The Fae Keeper

Book 2: Witch King Duology

by H.E. Edgmon

Genres: YA Contemporary

Synopsis

In the heart-stopping sequel to The Witch King, Wyatt and Emyr attempt to rebuild Asalin despite unexpected new enemies within their kingdom.

Two weeks after the door to Faery closed once more, Asalin is still in turmoil. Emyr and Wyatt are hunting Derek and Clarke themselves after having abolished the corrupt Guard, and are trying to convince the other kingdoms to follow their lead. But when they uncover the hidden truth about the witches' real place in fae society, it becomes clear the problems run much deeper than anyone knew. And this may be more than the two of them can fix.

As Wyatt struggles to learn control of his magic and balance his own needs with the needs of a kingdom, he must finally decide on the future he wants—before he loses the future he and Emyr are building…

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Release date: May 31, 2022

Publisher: Inkyard Press

Print pages: 304

Sample

CUT THE DECK

Two weeks after my boyfriend dies in my arms, we go to the woods in the middle of the night to close a portal to another world.

Emyr—my boyfriend, now less dead and more of a king—brushes his knuckles against the back of my hand as we weave through honey locusts, moonlight making puppets of our shadows. He doesn’t say anything, but there’s no need to.

Briar and Jin, walking side by side a few feet ahead, fill the silence for us, their yellow and purple energies batting back and forth at each other as they do.

“So, we’ll do this one, and then—”

“Right, these three, yeah. Are we sure about—”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should go back to—”

“I was just thinking that, yeah, and I was also thinking—”

Their conversation is both about me and not, and I only manage to half follow it. They’re still knocking out the logistics of what we’re about to do, making last-minute decisions on the sigils they’re going to use to close the door to Faery.

“What if it doesn’t work?” Briar asks, and she’s still talking to Jin, but her eyes meet mine when I look her way. I can only face her dark, tender stare without an answer.

Because I don’t have one.

This isn’t the first time we’ve tried closing the door. Briar, Emyr, and I have been out here a few times on our own. But Briar and I can barely come up with an ounce of magic between us, and Emyr is a fae Healer. None of us is exactly perfect for the job.

“It will work,” Tessa snaps, pushing past Emyr and me to force her way to the front of the group. “So, that’s a pointless question.”

My charming sister. We brought her into this endeavor the same time we told Jin, once we realized we were never going to fix the problem on our own. Tonight’s the first night we’ll try all together.

And it has to be tonight.

In the morning, Briar leaves Asalin, the fae kingdom hidden in upstate New York, for her home in Texas. She and her mother, Nadua, are going to start tracking down their family’s changeling contacts, gathering more information on the secret network of their people around the world. Changelings keep their true nature hidden, pretending to be human to avoid fae eyes, not wanting to face the same mistreatment the witches do.

But Emyr is king now, and he wants something better. With Briar and Nadua on his side, maybe we can make allies out of these creatures we didn’t even know existed.

Which would be fucking great, because allies are something we’re desperately in need of. Briar might be leaving Asalin tomorrow, but so are the rest of us. Emyr, Tessa, Jin, and I are heading to North Carolina, to follow up on a lead on the whereabouts of Derek and Clarke Pierce.

The sibling duo who killed Emyr. Who then escaped from Asalin and went on the run.

Under normal circumstances, hunting down his own assassins would not be the king’s job. But since one of Emyr’s first royal decrees was to finally shut down the Guard—the corrupt fae police force, previously led by Derek—in a move that wildly pissed off most of his kingdom, and the people he trusts not to murder him (again) are basically limited to the five of us in the woods right now...

Well, we don’t have a lot of options.

“Yeah, it’s gonna be fine.” I am trying to get better at sounding all confident and positive about things, even when the hamster in my head is screaming and its wheel is on fire. I’ve learned recently that being intentionally shitty about everything is not a personality, actually, or at least not one that’s fun to be around.

When Emyr’s knuckles graze mine again, I lace our fingers together. He squeezes, his gold energy wrapping like a cuff around my wrist, his claws digging into the fragile skin on the back of my hand. I don’t pull away, even when it starts to hurt a little.

