Page 10 of Escape from the Green

It was how she had justified marrying my father, how she had betrayed her own sister in doing so, how she had ripped my brother and sister from their mother before they could even know who she was, then raise them as her own. It was how she wrung any last shred of good from my father that may have been left after he had been cursed. Which, to be fair, couldn't have been much. But she stole that. Because she could. Because she liked the power. Because it never occurred to her to care what those around her might want.

Which was why I was in the middle of The Green - a place I had only toed the edges of all my life - cold, tired, scared, and, apparently, half-delusional since I was not thinking of the aforementioned coldness, tiredness, or fear, but was instead focused on things like Drake's darn muscles.

Of all things.

"Sorry," I said, shaking my head, trying to clear it. "I think I'm just a little, ah, overwhelmed with all of this is all," I admitted, it being as close to the truth as possible. "I've always known this day would come, but I guess it was somehow sudden at the same time. If that makes sense."

"Figure it makes sense since you picked the literal worst time of the year to make your escape, so something definitely pushed you into it."

"I didn't prepare enough," I added, thinking about the bags that had been slamming into my sides the entire run, making the skin beneath feel bruised and sensitive now that I could think of something other than suffocating with my own weak lungs.

"How could you? That mother of yours kept you locked up in that house for ninety-percent of your life. I hardly ever saw you outdoors, let alone free enough to learn things like survival skills."

"It's not an excuse," I told him with a helpless shrug, somewhat uncharacteristically down on myself. "I was a coward. I could have at least tried."

"A coward?" he repeated, brows drawn low, making my attention go to his deep eyes, eyes with unusual flecks of red around the irises, something I was sure I had never seen before, was just as sure I would never see again. It must have been part of his lineage. Maybe only the Draca had eyes like that. I wouldn't know. No one would. Drake was the only living one anyone had seen in generations. "A coward would never leave, Amy. A coward would sit up in her tower, taking whatever shit her mother threw at her, thanking her for flinging it in the first place."

"Drake, I--"

"You packed bags, got into ridiculous human clothes, snuck out of that prison you had been kept in, came to my barn, freed me, and then ran away. Cowards don't do that. That is the shit of the stories I was told as a boy. That is the shit of legends. You're like one of those childhood heroes the young ones in my tribe were raised on."

He spoke more like a human than the fae I had known. He was more blunt, more crass. He used foul language you didn't often hear from the types of fae my parents associated with. Though, to be fair, you did hear the guards speaking like that when they knew they wouldn't be overheard by my mother.

I wondered, maybe for the first time, what his kind were like. The Draca. I guess it never occurred to me to think of them since fae for generations had been convinced they were the things of myth, stories the more dominant fae told their own offspring about as bedtime stories. But here was Drake, supposedly the last of his kind, talking of his kin as though they were - or had been - a thriving community.

I didn't know how old Drake was. Such things were often impossible to tell without asking directly. We weren't like humans. We didn't show the stages of life so plainly on our skin. We didn't become incapable of childbearing around the age of forty. We didn't show lines beside our eyes and mouths at fifty. We didn't go gray and wither and dry and die before eighty. It was a slower transition. Many human lifetimes were needed to paint even a single sliver of gray into our hair. There were fae I had met who looked like a human forty when they had been around for thousands of human years. Fae who didn't spend time in the human realm to age them like I had could spend two human lifetimes as a child still.

So Drake, well, he could be as young as thirty human years. Or as old as a thousand.

I could never know.

And, to be fair, he might not even know after spending so much time locked away from the world around him, making it hard - maybe even impossible - to tell the passage of time.

He definitely carried himself, presented himself, with a bit more maturity than I felt. Or maybe that was just how I was perceiving him simply because he knew more of this world than I did.

Heck, maybe he thought I was more worldly because I had spent so much time in the human realm. He certainly seemed captivated by the ideas of elephants and zombies, two things that he never would have known about if not for me.

It maybe made me feel less like a child around him to realize that.

"Well, I did kinda save you, huh?" I asked, giving him a smile, feeling a little proud of myself for that part.

"You sure did," he agreed, eyes deep, trying to show me something, but I simply didn't know him - or, to be honest, that expression - well enough to interpret it. His hand gave mine a squeeze, making me almost alarmingly aware of it again, making me think and worry about strange things. Like how I needed to keep myself from letting my fingers curl, not wanting him to think I wanted to actually hold his hand.

Which I didn't.

Right?

I mean... of course not.

I didn't even know him.

I didn't hold hands with anyone.

It simply had never been allowed.

Heck, I didn't even know what hand-holding was until I went to the human realm and saw it for the first time.

My gaze must have been looking at the scarred, wide back of his hand, because he finally explained, "We have to go down a steep incline. I want to make sure you don't fall."