Hidden Ashes: Reigning Fae Book 1

by AC Washer

  “What the—” I cupped my face in my hands, taking deep breaths.

  Mickey knelt down. “Let me see it.” He reached his hands toward mine, but I turned away, rocking back and forth as the throbbing slowly—way too slowly—started to fade a bit.

  “Here, let me see it,” he said, his concern mixing with frustration as I shook his hands off.

  “Stop. Being. So stubborn,” he said, prying my fingers away until he sucked in a breath. I glared at him, yanked my hands out of his and back to where they belonged: cradling my throbbing face.

  “It’s not so bad,” he said, keeping his voice light.

  “Yeah, right.” My voice was muffled. “I’m going to have two black eyes just in time for Homecoming. I can already tell.”

  “No, I don’t think it’ll be that bad. I bet with a little ice—maybe some cream—it’ll be fine.”

  “Obviously, you’ve never been hit smack dab between your eyes before.”

  “Obviously,” he said dryly. “Hey, I’ll be back in a second.”

  I didn’t bother to nod, too busy hating life. Wait, did I dislocate my nose? I gingerly probed the area. It didn’t seem like it. Well, that was something, at least.

  Mickey jogged back into my room holding a tub of who-knows-what and smacked my hands away from my face.

  “Don’t touch it,” he said. “I’ve got something for the pain.” I winced as he smeared the cream on my face.

  “This royally sucks.”

  “Stop talking.”

  “You have a sucky bedside manner.”

  He ignored me, finishing the application.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Like you broke my face. How do you think I feel?” My voice came out muffled and whiny, but I didn’t care.

  His brows drew together. “You should be feeling better. At least the pain should be gone now.” Mickey leaned closer, examining my face. “And the bruise is still spreading,” he said to himself.

  “Well, yeah. It just happened a couple of minutes ago.” I glanced down at the jar of cream. “What’s that supposed to be, some sort of numbing lotion? You should probably check the expiration date.”

  He muttered something under his breath that I didn’t pick up.

  I might have been in pain, but even with a throbbing face, I didn’t miss the troubled look that crept over Mickey’s face.

  “Hey,” I said through my hands. I lowered them a bit and would have attempted a half-smile except, well, I’d just gotten hit right between the eyes, and it still hurt. “Hey, it’s no biggie. It’ll clear up in a couple of weeks. I think.”

  “Right, just like your other bruises?”

  I shrugged, avoiding his eyes. I thought I’d been covering them up pretty well, but I guess I wasn’t doing as good a job as I’d thought. And Mickey was right, they were sticking around for a lot longer than they were supposed to—something that was really starting to bother me.

  “Well, on the bright side, maybe I’ve developed some sort of blood disorder and I’ll be dead before Homecoming.”

  “Haha. Awesome job at trying to make me feel better,” Mickey said absently, like he was preoccupied with puzzling something out. Whatever conclusion he was reaching, he didn’t seem to like it one bit. His whole face changed into some sort of ominous—

  Mickey’s eyes shot up to the clock. “Hey, I know this is bad timing, but Bridgette and I have a project we’re working on, and I gotta go.” He met my eyes for a second before glancing away, his face the picture of genuine regret. “Sorry about that.”

  “Um, yeah, no worries. Like I said before…” I shrugged. He’d already chaffed off my lame attempt at helping him feel better.

  “Yeah.”

  Mickey left, his movements tense and swift.

  I looked back at the mountain that was now more of a hill—thanks in part to Mickey—and sighed. Might as well get it over with. I picked up another hanger.

  If I was going to die from a blood disorder, it would be nice if it’d happen before I had to figure out where to put the rest of this stuff.

  Angry. That was what shoving a gazillion clothes into a closet did to a girl. I knew that we did not walk out of Seelies with twelve different dresses all fit for a princess—and not just a homecoming princess, either. How they got there on my bed was a mystery.

