Just get it over with. If you don’t do it soon, he’ll be asleep.
Filigree squeaks from my bed, and I look over to find him clutching a silver ribbon in his squirrel paw. He holds it out to me. “Thanks, Fili.” I tie the ribbon around my hair to keep it off my neck. “Okay. I’m doing this.” I snatch up my stylus and hold it against the wall with shaking fingers. Shaking fingers? When do my fingers ever shake? I definitely need to get this over with.
I step through the doorway of the faerie path into Nate’s bedroom. The lamp beside his bed is on, and images flicker soundlessly across the TV in his sitting area. A strip of light is visible from the bathroom, the door held ajar by a running shoe. I can hear an electric toothbrush buzzing like a giant insect.
I perch on the edge of the couch and wait for Nate. The buzzing stops, water runs, the bathroom door swings open, and Nate walks out. He’s toweling his damp hair and wearing nothing but a pair of boxers.
Crap. I should have left this for a more appropriately clothed time of day.
I stand. My eyes are glued to his bare chest, which is absurd considering the large number of bare chests I’ve seen during training. Male faeries seem to like sparring without their shirts on.
But this is different. Faerie skin is pale, whereas Nate’s is golden brown, as though he spends his spare time in the sun. My eyes brush over the slight ridges of his stomach, the V-shaped indentation that runs from his hips down toward—
Stop stop STOP! Do not let your mind go there!
“Vi!” Nate tosses the towel onto his bed and walks toward me. “This is a surprise.”
“Um, yes.” I press my hands to my burning cheeks and force my eyes down to the floor. I clear my throat and take a step backward. “Yes. We need to talk.”
“Uh, okay.”
I swallow uncomfortably as I meet his gaze. “Look, Nate, this isn’t going to—”
“Wait.” He holds a hand up. “I know what you’re going to say.”
“I doubt it,” I mutter.
“I’m not stupid, Vi,” he says. “I was there when your mentor spoke about the laws you’d broken. I remember her saying how serious it was. She told you to bring me back home, but I don’t think continuing to visit me was part of the deal. And you didn’t say a word yesterday when I mentioned meeting your friends.” He steps closer. “I know you’re breaking the rules to come and see me, Vi. And you’re obviously terrified that someone will find out and you’ll be in even worse trouble this time. That’s what you came to say, right? That you can’t see me anymore because it isn’t allowed?”
I look down at my feet, press my lips together, and nod. Looks like I didn’t have to worry about what I was going to say; Nate said it all for me.
“Please don’t do that, Vi.” He grips my shoulders. “Please. I know it’s a risk for you, but who am I going to tell? As long as you don’t mention it to anyone, and you’re careful about coming to visit me, how will anyone find out?”
I look up into his eyes. Warm, pleading, beautiful. I feel my resolve begin to slip. “But . . . being a guardian is all I have, Nate. I can’t lose that. I’ll have nothing left.”
“That’s not true anymore,” he whispers, leaning forward to touch his forehead to mine. “You have me now.”
My throat aches. “For how long, Nate? My life is measured in centuries. Yours . . . yours will be over just as I’ve begun to live mine.”
Nate’s grip on my shoulders tightens. “We still have many years before we have to worry about that.”
Easy for him to say. I’ve lost my mother, my father, and the three best friends I had when I was younger. I don’t want to go through that kind of pain again. I watch my hands come up to rest against his chest. I close my eyes. His heart pulses beneath my fingertips, and I can’t help feeling that I want to stand here like this forever.
I snatch my hands away and step out of his embrace. I point at his closet. “I’m not discussing anything more until you put a shirt on.”
A grin creeps over Nate’s face, but he grabs a T-shirt from a drawer and pulls it over his head. He returns to the sitting area and takes both my hands. “Don’t think about something that will happen far in the future,” he says. “What do you want now? If you want to be a guardian and have me, then why should you have to choose?”
I bite my lip. It’s hard to say no to Nate, even when he’s wearing a shirt. I should have made him cover his face too. “I don’t know, Nate.”
