I took a breath and sat down next to her. “Be quiet. My roommate’s home now.”
Lattie immediately picked over the array of foods I placed before her. “She doesn’t like fairies?” She sniffed and poked and picked with a certain hesitancy.
I stared blankly at the wall. “Something like that.” The sound of crackers crunching in her gnarly mouth ripped me from the haze, and I snatched a piece of cheese. She watched my every move with a calculated stare. “So, explain how this works.”
Juices covered her hands and face as she gutted a grape and licked its flesh from her fingers. “You invited me into your home, trapped me in iron. So, now I’m bound to you.”
“Bound to me?” I plucked a few grapes off the bushel. Lattie watched, her tiny nostrils flaring for a second. She was adorable and horrifying at the same time. Like something out of a Tim Burton film.
“Bound, together,” she said slowly as if she thought me dumb. “Tied.”
A manic guffaw escaped my chest, and I had to tell myself to blink. “So, I’m just stuck with a tiny vampire?”
Lattie stifled a shriek. “How could you say such a thing?”
“What?” I asked. “It was a joke…”
“Vampires are no laughing matter, Avery.”
My breath hitched. “Are you saying that vampires… are real?” The fairy didn’t reply, only stared wide and unblinking up at me. As if I were the ridiculous one. I chewed for a moment. “How do I… unbind us?”
“I’m not sure,” Lattie replied after a breath too long, her black gaze gone wide and distant as she stared up at me. “I’ve never heard of it being reversed.” Her pointy shoulders shrugged. “I supposed you could find a Fae Lord or a witch. Although those are extinct. Witches, that is. Fae Lords are few and far between, but there’s a couple around.”
I shook my head. Thoughts swirled in a dizzying pattern. “Wait. What are you saying?” I swallowed dryly. “What kind of Fae Lords are we talking about here? Fairies like… you?” Lattie just shook her head slowly. “And witches?”
If I were standing, my legs would surely have failed me. They felt like Jell-O as I pushed up against the white tufted headboard Julie made. It was one of her many DIY attempts that actually worked. Julie… I was stuck harboring this murderous little creature, and I couldn’t tell Julie. Could I? I hugged my knees to my chest as if it could help keep the world from spinning around me.
Lattie fluttered her picaresque blue wings up to my knee and sat down, her long bony legs dangling as her heels bumped against my thigh. For a moment, we just stared at one another with equal fascination. From up close, I could see all the details of her. Her blue leathery skin seemed to breathe with every inhale and exhale. Some kind of shimmery dust coated every inch of skin from the top of her snowy hair to the tips of those long claw-like feet.
“How did you heal so fast?”
“Fae heal rapidly,” Lattie replied. “As soon as I freed myself from your cage, it was only a matter of a few hours, and I was fine.”
I just nodded, as if what she said made any sort of sense. Was I just amusing my delusion, or was there actually a tiny fairy in my room claiming the truth about magic and vampires and living shadows?
Slowly, I reached out, and she watched my finger as I stopped and silently asked for permission. When Lattie nodded, I brushed the edge of her wing with the tip of my finger, noting how delicate it felt, like a moth’s wings. She shuddered at the touch.
“What,” she breathed and hunched her back like a feral cat, “Are you doing?”
“I-I just had to… see if you were real.”
“Real?” Lattie chortled. “I assure you I’m as real as you are. And so is the threat pushing across Ironworld.” She pushed off my knee and flew over to the windowsill.
“Ironworld?”
She hunched, scanning the outside, but then peered over at me with an eye roll. “For someone with the Sight, you sure know nothing.” Lattie’s long and bony arm flew out and snatched a bird from the air with lightning speed.
I leaped across the bed and shooed her. “Don’t! Let it go!” I tried to keep my voice below a strained whisper. The fairy dared look annoyed and released the bird back into the night. “And what do you mean… the Sight?” She fluttered over to my bed and patted the mattress next to her.
“Come, Avery Quinn. I’ve got a lot to tell you about your world.” I had to tell myself to breathe as she spoke to me. “And the one beyond it.”