  I glared down at the small pile of clothes that refused to go away no matter how many I shoved into the closet. I did not want them, I did not need them. And I definitely did not want to spend my entire afternoon trying to squeeze more and more into an already-packed closet.

  I grabbed one of the empty blue Seelie bags, thinking I’d trash it to get it out of the way, but something was still in it. I fished out a pair of sequined tights and tossed them on top of my dresser. I balled up the bag and threw it into the wastebasket…and watched as a flowy red skirt shot out of the bag, landing on the floor.

  I crept over and poked the skirt, but it stayed still. I cautiously lifted the skirt between my two fingers and looked back at the bag long enough to see a green top and a pair of blue socks getting tossed at me like someone was on the other side, throwing them my way.

  I opened the bag and peered inside just in time for an orange striped pompom beanie with matching scarf to hit me in the eye.

  I sputtered, taking a step back, only to trip on a pair of heels I hadn’t put away yet, the bag dropping over my head and shoulders as I landed on my butt. But instead of hitting the bottom of the bag, my head passed through some sort of barrier that made my scalp tingle. I found myself with a different bag gathered around my shoulders, my head and neck sticking out from the bag’s bottom, probably looking like some twisted souvenir from the French Revolution. Through the partially opened top, I could make out Seelie’s store lights—until a meaty hand blocked them from view as it charged toward me with a fistful of panties.

  “Stu!” I screamed, not wanting to get clobbered.

  The hand paused, backed up, and Stu’s face appeared at the opening of the other bag.

  “Princess?” His eyebrows created a canyon in between them. When he saw me, his face broke into an enormous grin. “Princess!”

  He then frowned and wagged a finger so close to my nose my eyes crossed. “You know, you really shouldn’t be playing with the shopping portals like that. Tain’t safe.”

  “But…” I wriggled the bottom of the bag to my shoulders.

  “Uh-uh, Mickey’d flay me if he thought I let you cross through one. An’ anyway, there are better portals once you get yer magic broken.”

  “Broken?”

  “Yeah. Whew!” He sat back and beamed at me—or rather, at my head that was still all he could see from his side of the portal shopping bag. “Ye’ve no idea how hard it was pretending not to be fae. And ye’ve no idea what a relief it is, ye being let in on everything now.” He gestured at the portal shopping bag. “Not that it was a secret, mind you. Mickey just thought that you not being raised in the fae, well, ye might have had a hard time adjusting to everything. But I said, I did, that keeping ye in the dark weren’t gonna come to no good. Glad he came to his senses sooner. Seemed like he was planning on keeping mum all the way up to the investiture! Now wouldn’t that have been something?” He laughed a jolly, Santa-type laugh that, even in my bewildered state, made me crack a smile.

  “Um… Stu?”

  “Yeah, princess?”

  “What are fae?”

  His laugh stopped abruptly as he poked his head into the shopping bag to stare at me. My face must have said it all. “Ah, blimey. This was an accident, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t suppose you can just pretend ye never popped yer head into the portal?”

  I shook my head.

  “No?” He looked down at the floor for a few seconds before meeting my gaze. “Well, there be no help for it. Just maybe let Mickey know it was an accident, and, you know, it was, so…just be letting him know, okay?”

  I couldn’t eve
n get a word in before Stu shoved his meaty hand into my face, pushing my head back into the portal at the bottom of the shopping bag until I found myself sitting back in my room, the bag hanging off the side of my head like an oversized cap.

  I immediately jumped up and stared back into the bag. There was nothing—no sign of any sort of magical portal thingy.

  Just as I started wondering if I’d fallen, hit my head, and imagined the whole thing, a fistful of undies shot out at me like confetti. I stumbled back and landed on my butt.

  Magic.

  It was real, and I was, apparently, neck deep in it.

  And thinking back, wasn’t that what Mickey was oh-so-subtly trying to tell me this whole time? Explain it with magic and everything suddenly becomes less weird.

  A note puffed out of the bag, landing in my lap.

  Now that you know about the portal, please send me a note whenever you need something. So far, I’ve been guessing.