We’re greeted in front of the door by Boom. The hellhound sits twenty feet away from the opening, red eyes sharp and keen as he keeps watch, black hackles raised along his back. He hates this place.

Which really makes me feel good, you know, about what the hell is over there.

I reach over with my free hand to scratch the top of Boom’s head, nails scraping the base of his ears. “You can go home, bud. You don’t have to be here for this.”

He huffs, tilting his neck back to nip gently at my fingers, and then returns to his superimportant task of glaring at the door.

Though I’d really rather not, I turn to look in the same direction.

If you don’t know what you’re looking at, the door to Faery isn’t much of a door. It isn’t much of anything at all except a feeling—a wrongness. Two elm trees, ancient but long dead and blackened, have grown twisted together in the middle of the woods, their branches tangling into ugly knots to form an unnatural archway.

Before, when I looked at the door, I would see nothing. Not beyond it, to Asalin’s forest on the other side of the trees. Not through it, to the world of Faery inside. Just...nothing. It was as if my eyes couldn’t, or wouldn’t, focus on it. It was the same for all witches, while Emyr, like the rest of the fae, could see through it to whatever desolate wasteland was on the other side. But there was nothing for me here except the heavy feeling of something forbidden.

Now it’s the same, but it isn’t. I still don’t see Faery, not really, I don’t think. But I see...flashes. Sometimes, there is that strange, elusive, almost staticky nothing that sets my teeth on edge. And sometimes, for the briefest moments, there is something else. Something 

just as difficult for my brain to process, something so abhorrent that my eyes simply refuse to register it’s there until it’s gone again.

I want this fucking door dead bolted. Immediately.

“Alright. Let’s get to it, then.” Tessa claps her hands together and turns to look at Jin, raising her eyebrows. “You bring the thing?”

“Oh, right, yeah.” Jin digs a hand into their oversize mesh cargo pants, pulling out a small metal box, passing it over into Tessa’s waiting hand.

Tessa turns back around, and her soft lilac energy jumps to life, slicking from her fingertips and up her arms. She lifts the box to the base of one of the branches, and, with a deep breath, shoves it into the bark. The black elm allows her to do it, the tree opening itself up to her magic to accommodate the strange little device, making space for it to nest perfectly in the wood as if it’d grown there.

As soon as she does, the doorway begins to flicker. Once, quickly, and then a few more times in rapid succession, and then, a soft blue light fills the archway and doesn’t dim again.

This is why we needed these two.

Jin’s pet project for a while has been taking human technology and finding ways to integrate it with witch magic. They’ve invented cell phones that allow them to send spells through cyberspace, and laptops that let them share magically binding documents in the cloud. And this? This is a security system, ripped off from human designs, programmed with witch magic, that we’re about to install with sigils for a passcode.

Yes, we are, in fact, going to close the five-hundred-year-old door to the magical fairy-tale planet with a dressed-up ADT alarm. Because of course we are.

We need Tessa to make sure Jin’s spellwork is able to weave itself into the forest properly. As an Influencer, Tessa can shape the world around her.

It’s also nice to have a fae on hand who isn’t about to lose her shit at the sight of the tech magic.

Jin and Emyr worked on these projects together. He helped them with their design, their shared visions.

And then Clarke and Derek used Jin’s cell phone to send the magic that killed him. Now, even watching this display unfold in front of us, I can feel the way Emyr tenses at my side, the way his hand tightens around mine even more.

I wince when his claws prick blood, and he jerks away. I snatch his hand back with an absolutely not scoff. He doesn’t squeeze this time.

“Okay, it’s all yours.” Tessa waves her arm out, ushering Jin and Briar forward. “Make it quick.”

I know I should be helping them with the sigils. I’m supposed to be learning this shit, too. It’s important, and I’m already seventeen years behind, and if there were a witchcraft final exam, I would fail it. Big fail it.

