by Leigh Evans
Half of me would always be waiting for the Weres.
Could I stand living like that? Or would I run out of gas like the Taurus? Find a town on the road to wait until they came to put me out of my misery?
I picked at the stitching on the steering wheel cover.
Maybe I could find a good place to hide. Somewhere they’d never think to find me.
A quarter inch of graying thread hung from the line of stitches. I tugged it, and it slipped through my fingers.
It would mean another cautious life. Holding myself in check until the inevitable explosion. And then I’d have to travel again, and find another place … not quite running, but something that felt close to it. Scurrying with my breath held, chin tucked in, eyes always scanning my surroundings. I knew that hunted feeling; it had been my constant companion the first dreadful year after the fire. Even after we’d settled in Deerfield and I’d relaxed into my life somewhat, there’d always been that residual tight sensation in my chest, as if Creemore’s air were still stuck deep in my lungs. I’d been holding on to it for … forever. All this time, waiting for permission to exhale.
Ridiculous. I wasn’t accountable to anyone anymore. No one except myself, and maybe some knee-jerk reaction to the crumbling honor codes Mum and Dad had woven into me when I was a kid. Courage, valor, and family all rolled up in one motto: Strongholds hold. They don’t give up. They don’t run. They don’t relinquish.
I’m not much of a Stronghold. Given a choice, I ran.
But if I did a runner this time, Lou would die among Weres, frightened and defenseless, and I’d spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, worrying. Eventually, I’d die too. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in fifty years. Alone for as long as it took with nothing more than an amulet who seemed strangely fixated on the corpse of another amulet.
The knot in my throat swelled until it became a bulge around all the stuff I kept swallowing down.
So. No running this time.
Problem one: I didn’t even know where to find Lou. None of her dreams had given me a solid clue, and it wasn’t like we could converse when she was dreaming; I was just a receptor to dreams—the earpiece without the mouthpiece.
She could be dead already; she hadn’t shared a dream in hours. No way to check unless—Oh my.
No way to check unless I went to Threall.
* * *
I’d broken my pledge—“I swear, Mum, I’ll never go to Threall”—twice, both times quite deliberately. The first time the very same day Mum pried the promise out of me. The second had been less than a year later. It had been a bad day, followed by a worse night. I’d hit my bed knowing two things: Lou was never going to open a portal and I was never going to speak to my brother again.
Traveling to Threall meant shearing my skin from my soul.
Nine years ago, I was too young to appreciate or anticipate the full horror of the agony my body would experience. I’d lasted maybe six seconds, hands stuffed over my mouth to hold back the screams, before I’d fallen back into my semimortal body.
With that, I’d closed the book on Threall. But now, things were different. Back then, I’d had a child’s body, and I’d been completely ignorant of the fact that Fae gifts don’t come into full power until after puberty. Imagine my shock when my talent for magic doubled the day I had my first period.
I gave the hanging thread another savage jerk.
How long was six seconds?
One thousand, two thousand, three thousand … six. Surely I could endure six seconds? How much longer would it take to make it all the way to Threall? Twice as much? I could stand twelve seconds of anguish in return for a future of peace, couldn’t I?
What had I told Trowbridge? I am Fae. My eyes flared and the interior of the vehicle turned briefly green as I remembered my announcement.
And today, I’d flared for the first time. If that wasn’t my body giving me the green light to purchase a day pass to Threall, I was a full-blooded Were. Enough. I grimly booted thoughts of Trowbridge into the corner of my brain where I kept broken things. Threall had been the catalyst for my flare, not my troublesome meet-up with Trowbridge. Hell, I’d been thinking about the land of mists ever since Lou’s abduction—no, even before that. A visit there had been in the back of my mind ever since I started receiving Lou’s dreams.
I just hadn’t got past the point of toying with the idea, to actually doing it.
If Mum was right, then I’d be the Mystwalker in that realm, capable of traveling deep into any Fae’s drowsing mind. Once I found Lou, I could mine her memories for details of her capture and discover her location. I imagined hero-me using my Threall-gained knowledge to slither in through a conveniently open window, tiptoeing past a sleeping Were, rousing my sleeping aunt, and leading her to Bob’s car.
