“She was the queen of everything. In the fae world, of course,” he said. “Humans had their own tedious kings and queens. Rasha’s high court was held in the fae counterpart to England. A place called Avalon.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Most people in Ashia Hollow haven’t. It may not exist anymore,” Titus said. “You should ask Aril how he got that wound on his chest. If you’re brave enough, that is.”
“Already have.”
“And?”
“Nothing.”
One gray brow rose above the top rim of his glasses. “You’re lucky he didn’t kill you for asking.”
I went to the door, opened it a crack and snuck a look at the street. Rain. No people. Nothing to set off my instincts as they had when I’d sensed the hunter following me through the storm drains and tunnels underground. Aril could have been successful in diverting the guards elsewhere. They might be blocks away or perhaps not there in the first place. I couldn’t say. My senses felt dulled by the stuff in Titus’s mysterious flacon.
“It’s a good thing he’s been with you since the beginning of this,” Titus said.
I froze, my hand on the knob, door still ajar.
“What did you say?”
“You didn’t know?”
“I knew I had a hunter following me through the tunnels before I got out of Venice, but I thought—”
“Aril, of course.”
“You’re wrong. We didn’t meet until the next day on Isola di Guariti Dolori.”
“That might be where you first saw him. I assure you, he was already tracking you. For years, if I’m right.”
I shook my head. “No. I mean, at first I thought he was the hunter stalking me, but when he didn’t kill me, I figured I was wrong. It had to be a different dark fae hunting me for my life force.”
“I don’t know who put him onto you and how it ties into the reason you were born the way you were. It’s someone high up in that neon rat’s nest over there, though.” Titus hitched a shoulder in the vague direction of Luminosa. “They run him like a komodo dragon on a chain.”
My silence showed my ignorance.
Titus explained. “A giant, deadly lizard.”
“But he saved me,” I said. “He jumped into the Pool of Peace to keep me from drowning.”
A shadow flying over me and the surface of the pool. Someone splashing in as I take that first breath of water into my lungs…
…but moments before that, Aril’s voice crying out a warning.
“Lunari, no!”
He’d known my name. Aril had known who I was from the beginning.
That was the something off, the hinky feeling I’d had for the last day. I hadn’t told Aril my name until after he’d rescued me and asked me that evening. But he didn’t need to ask. He’d already known when I dove into the pool and he’d called out my name too late to stop me.
I felt sick.
Aril had been playing me.
I’d begun to trust him.
Just like he wanted.
You stupid, stupid bitch. When will you ever learn?
17
I ran.
Titus didn’t try to stop me. I think he expected me to freak and flee.
Aril’s pork pie hat blew off, and I left it where it tumbled into a canal. Sharp-edged rain mixed with hail pelted me in the face, but I didn’t bother to pull up my jacket’s hood. My only thought was to get as far from that apartment at which Aril or a unit of council guards would be arriving at any moment.
I had no idea where I was going or where I should be going. Oasi was new to me and unlike the human parts of Venice, had been built in relatively modern times. What was below the street level, if anything? Were there tunnels? Or storm drains big enough to use? I raced past doorway after doorway, alley after alley, not knowing which ones might hold salvation in the form of a place to hide. Even if I did manage to find a safe place to lay low, how was I going to get off the island? I’d left my dinghy behind on Guariti Dolori.
I was fucked. It couldn’t be plainer.
Racing across a street, I faced my reflection in a window as I approached the other side. I was me again, no more glamour. My clothes were sopping. Rain flew off the ends of my hair in wild arcs as I spun and headed in another direction where lights were few, the shadows deeper.
High tide had coincided with the storm. Seawater began flooding the streets a centimeter at a time, creeping up out of the canals and flowing over the fondimenti, which were made not of stone in this district, but cement. With every noisy splash, my boots betrayed me to anyone who might note and report someone on the run. I should slow down. Walk at a normal pace. I would if I could just stop my mind from racing.
I’m dead. I’m dead. No matter what I do.
Titus’s anti-anxiety medicine wore off in minutes.
Why did Aril pretend he didn’t know me?
With every footfall, my vision blurred to blue. I pounded water that changed from clear to navy. Cobalt rain streamed down my forehead and into my eyes.
“You are fae,” Titus said.
As with my previous dream seizures, reality distorted itself. Streets lost all sense of rational direction. Walls slammed into place where there shouldn’t be any, forcing me to veer off where I didn’t want to go. Stairs led up by going down. Canals flowed through houses.
“…born into a human body.”
A fae who couldn’t find her way out of her own dream world. I couldn’t tell what, if any of it, was real.
Rounding a corner, I skidded to a halt in water up to my ankles. The road ended. Just stopped. Buildings on each side of the street angled toward each other, fusing together in the middle of the street so that I stood at the mouth of a long, triangular dead end. Why would a street or buildings do that?
It has to be dream. It’s only in your head.
Arms held up protectively, I ran toward the pointed end. The walls would shift out of my way because, of course, they weren’t really there.
Know it. Believe it. You’re dreaming. The street goes through.
My palms slapped brick. I collided with the walls and crumpled into the tight wedge they formed.
