Simone and her father came with me across the room. She helped me to pull my T-shirt over my head. My skin should’ve looked like a sunrise, scratched and bruised. I couldn’t see a single flaw. Disconcerting, but in a good way.
I looked at Simone. She only smiled at me.
I positioned myself in front of the now-wingless mirror on the wall, turned around, and took a gander at my back. Where the skin had been a blank canvas before, one of Malek’s magical tattoos took up all the real estate. It was a big silver mirror, like something out of a fairy tale, and not just body art. It was an actual mirror. The real thing.
“Silver did this,” I said. “Why?”
Simone angled her head. “Why don’t you ask her?”
Ask her. Because her consciousness—her soul—lived inside of mine.
Silver had commissioned the mirror to make herself into a reflection of truth for her people. She knew who she was. The people would know who they were. All of them, on straight-up terms, equal footing. No games. No ends that justified the means.
It was a good way to begin. The best place to start.
“Did you know?” I asked Simone.
“About the ink?”
I shook my head. “About what Silver planned to do with me. I heard you two, back in the field where you pulled the knife out of her heart. You said you could only promise for yourself.”
“That I would see things through. That I would help her in whatever way I could,” Simone said. “Even if that meant that I died, or came away changed.”
“She didn’t tell you what she had in mind?”
“You know she didn’t.”
Because I had Silver’s memories. I could tap into her consciousness. Her love of her people and her realm, and her hollow grief over Max. Something else to get used to. I nodded. “I need to get through the day. I’m gonna need you by my side. Can you do that?”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” she said.
“Then I’m gonna take your father home. I have some stops to make there. People to see.”
She twined her fingers with mine and squeezed. “I’ll hold down the fort.”
She held my gaze and looked at me the same way she always had—not as a newly minted freak or as the most powerful being in Faery. “Come back to me, Kev.”
No matter how much I’d changed—and it would take me months to figure out how much—to Simone, I’d always be Kevin. She loved me for who I’d always been. I hoped she would love me for who I’d become. I trusted that. I trusted her. For now, we had each other.
The end of the world would come soon enough.
EPILOGUE
I sat in the grass at the edge of the bayou as the sun sank below the horizon of the Human world, turning the surface of the water to burnished gold and copper. The bayou ran high and the current moved crazy fast—a tropical storm had blown through town and dumped a foot of rain in thirty-six hours. Although I’d lived most of my life in Houston and understood the thrashing wind and crashing waves and rising floodwaters, I felt the aftermath now like never before. The world had been washed clean. Given a second chance. There was nothing gentle about it.
My pants were tight and bound in places that made me fidget, brown leather where I preferred denim. A white linen shirt with laces where I’d expect buttons had replaced my ruined T-shirt. I wore brown leather boots instead of sneakers. It felt like a costume. Either I’d get used to it or I’d have to raid the mall before I went back to Faery.
One thing I didn’t expect to ever get used to: the itch between my shoulder blades. The tips of white feathers had begun to poke through the skin there, just outside the edges of the mirror tattoo. I’d have wings sooner rather than later. Simone wouldn’t need to keep her feather souvenir from our Demon days, but I had a feeling she would anyway.
Memories were precious. I held onto mine as tightly as I could, especially since I understood so deeply now what Silver had given up when she’d sacrificed her memory to save her world.
I could feel Silver inside my head, her thoughts like ripples across still water—something else to understand and explore in the days to come. I’d need her wisdom and her strength. We all would if we hoped to survive.
Mosquitos hummed as they hovered at my ears, but they didn’t bite. My blood no longer satisfied them. A light breeze rimmed with brine kicked up from the southeast, rustling the leaves of the oaks. In the tall branches of the closest tree, a crow stood sentry, reporting on the goings-on in the park in a constant stream of thought-talk that played like a radio announcement in the back of my brain: cars and trucks and a river of cyclists on the parkway, joggers with dogs and a murder of humans riding Segways on the footpath that hugged the curves of the road. In the parking lot, a bunch of empty vehicles and one old, occupied Chevy Suburban.
My best friend in the whole world sat in the driver’s seat of that Chevy. Rude wore an orange Hawaiian shirt that matched the color of his buzz cut, along with a pair of khaki cargo shorts and scuffed sneakers without socks. He ran the air conditioning on high and the sound system on deafening. Metallica. With him, it always was and always would be.
I’d sent him a message through fae channels. He’d met me at the gate in the great oak outside of the pub in the Montrose. I’d stepped through into the human world as someone subject to his jurisdiction. He was a faery seer, magical law enforcement in the Human world.
The air had smelled of spent rain, spilled beer, crushed green, and car exhaust. He’d smelled of bubble gum and cigarette smoke and the heady spice of magic. He’d taken one look at me and said his favorite word: Dude. Then he’d wrapped me in the biggest bear hug I’d ever been suffocated in.
I used to think I saw him when I looked at him. His too-school-for-cool vibe, his extraordinary luck, how he tried to hide the way his parents ignored him. When I looked at him now, he glowed—his eyes, his breath and his hands and the tattoo of the city that spanned his entire back—those shone like the stars on a cloudless night, even through the kaleidoscope of his damned shirt.