  -Stuart

  P.S. Do you have enough underwear? Or do you want a different cut? I have the boy-short style, too, but I’ve been told they’re a bit uncomfortable and can bunch.

  My world crumbled and rebuilt itself as I sat amid magically-transported panties, writing a note I was about to shove into a portal disguised as a shopping bag.

  Yes, Stuart, I have enough underwear. Thanks!

  -Kella

  Magical beings—fae—existed. And I was smack dab in the middle of them. I thought back to all the odd conversations, the weird looks at school, even the fae-themed mall. Everything clicked into place.

  I was the outsider in a magical community—pretty much a muggle amongst wizards. They probably had the same rules about me not finding out about them, so I couldn’t really hold being kept in the dark against Maeve and Mickey. And I was the foster kid, after all. It wasn’t like I showed up on their doorstep and they had to spill all of their magicky secrets to me.

  But that was curious; why did they take me in? Stuart seemed to think I had magic, but I didn’t. My parents were 100 percent human. Maybe there’d been some mixup and the fae didn’t realize it until I got here. That kind of made sense.

  Well, whatever the case, magic existed. And if magic existed, magical things—things bigger than popping through portals—could happen.

  And my brother could use a pretty big magical thing right about now.

  “Hey, Mickey,” I said into my dresser mirror. “How ya doin’, little bro?” I shook my head and tried again. “Heya, Mickey. I just figured out this whole ‘everything’s magic’ thing we’ve got going on here, and I was kind of wondering if you could magically heal Caleb. Or know of someone who can. Wait, you can heal people, right?”

  I looked at myself in the mirror longer than I intended—almost like I expected my reflection to answer the question that I just realized I didn’t have an answer to. Crap. I had no idea how magic worked, when it worked, or even if it’d work on Caleb. Maybe they needed special ingredients or something.

  My heart sank as I remembered the salve that Mickey tried to use on me. If that was magic, then maybe magic didn’t always work the way it should—or maybe it didn’t work on humans.

  I banished the thought from my mind before it could take root. Positive thoughts. I took a deepish breath, nodded at my reflection, and exited my bedroom.

  It wasn’t until I got it to the landing of the stairs that I picked up on the heated conversation down in the study. It was one of those whispered ones where the voices gradually rise and then, at some sort of invisible signal, drop down to whispering as quietly as possible until the arguing built again. It reminded me of waves breaking and receding on a beach only to come roaring back.

  I paused, debating whether I should go up to my room and wait until people were in a better mood before I asked them to heal my brother.

  But when I heard my name, I froze.

  After another moment of indecision, I decided that them talking about me was pretty much an invitation to listen in. I crept forward just enough to hear a little better. My nose was a mere four inches away from where the wall melded into the study entryway.

  Someone sounding a lot like Bridgette sighed. “This is going to get ugly fast. It’s not like we can keep this a secret.”

  “I know.”

  A long pause followed.

  “I’m sworn to protect her, but give me the word, and I’ll find a way around it—I made sure I could.”

  “Are you insane?” Mickey hissed.

  “Are you? Maybe you’re too close to see the situation clearly. Kella has no magic, so she doesn’t have a chance at overcoming the investiture. We’ve both seen what that means.”

  Huh. Yeah, I didn’t have magic—I wasn’t fae. But what was this about an investiture? Stuart had mentioned it too, and whatever it was, it sounded important.

  I crept closer, kneeling on the floor to make myself smaller just in case I was too close to be invisible.

  “I can’t let her die.” Whoa! Did he just say die?

  Bridgette didn’t say anything for a long moment. “What do you mean you can’t?”

  Mickey lowered his voice. “Ashlyn begged me to promise to get her though the investiture. I didn’t think she’d ask unless she had a reason.”

  Another pause.

  “Just give me time to figure it out.”

  “Mickey—”

  “Just a week.”

  “If you wait too long—”

  “Then what? It’s not like I’m even capable of sending her away. I vowed a very specific, very unforgiving vow.”