His expression changes then, becoming more guarded. “Unless, of course, this is actually about me,” he says, “not the rules. I mean, I’d understand if, you know, you don’t feel the same way about me as I do about—”
“No,” I insist, before I can decide whether that’s true or not. “I . . . I don’t want to get hurt,” I admit in a tiny voice.
Nate pulls me closer, his arms encircling me. “I swear I’ll never hurt you,” he says, and presses a kiss to my forehead. “Besides, you have super gymnastic-like attack skills. I’d be an idiot to try and hurt you.”
“You know that’s not the kind of hurt I’m talking about,” I say. “But, yeah. I could totally take you out.”
“Aha, a smile!” says Nate in triumph. “Does that mean I’ve convinced you?” I look down at my feet. “Okay, let’s compromise,” he says before I can answer. “How about we find my mother first, and then you decide about us?”
After taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, I give in. What could be the harm in letting this last a little longer? It’s not as though I love him yet. “Okay.”
“Yes! Can we go now?”
“Now? Don’t you think it’s a little late, Nate? Wherever your mother is, she’s probably asleep.”
Nate leans forward and kisses my neck. “Please,” he whispers in my ear. His arms drop away from me, and he steps back. “I’ll take my shirt off again,” he teases. With a flick of my hand, I send a cushion sailing through the air and into the side of his head. “Hey, no attacking with magic!” he protests, trying to beat the cushion away.
“Fine,” I say, laughing as I let the cushion drop to the floor. “We can go now.”
“Awesome. There’s the book.” He points to his desk, then crosses to his closet and grabs a pair of jeans. I lift the book’s cover and run my finger across Angelica’s neat handwriting. I’m still aware of the possibility that she may be involved in something dangerous, but if things get dodgy I can open a doorway and bring us straight home.
Nate tugs a pair of running shoes on, ties the laces, and pushes his arms into the sleeves of a jacket. “Okay. Let’s do this.”
I sit down on Nate’s floor, loosely holding Angelica’s book in both hands. “So how does this work?” asks Nate. He sits down in front of me. “Do GPS coordinates pop into your head?”
“I don’t know what that means, but no.” I drum my fingers across the cover of the book. “Because this book belonged to Angelica, I can use it to connect to her. Once I have that connection, I can sort of . . . see everything she sees. As though I’m inside her head. And with that connection comes a vague sense of her location.”
“What do you mean by vague?”
“Well, when we come out of the faerie paths we shouldn’t be more than half a mile from wherever she is.”
Nate frowns. “Half a mile is a considerable distance.”
“And then I can connect to her again to get closer,” I explain. “Look, if Angelica were down the road from us, I could pinpoint her exact location, but the further away she is, the harder it is to find her.”
“Okay, okay,” says Nate. “I guess it’s not an exact science, huh?”
“Nope.” I close my eyes and grip the book. “It’s got nothing to do with science.”
I breathe deeply and extend my mind, searching for the owner of the book. I imagine myself soaring across a great distance, my thoughts brushing minds along the way like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower. When I find the one I’m searching for I feel myself s
ucked in. I open my eyes and see through hers. A large chamber, lavishly decorated with wall hangings, shadowy at the edges because I can never see properly through other people’s eyes. She looks down at the page in front of her, folds it, and smoothes her fingers across the crease.
I pull back.
“Okay, let’s go,” I say, pushing the book into Nate’s hands and jumping to my feet. “Quickly, before I forget.”
“Where is she?” Nate asks, scrambling up behind me.
“I don’t know, but I know what the place looks like.” I open a doorway on the wall beside his desk, then grab his hand and pull him in after me. I focus my mind on the image I saw, and the feeling that went along with it. Old, protected, possibly underground.
We step out into the near darkness of a tunnel. I look up, my eyes drawn to the tiny points of light glittering on the ceiling above us. The ceiling itself is rough and uneven, and curves to meet the walls on either side of us. I reach down and brush my fingers across the surface beneath my feet. Cold and hard, like stone.
