by E. A. Copen
“Just the handmaiden, Beth. She’s in there with her now. I…” He trailed off, his cheeks coloring.
“Spit it out, Declan. What were you going to say?”
“I can hear them giggling, sir. Your name’s come up loud enough for me to hear more than once.”
I winced and stopped in front of the door. “I suppose it’s inevitable when two of your exes get together in the same room that they’re going to laugh at you, right, Declan?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir. I don’t have any exes.”
A new bout of giggles erupted from behind the door, prompting me to draw a hand over my face. Whatever they were talking about probably didn’t bode well for me. Whenever girls compare notes, it always turns out bad for the guy. “Go get some sleep, Declan. I’ve got this.”
He frowned. “Are you sure, sir? I don’t mind standing guard.”
“You can’t stand here all night and still be standing tomorrow. I’ll pull some guards for duty when I’m done.” I still didn’t like the idea of trusting Odette’s safety to regular palace guards, but I didn’t have a choice. I was looking for a powerful wizard. None of the guards were wizards. I didn’t trust them, but they weren’t the assassin. I’d just have to verify with Odette that they were guards she trusted.
Declan nodded, made a proper bow, and walked away, leaving me alone to confront the two women.
I rapped on the door with my knuckles. “It’s me.”
The giggling came to an abrupt end, and a moment later Beth opened the door and looked right and left. “Where did your squire go?”
“Past his bedtime. Can I come in?”
Beth glanced back at Odette who sat on the sofa. Her hair had been braided and pulled back away from her face, and she was dressed in a frilly white nightgown. She shrugged and waved me in.
The energy in the room felt different from before. Lighter, less intimate. Maybe it was because Beth was in there and the two of them had just spent the last few minutes laughing at my expense. I was acutely aware of the two women staring at me. It felt like they were still about to burst into laughter over a punchline I’d only barely missed.
Odette relaxed against the sofa. “Did you make any progress with your investigation?”
I glanced at Beth. “Maybe we should have this conversation in private.”
Beth started to move away, but Odette shook her head. “No. Stay. She’s a part of this now. Might as well get used to airing some of our dirty laundry in front of her.”
“I don’t mind stepping out,” Beth said.
Odette fixed her green eyes on Beth, gaze hard. “You’ll stay.”
Beth shrank as far into the edge of the room as she could manage and busied herself by picking some things up and wiping them down.
I blew out a breath. Oh boy. This was already getting tense. “I went into the garden and had a few words with Athdar.”
“Athdar?” Odette sat forward. “You saw him?”
I nodded. “And spoke to William about him. Odette, I need to know how things were left between you two and how they were. Honestly. It’s important.”
She frowned and picked up a cup of water sweating on the table in front of her. “If you spoke to William, I’m sure he told you the important parts.”
“He didn’t tell me if you rejected him or not, or how. I imagine you slipped away from your guardian to have that conversation.”
She sipped at the water without meeting my eyes. “Athdar helped me escape after the first announcement. I think he expected me to fall in love with him. I was grateful for his help, but…well, you saw him. He’s a half-tree.”
My grip on the staff tightened, and I bit my tongue. Odette could be a monumental bitch sometimes. I hadn’t seen it before, mostly because half my life revolved around doing things for her and making her happy. Her spell drove me to do it without even thinking about it. She was a woman who expected the finer things to just fall into her lap. Expensive tastes, demanding personality, completely selfish in bed…I honestly couldn’t see what I saw in her anymore. The elitism she shared with most of the rest of the Summer Court didn’t endear her any more than the rest of it.
“He’s a Dryad,” I explained, though she knew that. “He’s got feelings. What did you say to him? Anything that would’ve made him want to get back at you?”
She shrugged, and her eyes widened. “You don’t think it was him, do you? Athdar doesn’t have a killing bone in his body, Laz. It’s why he left when the second announcement was made. I’m sure it did hurt, might’ve even made him angry, but Athdar’s not the sort of person who does things. He’s not like you. He sits in his grove of oak trees where he’s safe and comfortable and never comes out anymore.”
