The Ever After

by Amanda Hocking

  Dagny listened intently and asked a lot of questions, as I’d known she would. The whole situation had left me rather dazed, and my brain felt sluggish and slow.

  Jem had just finished explaining how he was a member of the Alfheim royal family, but eleventh in line for the throne, so he didn’t have the pressures of his title but had the freedoms to travel and do as he wished for the most part. Sumi was his vizier, which was something like an advisor and a bodyguard, but she described it more as being a professional best friend.

  “And we’re both old family friends of Eliana,” Sumi said.

  “What exactly is wrong with Eliana?” Dagny asked.

  “We don’t know,” Sumi admitted. “She’s been erratic and depressed since her mother passed, but ever since she went across the bridge, her memory has been jumbled and inconsistent. She couldn’t even remember any of us, which is why we had to take her against her will.”

  “You shot us with a psionic stun gun and kidnapped her,” Dagny said dryly. PSGs were entirely nonlethal weapons, but could completely incapacitate, and they hurt like hell. “I remember that well. Where did you go after that?”

  “To Áibmoráigi with Illaria, but we didn’t stay long,” Jem-Kruk said.

  Sumi pressed her lips together grimly. “I haven’t been welcome in Áibmoráigi since I left the Älvolk.”

  “Illaria convinced me that she was going to help Ellie, and I trusted her because they’re sisters. I’ve known them both since they were born.” Jem-Kruk stared down at the table, his dark lashes resting on his sharp cheekbones. “When they finally let us in to see her—”

  “They didn’t let us in,” Sumi corrected him bitterly. “We had to fight our way in, and you had to threaten all kinds of violence.”

  “They think I’m more powerful than I truly am,” Jem-Kruk confided sheepishly.

  “Only because the Älvolk have fetishized every aspect of our world.” Sumi rolled her eyes. “That’s what all of this is about. I don’t know what they were doing to Eliana, but I’m certain that whatever it was, they did it because they thought it would get them into Alfheim.”

  “When we finally got to see Eliana, the Älvolk were holding her in a dungeon.” Jem grimaced. “Illaria claimed it was for her own safety, but Ellie was sickly and pale and hardly remembered anything.”

  “Her memory has been coming back over the past month,” Sumi elaborated. “She still doesn’t remember much from before she got sick in the first place, so she’s foggy on us and her mother. But she has been able to remember the in-between, like Hanna and you.”

  “Which is why we’re here,” Jem said. “She’s not getting better, and we don’t know what to do for her.”

  “You said that the Älvolk fetishize your home. What did you mean by that?” Dagny asked Sumi.

  “Growing up around them, they constantly spoke of the other kingdom, just across the bridge, and how it was our birthright that the álfar kept us from,” Sumi said derisively.

  “A long, long time ago, a powerful enchantment was put on the bridge between the kingdoms,” Jem explained. “Only those with álfar blood can cross it.”

  “My mother was álfar,” Sumi said, sounding proud for a moment. “The Älvolk men are trained in the art of helifiske. Meaning they’re taught to charm and woo women into becoming carriers of their daughters. My father knew enough to lure my mother until she was trapped with him, much like Indu did with Senka.”

  My stomach rolled at the sound of her name. Senka. My mother. I wanted to tell them that she was my mother. But Sumi was talking, and it wasn’t the time, so I sipped my tea to keep anything from spilling out.

  “—rulers don’t have any álfar blood themselves,” Sumi was saying. “Perhaps they once did, but they need much more than a drop. So they were looking for other ways to break the enchantment. Thus far, they have not been successful.”

  “How do you know?” Dagny asked. “They could be crossing it as we speak.”

  Jem-Kruk smiled, crooked and uneasy. “If the bridge was open, what is on Alfheim would be here, and everyone would know.”

  “The Älvolk think that across the bridge will be their rightful Valhalla.” Sumi shook her head. “I followed Senka across, and what lies there is far more hell than heaven.”

  Jem bristled. “It has its own beauty to it.”

  “And its own monsters,” she said, meeting his gaze evenly.

