by D. N. Hoxa
“So, you’ll do it? You’ll ask the King to strip her?” I asked halfheartedly.
“I will,” he said with a determined nod. “There’s no place else she can hide, Winter. Without the King’s army, she’ll be alone.”
“But she has the kids.” Just the thought of that made me want to throw up.
“And she needs them. She’s not going to kill them. Right now, our best advantage is time. We can use the whole day to come up with answers, and only give Jane a couple hours in the fairy realm,” Julian said.
“She can’t have a few hours.” God, she shouldn’t have been allowed to have a single minute. Maybe Bender had been right. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so stubborn and let him take Ezra back to the covens instead.
“We need those few hours. We need to find out how to kill her, for good this time,” Bender said. “Wayne, my niece is with her. Trust me, there’s nothing I want more than to go find her, guns blazing, but it’s not going to work.”
He was right, of course. They both were, but the poisoned blood coursing through my veins wouldn’t let me even sit down. “Let’s split,” I said, as an idea came to my mind. “Julian and I will go to the fairy realm and try to speak to the Seelie King, and you can go search the ECU for her body, and a way to kill her.”
“And if you can’t convince him? Wayne, she has people willing to die for her. We need to be able to fight the fairies, too. We need help,” Bender said.
“He’s right,” said Julian reluctantly. “We need all the help we can get.”
“We don’t have time to go to the covens,” I hissed. Lynn and Ezra were with Jane Dunham! How did they not get that?
“We’re going to have to make time because we can’t do this on our own,” Bender said with a sigh, then walked to the kitchen sink to get a glass of water.
“Winter, we need to be ready for everything. If we let her catch us off guard like she did today, we won’t be able to save them,” Julian said with a sigh. Fuck. I hated it when he was right. “I think I have another idea, and you might not like it, but it could work.”
My whole body was covered in goosebumps. An idea was good. And idea was so much better than what I had.
“What is it?” I asked breathlessly.
“If the coven agrees to call a meeting with the Seelie King and his Court, they’ll be more vulnerable here than back at home. If all the coven leaders demand they strip Raina, it’s going to be much better than coming from me. I’m just a Prince, and they are leaders of hundreds of thousands of witches. And there’s a reason Jane is hiding in the fairy realm. She might be stronger there, and if the King bans her while she’s on Earth, she won’t be able to go back home. Assuming that’s where she took Lynn and Ezra…”
“She won’t be able to get back to them,” I whispered. “Holy spell…” This was brilliant. This was fucking brilliant.
“What the hell is this?”
I’d been about to jump in Julian’s arms and kiss the hell out of him, when Bender called our attention to the kitchen. He was standing behind the counter, looking down at the floor with a glass of water in his hand.
Julian and I rushed to him.
Behind the counter, there was a…thing made of white, shiny metal that strangely looked like wings with very smooth edges.
“What the fuck?” I’d never seen that thing in my life before. It definitely wasn’t there while we’d been sitting on the stools. “What is it?”
I touched it with the tip of my sneaker like a moron, like I was expecting it to move or something, when it was made of metal. Julian squatted down in front of it and read the engraved symbols around the smooth edges of the round wings.
Then, he reached out a hand and touched it. Shivers washed down my back, but nothing happened. He grabbed it and stood up. Now that we could see it from up close, it was a perfect circle, with two curvy openings on either side, which was what had made me think of wings initially.
“I think it’s a shield,” Julian whispered. “These are fairy symbols, but very old ones.” Then, he turned the thing around.
My eyes almost popped out of my forehead. It was the dragon pen!
“Holy shit,” I breathed, reaching out to touch it. The dragon was no longer embroidered around it, but it was the same size and had the same other decorations on its side. It held the two round wings together—something like a handle.
“It must have opened when you threw it to the floor,” Julian said, then grabbed the handle in his hand and brought the thing in front of him. Yep, definitely a shield. The opening between the wings let you see in front of you, and the one on the bottom gave you enough space to hold a weapon. It was really something.
“Try it on,” Julian said and handed it to me. For some reason, as I took it in my hand, I was much more excited than I should have been, considering. The shield was much lighter than it looked. The wings, probably of the dragon that had been embroidered around the handle before—minus the sharp edges—shone against the sun streaming through the windows. The small symbols around them weren’t ones I could ever hope to understand, but they did look very beautiful.
“This thing aside, are we going back to Bloomsburg or not?” Bender said, making another shiver run down my back. I put the shield on the counter. We had no time to waste admiring it.
A second later, the shield began to move.
It was over so fast, I didn’t even have time to take a step back. The wings folded on themselves and somehow hid inside the handle, and now the dragon was around it again, the sharp tip of its tail clearly visible.
“That’s something,” Julian muttered, and took it in his hands. It definitely was.
“Keep it. We might need it later,” I said, and nodded for the door. I’d have time to analyze the thing later. “Let’s go to Bloomsburg.”
I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t dread seeing my aunt. No matter what was happening now, a very big part of me was still hung up on Jane Dunham’s words about my father. I didn’t intend to mention it to Amelia, but every cell in my body was burning to know. Burning to look into her eyes and hear her say that it was all bullshit. That Jane had lied. My aunt knew nothing of who or where my father was.