Odette was the second person to discount Athdar. I’d been discounted before too. People assumed I was harmless, that I wouldn’t do anything to them if they hurt people I cared about. They were wrong. There was nothing I wouldn’t do to protect the people I truly cared about, even if that meant walking away from them completely. With the right motivation, Athdar was just as capable as me of hurting her.
“I saw William’s wound. Big cut right across here.” I traced a line across my stomach about an inch below my navel. “If that would’ve hit you, there’s a near zero chance you would’ve died since there’s no real death in Faerie.”
“That’s a lie. Things do die in Faerie, but it’s very rare and often requires outside assistance. You saw it yourself when Nyx died.”
She was right. No way Nyx had gotten up from the supernatural fire that had consumed her. It had taken a lot to make that happen though. I had to have access to her soul and expose it directly to iron, not an easy thing to do. If events had turned out any different than they had, I’d have wound up marrying her. I shuddered at the thought of being married to that psychopathic queen.
I took a step forward, the end of my staff clicking loudly against the floor. “But that won’t be the case once you have your baby, at least that seems to be what everyone believes. If the child has inherited any magic from me—”
“We don’t know that he has.” Odette placed her hands protectively over her stomach. “We don’t know anything yet.”
“I know that carrying my child has made you a target. That spell wasn’t meant to maim or kill. It was meant to make the child unviable. You’re not the assassin’s target, Odette. Our child is.”
She lowered her head, still caressing her belly, lips pursed, considering. Like me, she had known, but she hadn’t wanted to consider it. “They’d kill an unborn child on the off chance that he is exactly what they fear?”
“I can’t blame them,” I said stepping around the table to sit on the sofa next to her. “You were on Earth long enough to hear about Adolf Hitler, right?”
“Your people equate him with the ultimate evil.”
“He murdered six million Jews during the Holocaust,” Beth said stepping away from the wall. “Men, women, children…he ordered them all killed. One of the largest genocides in history all perpetrated by one man and his hate.”
“Ask any fictional time traveler what they’re going to do first, and they’ll all say the same thing. Kill Hitler. It’s the butterfly effect,” I said. “People think one small change can cause ripples. Kill one, save millions. For them, this baby represents an end to the life they’ve known. Death. The concept scares the hell out of them because they don’t understand it. But they’re just like those time travelers. They don’t realize that killing one person won’t change everything. Kill Hitler and someone else just rises to take his place. Then what do you do? Kill him? Kill the next one? Where does the killing end? When you’ve killed ten Hitlers? When you’ve killed six million? Then aren’t you just as evil as him?”
Odette shook her head. “But he won’t kill anyone.”
“They don’t know that. They don’t know anything, and that’s what scares them. It’s fanaticism at its finest. You’ll never convince them otherwise. You’ll never be safe,
not even after he’s born.” I put a hand on her arm. “We need a longer-term plan, one that doesn’t leave you or him so vulnerable.”
“You can take him to Earth.” She looked up at me with big eyes.
“Odette…” I sighed, closed my eyes and withdrew my hand. “He wouldn’t be any safer with me. No one is safe with me.”
Silence hung in the air for a long breath. I regretted saying what I’d said, even if it was the truth. If my encounter with the Archon had proven anything, it was that I couldn’t protect anyone. The bad guys would use anyone and everyone I cared about to get to me, and I couldn’t allow that. For the first time, I understood the consequences of taking on the mantle of the Pale Horseman. I had to live my life alone. It was the only way.
I stood. “I’ll post some guards in front of your door for the night. With your permission, I’d like to speak with Beth. Alone.”
Odette looked past me to where Beth waited. “Are you sure she wants to speak to you?”
