Jayce looked up, but not at her words. Like most mortals, he couldn’t see or hear the fey. Fortunately, her invisibility also meant that he’d never reject her, never tell her that she wasn’t the girl for him. Unfortunately, it also meant that he would never reach out and draw her closer. Still, she’d decided almost a year ago that their relationship was better if he didn’t know she existed.

She followed his gaze to where a desert tortoise plodded across the ground. When Jayce saw it at the edge of the road, he dropped his sketch pad on top of his satchel and picked up the tortoise.

He carefully lowered the tortoise onto the sand on the other side of the road. “Too many dangers for you out here.” Jayce watched the tortoise continue its journey into the desert. Then he glanced at the darkening sky. “Looks like it’s time for me to go too.”

As he packed up his art supplies, Rika packed hers as well, but when she looked in the same direction Jayce had, her happiness fled. What appeared to be an ordinary storm to Jayce was something Rika saw as far worse: a faery raced toward her in the heart of a swirling dust devil. Surrounded by twisting sand was the source of all of her greatest sorrows, Keenan, the Summer King himself.

Embarrassingly, even in the midst of the waves of ugly emotion his presence elicited, Rika couldn’t stop the sigh that escaped her at the sight of Keenan. When she’d fallen for him, Keenan had still been a bound king, the strength of summer hidden from him inside a mortal girl. Even then, he was captivating. Now that his curse was broken, he was devastating to see.

He’d spent nine centuries seeking his Summer Queen, romancing innocent after innocent. At one point, he’d convinced Rika that she was the one he needed. Worse still, he’d convinced Rika that she loved him enough to risk finding out if she was the one he needed. She hadn’t been the missing queen, and as a result of the curse, she’d been transformed into a faery, filled with ice and cold as punishment for failing the test. Such was the horrible cost of trying to break the curse that bound summer.