by Jenna Black
With a final sullen hiss, the creature let go of me and sank back into the water. The moment I was free of its grip, Ethan hauled me all the way out and onto the ledge.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I was on my knees on the narrow ledge, back hunched with strain as I tried to hack up a lung for what felt like the better part of forever. Ethan patted my back and murmured comforting words, but I was too miserable to be comforted.
My throat and nasal passages burned from expelling all that water from my lungs. My chest ached from taking all that water in. And all my joints throbbed from being a tug-of-war toy between Ethan and the moat monster. I was also soaked through and chilled to the bone, my whole body shivering violently.
When the coughs had calmed some, Ethan pulled me against him, wrapping his arms around me and holding me close to the warmth of his body. It was only then that I noticed he was wearing nothing but a pair of pants. Even so, his body felt like a furnace compared to mine, and I curled into myself and huddled against him.
“What was that?” I rasped, shuddering at the memory of that awful, evil face in the water.
“It was a Water Witch,” Ethan explained. “They are natives of Faerie and at least nominally belong to the Unseelie Court, which is probably the only reason I was able to make her let go. There are dozens of them in the moat, and they will attack anything, Fae or human, that falls in. If the moat were just empty water, then people—and Fae—could enter and leave Avalon at will and the Gates would mean nothing.”
I shuddered again at the thought of dozens of those horrible things patrolling the moat, hoping for a free meal. Not that I was sure the Water Witch had planned to eat me, but with those teeth she’d flashed, it didn’t seem out of the question.
I started to cry, then, for once not ashamed of my weakness. I remembered Grace yelling the fateful order into her cell phone moments before she threw it—and me—into the moat.
“She killed my mom,” I sobbed against Ethan’s chest.
He held me tight and rocked me. “Maybe not,” he murmured. “I called your father after I called mine. He said he’d send Finn to rescue your mother. We can only hope that he made it there in time. I wish I could offer you something more certain, but I think my cell phone is at the bottom of the moat by now.”
I sniffled and tried to hope. Finn did this kind of stuff for a living. If anyone could have saved my mom from Kirk, it would be him. But everything had happened so fast, despite my attempts at delay. Would Finn really have had time to get to the hotel before Grace ordered my mother’s death?
“I want to go home,” I said, though I couldn’t rightly say where home was anymore.
“I know,” Ethan said. “But the purpose of the moat is to keep people out of Avalon, so there isn’t exactly an easy exit. There’s a trapdoor in the bridge above us, but my father’s going to have to get someone to undo the locking spells on it, and then they’re going to have to haul us up somehow. We’ll be stuck here for a while.”
I was so cold I felt like I’d never be warm again in a million years, and the contrast of Ethan’s warmth only made me feel colder. He scooted backward until his back was against the concrete piling. He had to let go of me to do it, but then he patted his lap.
“Come sit on my lap,” he said. “I’ll keep you as warm as I can.”
I thought briefly about what had happened the last time I’d found myself on Ethan’s lap, but I shoved that thought to the side. Even Ethan wasn’t enough of a player to make a move on me now, of all times.
So I crawled onto his lap, and he wrapped himself around me. His arms surrounded me, and my face was pressed up against his bare chest while his body heat seeped through my sodden clothes.
“Aren’t you cold at all?” I asked him.
I felt him shrug. “Not really. We only feel the cold when it’s extreme. And as you can probably tell, our body temperatures run higher than humans’ anyway.”
Yes, I could tell. Every inch of me that was in contact with his body was toasty warm. Unfortunately, there were a lot of inches left, and I shivered nonstop.
“You saved my life,” I whispered into his chest.
His chin rubbed across the top of my head. “It was the least I could do.”
I thought about the Water Witch, with her milky eyes, razor-sharp teeth, and sticky cobweb hair. Ethan had jumped into the moat after me, knowing there were dozens of those creatures in there. And while they were supposedly both members of the Unseelie Court, they obviously weren’t kissing cousins.
