Falling Under

by Gwen Hayes

  “It’s a symbol. Magic requires it.”

  My eyes darted around for an escape route. But was I really there or still at the kitchen table with Varnie? “What will you do to it?” I asked. “How will it return my memories?”

  As I glanced around us, the rest of the graveyard disappeared. We were left on what appeared to be the summit of a mountain—just Mara, Jenny’s headstone, and me.

  “Haden, give me the necklace,” she demanded, her voice no longer lilting and calm.

  “Why do you want it so badly, Mother?”

  Mara chuckled. “That’s my boy. Even with no memory, you still recognize your own kind. It’s time for you to come home, Son.”

  “I’m not a demon anymore. I’m not your kind.”

  Mara’s pupils darkened. “We can fix that. Come home.”

  “Let Theia go.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m half tempted. Honestly, she’s even more annoying than you were. Haden—” Mara pouted. “Come back.”

  There was nowhere to go at that moment, unless I felt like cliff diving, so I humored her, hoping she didn’t want to kill me or eat my soul. How maternal were demons? I looked at the headstone again and wondered if my mother loved me. “What happens if I come back with you?”

  Mara cocked her head, intrigued by my interest. “You get your memories.”

  “And Theia?”

  “You get to keep Theia too.” The venom was coated in sugar, but it was there.

  I closed my eyes. “Let her go.”

  “You’re getting tiresome, Haden. We all know how this is going to go. You and your friends are not powerful enough to stop me. Theia has made her choice, she promised herself to me, and now my blood runs in her veins. Trust me, everyone is much better off with her in Under.”

  “Why do you want the talisman?” I asked again.

  “I told you. It’s a symbol.”

  It had to be more than that. “How do I get my memories?”

  She crossed her arms and arched her brow. When I blinked, I thought I saw her cheekbones protruding from her skin, but then her face was normal again. “Don’t you find your human body limiting, Son?” Mara didn’t wait for an answer. “You could have it all, you know. As a demon, you had more power than you can imagine right now.”

  The only power I wanted was the ability to save Theia, but I didn’t dare voice my desire.

  “You used to be special, Haden. Don’t you miss that?”

  It was as if Mara had plunged a knife into me and begun twisting it with each word. Yes, I did miss being special. I didn’t remember what it was like, exactly, but I knew I used to be more. What I wouldn’t have given just to be more useful to everyone.

  “When you embraced who you were, you were stronger. Your friends would envy your speed and strength. They would be amazed at all the things you could do.” She walked around me in a slow circle. “But instead you want to be a nobody. I don’t understand it. You could rule this realm and your own, but you cower in obscurity and mope about a girl who will never be good enough for you.”

  My heart beat so erratically, I thought it might pound its way out of my chest. “If she’s no good to you, why don’t you let her go?”

  “I made a promise to her just as much as she made a promise to me. I have to honor that, don’t I? Besides, what on earth would you do with her now? You can’t possibly control her, not in the unfortunate condition you’re in. You’ll need your other half or she’ll eat you alive. Literally.”

  I looked down at my legs as vines circled their way up them. Picking up my feet did nothing to disengage the barbed stems. And then I couldn’t pick up my feet anymore anyway. I was trapped, anchored to the ground with the mother of nightmares circling me like a predator.

  “You’re beginning to bore me, pussycat.”

  I tried not to panic, but I hated being immobile. “Where did the demon go?” I asked. “After they exorcised it?”

  “It doesn’t matter where it went, only where it is now.” Mara pulled a necklace from her bodice. It matched the one Theia had given me. She smiled at my reaction as she dangled the twin talisman. “I’m a fan of symmetry.”

  I didn’t know what she had planned to do. Maybe if I’d still thought she was Jenny, I would have given her the one I wore when she asked for it and somehow she would have switched them without my knowing.

  “So, you’re going to put that on me and I’ll be a demon again,” I said, even as I struggled against the vines that held my legs in place.

  “It’s not as simple as that. You have to accept it.”

  Accept a demon possession? “Then why tie me down?”

  Mara shrugged. “Because it’s amusing.” She walked towards me, but her feet didn’t touch the ground. She was gliding on air and getting closer and closer and . . .

  And then I heard Varnie’s voice, calling me back from where I was to where I needed to be.

  Varnie’s face isn’t exactly what I usually want to see first thing upon waking, but at that moment I was really happy to see him.

  “I was getting a little worried. You seemed a little deeper in the meditative state than I think is normal.”

  My throat worked for an answer. “Water,” I said finally.

  While he grabbed me a bottle from the fridge, I tried to understand what had just happened. The talisman thrummed with what felt like low voltage.

  “I think I went to Under,” I told Varnie after I drained half of the water.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “But I saw Mara,” I explained.

