by Lucia Ashta
Fianna, however, didn’t seek to console the other fairy. She got right in Naomi’s face instead and glared at her, buzzing her wings like an angry mosquito.
“What is it, little fairy?” Naomi asked, examining her fingernails. Petunia rubbed against her mistress’ heels and the bits of leg her curve-skimming dress revealed. The cat studied the flying fairy as if she were a tasty treat.
“You need to back off, do you hear me? We’ve all had enough of your crap,” Fianna snapped.
“Here, here,” Nessa said with a pathetic sniffle.
“You have no right to make everyone else miserable. We’re all stuck in the same boat right now. So shut it and deal with it.”
I expected Naomi to unleash her razor sharp tongue, but surprisingly she just ran a hand through her hair and sighed. “We’ve been here for far too long already.”
“We don’t know that,” Fianna said. “There’s no sun here. No moon. No way to tell the passing of time.”
“Precisely. Time could be passing very differently here than it is back on Earth. What seems like a minute to us might be a year.”
I stared at them, my mind struggling to process that possibility. “You can’t be serious,” I whispered.
“Deadly,” Naomi said. Of course she’d choose that word. Why would she want to bother making anything better for anyone else?
Nessa cried softly and hiccupped. The blue fairy was all but folded in on herself atop my leg. I blinked back my own tears at the thought that the Earth we finally managed to return to might be so different than the one we left behind. Quinn … he’d been my age. That couldn’t change. Whatever the connection between us was, I wouldn’t be responsible for changing anything about it.
He was still possibly fighting for his life and that of his uncle while we were stuck here. That vampire, Antonio Dimorelli, had been bad enough, but who knew what kind of other creatures might have awaited Quinn outside? The kind that would align themselves with a vampire like Antonio…
I licked parched lips. My skin felt dry and brittle after so much time outside of the ocean. I needed at the least to drink water, but we had no supplies here.
I swiped the messy hair from my face, flicked the long strands back across my shoulders, where they promptly tangled with my wings, and sucked in some resilience. I wouldn’t ask the witch and fairies to allow me to rest again. I’d trudge through, especially since they’d denied my request every time.
“All right. Tell me what to do.”
Nessa hiccupped. Naomi and Fianna opened their mouths to speak at the same time. I held up a hand to stop them. “Not the same things you’ve already told me. We need a new approach. If I can’t access my own powers in the way you think I need to—”
“Not think, know,” Naomi interrupted.
“Whatever,” I said. “How can we—I—do it if what I’ve tried already hasn’t worked?”
No one moved to answer for once.
I added, “We need to find something different to try. What can that be?”
Fianna glanced at Nessa, then said, “The best route would be to clamp on to Nessa’s magic and use it to pinpoint our destination. But she can’t feel the Earth.”
Nessa’s chest heaved as if she’d lost a dear family member instead of a planet. A tiny sob tore from her chest.
“Aw. There, there,” I said, awkwardly tracing the tip of my pinky finger along the line of her back between her drooping wings. Her breath hitched as another cry rattled through her, and she leaned into my touch.
Fianna said, “If she can’t feel the Menagerie, then I truly have no idea how we’ll get there.”
I glared at the crimson fairy as Nessa seemed to dissolve into a puddle of grief. She sprawled onto my leg like a dying starfish, limbs sticking out to all sides as she allowed despair to flow through her. I ran my pinky finger along one of her outstretched arms, wishing there was more I could do for the distraught fae.
But Fianna was busy stroking her lips, deep in thought. “Unless…” she started. “Unless we can go somewhere else. Once we’re on Earth, Nessa will be able to get us where we need to go.”
“I’ll be able to get us where we need to go,” Naomi said. “I’m the one with the transport magic.”
“But Nessa will be the one to guide you,” Fianna said.
“I don’t need—”
“Oh enough already, witch. We have bigger fish to fry than your ego.”
