Too many for me to handle if they attack me.

She didn’t expect an attack, but they undoubtedly knew that Keenan had visited her. They’d be tense as a result. The desert faeries didn’t belong to the faery courts; they existed in a hierarchical system of strength and dominance, not under the control of monarchs. Like all solitary faeries, the desert fey had an Alpha or co-Alphas, faeries who were the strongest and kept order of a sort. If a faery didn’t like it, she could simply leave—or challenge the Alpha for dominance. If Rika challenged the Alpha, she’d win, but she’d never wanted power—even when she’d risked everything at the chance of being Keenan’s missing queen. All she’d ever wanted was to be loved as she’d first thought Keenan had loved her.

“Where’s Sionnach?” Rika called to the watching faeries. He was their current Alpha, had been so as long as Rika had lived in the desert. He was also the closest thing she had to a real friend. He’d long ago decreed that she was not to be overly harassed. For solitaries, that was as good as it got.

“He’s out playing,” said Maili, a faery girl with sand-striated skin and short spiky hair. Her face was expressionless, and her eyes were solid black. She fluttered her two-inch-long nails, making her already elongated fingers look even more stretched.

Another faery, mostly hidden in shadows, said, “Sionnach is out wooing mortals again.”

“Which means he’s not anywhere near here.” Maili grinned. Aside from Sionnach and Rika, she was the strongest of the desert fey. If not for Rika’s decision to stay out of the politics and power squabbles in the desert, they’d have been at each other’s throats a decade ago. That didn’t mean Maili didn’t try to provoke conflict at every opportunity; it merely meant that they’d never come to serious blows.

As Rika watched, Maili waved at a group of faeries just a bit farther away—near the humans standing atop a small cliff. The faeries scrabbled up and across the rocks like misshapen crabs. They were almost human in their appearance, but with a worn meanness. Unlike Rika, they’d never been mortals, but always something Other. After so long in the desert, Rika didn’t usually notice their Otherness, but her conversation with Keenan had unsettled her and reminded her of their differences. No matter how long she’d been this—and it had been far longer than she’d been a human—she’d always be an outsider to them. She had been mortal; she had been a part of the faery courts. She was the reason Keenan, a faery king, had just walked across their desert. No matter that he’d cost her more than he would ever be able to cost them, she was not one of them.