by Lola Gabriel
Archibald
There were sparks in the sudden dark like fireflies, and next to him he could feel Lyric vibrating. There were still scenes playing in his head from his childhood—Lyric laughing, her small sister trailing them around in a dirty dress from having fallen over. And before that, or maybe at the same time, his parents—the way they looked at one another. The way they laughed all the time, even when things were hard. His mother, who had helped people. Died for helping people.
“Was that you?” Archibald said in the dark. Archie. She called him Archie, and he liked it when she called him Archie. She had always called him Archie, after all.
“Yes,” Lyric said, her voice small where a moment ago it had filled the room. Downstairs, the humans were bumping about and talking in surprised voices about a fuse box, whatever that was.
“Impressive,” Archie said. He felt for her, her small vibrating body. He got an upper arm and followed it down to a hand, which he took in his.
In the dark beside him, Lyric snorted with laughter. His eyes were just beginning to adjust, so when he turned his head, he could see the outline of her. He leaned toward her, and his nose was in her hair, and then his mouth was on her neck, and she moved a little so his mouth was on her mouth, and she tasted of wine and a little salty from tears.
“You don’t hate me?” she asked, pulling away just a little to do so.
Now Archie laughed, but in an astonished way, not from amusement. “What?” he asked, but couldn’t stop himself kissing her again before he continued. “How could I hate you? You’re amazing, you’re brave, and you’re powerful and you’re so fucking beautiful.”
Lyric’s hand was on the back of Archie’s head now, deepening the kiss, and she began to push her body against his, and then nibble his lower lip, and—
The lights came back on.
“It’s not a hotel!” came a voice from the narrow stairway behind Lyric. The couple jumped apart, and instinctively Archie went to flatten down his hair. An old woman was standing on the top step, staring at them, leaning against the banister. Then, quite suddenly, she cracked into laughter and said, “Away wi the both a ya!”
Archibald stood up very quickly, almost knocking over his glass of wine, which he then picked up and drank far too quickly. By the time Lyric had stood up beside him and righted her clothing, the old woman had made her creaking way downstairs.
“Bloody hell, Archie,” she said, “you’re such a goody two shoes. Can you calm down?”
“I don’t think so,” Archie said. “I’ve sort of had to be like this. I run a kingdom and I have poor role models, so I overcompensate.”
Lyric, who had bee-stung lips from their recent kissing and color to her cheekbones, raised her eyebrows at him.
“Also,” Archibald said, “I need to be keyed up, because we’re going to do some…well, I guess we’re going to do some mad shit.”
Lyric laughed now, and Archie nearly let embarrassment overtake him. But he couldn’t. Instead, he pulled her by the hand down the staircase and out the front door of the pub. From behind the counter, the woman threw the two of them a wink.
The cobbled lane was still wet, but the rain seemed to have stopped. Above them, clouds skittered in a mostly clear sky and a yellowish moon stood half full.
“So,” Archie said, “are you powerful enough to get us home, or what? I could do it, but I’d have to use a bunch of spells and…”
Lyric pretty much jumped at him. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him, and he could feel her smile even through the kiss. Then, when she landed, she took off the coat she had borrowed and handed it to him. “It’s Lilly’s!” she said. “I’ve got to give it back. Keep ahold of it.” And she stretched her shoulders this way and that and then unfurled her wings, which looked almost like swirling nebulae in the moonlight.
“Okay,” Lyric said, and she positioned herself beside Archie, “I know it doesn’t seem like it will work, but just hold my hand. I’m much better than the time I mostly fell out of that tree.”
Archie didn’t speak, but not because he didn’t believe her. In fact, he was in awe. He took the hand she offered, and they rose surprisingly smoothly into the air, the city shrinking beneath them until it was just strings of light, black ribbons of river, and dark squares of parks, with a vein of white light for the motorway that ran through its middle.
“Your hands are sweating,” Lyric said into Archie’s ear, her breath warm on the side of his face and his neck.