Chapter Nine
I poked the last stale cracker into my mouth and wiped the crumbs off on my black sweatpants as I balanced an open notebook on my upright knees. Lattie finally stopped buzzing around my bedroom like an ADHD-riddled busybody at some wee hour of the night and now relaxed, her wings spread out on my white duvet like silken drapes.
I had no idea what time it was. My blackout curtains blocked out every ounce of sunlight. But I didn’t care. I had taken the red pill, I followed the white rabbit–or blue fairy–and there was no going back. I’d learned so much during the long hours of the night. Some big fight happened over five hundred years ago that tore the mythical lands apart. They’ve been divided and at odds ever since. A war-torn world.
She also told me that If you feed a Fae, you’ll never get rid of them. They’re like stray cats. I considered those words as I watched her pick over the remnants of the snacks on my plate.
“Okay, so you come from a place called Faerie where… fairies live?” I confirmed as the tip of my pencil hovered over my haphazard notes. I’d filled half the notebook during the night. Lattie sat upright and gave a nod as she sniffed for crumbs of the snacks we’d consumed. “But other creatures live there, too?”
She nodded again, tiredly. “Yes, all sorts. Battas, Ly Ergs, Trolls, Sirens.” She waved a tiny blue hand as if the topic bored her. “But we’re all Fae. Ruled by monarchs.”
I flipped backward through my notes. “Yes, the monarchs. The… rulers?”
Another nod.
“Of different courts?” I wanted to get all the details right.
“No,” she replied with a shake of her head. “There’s only one. The High Seelie Court. The rest are Territories. Winter and Summer are the seasonal ones. Volatile but less… demanding. They balance one another.”
“What about Autumn and Spring?” I asked. “Those are seasons.”
“Those are merely a mix of the Fae that govern Summer and Winter. There are small domains that claim a place for Autumn and Spring, but there’s not enough Fae to rise to a Territory. It’s mostly a motley mixture of the seasons. You want to avoid those places. They can be… unpredictable.”
I stared at my notes, the pencil scratches that filled the papers before me. Page after page, I absorbed every word, story, and description Lattie told me in the night and spilled it all into my notebook.
Lattie found a broken piece of cookie in the folds of the blanket and shoved it in her toothy mouth. I flipped through the pages and noted a few question marks I’d left.
“But the other one, they don’t have balance? The… Seelie and…”
Lattie let loose an annoyed sigh. “The High Seelie Court is the one that rules everything, with a scorned mad queen at the throne.” She said nothing of her distaste at my constant questions. I wondered if it had something to do with the fact that I’d accidentally bound her to me. Did she have to answer all my questions? “Summer and Winter are the seasonal territories that help keep some semblance of balance in Faerie. Then… there are the other two territories. Dreams and Nightmares.”
I flipped to a new page. “And Kings and Queens don’t rule the territories. Only Lords, right?”
“Yes. Summer, Winter, and Nightmares each have a Lord at the helm. Holy people govern Dreams. Temples and libraries devoted to cataloging all our great knowledge dating back as far as our creation.”
I filled the page as fast as I could with words and sketches. Lattie fluttered up to my knee and peered over the edge of the notebook. “
No, no.” She shook her little head and pointed at the middle of a drawing I made of the lands. “There’s a lake here. Not land. The Seelie Court and four territories form a circle around it,” she told me as her bony finger made a clockwise motion over the paper. “Seelie, Dreams, Nightmares, Winter, and Summer.”
I tapped the eraser end against the page as I chewed the inside of my lip. “And… you mentioned there used to be a Seelie King that ruled with the Queen? What happened to him?”
Lattie shuddered at some dark memory. “At first, for as long as anyone can remember, there had only been a king. Orion, High King of the Seelie Court and ruler of all Faerie. Then a female named Mabry Solborn came along one day, out of the blue. She caught the king’s eye and married him.” Lattie’s expression softened, and her massive black eyes flitted to the window. As if she could see past the drapes. “But he disappeared not long after their union, less than a year. Some say Mabry killed him. Others say the Dark Lord Oden did it. But it’s all just rumors. No one truly knows what happened.”
