by Rene Sears
Hawthorn muttered, and eddies of energy around us bent as we ran. Pieces of different paths flung themselves under our feet. I caught glimpses of twisted trees, darks pools of seething scales seen only in glimpses. The sound of running water beat at my ears, then a howling wind in the distance.
Before long, a gate came into view. The trail ended at a pool. A thin, twisting trickle of water cascaded over a stone lip on the far bank, splitting into two rivulets that described an arch in the air. For a moment it hung over thin air, allowing us a view of the rock behind it and then Hawthorn shoved raw energy at it and the familiar shining silver mirror popped into existence.
At the same moment, an ear-splitting howl broke the quiet, followed by a loud barking. Lunn! I had to trust that he could take care of himself, that he would find me later, like he said he could. We all looked at each other.
"Go," Briar said to Hawthorn. "Take them, and tell him that I kept her safe."
Morgan's lips were contorted in a grimace of pain, but they quirked upwards at this nonetheless.
"I will," Hawthorn said. "Don't get caught."
Briar gave her a quick grin that seemed far friendlier than anything else we'd gotten from her today, and then she ran off, disappearing into the trees.
We wasted no time getting through the gate. Hawthorn led the way, doing whatever it was she did to make sure we went where we wanted to go. Teo got on the other side of Morgan and we followed her through. The transition was nothing like the one that had thrown me to a different gate entirely. It felt old, well-worn. I thought I felt a thread in the tapestry of power that was out of place, as wrong as the scraped and bent places I had seen in Faerie. What was it doing in the gate?
And then we stumbled out of the gate into the real world. I took a deep breath of free air and looked around. We were back at Morgan's house.
Teo's phone beeped, and he walked a few steps away. Morgan sagged against me, barely upright. Hawthorn looked at us, human glamour back in place, face pale and determined.
"Help me take her inside," she said. "We'll see what we can do."
*
"There's a kit in my bathroom," Morgan mumbled as we got her onto the couch.
"I'll get it." Hawthorn walked off in a swish of skirts.
I hesitated. I had some sort of vague idea that I ought to pull Morgan's shirt away from the wound, but that seemed awfully personal. Also, Morgan's shirt was stiff with dried blood, adhering the fabric to her side, and I didn't want to be the one who started it bleeding again.
Her hand kept stopping over her tattoo of the oak tree—over the spell she had destroyed to keep her sister from finding the twins. What would Gwen do—what would the queen force her to do—if she found the girls?
Hawthorn came back in and knelt next to me, assessing Morgan's injuries. She shook her head, not hopelessly, but like someone who had a lot to do in the next little while. Hawthorn had brought in a first-aid kit no different than you might find in anyone's medicine cabinet or car trunk, a pitcher full of water, and had a stack of folded towels draped precariously over one shoulder.
"Help me get a few of these under her," she said, handing me a towel. Together, we levered a groaning Morgan up and slid some towels between her and the couch. Hawthorn frowned at the shirt crusted to Morgan's side. Morgan's eyes fluttered open and she followed Hawthorn's gaze to her abdomen.
"Just do it." Morgan tried to put action to words, pulling at her shirt, but Hawthorn's hand stilled her.
"No need to be rough," Hawthorn said. She dipped another towel in the pitcher and soaked blood-crusted fabric. After a couple of minutes she gently loosened the shirt, working it away slowly and carefully, stopping often to add more water to the and let it soak through. Morgan winced, her face going ashen. Her hand clenched on one of the towels, tendons showing yellow through her skin. I felt completely useless, kneeling at her side, not helping in the least.
"Did you notice anything weird about the gate when we went through?" If nothing else maybe I could distract her. Hawthorn's hands didn't pause in their ministrations, but she shot me a brief, quizzical look.
"Weird?" Morgan's voice grated, but she looked at me instead of her side.
"I felt something...I don't know. Something off. It kind of reminded me of the...wrong places underhill."
Hawthorn's hand stilled. "I'll ask Rose." Her eyes looked into a distance Morgan and I couldn’t see.