  “Haden, I closed off the kind of channels that left you open for that. This was about you and your subconscious.”

  I knew what I had seen.

  “Seriously, dude,” he said. “Nothing else in or out.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “Neither were you. You were in your head.”

  I exhaled. “Varn—”

  What if he was right? What if the whole thing was an elaborate scene set up by my subconscious in order to tell me something?

  The talisman thrummed again.

  Only you can save her.

  You have to accept it.

  When you embraced who you were, you were stronger.

  As a demon, you had more power than you can imagine right now.

  I clutched the talisman in my palm. Was it true? Would I be more useful if I accepted who I was born to be?

  And then my palm burned. The talisman. I’d been living with it on my skin, never removing it and believing the whole time it had some kind of untapped power. I was probably right. It did have power.

  My power.

  The stone moved like it was alive.

  “Varn, why did Theia have a talisman?”

  He shook his head. “I wish I knew. Back when you were first sniffing around, I got a message that she needed a talisman, but that it wouldn’t directly protect her. It didn’t make much sense, which is nothing new. I couldn’t decode the message, so I passed it on as best I could. Why?”

  “I think I just decoded it.”

  He blinked, patiently waiting for me to explain.

  Removing the necklace wasn’t easy because my hands shook with the adrenaline coursing through my body. “The pendant can’t protect her, but what’s in it can.”

  “What’s in the pendant?”

  The one thing I’d spent more than a century wishing away. The one thing that would be strong enough to protect Theia from the nightmare of her new life. I set it in the middle of the table. “Me.”

  Varnie pushed his chair back a few inches, putting some distance between the talisman and himself. “The demon went in there?”

  I nodded.

  “How?”

  “Mara must have done it. Maybe it went in there on its own. I don’t know. I doubt Theia knew what it contained when she gave it to me. But that’s what I figured out when I went looking for my memories.”

  “So we need to bury it or hide it now?”
He looked as if he didn’t want to touch it with a crane, let alone bury it.

  “No, we let it out.”

  He shot out of his chair. “Are you insane?”

  “Call the girls,” I said. “We need to do another exorcism, this time in reverse.”

  DOWN IS UP . . . AGAIN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Theia

  Everything changed again the night the burning man fell from the sky.

  I scrambled from my covers and to the window.

  This time he didn’t look at me as he willowed past. His descent was slow, torturous again, and I know my heart stopped, catching in my ribs like a stone.

  As I watched him, waiting for him to land, I relived his horror, my horror. Was it Haden? What was happening?

  He didn’t touch ground, instead disintegrating and dissipating into nothing in front of my eyes. I swallowed hard. And then my stuck heart began to gallop. I didn’t know what to do, what to think.

  Surely, if it was Haden, he didn’t die. I didn’t die the first time I came to Under, and he didn’t die the first time he came to my world—so he was still alive. He had to be. I kept repeating it to convince myself.

  But Haden shouldn’t have to burn again, should he? I paced like a caged lion trying to work it out in my head. Was it someone else?

  I tried the door but it was locked. It wasn’t Mara who had locked me in; rather, it was one of the faceless butlers who had taken kindly to me. Some of the inhabitants in Under were still loyal to Haden, despite their fear of Mara. When I had explained to the butler that I didn’t trust myself not to hurt his old master, he found a way to lock that door most nights.

  Hours later, still unable to sleep, still pacing, I stepped onto the terrace. The view was never exactly the same; the mountains were always changing shape. One more thing to keep me off balance.

  The night air was cool but a little balmy. It smelled like the sea. Sure enough, between two mountain peaks, an ocean not usually there was visible. Light from two setting moons glinted on the surface in a golden imitation of the sun.

  I didn’t let myself think about the beach back home. It was dangerous to want things. I turned to go back into Haden’s room, my room, when I heard a noise. The hairs of my nape rose.

  One thing I’d learned during my time in Under was that I couldn’t cower. Fear was cherished and cultivated—my best weapon so far had been to imitate my father’s formidable attitude in most situations. I straightened my spine and strode towards the ledge of the terrace, wishing I’d worn something more than one of Haden’s “pirate” shirts outside. I took a deep breath and looked over the railing.

  At the same time, Haden appeared, climbing up to the terrace. My first reaction was surprise, then joy, then fear. “What are you doing here?” I asked. What if Mara could sense him?

  He vaulted over the edge in a practiced move.

  “What have you done? How did you . . . ?”

  “I’ve been sneaking in and out of my bedroom for half a century.” His eyes flashed with dark humor. “There are strategically placed iron spikes from the ground up.”

  “You climbed the wall? What if you fell? You could have been killed.” I paused as a new thought flashed across my mind. “Wait—you remember?”

