“Almost is nothing,” I said. “Almost is no fire. Almost is only smoke.”
I seemed to grow taller, the boundaries of my body stretching until my feet touched flat on the ground, solid and unwavering. My neck grew larger—wider, more muscular—and Famine’s grasp faltered. I pushed her away—the heel of my hand struck the giant girl’s solar plexus. She grunted and staggered back.
I glanced down. My feet in their sneakers no longer looked like feet—they’d grown roots that burrowed into the floor, punching their way through the floor and whatever foundation anchored the building, into the land itself.
I more than saw it. I felt it. Tendrils burrowed through the soles of my shoes into the stone, obliterating everything in their track through the foundation of the Court, into the rich, dark soil underneath. The roots kept going, soaking up moisture and nutrients—the blood of the land—digging down past the water table and long-buried stones and bones, deeper into layers of earth that had never seen the surface, spiraling down into pulsing, spinning, molten iron. The core of Faery. The core of the Earth.
The heart of Faery was also the heart of all the worlds.
I touched it. More, I could tap into it.
Any step I might take, the whole realm would take with me. When I moved, all of Faery would move in my orbit. I was power and strength. Famine might as well have been an ant. An insignificant ant under the spotlight of a magnifying glass in the sun.
Holy ever-loving Jesus H. Christ in a sidecar. What the fuck was going on?
Silver’s voice rang inside me. “Kevin, listen to me. I don’t have long. There are things you need to know.”
I asked the question in my mind, where Silver seemed to be. What things?
“You asked if I could take Famine on my own. The answer’s no, Kevin. I didn’t have enough power in me. Even if I’d not been mortally wounded, it wouldn’t have mattered. I am only fae, even if I am the Queen. No Fae being could keep a creature like Famine out of the realm. Not alone.”
That scared the hell out of me. I hadn’t thought my heart could race any faster, but I’d been wrong.
“You think you’re nobody,” Silver said. “You have no idea how wrong you are. Do you know how rare it is to be an ambassador between species? Between human and fae? It’s not just a title. You weren’t just appointed because you happened to be in the right—or wrong—place at the right time. You have something inside of you that marks you as kin to us. Your magic.”
Hearing other people’s thoughts when danger threatened. That makes me a freak. It makes me wrong.
But it also helped people, saved lives.
“It makes you strong, Kevin,” Silver said. “It’s about connection. You have a connection to all other humans when they’re at their most vulnerable. That makes you powerful. You’ve never chosen to use that power to hurt others. You’ve put life and your heart and your soul on the line for the ones you love. That makes you a good man. A good human. You’re the only one here who has half a chance to take the choice I’m about to offer and make something good come from it.”
What choice? I asked.
But I already knew. If Silver was dying—and she was—there was no one designated as her heir. No one to take over the throne, to keep Faery alive. No one.
I couldn’t see her at all. I could hear the bittersweetness in her voice. The hope and the sadness in it. “Like I said, Kevin, no pure fae can keep Famine out of the realm.”
And no human could do it either.
“A human-fae hybrid could,” she said.
How could she possibly know that?
“There are legends, Kevin. They say so.”
So now we came to it. You’re asking me to give up my humanity.
“I’m asking you to become something else. Something new—or something very old, something not seen in any world for millennia.”
If I say no?
“Then Faery will become something else,” she said.
You mean it will die.
“Maybe. It will surely no longer be what it is and has always been.”
I had every reason to say no. I’d never be the same. I’d never have the life I’d wanted. That life would die. I’d be chained to Faery for as long as I lived—which, given what I understood about the fae, would be for centuries, if not forever.
Unless I laid it all on the line on the side of life in the coming apocalypse and lost.
That was a fight worth making. Saving the worlds was worth dying for. Saving the heart of all the worlds. Guarding that treasure. Using it on the side of right.
I couldn’t say no. Not even if it meant all the hard choices and responsibilities that Silver had, the ones I didn’t want. I wouldn’t say no.
What will happen to me? I asked.
“You’ll have my knowledge, my power. You’ll have human knowledge and power, too. You’ll know what to do.”
Will you be in my mind like you are now?
“Yes,” she said.
I drew a deep breath through my aching throat.
“It’ll be a hard road, Kevin.”
I accepted that. I accepted all of it. I was who I was, no matter the power that would flow through me. Simone had said as much. I believed in her. I trusted her. I trusted this.
Whatever you need to do, Silver, do it.
The shining that enveloped me grew brighter—so bright I had to close my eyes. It didn’t help. The shining filled me up inside, too.
My senses sharpened to a razor edge. I tasted blood and poison and bile. Smelled the dry scales of a serpent’s skin, the tannins in the oak beams, the rime of water and decay in the stone. I felt the urgent rage and sucking emptiness inside Famine and the endless depths of sorrow in my own heart, the trickle of sweat running down the back of my neck, funneling between my shoulder blades.
As if gazing into a mirror, I saw myself as I’d always been. Just Kevin. The rush of my own blood filled my ears. The sound of my heartbeat.
Time slowed to a crawl. In a flash, it stopped.