“We’ll take my car,” Bender said when we walked out on the street, leaving a house nearly completely broken down and a front yard full of dead fairy bodies behind us.
“Who’s going to clean that up?” I asked halfheartedly, not even sure if I really wanted to know.
“I’ll send some people over later. Right now, we got more important things to do,” Bender said.
We walked over to his Audi, which was much faster than Turtle. It sucked leaving it behind, but at least there, the car was going to be safe. Unfortunately, I couldn’t say the same thing about us.
Sixteen
By the time we arrived in Bloomsburg, I was sweating like a pig. My own mind was turning against me, making up scenarios where we’d be late in getting to Lynn and Ezra and they’d be…the D word.
What were they doing? Were they even awake? I hoped not.
And what was Jane up to with them?
I sat in the back while Julian and Bender stayed in the front. They even talked to each other every now and then. Julian spoke about fairy politics and Bender told him about the Bone coven. In their scale, that made them best friends already.
Trying to get involved in the conversations resulted in my head pounding even harder than normal, so I quit even listening to them after the first try. Instead, I shut down to myself and bathed in misery. Now that we were in front of the building the Bone leaders had turned into their headquarters, I could barely even breathe.
I’d used wet wipes Bender kept in his glove compartment to wipe off the blood from my face and body—even my hair. I hadn’t lost any of my teeth from the fall on the stairs, so there was that at least. I still looked like shit and I was shaking when we climbed out of the car.
The street was quiet, only two other houses in front of the whi
te, four story building in front of us. Three witches stood guard in front of the double doors, and I could see three more standing at the sides of the building. There was no grass on the lawn—only dirt. Bender said the parking lot was in the back, but neither of us had any patience to wait for the back gates to be open, then report who it was that was going through. We’d rather just tell the guards in the front.
They did recognize us when we walked up to them.
“Are they in?” Bender asked with nod.
The witch in middle nodded, his brown eyes sizing us up, even though that was where Bender went daily. His offices were in that building, too.
“Do they have clearance?” the witch asked Bender, nodding at us.
“They do,” Bender said. “It’s urgent.”
“I need to notify—”
“I’ve already notified them over the phone,” Bender said impatiently. “They’re waiting.”
I had no idea if that was true—he could have sent a text or even called while I’d zoned out in the backseat, but the witch guards nodded and stepped aside. Taking in a deep breath, I followed Bender.
The air was considerably colder in there. The hallway was small and barely fit the stairway and the seven doors. Two witches were walking toward each other when we walked in, and when they saw us, they froze in place, as if it was that obvious that we weren’t supposed to be there, or that we looked like shit. We’d healed already. It didn’t matter that our clothes were a mess. Stopping somewhere to change would have meant wasting time, so we’d just kept going.
Bender took us up the stairs. The second floor was a copy of the one before, except no people were there and all the doors were closed.
“My office,” Bender mumbled, pointing at the third door to the right. None of them had any signs. The third floor was the same, too, except at the corner, there was a plastic water can and a single cabinet with a few mugs on top of it, and a kettle.
The fourth floor was different. At the top of the stairs, there was a steel door with a panel to the side, and to open it, Bender had to swipe a white card over the scanner. With a low beep, the heavy looking door buzzed until Bender turned the knob.
Behind it, it wasn’t an office; it was a lounge room. On the left, there was a complete set of white leather furniture and a large TV above a beautiful white stand. On the other, there were five desks with brand new looking and shiny computers on them. To the side of the desks, there was a cabinet, much bigger than the one on the floor below, with a lot of empty glasses and full bottles of alcohol. The carpets, the lamps, the pretty grey curtains—they all looked really expensive.
So, this was where the leaders worked.
Only, when we walked in, they were working while sitting in the leather couches, and watching TV.
They all looked surprised to see us, and immediately jumped to their feet. Joseph and his wife, Monica Raymond and her husband, Alice Rivera and Catrina Reigns—they were all there.
And my aunt.
Just the sight of her face made my stomach turn. The taste of bile filled my mouth and I almost let it go, right then and there. She had her eyes wide open, her lips slightly parted. The way she held her shoulders, my brain screamed guilty! Suddenly, it got very hard to breathe.
“Winter?” she whispered, and it took all I had not to cringe. Instead, I just looked down at the floor.
“Why are you here, Bender? What’s going on?” Mr. Turner, Monica Raymond’s husband said. “Did something happen?” He must have figured that by our outfits.
“The fairy has the boy,” Bender said with a sigh. “And Evie.”
His sister Caroline sat back down on the sofa as if her legs would no longer hold her up, not a drop of blood on her face.
“That’s not possible,” Joseph Davis said. “Evie is at her friend’s house. She texted me this morning.”
Rubbing his face furiously, Bender sighed. “She lied, Joseph,”
“Winter, what’s going on?” my aunt demanded. Hearing her voice was getting really difficult.
Taking in a deep breath, I looked up at the others. The sooner we told them everything, the sooner we could leave. “Let’s sit down first. There’s a lot we need to talk about.”