  Haden smiled. “I remember you. I remember every second.” He reached for my hand, oblivious to the danger I presented to him, and kissed my fingertips in a gesture reminiscent of the Haden I remembered all too well. One that was both a demon and a boy.

  Butterflies fluttered in my stomach, canceling for a sweet moment the ugliness I’d felt since the demon had taken residence under my skin. I wanted to warn Haden, to be strong and do what was right, but selfishly, I tightened my grip on the moment instead.

  “You still have the way of moonlight about you,” he said, reminding me of the thrill of our first meetings.

  I felt beautiful when I looked into his eyes. He hadn’t given up on me—on us. Not even when he couldn’t recall that he’d loved me. I wondered if I had it in me to dare to hope again.

  He looked over his shoulder at the waning light of the moons. “I’ve come to take you home.”

  “No, Haden, you should—”

  “You will not wither here, not while there is breath left in my body.”

  “But your mother—”

  “The night you made your blood oath to Mara. You promised you would never try to escape.”

  “I know. That is why you must leave. Now, before she finds us.” Panic was rising in my chest. It was never a good idea for me to get too emotional. I had less control of the darkness inside me when I was overwrought.

  “You won’t break the oath if you are abducted.”

  I stepped back. “Haden, no.”

  “Good. Yes, if you fight me it will be even more believable. Try to run if you like.” The wolfish smile was back. “I like a good chase.”

  I backed away from him. “This isn’t a game. You have to leave. I can’t go with you.”

  “I’m not asking, Theia.” Haden’s pupils darkened and it occurred to me that he was still dangerous. He lunged once and hefted me over his shoulder like a sack of flour.

  The old Theia blushed at my precarious position. The new Theia rankled at the treatment. “Put me down,” I commanded.

  “Keep wriggling. This night just keeps getting better, lamb.”

  I pounded my fists on his back, but he never broke his stride. When the door didn’t open, he kicked it. As we passed the shards of it in the hall, the situation began to get clearer.

  “You’re a demon again,” I whispered, afraid to draw any more attention to my kidnapping.

  “You’re one to talk,” he joked.

  “How?”

  “Later, Theia.”

  He took a set of stairs at the end of the hall, still carrying me as if I weighed nothing. They spiraled up and up the turret until we got to the tower room that held the looking glass into the portals.

  He let me down, finally, in front of the window to the worlds. At first glance it was a simple gilded mirror, the only thing in the room. Looking into it, though, was always like breaking my heart.

  “I can’t go back there.” In the reflection were Donny, Ame, Gabe, and Varnie holding hands, at the same cabin where I’d last seen them. “What if I hurt someone?”

  He pressed his fingertips lightly over my lips. “Hush. Once upon a time, you told me we should fight to be together. You believed in me then, Theia. Could you find it in your heart to give faith one more chance?”

  I wasn’t the same girl anymore.

  I was stronger.

  I removed his hand from my lips. “Promise never to hush me again.”

  He laughed.

  “I mean it, Haden. From now on, I say exactly what I want and no one tells me how I should or shouldn’t feel or what I can or cannot say.”

  “All right,” he promised. “Any minute we’re going to crash back into that world, provided they get the spell right this time. Tell me, then, lamb, just in case we both lose our memories this time, is there anything you want to say to me?” His grin was full of dark promises and too charming by far.

  “I want to say that you need to leave before you’re caught.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  I looked at my friends. I so badly wanted to be reunited with them, but was terrified of trying to live on earth with the blood of a demon coursing through my veins.

  “I know you’re scared, but we’ll find a way, Theia. Together.”

  I felt the pull of the spells, both the one from the other side of the portal and the one Haden was weaving around me.

  I didn’t know if I was strong enough to fight either of them.

  “Don’t let me hurt anyone.”

  “You hurt us all by staying away.”

  I looked longingly at the door. If I could find the courage to run . . .

  “Theia,” he pleaded, his palms cupping my jaw gently and turning me back to him. He lea
ned into me, and I to him. His eyes searched mine and, finding what he looked for, his lips followed suit.

  His kiss was tender but full of a yearning I recognized from my own heart. I began to drown in everything he offered—love, hope, faith. It was all there, even though it was mixed with a heavy dose of the darkness that lived in me now.

  It wouldn’t be easy. And Mara wouldn’t give up. That was certain.

  But Haden had turned away from the thing he wanted most, to be human, to come for me. I couldn’t fight him, didn’t want to. Instead, I gave myself to him and to the dragging tide of his heart. We kissed as our bodies became weightless and we were pulled into another world.

  And together we fell under.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gwen Hayes lives in the Pacific Northwest with her real-life hero and a pack of wild beasts (two of whom she gave birth to). She is a reader, writer, and lover of pop culture (which, other than yogurt, is the only culture she gets). Visit her on the Web at www.gwenhayes.com.