My human senses shattered like glass, shards exploding out like a thousand mirrored blades. The pieces of the shattered mirror traveled in an instant to the far reaches of Faery—the Forest of Dreams, the Door of Death, the Faery Roads—all the places I’d not yet seen but that now belonged to me. Were now parts of me.
In an instant, the shards and the reflections in their mirrored shine rushed back into me. They sliced me open, embedding themselves in my bones. In my heart. In my blood. In every cell, and in every memory within those cells. My body gathered them in, absorbed them—healed around them—and the broken bone in my arm mended itself in a flash of heat.
I fell to my knees, the shock of striking the stone floor shuddering through me. I registered the pain, but I didn’t feel it. My Kevin-self, my Kevin-ness, embraced a companion. Silver’s memories, her consciousness, her essential self, wove into mine. For a moment, I could see the seams in the weaving, the borders and boundaries of who was who, and which was which. And then the boundaries, the borders, melted into each other, and there were no seams at all. No separation.
One whole being. One brand new being.
I blinked in slow motion, closing my eyes on everything I’d known. I was no longer just Kevin. Silver was no longer just Silver. There was no longer a distinct sense of I, only we.
My senses merged with Silver’s. I heard all of the things I would normally hear. And: I heard the brush of Famine’s dress against her legs and the small pops in the joint of her elbow as she pushed herself off the floor. I heard, too, the swing of her pigtails as they disrupted the air and the folding of her fingers to make the fist she intended to punch me with.
I opened my eyes. I saw the punch rush toward my nose. I leaned left, out of the way. Her fist raced past my face, all the force in her body contained in the momentum of her arm. She was off balance. I pushed her, like I’d done a minute ago—this time in the direction of her punch. She went down like a bundle of sticks, limbs tumblin
g over each other.
I didn’t hold with the possibility that I’d become some kind of badass fighter all of the sudden—more likely, I was just faster. I noticed more. It gave me a better shot in a fight than I’d ever had.
As much as I wanted to pummel Famine, to beat her down until there was nothing except that gaping black hole left of her, all that would get me was my ass handed to me. It’d be a waste of what Silver had given me. I had one thing to do and one thing only. I stood and turned to face Famine.
She scrambled to her feet. Before she could lay a finger on me, I wrapped mine around her neck and held on while she struggled. She flailed her arms. Tried to kick me—and connected hard. I’d be lucky if the bruises didn’t go bone-deep. But I didn’t let go.
Her skin felt sticky and hollow. Because, unlike me, she didn’t need a fully functioning throat made of delicate parts and plenty of breath to speak, she had no trouble getting words out. “I don’t know what the Queen told you, but you can’t do anything to me. I’m beyond you, Kevin.”
“We can clearly see under the circumstances that you’re not,” I said.
“We?” Famine asked.
I cocked my head in Malek’s direction as he made his way toward us. “We.”
Famine narrowed her eyes. “But Silver—”
“When you said I was marked for the sacrifice and didn’t even realize it, I thought you meant I was the sacrifice,” I said.
“Silver gave up her life,” Famine said. “But so have you.”
Famine wasn’t wrong. I’d lay bets she didn’t know how right she was. “We’ll see how it goes from here. Or I will, but you won’t.”
“You can’t kill me,” she said.
“Not yet. But I can send you away.”
And I could do one other thing. I slid a fingernail across the thin skin of her throat. Blood welled into the curve of my nail—at least it looked like blood. I considered it, and I considered how to throw her out of Faery for good.
I didn’t need to march her to the edge of the realm and open a gate to make it happen. I was the whole of the realm, the center and the edge. I tightened my grip around her throat. I opened my mouth and spoke words from Silver’s memory in a language not my own. I heard them in that tongue, dripping with the raw power of fae and human magic, echoing against the wood and stone. I understood them in my own language.
You are banished. You are forbidden from entry into this realm forever on pain of death.
Although I didn’t have the power to kill her myself, those words did, should she trespass in Faery ever again. They bound her in ways that went beyond the physical. If Famine had a soul—if a being like her could have a soul—the binding went as deep as that.
As the echo of the last words faded, so did Famine. She vanished in a flash of light. She would not return.
I started to shake and couldn’t stop.
Malek laid a hand between my shoulder blades. It felt cool, solid. I looked at him.
I glanced over my shoulder. For someone who’d been trapped in a nightmare and thrown across the room, he didn’t look even a little worse for wear. “I’m here,” I said. “You okay?”
Sit down.
I needed to, yeah, but not here. On the throne. That was where I belonged, where I could gather the strength and power from the heart of the worlds and figure out what had happened to me and what it meant. Where to go from here.
There was something else that needed doing first. Something I demanded. I was the King of Faery. I was the land and its people. I could harm. And I could heal.
I looked at Simone. I hadn’t been able to do that much since she fell, screaming. I thought she’d died alone, but she hadn’t. Mr. Nance held her to his chest as if she were a sleeping child. Maybe to him, she was. He’d lost his suit jacket and his tie. His hair stuck out in every direction. Blood smeared his wrinkled shirt and pants. Tears ran in fat drops down his cheeks.
