Immediately, the map zoomed out so that I saw all of Ashia Hollow, including what was once part of mainland Italy. Enclosed within the barrier, the river Brenta formed the western border and the river Piave the eastern border. To the south, the hollow included all the barrier islands along the Adriatic Sea, plus a few miles of open water, while to the north, the barrier fell short of another old province that had once been called Treviso. Our entire realm covered seventy-five by forty-five kilometers. This included hundreds of islands and a coastline to the northeast inhabited by fae only. I couldn’t see hiding out with them, plus the trouble with islands and small towns was that everyone knew everyone who lived there. A thirty-meter calamari beaching on their shore would be less remarkable than a stranger showing up and wanting to stay.
I could stay on the Island of Healed Sorrows since it was under fae control, but for my whole life? Eating fruit and nuts and getting wasted on grapes? Hardly the future I’d seen for myself. Yet what future had I envisioned? Had I ever stopped to think about what I would do with my life?
I hadn’t. I hadn’t given those unplanned years a single thought. For me, the future had seemed endless. Death was something that didn’t apply. It had always been too far off to consider.
What about the barrier? Was that a possibility? I searched but couldn’t find a single town on the map within five kilometers of it. What was out there? Could I survive in that no-man’s land? Maybe find a way through it and escape Ashia Hollow all together? No one knew what was on the other side—the rumors were horrific—but try as hard as I could, I couldn’t see myself living for long in the hollow. Sooner or later, someone would identify me, and they’d come for me.
Face it.
My future was no longer measured in years. It might be months or weeks, but days were more likely.
You have nowhere to go. There is nowhere.
It was senseless to run. Stupid to hide.
I was tired. Just so fucking tired of it all. I wanted to turn off the world and walk away from it and go someplace where I wasn’t on the run from execution or evading gangs or fighting back loneliness or in danger of starving once I’d picked the ruins clean of artifacts to sell.
I wanted five whole minutes with my head freed of dread and fear.
Again, I stared into the pool. A silver fish with ruby red scales lining its fins nibbled at a submerged blade of grass.
Pool of Peace.
I crawled toward the primitive stairway leading down into the water and flopped on my stomach nearby. Stretching out an arm, I scooped up a handful of water, letting it trickle through my fingers. Not so cold now that the June night inside the garden had warmed me up again. Weirdly, the water didn’t feel like water exactly. Why hadn’t I noticed earlier? It felt like liquid comfort and not the alcoholic variety. It was softer than water. It soothed not just my skin, but eased my muscles. Before this moment, I hadn’t realized how tense my fingers were, how tight my wrist, how frayed the tendons in my forearm.
This truly was a pool of peace and its mystical waters sent their enchantments up my arm toward my shoulder, which they eased, into my throat which it relaxed, around and up the back of my neck and then gently penetrated my spinal column and finally…
I got up. Climbed onto a large slab of rock jutting up from the water to the left of the stairs.
Pool of Peace. Pool of Peace.
The name of this place infiltrated my distress, chanting it away.
“How wonderful!” I breathed. “Oh, I want this.”
I needed it.
Without removing my clothing or so much as a boot, I dove into the pool.
In the last microsecond before my head hit the water, I heard his voice, the fae hunter, calling out a warning, too late.
“Lunari! No!”
12
Peace isn’t what you think it is.
Or else, it wasn’t what this pool thought it should be.
For the first few moments, I experienced the same feelings as when I’d dipped my hand in the water. A voice in my head urged me to relax, let go, release the tension in my body and soul.
Forget. Forget. You are free to forget.
I’d dived into water with my eyes closed and opened them now.
Confusingly, the bottom was a lot farther off than it had seemed back on land. Standing at the edge, it had appeared two meters deep at the most, shallow enough for me to touch with my toes and kick myself to the surface again. Now, I couldn’t see the bottom, not clearly. It radiated the same reassuring glow from its sands below, but the pool wasn’t so crystalline and clear. It was glaringly white, light bleeding into and refracting off every molecule of liquid so that the bottom and sides of the pool disappeared in searing brilliance. Fish blurred into streaks of color moving too fast for my eyes to follow. Grass stroked my face like the loving fingers of the mother I’d never had and wrapped around my wrists encouraging me to swim down, swim down. The farther down I went, the happier I would be.
An instant later, the water took over my body, inducing me to open my mouth and breathe in. I dissolved into hysteria. The pool wanted me to drown myself. I clamped my teeth and lips as tightly as I could and turned over, away from the bottom. My hands clawed at the water, reaching for the surface but unable to find it in all that white.
Soon, the desire to open my mouth and suck in water was too great. I stopped trying to find my way to the surface and fought only to keep my mouth closed, my nose from inhaling. My fingers pinched my nostrils closed while I pressed my other hand over my mouth as hard as I could to prevent the flood of water that wanted to course down my throat. It was futile. I wasn’t strong enough. The water won. My fingers let go. My hand slipped away.
Drowning was next.
A shadow flew over me. I heard something splash into the pool as I took the first deep breath of water into my lungs.
