The male made his way toward them, having noticed Daria. His wide smile was warm as he stopped beside their table.
“Hello there! You must be Miss Bradford, our guest.” He bowed slightly. “I’m Sariel, or Blue if you prefer. For obvious reasons.”
Her mouth worked, speech having died between her brain and her mouth.
Ryon interceded with a chuckle. “She’s going to need some time to get used to us, buddy. Just call her Daria. Daria, this is our resident Seelie prince.”
“Removed from my throne,” he said smoothly. “Titles don’t mean much here, unless you’re the commander.”
“What’s a Seelie?” she managed at last.
Blue explained patiently. “A member of the Fae realm, a world that exists parallel to this one. The portal to the Fae realm is located in a country you call Ireland. The Fae consist of two groups—the Seelie and the Unseelie. Members of my Court consider us to be the good guys, if you will. Though we all know not every world is made of entirely good or bad people.”
A shadow passed over his face as he related that last bit, and she wondered at it. “What are the Unseelie, then? The bad guys?”
“Essentially. They devote their existence to pleasing themselves, no matter who they hurt. Their minions are the Sluagh, Seelie who’ve given themselves to evil, and have fallen.”
She took this in. “And you’re a prince.”
“Yes, formerly from the Seelie Court. Old news, and a long story.” He waved a hand at a vacant chair. “May I join you both?”
“Sit,” Ryon said. “Eat. You’re way too skinny. Haven’t you been following the diet Melina put you on?”
Blue, as Daria was starting to think of him, wrinkled his nose at the hamburger patties as though they were the most revolting things he’d ever seen. “I seriously doubt those should be on anyone’s diet.”
“You just need to gain weight, man. Doesn’t matter how at this point.”
Blue glared at his friend. “Thank you for so helpfully pointing that out.” He reached for a bun and piled it with vegetables, leaving out the meat altogether and ignoring the fries.
Thankfully, Ryon didn’t comment on his choice. She could see that Blue was rather sensitive about the subject of his eating habits. She wondered if food was so different in the Seelie Court that he couldn’t find things here to satisfy his palate. Then she ground to a mental halt at the direction of her thoughts.
She was pondering the eating habits of a Fae prince. As though that were perfectly normal.
We’re wolf shifters, Daria.
She had believed Ryon to be mentally ill. And the proof that he wasn’t was sitting here, politely chatting away with the man who’d appointed himself her friend and protector.
Ryon had been telling the absolute truth about his world and the creatures in it.
And her world had just been irrevocably turned on its head.
Five
Ryon witnessed the exact moment Daria knew the truth.
He saw it in her brown eyes, on her stunned face. She was shaken, but didn’t do anything dramatic like dissolve into hysterics, and for that he breathed a sigh of relief. That didn’t mean they were out of the woods on her acceptance of things, but it was a start.
To her credit she held it together, focusing her attention on Blue, who preened under the attention. The prince regaled her with tales of his brothers, his adventures with them, and the good times they had. Well, before he’d been thrown out of the realm when Elders in the Seelie Court found out that Blue was a bastard. A product of the Unseelie king Malik’s forcible taking of the Seelie queen, Blue’s mother.
“I’m so sorry,” Daria said, her pretty face empathetic.
Blue smiled, though Ryon knew it was a front. “I’ll see my brothers and Mother again one day. In the meantime, I have Kalen. He and I recently found out that we’re half brothers.”
“Who’s Kalen?”
Ryon pointed to the man, who was sitting at a nearby table, eating and talking with Aric and Aric’s mate, Rowan.
“Wow, physically you guys are total opposites,” Daria observed. “He’s completely Goth, and you’re like sunlight and sky.”
Ryon had gotten so used to Kalen, he didn’t notice anymore how different the man was from the others. But it was true. With his layered, black rock-star hair falling to his shoulders, the black jeans and T-shirt with his new black leather duster over it, and the matching kohl-rimmed green eyes and nail polish, the guy definitely made people look twice.
Blue smiled. “Sunlight and sky? That might be the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.”
She shrugged. “Well, it’s true.”
Ryon knew she had definitely earned a friend in their Fae prince.
“So,” she went on, “how are you and Kalen half brothers?”
“It’s complicated, but I’ll try and simplify. We had different mothers, but like me, Kalen’s father was also Malik, the fortunately now-deceased Unseelie.”
“Kalen fried his ass in a big battle we had with Malik and his forces not long ago,” Ryon supplied helpfully.
“Did Kalen live in the Seelie Court, too?”
“No. If he had, we would’ve met long ago. He was raised in the human world, led to believe he was human with magical powers. His grandmother didn’t want him to learn the truth of his ancestry, in order to keep him safe from Malik and his minions.” Blue sent his half brother a look filled with sympathy. “When she died, the man Kalen believed to be his father threw him out of the house, leaving him to survive on the streets. He was fourteen.”
“Rotten bastard,” Daria hissed. “What happened then?”
“He survived for years, until the Alpha Pack found him in a nearby cemetery, raising a corpse to speak to it while investigating the man’s murder.”
“Hold up—Kalen raised a corpse? Out of the ground, and spoke to it?” Her eyes were wide. “As in ‘Hellooo, Mr. Corpse, let’s have a chat and tell me who killed you?’”
“Not so simple as that. It’s not easy to raise the dead, you know.”
Daria blinked at him. “Guess not.”
“So Kalen was taken into the Pack. He was just finding his place here when he met Mac and started to fall in love with her, and then Malik came along and tried to steal him away from all of us to use his Sorcerer’s power.”
“So, he’s a Sorcerer and can raise the dead. What else?” She said it sarcastically, as if there couldn’t be anything else.
“He’s also a black panther. That’s all.”
“Sure.” She rested her elbows on the table and looked around the room. “So Kalen is married to the doctor, Mackenzie Grant.”
“Mated, not married. Much stronger bond than some piece of paper,” he said. “But yes, and they’re expecting their first child.”
“I sort of got that from the baby bump she’s carrying around. Any other mated pairs here, as you call them?”
“Aric and Rowan. Aric has been with the Pack since the beginning, like a lot of the men, but Rowan recently joined the team. She’s a former police officer from some vile place called Los Angeles.” Daria snickered. Blue pointed to the redheaded wolf and his brunette mate. Then he gestured to a goateed man and a small blond woman.
“Then there’s Jax and Kira. Jax is an original member, a silver wolf and RetroCog, meaning he can touch an object and see important events surrounding it. Kira is one of our lab assistants who specializes in DNA and gene strand stuff. Don’t ask me more about that, it’s confusing. She’s also working to build a sanctuary for displaced paranormal beings, and I’m helping her,” he said proudly. “That’s my job here.”