The blood had come from Simone. It’d streamed from her nose and her mouth. And, God, her eyes. Her purple and black mane of hair was soaked with it. Her wings, crumpled. Her fingertips, raw—she’d clawed at the stone.
I hunkered down beside her father and held out my arms. “Give her to me.”
He shook his head. “No.”
Malek loomed over Mr. Nance, signing quickly. Would you really rather have her dead than alive and out of your reach?
“What did he say?” Mr. Nance asked.
I translated.
Nance gazed up at Malek. “How can you say that?”
Malek stared at him.
Nance looked at me. “Is it possible to make her live?”
I nodded.
Nance transferred her into my arms. She felt light. Flesh and blood remained, but her soul had flown. Her soul, which was part of this place. Part of the land. Part of me.
I brushed the damp hair from her forehead and laid my brow against hers, whispering words in the language I didn’t quite know. I heard the rustle of tiny wings, the first beat of Simone’s heart. I pressed my lips to hers, tasting coppery blood and patchouli and her first indrawn breath.
“Open your eyes,” I said.
I felt the flutter of her lashes on my skin as she did.
I met her gaze. “You’re home,” I said.
She searched my eyes. “You, too.”
I nodded. In a place that had never been mine, I was home.
“I love you, Kevin.”
I’d needed to hear her say those words. She’d held them in for far too long, just like I had. I pulled her tight against me. We had a lot to sort out, and we would do it together. For now, there was unfinished business.
Malek tore open the door behind us on his way to Beth. I tried not to eavesdrop on what he did for her, but it was hard to ignore. He fed her his blood. The same blood that had killed Simone saved Beth’s life. I heard her murmur her thanks to him before I refocused on what lay in front of us.
Parts of the realm would be in chaos. There was no telling how much damage Famine had done, and no way to find out except to check everything and everyone with a freakin’ magical microscope. The people here might not be too keen on having a partially human King, either. It wasn’t like Silver had time to send a message to all of her subjects letting them know why she’d done what she had and what they could expect. People would deal, best case scenario. Worst case, I’d have insurrections and rebellions to put down.
On top of whatever I faced, there would be more fae whom Famine had spelled to come after me. They’d have to be hunted down. I’d do everything in my power to heal them. Failing that, they’d have to be killed. If it came to that, I’d be the one to do the killing, with my own hands and my own magic. They were my responsibility now.
I hated that thought. I hated that it came as naturally as breathing. That was what it meant to be King.
Silver had at least been raised to understand royalty. To become royalty. I’d been raised to keep my nose clean and study hard. I had a lot to learn.
Some things I knew, though. I glanced at the mirror on the wall, the one that had been framed with Max’s wings. The wings were gone. Silver had taken them into herself as she’d passed into me. One last, loving act of defiance against the end that Famine represented. One last gift Silver could give to her beloved.
She’d treasured hers. I would treasure mine. Anything could happen. The past months had proved that in spades.
I held Simone’s gaze. “How long do you figure we’ve got until the hordes descend?”
“Until morning,” she said.
Tomorrow. What day was it? What time? I freaked out for half a minute before I realized that I knew those things now like I knew my own name. Outside, the full moon had risen, shining its pale light on the land. It was midnight. Time held its breath for a heartbeat, then moved forward into the new day.
Malek walked in, carrying Beth in his arms. From the scowl on her face, she didn’t like it one bit, but she wasn’t going to fight him on it. Her r
elief was palpable when Malek finally put her down.
You have a lot to do, Malek said. I’d offer to stay, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. The fae don’t like me.
He was right about that. “Thanks for the thought.”
Mr. Nance cleared his throat. “I’ll stay. For a while, at least, if you’ll have me.”
Simone pulled away from me to study him. “For a while,” she said.
I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.
The fae brass, Malek said. The big shots. I can give you a handle on them.
“With what? A tattoo?” I had a small token of Malek’s magic on my body already, and I had no intention of ever having more if I could help it. The price of that kind of magic was so high. “Not to seem ungrateful, but I’ve already had way more than my share of magical transformation.”
Malek raised a brow. I was going to give you a piece of advice.
I waited.
Tell them the truth. All of it. Hell, call a meeting. All the Faery brass. Tell them what Silver did, and show them what she left you. They’ll believe you. You need them on your side.
“What she left me isn’t exactly visible,” I said.
He laughed. That’s what you think. Why don’t you see for yourself?
“On your back,” Beth said.
“Why don’t I think I’m gonna want to do that?” I asked.
“You’ll love it,” Beth said.
“I doubt that, sincerely.” I looked at Malek. “I have something for you before you take off.”
The blood, he asked. I saw you do that. I wondered why.
I nodded.
He pulled a handkerchief from the back pocket of his pants.
I used it to mop the congealed red from under my nail and gave it back to him. “Think you could do something with that? I don’t know—some kind of magic that will keep you two safe from her?”
Malek grinned. If he weren’t my friend, the sight of that smile would’ve chilled me to the core. Because he was my friend, it made me feel marginally better about our chances.
He walked out with Beth. If I wanted to, I could sense their exit from the Court, into the woods and out of Faery. But I needed to look in the mirror.
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