Dying Dreams (Book 1 of Dying Dreams Trilogy) by Katharine Sadler

overreacting, but she didn’t care. It was either act like a child or scream and pull her hair. She had to release the tension and frustration of the day somehow. Finally, she and Ellison sat down at the table with food. She dug in and motioned for him to start talking before she sat on him and began the tickle torture she knew would get him to talk.
    He sighed and put down his sandwich without a bite. “The fae are another species, Liza. They lived in a land on another plane of reality. They have some complex name for it I can’t pronounce, but we humans call it Fairyland.”
    Liza knew she was looking at him, her eyes wide and bugging out of her head, like she thought he was crazy. She knew she shouldn’t be looking at him that way. After all, she’d been talking to a guy with horns and hooves just last night, but she couldn’t help feeling that her best friend and roommate might have lost his mind.
    Ellison, of course, knew exactly what she was thinking. “If you keep looking at me like that, I’m not going to tell you why I won’t be seeing Marcy again.”
    She swallowed hard and tried to return her eyes to their normal size and position, which was not as easy as one might think. She’d get them back to normal and then she’d think Fairy fucking land and they’d pop back out again. Ellison took her discomfort as an opportunity to stuff a few bites into his mouth.
    “Okay,” she said, finally. “I’m good, continue.”
    Ellison cleared his throat dramatically. “As I was saying, the fae mostly lived in Fairyland and those that lived here were the sort who weren’t welcome in their own land for one reason or another. Then the climate changed, people died, new diseases sprung up–”
    “I’ve taken history class, El. Can you skip ahead to me being one of these people?”
    Ellison glared at her and took another bite of his sandwich.
    She sighed. He could be such a baby. “Okay, fine. I’m sorry I interrupted. Please continue your history lesson. I’m fascinated.”
    Ellison took his time finishing his sandwich and then took a long, long drink of water. “Now, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, the fae in Fairyland were hit especially hard by the changing climate of the planet. Their land experienced drought like it never had before on one end and an ice age to conquer all ice ages on the other. Everything went wackadoo screwy and, on top of all that, the fae got sick with a new disease that affected them all no matter what species of fae they were. The ones who could flee Fairy did and, in their desperation, they came to our government, or the government of whatever country they happened to be closest to, for help.”
    Ellison looked at her like he was expecting her to make a snide comment, but she restrained herself.
    “Our government helped them, at least one government of another country killed them on sight, and no one knows what happened to the fae in other countries. Here they were allowed to immigrate and our scientists developed medicines that cured them of the disease. The powers that be felt humans had enough on our plates, what with the oceans rising and the climate changing, so they decided to keep the fae a secret. The fae can use magic to look like regular humans, if they don’t already, so it wasn’t such a hard secret to keep.”
    “Sure it wasn’t,” she couldn’t help saying. Ellison shot her another glare, but she shrugged it off.
    “Fairyland is no longer habitable for the large majority of the fae, and many of them have made lives for themselves here, marrying humans and settling down. Our government is a bit nervous about the fae, considering some of them are quite powerful and scary. Not to mention that the human populace might get a little ticked off if they learned their government kept the existence of fae hidden.”
    “And I am one of these fae?”
    “They claim you have banshee blood.”
    “What’s a banshee?”
    “I don’t actually know a