I turned and held my breath as Beth considered me. If she didn’t want to talk to me, I couldn’t count on her help curing the disease ravaging my body, and I badly needed her help.
She nodded. “Of course.”
I went to the door and held it open for Beth. She gave Odette a small smile that still struck me as slightly vicious and went through it. Women. When all of this was over, I was going to swear off them for good.
Chapter Nine
In the hall, I flagged down two guards on patrol and told them to stand outside Odette’s door after getting their names. Beth and I walked side by side in silence, strolling toward the garden. The moon was high by the time we reached it, but on its way down. It was getting late. The only reason I probably didn’t feel tired was the nap I’d had earlier in the day.
We stopped on a balcony overlooking one of the clearings. If I strained my eyes, I could just barely make out the tops of the oaks in Athdar’s grove. I wondered if he slept. If he did, was it as a man or a tree? Did trees even need to sleep?
Beth folded her arms and leaned on the railing. “How’s being the Summer Knight treating you?”
“I’d rather not talk about it, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Oh?” She eyed me askance. “Then what do you want to talk to me about?”
I turned around to lean my back against the wall, letting the staff rest in the crook of my arm. “The bite. I’m sorry about earlier.”
She waved a hand, dismissing it, though I could clearly see her bottom lip was still slightly swollen. I’d done that. It bothered me. A lot.
“It’s only going to get worse, you know. Coming here only slowed it down. I need to find a cure.”
“A cure for the incurable,” she said, looking out over the garden. “Sounds like your type of thing. I’m not sure what I can do to help. My healing won’t work on you, not as long as you’ve still got your Horseman powers, and I’m not a doctor.”
“You’re the smartest person I know. If anyone knows how to help me, it’s you.” I tried not to make it sound too much like I was playing the flattery card. It was true and had always been true. There was a reason Beth was the girl I chose to copy answers from in high school, and it had very little to do with her chest.
She pressed her lips together and stared out over the opposite wall of the castle. “Maybe there’s something in one of the books in the university, or maybe Dr. Feneque knows something. Either way, I can’t help you from here. I need to get back.”
I nodded. “I didn’t think I’d find any answers in Faerie. We need to get back, but I can’t stay for long. I really don’t want to turn into a ghoul.”
“There’s no way out of Faerie, Laz, not without Titania’s permission.”
The staff made a hollow sound as I let the bottom of it drop against the concrete, picking it up just before it fell and pointing out toward the oak grove. “He knows a way. Odette just told us he got her out. We just need to get him to cooperate.”
Beth gave me a doubtful look. “You’ve accused him of trying to hurt the woman he loves. Why would he help you?”
I told her my plan for making Athdar cooperate.
When I was finished, Beth shook her head. “If you want to make enemies, that’d be the way to do it. He’s not going to help you.”
“Don’t worry so much about him. I’m the Summer Knight. I think I can handle Treebeard. What about you? Will you help me?”
She huffed so hard her shoulders shook. “Why not? If it gets me out of this crazy place, I’m all for it.”
I pushed away from the wall with a hip and descended the stairs as quickly as my feet could carry me, stopping at the bottom to wait for Beth. She yawned as she stepped onto the grass with me. “Sorry. It’s been a long day. How are you feeling by the way? Any symptoms?”
I pushed aside a low hanging branch and started toward the oak grove. “Aside from wanting to devour every type of meat I come across and the gnawing hunger? Not yet.”
“You may get more symptoms once we return to Earth, you know that?”
I nodded. The fever would probably come back. It was the hallmark of the ghoul virus. The body tried to fight it as the virus mutated the body at a cellular level. Fever was the body’s way of trying to burn it out, creating a hostile environment. If the fever didn’t kill you when it surged dangerously high, the virus changed you. I’d fought the fever off only temporarily because of the way time moved differently in Faerie. Once I stepped through a portal and found myself back on Earth, that time might decide to suddenly catch up with me, or it might simply restart the frozen timer. I hoped for the latter of the two events, but since when had I gotten lucky?