I could go digging for other secrets too.
How to open a sealed portal.
How to find a long-lost brother.
I could be a twin again.
* * *
Basic Fae magic is simple, or at least it has always been so for me. I focused on a command—fetch, grow, squeeze, whatever—and then somehow that action verb became more than a word as my wish melded itself onto the ball of Fae magic resting in my gut. When I released my magic and told it to fetch, it was as if there were a layer of my will or essence thinly spread over the line of magic spinning from my fingertips. Safe to say, I extruded my magic. But going to Threall required the reverse action. First off there was no word for soul separation, and instead of unleashing my magic outward, I was asking it to turn inward—implode versus explode.
I breathed out, and in, short little breaths, and then I took one last huge breath, and visualized it sinking down to my lungs, and then going beyond that, right down to my stomach, where it surrounded my ball of magic and squeezed. Take me up to Threall. A flare of heat in my belly. Let my soul fly free. A quick stretch of my skin as my Were backed away from whatever she saw going on down there.
Up, I thought, imagining flight. Up.
Oh … I hurt. Like someone was pulling my head, and toes, and my ribs were starting to crack, my ligaments starting to tear. My breath came out in short little pants. Lexi. Lou. Up to Threall. “Push,” I said, through my teeth. My voice turned into a whine of pain, high through my nose. More squeezing, and then, the beginning of the rip.
There was a resistance, a grounding, tied to a piece of me that didn’t believe I could do it.
Oh Goddess.
A slow laceration—like being caught in the ragged claws of a sluggish contraction—impossible to stand. I sucked in some air, and pushed. One last horrific sharp rending, and then … No sound. No scents. No sensation of pain.
Overwhelming terror.
I had no body. I was nothing but a mind … a soul … a thing.
A floating thing.
No weight of Merry around my neck. No Were warm in my belly.
Nothing to anchor me to either realm.
Oh crap.
Chapter Twelve
Time passed. Not like eons, or days, or even hours. Just time. Long enough for me to contemplate the awfulness of being neither here nor there. Long enough for me to understand that minus physical sensation, emotions are blunted and muted—no aching throat to deepen your hurt, no gooseflesh or hair rising along your neck to amplify your fear—a concept, versus that marvelous gift of spirit and mind connected. Theoretically, that should be good, yes? No needless suffering, no squeezing pain in your solar plexus because you grieved for something you could never get back. And yet, it was worse. Because with nothing to distract you, sadness lingered and pervaded. You couldn’t self-medicate by feeding your taste buds ice cream or comfort yourself with the soothing scent of lavender. Without functioning eyes, you couldn’t observe any other life than your own interior one.
Nothing to hide behind. Nothing to do but think.
I want to have flesh again. Fingers and hands. Tear ducts and snot.
And then, another stretching
feeling, and a swelter of crushing physicality—skeleton and skin being sewn together, blood vessels and organs being added to the mixture … too much, too fast, the sudden heat of my blood, the grave weight of my flesh, the unyielding construct of my bones … I’d have screamed but I hadn’t earned my mouth … a little more agony as details were added—pores and hair, teeth and lips … and then, finally, oh bless you, Goddess, bless you. My body was returned to me. I had a heart. It was beating too fast. I was facedown—my least favorite position—boobs uncomfortably flattened, but beneath my knees and hips I felt solid ground. Gratitude and quick promises welled up. I swear I’ll never curse my big butt again. I’ll be thankful for everything I have from the swell of my upper lip to the dimples at the bottom of my spine.
I cracked open my eyes. My hand lay in a patch of sunlight on a small hummock of moss. It was so good to have a hand again. I spread my fingers and watched the tendons flex as my thumb pulled away from my splayed fingers. What a marvel of engineering and beauty was the semimortal hand. I turned it sideways, examining my paw. It looked pretty much like it did in earth’s realm, small and on the pale side. Except, my skin felt different here. Thinner, more delicate. It tingled.