He’d lied to me. He’d tried to use his magic against me. And he’d set me up for an attack that could have gotten me killed. But in the end, he’d risked his own life to save mine, so how could I not forgive him for the bad things he’d done?
“Let’s just call it even now and leave it at that,” I said. Ethan kissed the top of my head but didn’t respond.
“How did you know Grace was about to cast a spell at my father?” he asked me. “You saved his life with your warning.”
That thought made me feel a tiny bit less wretched. At least I’d done something right. And I was glad to have saved a life, even if I’d needed rescuing myself.
“I could feel the magic building up,” I explained, and I felt Ethan go still. I tried to lift my head from his chest to see his face, but he wouldn’t let me.
“What?” I asked. “What did I say?”
“You felt the magic,” he repeated, and he sounded like he couldn’t quite believe it.
“Yeah. At least, that’s what I think it is. The cameo my dad gave me heats up, and then my skin starts to feel all prickly. I’m pretty sure that only happens when there’s magic around.”
Now Ethan pushed me away, allowing me to see his face. Not that I could see much in the darkness under the bridge. But I could see the intensity of his expression.
“I’m going to forget I asked you that question,” he said. “And I’m very certainly going to forget your answer. If your father or mine ever asks you, say you heard her muttering something and made an educated guess as to what it meant.”
“Why?”
“Because traditionally, the magic has always treated Faeriewalkers like humans, even though they are truly half Fae. But if you could feel it building, that means you have an affinity for it, which means you might be able to train and use it yourself. You are a powerful and frightening enough weapon as it is. If anyone thought you could do magic as well…” He shook his head. “Too dangerous. It wouldn’t be just the Queens who wanted to eliminate you then.”
“But it’s only because of the cameo,” I protested. “If I take it off—” I reached for the clasp behind my neck, but Ethan’s hands closed around my wrists.
“Keep it,” he said. “I don’t know exactly what it does, but if it reacts to magic, then it’s an object of power of some sort and could come in handy someday. You wouldn’t have felt the effects if you didn’t have a natural affinity for magic. A human wearing it would feel nothing. So we never had this conversation. Got it?”
My eyes no doubt wide as saucers, I nodded. Why would my father have given me an “object of power” if he thought I couldn’t access the magic? Had he somehow guessed that I would be unusual even for a Faeriewalker? Or had he just figured that since I couldn’t sense magic, the cameo was harmless, just a symbol of my Seelie affiliations? If I couldn’t ask him about it, then it seemed likely I’d never know the answer. “And you’re not going to tell anyone?” I prompted Ethan. “Not even your father?”
“Tell them what?” he asked, and though he was trying to sound dry and witty, he just ended up sounding nervous.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The moat had killed my watch and Ethan wasn’t wearing his, so I had no real concept of how long we huddled there beneath the bridge, except that it was far, far longer than I would have liked. During that time, I discovered a new pain. My skin apparently didn’t react well to Water Witch hair, so there were raised red welts all along th
e lower part of my legs where she’d grabbed me.
They burned and stung, and by the time Alistair arranged for someone to open the trapdoor that led under the bridge, I was starting to feel the warm flush of fever in my cheeks. They had to haul me up with some kind of harness. I’d have been scared, except I felt too awful to bother with fear. Maybe everyone—including me—would be better off if I fell and splatted on the concrete below. But I didn’t fall.
Alistair and my father were both waiting for me on the bridge, and they helped the emergency folks extract me from the harness. I locked eyes with my dad as they went to work on the buckles that held me safe. He looked pale and worried, impatient to get me out of the harness.
“Mom?” I asked in a terrified whisper, trying to keep myself from bursting into tears yet again.
Dad gave me a reassuring nod. “She’s safe.”
I didn’t try to hold back the tears anymore. I wasn’t up to standing, so when all the buckles and straps were loose, my dad picked me up and started carrying me toward his car, which was hard to miss, sitting in the parking lot in its bright red glory.