Bender waved for Julian and me to walk over to the sofas. The leaders watched us like we had an extra head each on our shoulders. I didn’t want to sit down, but standing was going to invite all of their eyes on me. I’d rather let Bender explain everything and handle all the stares. I just hoped he’d do it really fast.
“For God’s sake, Eli,” Monica Raymond said to Bender with a tired sigh. She was right—I felt the same way. He should have started by now.
But Bender took his sweet time and cleared his throat before he spoke. Julian took my hand in his and squeezed it, as if to tell me that I wasn’t alone. For once, his touch didn’t chase away the dark cloud over my head. For once, I didn’t believe him.
“Ezra walked away from home because he saw a vision that told him he needed to find Winter,” Bender said. “That's exactly what he did.”
All eyes turned to me. I looked down at my lap.
“How did he—” Alice Rivera started but Bender raised a hand to cut her off.
“Let me just tell you everything first. What we didn’t know all this time was that the fairy that Winter attacked in the fairy event in Manhattan was after him, too. As it appears, I was mistaken. She really is Jane Dunham,” said Bender reluctantly.
“But you killed her,” Amelia said, squinting her eyes at us in confusion. Every time I looked at her, chills washed down my whole body and the question reached all the way to the tip of my tongue. It took a lot of energy to keep my mouth shut.
“I don’t know how she’s doing it, but she’s alive, and wearing the skin of a fairy, just like the other Hedge witches wore the skins of wolves,” Bender said. You could tell by the looks on all their faces that they already knew how deep into shit we were. “Winter has been on the run with the boy and Julian. I found them in Providence while looking for Evie.”
“Where is she?” Caroline whispered, her voice weak and breaking.
The blood in my veins froze with guilt. I was the reason her daughter was in danger again. If I hadn’t gone to Lynn’s house the day before, she’d be home now. She’s be safe.
“She’s with Jane,” Bender said. “And with Ezra. The witch took them both, and we believe they’re in the fairy realm.”
“Winter, is this true?” Amelia asked me. That was a first. She usually trusted Bender even more than me.
“It is,” I said reluctantly. “But we have a plan, and we need your help.”
Caroline Davis covered her face with her hands and her shoulders shook violently as she cried. I could only imagine what she must have been thinking. Every time I was around her daughter, shit like this happened and Lynn life was endangered.
“We need you to request a meeting with the Seelie King and his Court,” Bender said. “Julian thinks we can get them to expose Jane Dunham here, much easier than in the fairy realm.”
“But the boy—” Monica Raymond started, but Julian cut her off.
“She’s keeping them in the fairy realm. If we can convince the King to expose her, he will banish her from the fairy realm. When he does that, she won’t be able to get back to Ezra or Lynn. They’ll be safe.”
A cry escaped Caroline’s lips. “Do it!” she shouted.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Catrina Reigns said, raising her palms at us. “How does she know Ezra? Why would a witch disguised as a fairy want him?”
She pressed my buttons real hard with that one. “Why don’t you tell us?”
Looking at Amelia was painful, but necessary. She’d been the one to shut the door to my face, when all I’d wanted to do was help her. I was still trying, but I hadn’t come up with an answer to this huge question yet: why wouldn’t she trust me?
“Tell you what?” Joseph David muttered, and I rolled my eyes.
“Wayne is right,”
Bender said. “If we’re going to be able to plan accordingly, we need to know why she’s after Ezra.”
“No, you don’t,” Monica Raymond spit.
“We do,” I said, a dumbfounded smile on my face. “Why does she want him? If we don’t know that, we’ll never catch her, even if the Seelie King does banish her.”
“We cannot count on that a hundred percent. Our odds are better here,” Julian said, “but the King can refuse to expose her. If that happens, we need to be prepared.”
It was like asking all of them to spill their dirtiest secrets. What the hell was up with them? What was Ezra? I wanted to know now more than ever.
“He’s the—” Caroline started but her husband cut her off.
“Caroline!” he shouted.
“Our daughter is in the fairy realm!” she cried. “You better make sure you do everything you can to bring her back safe!”
“She’s right,” Amelia said with a flinch, as if the words tasted bad in her mouth.
“There’s a reason that information needs to remain within coven leadership, Amelia,” Monica Raymond hissed. “If we go around telling everyone, there will be nothing left to tell.”
“So then why didn’t you protect him better? If Ezra is such a big deal, how come you demanded that his parents lock him in his house without ever seeing the light of day?” I asked. I hadn’t forgotten the report I’d taken from the Malone’s house. She had signed it herself. They were responsible for what had happened to Ezra just as much as I was.
But Monica Raymond clamped her mouth shut and leaned back on the sofa.
“The Spellmaker,” Amelia whispered.
“Excuse me?” Julian, Bender and I said at the same time.
“Ezra is the Spellmaker of our time.”
The Spellmaker.
What the hell did that even mean?
“I thought Spellmakers were made. They trained hard to be able to create spells, they…they’re old people, right?” I’d read about the scholars that could make spells. A very small number, but wasn’t that how all our spells were made? I’d never thought to even wonder about it before.