  “Should we be worried?” Dagny asked.

  “If the Älvolk ever break the enchantment, then yes,” Sumi said. “But it’s held for nearly a thousand years. Even with their fanaticism, I don’t see why they could do it now.”

  “What can we do to prevent them from undoing the enchantment?” Dag asked.

  “We don’t even know what is required to break it, so it’s difficult to say what one shouldn’t do,” Jem said with a dismal shrug.

  “They’re collecting blood,” I said. Everyone looked at me with a start because it had been so long since I’d spoken. “They took so much of my blood, and they’ve got all these flowers that bleed.”

  “I bet they took Eliana’s blood,” Dagny said. “That’s probably why she freaked out so much when Elof tried to draw her blood back in June. If they held her and drained her the way they did Ulla.”

  “And I could probably handle it better, because I’m Omte,” I realized.

  In the bathroom, Eliana was loudly singing the song of heroes and worms of flowers.

  Dagny looked at the door with pity in her eyes. “They stole her blood.”

  “And they still can’t get across the bridge,” Sumi said with a heavy sigh.

  “So where do we go from here?” Dagny asked.

  And then they launched into the logistics of it all. Where they could stay—to keep it under the radar, they’d have to make do with extra blankets and pillows in the living room; what they would do about Eliana—Dagny would arrange to sneak her in to see Elof tomorrow; what everyone else would be up to while Dagny and Sumi would be helping Elof and Eliana—Dagny assigned me and Jem to go to the archives to convince Calder to help us find anything we could about the Lost Bridge of Dimma and how to cross it.

  After Eliana came out of the bathroom, she complained of being hungry, and Sumi admitted they’d had trouble finding food on the road, which was a problem I understood all too well.

  Dagny and Sumi headed down to the market to get more food, since we didn’t have nearly enough for five mouths, while I stayed back to help Eliana and Jem settle in.

  I felt strangely on edge with just the two of them, an electric current of anxiety threaded through me, so I couldn’t sit still. I set up the laptop so Eliana could watch her shows while curled up on the couch, but I moved around, mindlessly dusting things that didn’t really need dusting.

  Before she’d gone, I’d pulled Dagny aside and in a hushed voice, made her reassure me that this wasn’t still a dream.

  But this still felt so unreal and bizarre. Eliana was back, and Jem-Kruk was in my apartment, watching me with a bemused expression as I paced the room. My stomach flipped the same way it had every other time I had seen him—a mixture of butterflies and a hint of trepidation. But I had never felt both quite so intensely before.

  It had been weeks since I saw him last, with the Lost Month in the middle, and now he was here, in my home, telling me that a cult had stolen my blood to open a bridge to a dangerous, mysterious kingdom.

  38

  Bahsutt

  I’d climbed up to my bedroom loft to gather up all the blankets and pillows I could spare, and I didn’t realize that Jem had followed me until I heard his voice behind me.

  “It’s cozy up here,” he mused, and I looked back to see him perched at the top of the ladder at the edge of my loft.

  I knelt on my bed, my heart racing in my chest, and I realized this was the first boy I’d had in this bedroom. Although the term “room” was being generous. It was an open loft above the bathroom.

  Wood railings su
rrounded it to keep me from falling eight feet in the middle of the night, and the slant of the roof meant that I didn’t have a ton of headroom. The floor space wasn’t that much bigger than the mattress, with a nightstand and outlet squeezed in by the head of the bed, and I had some storage in the shortest part of the room, past the foot of the bed.

  To brighten the small space up, I’d strung fairy lights around the loft, and I’d tacked up pictures of my friends and the kids in Förening on the wall by my nightstand. It was cozy, actually.

  And there was Jem, his dark eyes taking it all in. The warm glow of the fairy lights played wonderfully on his tawny skin, highlighting his sharp cheekbones and the playful smattering of freckles across his face. His black waves of hair hung mostly free, except where a few small, well-placed braids kept the rest of his hair out of his face.

  He was so handsome, he seemed unreal, and his smile cut through me like a knife through melted butter.

