Mags & Nats 3-Book Box Set

by Stephanie Fazio

  Sir Zachary zoomed around, leaping in and out of various people’s arms. I noticed a leg of turkey disappear from the table during the confusion.

  “Twins,” Oliver said, amid the ruckus. “A boy and a girl, if I’m not mistaken.”

  A worry that had been gnawing at the back of my mind evaporated. Ever since the night Oliver pulled Kaira aside to talk to her, I’d noticed Graysen being even more protective.

  Now, it all made sense.

  A.J. was jumping up and down, shouting, “I’m gonna be an uncle!”

  As soon as their family moved aside, the 7.5 gathered together into a giant group hug. While I hung onto Kaira with one arm and A.J. with the other, I looked over at Diego. His gaze was already locked on me.

  I stepped back from Kaira, opening up a space in silent invitation.

  Diego swung his legs around the bench and came to join our group. He leaned in to kiss me before taking his place between Kaira and me, wrapping an arm around each of us.

  Our circle was whole and complete. And so was I.

  THE END

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  The Prince’s Chosen

  StephanieFazio.com

  PROLOGUE

  18 YEARS EARLIER

  Their “little miracle,” as they had taken to calling her, was only a day old.

  They swaddled her, folding and tucking the pink blanket around her just like the nurse had shown them. The setting Texas sun bathed their fields in fiery oranges and golds, and there seemed to be no better time to give their baby a tour of the farm.

  The man and his wife stepped out onto the porch. He carried the pink bundle like she was made out of glass and might break. The rich brown of his wife’s hair stirred in the breeze as she smoothed the blankets. They sat in the wicker rocking chairs and gazed out over the cattle grazing peacefully.

  “Welcome to paradise, little one,” the man said.

  Looking down at his perfect baby girl, his little miracle, the man felt happiness in a way he never had before.

  His wife hummed in contentment, echoing his satisfaction.

  His eyes were still on the baby when he felt a change around them. The cows went still, some of their heads still lowered to the grass. The wind stopped rustling the tall weeds that he hadn’t gotten around to mowing. The air felt heavy, the way it did before a storm broke. It was as if the land around them had inhaled in preparation of a great breath. Or a scream.

  And then the sky tore open.

  There was no other way to describe it. There was a terrible ripping sound, like the golden-hued sky was pulled apart at its seams. It was like someone had taken a carving knife and sliced a line from the top of the sky down to the bottom. The grass shriveled and died in the place where the tear met the earth. And from the torn sky came…people….

  Lots of them.

  They stumbled out of nowhere and onto the front lawn. Some were moaning, others crying.

  His wife grabbed his arm as she uttered a strangled shriek. “What in the—?”

  “I—I don’t know,” the man replied, clutching the pink bundle tighter to his chest.

  Some part of the man on the porch registered the inhuman beauty of these newcomers, with their rich copper skin and long, black hair. Even blood and flames couldn’t hide the loveliness that radiated from these people.

  A boy came through the tear, limping and clutching his side. At first glance, he seemed no older than sixteen. But he seemed to age before the couple’s eyes. He grew haggard and stooped. With a groan, the boy, who was now an old man, fell to the ground. His heaving chest stilled. And then, he disappeared in a puff of blue smoke.

  The man blinked. Had that boy really just disappeared?

  He looked at his wife. His own incomprehension and fear were reflected in her too-wide eyes.

  A young woman fell to the ground where the boy had been moments before. She was weeping. The man could hear her choked, agonized sobs from here. There was no one to comfort her. Everyone else on the scorched ground was too full of their own suffering to notice hers.

  The man’s throat burned in sympathy for these strangers’ pain. He stood, meaning to go down and help. But he couldn’t make his feet move. He was just a simple cattle farmer, and this was…Armageddon?

  The mayhem reached a fever pitch as a whole group of the Others fell through the tear in the sky. Even amid their obvious terror, they surrounded two people at their center, protecting them from whatever horrors they were all fleeing.

