“In case we need to leave in a hurry.”
I didn’t like to think about what in a graveyard would force us to leave ‘in a hurry’. Instead, I stayed close as he began inspecting headstones and plaques.
“What are we looking for?” I asked, hoping that if I could help, we could speed this up a little.
“Greyson.”
“Yes?”
“No. That’s what we’re looking for.” he glanced at me and then moved on to the grave.
My throat went dry. “Why would we be looking for my father’s grave?”
I would not be digging up my dad. Seraphim and her whole Quest nonsense could go to hell if that were the case.
“It’s not what you think.”
“Oh, really?”
“Really. Usually, when a Fairy Godmother dies, she tries to be buried with her charge. Since you have Seraphim, it only stands to reason that someone else in your ancestry must have had a Godmother as well; otherwise you never would have been assigned one. Plus, it wouldn’t be your father we’d be searching for. The fairies died a few millennia ago, so maybe a great, great something or other. I’m still iffy on human lifespans so I’m not sure how many ‘greats’ that adds up to.”
“But why are we only looking for graves on my father’s side?”
Sam paused, opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, and then looked at me nervously from beneath his lashes.
“Seraphim says she’s descended along the Greyson line.” his face was a mask of guilt and I opened my mouth to call him on it but he turned, and hurried away.
We moved in silence for a few minutes while I let him stew. I finally spoke, only when I couldn’t take the lack of conversation any longer.
“We won’t have to dig anyone up will we?”
He hesitated visibly.
“It depends.”
My eyes narrowed. “On what?”
“On what sort of fairy we’re dealing with.”
“Explain.” I stopped in my tracks, forcing him to do the same, and folded my arms beneath my breasts. One mini, fairy, body I could handle. The decomposing carcass of my great great something or other? No, sir. Not this day.
He sighed. “Magic follows certain paradigms. With any species, you’ll find that their denominations usually fall within the five elements. Earth, fire, wind, water, and spirit. This not only determines our strengths in life and magic, but also how our bodies are returned back to the ether. If the Fairy we find was particularly strong in earth magic, then we will have to do some digging in order to find her.”
“What if she was from the fire nation?”
“Then I hope you brought matches.”
* * * *
“Why are there so many dead people?” I didn’t mean to whine, but I couldn’t help it. We’d been at this for hours already, we’d even had time to stop for a late lunch, and now we were finally nearing the back end of the cemetery. I’d found my Great Aunt Josephine, gave the bird to my skeevy Uncle Peter, and said hello to three out of four of my mother’s ex-husbands. Three out of four. I hadn’t found Dad’s grave yet. In fact there hadn’t been a Greyson anywhere in sight.
“There are dozens of cemeteries in this city. How do you know they’re even buried here? They could be anywhere.”
“I Googled it.”
That actually made a lot of sense.
I threw myself back into the search with renewed vigor. I’d only been at it another five minutes or so, when I heard it.
Music.
Someone was playing a flute or something, and the delicate notes echoed eerily in the gathering twilight. I turned to ask Sam if he’d heard it, only to jump when I realized he stood less than a foot away. He wasn’t looking at me, instead staring over my head and off into the distance. His body was rigid with tension and as I watched his upper lip peeled back from his teeth in a silent snarl.
“Get to the bike.”
The fear came, sudden and sharp. “What’s wrong?”
“Go.” he barked, and grabbed my arm in a grip like iron, steering me around and pushing me in the direction we’d just come from.
Not wanting to just leave him there, I hesitated. When he realized I hadn’t moved he turned on me like wild thing. He walked into me, breaking into my personal space, with all the lethal grace of a leopard. Those dancing flecks of black had completely swallowed the blue of his eyes and he glared down at me with a gaze as hard as granite. When he spoke, I swore I could smell sulfur.
“Get. To. The bike.”
His words were measured, but his voice whispered a threat. It promised pain and destruction, and shivering more from his behavior than any unknown danger he may have been protecting me from, I stumbled away from him and ran.
I’d taken two steps, maybe three, before the ground beneath my feet began to tremble and sway. I tried to keep running but the ground was bucking like a bull in sight of cape and I fell, hitting a gravestone on my way down. As abruptly as the quake started, the land fell still once again.
The bump on my head had me swaying and I had to fight down an almost violent urge to throw up. I hadn’t eaten since…well, since the cheesecake with Flo and there was no satisfaction to be had in dry heaving.
I swayed on hands and knees until I felt steady enough to rise. Only, when I lifted my head all thoughts of standing just sort of…slipped away.
A little girl stood in front of me. She was trailing her hand back and forth across the top of one of the gravestones, and watching me with an unblinking intensity I would have found disturbing if I hadn’t known instinctively that she wouldn’t hurt me.
Her blond hair was pulled up into a high ponytail that bounced with even the slightest movement she made. She looked pale. Too pale. There were dark, circles beneath her blue eyes that spoke of sleepless nights and a grayish cast to her rosebud of a mouth that made her look sickly.
Dirt clung to the edges of her hair, and to the wispy white material that made up her dress. She wasn’t wearing any shoes, and the dress was short enough that I could see the way her toes curled into the soft dirt beneath her.