  “You of all people know better than to do that,” Bridgette said.

  “Again, I thought Ashlyn had a reason for asking me to swear, and I’d thought I’d puzzled it out.”

  “There’s your problem,” Bridgette said. “You thought Ashlyn was still in her right mind. She wasn’t.”

  “It was before the investiture.” There was silence. I heard the creak of shoes on the floor and I retreated, creeping up the stairs as fast as possible. Once I made it into my room, I shut the door, leaning against it.

  If finding out that I lived in some magical fairyland wasn’t enough, my life now seemed twisted up in something I knew nothing about.

  Investiture, Ashlyn, vows, death… The words were bumper cars, ramming into my skull, jarring any halfway decent thought out of existence. Nothing made sense.

  I took a deep breath. I needed more information. And probably from someone who’d say more than he should. I looked back at the shopping bag.

  Someone like Stu.

  Chapter 12

  Meet me at Seelies after school.

  I’d rubbed the wilted strip of paper until the ink had faded and the paper started to pill. Go figure Stu wouldn’t let me pop on over to his store right then. That would’ve been too easy. When I’d tried shoving myself back into the shopping bag, only the crown of my head got through before he strong-armed me right back out into my room.

  A few seconds later, Stu sent a hastily scribbled note that said he’d never speak to me again if I dared poke my head through. It wasn’t safe yet, and I was lucky I hadn’t fried my brain the first time it’d happened.

  I wanted to howl in frustration. Patience was so not my strong suit. The clock in physics showed we had five more minutes until I could grab Bridgette and bolt out of here. Sure, the conversation between Bridgette and Mickey had her coming across being on the fence about me dying and all, but at least she had a car that could get me to someone I thought would like me to stay alive.

  Bridgette hadn’t needed much prodding, anyway. All I had to say was “matching shoes” and she’d been ready to cut class and take us straight back to the mall.

  Tic tock, tic tock. The clock was louder than anything else in the room. And slower, too. I was seriously regretting waiting until class, but I needed to stick to my plan: responsible senior with an excellent school record and a job—somewhere. Skipping classes wouldn’t look good to my emancipation judge.
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  The bell rang shrilly, and I jumped out of my seat and sprinted toward the door, heading down the hallway as fast as I could pump my legs without running. Bridgette raced one step behind me as we charged out the school doors and headed to her car.

  “What changed?” Bridgette asked as we slid into the front seats of her black BMW.

  “Huh?”

  “You wanting to get ready for Homecoming. You were so enthusiastic about Patrick’s proposal that I thought you’d died.”

  Patrick had cornered me in the cafeteria today, and after registering his lean chest and dark eyes, I mumbled a “yes.” His tense shoulders relaxed as he smiled. He said he’d pick me up at seven before he retreated to his table. I’d gone back to eating my tuna sandwich, rolling my eyes at Bridgette’s grin.

  I glanced down at my hand clenching the little scrap of abused paper and back up. “Well, I just want to get this over with.”

  “Ah.”

  Keeping up small talk with Bridgette was nerve wracking now that I knew what she was. Fae. A magical creature that could do who knew what to me.

  My anxiety climbed the closer we got to the mall. It didn’t help that I’d caught her looking at my fisted hands—hands that I immediately forced myself to relax—or that she kept shooting me glances out of the side of her eye.

  Just act normal.

  “So, what style of shoes were you thinking about getting?” Bridgette asked as we entered the mall.

  I shrugged. “Something with a heel?”

  “A heel.”

  “Well, he looked like he was a lot taller than me, so, yeah.”

  I paused at the entryway to Seelies. Show time. “Crap!”

  “What?”

  “I left my money in the car.”

  “Don’t worry. Stuart’s cool. He’ll spot you until you’re good for it.”

  I shook my head. “No, um…” Crap. “I also had some ideas in my backpack—a few doodles from class.” Technically true. I doodled all the time in class.