“He just disappeared without a trace?”
“The king, yes,” Lattie replied and failed to fight off a yawn, revealing dozens of those toothpick teeth. “But Mabry is now the High Seelie Queen. After her beloved king went missing, she went mad. Her grief consumes her still. She rules her court with a bloody fist and has pushed the rest of Faerie into ruin. So much so that it’s a sliver of what it used to be. Fae have been fleeing to Ironworld for years in search of solace.”
I shook my head as if it could whisk away the horrible images Lattie conjured in my mind. “But you said the metal in this world hurts you.”
“Yes, it poisons our blood,” she confirmed and stretched her too-long arms as her wings fluttered awake behind her. “But slow enough that we can withstand it for a mortal lifetime or two.”
“That’s… sad.” Pity and grief filled my chest, but I was too tired to think of another word.
Lattie climbed back up my leg and stood on my knees, forcing me to set down my notebook. Her tiny hands tickled my cheeks as she pulled my face close. Her eyes were wide and stared right into mine. “Do not feel pity for us, Avery Quinn. It is far better to live a brief life of freedom than to live an eternity under the rule of a being such as Mabry.”
I swallowed dryly. “Is she really that bad?”
Lattie released my face and sat atop my knee. “Yes, I’m afraid she is. But losing the love of your life and the heir to the throne all in one single swoop….”
“They had an heir?” I asked and readied my pencil. “A child?”
She nodded sadly. “Yes. A rumored son. But Lord Oden had killed the child the same night he killed Orion. Supposedly. But some whisper of the savior. The first and only born youngling of the two monarchs.”
“What do they say?”
Lattie placed a hand on my notebook, trailing her fingertips over my notes and sketches, the drawings in the margins. “That the child lives. That the magic tasked with ending its life instead hid the child away. To only be found when they were of age. When they could return to Faerie and claim the Seelie throne.” She blinked up at me. “To save us all.”
I stared back at her, feeling the weight of the words she spoke, the longing she harbored for her long-lost home. The space in my bedroom seemed to close in, darkening around the edges of my vision. I could hear my heartbeat thrumming hot in my ears.
A loud knock at the door ripped me from the trance, and I stifled a yelp.
“Av’, you up?” Julie bellowed from the other side of the door.
I scrambled to put away all my notes but remembered that I’d locked the door last night. “Uh, yeah, just woke up. I’ll be out in a minute.”
“I’ll put the coffee on!”
I sucked in a deep and cleansing breath as Lattie flew over to the windowsill and pulled back the curtain. Sunlight cut through the air, and I shielded my sensitive eyes from the blaring glow. Lattie and I talked all night and well into the morning, it seemed. Thank goodness it was Saturday. I would have been happy to curl up under the blankets and sleep the day away, but my phone buzzed with a reminder that I’d set for myself, and I cringed. I was meeting Max today to work on our project.
***
After I downed some coffee and breakfast with Julie–her too aware gaze raking me over with every bite–I said goodbye and headed down to the café to grab an espresso for the road and found Max standing outside, waiting. She stood as still as a statue, but the annoyed tap of her black gladiator sandal on concrete told me she’d been waiting a minute too long.
“You ready to walk the streets and admire some architecture?” I asked her with a heavy dose of morning pep.
Inside, I was a zombie. Desperate for the confines of my bed to drag me into a coma. But caffeine coursed through my veins, and part of me wondered what it would take to see a smile, even a hint of a grin, tug at Max’s constant glower.
Her answering grimace told me all I needed to know. “Let’s get this over with.”
She shoved off the brick exterior of the coffee shop and smoothed out the blood-red silk tank top she wore over tight black pants that shimmered in the sunlight. Her lips, usually painted a matte black, matched the deep red of her top, and her hair hung in two immaculate braids that flanked her heart-shaped face. I could stare at her all day. Max was like a work of art.