"I'm sure it's nothing," I said, taken aback. I had only been trying to keep Morgan's mind off the pain, not seriously suggesting anything was wrong.
"With our luck...." Morgan shook her head. "Did you find any sign of the girls?"
"Not yet." I wished I had something better to tell her. "I got thrown off the gate I wanted and ended up...I'm still not sure where. That's when Teo found me."
Morgan frowned. "Are you sure he's—"
Hawthorn's eyes snapped into focus. "Good catch, Javier. Rose tells me we may have bigger problems soon. It's possible those...aberrations...we saw underhill may cross through the gates into overhill." She kept working on Morgan's shirt.
"How is that even possible? If...underhill is a land of magic and overhill is only partly so, how can that even work?"
"Magic passes between realms, and if there's a problem with the magic, the problem goes where the magic does." Morgan hissed as Hawthorn pulled the last piece of shirt away. I winced, but not at her pain. Of course that was what my father had been counting on when he tried to attack Faerie.
"Does that mean it might go to other realms?" I wasn't sure how many there were—all of them were theoretical but two: Faerie and Earth.
No. There were three.
Strangehold.
"Maybe," Morgan said. Her voice sounded casual, but a fat drop of sweat rolled down her forehead. "Magic passes through the gates all the time. Magic and people."
"Could it get to Strangehold?"
Hawthorn bit her lip and looked at Morgan.
"It could," Morgan said. "Hawthorn—"
Hawthorn pulled out a silver-topped glass bottle filled with a faintly glowing liquid. Guess it wasn't completely an off-the-shelf first-aid kit after all. Hawthorn unscrewed the top and let drops fall onto Morgan's wounds. Morgan relaxed. I let my eyes unfocus and called up spellsight; silver lines threaded through whatever the liquid was. "What you don't know, Javier," Hawthorn said, "is that Strangehold is built on what, as far as Rose could determine, is the source of magic."
"The source?" I had never thought of magic as having a source. It was just there for us to use.
"Imagine a rock dropped into a pond. Ripples spread out from the rock, right? The ripples closest are deepest and most sharply defined, and the ones further out are bigger and looser." Morgan frowned at the slice through the tattoo on her shoulder.. "Faerie is close. There's a lot of magic spread out through a smallish world. Earth is farther away. Less magic, spread out through a larger world. There are other worlds, theoretically, but for whatever reason, underhill and overhill are linked. We can get from one to another relatively easily." She shrugged her shoulder experimentally. "Man. I forgot how effective that painkiller is. Okay, so Strangehold is built right where the rock drops into the pond. That's why the magic there is so strong."
"So what happens if the weirdness travels through the gates here? Or to the source of magic?"
"I don't think we want to find out." Hawthorn snapped the lid of the first-aid kit shut.
"And the girls and Rowan are still out there somewhere,"" Morgan said softly.
The door opened before I could say anything and Teo walked in, phone in hand.
"How are you feeling?" he asked Morgan.
"Better." She tried to sit up, but Hawthorn put a hand on her uninjured shoulder and held her in place.
"Don't waste my work. Give the salve a chance to work before you rip everything back open again."
Teo nodded, but then his gaze found me. He looked grim—not that the situation wasn't serious, but this was ne
w. Maybe almost being acquired by some sort of siren fae had shaken him up. It had me, and I wasn't even her target.
"Can we step outside?" he said.
"Sure." I nodded to Morgan and Hawthorn and led him out to the vegetable patch. It was warm outside, and bees buzzed around the flowers.
"We've got to go," he said.
I raised an eyebrow. "Go? We haven’t even found the girls yet."
"I know you want to help," he said. "I do too. But it just got complicated. I talked to Uncle Vicente. He wants us to come home."
"Well, no offense, but...so?" He frowned at me, and I frowned back. "Look, I can't go yet. They need my help. Besides...I don't have a passport or anything." I had been so pissed at Mamá and Dad—I didn't even have a birth certificate. But I understood a little better now. They hadn't wanted to leave any kind of paper trail for Vicente to find. I'd be lying if I said that made me more eager to meet him.