But I don’t let go of Emyr’s hand to join them. I just stroke my thumb against his, watching the way his energy tightens like armor around his chest and hoping my touch makes 

him feel anchored to his body, because I love him, and I need to do this right now. And I let our friends close the door, and I don’t worry about not doing my part, because I know they love me anyway, and they need to do that right now.

Minutes later, the blue light in the archway flickers again and then disappears.

“Okay...um. Okay, it’s done.” Briar’s words are soft, and she takes a few steps back, tilting her head to consider the elm trees.

“Are we sure?” Tessa demands.

“Positive.” Briar nods. She looks over her shoulder at me, offering a lopsided half grin, flashing one little dimple when she does. “It’s over. We did it.”

Next to me, Emyr exhales. Boom rolls onto his back in the dirt.

“It’s just a shame we couldn’t even take a peek inside.” Jin’s voice is a taut whisper, each word seemingly pried from their throat. Their eyes flit across the twisted tree branches covering the now-closed doorway, and I notice the way their hand gives the smallest of twitches at their side. “Not even a look.”

“If my father’s account of Faery is to be believed, we don’t ever want to go through this door.” Emyr sounds exhausted at the mention of Leonidas, his father, who lied about what was behind this door for decades. My black energy winds up and curls around his throat, stroking through the curls at the nape of his neck. “Besides, we have more important matters to deal with right now.”

“Whaaaat? C’mon.” I huff sarcastically, reaching down to pat at his backside. “Personally, I don’t think we have enough going on. What if we got another dog?”

I pretend not to see the scowl Emyr slides me. But Boom’s ears perk up with interest.

“I don’t give a shit what’s over there,” Tessa snaps, balancing her hands on her hips, still eyeing the doorway with contempt. “I’m more concerned about what might’ve already come through.”

Right. That part.

We definitely don’t have time to deal with that part. Here’s hoping it doesn’t come back to bite us in the ass.

CHAPTER ONETHE TOWER

The next time I see Derek and Clarke Pierce, we’re in the outskirts of Nowhere, Appalachia, and I’m pretty sure my arm is broken. Emyr would have healed it by now if it weren’t for us barreling up this freaking mountain after them.

If you get away again, I quit.

Two weeks we’ve spent playing cat and mouse with these assholes, up and down the East Coast, in and out of little nothing towns, and I’m tired. I want to take a nap. I want to take several naps. I miss when I got to do things that weren’t hunting wanted criminals, or helping my undead-king-boyfriend try to reconfigure his kingdom, or keeping very big world-altering secrets about doors to other worlds.

I miss Briar.

But all I have to do is think about Emyr’s lifeless body in my arms that night, and I’m pushing past the pain to hurry in the siblings’ direction.

Fifty feet away—or maybe twenty, or maybe a hundred, I cannot possibly be expected to do any kind of mental math—Derek turns so sharply on his heel that he kicks up ash. He wheels toward us, black wings blowing out at his back, blue eyes glowing like headlights in the center of his face. This is the most disheveled I’ve ever seen him, dressed down in jeans covered in muck and blood, white T-shirt snagged down the chest where Emyr almost managed to catch him moments earlier by grabbing a fistful of fabric between his claws. He looks like he hasn’t managed a decent night’s sleep in the month since he ran.

The fact that I once thought this man was the epitome of male beauty is unbelievable to me now. There is no way that wasn’t a direct result of the Influencing he was wielding over my head. Giving him a second of my time when Emyr was right there? I’m a clown, but I’m not the whole circus.

I can make jokes about it. But the sight of him this close, rancid as he is, still makes my stomach hurt. This man was in my head. Clouding my own thoughts, making me want him, just so he could play with me, a pawn in his little political game.

What else could he have Influenced me to do? How much further could he have taken his coercion?

Derek raises his hand, energy sparking along his fingertips, and the sugar maple trees surrounding us start bending in his direction.

“WYATT, DOWN!” Tessa shouts from behind me, and I barely manage to dodge the boulder that comes flying overhead. One jagged edge brushes against my shaved scalp and my stomach roils at the almost of the sensation.