Naomi opened her mouth, then shut it, and reached down to pick up Petunia. Once in her arms, she petted the cat in fast, furious strokes.
But she didn’t say a word. Finally!
Fianna nodded her approval and flew over to land on my other thigh. She looked up at me, craning her head far back as if my face were a mountaintop. “There’s another reason you really need to hurry.” She grimaced and my stomach churned. Please no. No more reasons to instill desperation in me. I was already doing the best I could.
“Our power wanes the longer we remain here,” she said, and I thought my chest would burst from the pressure.
I was two seconds away from a total freak-out meltdown. From the alarmed look on Fianna’s face, she knew it.
“It’s okay, girl. Breathe. Just breathe,” Fianna said.
I worked on breathing in the thin air that surrounded us, but Naomi paced furiously in front of me, all the while petting that cat of hers with quick, obsessive strokes.
Fianna shot Naomi a nasty look, but quickly met my eyes again. “We’ll figure it out. Just breathe through it.” Her voice was artificially calm, but hey, I’d still take it. I obeyed and breathed, keeping my attention pinned on the fairy. I missed my ocean home so desperately that I wouldn’t allow myself to think of the feel of the water against my skin; if I did, I’d end up in a puddle of desolation alongside Nessa.
“Our powers might be waning, but perhaps yours aren’t,” Fianna added.
I was about to protest and explain, yet again, that I didn’t have any, so they couldn’t be waning or not waning, as it were, but Fianna was shaking her crimson head even as I thought it, flakes of plaster continuing to shed from her shoulder-length hair. “We don’t know anything about your powers, and neither do you. There’s hope, no matter what you’re thinking, or how you’re feeling. You’re a sirangel for goodness’ sake.”
“She’s right,” Nessa snuffled while staring up at the bright empty sky, the one that should’ve had a sun or a moon, a cloud or a bird, something, anything, to feel more like home. “It takes time, often a long time, for a new creature to come into her—or his—powers. You’re doing great.”
“I-it can take a while?” I asked.
“Of course.” Nessa hiccupped again.
“Well, why didn’t anyone tell me that before?”
“Because we don’t have time for you to dillydally,” the witch said.
“Naomi…” the tiny red fairy warned, and the witch grew quiet.
Fianna continued: “For a creature like you, new to everything on land”—at the mention of Earth, Nessa whined and flung her head to the side in a dramatic gesture; Fianna rolled her eyes where the other fairy couldn’t see her—“it makes sense for your magic to feel foreign, out of reach. Especially since there are no others of your kind to guide you or teach you some tricks. Nessa and I had an aunt who taught us much of what we know.”
“You did?” The pressure in my chest was beginning to lighten.
Fianna nodded, red hair bouncing. “She showed us the way until we could continue the path of learning on our own. Of course it helped that Nessa loves books so much. And that I have such an astute mind and excellent observational skills. I’m also great with other creatures.”
Naomi snorted, as did her cat. Fianna ignored them, trailing a ticklish circle around my thigh as she walked. “We were soon able to figure out all sorts of things without Aunt Sosie’s help.”
“Wow. That’s really great,” I said. “So does that mean you’re sisters? Or cousins?”
N
essa smiled faintly and nodded, sweeping blue hair up and down her spot on my leg. “We’re first cousins. Our mothers are sisters. That’s why I put up with Fianna’s obnoxious tendencies—”
“Hey!” Fianna protested.
Nessa looked up at the blank azure sky. “Either way, we stick together.”
“I’ve remained quiet as long as I could,” Naomi said. “But you surely can’t think this is the time for family history. My power is slipping away from me!”
Fianna didn’t even look at the witch, only back at me. She held my eyes and narrowed her features into determined lines. “You’ve got this. You just need to fast-track some of your learning is all. You for sure have powers, no doubt about it.”
When the panic erupted across my face again, she shook her head. “It’s okay, really. The magic you come up with doesn’t need to be fancy or perfect. We just need to ride it back to Earth. Anywhere on Earth will do. Nessa can guide us the rest of the way.” As if she feared another of the witch’s interruptions, she quickly added, “And Naomi can transport us there.”