But I cast aside that awe in favor of a retort, refusing to let her intimidate me any longer. “I’m surprised you haven’t finished the whole thing yourself.”
She narrowed her dark eyes on me. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
We fell in stride together as we strolled down the sidewalk. “You did all the initial research and outlined the entire project without even talking to me, then emailed it to me like I’m nothing more than your lowly assistant or something. This is my project, too, you know.”
Max shot me a sharp look. “This is our first extensive project from the course, and architects from all over the city are coming to watch us present. Excuse me if I do everything in my power to ensure I come out on top.”
I sipped my coffee as we rounded a brick-clad corner. “We ensure we come out on top.”
She said nothing, but I saw how her fists clenched at her sides. It took every ounce of willpower not to ask Max why she was so angry all the time. I was sure the question would just lead to more pointed silence and death stares. She was beautiful, intelligent, stylish, and clearly well off on the surface. I wondered what must have happened to her to make her this way. To regard the world with such disdain.
But I held my tongue as we wandered downtown, making notes and taking pictures of all the historic architecture. The city was peppered with a mix of Victorian Gothic and Georgian designs, and it was hard not to stop and stare in awe of the splendor. The art, so well preserved and on display for all to see.
We only exchanged a few words the whole time, only about the project. I could see the restraint she struggled with, the desperation to take over and do everything her way. Max clearly wasn’t used to working with others.
After about an hour, we had just about all we needed and walked side by side past a residential area tucked away on a street stuffed with massive trees. The greenery, already fading with the coming Fall, draped over the sidewalks and cast the houses in a cool shadow.
Max came to a halt outside an old but pristine Victorian Gothic revival mansion on a corner lot. The exterior was a deep purple with black trims and a wrap-around veranda on the main level. I saw a smaller semi-circle balcony of black wrought iron on the top third level when I glanced up. Thick iron gates protected the entrance, their pointed tops sharp enough to impale intruders.
“God, I’ll never tire of the beauty in this city,” I said and blew out a long breath.
Max chortled under her breath. “I’m surprised you’ve never seen this one.” When she saw the confused look on my face, she rolled her eyes. “It is your boss’s house, after all.”
“Oh.” I lo
oked back at the house and saw it differently. Saw it as Celadine’s and smiled to myself as I realized just how her it really was. Of course, this was where she lived. It was like the house version of Celadine. “No, I had no idea.”
“How’s the janitor’s job going, by the way?” It was the first thing she’d spoken to me that wasn’t related to the project.
“Good,” I replied and felt my cheeks fill with heat. “I… I’m not just the temp anymore, though.” Max’s odious stare shot to me. “I’m apprenticing under Celadine during the evenings.”
Her lips pursed as she took in the idea. “Well, isn’t that nice for you, then?”
I swear, she couldn’t make a compliment sound non-threatening if she tried. “It is,” I replied. “Good, I mean. I’m learning a lot–”
She threw up a hand and looked away. “That wasn’t an invitation to get chummy.” I swallowed nervously as she stuffed her phone and notebook back in her bag. “Are we done here?”
My thoughts reeled. “I, uh, yeah, I guess so–”
And she was gone. Turned and strutted down the street before I even got the chance to register what was happening.
***
The sun had just dipped below the horizon, leaving behind a violet-blue stain. I mentally checked that I had everything I needed as I locked the door behind me and cursed at my trembling fingers. I raced down the spiral staircase that led to the coffee shop below. The evening shift was just starting, and Tomas stood behind the counter as he tied his black apron. He flicked his head with a smile, tossing his floppy hair back from his eyes.
“Hey,” he said. “Where you off to in such a hurry?”
My eyes burned as I looked at him and adjusted the strap of my leather bag. “I slept in.” He gave me a dumbfounded look. “I took a nap this afternoon and slept too long. I had a bunch of stuff to do on a deadline for the gallery showing I’m planning.” I checked my phone and grimaced. “Two of the places I need to get to close in less than an hour.”
A Kingdom of Iron & Wine : New Adult Fantasy Romance (The Ironworld Series Book 1) Page 11