Traps, Tricks, and Beasts [Book 2 Complete][Fantasy, Adventure, Underdog]

The rest of the day passed in a blur. Once her bouts were finished, Instructor Hawke had all the greenlings practicing basic stances and dodging motions. Squirt wove in between them all, murmuring instructions to those who needed it.

Then came more placements, more questions, more directing of fey to grab blankets or tally inventory or answer complaints about who got what. At least the greenlings spoke to her once she shooed off Qzi. The redcap flipping knives behind her back with a toothy grin had terrified the lot of them, and Squirt swore she saw a genuine hunger in his eyes. Not directed hunger, but the edges of it.

Even without it being aimed in any direction, the greenlings were sensitive enough to notice, irritating Squirt further when she was damn sure Qzi wouldn’t touch any of them.

There’d been no time to dwell on it after snapping at him to go hunt more rats.

Night fell. Dinner was finished. Squirt watched from the side as those there quietly began bedding down, the hour they called half-light for half the lights being extinguished. Games were played in the dirt with rocks for game pieces. In a corner, one of the caretakers was telling stories to a rapt audience of teens entirely in greenling. The words were whispered, the tones too faint for her to hear much more than the general cadence.

She knew that story. It was a good one. About a magic tree that followed the greenling everywhere, making it impossible to walk down the streets of the Capital.

The moral was to hide in the shadows and avoid attention, making it a story unique to greenlings. Squirt had never heard another story like it in any other language.

As the groups came together, bedding down in a huddle in the middle, Squirt knew her battle against rest was coming to an end. Her eyes were fluttering shut. It didn’t seem to matter that it had been sixty years since she participated in half-light, there was something soothing about it that called to her soul.

Not thinking, she took a few steps forward, lost in a haze of exhaustion and nostalgic yearning. Three steps in, the room came to a stop, and every single greenling turned to look at her expectantly.

The gut-punch was swift and brutal. The chasm between them brought about by a mistake in her youth was simply too wide to cross.

For the briefest moment, she lingered. She’d been up too long. The wakeberries could only do so much, and she’d been using them too frequently. So she lingered in the possibility that she could push past this and join the huddle. Get kicked in the face by some old geezer or elbowed by a teen or woken by a crying baby. The warmth and comfort of being held. The familiar scent of Breezy.

This was stupid. She was stupid. They were looking at her for orders like she was any other outsider, poised and ready to obey. No one would get any rest with her in the mix.

She didn’t belong.

Shoving down her feelings, she spoke clearly to the group, as if the words were her intention all along, “I’ll be back in the morning.” She gestured at her hound. “Pakos will guard you. Keep you safe.”

The gratitude in those faces was more than she could bear.

Are you sure about this? I will be unable to replenish my moonlight.

She countered, Why don’t you go ask the Pest, since he’s your—

Nope. Not even in her own thoughts could she repeat that Pakos had repeatedly referred to the pest as fucking father.

The knowing amusement from Pakos irritated her. He knew something. Some bullshit had to be behind the stupid father comments.

Turning on her heel, she caught the eye of Qzi leaning up against the wall and waiting for her. He perked up as soon as she caught his eye.

Like a puppy.

So what if she didn’t get to sleep in the dog pile at the center? At least she could trust Qzi to stab anything that came after her. Nothing was safer than sleeping with psycho and darko, and at least they didn’t flinch at the sight of her.

They never had.

The thought made her lips tilt up in just the barest hint of a smile.

***

It was still enough to make Qzi swoon.

***

Squirt studied the redcap once she got close enough to. Warily, she said, “You’ve been… strangely quiet.”

“I can be loud. Should I be loud? Or should I just make someone scream?”

“Please don’t.”

“I could make you scream.”

Squirt’s expression flattened. The image was weirdly tempting in a way she did not appreciate. Especially when she didn’t know if knives would be involved.

He shrugged. “Back to the den?”

Squirt considered it.

Truthfully… she didn’t want to be that far from the greenlings.

A shadow wavered, drawing her eyes to Zhadin. Much as they had every night for the last few weeks, they simply announced, “I have secured a place to sleep for the night.”

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A knot in her chest loosened. “Where?”

“The loft.”

The knot unfurled. “Good. That’s… that’s good.”

It was the next room over. Up in the rafters with the spare hay. Close enough to hear anything and be there in an instant, far enough away that… that…

That she didn’t have to think about the giant pile of fey sleeping next door.

She didn’t want to be alone.

Not allowing her to think further than that, she took the redcap’s hand, not sparing him a glance as she tugged him out the door and around the corner.

Only to see the pest.

He flinched as soon as he saw her, shifting uncomfortably. Then, to her surprise, he stepped to the side, bowing his head and coughing. “I um… I do not need to sleep and… um…” He gestured vaguely at the carriage storage. “I will eye—non, non, I will keep watch.”

She stared at the top of his head as he kept his head bowed.

Well, he tried to.

After about ten seconds, he glanced up, realized she was still staring, and quickly dropped his gaze. Then did it again fifteen seconds later.

He did not rise so long as she did not answer, but he was clearly not very good about waiting. Though he was powerful, his powers were severely muted, meaning that he’d be feeling practically blind. Without his magic sense to rely on, he was clearly struggling to keep still.

He didn’t say anything to her. No sonnets or declarations, not even an instrument pulled out to strum. He just waited—badly, impatiently—for her to say something.

Tired as she was, Squirt did what she did best.

She ignored him, tugging the redcap along with her to the ladder of the room next door. She didn’t acknowledge any of it. The prince bowing to her and awkwardly offering to keep watch of her people, the redcap she tugged along to curl up next to, or the shadowfell whose tendrils wrapped her up, their touch quickly sending her off to sleep.

