Faery (The Faery Chronicles Book 3)

by Leslie Claire Walker

  “Better her than us,” Simone said.

  I had to agree, but that didn’t stop my gut from churning. I swallowed hard. “Did you see what just happened?”

  “From flesh and blood to skin and bones in the time it took me to blink?” She nodded. “I’ve never seen that before.”

  Usually, if the disease was advanced, it was easy to spot. But this girl—something was different. I could only think of one reason for that. Magic.

  “Someone cast a spell on her,” I said.

  Simone mulled that for a minute. “She was sent to kill like all the others we’ve encountered, but somebody camouflaged her, trying to give her a better chance to get close to us.”

  “You can’t see death coming, you don’t know to get out of the way,” I said.

  Simone nodded.

  I looked at the girl. The nausea in my stomach built to a fever pitch. The girl had been someone’s kid. Someone’s friend. She hadn’t died by my hand, but I’d have killed her, no question. If necessary, I’d have died trying.

  Simone blew out a breath. “Did she hurt you bad?”

  “My arm still works, so I don’t think she cut anything vital.” I couldn’t feel the wound in my shoulder much. Adrenaline, maybe. If so, that would change in a minute, as soon as my body realized the immediate threat had passed.

  I took red bandana stuffed into the back pocket of my jeans and walked on shaking legs over to where Simone rested and lowered myself to the ground beside her. “Need your help.”

  “Pressure on the wound,” she said.

  I nodded.

  She obliged. I sucked in a breath and hissed between my teeth.

  “Lean back against the tree,” she said.

  She kept the pressure up as I did, moving her hand only when we were sure I’d have a good seal against the bark.

  “We should bandage that before we move. Can’t have you leaving a blood trail all the way back to camp.”

  “Pot calling the kettle.” I gave her my good shoulder to lean on.

  She rested her head there. “She seemed okay when I first saw her. Said she wanted to help if she could share a fire with us tonight. She said she knew who I was and why I was here. She wanted to meet you. Specifically. She asked about you, Kev.”

  “Not good,” I said.

  There was no reason for the girl to ask. I mean, I did the liaison job, which meant I wasn’t a nobody anymore. But I only talked to Simone or the King. I didn’t know any other fae. I didn’t interact with any of them. If one of them happened to run into me, I’d just be another human, at least at first glance.

  Simone winced as she sat up straight. “The girl said that there are people looking for us. Like, out to get us. She could help us hide from them. I figured we could question her. See what she was about. She got behind me, though, and attacked me halfway back to camp. She knew where I was headed. Not so hard to follow my trajectory straight to you.”

  The disease that’d infected the realm destroyed the body and the mind. It left its victims completely out of it. The girl had the sickness, a spell masking extreme fatigue, the rise of the veins toward the surface of the skin, the bleaching of the blood.

  Faery biology was different than the human kind. Their black blood was actually liquid faery magic, if we defined magic as the potential for the unexpected to happen. Magic was like a promise that hadn’t been carried through yet. It held all the wishes that went along with the promise—for good fortune or ill, for uplifting or for revenge, for blessing or for cursing. It stayed just that—a promise—until the fae who carried it pointed it at someone or something and set it loose.

  The disease affected faeries’ magic. The disease took control of it and used it against them until they died. Whatever magic remained after that was done just disappeared. No one knew where it all went. Everyone was too busy just trying not to catch the sickness, trying not to die.

  The girl who’d cut Simone and stabbed me had been hunting us, just like the others. She’d almost succeeded in bagging her prey.

  I asked the question I’d asked all the times before, but this time with more panic. I’d assumed that the disease had turned the sick fae into hunters and that they’d gone after us because of the sickness, but now it’d suddenly become personal.

  “Why would someone want to kill me on purpose?” I asked.

  Simone laid a hand on my leg. “I can’t think of a reason, Kev.”

