Evanescent (Chronicles of Nerissette)

by Buchanan, Andria

  “I love you, too.” I buried my head in his chest and tried not to cry. “And thank you for coming to save me.”

  “You’d have done the same for me.”

  I heard a cough and lifted my head. John of Leavenwald coughed again, and I stepped back from Winston and wiped my hands on my trousers. John wouldn’t meet my eyes. “John?”

  He sprinted the few steps between us and wrapped his arms around me so tightly that ribs creaked as he buried his head against the top of my head. “Thank the stars I didn’t lose you too,” he murmured. “I don’t know what I’d have done if I lost both of you.”

  “You’ll never lose me again,” I promised.

  “We’ve got so much time to make up,” he whispered. “So many things for me to make up to you.”

  “Then it’s a good thing I’ve got nowhere else to go.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  I stood on the Cliffs of Fesir, looking out over Dramera Lake, and watched the sunset, staring at the crown that I’d finally managed to go back into the forest and retrieve. It didn’t feel right to wear it. Not now. Not with everything we’d lost today.

  “So, John of Leavenwald is your dad, huh?” Winston sauntered toward me, his hands in his pockets. “That’s got to be weird.”

  “A bit.” I smiled as he sat down beside me and took my hand in his. “It’s a good weird, though. Better than having a psycho, homicidal wizard for a father.”

  “True.” He nudged me with his shoulder.

  “He might make the whole prince consort thing a nightmare for you, though. You know, being my dad and all.”

  “He’s already threatened to wire my jaws shut if he ever sees us kissing again.”

  “Ouch.” I wrinkled my nose, and we both laughed.

  “I think we’ve got a few days before he actually does it though,” he said quietly, his voice becoming serious. “Since he’s leaving with the rest of his woodsmen in a few hours.”

  “He’s leaving?” I asked, stunned. What did he mean my father was leaving? We’d just gotten each other back.

  “The woodsmen do their funerals at dawn,” Winston said. “They’re going to…”

  “Bury Eamon.” I nodded. “They’re going to bury my brother.”

  “And then they’ll be back,” Winston said. “Your father made sure to tell me that. They’re going to take care of Eamon and then they’re coming back. He’s coming back.”

  “Good.” I sniffed and tried to ignore the sudden relief I felt. “That’s good.”

  “Allie?” Winston asked. “I’m curious about something. Something besides what happened with Eamon.”

  “What?”

  “What did the Fate Maker offer you earlier?”

  I turned back to the lake and tangled my fingers in the grass to keep from fidgeting. I couldn’t tell him the Fate Maker had given me a chance to go home and I’d refused it. That I hadn’t bargained for a way to get us all home. I couldn’t tell him that I’d had that chance and had let it go to get revenge instead.

  “Before you sent him to the Bleak, he told you it was your last chance. What did he mean by that? Your last chance for what?”

  “Nothing that I want. Or at least nothing I want enough to give up what I already have,” I said, deciding that the truth was always a better than lie, even if it didn’t really answer his question.

  “So what are you going to do with it?” He touched the Dragon’s Tear still hanging around my neck.

  “Timbago said that when I needed to destroy the tear, I would know how. So I’ll keep it safe until that happens.”

  “What are we going to do about your aunt? Her army is still massed at the borders, and several of our warriors said they’d seen her at the palace. She took part in the attack.”

  “I know.” I yanked up a tuft of grass and tossed it angrily at the lake. “I saw her, too.”

  “She will come for us at some point,” Winston said. “What do we do then?”

  I didn’t meet his eyes. “Then we fight. Just like we’ve fought every other time. We fight until we win or we die. We don’t have any other choice.”

  “When that day comes, no matter what happens, I’ll be right by your side.”

  “Together,” I said and smiled at him.

  “Always.”

  “Always.” I pressed my lips against his and let the world around us slip away. Tomorrow was soon enough to start worrying about what lay ahead.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I struggled to find a comfortable position to sleep in that night, twisting inside my blankets. I rolled onto my side, facing the window, and then shifted again so that I was facing the rest of the room, my back pressed against the wall.

