by Jen Pretty
“I’m so sorry, Puck. That was all my fault. I wasn’t looking.” I started to ramble.
“You don’t get it, do you?” He shook his head, turning to face me. Puck had never let me down and I had let him down miserably.
I dropped my head, ashamed. I couldn’t look him in the eye.
He reached out and lifted my chin. His face was hard, and he winced when he took a breath, making the throb of guilt that much stronger.
“You have given me everything, Lex,” he whispered above the clash of swords and the shouts of war. “I will be forever in your debt. This is but a tiny repayment. I would pay you back with every drop of my blood if you asked for it.”
The angry screams and clashing sounds were dying down as we finally made our way back to the cliffs where the wounded were laying. Apparently, we had a few healers among the Fae who had come with us. They abandoned the other wounded when they saw me and Puck coated in blood.
Puck waved them away. Tough guy. His innate healing ability was already kicking in anyway. Not all the elves and hunters were as lucky. They didn’t have the healing powers that Puck and Roman had and needed time to completely heal. Some had more serious injuries and wouldn’t be able to continue on our journey. I couldn’t leave the wounded without protection in this place, which meant that my army had been cut in half.
✽ ✽ ✽
“Lex, do you want to stop for the night?” Roman asked as we walked over a ridge to discover nothing but more of the same dull landscape lay ahead.
“Alright, let’s set up camp. It must be getting late.” Although the sky didn’t show signs of change, between the battles and the walking, we were all nearly exhausted.
Roman squeezed my hand and turned to help get things organized. We would need people to split watch shifts, and everyone would need to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice. I was pretty sure the witch had more in store for us. We rang her doorbell and now she knows I have more magic than last time we met.
I sat down on a rock. Daisy waddled over and hopped into my lap.
“I should have left you at home. It’s not fair to put you in a position to have to fight for your life,” I said squishing my face into his downy back and muffling the last few words. A lump was rising in my throat. I needed to be strong for these warriors who were counting on me, but all I wanted to do was go home and cuddle Daisy.
“You ok, Lex?” Roman asked when he returned a few minutes later to find me still cuddled down into the soft duck feathers.
I straightened out. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just worried about what we are going to face. I have a bad feeling, Roman. It keeps getting worse.”
He sat down beside me and rubbed my back until an elf bowed in front of me and let me know that there was food ready.
I shuffled Daisy under my arm as I stood up to join the men and women around the fire. They had brought some meat from the shifters’ land and made a stew in a large pot. I don’t know who had been carrying the pot, but it seemed like there would be enough stew for everyone.
Armond handed me a bowl, spoon and a couple slices of bread. Roman laid out a blanket and we sat down to eat. Daisy managed to rouse himself long enough to have some bread before waddling back into my lap to continue his sleep. Roman ate with one hand, propping the other across my back to support me. He was so charming when he did silly little things like that-- making sure I was comfortable. I leaned into him and enjoyed the quiet time. Men moved around camp and Armond set up patrols. He divided the various members of our army up to cover the next eight hours while still allowing everyone to get enough sleep. I volunteered to help, but they unanimously denied they needed help. I would have called them chauvinists, but women were telling me to sit down, too.
Being queen was dumb.
Roman ushered me back to the tent and I gave up. I would have my turn to be badass. As soon as the witch was in sight, I was going to fry her like bacon. I smiled at the thought until I smelled something burning.
“Shit!” I scooped up the still slumbering Daisy and crawled out of the tent which was rapidly filling with smoke.
A nearby hunter grabbed a bottle of water and doused the flame I had started in the blanket. Puck, as a unicorn, came sliding to a halt beside me. He shifted back when he realized I wasn’t in any actual danger.
“Did you light yourself on fire, Lex?” He asked in his typical snarky tone. A crowd had gathered already and I heard a few muffled chuckles.
I didn’t answer him. Jerk. So what if I did light myself on fire? At least I could light a fire with nothing but my own magic. That was something.