“I don’t know a lot about ghouls,” she said. “I mean, I know about them in folklore. They were originally a type of jinn that fed on the dead.”
“I think the head ghoul is a jinn. His name is Serkan.” I thought about my most recent run-in with the self-declared king of the ghouls. He wasn’t the friendly sort, but he was honorable in his own way. He might be able to help if Beth couldn’t find any answers in her books, but I didn’t want to go to him until I’d tried every other avenue. He’d be happier to add me to his ranks of the undead than to let me go.
Or maybe he’d decide I was too dangerous to let live. I’d already discovered I wouldn’t lose my Horseman powers just because my body succumbed to the disease. Famine hadn’t. Instead, I’d be a madman consumed with the desire to eat. With the powers of Death at my beck and call, I’d be dangerous. I’d already planned to end it myself if it came to that. No way was I letting myself turn into one of them. But Serkan might take one look at me and decide to take matters into his own hands, executing me himself. Anubis had wanted to do that, and I’d weaseled him into giving me another day. I hoped he was the forgiving sort.
“Maybe Serkan knows how to help,” Beth suggested.
I shook my head. “Talking to him is dangerous. Taking you there would be more so. I don’t think he likes me very much.”
“You should still ask him if you’re able. No one would know more about ghouls and how they’re made more than Serkan.”
“I’ll take it under advisement.”
We reached the grove of oak trees and stopped. The garden had gone silent at our approach, the air heavy with the promise of something dark about to happen. My staff suddenly lit up bright green, the tip crimson. I gave Beth a confident smile and pushed on inside the grove.
“Athdar,” I called, “come out. I need to speak with you.”
I turned a full circle, keeping a watchful eye on the tree line for any movement. When there wasn’t any, I repeated my call louder. After he didn’t show the second time, I walked over and grabbed a twig from one of the tree branches, twisting it until it cracked.
Pulling the green wood from the tree brought back memories. My father wasn’t a kind man. Like lots of angry Southern men, he thought taking a switch to his son’s backside every day would make me into more of a man. The idea persisted u
ntil switches weren’t enough and he started using his fists. Granted, I was a rotten kid and deserved what I got, but kids aren’t supposed to get what they deserve. A parent’s job is to teach them a better way. Can’t do that by beating it into them.
I remembered being sent into the backyard to fetch my own switch and the day I discovered green wood hurt a lot more than old, dead branches. Green wood had spring to it. Felt like a whip cracking against my ass and left behind plenty of welts and bruises.
It was after one particularly bad beating, one not long before the very last he’d ever give me, that I decided to run away. I packed a suitcase full of t-shirts, shorts, and snacks and hit the road, walking the five blocks in the rain to Beth’s house. Her dad opened the door, and I expected him to kick me to the curb. Instead, he welcomed me inside, and her mom made me a peanut butter sandwich while I waited for Beth to get done with her piano lesson. I’ll never forget the look of pity on her mother’s face or the hushed whispers between her parents as they argued whether or not they should call the authorities and report my bruises. Meanwhile, I sat in a chair with my feet dangling a few inches from the floor, feeling guilty about eating their food. That adventure ended with me sneaking out before Beth was ever done with her lessons and the both of us pretending it never happened. Just like I was going to continue to do.
I pulled the green wood free in strips, peeling more and more of it away and piling it in the center of the grove. Once I had a decent sized pile, I stepped back and pointed the glowing red end of my staff at the wood. “Last chance, Athdar. Come out, or I light it up.”
Leaves rustled to my right, and the Dryad slid out between the branches. “No fire. What is it you want, Sir Knight?”
I lifted the staff so it wasn’t pointed at my small pile of twigs. “We need to talk about Odette.”
His eyes slid to Beth who’d come into the grove after me and then to a space between the trees as he considered his exit.
“Don’t,” I warned. “I don’t want to torch the trees, but I will.”