  Mercedes had pulled the blankets over her head, and nothing but her dark hair visible. I watched as she kicked and jerked in her sleep, murmuring under her breath. Kitsuna had fallen asleep on top of her blankets, clutching her sword and still wearing her boots, ready to fight.

  I sat up and shook my head, pushing bits of hair that had escaped my braid out of my face. Outside the window a large, bloodred moon hung over Dramera Lake, and I gazed at it for a moment before retrieving the bit of the mirror that I had from my trouser pocket.

  “Show me my mother. Show me the last Golden Rose,” I said while touching it.

  The mirror went hazy, and my mother’s memories began to play out over the shard. Pink flowers shone and then the mirror cleared, and I could see my mother in her hospital bed.

  “I’m sorry.” I traced my hand over her cheek. “I’m so sorry I left you. And I’m sorry that I’ll never be coming back.”

  I lifted my eyes from the mirror and glanced up at the moon again. “But don’t worry, Mom. I’ve gotten rid of the Fate Maker, and he’ll never hurt any of us again. I promise you, no matter what, you’ll be safe. He’ll never get near you again.”

  I saw her jerk and then still, her head turning toward me, like she was somehow soothed by the sound of my voice. I ran my finger over the glass one last time and put it back in my pocket before lying back and trying to sleep. Tomorrow we were heading back toward Neris to start rebuilding the city and the palace, and I needed all the sleep I could get. We had a lot to do before our home would be livable again.

  “One tiny dragon jumping over a fence,” I said quietly. “Two tiny dragons jumping over a fence. Three tiny dragons jumping over a fence and setting the field on fire. Four tiny dragons—” I yawned and let my eyes drift shut.

  The world around me was hazy as I slipped into sleep, and I tried not to groan. Not another vision, another nightmare. Not tonight. I really needed a full night’s sleep.

  “Allie?” my mother’s soft voice called. What was she doing here? If this was a vision—and it certainly felt like a vision—then it was a vision about something bad, and I didn’t want my mother here for that.

  “Allie, sweetheart?”

  I rolled onto my back and saw my mother at the foot of the dirty pallet I was using as a bed, dressed as she had been the morning before her accident. I pulled myself up, and she sat down beside me, her hand brushing along the side of my face and trailing into my tangled hair. “Mom?”

  She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed. “Oh, Allie.”

  “Is it really you?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not really,” I admitted, sinking into her embrace, happy to have my mother again, even if she was just a hallucination brought on by one of my visions.

  “Mom?”

  She lifted her head and stared at me. “The end is coming,” she whispered, her eyes wide and filled with tears.

  “And then what happens?” I asked. “When the end comes, what happens?”

  “We’ll find a way to be together again.” She kissed my cheek and then unraveled her arms from around me, fading slowly from sight.

  “Mom?” I grabbed for her hand, trying to keep her with me. “Don’t go.”

  “We’ll be together again soon,” she said
before she disappeared.

  “Your time is coming, Your Majesty.” Esmeralda’s voice found my ears, and I turned to see her sitting behind me, my heart breaking at the sight of her. She was a vision, too, just like my mother. A dream that I could only see when my world was getting ready to turn upside down again. A warning signal for the crap that was about to come.

  “And when it does, if you are brave and we are triumphant, one day soon the end will come. We will all truly be free. Even you.”

  “I’m already free,” I said.

  “No, you’re not.” She licked one of her paws and kept her eyes on me. “But, soon, you will be. One way or another.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded as she started to fade away, my stomach flip-flopping with dread. “It’s the ‘one way or another’ part that always seems to end up getting people hurt. Usually the people I care about the most.”

  Acknowledgments

  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—no one ever writes a book alone. There are so many people to thank but the first has to be my lovely daughter Ainsley for asking me to write something that she would be able to read. Here is something for you to read. I hope it meets your expectations.