With no way forward, I whirled around to run in the opposite direction.
A line of figures, six men and a woman, blocked the entrance to the bizarre alley. Their jackets and riot shields bore the crest of the Gagliardi Family, and right below that was a smaller insignia belonging to the human council.
“I smell magic on you,” Aril had said back on the island.
“You’re lying to yourself,” Titus had accused minutes before. “You’ve been doing that for quite some time.”
Had I been lying to myself? Were my dreams more than dreams?
“I smell magic on you.”
I still didn’t believe I was fae. The bricks at my back, blocking my escape, would have been nothing to a fae with real magic. However, my dreams did have their own strange power. Time to use that.
I pointed at each guard from one end of the line to the other. Just like back in my apartment with the gang members, a knot made up of a thousand wriggling threads of energy blazed for me in their heads, revealing their mental and emotional vulnerabilities. They couldn’t feel or see them, but I did. I knew their dreams and nightmares. I knew how to save myself; pull on the bad threads. Make them real. Bring them to life.
Darkness. What each and every one of the Gagliardi’s feared most was the dark, not literal darkness, or else they wouldn’t have been out here tracking down a fugitive at night. Rather, they dreaded a darkness they’d all been taught to fear, one they believed was coming and too horrible to contemplate.
It had something to do with the fae.
And me!
“Lunari di nessuna famiglia,” the shortest man among the guards spoke to me. Lunari, who is of no family, “by the decree handed down upon you by the council of Humans of Ashia Hollow, morte dal consiglio, I arrest you.”
“Like hell you d
o,” I said.
I borrowed from the night and made darkness into a solid thing. Drawing every ounce of water in the street toward me, I added it to twin waves of blue-black that curled up at my sides all the way to the rooftops, thick and heavy, with the drowning weight of the ocean in them.
Through the windows in six riot shields, I watched horror contort the guards’ faces. Eyes looked up and went wide. Mouths dropped open. Adams apples bobbed.
I was ready to let loose with the worst I could bring down on those hounding me, when suddenly the memory of Titus backing away from me with revulsion, popped into my head.
“You didn’t tell me she was dark and had just killed.”
My concentration faltered.
Razor sharp pain lanced my neck.
My fingers flew up to a tufted dart sticking out of my throat. Whatever was in the needle worked instantly, deadening my thoughts, muscles, emotions. Slowly, my eyes tracked in the direction the projectile had traveled to the one female guard and the pistol in her hand, its barrel raised toward me.
Overhead, my obsidian tsunami broke apart and lost mass. Tatters of the waves dashed riot shields and helmets, but compared to the already leaden downpour, the effect was minimal.
I fell face-first into the street.
18
“But she’s Fae.”
Coming to me through a thick, syrupy mental fog, the voice was annoyed, yet subservient.
I struggled to wake up. Every thought slipped away from me under a blanket of lethargy. Listening required too much effort to sustain. Down deep, a part of me went into a frenzy, knowing the drug they’d given me had left me completely vulnerable. My panic wasn’t strong enough, however, to punch through my near-comatose state.
“Take a look at her eyes.” That voice again.
Cool fingers pried up my right eyelid.
A balding head with a vulture’s beak of a nose leaned down into my face. Indifferent eyes examined me. The thin neck attached to the head was that of a vulture, as well, the way it narrowed down into a feathered collar bone and high, hunched shoulders.
I whimpered at the sight of the bird of prey standing over me until my brain finally put together the pieces, and I saw it was not a griffon vulture, but a man in Carnival costume wearing a cape covered in a griffon vulture’s golden-brown feathers, trimmed in gold embroidery and cabochon gemstones.
“I can name a dozen places in Oasi that will perform indigo surgery these days,” the vulture-man said.
Something metallic rattled close by, but with my head pinned back by the man prying open my eyelid, I couldn’t look for it. Rough cut wood paneling, stained by centuries of prisoners and foul living conditions, lined the walls of the windowless cell in which they kept me. So low was the ceiling, it felt more like a box or crate than a room.
I got out a single word. “Why?” I said.
“Why are you here?” Vulture-man said.
“What crime?”
“You were born,” he said.
He let go of my head, and it sagged toward my chest. I was seated in a metal chair, my wrists cuffed to the chair’s arms and my ankles shackled to its legs. They’d taken away my jacket, and it was ice-cold in the room, which didn’t have a source of heat. I was the source of the rattling, my body shivering uncontrollably in cuffs and shackles.
“I don’t know, Donato.” A man spoke somewhere behind me.
Donato. The man in the vulture costume was Donato Nazario, head of the human council.
The other voice I recognized as belonging to the Gagliardi council guard who’d spoken back in the alley just before I was darted and tranquilized.
“Her eyes look real enough to me,” he said. “They’re fae.”
“She’s human,” Nazario said. “But conduct the ritual anyway and record it so we can prove that later if need be.”
My eye closed.
“Do you really want to take a chance of pissing off the fae council if they think we’ve executed one of their own?” the guard continued.
I clung to the conversation, yet asking why, what did I do to deserve death, had exhausted me. My mouth was too dry to form coherent sounds.