Anyone who claims drowning is a painless way to go is wrong. My body seized in agony at the influx of water rushing in where it didn’t belong. Survival instincts kicked in, but only after I was out of time. My arms flailed, my legs kicked weakly. My vision grayed at the edges, nothingness swallowing me on all sides.
And then he was there. Powerful arms stroked down through the water toward me and the hunter’s face materialized in front of me, blotting out the deadly light with something real and tangible. His fierceness echoed the hippocampi’s. His black hair streamed out from his face in waves and temper drew together his brows. Something surprising animated his normally unreadable eyes.
Fear.
He wrapped his arms around me. I sensed his immense strength at the first touch. Energy poured into me at every point of skin to skin contact, the muscled chest, the tense grip in his hands, the hard line of his jaw.
Another voice drowned out the siren song from the water.
“Come on, live!” I heard him demand. “Live!”
I didn’t know if he meant me to hear, or if his repeated cries were said only to himself in desperation, but the command in them woke me from the pool’s hypnotic embrace. With a powerful scissor kick, he launched us upward. I, half-drowned, was unable to help us fight toward the surface.
What seemed like moments later but could have been hours or days, my body breached and landed awkwardly, half-in, half-out of the water in hot mid-day sun. I dragged myself onto the mossy shore. My stomach and lungs convulsed, hacking up great splashes and sprays of water. More pain, if possible, went into ridding my body of it than I’d felt when sucking it in.
When at last my stomach muscles gave out from exhaustion, and my gag reflex died in my throat, I sagged face down on the ground, able only to mutter a simple, “Thank you.”
My gratitude was met with silence.
It took serious willpower, but I rolled over on my back and lifted my head, looking for my rescuer.
I’d expected to find him standing over me looking down, but he wasn’t there. Not anywhere in sight.
Something warm touched my ankle, however, an
d I leveraged myself up on my elbows to see what it was. A beautiful male hand brushed my skin, rising and falling on the backwash in the pool created by my exit.
No.
He was in still in the water. Face down and motionless. Only a belt loop from his jeans, snagged an irregularity in a block of stone, kept him from sinking to the bottom. The fae hunter was either already dead or on his way there.
“Shit.”
He was dark fae. Why had he risked his life to save mine?
I scrambled to my feet and splashed down into the water next to him. Instantly, the pool resumed its narcotic pull, whispering in my mind that oblivion was what I wanted and needed. Fighting back against that lure, I hooked my hands under his arm pits and tried lifting him. His body’s musculature was too developed and heavy for me. Leaping out again, I faced him and grabbed him by the wrists. I braced my sopping wet boots against the rear edge of the massive stone forming the first step down and put all my weight into dragging him up out of the water.
My efforts were clumsy. His chin hit one step’s edge, and then another, cheek scraping against rock, but I got his upper body out of the water. He was still face down, but his face was no longer submerged.
Nothing happened. He didn’t regurgitate water like I had. Maybe he needed to be completely free of the pool’s influence. I grabbed him by the jeans waist band and belt and tugged. He weighed a freaking ton. Centimeter by centimeter, however, I freed him from the pool until with a final, brutal grunt, I slid him fully onto land.
He remained still.
“Shit, shit, shit.”
I’d killed a fae. Maybe not on purpose, but his jumping in to save me was my fault. I’d heard of something called CPR used to resuscitate drowning victims, but I’d never seen anyone do it, didn’t know if it really worked, or more importantly, if it would work on someone who wasn’t human.
“Please. Breathe.”
I shoved as hard as I could, rolling him up onto his side, facing me. He was beautiful even now, every bone in his face rugged yet following curves and lines no human could draw with greater expression. From his defiantly arrogant brow to lips harboring savagery he’d be all too willing to dispense, I could study him for a hundred years and still not get enough. Runnels of water dripped from his hair, which meandered across his face and throat like gnebi, the winding canals through the barene. I reached out and combed my fingers through the wet locks, curious what they felt like. Like human hair, it turned out.
He was naked except for the jeans. I glanced down at his chest and found his first, and probably only true physical defect. I couldn’t tell precisely what it had been, perhaps a birthmark or tattoo in the shape of an ornate crown, but someone or something had deliberately burned it away. Left behind was scaring that puckered at the edges with deep gouges scratched back and forth over the area. Though it didn’t bleed, the skin was charred black, not pink or raw red. Though not particularly hairy, clumps of chest hair were missing near the scar and the skin was raised and bubbly there.
I didn’t know what to do with a deceased fae and kept hoping for a miracle.
“Hello?” I said and leaned closer in case I could detect him breathing. “Are you there?”
Are you there? Could you say anything more inane?
“Can you hear me—”
His body convulsed, and water splashed my face. I jumped back to watch him go through the same unflattering spasms, the coughing up of water and gross dry heaves I’d endured minutes earlier.
Finally, no more water spit or burbled from his lips. He groaned, flopped back over on his stomach, and then, with his face turned in my direction, opened his eyes.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello.”