I focused on deepening my breath, doing my best to ignore how thin the air tasted, doing what I could to prepare myself for pushing through to success. “So it doesn’t have to be great … just get us there…”
“That’s right. It’s simpler than what you fear. There’s no way, at all, that the first daughter of a siren and an angel won’t have at least some of their magic.”
I nodded, wanting her to convince me. Her pep talk had to work, because I had to do this.
“And why do you think my powers wouldn’t be weakening if all of yours are?” I asked.
“It’s a guess, but an educated one,” Fianna said. She stopped moving across my leg to peer up at me, fists clenched to either side of her. She was going to pep talk the current out of me, all right. “Selene, your parents are from the sky and the sea. Though I realize the ocean is part of the Earth, and that the same Earth that we fairies are connected to runs beneath it, the water has a different feel to it. A different magic all its own.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “The ocean feels very different from land.”
“Exactly. Which means that of all of us here, you’re the one most likely not to lose her powers when we’re away from the Earth. We fairies rely on the earth for our magic. It’s the source of all our power. The earth lends us her magic so we can take care of her and her creatures.”
Fianna smiled tenderly at Nessa, who’d stopped crying and was rubbing at her eyes with diminutive fists. When Nessa looked Fianna’s way, the crimson fairy dropped the smile before Nessa could spot it, returning to kickass fairy in a snap. She tucked her hands behind her back and said, “All fae are connected to the earth, but Nessa has a special connection to it, one I don’t have. Maybe there’s still a way to merge with her connection and get us back to Earth.”
I nodded, trying to believe that it’d be easy.
Nessa sat up, sprawling her hands behind her while staring up at me. I craned my neck lower so I wouldn’t seem like such a giant to the fairies. “Your powers aren’t tied to the earth as much as ours, but more to the sky and the water,” the sapphire fairy said.
“There’s no water here.” I swallowed around a parched throat and licked at nearly cracking lips. In the ocean, I’d never once been thirsty.
“No, not that we’ve seen. But there’s plenty of sky,” Nessa said, attempting to imbue her voice with an upbeat tone that contradicted the droop to her wings.
It was as weak an argument as it got, and the fairies were well aware of the fact. Fianna worked to conceal her doubt from me, contorting her miniature crimson lips into a forced smile that came off more like a grimace. When she realized I knew it, she sighed. “Look, Naomi is a natural witch, which means she derives all her power and ability to do spell work from the earth too. We all feel our power weakening the longer we remain here. You don’t.”
“Yessss, but that’s only because I don’t feel my power at all.”
“But you also still don’t feel it weakening, and that’s all we’ve got.”
My shoulders slumped. Fianna flew straight toward my head like a projectile. In a flash, she was hovering so close in front of my face that I had to pull back to focus on the blur of her.
She pointed a tiny finger at me. “You are no regular supernatural creature. Get that through your thick head already, will you? Angel plus siren. That’s a big friggin’ deal. Angels are so powerful that we don’t even know what they’re capable of because they’re too big and mighty to come down to Earth. Sirens are the most powerful of the merpeople. You’re a cocktail of awesome and amazing. So buck up, step up, and get to it already. Because time’s a wastin’, and we can’t afford any more of that.”
She pressed her finger against my nose, squashing it. “You hear me, girl?” Her tawny eyes blazed as if lit from behind. “You can do this.” She pushed against my nose and I closed my eyes. She was one big blur, and the air from her flitting wings was making my already dry eyes feel like they were about to break and crumble.
If the fairies believed in me, or at least were willing to pretend they did, I’d do it. I’d do whatever I had to do, because, well, there was no other choice.
“Back away from my face please,” I said. “I’m ready.”
Fianna hooted and hollered and flew back down to my thigh. “That’s the way. We have places to be and people to see. Lead us out of here, sirangel.”