Someone was yelling behind me, but I ignored the voice in favor of the little girl. She was so, so pretty. And all I wanted to do was please her.
“Hello.”
She said, her voice strangely distant, and I smiled in relief as her words seemed to drag the pain in my head away.
“Hi.” I said happily.
“You woke me up.” she said, her bottom lip jutting out in a pout and I found myself crawling to her, instantly contrite and wanting to offer comfort.
“I’m sorry. It must have been the music. But Sam and I would never—”
The child cut me off by placing a finger against my lips. She was really, freakin cold. Also she smiled like soil and something rotting. My nose was beginning to wrinkle in distaste but then she grinned at me, and suddenly how she smelled and what she looked like didn’t matter anymore.
Nothing did.
“It’s all right Alexandria Marie Greyson. The ‘how’ of it doesn’t much matter now, does it? All that matters is that we can finally be together. Now I can take care of you the way you need. Wouldn’t you like that?”
I nodded and found myself relaxing into the palm she settled against my cheek.
“Wouldn’t it be grand if we could send that wicked old Maleficent away? That, dirty, rotten, witch doesn’t deserve you. She’s proved that, hasn’t she?”
I almost nodded in agreement, but something about her wording confused me. Maleficent? The hell? Last I checked I wasn’t exactly anyone’s version of a sleeping beauty.
“Who are you?”
Her eyes filled with tears and I had to work hard not to break down completely at the hurt my question caused her. It was like I was drowning on something. Like the real Alex was trapped beneath miles and miles of tar and choking on the stuff, while this girl fed me the emotions she wanted me to have.
But just because I realized what was happen
ing didn’t mean I could stop it.
“Don’t you know me?”
To my shame, I was forced to shake my head.
“I’m your Godmother, Seraphim.” she patted the side of my face and smiled. Some part of me, the part buried deep beneath her spell began to scream as the skin along her cheeks began to peel away, tearing like wet tissue to reveal bone and teeth, muscle and sinew.
“I’ve come to grant your wish.”
“What wish?” I whispered, some of my terror leaking into my dreamy monotone.
She laughed and one of her pretty blue eyes began to slough to one side as if her face was wax and someone had just brought a flame too close. “Your wish for peace, silly girl.”
Quick as a snake, the hand on my face tangled in my hair. She released me from her glamour at the same time she jerked my head back at an angle that made things in my neck pop ominously. I tried pushing her away but she slapped my hands away with the ease of batting away an insect. Because of how far my head was angled back, I couldn’t even scream when, with a sound like popping corn, her jaw unhinged. Not unhinged as in fell off, unhinged as in she was the boa constrictor and I was her chosen meal for the day. I could only stare, wide-eyed, and whimpering as she came at me, mouth widening like a flesh and blood version of hell and a roar just shy of demonic singing her triumph to the sky.
Then she bit me.
The world sort of…dissolved, and when I woke up I was sitting on my back patio. Mrs. Pearson wasn’t anywhere in sight, but I had the distinct feeling that I was waiting for someone. It was midmorning and the traffic outside was light enough that I could hear the birds singing.
It was nice.
I had a blanket wrapped around my shoulders and was just thinking about how I was too comfortable to move, even though I was starving, when warm hands slid along my shoulders. I sighed, and my head fell back of its own accord.
There.
A man’s chuckle.
I closed my eyes.
Lips, hot and firm, working patiently against my own. When my own lips finally parted, I tasted coffee on his tongue.
He tasted like something darkly sweet. Like Hazelnut or baked vanilla.
He tasted like home and I would have sunken completely into him, let the feel of his hands and mouth carry me away, had he not shouted my name.
“Alex!”
My eyes snapped open, and I realized with an icy stab of panic that a little girl was chewing a hole in my collarbone. She’d only taken away surface chunks, but with the vigor with which she was ripping into my skin, it wouldn’t be long before she met bone, and snapped right through it.
A high pitched shrill ripped through the air, bringing the child up short, and she pulled back from me, snarling in abated hunger. Saliva and blood dripped from her canines and her eyes were slits in her once-lovely face. More skin was beginning to fall from her bones and she looked down at me desperately, her face already growing slack and dead once more with the need to feed.
She was lunging forward again, when a black blur streaked across the air over my head, and ripped her away from me. The force of the collision was enough to send all three of us rolling, though the other two traveled much further than I did as their struggle intensified.
“Sam.” somehow, I knew that mad explosion of muscle and rage had to be him. The gathering darkness and the blow to the head were making it hard for me to understand what I was seeing. I just knew that the black blur had to defeat the white blur if either one of us were going to make it out of the cemetery alive.
I saw the child swipe at him and there was a terrible noise, like the sound of a dying animal, and I swore that I could smell blood on the air.
Mine or his I didn’t know.
“Sam!” I screamed it, trying to get to my feet, to help, but down I went again. I looked up in time to see him pause. He turned his head, to look for me I suppose, and in that moment of inattention the little girl moved. She ripped a headstone from the ground, swung it, and struck him across the head with such force that it spun him around. I screamed again, and this time when I struggled to my feet, I stayed there. Then I started to run. In my heart I knew I wouldn’t get there in time. She was standing over him, headstone raised high, her laughter infectious, even now when she was about to bring that heavy weight down onto his skull.
