booth.
Human families around the morning tavern leaned to see what the commotion was. Mor sighed and swiped the arm of his denim jacket over the table to clean it.
“Hey!” Shayne slammed a hand down to protect the shallow pile of trinkets he stole—one for each new place he went: coins, rocks, and other useless human items he couldn’t seem to keep his hands off of.
“There’s a hunk of human brick in my cooked bird eggs,” Dranian complained in a low, monotone voice.
“That’s what you get for sitting across from the Prince of Nightmares,” Mor said, wrestling a human-mouth-cloth from the metal box contraption and extending it to the perturbed auburn-haired fairy. Dranian took the human-mouth-cloth. He stared at his eggs for a moment. Then he began dabbing them with the cloth to get the bits of brick out.
“Don’t call me that.” Cress rubbed his temples as a headache blossomed there.
“Why ever not?” Mor asked. “You woke us all up every hour through the whole faeborn-cursed night.”
“Because I can’t stop dreaming about her. This is torture!” Cress slammed his fist on the table and the whole thing rattled. “This is your fault, Shayne! You said the kiss would enchant her.”
Shayne only grinned.
“He said it would enchant her if she already had slight feelings for you. None of us expected the reverse to happen—”
“That is absolutely outrageous!” Cress barked, and a young human mother at the table beside them grabbed her childlings and rushed out of the tavern. Cress’s shoulders relaxed. He sighed. “We need to kill the human target to end my suffering, and we need to get back to the Ever Corners before my future mother-in-law loses her faeborn mind and covers the whole North Corner in a sheet of ice.” He paused, glancing at the ruined bricks where his head had been resting. “When did I fall asleep here, anyway?”
“About thirty minutes ago. I was going to wake you, but Mor said you needed rest,” Shayne said as he lifted his own glass of warm beast milk to check it for red brick chunks. He deemed it safe and began to guzzle.
“We didn’t expect you to have a bad dream and punch out half the wall,” Dranian muttered.
“Well, you shouldn’t allow me to fall asleep in a random human cookhouse that smells of hog meat.” Cress glared toward the kitchens where the loud sizzling of food came from.
“We’re only keeping you here until the enchantment begins to wear off. We’ll attack the human target as a group the moment the magic weakens. You’re not leaving this tavern, Cress, even if we have to let Dranian sit on you,” Mor told him. “We’d be fools to let a powerful royal assassin wander the human streets while maddeningly in love with a human. And besides, we can watch her just fine from right here.” He nodded toward the window.
Cress couldn’t help but look out and try to spot Kate Kole across the road. Even a glimpse of her burgundy hair would have satisfied him. But she hadn’t come out of hiding in several days.
“And the hog meat is good here,” Shayne added, holding up a strip and dunking it into a heap of thick fruit juice the humans called ketchup.
Cress made a repulsed face as he watched Shayne shove three more pieces into his mouth at once, followed by a scoop of cooked bird eggs. “Human food is repulsive,” the Prince muttered. He pulled his warm milk over and took a long drink.
A second later, he choked on a piece of brick and spat it across the table into Dranian’s eggs.