“Something doesn’t feel right here, Nate,” I whisper. For some reason, I’m afraid to speak out loud.
“What do you mean? Are we in the wrong place?”
“No, that’s not it.” I pause for a second, listening to the dead silence. “I don’t know, I just have an uneasy feeling, almost as though . . .” My next breath catches in my throat.
“Vi?” Nate reaches for my hand.
“I think we’re Underground, Nate.”
“Uh, yeah.” I can tell from his voice that he thinks I’m being slow. “I’m pretty sure we’re underground, Vi.”
“Not just normal underground, Nate. The Underground.”
It’s just light enough for me to make out Nate’s confused expression. “The Underground as in . . . the subway system in England?”
I close my eyes. Why do I even try? “No, Nate,” I say with as much patience as I can muster. “The network of tunnels beneath Creepy Hollow that the most dangerous fae call their home.”
“Oh.” His fingers tighten around my hand. “So that’s bad then?”
“Yes, Nate. Very bad. I don’t know what your mother’s doing down here, but we’re not sticking around to find out.”
Without letting go of his hand, I hold my stylus against the wall and scribble the words to open a doorway. Nothing happens. My stomach lurches as I try again. Still nothing.
“What the . . . What is happening?” I step back and drop Nate’s hand. “Where is my magic?” I push both hands into the air in front of me, not thinking about what I want to produce, just hoping I can release some power. A ball of light blazes into existence.
Nate throws his arm across his eyes. “Whoa, can you turn it down a little? That’s kind of blinding.”
I ease up on the release of magic, leaving the ball shining in midair behind me as I try once again to open a doorway on the stone wall. Nothing.
“What’s wrong?” asks Nate.
“I don’t know. It’s not me. My magic is fine.” I nod my head toward the ball of light. “There must be some kind of power in these walls that’s preventing me from opening a doorway.”
“So you’re saying we’re stuck down here?”
I nod, the movement terse. “Dammit, Nate, we shouldn’t have come here.”
“Hey, you were just as keen to find my mother as I was.”
“Actually, up until about ten minutes ago, I was planning never to have anything to do with you or your family again.”
Nate jerks back slightly from my verbal slap. He doesn’t say anything. Guilt wraps itself around the knot that’s already sitting in my stomach. “I’m sorry,” I say, reaching for his arm. “I obviously didn’t want that badly enough, since you managed to change my mind.”
A howl breaks through the silence around us, echoing along the tunnel. I can feel the hair on my arms rising. A high-pitched shriek follows soon after, causing me to stuff my fingers into my ears. When the noise has subsided, I take hold of Nate’s hand and nudge the ball of light forward. “Let’s find our way out of here.”
“Wait.” Nate pulls me to a stop. “Are the faerie paths really the only way you can travel? You don’t have any, I don’t know, disappearing spells?”
“None that I know of.”
“Oh. It’s just that . . . well, remember when that reptiscilla attacked me? You were about to stab her with an arrow, and she just disappeared into nothing.”
“Oh, yeah. Other kinds of fae can’t use the faerie paths, so they have their own ways of travelling. But for faeries it’s the paths or good old-fashioned walking.”
“Right.” Nate looks both ways down the tunnel. “So which way do you think leads out?”
I shake my head. “No clue.”
“Well, perhaps if we find my mother, she can help us.”
I’m not sure I like that plan, but it’s better than wandering aimlessly until we run into some horrible Underground creature. I take the book from Nate, try to relax as much as possible, and send my mind out. I find her easily, climbing a curved stairway, the chamber disappearing below her.
“This way,” I tell Nate, feeling myself drawn forward. We walk in silence. We pass other tunnels that break off to the left and right. Sometimes we come to a fork of two or three paths, or a T-shape, where we have to choose to go left or right. The occasional crevice has been dug into the wall, like a bus stop for whatever magical traffic comes down these tunnels. It could be dreadfully confusing, but I keep hold of Angelica’s book, sending my mind out every few minutes, just for a second, to determine the direction we should go in.