“We’re very, very high up,” he said. “I don’t usually travel like this.”
Lyric squeezed Archie’s hand, and it really did calm him. She was smiling, not a silly or a cheeky smile, a real, happy one. And then suddenly she turned to him. “Hang on,” she said.
This was a renewed kind of scary now that Archie’s initial adrenaline had worn off. He wriggled, and his hand nearly came out of Lyric’s.
“Bloody hell!” She grabbed his fingers incredibly tight, and then held them with her other hand so that she could move back to palm-to-palm, interlaced fingers, without losing contact. “Do you want to plunge to your death?”
Archie let out a noise he didn’t know he could make. “Sorry!” he said. “Ah…so, actually, I thought we would go and get your mother and sister.”
Archie expected, or at least half expected, Lyric to laugh at him or tell him he was an idiot. Instead she said, “I’m listening.”
The plan was, as yet, not totally clear even to Archibald. But he had a palace, and diplomatic immunity, and a much stronger standing in the immortal elite than a fading fae king. In fact, he might be able to get the council of elders to indict Albaline for his behavior, especially trying to marry Lyric off.
“Archie, the plan! Do you have one?” Lyric sort of shook him by the arm.
“Uh…well…you got out, didn’t you?”
Lyric nodded. “Yes,” she said, “and I can get back in, but my sister and my mother… My dad has powerful friends.”
They had sped up and were passing over what had to be open countryside now. The only lights below were all from cars on the roads or from small villages which sat in orange-yellow clusters.
“Well,” Archie said, “so do I… and I have an incredibly well-fortified palace. You know, before my dad ran away to…”
“To grieve, Archie, you know that’s what he’s doing. I remember how much your parents loved one another. I think they might be one of the only royal couples I have ever seen who truly were mates.”
Archie was silent for a moment after this. Then he said, “Yes, but he left me on my own.”
“And how are you doing?” Lyric asked, squeezing his hand again. She looked at him, and her eyes, dark in the moonlight, told him she wished she could do more than just squeeze a hand. Archie didn’t answer, but Lyric said, “I hear you’re doing fine. Maybe overcompensating a bit with all the regulations you seem to have brought in, but otherwise…”
“Okay,” Archie said, “okay! So are we going to try, then, to get your family? To save them? And you, Lyric, I want to save you.”
Lyric leant over and kissed Archie softly on the cheek. Then she said, “Fuck it. Let’s go. You don’t mind if I speed up, right?”
14
Lyric
The thought of Archie’s plan, if you could really even call it a plan, was making Lyric’s heart beat hard against her ribcage. Not as fast as her wings were beating, of course—moving like the wings of a hummingbird against the streams of magic in the air to get them down to the southern reaches of London where, presumably, her father was sleeping in their small, weathered stone castle in the rolling Surrey hills.
Archie had hardly had to persuade her, because this felt right! It felt more right than anything else had for a very, very long time. And at the moment, she wasn’t sure if that was just not running anymore, or being in the sky going very fast, or trying to take back her life, and her sister’s life.
And, she was being supported in her effo
rts. She didn’t expect this. Archie’s hand felt warm in hers. Could those things be untangled from one another? Would she have done any of this without him crashing into her life and trying to be her knight in shining armor? Maybe he would succeed, inasmuch as she actually needed one. An emotional-support knight in shining armor.
Lyric’s mind wandered, and she took a while to notice the dirty yellow pollution smell that was beginning to surround them. When she did, she slowed to a relative flutter and looked at Archie. His hair was a mess, and he was quite pale.
“Nearly there,” Lyric said. “Are you ready?”
“If I’m not sick,” Archie replied, “I’ll be ready. Land outside, and I’ll bring you in like I’ve just found you and I’m bringing you home. I’ll demand an official handing over of the crystal.”
Lyric nodded a slow nod. “Okay,” she said. “This just might work.”
“I had to concentrate on something other than the flying,” Archie said as Lyric brought them to the ground on a country lane. “And making a plan worked, sort of.” Having said this, he leaned heavily on Lyric’s shoulder, and she let him. She rubbed his back and smoothed his mane of hair down behind his ears.