If I wanted to, I could’ve told him his future, his fate, as it stood in the moment. I didn’t want to. I’d only wanted to hug him back and be happy about it. For his part, he held off asking me questions and drove me here to see Amy one last time.
I would’ve waited for hours for her if I needed to. I had a lot more patience than I’d ever had before. It didn’t take much imagination to figure the cause might be the fact that the fae lived forever. If you had forever, then time took on a different meaning.
A moment later, the moving surface of the water broke into a cascade of ripples as Amy’s head and shoulders emerged into the night air. She swam towards me. I expected her to stop at least an arm’s length away, but she kept coming, reaching out to grab hold of the bank. The moss that covered her skin looked like velvet in the gloaming.
“You didn’t die,” she said.
My lips curved. “Not the usual way.”
“No.” She studied me. “I don’t know whether it suits you, though. The change.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I didn’t have a choice.”
She shook her head. “Of course you did, Kevin.”
“You know what I mean.”
She inclined her head, giving me the point. I was who I was. I couldn’t have made a different choice and lived with myself.
“Why’d you come?” she asked.
I’d have thought that would be obvious. “To thank you.”
“You could’ve, I don’t know, sent a note.”
“No choice about that, either,” I said. “You saved my life.”
She sighed. “I meant it when I said I didn’t want you dead.”
“I know.” There was another reason I’d come beside gratitude. I needed to tell her something, and I didn’t know whether she’d hear it from me. I held out a hand and hoped she would take it.
She didn’t back away, but she didn’t accept the touch. “I’m not coming out, Kevin.”
&
nbsp; “I’m not asking you to. I’m not asking you to forgive me.”
“Good, because I’m not there yet.”
“I’m asking you to listen,” I said.
She narrowed her eyes. “You have no power over me.”
“Just listen,” I said again.
She considered for a moment, then nodded.
“I want you to think about why you’re in the water. What it means. What you want from your life. If you’re all right with spending however many years mermaids live in this bayou, I’m nobody to tell you different. But if you want something more, I think you should go after it.”
She glanced away, gaze pointed toward the setting sun. “You think you’re the first person who’s said that to me?”
“No,” I said. “Who else? The whole group?”
She laughed at that. It sounded sad. “No. A couple of them tried to pull me out of the water. It didn’t work out too well for them. Malek talked to me like you’re doing. He’s the only one.”
“I’m surprised,” I said.
“He set the spell that gave me the chance to become part of the water—because that was what I needed at the time. It was my choice to actually transform. To make myself into something different. Something no longer human. He’s an asshole and everything, but he’s not an asshole, if you know what I mean.”
I showed her a half-smile. “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. He told you what I’m telling you now?”
“In so many words.”
“You’re thinking about it?”
She hesitated, but only for a second. “Yes.”
“That’s all I wanted to know,” I said.
“That’s all?”
I nodded. “It’s gonna get hairy around here. I don’t know how soon, but it’s gonna get real. So I might not be around very much.”
She rolled her eyes. “Kevin, you don’t live in this world anymore.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t visit.”
“What’s your point?”
“If you need anything, just ask. Okay?”
She met my gaze and held it. “Deal.”
“And if you decide to come out of the water, the rest of us could use your help,” I said.
“With the hairiness.”
I nodded and stood, brushing the grass from the seat of my pants. “See you, Amy.”
“Bye, Kevin.” She pushed away from the bank, treading the surface for a breath, then sank under the surface.
I turned away from the water and walked back to the lot. The crow in the oak took wing and circled above me, following me all the way. I caught sight of Rude through his windshield. He saw me at the same time, leaning over to push open the passenger door, flooding the night with a solid wall of electric guitar solo.
I slid into the Suburban, closing the door after myself. Rude turned down the tunes so we could hear ourselves talk. Hearing ourselves think was something else. I couldn’t help cracking a full-on smile.
“It go okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. I have a couple of more stops to make tonight.”
“Figured,” he said. “Your dad?”
I nodded. “I have no idea what I’m gonna say to him that won’t freak him out.”
“Don’t even try, dude. On the other hand, he might be cool knowing that his kid is the new Faery King.”
“He hates the fae,” I said.
“Faery. King,” Rude said again. “He can quit worrying about the old King coming after him again and live his life.”
I brushed the hair from my eyes. “You say.”
“I do.” He lifted the cigarette pack off his dash and tapped out a fresh one. “Where else?”
“Snake Bite,” I said.
“Malek’s.” He flipped open his Zippo and lit the smoke. “Please tell me you’re not getting inked there.”
“I’ve already got new ink. Well, new to me anyway. It was Silver’s, and now it’s mine. I want to know the magic he put into it. Devil’s in the details.”
“You gonna tell me what happened to you?”
I laughed. “All about my summer vacation.”
“All the highlights.”
“Every single one. Even the ones you don’t want to know.”
“All ears, dude.”
“We have all night before I have to get back.” A whole night for me to be only human—or as close to it as I could get. I wanted to remember the feeling, savor it so that I would never forget.