It was the magic-tainted air. I could smell it, sweet as freesias. I’d caught that fragrance once before—the night a Were had leaped through Creemore’s portal—and had always remembered it as a double whammy: not only a scent, but a skin-humming physical reaction. Perhaps I’d remembered it wrong? Overemphasized its allure in my memory? The sensation I felt now was milder, its impact reduced just to a mild tingle that my body was already starting to ignore.
I sifted the air through my nose, testing for other scents beneath that sweet floral Fae fragrance, but there were none. Threall smelled like … flowers, damp mist, woods, moss … and nothing else. No humans. No Weres. No living creatures, big or small. And yet, I sensed living things all around me, even if I couldn’t see them—the instinct sharp enough to bring me up onto my knees. I looked around the empty clearing.
I’d materialized in a open space roughly the size and shape of one of Deerfield’s hockey rinks—about two hundred feet long, and less than half as wide. My lips curved into a smile. Mum had been right in one respect: Threall was a land of mists, but in this realm, the haze was predominantly bluish, not white, and it didn’t hover like a heavy layer of fog, it moved in streams. I watched a ribbon of blue haze drift across the glade before it ran a sinuous finger of smoke up over the sharp tangle of an overgrown hedgerow. My eyes followed—
Sweet Fae Stars. I sank down onto my heels in wonder. The lights.
The sky was full of them. Soft hazy balls of gold light—some sun-yellow, some as tepid as weak green tea, others defiantly peach toned, and a few, a blushing primrose. There were other colors too; shades of green-mottled blue, a pinch of pink, and even some that were decidedly earth toned, their faint amber glow almost lost beneath the soft blue smoke of Threall’s mist. Oh, even more lovely—in the far distance, just where fog-wreathed land met horizon, a handful of counterfeit blue moons twinkled. I wanted to pluck those blue orbs from the sky and pocket them like jewels.
My connection to this landscape was immediate. This belongs to me. Each and every light.
I watched their glow for a while, my fingers curling into fists, wanting to reach and touch. The sight of them roused an instinctive sense of destiny. Mine. There were no attached wires or electrical lines to explain their luminosity. The perfectly round balls—all of them roughly the same size, with skins as translucent as vellum—either hung from a branch by a strand of the same stuff covering their surface, or were jammed into the fork of a fantastically old tree.
Those trees. Even without their glowing lamps, the ancient specimens were the stuff of fantasy. What mortal had ever seen anything the size of these old elms? Their trunks were wide enough to drive a Hummer through and still have room to spare. There had to be hundreds of them. The vista of lights stretched for miles.
Mum was so wrong. This is where I belong. Watching over these soft hazy balls.
I took stock of my new empire. If the clearing was about the size of a small ice rink, then I’d say I was near the boards at the center line—at approximately the midpoint on one of the longer sides of the rectangular open space. When I glanced right, to the goalie area one hundred feet away, I got a quick impression of two enormous black walnut trees sitting in the shadows. I then turned to the left. That end of the clearing was better lit, and a great deal less green. A near vertical wall of sheer rock soared fifty feet into the sky. Above its cliff, the sky was purple-black.
Interesting. I returned my attention to the mossy meadow that surrounded me.
Someone had taken care to add a sense of symmetry to the field by planting two long rows of hawthorns, one on either side of the clearing. Back in the day, they may have been nice hedges, but now they were just a thick border of shrubs that had been allowed to grow into a dense line of ground-sweeping short scraggly trees. They were overgrown, but they still did their job of holding back the trees attempting to encroach on each side. They too were inner-lit, though their illuminations came from deep within the thicket, and were not as colorful nor as varied as the ones in the dark sky, and definitely not as accessible, thanks to the sharp thorns of the hawthorns. Their glows were golden toned, but—and this distinguished them from all the other balls I’d seen—their surface had been treated to a wash of red. The overall effect was watchful and brooding.
On the heels of that thought, a curl of blue mist emerged from the small gap in the row of shrubs. It wafted along the hedges’ tangled top, skimming the curved thorns, until it found a clump of red berries. Then, with a pirouette, it disappeared deep into the cluster. Less than two seconds later, it emerged in another spiral of now mauve vapor, before it streaked down where the two enormous black walnuts—one nothing more than a wind-nibbled, dying husk and the other, a robust living duplicate of it—held court.
