The Fated Fire Princess

Kenton f*****g Crowley

Milo’s POV

About a month after Harper’s sixteenth birthday, Nell tells me about her conversation with the Senses.

“I’m a terrible mother,” she wails as she grabs me, buries her head in my chest, and starts to cry. Harper just blinked out of our suite and over to the Academy, leaving us alone in the kitchen. “I should have already told her.”

I heave a sigh, wrapping my arms around her and resting my chin on top of her head as I sway gently back and forth with her. “You’re not a terrible mother, Nell. We agreed not to tell her for her sake, remember? We wanted her to have a normal life—to experience what Earth is like before realizing that she has the chance to leave it.”

“But is she even experiencing that?” She pulls back from my grasp, looking up at me with wet, reddened eyes. “We took her here, Mi—to the HQ. She’s surrounded by Farnethians.”

“And Jack,” I point out. I like Jack a lot—have been rooting for them to get together for some time, if I’m being honest. I find him far more smart and interesting than most of the guys in Harper’s class, Logan Townsend included. “He’s a regular.”

She frowns, wiping her eyes. “I guess. But don’t you think we’ve waited too long already? Like she’ll be furious with us when she finds out?”

“She’ll be hurt, but she’d also have been hurt if we told her a year ago, or even two. There’s no good time to tell someone something like that.”

“You think we should tell her now, though, don’t you? That we’ve waited long enough?”

I consider this, thinking back to Harper’s sixteenth birthday party and the way she danced and laughed with Effie and Jack. She really glowed—the same way Nell does when she hits cloud nine—like a creature from another dimension, gracing us all with her presence. 

I don’t want to take that away from Harper. She’s not going to glow like that when she knows the weight of the pressure that’s on her.

“Soon,” I decide. “Maybe on her seventeenth birthday.”

The relief in Nell’s eyes is unmistakable; she doesn’t want to tell her yet, either. But she feels even more guilty than I do about it.

- - - - -

When Ash established the Farnethia Project, she appointed Nell and I as what she calls the Figureheads. Basically, we attend the functions, give speeches, pose for pictures, and chat up the people with deep pockets. Sadie and Liam are the Executive President and Vice President—the ones who actually run the organization. Lana and Ace are in charge of the Farnethia Museum, which is one of the hottest tourist spots in the world. And Haley and her girlfriend, an ex-she-elf named Meena, run the Farnethia Manor—the gigantic building where nearly everyone at the HQ lives.

None of us are involved in the Academy; that responsibility belongs to one Headmaster Luke Morrison.

Luke was a serpent back on Farnethia. Most ex-Dark creatures moved to the Dragon HQ, a similar facility to the Farnethia HQ established by my little brother Wren and located in Tokyo, but a few of them came to ours, Luke included. He worked as a tutor in the Castle of Darkness, where he tutored me and all my brothers, and his credentials earned him a job as a teacher at the Farnethia Academy right away. He moved up the ranks quickly and became headmaster within a few years.

I used to like Luke, who was much less evil than most of the people who surrounded me in the Castle of Darkness back then. But since moving to the HQ, I’ve noticed that he has a very clear and very irritating thing for my wife, and have grown to like him less.

Anyway, Nell is currently in a meeting with Luke—not about Harper, who is a star student, but about what how to promote the Academy in our next press appearance. She invited me to join her, but I politely declined. Even if I’m jealous, I still trust Nell with all my heart, and certainly have no desire to watch Luke flirt with her as he tells her what gushing things to say about his precious Academy.

So I hung back in our suite, instead.

I step out onto our patio, bringing a glass of whiskey and a cigar with me. But just before I’m able to light it, I hear a voice that makes me stiffen so sharply, I drop the cigar.

“Afternoon, Drexel.”

You guessed it: Kenton f*****g Crowley.

I glare at the blond, pretty boy ex-elf as he nimbly climbs the brick exterior of the manor and takes a seat on the railing of my patio. It’s hard to say whether immortal Farnethians remain immortal on Earth; it hasn’t been long enough to know for sure. But he doesn’t seem to have aged much.

After Kenton told us about the final prophecy, we made him swear never to repeat it to anyone else—especially Harper. “If you do,” Nell told him, “so help me God, Kenton, I’m going to kill you the way I should have several times already.”

Her words pained him, I could tell—Kenton loved her nearly as much as I did, even then, after her many and constant rejections of him. But he had no intentions of telling anyone, I could also tell; he just wanted her to have the full truth.

“I hope she decides to bring us home,” Kenton told us then. “But I understand that it’s not my place to convince her.”

And he left.

When the Farnethia HQ was established, he sent Nell a letter—one that she shared with me as soon as she received it. He told her that he wanted to move into the Manor, but that if she wanted him to stay away, he would respect her wishes.

“It’s okay with me,” I told her. “If it’s okay with you.”

It wasn’t, though. She didn’t want him that close to Harper. She didn’t want him anywhere near her.

So she told him to stay away.

And now he’s here.

“She’s sixteen, Milo,” Kenton tells me. “And you still haven’t told her.”

I cross my arms, watching him curiously. “You specifically came here when Nell was gone. Why?”

The corner of his mouth twitches, but he doesn’t answer my question. “When do you plan on telling her?”

“We’ll give her enough time to decide. I don’t think we owe you any more details than that.”

“I think you owe the entire world you come from more details than that, Dragon Prince.”

I haven’t felt threatened by Kenton Crowley in a long time, and I still don’t. But he’s rapidly starting to piss me off. “I know why you came to me alone. It’s because it worked for you before. When you came to me back then, telling me that I was putting Nell in danger by being with her, I listened. You think I might listen again. You know Nell never would.”

His light, azure eyes glint. “You’re putting her in danger now, are you not? Harper, I mean? For her to find out in the wrong way, to respond emotionally, to start fires—”

I reach out to grab him by the throat so quickly, he’d gasp if I wasn’t already blocking his wind pipes.

“She’s not going to find out the wrong way,” I growl at him, my voice instantly much darker than it’s been in years. “Because the only person who would ever consider breaking our trust is you, and even you aren’t that stupid.”

He coughs and sputters, but I don’t let go.

“The man who ran away from Nell because you convinced him to is gone,” I spit at him. “I will never leave her, or my daughter, again. And I will never let someone like you dictate how I serve them as a husband and father.”

His face is nearly as red as a tomato now, and I think, for a moment, that I might just kill him.

I don’t, though.

The creature of the Darkness I once was is gone; I’m now just another man looking out for his wife and daughter.

No matter what the cost.