My father would yell before he paced and pulled at his hair and enumerated every single thing that could possibly go wrong. Then he’d relent and pack me a PB&J and watch me walk out the door with eyes filled with worry.
Malek would…who the hell knew what Malek would do? He’d give me the lore on my ink and tell me everything he could think of about Famine to make sure that I knew what I needed to hold up my end of the anti-apocalyptic brigade. He’d want to know what I thought about being half-human and half-fae. Or maybe I wasn’t the first person that’d happened to, and he had lore to share about it that would make my life easier, or at least easier to negotiate.
There was one other important thing to negotiate: Malek and Beth had a bandage with my blood on it. I wanted it back.
I’d thought Malek was the Devil, once upon a time. I’d thought the same thing about the previous Faery King.
“You know, the Devil’s not really in the details,” Rude said, taking another drag of his smoke. “He’s in the wind. We’re gonna have to work together on this. Be ready when the apocalypse hits the fan.”
We’d saved the world, and I knew what for. We’d saved it for all the worlds. For the humans and fae and demons and angels who lived. We’d saved it to turn around and save it again. To keep saving it as long as we had breath in our lungs and strength in our hearts and hands.
One whole night to be human. Then down to business.
“Count on it,” I said.
Turn the page to read Chapter One
of the first book in a new urban fantasy series
set in the same universe as The Faery Chronicles,
NIGHT AWAKENS.
CHAPTER 1
PORTLAND, OREGON, stretched and yawned, awakening around me in the hour before dawn. I shivered as the November chill bit through the black fleece of my hoodie, and a wicked wind gusted from the west, spiraling the fine drops of mist in the air. The traffic light at the corner flipped from red to green, the hum of engines and the slick of tires on wet concrete a comfort to my wired nerves.
I stood beneath the dripping overhang in front of Justice Gym, go-cup of black coffee in hand. I listened and scanned the neighborhood for anything out of the ordinary. My life depended on it.
Twenty yards to the right, around the corner at the neighborhood stop-n-shop on Burnside, a car door slammed. Sleepy voices wafted my way. People stopping for smokes or snacks. Harmless.
To my left, the street curved and forked, parallel-parked cars huddled inches apart for warmth at the curbs. Out of the dark, the Orange Warrior materialized in his neon-orange rain suit, bike tires splashing through the puddled light of the street lamps. He caught sight of me and flashed the peace sign and called out, “Hey! Morning!”
I gave him a thumbs-up. Then he whizzed past on his way to work, the headlamp on the front of his helmet beaming like a search light, the red light on the back of his bike blinking fast enough to give somebody a seizure.
The golden halo around his body—the manifestation of the life force that moved through him—lit him up like a firework to my magical sight.
Across the street, the Stump Town Diner spoke the language of my belly, the rich aromas of dark-roasted coffee, salty, crisp bacon, and fresh-baked bread streaming from inside each time the door opened. Blond Bagel Girl, wrapped in her hooded purple raincoat, slipped inside for her usual breakfast to go. She shone with the same gold as the cyclist, though more muted, melancholy.
It was beautiful. Normal.
Normals in my neighborhood, going ab
out their normal lives like clockwork. I’d never be one of them. I’d look over my shoulder until the day I died.
I turned the key in the lock of the gym door, same as every other day for the last three months since I’d moved to town. That my boss, Red Jennings, trusted a woman so secretive and new to the city with his life’s work said a lot about him. A woman without much money and a teenage kid in tow, no less. Most people would call him a fool, but I chose to believe he was an uncommonly good judge of character. One who backed up his judgment with thorough background checks.
He hadn’t batted an eye when I’d asked to be paid in cash, though; my existence kept off his books. When he asked the occasional personal question, I talked around it rather than answering directly, and he didn’t give me any crap about it. He’d run a check on me and found it unremarkable. Of course, it was an unremarkable lie that I’d built through illegal channels and paid for with blood money, but all Red knew was that I wasn’t a criminal, that he and I shared a hometown in Houston, Texas, and we shared a soft spot for troubled kids.
I pushed my way into the narrow front room of the gym, the electronic bell above the door chiming. I flipped the light switches with the flat of one hand and inhaled the perfume of rubber, bleach wipes, and sweat as the overhead fluorescents buzzed to life. The lights threw the entry into sharp relief: the interlocked, black rubber mats that covered the concrete floor, the triple-stacked row of black plastic cubbies and lockers that covered the long wall in front of me, and the donated, brown suede sofa on the right, its seats so deep I sometimes wondered whether it ate people as well as car keys and loose change. I keyed the code into the alarm, hung a right and then a left, bouncing down the short staircase onto the gym floor.
It shared the dimension of a good-sized basketball court. The walls had been painted white once upon a time, but had been scuffed and scratched to head-height. All the essential equipment hugged the walls: long barbells pegged into metal stands, kettlebells, weight racks, and benches for presses. Pull-up bars, medicine balls, wooden boxes for jumping. The back wall of the gym consisted of garage doors that could be opened in the summer for air flow. Two climbing ropes hung suspended from the ceiling. Also in back, a dozen rowing machines stood on end beside the water fountain, bathrooms, and small table that held the sound system.
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