  Which made things more worrisome. I dragged myself to standing, gritting my teeth at the sharp throb in my shoulder. “We need to get patched up.”

  Simone reached out a hand. I helped her up and didn’t let go until she tried her legs out and they decided to cooperate, but grudgingly. The wound on her thigh saw to that.

  “We won’t be running anywhere soon,” I said.

  “We might need to,” she said. “There’ll be others in the woods, tracking us. Whoever helped that girl.”

  My thoughts exactly. “So you don’t think she was on her own either?”

  Simone shook her head.

  We wouldn’t be safe here, then, not that we’d been safe before. But there was a difference between general danger and targeted danger. We—or I—had a bull’s-eye on my back. “We’ve got to get out of Faery.”

  “I want our stuff,” she said.

  That meant going back to camp and hoping we didn’t get ambushed. “You sure? We can always get more stuff.”

  “No,” she said. “We can’t.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “What’s that mean?”

  “Means I left something there that we can’t replace.”

  “What kind of something?” I asked.

  “Later,” she said. “Okay?”

  Except we’d be risking our lives for whatever it was. And knowing Simone, she would tell me in her own good time or not at all.

  “Hold still a sec.” She pulled the wadded bandana away from my wound, stretched it out lengthwise, and tied it around my shoulder while I gritted my teeth.

  “Better,” she said. “Less bleeding.”

  “Great.” I wished I could see the cut. I wished I knew whether I’d need stitches, and whether I’d live long enough to endure them.

  My hands were smeared with red. I wiped them on my jeans, for all the good it did.

  “It’s not the end of the world, Kev.” She bit her lip halfway through my name, and we both knew why.

  “Hell yes, it is,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Simone’s first step was a limp. She stretched her wings to full length so that they extended five feet from the back of her body. The muscles that extended them jumped under her skin. “Balance,” she said.

  “Right.” I held the blade I’d taken from the girl in my best fighting grip. I tried not to swing my arm on my wounded side.

  We walked for a few minutes in silence. I kept my physical ears peeled for sounds that shouldn’t be there. The huff of someone else’s breathing. The rustle of brush or branch between gusts of wind.

  I kept my psychic ears primed, too, imagining them like satellite dishes waiting to pick up any semblance of a stray thought that didn’t belong to Simone or me.

  I didn’t hear a thing.

  The campsite looked just like I’d left it. A small clearing with even ground, the small mound of stones I’d stacked as a monument to the realm as we’d known it, which had ceased to exist.

  Moss and fallen leaves and needles carpeted the ground—good to sleep on. The wood I’d gathered remained where I’d stacked it, neatly to one side of where I’d planned to build the fire. The long, brown leg of a spider scratched the surface of the lowest log. I saw it, and it knew that I saw it. It didn’t bother backpedaling to hide.

  It wouldn’t talk to me. None of the Faery creatures talked to me except the blackbirds. Back in the human world, we’d fought a Demon. During the most desperate hour, our friend Stacy the Witch had marshaled the local blackbirds to help us humans pass messages back and forth telepathically. Which was brill
iant and wicked cool. The surprise was that even after the emergency ended, I could still understand the grackles and crows and ravens, and they could still understand me.

  I didn’t know whether or not to feel weird about that. I only knew that it could come in handy sometime in the future. Therefore, I refused to look that particular gift horse in the mouth.

  Spiders, though? That would have to be Simone.

  Besides the magic that she had in her voice and her blood, which was hers and hers alone, she could tap the powers of the Faery realm. Which meant she could travel through the earth, and draw up the gentle glow of the twilight, and talk to animals and trees and bodies of water. She could hear voices in the wind sometimes.

  If she had great need, if it meant everything in the world to her, she could bless or curse. Once, she’d stolen the air right from my lungs because I made her feel breathless. That had been an accident. She’d felt terrible about almost killing me. I think she understood in that moment the consequences and responsibility of power. It couldn’t—or at least, it shouldn’t—be about what you wanted. It had to be about what was best for the people or the realm or whomever or whatever you served.