  Thank you as well to my editors at Entangled Teen, Libby Murphy and Danielle Rose Poiesz, as well as all the other hardworking editors, cover artists, publicists, and writers who make every single day that I work with Entangled Publishing a good one. Without all of you I’d still be doing a job I hated instead of one I love.

  And finally thank you to my family for putting up with the pixies, the dragons, the wizards, and the frozen pizzas that come with having a mother who spends her days writing stories and living inside her own head instead of doing more interesting things. I love all of you.

  Turn the page

  for a special look

  at the third and final book in

  the

  Chronicles of Nerissette

  trilogy

  Infinity

  by

  Andria Buchanan

  Prologue

  I was sitting in front of the mirror at the dressing table in the Queen’s Tower. That’s how I knew it was a dream. My Tower had been burnt during the Fate Maker’s last attack against the palace but right now, in my dream, it was still perfectly fine. It looked the same as it did the first time I’d ever set foot inside of it.

  “The end is coming,” my reflection announced, and my eyes widened as I stared back at the girl in the mirror.

  “What?”

  “I said,” my reflection said, “the end is coming. The Last Rose is on her throne, the relics have been found, and the land is free of the Fate Maker. The time of the Prophesies has come.”

  “Wait. What? No.” I shook my head and the girl in the mirror arched an eyebrow at me. “No, that’s not true. I don’t have all the relics. We’re searching for the last relic but I haven’t found it yet.”

  “You have found it,” the girl in the mirror argued. “The First Leaf was never lost. It’s always been with you. Because of it life flows through you. The ability to keep this world—and its people—alive.”

  “I don’t—”

  “The Last Great Rose is on her throne and the relics have been found. The dead will rise, the lost will be found, and our world will be free again. The Prophesies command it.”

  The girl in the mirror in front of me dissolved and when I looked into the mirror nothing stared back at me. The room behind me was reflected as if I wasn’t even there. “Wait.”

  “She’s right,” Esmeralda said and I gaped at the sorceress, still trapped inside the body of a small, black and white housecat sitting on the reflection of my bed in the mirror. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that she wasn’t actually there, and even in my dream she was just an illusion. “The time of the Prophesies has come.”

  “But the Prophesies are made up. Make believe. You should know, you’re the one who made them up.”

  “The things I wrote, I never meant for them to come true. But they have now. Fate, or whatever it is that truly guides us, has made the nightmares I wrote about come true and you’re the only one who can save us. Save our world, Allie. Save us. Before it’s too late.”

  “Save you from what? The Fate Maker is trapped in the Bleak. I’m signing a peace treaty with Bavasama in the morning. Our world is safe.”

  “Death is coming, my queen. A world of death and nightmares, and if you’re not prepared they will destroy us all. The nightmares that I unleashed upon this world will destroy us all.”

  “I don’t know how,” I said. “I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.”

  “When the time comes you’ll know,” Esmeralda said, her brilliant green eyes meeting mine in the mirror.

  “No, I won’t.”

  “There’s only one thing that can defeat nightmares,” Esmeralda said. “Only one thing stronger than fear.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Instead of answering the cat in the mirror began to fade away.

  “No!” I slapped my hand against the mirror. “No, don’t leave. You have to tell me it is I need to do to keep us safe. What I need to keep us safe from. You can’t leave me.”

  The cat disappeared, her eyes the last thing to fade away, as I stood there, watching her. “Don’t leave me,” I whispered. “Please don’t leave me. I can’t do this alone.”

  About the Author

  Andria Buchanan is the pen name for Patricia Eimer, a small-town girl who was blessed with a large tree in the backyard that was a perfect spot for reading on summer days. After a stint of “thinking practically” in her twenties she earned degrees in business and economics and worked for a software firm in southwestern Germany, but her passion has always been a good book.

  She currently lives in Pittsburgh with her two wonderful kids and a husband that learned the gourmet art of frozen pizzas to give her more time to write. When she’s not writing she can be found fencing and arguing with her dogs about plot points. Most days the Beagle wins but the Dalmatian is in close second. She’s a distant third.

  http://www.andriabuchanan.com/