At the same time, Derek rends a tree straight from the ground, roots and all, and sends it hurtling right at my body. Before it can wipe me off the map, it collides with Tessa’s rock in midair. The BOOM of the Influencers’ magic clashing is enough to set my teeth on edge, and I stumble back, blinking away stars in my vision.

Wait.

Pause.

“Where’s Clarke?”

Emyr grips the hilt of his sword, casually slung over his shoulder like it’s just another one of his accessories. He’s started carrying one since not long after they put the crown on his head, an ancient relic from Faery itself. It would be very sexy if it weren’t because he felt the need to protect himself from another assassination attempt at all times. (As it stands, it’s only moderately sexy.) He slides it down and in front of his torso, wielding the weapon with practiced ease. “Where’s Jin?”

Well, fuck me.

Tessa rushes past. She and Emyr circle closer to Derek, trying to back him up against the stone face. He smiles, teeth bloodied from some earlier collision, tilting his head back as blue energy snakes up his body. Emyr and Tessa respond in kind, gold and lilac draping itself across their shoulders, curling around their throats, twining together in the air between them.

As much as I don’t want to leave Emyr or my sister to fight the evil Ken doll alone, I have my own pressing problem. Why the hell did we not assign someone to keep their eyes on Clarke?

Okay, correction. Why the hell did we not assign someone who wasn’t her ex? Jin insisted they be the one to deal with her, that they be responsible for making sure she was brought in safely. (Never mind whose safety they were worried about there.) We never should’ve let that happen. They shouldn’t have even been on these recon missions in the first place. Their head’s been screwed on wrong since they found out the truth about their fated mate. Now they’ve gone and disappeared without backup.

And if Clarke does anything else to hurt Jin, Briar is going to string me up by my toenails. So, when I catch a flash of electric purple just past the tree line, bobbing farther up the mountain, I grit my teeth and race off in the same direction.

“Jin!” I push past tree limbs with my good hand, my clothes and skin snagging on brambles all the way up. Everything hurts and I’m dying, or at least exhausted. And it doesn’t matter. “Where the hell did you go?!”

“Wyatt.” Someone giggles, a chirping, harmonic little sound. “So nice of you to join us.”

Ah. Not Jin.

The air at the top of the mountain is cold and sharp, like ice fractures settling into my heaving lungs. It’s quiet, too much so, or maybe I just can’t hear anything over the sound of my breathing.

Clarke Pierce stands in front of me with her hands on her hips and a fat, self-satisfied smirk on her glossy pink mouth. Unlike her older brother down there, she somehow looks Pinterest perfect. Her tanned white skin is unmarred by a single scratch, her white-blond curls perfectly pinned behind her head. The blush tracksuit looks like the early 2000s spit up on her. And she’s wearing heels. Bejeweled heels.

I would be impressed by her dedication to the vibes if I did not hate this bitch with every itching, furious inch of me.

“Hey there, handsome.” She grins, raising one hand to wiggle her fingers in my direction. Those fluffy white wings shimmy at her back. I get the feeling she’s enjoying being the center of attention. “Was just telling Jin here how much I’ve missed them.” Those round blue eyes flick to Jin’s face and I think, maybe I’m imagining things, but it’s almost like something in them softens. “And I have missed you, sweetheart. More than you’ll ever know.”

“Jin.” My teeth grate, and I bare my sharpened fangs. “She’s a liar. Every word out of her mouth is a lie. You know that now.”

Jin isn’t looking at me. They only have eyes for Clarke, twin black holes drinking in everything that this manipulative asshole is spinning for them.

“Not everything,” Clarke assures them. “Some things. I’ve done a lot of lying. I’ve hurt a lot of people. But could I lie about what we have? Do you think I ever really wanted to hurt you?” She shuffles closer, tilting her head to blink up at Jin like some kind of wounded fawn. “No one else is in this relationship but you and me. No one else knows what it feels like. You know I couldn’t fake this. Not even I’m that good of a liar.”

Clarke is a tiny thing, dwarfed by Jin’s height and muscles. But it’s clear, looking at the two of them only a few feet apart, who’s in control. Clarke’s pink energy hisses with venom, and Jin looks like they might just disappear into the dirt.

