Steal the Sun (Thieves #4)

Steal the Sun (Thieves #4)

Lexi Blake



Chapter One



The warmth of the midday sun shone down on the village in Faery. The sun didn’t look different from the one I was used to seeing, but I was no longer on the Earth plane. I hadn’t been for the hours it had taken us to walk from the sithein door to the village located close to the white palace, the home of the Seelie royals.

I let my face drift up, closing my eyes and pretending I was back in Dallas, standing on the balcony with Dev, waiting for Daniel to wake up.

“Zoey.” Neil looked at me with big blue eyes from across the table. “They wouldn’t call them brownies if they didn’t taste good.”

“Did you learn nothing from the pixies?” I shot my werewolf a nasty look, remembering the day not too many weeks ago that I scrubbed his scalp raw getting rid of the fleas a certain ruby red pixie had left him as payment for trying to make her a little snack.

I looked over at the next table and saw my other bodyguard. Lee wasn’t even paying attention to the little brownies who were shyly watching the festivities from the doors and windows of houses. Lee and his brother, Zack, were drinking ale and guarding the coffin they'd carried into the sithein. Sarah’s husband, Felix Day, was talking to Zack and looking around the town square with a ready smile.

Neil nodded his head vigorously, looking at both Sarah and me as we sat at a table in the middle of Dev’s hometown. “Yes. I totally learned something. I learned not to eat the pixies. Those brownies look mighty tasty and easy to catch.”

Sarah let her head fall to the table, and she groaned heartily about Neil’s fondness for faery creatures. It didn’t bode well for our stay in Faery that my best friend thought most of the inhabitants looked tasty.

I took the time to stare at my husband. Well, one of them anyway. I couldn’t exactly stare at Daniel, and looking at his coffin only made me wonder if he was hot in there. So I stared at the husband who was up and walking around and wondered when I could go home. I’d been in his homeland for approximately half a day and I already wanted to be back at the penthouse. It was selfish, but I was in that kind of mood.

I like to think of myself as a fairly simple girl. I wouldn’t call myself normal, of course. When a girl is married to two men, she can’t consider herself normal. When those men happen to be a faery high priest and a vampire king, she can wave any thoughts of a nice, normal life good-bye.

I’ve gotten used to the fact that my life consists of a whole lot of subterfuge, plotting, and a liberal dose of violence. I live firmly in the supernatural world. My home might be a condo in Dallas, but I’m more likely to come into contact with werewolves than some nice accountant. Since I’m a thief by vocation, most of my human interactions involve the police, but I try to keep that to a minimum. All in all, I have a healthy tolerance for weirdness, but this was beginning to push it.

“I love you, Prince Dev!” a girl with ridiculously long hair called out to my husband. She looked like she was dressed for a medieval fair, but then we all did.

I rolled my eyes for the three hundredth time. I’d stopped keeping count or noting the hair color of the girls who screamed his name as we paraded by. It was like being married to a rock star. Maybe I could have handled that if he was being adored for his ability to play a guitar or his amazing vocal prowess.

That wasn’t what Devinshea Quinn was good at. Nope. My husband was part fertility god.

It had been this way all day. We’d gone through three towns on our way here, each one greeting the returned Green Man with pomp and circumstance and a whole lot of propositions I wish I hadn’t heard.

Dev looked for me across the center of town that was now filled with all manner of curious faery creature. This village was the largest we’d visited and the closest to the palace. Dev and his brother, the future king, had walked me down the main street in a little parade of sorts, but when we reached the center he was bombarded with well-wishers and gawkers.

An officious woman who introduced herself to me as Mara, a member of the queen’s staff, had met us. She was currently directing traffic around the royal twins. She had pushed or pulled the brothers this way or that in an attempt to make the most of their time in town. My group had been told to take a rest break and shoved to the side.

“He has groupies, Z.” Sarah watched the proceedings with an air of shock. “This is worse than a bunch of preteens at a One Direction concert.”

“There’s no comparison, Sarah,” Neil snorted. “Those concerts are filled with screaming virgins. There are no virgins here, thank god.” Neil glanced around, his eyes taking in all the tall, good-looking Seelie commoners mulling about trying to get a word in with the newly returned priest. “Why did I have to go and make up with Chad? I could be having ridiculously hot revenge sex with some glorious slab of man. Look at them. They’re all gorgeous.”

They were. As a race, the sidhe won points for hotness. The men were all tall and well built. Their faces would grace the walls of a male modeling agency, and they didn’t understand the meaning of the term pot belly. The women were tall and lithe. Their lovely bodies were made to fit into designer gowns and walk runways. And everyone was serious about their hair. It ranged from almost shock white to that deep, midnight black of Dev’s. Everyone’s hair was long and straight.

I stuck out like a sore thumb. I was the only redhead in the town and they were probably mistaking me for one of the aforementioned, probably-tastes-good brownies. I’m that short.