  The ones being protected both wore crowns on their heads. Almost as soon as they had appeared, they ran back through the gathering crowd to the seam in the sky. They reached back through the bottom part of the tear, their arms and legs disappearing from view as though they were crossing some invisible boundary. They seemed to be pulling at something on the other side of the barrier.

  The queen—for there was no doubt that was who she was—released a cry as her hand found whatever she had been searching for. She was pulling something through the tear, or at least, she was trying to. There was some force on the other side of the invisible barrier that was fighting her. The king wrapped his arms around his wife’s waist and gave her a great tug.

  They tumbled back onto the scorched grass. A wailing baby was now clutched in the queen’s arms.

  The man on the porch gripped his own baby tighter at the sight of the infant in the queen’s arms, who was covered in blood. Everyone on the porch and on the ground seemed to have the same realization at the same moment. The baby’s left arm was gone…torn off at the shoulder.

  The queen was screaming. The king was trying to staunch the wound with clumsy hands.

  “What’s that?” the man’s wife gasped, pointing to something wiggling around in the tall weeds on the edge of the mayhem.

  The man on the porch felt his muscles unfreeze as he awoke from his stupor. He thrust his daughter into his wife’s arms.

  “Call 911!” he shouted to his wife.

  The people who were crying and bleeding and putting out fires didn’t even notice the man who had run down the porch stairs to help.

  He turned back at the sound of his wife’s shout. His wife was cradling their daughter in one arm and pointing up with the other. The man stopped.

  The two halves of the sky were peeling away. He shaded his eyes as a ball of blue fire blazed through the tear.

  It moved at impossible speed, and it was heading straight for the porch.

  CHAPTER 1

  ADDY

  Addy climbed onto the tractor. The sun was setting behind the young green stalks of sweet corn, making their color look a little brighter and healthier than usual. The breeze stirred her long hair and surrounded her with the smell of fresh earth and unripe corn. She turned the key, feeling the familiar rumble of the tractor’s engine beneath her, and pressed the throttle. She maneuvered the Benz—the name Addy had made up for the old tractor when she was a kid, thinking herself terribly clever for coming up with the ironic name—onto the path carved from years of tracing this same route around their property.

  By the time Addy finished surveying all two-hundred acres of corn fields, the Benz was groaning and shuddering in protest. It sounded like the fan belt was going again. Addy made a mental note to ask Fred to take a look at it the next time she saw him.

  Fred was the dairy farmer’s son from next door, if you could call five miles of separation next door, and had been her best friend since she was three. He could fix anything in half the time as the mechanic whose shop was forty-five minutes away. Plus, he never charged them, claiming there was a “Deerborn discount” that applied for any of he
r family’s repairs.

  The Benz creaked into the shed, and Addy killed the engine. She hauled fresh water to their one old cow, Ginny, who was the only reminder of her parents’ past life as cattle ranchers in the middle-of-nowhere Texas. Addy had been born in Texas, but she didn’t remember it because her parents had moved to a corn farm in the middle-of-nowhere upstate New York soon after. Her only memories were of corn fields in the summer and snow in the winter. Their town was called Nowell, and had a population of 15,000. When she said the name, she pronounced it so it sounded like Nowhere, New York.

  She shooed Cluckers Numbers 1-5 into their henhouse. All she got in return for saving them from the fox that had been prowling around lately was a mouthful of feathers and a shrill protest from Cluckers Number 4.

  Addy washed her hands and face in the mudroom sink. She kicked off her muddy boots and shed her windbreaker. Even though it was June, it had been an unseasonably cool week. It had her dad in a tizzy over the corn.

  “Everything alright with the corn?” her mom called out. She was peering into the oven, appraising the pot roast inside.

  “Yes, everything’s fine,” Addy replied. “Not a stalk out of place.”

  There never was. Everything was always fine…because nothing ever happened. It made her want to set something on fire or blow something up, just to see people’s reactions. But she didn’t think her parents would accept impending death by boredom as a valid excuse for vandalism.