“Wait!” I cried, looking over his shoulder at Alistair.
He was watching the rescue workers lower the harness again, but he seemed to sense my gaze on him, since he turned toward me.
“Aunt Grace,” I said. “What happened to her?”
Alistair’s already thin lips practically disappeared as he pressed them together hard and shook his head. “She got past me.” He forced his expression into one of wry amusement, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I was somewhat distracted when she tossed you into the moat, I’m afraid.”
My eyes fixed on the door to Faerie, and Alistair’s slight nod told me that’s where Grace had gone. Why did I expect she wouldn’t stay there forever?
I lost consciousness before my dad got me to his car. When I woke up, it was to find myself in a hospital bed. The aches and pains I remembered from before were all gone, but my head throbbed fiercely, and I was sweating like it was a hundred degrees in the room. I moaned and turned to my side.
Finn was sitting on a visitor’s chair beside my bed—between me and the door, naturally. I supposed he was back on bodyguard duty, but it felt good not to be alone when I woke up. He was reading a magazine, but he closed it and put it away when he saw I was awake.
My stomach wasn’t much happier than my head, and for a moment, I was afraid I was going to puke over the side of the bed. But the urge passed.
“Why am I in the hospital?” I asked Finn as I peeled sweaty strands of hair away from my face. “What’s wrong with me?”
“It seems you had an encounter with a Water Witch,” he said.
“No kidding?” Whatever was wrong with me, it wasn’t amnesia. I wished I could burn the image of that evil face from my brain.
Finn gave me a reproachful look, then continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Prolonged contact with Water Witches apparently makes humans rather ill.” He frowned. “Actually, prolonged contact with Water Witches usually leaves just about anyone dead. You were very lucky.”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “Yeah, luck central, that’s me.” The laughter morphed into a coughing fit. I was braced for the coughing to hurt my chest, but only the headache pain troubled me. “How long have I been here?” I had absolutely no sense of time at this point. It could have been hours or days.
“About four hours,” he said, and I was relieved that I hadn’t lost more time than that. “The healers took care of your physical injuries.”
Oh. That explained why the chest and throat and joint pains weren’t bugging me.
“But they can’t fix the sickness?” I guessed.
Finn shook his head. “The Fae don’t get sick, so our magic isn’t suited to curing illness, I’m afraid.”
In a way, I supposed that was a good thing. Otherwise every sick person in the world would be besieging Avalon. In fact, I bet even if the Fae healers could cure illnesses, they wouldn’t admit it. I could only imagine the chaos it would cause if a handful of people in one small city could, for instance, cure cancer.
I was already starting to feel exhausted just from the effort of simple concentration, but I managed one more question before I drifted back into sleep.
“How long am I in for?” I asked, not only because I hated being in the hospital—like any sensible person would—but because even with Finn guarding me, I wasn’t sure how safe I would be here.
“Probably a couple of days. The human doctors want to keep an eye on you, make sure your fever doesn’t get too high.”
I acknowledged my sentence with a heartfelt sigh, then rolled over and willed myself back to sleep.
The next time I woke up, it was because someone was gently shaking my shoulder.
“Come on, Dana,” I heard Finn say. “Wake up for a moment.”
The headache still pounded behind my eyes, and I was sweaty and cold at the same time. I didn’t much want to be awake for the experience, but I managed to pry my eyes open.
Finn was sitting on the edge of my bed, but my attention was immediately drawn to the mountain that stood just inside the doorway. The mountain named Lachlan.
I should have been alarmed to see him. He was Aunt Grace’s … boyfriend? Nah. I couldn’t see applying that term to Lachlan. But “lover” sounded so crass. I hated the term “significant other,” but I decided it was a fair compromise.
Anyway, I should have been spooked, but I wasn’t. Either the hospital had me on some really good drugs, or I figured Finn wouldn’t have let him in if he was a threat, or I just couldn’t see Lachlan in the role of villain. He had been pretty nice to me, even though he’d been holding me prisoner.