I closed my eyes for a second and an image of the witch lit up like a Christmas tree flashed into my mind. The lights were tiny fires flickering on her clothes and her hair was tinsel. I giggled a bit at that and everyone took a step back from me like I was a bomb about to go off.
.
“I am going to burn that witch down, Roman.” I started laughing harder. It was funny. Nobody else seemed to think it was funny, but she was going to go up in flames like a pyre. It was going to be beautiful.
An intense sadness moved across the image in my mind of the witch burning. The smile slowly wilted off my face, drawn down by the weight of the overwhelming sorrow. I couldn’t see what made me sad, but I knew that something horrible was coming. Tears started pushing out from the corner of my eyes, but before my knees had time to buckle, Roman caught me. He carried me into another tent, sat cross-legged on the blankets and tucked me into his lap, my head firmly under his chin.
His hand made slow circles on my back, soothing away the sick feeling in my stomach and the anxiety in my chest that was making my heart race. I had a premonition or something. It wasn’t just a vision. It was also an intense emotion. I had seen the witch burn, but there was so much sadness connected with the scene that I knew it wasn't the whole story.
“This isn’t going to end without something bad happening,” I whispered. Romans hand stopped on my back for a moment before it continued.
“Is that what you saw, Lex?”
“It’s what I felt. I saw the witch burning, but I felt loss, devastation.” I choked on the words. Saying them out loud made them true and I didn’t want them to be true. “Maybe we should go home,” I whispered even softer so only he could hear me.
“We will get through it. We always do,” He replied.
He was right. We would probably get through it, but I wasn’t sure I could handle losing anyone and I knew that was the only thing that could happen to give me this feeling. This sense of foreboding and the sharp stabbing pain in my heart were as real as Roman’s hand in mine.
I must have fallen asleep for a while, but when my eyes opened again, Roman still held me in his lap. My head had slid down into the crook of his arm, and, when my eyes opened, I could see his face. His eyes were closed, but I knew he wasn’t asleep; he didn’t sleep. I thought about all the years he had spent on earth. All the vast knowledge he had gained, but how humble he was about it. He never once tried to tell me what to do except for maybe drink less alcohol. He was self-assured, but in a quiet way. I sighed and his eyes slid open, gazing down at me. He snapped his teeth when he caught me staring at him. I giggled until he leaned down and started kissing me. I got lost in him. His strong arms were supporting me as we fit together like puzzle pieces. In a different life we may have never known each other, but in this life, we were meant to be.
Eventually, the strange army we had created began rousing and packing up their things. I sighed, out of time again.
We marched along again the next day, but I was starting to feel like we were going to keep walking forever. The landscape didn’t change much from rock, dirt, smog and the occasional black muck puddle.
“Are we going to run out of water?” I asked Armond about halfway through the day.
“Nah, I loaded up some of my troublemakers with extra water, so we should be fine for a week at least. Hopefully, before then we will find a source of water. If
anyone is alive here, there has to be water. Those trolls didn’t survive on air alone.”
They might have. The witch had some crazy magic if she could make the dead trolls rise and fight again. I hoped it wasn’t some magic that kept them from dying of thirst.
As we came around a bend in the path where the rock face beside us dropped away, we were in a vast flat open area. In the distance, we could see a mountain that stretched up into the brown smog and disappeared.
Armond sent Roman ahead to scout. He had been zipping ahead regularly on the journey so I thought nothing of it. When time marched on, and he didn’t return, I started to get nervous. One glance at Armond told me he was getting nervous too. The mountain sat ahead like a looming monster ready to rise and strike us all down, but that foreboding feeling I had all along was getting worse the closer we got.
The tension in my body was rising with each step. It got bad enough that Puck sensed it through our weird connection and picked me up, transforming into a unicorn and stomping his feet. He was ready to race towards our foe and end this war.
“Wait, Lex,” Armond cautioned.