  Addy’s mom poked a fork into an apple pie on the counter. The smell of cinnamon wafted across the kitchen.

  “Addy!”

  Lucy, the youngest of Addy’s four sisters, came skidding across the linoleum floor of the kitchen in her fuzzy socks. Even though Addy had only been gone for a few hours, Lucy acted like they hadn’t seen each other in weeks. Grinning down at her baby sister, Addy picked her up and spun her around in a circle.

  “Wheeeee!” Lucy squealed as she waved her short legs in the air.

  “Be careful with Baby Lucy,” Addy’s mom said as she put a casserole dish full of cheesy potatoes into the oven.

  At three years of age, Lucy wasn’t a baby anymore, but everyone still called her Baby Lucy anyway. Lucy didn’t seem to mind.

  Addy put her sister down. When her mom turned back to the oven, Addy reached across the counter and broke off a flaky piece of pie crust.

  “Adelyne Deerborn!” her mom scolded when she saw the evidence of Addy’s theft.

  “Wha’?” Addy gave her mom an innocent look as the cinnamon and sugar melted on her tongue.

  When her mom turned back to the oven, Aunt Meredith, who was visiting from Texas, gave Addy an ahem. Addy stole another piece of pie crust and tossed it to Aunt Meredith. Her aunt caught it and stuffed it in her mouth just before Addy’s mom turned back around. Her mom frowned at Aunt Meredith.

  “You’re as bad as the girls,” her mom tsked.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Aunt Meredith winked at Addy.

  Aunt Meredith’s face was tan and a bit leathery from so much time spent outside. Even when she wasn’t on the farm, she wore her cowboy boots and cowboy hat and said ya’ll.

  Before she had become a cattle rancher, Aunt Meredith had been a volunteer in the Peace Corps. Addy loved hearing about all the places she’d gone and the people she’d met. Aside from being born in Texas, which didn’t count since she didn’t remember it, Addy had never traveled farther than a few towns over. When she laid in bed at night, she tried to imagine what it would be like to travel the world like Aunt Meredith had before she retired to the ranch.

  Addy wanted to see everything, go everywhere. It was some twist of irony that she’d been born into a family whose big yearly outing was to the mall an hour-and-a-half away.

  The rest of Addy’s sisters came through the swinging door to the kitchen in a tornado of laughter and good-natured arguing that was the constant background noise in the farmhouse.

  Stacy came in first, complaining about how Rosie had stolen her nail polish…again. Rosie was flatly denying it even as she kept her hands noticeably hidden behind her back. Livy, Addy’s very non-identical twin, followed the other two, picking up the toys and books they left discarded on the floor. Addy grinned at her twin across the room. In spite of the mayhem, Livy sensed Addy’s gaze and returned her smile.

  All the sisters looked just like their mother…all of them, that was, except Addy. Addy’s sisters all shared their parents’ brown hair, brown eyes, and soft features. Neither of Addy’s parents was tall, her father coming in at 5’6” and her mother barely hitting 5’, and the rest of her sisters were similarly petite. Even Addy’s twin barely made it to 5’1”…in shoes.

  Addy, on the other hand, looked nothing like any of them. She alone had coppery-red hair and green eyes, which she inherited from Great-Great-Grandma Ellen. She also inherited Ellen’s freakish height of 6’1”. It made her stick out like a sore thumb, or a giant, in the Deerborn crowd. It also made for the world’s most ridiculous Christmas card photo.

  There weren’t any pictures of Great-Great-Grandma Ellen—and even if there were, they would have been in black-and-white—but Addy’s mom told her that’s who she could thank for the features that Livy said made her look like a model. Addy just thought she looked like the giant that Jack killed…if he had been a ginger.

  Addy’s dad always joked that the temper tantrums she’d thrown during her “terrible two’s” had given her parents gray hair and turned Addy’s red. That was also around the time her parents started calling her Firecracker Addy. All these years later, the nickname stuck. It was a nickname Addy much preferred over her twin’s equally-deserved one of Sweet Livy.