  “Is it okay that I’m up here?” Jem asked. He must’ve noticed something off in my expression.

  “Yeah, yeah.” I nodded weakly. I had just thought that Pan would be the first guy I had in my bedroom, but I didn’t say that.

  Jem-Kruk came farther up, and he slid back on my bed so he was sitting beside me.

  “I know I don’t know you that well, Ulla,” he began cautiously. “But you seem especially shaken up since we arrived. Is there anything I can do to put you at ease?”

  “No, I…” I trailed off. I looked over the railing to make sure that Eliana was fully engrossed in her shows, but I still lowered my voice when I said, “I think Senka was my mother.”

  His eyes widened, and in an awed whisper, he said, “You’re the dead baby.”

  “Wh-Wh-What?” I gasped. “What are you talking about?”

  “Senka fell in love and left our kingdom,” he explained. “I visited her once, and she was pregnant. Sometime later, when she came back, she said the baby had died. She never talked much of her time in Áibmoráigi, only saying that it was too painful.”

  “She thought I was dead?” I asked around the lump in my throat.

  “That is the only way she would’ve left you behind,” Jem said. “She was a devoted mother, and she was never quite the same after she lost the baby. Lost you.” He gave me a sad smile.

  “She sounded daring and bold in the book,” I remembered.

  “She could be quite daring and bold, but what book are you talking about?” he asked with a puzzled expression.

  I took the Jem-Kruk and the Adlrivellir book from off my night table and handed it to him. “This book is about you and Senka and Jo-Huk.”

  He stared down at it in confusion and ran his fingers over the cover, tracing the triskelion triangle with its swirling vines on the inside—the Älvolk symbol. “What does it say about us?”

  “It just talks about the adventures you had when you were younger,” I said as he flipped through the pages. “The man who wrote it, his wife was friends with Senka.”

  “Senka must’ve told her all our stories.” He blinked back tears as he looked down at the book wistfully. “I hope she portrayed me in a favorable light.”

  “You came off looking good,” I said with a smile. “What was she like?”

  “Senka was…” He exhaled and stared off. “Brave and bossy, but only because she cared so much. She would be as fierce as a kuguar, but she was warm and funny. We have a word where I come from, bahsutt. It means to be aggressive without anger. She was kind and generous, but never angry, and always bold and motivated.

  “Illaria was more like her than Ellie, but Senka never had the bitter streak that Illaria does,” he said.

  “What happened with Illaria?” I asked.

  “I don’t truly know. The time she spent with the Älvolk when she was young shaped her heart and mind more than I had ever imagined. Indu and his rhetoric burrowed deep inside her and slowly ate away her brain.” He scowled. “That’s the only way I can explain how she could betray her sister—and her mother’s memory—the way she has.”

  “How did Senka die?” I asked.

  “She was bitten by an etanadrak in the spring. The venom didn’t kill her but she never fully recovered. When she later fell ill with a bloody cough, it was too much for her.”

  Another weight around my heart tightened, like a noose squeezing so tightly that every heartbeat ached. I had known she was dead, but hearing Jem say it—right after finding out my father was also dead—it was hard for me not to cry.

  “Hey, hey, are you okay?” Jem sounded alarmed as tears spilled over my cheeks.

  “Yeah.” I wiped at my face and sighed. “Life has just been … a lot lately.”

  Jem moved closer to me and put his arm around me, loose but comforting. “I know precisely what you mean.”

  I shook my head. “I feel so silly. All this time, I thought I would feel better just knowing the truth about my parents. And now I found out the truth, and I’m blubbering.”

  “You haven’t exactly been getting good news,” Jem said reasonably.

  “That is very true,” I agreed with a weary laugh. “But I’m glad that Eliana is safe here, and I’m safe.” I looked over at Jem, so close to me, with his dark eyes on me. “And you.”

  “And Sumi,” he added because I didn’t.

  Heat flushed my cheeks and I looked away from him. “Right, yes.” I swallowed hard. “I am grateful everyone is safe and sound.”