If only her dreams were as peaceful as these quiet moments.

Squirt woke at dawn as always, sandwiched between a softly snoring redcap and a mass of tentacles.

For a brief few seconds, she stayed in that state—half awake, half asleep, comfortable, relaxed, and warm. The smells of shade and copper were oddly familiar at this point, after weeks of these types of arrangements.

The memory of watching her people curl up on the floor together away from her was distant. Within this space here, mostly hidden in the shadows controlled by Zhadin, she didn’t feel the sting of rejection nearly so keenly.

It was fine.

After all, she had tried to kill her fey. By all rights, she should—justifiably—be culled. Puds shouldn’t have been. None of them should have even been shunned, but Squirt? She was the antithesis of every ideal in the greenling code. Keeping her distance would be wise.

All it took was a slight shift, and Qzi’s eyes snapped open. Their eyes locked onto each other.

He shouldn’t tempt her.

But he did.

Tension stretched. Each lingered in it, the silent possibility of something more.

Qzi grinned, his sharp teeth on full display, the sleepiness still visible in the corners of his eyes. “Morning, pricklebear. Care for a snuggle?”

It was clear by the exaggerated waggling of his eyebrows he wasn’t serious. Or, more specifically, he didn’t intend for her to agree.

She considered it. A brief moment of vulnerability.

His smile faded as he realized she was genuinely considering it, and to her amusement, he swallowed nervously.

Nope. Nope. And definitely nope. Cuddling with the redcap to sleep was one thing. Cuddling for warmth and safety was a biological need that her hand could not fulfill. Cuddling outside of that meant some form of acknowledgement that he was tempting, and that was simply a step too far.

The moment was over, much to the relief of both Squirt and Qzi, the former berating herself for considering it, the latter flustered that she had. Neither of them said anything more as they both sat up to get ready for the day.

Though when Squirt turned, there was an oddly knowing look in Zhadin’s eyes. A teasing look.

One she was absolutely not dignifying with anything more than a glare and a muttered, “Fuck off.”

Dressed, she scampered down the ladder and away from both fey, muttering that maybe she should have slept with the wolves instead, because at least Tobias’s wolf didn’t cause a crisis of conscience.

She couldn’t seriously be considering a redcap, could she?

It didn’t matter how well muscled or handsome his features, that was just—

Well, he was no pest in the looks department—

That thought brought her to another as she approached the closed door to the carriage storage, noting with a frown a barely perceptible line in the dirt and dust. Opening the door, she crossed it, the slightest touch of the pest’s magic there followed by the burbling noise of fey existing quietly.

She paused.

He’d set a silence barrier over the entire space. Her people were quiet to begin with, so it wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t.

The pest wasn’t hard to spot in the room. There he was, on the edge of her people, trying and failing to cajole them into allowing him to help fold blankets. They responded only with wary stares and deference. After being rebuffed by one of the elders he had offered a hand to, the pest slumped, dejected, before summoning an instrument to idly strum.

If anything, the moment the music was brought into the space, the greenlings cast worried glances around and gave him an even bigger berth.

Squirt stood at the door, letting the redcap wander in behind her as she watched with not a little bit of glee. The pest was genuinely struggling. No one was letting him help, and as the literal distance between the greenlings and his music grew, the instrument crumpled into dust in his hands, leaving him once again dejected as he stared off at them.

Another minute ticked by as she watched the others rise and start their day. Pakos had been fully accepted by the group, several of the greenlings hanging off of him happily. The pest remained on the edge, awkwardly looking for a way to integrate and help. And as the seconds ticked by, her glee turned to something more muted. Melancholic.

She stepped forward and noticed with a twinge in her heart that the others treated her with as much wariness as they did the pest.

Her sympathy for him died as he turned towards her with a bright smile and called out loudly, “My goddess!” He gestured at the greenlings. “Safe and sound, as promised.” Then his hands landed on his hips, his chest puffed out in pride. He didn’t even notice that the greenlings froze at his loud tone, all eyes turned to him in stunned horror.

Squirt narrowed her eyes at him as she approached. There was something off about his cavalier attitude. A deliberately forced brightness.

Studying him more closely, she could see the faintest sign of his smile twitching nervously.

She huffed. Then turned to the others, stating loudly and clearly, “He set a sound barrier before he started making noise. He just didn’t say anything.”

He blinked repeatedly. “Was that not obvious?”

“Why would it be obvious?”

He gestured at her. “Because you…” he hesitated. “You like the silence when relaxing, yes?”

Her expression flattened. “I meant why would it be obvious to anyone else that you had done it?” The barrier he’d left had been so subtle most wouldn’t notice it.

He blinked repeatedly. “Oh.” He crossed his arms and frowned. “Should I… announce my use of magic, then?” More quietly, he muttered to himself, “Bartos said to support quietly without making announcements, though.”

She bristled. Trotting closer, she leaned in to mutter angrily, “Lord Everwinter put you up to this?”

He leaned back, shrinking under her anger and holding up his hands in a protestation of innocence. “Ah, non, non, my goddess, I just—you see—”

Rage at his insincerity had her spitting out, “I’m not your fucking goddess.”

He froze.

She turned to stalk away, hearing his quiet, mournful whisper of, “As you wish, Squirt.”

The pause in her step was slight. Just long enough for her to process the lance through her heart made of ice that hearing her name from his lips caused.

She shook it off, continuing onward to the first group she needed to get placed today and shoving all thoughts of the pest to the back recesses of her mind.

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