“They know exactly who she is,” Nazario said to the other man. “We simply got to her first. Our job is to deprive them of her. Of course, if you prefer the dark to rise and destroy us all as it’s been prophesized then, by all means, lieutenant, let’s sober her up and dump her free in the middle of St. Marks.”
“You misunderstand me, Monsignor el Doxe.” The guard suddenly kissed ass using Nazario’s ceremonial title. “My only concern is with public perception. If they think she’s fae, some might question our hanging a person we have no right to hang.”
“And?” Nazario prompted.
“We could always gouge out the eyes. They can’t question what isn’t there.”
I choked. Dry heaves sent bile rushing up my throat as I listened to them calmly discuss blinding me.
A dry chuckle from Nazario. “That’s what I admire about you, Tomas. Your bloodthirsty practicality.”
The two lapsed into silence as the human doge of Venice presumably considered his lieutenant’s suggestion.
“No,” Nazario said at last. “The lack of eyes will only stoke the rumors she’s fae. Find her a pair of lenses. What color were her eyes supposed to be?”
“Green.”
“Have her fitted with green ones then. But make it quick. The fête in la Piazzetta begins in less than an hour.”
Footsteps headed across the room, presumably for the door.
Tomas Gagliardi, head of the Gagliardi family, cleared his throat.
The footsteps paused. “What is it?” Nazario said.
“We have petitions.”
“Petitions?”
“A woman outside your council chamber is asking for Lunari’s hair to be shaved and given to her now,” Gagliardi said. “Plus, a handful of oddities dealers are competing for rights to her teeth. It’s been so long since we had a public execution I’m not clear on protocol. Technically, Lunari has no right to any property. I need a legal opinion. Does property include her body?”
Nazario huffed his impatience.
“Tell them they’ll have to wait and fight over the corpse. As you say, the public’s perception matters. We need her to be identifiable when she goes to the gallows, not some blind, shaved, toothless marionette.”
It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes later that I lost consciousness and dreamed. This was a regular dream. Nothing turned blue. Reality didn’t contort itself. I couldn’t manipulate my surroundings to escape.
I sat in the chair in the cell and watched a silver mouse squeeze through a knot hole in the wood paneling in a far corner. It wavered atop the room’s baseboard, balancing precariously with a small purple object held in its front paws. After a moment, where it appeared the mouse debated what to do, it stuffed the object between its teeth, dropped to the floor and scurried across the floor in my direction, limping slightly on its rear right paw.
Reaching my chair, it hopped onto my left boot and then climbed my leg. I wasn’t afraid. Mice looked much as they had before the merge. Harmless. Unlike cats, dogs, and many birds, I guess the magic hadn’t affected them. Still, it was silver, an unusual color for a rodent.
When the mouse reached my knee, it clambered up into my lap and looked meaningfully at my hand. Since this was a dream, nothing had to make sense relative to the real world. I was no longer cuffed to the chair, and I turned over my hand. Making a heroic leap up onto the chair’s arm, the mouse placed the object it carried in its mouth in the center of my palm.
A grape.
Perfectly ripe with a velvety purple blush to the skin.
The mouse spoke. “Aril says to be ready.”
Curious to see if the grape was what I thought it was, I placed it between my teeth and bit down.
The fruity spice of a young Sangiovese wine saturated my tongue and wetted my parched mouth. It was
so delicious, I wanted to cry.
“And another thing,” the mouse added, “he says you better not get drunk on one grape.”
19
From Lunari’s Journal No. 3
Age 16…
September 18
Sulla let me watch TV.
That’s how he got me when I was 9.
It wasn’t really TV, not like they used to have before Ashia Hollow became Ashia Hollow. Sulla called it ghost TV because no one on it was still alive. They’d all died 150 to almost 300 years ago. The Fae had the real thing with living people on it. So did the humans ruling us in the Doge’s palace, and the rich people who lived in San Marco, and Castello, and most of the way along the Grand Canal before you got to the ugly bombed-out parts.
Real TV with new shows needed magic to run it, and all Sulla could afford was the historic stuff on disks you could watch as many times as you wanted.
Back when I was nine, any kind of TV would have been magic to me. I lived in an old bathroom in an abandoned office building without electricity and nothing to do most of the time. I couldn’t read much at that age. It wasn’t too bad, though. I liked that I could lock the door and feel okay going to bed. The only window was too small for a person and so high up in the wall the only one who could use it was Whisper. The toilet and the sink didn’t work, but that was okay, too, because I could still use the sink to wash things if I put a rubber ball I had into the drain hole and brought in water.
But I didn’t have TV. I hadn’t even seen it before. It wasn’t until I was 12 that I watched my first fae created 3D, hidden in a miniature history book.
God, I wish I could have written this when I was 9. It’s been 7 whole years. I’ve probably forgotten some of it, and I wanted to write ALL of it down, get ALL of it out of my head forever. I don’t want to remember what happened with Sulla. If I put it all down, every last thing about that day, I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to forget it. Period. But if even one little detail is still stuck in there somewhere, I don’t write it in this journal, and suddenly, out of the blue, I remember it when I’m 19 or 20 or even 25!! I’m afraid I’ll remember ALL of it again.
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 14