Thankfully Roman flashed back in front of us. A trail of dust his feet kicked up as he stopped was the only sign that he hadn’t just magically teleported back.
“Thank fuck, Roman. Jesus, I thought that witch had abducted you.”
“No way. I’m too fast for her,” he said smiling up at me.
I slid down Puck’s side and into Roman's arms. He caught me easily and wrapped me up in a hug.
“All right lovebirds break it up. What’s happening on that mountain?” Armond asked.
“The witch is up there. About halfway up is a cave in the side of the mountain and trolls are patrolling. There are ruins, as you get closer you can see it must have once been a castle, but now it’s just rock and dirt. I had to keep running all the way around the mountain to come back so they wouldn’t spot me. That’s why it took longer than expected.”
The feeling in my stomach was getting worse, but with Roman back, I could at least relax for a few minutes. I remembered the vision that Marick had shown me of a castle. This looked nothing like that. Maybe it had, at one time, long ago.
“So, do we set up camp here or face her today?” I asked Armond. He had been dubbed our army general even though he was possibly the youngest of them all, apart from some of the hunters and a few of the shapeshifters.
We were sitting ducks. If the trolls wanted to, they could just come down and attack us, but we would also see them coming.
“Let’s set up camp. Who knows what waits for us in that cave and I’d rather everyone went in well rested,” Armond replied.
My stomach was twisting and turning like the ocean in a storm. I could hardly eat and sitting still was almost impossible. I had no idea how I was going to sleep.
Roman and I sat together on a blanket in the middle of camp. Daisy was curled up in my lap, but the tension was so thick around me even Daisy wasn’t sleeping. It felt like a waste of time, but there were unicorns, elves, and hunters sleeping, eating and relaxing. I would need them if I had to face the witch before the trolls were all dead. There was no way I could focus my will in a bunch of different directions. I was having a hard time focusing it at all.
“Come on Lex, let’s lay down at least,” Roman said standing and scooping Daisy and me up off the blanket. He carried us to our tent and lay us back down. I set Daisy on a pillow and let Roman pull me in tight beside him. I squished my face into his shoulder and closed my eyes. We lay there in peace for a long time, and I must have fallen asleep because suddenly I was in my forest, back in homeland.
✽ ✽ ✽
“Hey, Lex,” Luke said as I wrapped myself around him.
“Hey, yourself. How are things?”
“Fine. How are things in there?”
“Ugh,” I replied, linking his arm in mine and dragging him over to a stump to sit down. “This place is horrible. It’s all dirt and sludge. No trees or grass or birds.”
“That doesn’t sound very nice, no wonder the witch wanted the shifters land.”
He had a point, but the witch didn’t need my sympathy after she enslaved the werewolves to control their land. She could have just lived in peace with them or on earth centuries ago when she started a war between the fae and the vampires.
“I want this over with so I can come home, Luke. I want to sit in my giant tub and drink wine until the water goes cold.”
“Almost done Lex, Margot has been watching your progress. She says you will be leaving for home soon,” Luke said as he shifted on the stump seat trying to get comfortable.
“Well, that’s good to hear.” I bit my lip trying not to say what I had been feeling in the pit of my stomach from the moment I got my memories back. Before I could swallow the words down, they came tumbling out of my mouth. “I think I’m going to lose someone.” As soon as I said it, I wished I could take it back. Like saying the words out loud gave them some power to activate and I was going to run out of luck.
Luke just hugged me tightly and we sat like that for a while. The fact he didn’t say anything suggested he had already heard something from Margot about what I was about to face, but I didn’t have it in me to question him. I didn’t want to know. After seeing this world, I knew the witch would not stay here and who knew what havoc she would bring to earth. I had to fight her and had to win. Someone I cared about wasn’t going to be returning with us and that just made me want to turn and run right now -- head for home and hide under my blankets.
“You should go, I’m pretty sure someone is trying to wake you up,” Luke said, releasing me from our embrace.