  She was bound to Faery by honor and obligation. The King could control her like a puppet if he wanted. When she’d lost her humanity, she’d lost her ability to feel and love the way humans did, as if a wall of ice separated her from all of that messy, mortal stuff. She could reach for it, but she couldn’t quite touch it.

  Except where I was concerned. Then all bets were off.

  It was confusing and hard and she hated it, and she alternated between accepting her cold fate and doing everything she could possibly think of to hold on to whatever last shred of humanity might hide in the deepest, darkest corners of her being.

  She served whoever sat on the throne of Faery because she had no other choice. In her heart of hearts, though, Simone served the forces of life. She was on the side of all living beings and the powers that kept the world turning, blood pumping, hearts beating.

  I glanced at her, then cocked my head toward the intrepid arachnid. “Anything?”

  She stared at it. “No one’s been by.”

  “Good news.”

  “That’s not the only news,” she said. “The throne changed hands.”`

  “Changed hands? That’s a strange way of putting it.” Either the King had died—if that was even possible—or he’d stepped down. I couldn’t imagine him doing either.

  “He was affected by the disease. He couldn’t rule anymore,” Simone said.

  “You got all that from the spider?”

  “The way we haven’t been able to reach the Court to speak with the King, the way we haven’t been able to find any place safe to make a home base—it’s not just because of the disease. It’s because something else had changed, too. The King abdicated his throne. The Queen went with him. There’s a new Queen now.”

  Better or worse than the old one? “Who?”

  “It’s Silver.”

  I stared at her.

  Simone and I had run into Silver when we first found a way into Faery—for the first few days, we hadn’t been able to find a way in. The gates were supposed to be open to us, but the gates, just like the population, were living, breathing beings with intelligence that’d been warped by the disease that’d devastated the realm. It was impossible to ride to the rescue when you couldn’t get close enough to matter.

  So we looked for chinks in the realm’s armor—its borders—and hid out, breathing the sulfur-stained air, avoiding the others who hid there, too. It’d taken two weeks to find the first crack in the border. And one week after that to slip through without getting dead. Silver was the first fae we met who didn’t try to kill us, and she looked more like a rebellious human than any creature born of Faery.

  She wore rings in her eyebrows and had short, silver, spiky hair. She dressed like a punk and had an attitude to match. The last thing people expected from the Queen’s daughter, the King’s stepdaughter.

  Like Simone and me, Silver had tried to heal the sickness infecting her world and her people. Silver’s solution to the problem involved the ultimate sacrifice. She’d taken all of it into herself.

  I’d never met anyone that brave. One thing to offer up your help, another to offer up your life. And not just for someone you loved, but for a whole world. Silver had done that. She’d done it willingly and without even thinking about the consequences to herself—if that was the only way she could help the people and the land she loved, it was a no-brainer, not worth a moment’s doubt.

  I didn’t know if I’d have the guts to do that. I suspected I didn’t, and it made me feel embarrassed. Humbled.

  Silver wasn’t just some girl who’d tried to keep her head down and have a normal life and then took the short straw, like had happened to me. She was a powerful, magical faery being. She was the only heir to the Kingdom. The Queen and King were sick and not capable of naming another heir in her stead. It took magic to do that—pure, untainted magic, which they no longer had. So when Silver died, Faery would fall into chaos.

  It would only be a matter of time before the realm itself went under from infighting. War would break out. The people would vie for power and whoever smashed the others would win. In trying to save her world, Silver had doomed it.

  The King exiled her because it was the only punishment that made any sense to him, sick and rule-bound douchebag that he was, and Silver needed help to try to fix what she’d screwed up. She asked us for help. We’d sent her to our Witch friend in the human world, and they’d gone to Malek, and somehow Silver had ended up not only still alive, but Queen of Faery?