18
I didn’t bother to think things through overly much. Since I had little idea what I was doing anyway, there seemed little point to it. I did, however, make sure the witch wouldn’t try to kill me if I accidentally used her power again. Since I didn’t know how I’d done it in the first place, I couldn’t figure out a way to prevent it.
“I realize you say your powers are waning,” I started, “but—”
Naomi cut me off. “If you find yourself drawing on them, that’s fine—in this one and only instance, you understand me.”
“I totally do. It won’t ever happen again—assuming it happens this time.”
The witch stood directly in front of me, though she hadn’t ceased petting Petunia. The cat didn’t protest, however. There was an odd connection between the witch and her pet. She said, “Do whatever you need to do to get us out of here. But by the love of all things holy and unholy, get us the hell out of here.”
I nodded. “Right. I’m on it.” At another time I would have laughed at my empty assurances. Now I wouldn’t dare. I was the only shot we had. I purposely hadn’t asked what would happen if I didn’t lead us away from here. I ran my hands across the “grass” beside me, and when an empty sensation like a cool breeze was all that met my palms, my heart thumped with urgency. Despite its idyllic appearance, this place was unnatural. This plane, wherever it was, wasn’t equipped to sustain life.
“Take flight,” I said to the fairies still on my legs. They responded right away, but remained close by as I stood awkwardly, still trying to get a handle on moving on two appendages with gigantic wings attached to my frame.
I closed my eyes to focus, then popped them back open. “Wait a minute. Are we going to go through what we did when we came here? Because I’m not sure I can survive another journey like that one.”
“No one wants another journey like that one,” Naomi said. “Do your best to avoid it, but in the end, what’s most important is to get us back to a dimension we recognize.”
Sure, okay. Piece of kelp pie.
I swallowed my nerves around a scratchy throat and closed my eyes again. At least that way I looked as if I had a clue, and pretending was the first step to doing magic, right? It seemed like it should be.
I could at least go through the motions. I’d seen Mulunu connect to her sea crystal and the magic it channeled through her staff enough times. I’d do what she did.
I spread my arms out to the sides as I’d seen her do hundreds of times. Palms pointing upward toward the cloudless, sunless
sky, I waited for the magic.
I wasn’t sure what Mulunu felt when it first touched her. The sea witch was nothing if not reserved with her secrets. But I had a vivid imagination.
I tilted my face up toward the nonexistent sun and pulled in deep inhales, envisioning the air as rich and alive as it was on Earth, not this thin, artificial-feeling substance.
I focused on the way my torso rose and fell with my breath, with the way the air fueled my life. Therein must be magic. Air gave life. That was as close to magic as anything else.
I longed for whatever guidance the fairies and witch might offer, but we’d tried that and it hadn’t worked. My own ideas were all I could count on now.
I rooted my feet to the ground, working to override the image of my tail, the one I missed as if it had been hacked off instead of transformed. I pretended my bare soles sank into the grass heavily, and I imagined the dirt of Earth beneath my feet—there, I even smelled it … the rich, nearly pungent smell of the humus of the forest behind Irving’s house.
My heart fluttered toward Quinn and whatever sparked between us, but I staunchly moved it along to the here and now; I needed to find a way to survive.
I opened my wings to their fullest. As the air rushed through their feathers, I pulled on that richness—whether imagined or real, I didn’t know anymore.
I imagined the sun warming my face, my bare shoulders, my stomach, and legs, the air nurturing all aspects of my living organism. I even called on the memories of the surf crashing upon craggy rocks and spraying my face with mist. I felt the water.
Then, without conscious decision, I envisioned myself pulling on Fianna’s magic. Once I experienced a warm tingling in my center, I reached for Nessa’s. With the powers of both fairies within me, tingling warmth swept all the way across my body and down my limbs, awakening my fingers and toes. I even felt it through my wings, which I hadn’t truly felt before, I realized.