I remain on edge, alert for the slightest sound or movement, my mind ready to call to whatever weapon I might need. But when a sound eventually does come, it creeps up slowly. It whispers in the distance, too faint to be recognizable. I can hear it gathering in strength though, gradually becoming louder.
“What is that?” whispers Nate.
I can’t tell. It’s like a forest of leaves being attacked by a stormy gale. A rushing sound, like . . . “Water?” I say. I send the light behind us, lifting it higher and increasing its intensity. The rushing sound is getting louder. And louder.
And then I see it! A wall of water tumbling toward us with terrifying speed. “Run!” I shout, pulling Nate after me. But there’s no way we can outrun this flood. It will overtake us in a matter of seconds, drowning us like rats in a sewer. I skid to a halt beside a crevice, catching Nate’s arm before he can run past me. I shove him into the small space, squeeze my body in beside his, and throw up an invisible shield. My mind flits around the edges, making sure it completely seals us in. A heartbeat later the wall of water tears past us. I can feel it pressing against the shield, but I’m strong enough to hold it back.
Nate slides down to the floor and draws his knees up close to his body. I let my hands drop. I can hold the shield in place with my mind as long as I don’t lose concentration. With my knees pulled tightly against my chest, I can just fit myself into the tiny space left on the floor. My hair falls forward over my shoulders, and I loop it behind my ears. The ribbon Filigree gave me must have fallen out.
“Well done,” says Nate, resting a hand on my knee. “Is that force field thing going to hold?”
“Yes. Well, unless the flood carries on for hours and hours. In that case, my strength will eventually wane.”
“I think it’s slowing already,” says Nate. After watching the water for a few minutes, it’s clear that he’s right. The bubbling and churning have become a calm, steady current, and the level of the water seems to be lowering ever so gradually.
“Well, this is cozy,” says Nate. He winks at me.
“Don’t get any ideas, Mr Draven Avenue. Losing my concentration right now would not be a good idea.”
He looks at the wall of water, then back at me. “But you’re a girl. Can’t you multitask?”
I lean my head back against the stone wall. “I refuse to let you talk me into a make-out se
ssion in a dodgy, underground tunnel. I have standards, you know.”
Nate laughs. “Even if I read you some love poetry? Would you still refuse a kiss?”
I lift my head and look at him. “Love poetry?”
“This book,” he says, removing Angelica’s book from where it’s tucked beneath his arm. “It’s an anthology of poems. I don’t recognize any of the names though.” He turns to a random page. “‘Dress my love in night. Adorn her hair with stars, her arms with shadows, her lips with moonlight. Let the wind be her chariot, the mountains her footstool.’”
“Ambrose Nightlace,” I say immediately. “He was a faerie poet, so you wouldn’t know him.”
Nate stares at me. “So now you know poetry?”
I shrug. “My mom was into it. I still have all her books.”
Nate shakes his head. “If someone had told me before I met you that faeries existed, you, Violet, would not be what I imagined.”
“Oh really? And what exactly would you have imagined, Nathaniel?”
“Well, you’d be miniature, for one thing, with wings and some kind of sparkly, otherworldly clothing. You’d wave your wand around a lot, and you’d have your own language. Or maybe you’d speak proper, old-fashioned English.”
That last one stumps me. “But humans don’t speak proper, old-fashioned English anymore. Why should we? Besides, I spend a large amount of time hanging around humans while waiting for bad things to happen to them. Of course I’m going to end up speaking like—”
My words are cut off by a screeching, groaning sound, like slabs of rock moving against each other. The tunnel shudders, and through my shield I see chunks of stone falling into the water. I extend the shield to cover the entire surface of the crevice wall, hoping to hold it together. But the earthquake—if that’s what it is—passes as quickly as it came.
“Weird,” says Nate, as I carefully pull my shield back so that it only blocks the water.
I shift slightly in the tiny space and feel something digging into the right side of my butt. I reach beneath me and pull the metal disc out of my pocket. “Oh, hey, I found out what this symbol means.” I rest the circular shape on my knee. “Remember when I told you about halflings?”
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