Finn smiled at me, but it looked like he wasn’t really used to smiling. It looked almost like it hurt him.
“Lachlan is here to relieve me for a while,” Finn said. “I wanted to wake you and assure you that you’re safe with him. He’s no Knight, but there are few who’d be foolish enough to take on a troll. And your father is confident Lachlan will not take you to Grace.”
I saw Lachlan wince. “Thanks,” I mumbled. I just wanted to go back to sleep. Being sick sucks.
Finn gave me one of his businesslike nods, then headed out without another word. Lachlan came to the bedside to tower over me. He looked … very sad. There was a shadow in his eyes that hadn’t been there before, and his shoulders were tight with tension and misery.
Tired as I was, I managed to smile up at him. “It’s all right, Lachlan,” I said. “I know you had nothing to do with what Aunt Grace did.” And I felt that truth to my bones. No matter what his relationship with Aunt Grace was, he wouldn’t sit by and let her kill someone. Or throw someone into the moat.
The tension in his shoulders relaxed, and he bowed his head. “Thank you.” He sighed heavily. “I don’t know what’s gotten into her.” He met my eyes with a pleading, earnest look. “She’s really not like that. She’s just…”
I could forgive Lachlan for being in love with Grace, but I really wasn’t open to hearing whatever excuses he had for her bad behavior. I guess he saw that, because he didn’t say anything more, just took a seat in what I was already coming to think of as Finn’s chair.
That was my cue to return to la-la land, and I was more than happy to obey.
I drifted in and out of sleep for the better part of the day, waking up only when the nurses came to take my temperature, give me drugs, or urge me to eat and drink. I was not in the mood for eating and drinking, and hospital food turned out to be hospital food, even in Avalon. But they threatened to hook me up to an IV if I didn’t keep myself fed and hydrated, so I did the best I could.
At one point, I woke up to find a huge bouquet of yellow roses on my bedside table. Turned out Ethan had stopped by to visit while I was sleeping and had chosen not to wake me. Just looking at them—and their cheerful, sunny color—made me smile. Interesting that he’d chosen to send me roses, even if they weren’t red or w
hite. I suspected gifts of roses took on a whole different meaning and significance when you were Fae.
By late afternoon, I was finding it hard to stay asleep, even though I felt terrible when I was awake. Worse, I knew the ordeal of dinner wasn’t far in the future, because hospitals always seem to feed people early. At least, that had been the case in the American hospitals my mom had landed in a couple of times after drunken “mishaps.”
Lachlan was still on guard duty, but neither one of us was feeling particularly chatty, so we were sitting in not-quite-companionable silence when I had my second visitor of the day.
I hadn’t seen or spoken to Kimber since the attack at the boutique. I supposed I should have called to check on her—after all, she’d been hurt, too—but my mom’s arrival in Avalon had driven all other thoughts from my head. Kimber hesitated in the doorway, chewing her lip in a very un-Fae-like show of nerves. The expression on her face was vulnerable, but I wasn’t sure what was wrong.
“Come on in.” I beckoned her as I raised the top half of my bed so I could sit up.
Kimber smiled tentatively and stepped through the doorway.
“I’ll wait outside to give you some privacy,” Lachlan said, and I flashed him a smile of gratitude.
When the door closed behind Lachlan, Kimber came to sit on the edge of my bed. She glanced at the bouquet of roses and raised her eyebrows.
“I see my brother has been here,” she said.
I discovered I could blush even with fever-flushed cheeks. “Yeah. I was asleep at the time.”
Her eyes glittering with mischief, she reached into the tote bag that hung from her shoulder. “I brought you something better.” She pulled out a thermos and gave it a vigorous shake.
It wasn’t hard to guess what was in that thermos, and as soon as Kimber twisted the top open, my nose confirmed the guess. As badly as I’d dreaded having to choke down dinner, the scent of the hot posset set my mouth instantly to watering. She poured me a careful capful and handed it to me.