  “How did that happen?” I asked.

  Simone shook her head. “No idea. But she’s a friend. An ally. We got lucky.”

  Maybe. It was tempting to think so. “Not counting my chickens.”

  “What?”

  “Before they hatch,” I said. “She’s the Queen, but that doesn’t mean she’s the Silver we remember.”

  Simone bit her lip. “Power changes people.”

  I nodded.

  “Not that much, Kev. They are who they are.”

  She wasn’t just talking about Silver. She was talking about herself.

  I’d never known her as one-hundred-percent-human, back when she’d had a regular life and hopes and dreams that didn’t involve mayhem and destruction. I couldn’t say what being turned fae had changed in her; only she could.

  “Okay,” I said. “But if Silver’s the Queen, why hasn’t she let us into the Court? It’s up to her, right? Even if she kept most of the realm out, she’d be letting some people in. We should be on that list.”

  “Point taken,” Simone said. “We can add that to our list of mysteries to solve.”

  At least the campsite turned out to be free from mystery. The backpacks and canteens we’d picked up in the In-Between, that space between the Human world and the Faery realm where people went to get lost, they were still there and untouched.

  “There’s a cave pretty close,” Simone said. “We could hole up there. One way in, one way out. A lot easier to defend.”

  “A lot easier to get caught in with no way out, and we don’t know how many accomplices that girl had. All we need is a horde of them to descend on us.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “You want to go to the In-Between because it’s safer than the cave. I hate the In-Between.”

  It stank of sulfur. Predators lurked in shadowed corners. I hated it, too. But I didn’t see another choice. Not if we wanted to live through the night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE ROAD INTO THE IN-BETWEEN burned with the heat of a thousand suns—something about the friction of worlds rubbing up against each other. I hated to travel there. I hated to breathe the air, which smelled as if someone had lit a billion matches all at once. I didn’t understand the place. It didn’t conform to any kind of logic.

  It was a patchwork of different moods and places and times.
A burnt-out store with everything a body needed in 1970-something, right down to the Fat Albert lunchboxes. A smoky pub with an 1800s European vibe, where the hearth fire built with peat bricks never went out and the sturdy shelves behind the bar held an endless supply of amber whiskey in dusty, corked bottles. I’d seen log cabins perched on tiny patches of wooded land, flickering gaslights shining halos on foggy cobbled streets, and impeccably engineered ruins of Mayan temples, all of them picked up from wherever they’d been before and deposited in the In-Between.

  People on the run from every realm hid there, and black market trade and scavenging followed. Also, predators. Who better to shake down than people who didn’t want to be found? People who’d chosen to disappear, with no one the wiser if they never showed again.

  Previously, Simone and I had found a place to hide out and figured out how to get what we needed. We’d traded for or stolen whatever we could get our hands on. Herbs and semi-precious stones, bits of chalk and bobs of thread, bandages and blades and stale, yellow corn chips and saltine crackers and jars of chunky peanut butter.

  Simone’s pack was stuffed to the gills with most of the food we’d foraged. Mine was held together with duct tape and a prayer, and filled with magical supplies and the other mundane, important stuff. Like matches and a first aid kit.

  I scooped them up and shouldered them on my good side. The weight felt good. Grounding.

  Simone closed her eyes, her lashes black as soot. Bruises started to show under her eyes and along her cheekbones. She curled her hands into fists at her sides.

  She whispered. “Open the way.”

  The air in front of her shimmered gold in the gathering dark. That was the door into the In-Between. It would stay open for less than a minute.

  I reached for Simone’s hand and twined my fingers with hers. My skin was warm; hers was warmer.

  “On three,” I said.

  We counted out loud together. I held my breath as we stepped into the shimmer. The assault came immediately: rolling flame overhead, underfoot, all around. The metal buttons on my jacket superheated, glowing red. The hairs on my arms curled up as if they’d been singed to the skin.