The stream of colored smoke vanished inside the healthier walnut’s dense foliage.
Even as I told myself to relax, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. That tree gave me the willies. How could a bunch of leaves and twigs arouse the fight-or-flight response? Yes, it was the biggest, baddest walnut tree I’d ever beheld—sky-tipping, with heavily foliaged branches stretching out perhaps sixty feet wide. And it was decidedly ugly; misshapen bulbous growth erupted from the knotholes on its thick trunk. Not only that, its light set it apart from the other specimens in the forest. It was purple—not violet, or velvet pansy hued, but a deep eggplant with a throbbing blob of red in the middle of it. That freaking globe didn’t just glow, it glowered.
Yep, all those things were grab-Toto-and-run scary, but there were worse things down at that end of the clearing than an evil walnut.
I may have left school in sixth grade, but I’ve been selectively self-educating since then through Bob’s no-fines, no-jailtime lending library. Thus, I knew that before Columbus proved them wrong, those dumb-ass mortals had thought the world was flat. Hard to believe anyone could be that stupid. Almost impossible, unless you were standing where I was, looking at flat-earth evidence with your mouth hanging open in disbelief.
The world I’d been born to was round. Which meant, there was always a horizon. It’s one of those laws of nature you take for granted. But here in Threall, that cardinal rule did not apply. Where I was expecting some sort of vista beyond those two walnuts—a forest, or maybe a babbling brook, anything to give you a reference for perspective—there was nothing. No sense of definition between ground and sky. The air between the almost-dead and living tree was flat as flannel, and gray as a banker’s suit. Featureless—a backdrop of seething gray.
Not something you turn your back on, or for that matter, get too cozy with. What I meant to do was sidle away from it, but what I did was lurch. It took a few steps before I got my center of gravity realigned. It was almost like I was too light—I paused, stricken, and touched my
stomach. There was no answering quiver from my Were.
I was empty. Gutted and tenantless.
It had been a long-held wish: the total exorcism of my Were-bitch. Had I willed her dead? I froze, both hands pressed hard on my belly, my breath suddenly caught in my chest. Or was she alive and well in my mortal body, down in earth’s realm, thoroughly disgusted by the scents emanating from the strip club? I didn’t know, but I kind of wanted her back, just to check.
I might have stood there for quite some time, my worry split between the walnut’s malevolent ball of light, and the fact that my canine nature hadn’t made the boat to Threall, but someone issued an invitation.
It was a single chord.
Soon followed by a single note, plucked by a string instrument that thankfully bore no resemblance to a harp. Two more notes. Plaintive. Then those unseen fingers delivered to me a song. Simple in construction; its melody climbed upward, took a half step backward, pressed on for a higher note. Lazily played and melancholy too, as if the song were a line drawing, hastily sketched in by an artist puzzled by something he couldn’t figure out.
By the time the musician had played the final chorus, I’d pinpointed the location.
I started toward the wall of rock about a hundred feet to my left and as I did, the mist moved away, as if saying for all the world, “Clear the way, here comes the mighty Mystwalker.”
Hard not to experience a little stroke of pleasure at that thought.
As I got closer, it parted and revealed the presence of yet another ancient tree. Great effort had been made to keep this elderly beech safe. From what danger, I wasn’t sure, but it had been protected by a fence of sorts, fashioned from various lengths of branches. Someone, or several someones, had dug a trench, and then rammed branches into the exposed earth at a forty-five degree angle, one piece on top of the other. The end result was an intricate puzzle of forked branches and straight ones, bristling with pointed edges. The barrier curved completely around the elderly beech, serving as a six-foot-high impediment to anyone who had a pocketknife and a desire to carve their initials. I don’t know who the hell would love that tree enough to go to all that trouble; it was as ugly as sin too. Its thick branches had grown twisted, so that the overall visual was tortured wood, as viciously gnarled as an old lady’s arthritic knuckles.