“Jin...” Blackness creeps from under my fingernails and crawls up past my wrists. I reel it in before it slides the rest of the way up my arms, stifling the embers that flicker just beneath the surface of my skin. I’ve been working with the witches in every spare moment I have, but those moments are few and far between. I didn’t have that many brain cells to begin with, and the ones I have left, with everything else going on, don’t seem interested in learning Witchcraft 101.

See, witch magic is fueled by emotion. We draw our power from what we feel, the way fae draw theirs from the earth around them. But we need conduits. We need something to channel our magic, like sigils, or spells, or potions, otherwise...you know, we accidentally burn villages to the ground.

Not that I’d know anything about that.

Anyway, I’ve been studying when I can, but I still have no idea what I’m doing. At this point, all I can do is try for emotional self-control (clearly my strong suit) and hope for the best.

“Jin, look at me.”

“Wyatt.” Their voice hitches. They don’t look away from Clarke’s face, even as they speak my name. “What card did you draw when you woke up this morning?”

Every morning, I pull a single card from my tarot deck. Most mornings, I tell the others about it, a glimpse of insight into the rest of the day. Today, I didn’t. It’s been sitting in my gut like lead.

I swallow. “The Tower.”

Chaos. Violent upheaval. An awakening that can’t be stopped.

A single tear streaks, wet and hot, down Jin’s cheek, and drips from their chin. We both know, no matter how this encounter goes, Jin doesn’t get what they want. Because what they want is a world that doesn’t exist anymore. A world where Clarke is innocent, and she loves them.

“Hmm.” At length, Clarke turns away from her mate to face me. “Okay, let’s talk. What do you want, kiddo?”

“Huh?”

“Well, I want to leave this mountain without my hair singed off. I know I have a pretty face, but I’m thinking I wouldn’t rock the shaved head look nearly as well as you do. Now, what do you want?”

She cannot be serious, except she is, and I know she is.

“You killed Emyr. The only thing I want is for you to get everything you deserve, peaches.”

Jin makes a warbling sound of distress at my words.

Clarke’s tongue flicks out against her razor-sharp teeth. After a beat, she giggles again, like nails on a chalkboard. “You know, Wyatt, you and I have so much more in common than you’d like to believe.”

“We absolutely fucking do not.”

“No, really. Look at us. We’re constantly underestimated. We’re small, and cute, and people think that’s all there is to us. They think they can push us around. And we keep getting caught up in all these awful little conundrums just because we’re trying to do the right thing.” She shrugs. “Sure, maybe we have different ideas of right and wrong, but that’s neither here nor there.”

I stare at her for a long moment. She stares back. Sweat drips down the side of her forehead, creasing her foundation.

Finally, I smile. “Appreciate you thinking I’m cute. But I can tell you’re stalling.”

Clarke raises one eyebrow. “Pardon?”

“You’re trying to buy yourself some time, wait for Derek to show up. You’re... Oh, Clarke, are you afraid of me?” That shouldn’t send a thrill through my body the way it does, but I’ve 

always known I’m a little messed up in the head. I take a step forward, and I don’t miss the way she shifts her weight to the other foot, easing herself back a pace. “You’ve seen what I can do, and you’re scared. After all, I did almost kill you once already, didn’t I? Don’t think Emyr would waste the magic healing you if it happened again. And now that I’ve had time to train...”

Now that I’ve had time to train absolutely nothing, but she doesn’t need to know that.

Clarke tilts her head and shifts her weight again. I can actually see the moment she decides to stop playing coy, her shoulders tightening and her pretty face twisting into a grimace. “Fine. I think you’re a creepy little weirdo and I don’t trust you or your magic one teeny tiny bit. I’m a survivor, honey. That’s what I do. That’s what we both do. We survive. And sometimes that means making a deal with the devil. Isn’t that exactly what you did with Derek?”

“I made that deal before I had any idea who Derek or Emyr had become.”

