I ate in silence for a few minutes, listening to the others talk and laugh about stuff while I let my body rest from the beating it just took. They may have appeared to be in good moods, but I knew better. I saw the tension wrinkles around their eyes and between their brows. I saw the bags under their eyes from lack of sleep. I saw the twitches, leg bounces, and finger-tapping. They were restless, exhausted, and worried, but they were keeping their sinking ship afloat any way they could.

This brought my thoughts back to our task at hand. Or tasks plural. We knew the end goal was to block the Unseelie out of Earth permanently, and to do so we had to use the tome that the now deceased Seelie King used to do this exact same thing. We had the tome and the key to unlock it, so now we needed the missing page. I was too tired to even ask how they knew we were missing a page when we couldn’t open the book without summoning the Unseelie—but I kind of figured that question was above my pay grade, and besides, the how that Tegan knew wasn’t really that important. By now, I trusted that girl point-blank.

The missing page was a concern, but Valathame and Leyka had hinted that I’d be going on a quest to find that page—and that hint was not so subtle. I was trying not to worry about that. I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. There was also this little waving red flag in my mind telling me we were going to have to do something in order to be able to open the book at all. Oh shit, and the cipher. Fuck, we have to decode the damned thing. My stomach turned. Our checklist was growing bigger.

Leyka’s note burned a hole in my pocket, figuratively speaking. I’d read it many times now and taken a picture of it that I’d sent to Tegan and Tenn for backup. That was the task that really weighed on me because it was first. Leyka even said so. I had to make these potions for everyone first. The idea that Tegan becoming conscious again was dependent on me made my skin crawl. I had no idea where to begin or what it would entail. Thus far, creating potions had been the same as being thrown into chummed shark-infested waters. And it wasn’t like I had all the time in the world and zero other stress to deal with while figuring this out. The Unseelie and fallen angels weren’t just going to sit back and wait for us to catch up. Not to mention the vampires. We had to handle them, too. Part of me wondered why we didn’t just peel the roof off that castle and let the sun take them.

“You okay over there, Frankie?”