“Yeah, ok. Keep your fingers crossed for me, ok?”
“Always, Lex. Go get 'em.”
I smiled as he faded away and then reality hit me in the face.
CHAPTER NINE
Not reality. It was Daisy. He was standing on my chest pecking my nose.
“You dork, what are you doing?”
He quacked loudly in reply, the camp was quiet, so I shuffled up and looked out the tent flap, quickly realizing everyone was frozen, but I wasn’t using my magic and Daisy was still moving around.
“What the fuck?” I whispered. I looked around for Helena, but she wasn’t there.
“Don’t bother trying to kill me,” a voice said from behind me. When I whirled around, I immediately drew my short sword.
“I’m not here, you imbecile,” she remarked as I pointed my blade at her. “I just wanted to give you a warning,” she smirked as I tried to cut her down, but my blade just ran through the projection of her. She wasn’t here.
“Why would I believe anything you have to say?” I asked scowling at the evil bitch.
“Because I have taken a few liberties with your vampire,” her smirk was now a full smile with humour flashing in her eyes.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, not taking my eyes off her for a second.
“I destroyed him and remade him. My magic keeps him alive now. So, if you want him to stay that way, you best scurry on home and not come back.” Her amber eyes turned solid black and she lost all humour. Then she was gone and the rest of the camp came back to life.
“Hey, Lex, you’re up!” Armond called from beside the bonfire that was cooking more food for the troops. My expression must have warned him something was wrong because he handed the mixing spoon off to another hunter and stood in front of me.
“She g-got to R-Roman.” I stuttered. My eyes scanned the camp. I couldn’t see him anywhere. “Where is he?”
“What are you talking about Lex? Lex?” But I was already gone. Running through camp, looking for Roman. She was lying; she had to be lying.
Puck scooped me up and tossed me on his back as he shifted. The higher perspective gave me a wider view, and I spotted him sitting alone on the edge of the camp area. I pointed and Puck took me where I needed to be.
I slid off his back and fell to my knees in front of Roma
n.
“Say it’s not true. You just ran around the mountain. You said you didn’t stop,” I muttered almost incoherently. My lungs felt like they were full of lead. I couldn’t take a full breath.
“I’m sorry, Lex. I didn’t want you to know. I thought if I didn’t tell you, it would be easier for you to do what you must do. What you still must.” His hands cupped my face and his eyes flashed bright red as a sad smile crossed his face.
“I won’t,” I said shaking my head. “I can’t, Roman.”
“Shh,” he said, stroking my hair and pulling me close. “You know what you have to do.”
“I’ll find another way,” I promised.
“There is no time, Lex. You must end this and bring Aldridge home. I am already gone. My body is only held together by magic now, dark magic. You have to let me go.”
I stood abruptly. “No, fuck you, vampire. You will not leave me. I refuse. I will let the world burn around us, but you will live.” I turned and ran back to my tent. This was not happening. I started packing my things. I was taking Roman home. The elders or someone would surely have an answer. What if he died when I took him out of this world, away from the witch’s magic? I stopped and dropped my bag, crumpling down on top of it. This was the loss. This was the feeling in my stomach. The price I had to pay to save the whole fucking world was the one that would finally break me.
I cried for a long time and then got mad and broke some things. Mostly Roman’s things which I realized later was wasn’t going to help. I needed to do something, but I was stuck. I couldn’t go forward and couldn’t go backwards. I was at an impasse.
There was no way I could sacrifice Roman. Not while he was still walking and talking. I wanted to try and use my magic on him, but what if I killed him instead?
The hush over the camp when I emerged from my tent was bone-chilling. Everyone was waiting for me to decide what we would do.
It wasn’t fair. But then, when had my life proven to be fair? Roman stood in front of me, no expression on his face, arms at his side. He was resigned to the fact that he was already dead, but I wasn’t going to stand for that.