Okay, look. Clarke’s stalling, but so am I. She’s afraid of the power that nearly took her life the night of the riot, but I don’t actually know how to control that power. I need backup, and Jin sure as hell isn’t it. “And that doesn’t change the fact that you don’t have anything I want.”

“What about a new face?”

The words are just unexpected enough to throw me for a loop. “What?”

“I’m an Influencer, Wyatt. I can shape the world into whatever I want, and that includes you.” Now she’s sidling closer again. “So, tell me. What would turn this body into a more comfortable place to live? A dick? A flat chest? A deeper voice?” She flicks her wrist at my face with a grin. “Maybe you want all those scars to disappear.”

My heart pounds hard enough I can feel the reverberations all the way down my broken arm. I know Influencers can control the world around them. I’ve heard of ones who could shape-shift. But could Clarke possibly be as powerful as she’s claiming?

Something saccharine and sinister sneaks into the corner of her smile, and she gives a quiet little hum. “Hey...maybe that’s not what you want at all. Maybe what you really need are sharper teeth. Claws as deadly as Derek’s?” She’s close enough now that I can smell her perfume, sweet like candy. “Maybe you want everyone to finally see you as the biggest monster in the room. And I could make that happen. I could turn you into anything you wanted.”

Anything I wanted.

I refuse to bend to the cis logic that my body is wrong, that I am a boy’s soul stuck in a girl’s bones, that the only appropriate way to be trans is to hate myself. I don’t want to be cis. I don’t want the magical penis Clarke is offering me, and I wouldn’t go back and give up the experiences transness has given me, either.

Seriously. Me, a cis man? No thank you.

And yet...there is a part of me that wants to buy what she’s selling, and I hate m

I know who I am, but how much easier would it be if the rest of the world knew it, too? If I didn’t have to listen to their uninteresting apologies over pronoun slips. If I didn’t have to wonder where it was safe for me to exist in full.

Besides, transness isn’t the most interesting thing about me, and it’s definitely not the only reason I might want to make some renovations. At seventeen, my body has already survived more than it ever should have had to. Maybe it’d be nice to have skin that didn’t feel marked by the things the world has done to me. Maybe it’d be nice to be the kind of monster that could stop it from ever happening again.

“Wyatt.” Jin’s voice this time, startling me out of my reverie enough to look over at them. They haven’t looked away from Clarke. The first tear has been joined by others. “Maybe we should just let her go.”

“You’re absolutely not going to do that, Jin.”

Not my voice. Tessa steps up to the top of the mountain with us, arms already outstretched, soft lavender energy resting in her hands and ready to throw down. She shoves herself in front of both us witches, her small body like a shield. Her translucent wings sparkle a thousand different colors in the low afternoon sun.

If Clarke and I are similar, Tessa and Clarke are, too. It’s more obvious with the two of them, I guess. Little blonde girls, always draped in shimmer and pastel. Both of them far deadlier than people might assume at a glance.

Only my sister isn’t pure evil. For the most part, anyway.

We’re still working on our relationship.

“Where’s Emyr? Derek?” I can’t believe I was actually standing here fantasizing about Clarke’s offer. In what world would anything she could give me be worth letting her go?

Tessa doesn’t look at me. “On the way.”

When the trees behind me rustle with movement, I jerk around in time to see Emyr joining us and my body nearly goes limp with relief. I didn’t realize I was holding tension in every muscle, not knowing how things were playing out down below, until I saw him again.

He looks exhausted. Shaken up. But okay. Alive.

Emyr is alive. He’s breathing. Sometimes, I have to remind myself of that over and over again, even on the good days.

“Derek?” He must’ve gotten away. It’s not like they would’ve put him in cuffs and left him somewhere to be picked up later. And that just means, even if we manage to get Clarke back to Asalin, we’re going to have to keep doing this. Round and round the fucking mulberry bush.

I just want a nap.

Emyr stops at my side, reaching out and curling his fingers around my wrist. A golden glow emanates from beneath his palm, and suddenly the pain in my arm is gone. I hadn’t even realized I was still in pain until I’m not anymore. Magic or not, he has a way of doing that to me. ...

yself for it.