“You’ll be okay in a moment,” she said. “You need to get your sky legs if we’re going to…well…”
Archie, color returning to his face, leaned in and kissed Lyric. He stroked the nape of her neck with his cloud-cold fingers. “We are going to,” he said, “aren’t we?”
Flying didn’t make Lyric nauseous, but this made her stomach flip. “Mhmm,” she said and stepped away from Archie. She couldn’t hold his melted copper eyes with her own, or she would melt too…or something. They had a job to do, so they should do it, and any talk about other things could wait. Their feelings weren’t going anywhere, were they?
“It’s this way,” Lyric said, pointing down a tree-lined street. “It looks like a ruin from outside the magical boundary, and obviously only immortals can cross that.”
Archie nodded. “Standard stuff,” he said. And he felt for her hand, which she let him take for a moment because it made her feel safe, and she needed to feel safe right now. Then she shook him off.
“We can’t. What if my father or someone else from the castle sees? You’re bringing home someone you think is a freed prisoner,” she said.
“Right,” Archie agreed. “Right, yeah.” They walked on for a little longer, and soon the hulking shape of a modest castle, its turrets fallen and the whole thing overgrown with grass, trees, and vines, came into grey view. Around it was a fence topped with barbed wire and covered in signs that said DO NOT ENTER and DANGER OF DEATH. The two ignored it, pushed their bodies against it, and after a moment and a vague ripple of light, they were through.
There was a light burning in her father’s study. He was up, then, probably anxious about his plan, which hadn’t been supposed to take this long. The castle filled her with a sense of unease. A place she had been unhappy for most of her life. Her mother, when she’d had any sense about her at all, had been tense here. Her sister had been a person to protect at all costs. Her father, a presence to hide from, Lyric behind her mother’s skirts and Allegra behind Lyric’s. Looking at the shape of it now, her childhood home, and imagining what Archie must be seeing with his fresh-to-the-scene eyes, it seemed dilapidated. Not as tumbledown as the mirage for the humans, but not in great condition either. The battlements were in disrepair, with great stones that had fallen from above peppering the grass, and the vines that had been heavy with grapes throughout her childhood were gnarled and lacking in leaves, even coming away from the stonework in places. Lyric led them up the driveway and the path to the front door, once a grand gravel sweep but now overgrown and full of muddy pools. She splashed through them, not caring. She wanted to make an entrance anyway.
At the steps to the front door, she paused.
“Shall I knock?” Archie asked.
“Yeah,” Lyric said. “How do you normally get through front doors?”
Archie raised a hand, balled into a fist, but then he stopped and turned to her. “Lyric,” he said, “I know you’re scared. I know this place is bad for you, but don’t push me away. We need to do this together, right? We’re getting through this together and getting out of it together. I…” he took a breath, “we’re going to keep each other safe. And your mum and sister too.” Lyric nodded, because he was still looking at her, and then Archie said, “I wish I could kiss you.”
Then he turned to the big wooden door and rapped on it hard with his knuckles.
15
Archibald
A young man answered the door, ushered them in, and muttered something about getting sir.
“They don’t last long here,” Lyric whispered from behind him. Then she grabbed his lower arm and gave it a squeeze. “Act more like you’ve just saved me from people you thought were rogues…or something.”
Archie turned to look at her. She had folded her wings away on the walk and put the coat back on, done it up tight. Her hair was neat, and she seemed almost to be folding into herself. Locking the best bits of herself away. Quickly, he put a hand up to stroke her cheek. He wanted her to stay with him.
“Archibald, my boy!”
Albaline’s voice ricocheted around the hall, and Archie turned quickly to face him. The fae was standing a couple of stairs up a large stone staircase, and he was wearing an ornate red and gold robe.
“I was just corresponding with some friends in Albania,” he said. “We’re trying to find my dear eldest daughter’s one and only, you know, she’s well beyond marrying age.”
