City of Fae by Pippa DaCosta Page B

and brushed at my shoulder, while spinning, trying to get the damn thing off. My hip found the dresser’s edge with a dull thud. I froze, blinked at my reflection in the mirror, and saw the stray tendrils of hair that had worked free of my band. No spiders. Holy crap, I looked like I’d been run over. Twice. Not a dream. My shoe was missing. And the other was caked in mud, bits of grit and tunnel debris, just like the rest of me.
    Yanking at my headband, I freed my hair and shook it out. A spider tumbled to the floor. I squealed and stamped on it. A second fell free. Dead, its legs curved inward. The first one might have been dead but I’d not given it the benefit of the doubt. A third fell free. I stomped on it and fled to the safety of the shower, tearing off my clothes, dry heaving, suddenly terrified I had hundreds of the critters against my skin.
    Only when scalding hot water blasted my pale skin did I feel halfway to normal again. The spiders were real, Under was real, ergo the conversation between Reign and that
thing
had been real too. The spider was the queen? My skin prickled, even under the pummeling jets of hot water. I snatched the soap up and lathered everywhere, taking off a layer of skin if I had to. If the spiders were real, then had I really been smothered by them? I assumed Reign had brought me home, but I had no memory of him doing so. How he’d saved me didn’t matter, not in that moment. I was alive. I was home. Back in reality. But, what I’d seen had been real. The queen … How was I going reveal something like her to the world? It would sound like the ramblings of someone losing her mind. Or someone lost to fae bespellment. I needed evidence. I couldn’t write about a giant spider living under London. It went against everything we knew about the fae. They were beautiful, not hideous. Damn, I’d have to go back. I needed proof.
    “Alina … ?”
    I jolted and made a tiny yelping sound. The bar of soap flew out of my hand, shot between the shower-curtains and bounced on the floor somewhere outside the bath. “Damn it! Get the fuck out of my bathroom, Reign.” My heart beat against my chest and throbbed in my ears. I’d had enough. He was lucky I was trapped in the shower, had I been dressed, I’d have slapped him and kicked his ass out. Forget that he’d saved me; he was the one who walked me into that nightmare without a warning.
    “Alina.”
    “Don’t! Just don’t. Unless you’ve come to tell me it was a trick, an illusion?” I knew it wasn’t, but would happily convince myself otherwise.
    “No, she was real.”
    I splayed my hand on the cool tiles and bowed my head under the water.
It was real
. Tears fell, hidden by the streams pouring over my face. If she was real, what else lurked out there? What other horrible things lay in wait beneath London? Were the scenes depicted on those tapestries real? Now I knew the truth, I almost didn’t want it. This was bigger than me. I was an out-of-work reporter with no clue how to handle the ugly truth.
    “Are you okay?”
    I laughed, and I didn’t care that it sounded maniacal. “I am so far from okay, I think I might be crazy.”
    Reign’s hand poked through the shower curtain, soap cradled in his palm.
    I glowered at it. “Drop it.” He did. I scooped it up. “Pervert.”
    “I thought you said
pervert
, but my ears heard
thanks
.”
    “And I thought faeries had excellent hearing.” Through the opaque curtain I could make out a black smudge in the bathroom doorway. He wasn’t moving.
    “The word you’re looking for is
selective
,” he said.
    I rinsed my face under the water, counting to five in my head. When I opened my eyes, he was still there. I wanted to rage at him, to scream and accuse him of lying, of misleading me. I wanted to demand answers, to shake the truth out of him if I could, but most of all, I didn’t want to be alone. “Don’t go.”
    His outline shifted, torn between loitering in my doorway and leaving.