"Javier—" Teo shook his head. "We can work around the lack of paperwork until we get it sorted out. I can get you there without having to worry about it, but...Look, you don't want to piss him off. I'm not—I might not be explaining this the best way. But our family, it's..." He looked up, searching for the right words. "Big," he finally decided. "Important. Amazing to be a part of. But you have to be a part of it, and when the family needs you, you come."
I bit my lip. "I don’t think you understand. I just found out about you—about all of you. I can't—I have stuff I need to do. I do want to meet him. I want to meet them all. But I can't just run off because some guy I never met has a problem with..." I looked at Teo. "Why does he want us to rush back?"
Teo shrugged. "There's a family problem. That's all we need to know."
"It's not enough for me. I have to help here." Some part of me felt like it was tearing. I didn't want to upset my family. I didn't want to lose the brother I'd only just met. But...what they did to my mother was wrong. What they did to me, to Teo, was wrong. I shouldn't have grown up not knowing him, hidden away like a dirty secret.
No. Not a dirty secret. Like something precious my parents couldn't bear to lose. The phone calls where I had to leave the house, after which my mother's eyes were always red and my father was always coldly furious. The visits with my aunt when my uncle came to visit. I hadn't been a shame to them, but my mother's family had been a risk they couldn’t take. Not after something—someone—equally precious had been lost to them.
That someone stared at me soberly, shaking his head again. "No—he sent me to bring you home. You have to come home."
"I'm not saying I won't go." I couldn't call it home. Not yet. Home was still an island, an island where three people lived, a place I could never go again. "But I can't drop everything and go right now. There are things I need to do." I had promised to help Morgan, but more than that, now I knew there was a threat coming through the gates of Faerie, I had to do whatever I could to help. I didn't have the right words to explain it; but my father had tried to send something bad into Faerie, and I could help stop something bad coming out of it. In some way it felt like a trade I needed to make, a balance I needed to restore—even though I knew, rationally, that what my father had done was not my fault. Rationality didn't mean that much to my gut feeling.
Teo looked at his phone, his brow wrinkled. Then he met my gaze and I actually took a step back. He looked deeply, terribly conflicted.
"Teo...?" I hated how uncertain my voice sounded. "What is it?"
"You think you have a choice?" His voice was hoarse. "You don't know...Javier, you can't just tell him no, you can't just do what you want."
"What do you mean?"
He licked his lips. "Uncle Vicente is the head of the family. He can accept you, or he can turn against you."
I thought again of my aunt, completely disregarded because she had no magic, of my mother, hiding one child because the other had been taken from her, and then it crystallized. I was just finding out who I was and what I believed. I wanted to have my brother, desperately, but this was bullshit. I'd drop the whole family no matter how much I wanted them if they were going to try to control me. I looked at Teo. "I'm sorry. I want to meet the rest of them, I do, but this is ridiculous. I'm not going to drop everything because some man I never met says so, even if he is our uncle."
He shoved his phone in his back pocket. "Please don't make me do this." His empty hands suddenly looked threatening. He was bigger and older than me. If it came down to it, he could physically overpower me. But I wasn't completely defenseless, and I'd been wondering how my spells stacked against his.
"I'm not making you do anything," I said as calmly as I could. "You've got to decide what you're willing to do."
He looked at me, and his face went still. I called my spellsight and saw a ring on his left hand take on a silver glow. Shit.
I allowed myself one instant to regret having given my coquí to Igraine, but I still had the charm cords at my wrist. One was an energy well I could use to knot anything, and one was a simple ward that would deflect other spells.
He flung his left hand out, but I was ready with the ward and managed to knock his spell away, if barely. Silver flashed bright as the spell unraveled into threads in a pattern I recognized: a sleeping spell. My pulse thumped hard against my throat. He almost had me there.