  “I know,” he said with a playful squeeze of my shoulder, and my stomach flipped.

  “I have…” I trailed off because I didn’t know how to finish it. Or if I needed to say anything at all, or if I would just make myself seem even more ridiculous than I already had.

  I wanted to tell Jem about Pan. That we were … something.

  And maybe I was misreading the situation. Jem was trying to make me feel better, and my tears had stopped. But I still felt like crying, and I did also kind of want to kiss Jem, even though I mostly just wished that Pan were here instead, and I wanted to throw up.

  I was all over the place, and I swear at that moment, I felt every single thing all at once.

  “You have what?” Jem asked, because I’d never finished my sentence.

  “I have no idea what I’m doing anymore or how to feel about anything,” I said finally.

  Jem moved, taking his arm from my shoulder, so he could face me more fully. His knee pressed against mine, and he took my hands in his. “You’re going through something, and no doubt the journey is treacherous at times. But you must remember that you are not alone, and you still get to decide where this journey ends.”

  “But what if I don’t know where I want it to end?” I asked.

  He smiled. “You’ll find the way as you go.”

  A knock at the front door interrupted the moment, and Eliana bounced up from the couch and announced, “I’ll get it!”

  I let go of Jem’s hand and moved toward the railing. “Eliana, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “But maybe it’s Elof or Hanna,” Eliana argued cheerily, and she never slowed as she threw open the front door.

  “Holy shit, you’re back,” Pan said. I couldn’t see him yet, but he sounded shocked.

  Eliana made a delighted noise before grabbing him and pulling him into a hug. As she embraced him, he looked over her shoulder, and when he spied me, sitting up in my bedroom with Jem, his expression faltered.

  “What’s going on, Ulla?” he asked.

  39

  Risks

  Pan leaned back against the counter, his hands beside him, his palms resting on the butcher-block with his fingers drumming along the edge. All the while that I’d been telling him about how Jem, Sumi, and Eliana came to be here—with Jem expounding occasionally and Eliana interjecting whenever she felt like it—Pan’s expression had only contracted: his eyebrows pinching and his full lips pressing into an anxious frown.

  He’d come over to check on me and invite me to brunch, since we
hadn’t seen each other since we’d gotten back to Merellä. Instead he was getting everything dumped on him, so I understood his growing unease.

  Jem and I stood across from him in the small kitchen. Eliana was in the living room, practicing an exercise dance that Sumi had taught her.

  “Sumi is an Älvolk, right?” Pan asked when we’d gotten to the end, and he looked to Jem for confirmation, who nodded. “Does she know why they stole so much of Ulla’s blood?”

  “We don’t know exactly what they’re doing with it, but we think that her unique parentage makes her tolerate it well, so they took as much as they could,” Jem said.

  “Unique parentage?” Pan echoed, and looked at me in surprise. “You know who your parents are?”

  “Yeah, it all just came together,” I said sheepishly. “Thor Elak and Senka.”

  “Thor?” His eyes widened. “The Omte King?”

  I nodded. “Elof did a familial match with Furston.”

  “Wait,” Eliana said, and stopped her dance exercise. “Did you say Senka is your mother? But isn’t she my mother?”

  I took a deep breath and faced her. This wasn’t how I wanted to tell her, but I guessed this was how it was happening. “I think we’re half-sisters.”

  She put her hands to her face and let out an earsplitting scream. Her skin started changing—her usual deep tan became a rapidly shifting kaleidoscope of colors, and her long hair rippled bright green.

  “This is the best news!” She ran over to me and literally leapt so I had to catch her. When I put her back down, her skin and hair returned to normal, and she smiled up at me with tears in her eyes. “I was looking for you, wasn’t I?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted.

  “You must’ve been why I came here,” Eliana insisted definitively. “I had to find my sister.”

  “Maybe, Ellie,” Jem allowed. “But we don’t know anything for certain.”

  “No, I know it in my heart of hearts,” she persisted. And then she twirled around and went back to doing her dancercise.