Then that noise came again. A high pitched whistle, and just as Sam had done when he’d heard me scream his name, the girl hesitated and looked toward the sound, her face a mask of irritation.
I didn’t exactly see what happened next. One second Sam was a goner and the next the girl was falling to the ground like a puppet with her strings cut. He stood over her limp body as it began to dissolve like acid into the grass, and there was something very strange about his eyes…
His skin looked different too.
What was wrong with him?
As I got closer I determined that it must have been a trick of the light, because he seemed normal enough. Just exhausted. His face was pale and there was dirt and blood smeared down the side of his neck.
“Jesus. Are you all right?” My hands were on him before I could think things through and I found myself checking him over for scrapes and cuts much the same way my mother used to do when I was little and life had knocked me flat on my ass. There was a gash along one leg and a few scrapes along his knuckles. The worst damage had to be a wound across his abdomen where the girl had tried to slice him open.
Any deeper and parts of Sam would have been on the ground.
Just like poor Mr. Jenkins.
I looked up at him and was shocked to realize that his image was so blurry because my eyes were filled with tears. I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else dying because of me, and there was a sense of near painful relief that Sam, at least, was all right.
“You kicked that little girl’s ass.”
This was my version of praise, and though he frowned over the sight of the tears, my words seemed to please him. Suspicious, he inspected me a moment longer to be sure I was really ok, and then allowed himself to grin.
“I didn’t. Not really. But I did take her head.”
Hold up.
“Say what now?”
Still grinning, he lifted his hand and I saw he held the child’s decapitated head by the ponytail.
I squeaked in pure, unadulterated, terror.
“Now we have the first ingredient and—”
But I was no longer listening. I was too busy staring at the way the skin was dripping from her skull. I may have been able to do some breathing exercises or something and work my way through it, but then the once sightless eyes turned to look at me, and the lipless mouth grinned in macabre delight.
“Alex? Alex, what’s wrong.”
Sam’s voice grew very distant, and the next thing I knew I was falling and the world went dark.
* * * *
Someone was talking.
Two someone’s actually. Both men, if the deep timbre of their voices was any indication. I would have opened my eyes to check and see, but I was too comfortable where I was to try. As I lay there, their voices became more distinct.
“—it’s a myth. It doesn’t actually work that way.”
“How would you know?”
“I’ve seen a number of idiots try and fail. Kisses can’t break spells.”
“Ah, but true love’s kiss—”
“Is just an excuse to molest an innocent woman while she can’t fight back or complain.”
There was movement and then a low, threatening, growl of a sound. “Get away from her.”
“I’m just trying to help.”
Sam’s voice was sardonic. “She’s unconscious, Prince Charming. Not trapped in an enchanted sleep. Now go sit over there before I hurt you in places you’re fond of.”
“Me-ow.”
I was tempted to pretend unconsciousness for a little bit longer, if only to hear more of this fascinating conversation, but my stomach gave me away.
&n
bsp; “Alex?”
I opened my eyes to see Sam looking down at me in concern. Beyond his head I recognized the ceiling of my apartment. I also recognized the awesomeness that was my couch. Sam’s hair had come loose from its topknot and hung in a tangled mess nearly to his shoulders so that there was a corkscrew of inky, black, curls he had to contend with as he leaned over me. For a second we were cocooned by the fall of his hair, and my world was nothing but blue eyes and the comforting scent of hazelnut.
We locked gazes and there was a millisecond of knowledge, of shared relief that we were both all right, and then he was pulling away. Taking a step back both literally and figuratively.
I can’t exactly say that I wasn’t happy to see him go. Things were getting a bit confusing and I didn’t like this easy sense of camaraderie that had sprung up between the two of us. I noted he hadn’t taken the time to clean any of the blood and grime off from the cemetery. Either I hadn’t been out that long, which I doubted considering the circumstances, or he hadn’t trusted the stranger standing at his shoulder enough to leave me alone with him. Which I understood and approved of.
The man who’d been looking for an excuse to accost me was about an inch or two taller than Sam, though he lacked the other’s man’s sheer mass. He was leanly muscled. Like a runner or swimmer in comparison to a linebacker. His wheat blond hair was cropped short and spiked a little at the top. It went well with his warm brown eyes and dazzlingly white smile. The freckles across the bridge of his nose added to the sense of good ol’ boy charm. Despite my better judgment I found myself growing amused about the exchange I’d overheard earlier rather than taking it as a sign of his character as had been my original intent.
Unlike the two of us, there wasn’t a mark to be found on the newcomer. In fact he was almost annoyingly clean. However, despite his air of superiority, the pristinely pressed white button down, and hundred dollar jeans (hey, I come from money so I know), I found that I wasn’t automatically inclined to dislike him.
Distrust him?
Yes.
Dislike him?
No.
“She warned me that you’d be lovely, but I have to say,” he shook his head in wander and his eyes seemed to drink in the sight of me. “There was no way I could prepare myself for such beauty.”
The Dragon King and I Page 7