Archibald felt his spine stiffen, felt his hackles raise, but he also felt Lyric’s hand, quick and soft and calming on the small of his back.
“Glad you got her back to me, old chap, but what took you so bloody long, eh?”
Archie put a hand back and grabbed Lyric softly by the arm, dragged her forwards, hoping she would play along. She did, of course, acting as though she was being half pulled down the stone flags of the hallway.
“They kept moving,” Archie said. “I think they might have been using the silver-lined tunnels beneath cities, which would make sense for vampires.”
Albaline raised his bushy, yellow-grey eyebrows. “I see,” he said, “you found her with a…a bevy of blood suckers, did you?”
Archie shook his head, “Human guards, actually, I was lucky. I imagine, during the day…”
Albaline smiled the smile of someone who has gotten away with something. He reached a hand out for his daughter, but Archie jerked her away. He pulled her hard enough that he felt terrible not apologizing, but he couldn’t do so in front of her father.
“Don’t you have things to…take care of, boy?” Albaline asked. “I seem to remember you were in the middle of a large stack of paperwork.”
Archie didn’t flinch. “The crystal,” he said. “That was part of the deal.”
Albaline lifted a hand and wagged a finger at him. “Canny!” he said. “Maybe you’re a little more switched on than I thought you were, eh?” He stepped back just a little and looked Archie up and down. “I’ll get you the crystal,” he said. “Wait here. You look utterly ridiculous, by the way.” The older man turned to ascend the stairs, but Archie said, “No, Albaline. I will be needing a proper ownership ceremony. I want this crystal to know it’s mine.”
Albaline sighed. “Boy, I’m tired, we can do all that nonsense next week or next month. Right now I need to welcome my dear daughter home.” He leaned toward Lyric and smiled. Archie felt Lyric tremble where he had her by the arm still, and he rubbed his thumb soothingly in circles. It was all he could do.
“You just insinuated you thought I was stupid, Albaline. I’ll take the crystal now, and properly. Wake your household. We’ll wait in the great hall.”
Again, Archie tugged at Lyric. “Great hall,” he said to her. “Go on.” He didn’t turn, but read Albaline’s silence as irritated agreement.
Lyric led them down
the hallway and round a corner, and then into a large, drafty space. She snapped her fingers, and crackles of lightning lit the torches that were mounted at intervals on the walls. Archie jumped, then said, “Sorry, just surprised.” The firelight made the shadows jump, but it was a warm light at least. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?” he asked, turning to look at Lyric, who was standing in the center of the great hall, her blonde hair fire-blushed by torchlight, her expression strange.
“You didn’t hurt me,” she said. And the two were silent, looking at one another. Archie was all a-fizz with something. And Lyric took a step forward, took a breath, and finally said it. “Archie, I love you…I think… No, I do… I love you.”
Archie’s new grin hurt his face. He took the two steps between them almost at a run, and he kissed her, picking her up. She smelled like the sky. “I love you too, Lyric. I really, really do, and it is so fucking complicated and also so uncomplicated…”
Lyric kissed him back. Her legs were wrapped around his waist and—
The doors to the great hall opened with a creak, and Albaline’s voice delivered a “What the—”
Before a young, female voice overtook him. “Lyric!”
Archie put Lyric down on her feet, and the fairy turned and opened her arms to her sister. Allegra had a rounder face and a darker complexion than Lyric. She was a grown woman now too, of course, where Archie had been imagining her as a small child. But she ran at her big sister with the same enthusiasm she had displayed as a toddler, chasing them around the palace. Lyric embraced Allegra. “I’m here,” she said into her sister’s long, loose brown hair. “Sorry I left again. Sorry.”
And Allegra was crying a little, but she said, “It’s okay, we missed you, but it’s okay.”
Behind Albaline stood a figure, small and dressed in old-fashioned grey, shrouded in the shadow beneath a sconce.
“Mummy?” Lyric asked in a small voice. “Are you okay?”