He pushed himself up to his knees and sat back on his heels. I did the same, putting more space between us.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
Why did you save me?
He pretended he hadn’t heard my question.
I tried another. “What’s your name?”
He hesitated. I didn’t know what he’d originally intended to say, but it wasn’t what he finally said.
“Aril.”
“Aril,” I repeated. A dry, non-musical name, so unlike the fae.
“It’s English,” he said.
That was when I remembered where I’d heard someone with an accent like his before, watching a glitchy pre-merge video. I’d once found a huge stash of “films” on shiny discs each the diameter of my splayed hand. The characters spoke English, with the Italian translation popping up at the bottom of the screen.
I now had a clue to his age. He was around two hundred, minimum. He had to have been born before the merge, back when there had been an England.
“What’s it mean?” I asked.
“Mean?”
“Your name? It has a meaning in Italian, no?”
He shrugged.
We sat for almost a minute without speaking. Since he wouldn’t tell me why he’d saved me, I had nothing more to say. No, that was a lie. I had questions. I always had questions about things, but I usually preferred to find the answers without asking. Asking for anything, even information, felt like asking a favor of someone, and I didn’t incur favors if I could help it.
He took a long breath, his first deep, clear breath since reviving.
“You shouldn’t have gone in there,” he said of the pool. “It’s not for you.”
“Oh.”
I looked down at the moss in front of my knees. Growing up in Venice, I was used to discrimination. For human Venetians, privilege was always about family. Your place, your status, your ability to find work, your life’s destiny, all were determined by the people you could call family. Having no family meant you were an outcast. It didn’t matter that I’d found an apartment for myself or that I earned my own money. As far as familied Venetians were concerned, I was the equivalent of a homeless beggar on the street, not worth bothering with.
“It’s not for either of us,” Aril said. “Unless you’re intent on committing suicide…you weren’t interested in that, were you?”
I shook my head.
“I didn’t think so. The Pool of Peace is brights only.”
“Oh. I see.”
“Do you?” He frowned at me.
“Yes. We’re not good enough to swim or bathe in a brights-only pool.”
“No. Apparently you don’t understand.”
I looked at him, waiting for explanation.
“It’s the Pool of Peace. It operates on the spelled concept that anyone who dives in has come here in search of that,” Aril said. “Brights are healed by the waters. They create heaven on Earth every day. People like us? We can’t even experience it. We don’t have the capacity.” He paused and then added. “Anymore. Unfortunately, the only peace either of us will ever know is in death.”
“You were a bright once,” I said. I recalled my jeweled fae history book had mentioned something about how bright fae became dark once they’d killed. I’d always thought they’d been born dark. Despite what the book said, I’d not known for sure.
“We all start off as brights,” he said.
“I’m not part of your we.”
A smile touched the corner of his mouth.
“Really? You deny you’re dark? Tried looking in a mirror lately?”
I scowled at him. He was ready to make fun of me.
“I’m human. As if you didn’t know.”
To prove him wrong, I got to my feet and walked over to where my jacket lay dumped on top of my pack. Sliding my flick blade out of its hiding place in my left sleeve, I walked back to him and sprung it open as I approached.
Aril crossed his arms over his chest with haughty, try it, little girl defiance. I didn’t know what he was expecting me to do with the blade. Stick him? His stance told me he wasn’t impressed.
I turned over my right hand and held it in front of him and curled all but my index finger toward my palm. Using a quick, shallo
w slash, I cut open the tip of my finger.
This did surprise him. He uncrossed his arms, got up and backed away from me.
“What do you smell?” I said.
He stared at the blood pearling up in the cut.
“Do you smell sandalwood or cedar or clove?” I said. “What about cypress or myrrh?”
He looked me straight in the eye. I knew what he saw. Indigo irises. But blood didn’t lie.
“Do you need me to hold it closer?”
He held up a hand, palm out. “No. I’m good.”
“That’s right. You’re smelling iron. Metal. No fae blood perfume.”
He scowled.
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “I smell magic on you.”
“Just not in my blood.”
He focused intently on the cut to my finger. At last, he shook his head.
“No. Your blood is human.”
I returned to my pile of things and folded cross-legged to the ground again, my back to Aril. My near-death experience in the pool and the fight to save the hunter afterward had used up my last bit of endurance. I was human. I wasn’t fae. I didn’t have the magical ability to pull energy from the sky or the ground or other humans or wherever it was they got it.
“I just noticed it’s daytime,” I said. “I dove in when it was night. How long were we in there?”
“Difficult to say, really,” Aril said. “It’s a magic pool, subject to its own rules. It could have been a few hours. Could have been days. Weeks even.”
I snorted, skeptical. “Weeks without breathing air.”
“Minutes or weeks, does it matter?”
What he suggested was incredible. By human standards, insane.
“I suppose not.”
Abruptly, without a word of farewell, he walked passed me, toward the trees.
“Aril,” I called after him.
He paused but didn’t look back.
“I don’t know why you did it, but thank you.”
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 10