I pulled my hand back and frowned at him, praying my voice would be steady when I spoke. "Do you just carry that around all the time or is it just me you're ready to roofie?"
Teo flushed a deep red, and that was my answer. My uncle had sent him to bring me back by whatever means necessary. The ring flashed again, but my ward charm was spent. I pulled energy from the sadly meager resource of the well cord and spun it into a basic knot I could adapt multiple ways, depending on what he threw at me.
This time it was a net of energy sort of like the one that Iliesa had cast on me earlier, but this time, I was ready for it. I wove the edge of my knot into a blade and sliced through his spell without dissipating my own.
His eyes widened. "Nice."
"Thanks." I stayed wary, watching for his next move. The ring glowed—how many spells could it hold?—and he struck again. I twisted my knot into a shield, and almost missed his real attack trying to deflect a harmless illusion. As I warded off a brightly glowing light, he drew together a spell to cuff my legs together. I turned my shield just in time and flung away the cuffs before they could catch me. But the force of the spell damaged the weave of my knot and it came undone.
I frantically tried to pull enough energy from the leylines to summon another spell, but Teo was faster. Instead of casting, he barreled toward me like a linebacker and knocked me over. I swung my fist wildly and felt it glance off some part of him, but I was already falling. I hit the ground with a thud, the wind completely knocked out of me. As I struggled to get my lungs to work, Teo pinned me with a knee and wrapped my wrists together in his hands.
Despite having won, he was frowning.
"Now what?" I wheezed after a moment.
"Now I take you home," he said, but it lacked conviction.
"By force?"
"If I have to."
"Look, I don't know what it's like there, but if this is typical, you're not exactly filling me with anticipation to go." He snorted, but let go of me. I sat up, rubbing my wrists.
He dropped to the ground beside me. "There are so many of us. Our aunts and uncles raised me along with their kids, but I moved from house to house. I always knew I was loved, but I never felt special. When Vicente asked me to come find you, it was an honor. I could prove myself." He hesitated. "And I didn't want you to be alone. I didn't want you not to feel special. It never occurred to me that you wouldn't want to come with me. It never occurred to me that you already felt special."
"Teo—" When I thought about all the things my parents had taught me, the frog my mother had given me, the fact that she had stayed on that little island when she could have left, the way my aunt had taken me in, both when my parents wer
e alive and after they died—I'd never thought of myself as special, but I'd never doubted that I was special to them.
I groped for words, but he spoke first. "It never really mattered to me before that I didn't grow up with Isabel and Matthew. I always thought I had it better where I was." He turned toward me. His bottom lip had a split in it and was starting to swell.
"Sorry about your face," I said.
He touched his lip and flinched. "Sorry for knocking you down."
"Look. I want us to be brothers for real, but right now you have a choice." He looked at me without speaking. I steeled myself. "You can do what Vicente wants and take me with you now, and maybe you'll be special to him, but I'll have a hard time ever forgetting that. Or you can let me make my own decisions, and I'll come to the rest of them in my own time. And I'll know I can trust you."
He stared at me for a long moment, and I wished I knew what he was thinking.
"Do you have a phone?" he said.
I leaned back, a little taken aback at the change of subject. "Not with me."
"Well, you do now." He tossed me a phone, not the one he'd been using earlier. Did he just carry around a spare one? It boggled the mind. He pulled his own phone out, tapped the screen, and a second later the one in my hand rang. "Now you've got my number. Whenever you're ready to come home, call me, and I'll come get you. Even if you're not ready, call me if you just want to say hi." He flashed me a quick smile, wincing as his lip pulled. "I want you to trust me."
"I do too." I nudged him. "What are you going to tell Vicente?"
"That you went to Faerie before I could stop you. It's where you're going, right?" He stared at nothing for a second then shook himself. "I don't envy you. And I'll tell him I thought it was better if you came to us on your own. That's true too." He shoved himself to his feet and extended a hand. I took it and let him pull me up.
"Thanks," I said. He grabbed my hand a little tighter then let it go.