  “Mo-om!” Stacy called from across the kitchen. She was chasing Rosie back through the swinging door into the living room. Addy caught the door before it hit Baby Lucy in the face and eased it shut.

  “Never a dull moment around here.” Addy’s mom smiled as she wiped her hands on her jeans and moved over to the colander of green beans.

  Addy’s middle sisters came back into the kitchen. Stacy held the bottle of nail polish victoriously over her head while Rosie jumped up and down, trying to steal it back.

  “Jeez, Mom,” Stacy said eyeing their mother’s grease-stained jeans. “Can we buy you some new pants the next time we go to the mall? Puh-lease?”

  “But these ones are fine,” their mom replied. She patted her leg. “Plenty of life left.”

  “Debatable,” Stacy muttered.

  Their mom wore what Stacy complained were “Mom jeans” and the same plain, cotton shirt that came in six different solid colors at Wal Mart (their mom never tired of bragging that they were buy one, get one 50% off). One of their mom’s favorite sayings was never buy something without a discount. The other was family, corn, and God, in that order.

  “Set the table, girls,” Addy’s mom said. “We’re having an early dinner because I need to take Aunt Meredith back to the airport, and I don’t want her to miss the celebration.”

  “Celebration?” Addy asked, taking the ear of corn her aunt handed her and shucking it over the compost bin.

  “Do you think I’d come all the way up to the Arctic for anything less than a celebration?” Aunt Meredith asked.

  “We don’t live in the Arctic,” Rosie informed their aunt.

  At ten years of age, Rosie was always trying to keep up with her older sisters.

  “You don’t?” Aunt Meredith glanced around, feigning confusion. “Then why is it so cold here?”

  “It’s because you’re from Texas and we live in New York,” Rosie replied with confidence.

  “She was joking, stupid,” Stacy, three years older than Rosie, informed her younger sister. Stacy and Rosie bickered worse than the Cluckers.

  Lucy looked at Stacy and started to cry.

  “Girls, stop fighting,” their mom said. “You’re upsetting Baby Lucy.”

  “She isn’t a baby anymore,” Rosie informed their mom.

&
nbsp; Their mom just smiled.

  Livy opened her arms to Lucy, while Addy snatched the stuffed animal Lucy had dropped onto the floor and offered it to the baby.

  “Seriously, Mom.” Stacy threw up her hands. “Can’t you wash Chicken Little? That thing is smelling worse than usual.”

  They all looked at the stuffed animal Lucy was clutching and using to wipe her tears. Rosie had named the stuffed animal Chicken Little when Aunt Meredith first gave it to Lucy. Even though the toy was a duck and not a chicken, the name prevailed.

  There was the sound of boots being scraped against the side of the house, and then the back door slammed.

  “Livy-Addy-Stacy-Rosie-Lucy!” their dad called from the mudroom. “Where’s my fabulous five?”

  “Daddy’s home!” Stacy and Rosie shrieked. They raced for the back door, pushing and arguing as they went.

  Addy’s father came into the kitchen, a daughter clinging to each of his legs. He smiled, the corners of his eyes folding in the oft-practiced gesture. He rolled up the sleeves of his faded shirt—his uniform was flannel, jeans, and work boots, no matter the season—and combed his unruly tuft of graying brown hair with his fingers.

  “Hello, darling.” Addy’s mom stepped around Rosie, who was still clinging to their father’s pantleg, and gave her husband a kiss on the cheek.

  Addy looked at her family swarming around the kitchen. She loved them all so much it physically hurt. Everything was so warm and familiar.

  And yet, even as she was surrounded by all of them, she couldn’t help the disembodied sense that she didn’t quite belong with the rest of them. It was a feeling she got from time to time, and it had nothing to do with her red hair, green eyes, and height. It was a sense that she was an outsider staring in on someone else’s family.