by Eva Sloan
Andy’s eyes felt like they were about to pop right out of her skull. “You made me?”
“Yes my dear. Let me introduce myself. I am Arianna, Queen of Summer, of Light and Water. And I molded you into what you are.”
Andy jerked forward, the words tumbling out of her mouth before she could catch them. “What am I?”
“You’re human…well at least, on the most part. But I already told you what you were before your mother and I interceded.”
Andy just stared at her without comprehension.
“A star my dear. Well, a piece of one.” The fae woman glanced out the window of the diner and smiled secretly to herself. “I believe you came from Andromeda. That is why you are so named…Andy.” Just the way she said her name made an invisible string pull at her heart.
Andy sat back in the booth and clutched the napkin that was by her right hand. “No…that’s—”
“Impossible?” The Summer Queen waved her hand dismissively. “As if humans know anything about what is possible. They know not even the limits of their own world, yet they seek to find other worlds to be ignorant of as well.”
Andy felt her stomach lurch. “So I’m some sort of meteor? A big piece of space rock?”
“Heavens no,” The faerie chuckled, “you landed on this earth, but not in this world. You came to rest in Faerie, and once there you became what you were meant to be: living energy, pure radiant light.”
A sphere of some sort of energy. Her mother had said.
“So I did the only thing I could do,” Arianna continued, “I transformed you into this form, and gave you guardians, a family to love and protect you.”
“But why? And why is the other queen after me?”
“Both questions have the same answer. My cousin, Sliva, Queen of Winter, of air and darkness, well…she’s gone quite mad you see. Happens sometimes to the very old. But not usually one of our station. She’s family, and I love her…and I hate her. We’ve been battling for thousands of years, so it’s hard to keep a concise track, but it seems like forever. And every year we both win, and we both lose, and that keeps the balance of power between the two courts. But as I said, she’s been driven insane, and she’s seething for more power.”
Arianna looked out the window of the diner again and sighed. “Why she’d ever want more power is beyond me. Our powers are so great already, one nearly has not enough things to put it into. But for the last few millennia she has been very active in trying to gain more power. Her dream is to someday plunge the world into one endless winter. As I said, crazy.
“Our powers were created equal, to make sure they canceled each other out. That is our purpose, that is our reason to exist. I am the beginning of things, and she is the end. She is the queen of winter, of darkness and air, and of the end of things. She does not create anything, only destroys and kills. I on the other hand, am the queen of beginnings, of creation.”
She fell silent, staring out the window, her warm green eyes haunted.
“So, she’s looking for me, to…” Andy’s stomach churned and she felt nauseous.
“To devour you, yes.” Arianna said cheerfully. “She will take you into herself, to finally make herself more powerful than I, to upset forever the power of the courts.
“That’s why you hid me with my…”
“With your family, yes.” Her green eyes bore into Andy. “They are your family, I made you from them, molded you into their lives. Do they not feel like they belong to you, and you to them?”
Andy had to admit, they did feel like they were her family. And she felt as if she belonged with them. Even with the lies, they loved her, and she them. Actually, she wanted nothing more for them to show up right then and there.
“Alas, I think my dalliance in subterfuge has not been good enough, for my cousin searches this very moment to find you.” Arianna sounded almost bored, certainly not as if she were nervous about the winter queen finding her.
“Yeah, she found me in the park across the street from my apartment building.”
“It’s not your fault. I imagine I could have hidden you better. Maybe I could’ve made you into a blade of grass in a forest in the Ozarks, or one of the roses in that quaint little garden at your White House. My cousin may have never found you. But she has, and that’s…well,” Arianna eyes radiated with satisfaction, “that’s just marvelous.”
Andy blinked. Then she sat forward and looked upon the fae queen with bewilderment. “What?”
The Summer Queen gave a silent chuckle as she waved away the scorn in Andy’s voice.
“What I mean is I had to make the crazed old girl want you in the worst way. How else could I get her to ignore the fact that you are a star, a being of light.” She leaned forward and touched a single finger to the hand Andy still clutched the napkin in. That one touch was like being struck by lightning, like having every molecule in her body catch on fire at once, her mind turned on as if the rest of her life had just been some kind of fuzzy dream. Perfect clarity, and the roar of the most terrible, blinding power—and she liked it.
The Queen broke the contact, pulling back her hand, and the instant she did Andy felt as if a part of her—no, not part of her, that she and the creature sitting across from her were one and the same.
Andy trembled, pulling her hand back and cradling it against her chest, her breathing suddenly rapid, her mind spinning, though her thoughts nowhere near as clear or as brilliant as they were a moment ago.
Arianna sat back, and she too was breathing hard, her eyes glowing and wild. And she looked as if she were as disturbed as Andy had been.
She glanced at the hand she’d touched Andy with, and then clenched it into a shaking fist, drawing it under the table top of the booth. She took a few more ragged breaths, and then turned her gaze back upon Andy. They no longer glowed, but there was still that wild intensity.
“My cousin only sees that you are a thing of power, and that I am hiding you from her. That makes you absolutely irresistible to her.”
Andy had fallen back against the padded back of the booth, still clutching her hand to her. “So you want her to find me?”
“Of course,” Arianna said as if it were obvious.
“But why the hell would you want that?” Andy’s words practically exploded from her lips.
The faerie queen’s lips parted as she took in a breath, and just as she seemed about to say something, the bells that hung over the front door of the diner clanged, heralding someone’s entrance. Arianna looked to the door, and a slow, sweet sigh escaped her lips.
Andy turned to look too, startled by the interruption and the way the queen had looked. There stood Min’s vampire, Luca—blond, tall, pale and to-die-for gorgeous. The look on his face as he caught sight of Andy was one of huge relief. But that look was replaced a heartbeat later with a murderously angry one. He started toward the booth Andy and the Summer Queen were seated at, and suddenly she was filled with the terrifying thought that the fae queen might hurt or kill her sister’s beloved vampire.
She whipped her head around, a plea for the queen not to hurt him on her tongue—but the Summer Queen of the fae was gone. Not even her scent remained.
The vampire suddenly stood beside her, looking down scornfully at her. Andy looked to him, and back to where the faerie queen had been sitting, and she shuddered at the sudden change in her reality. Had she imaged what had just happened?
No. She certainly was not imaging any of that. It had been real, and she knew enough about magic and the Otherealm to know that it was most assuredly, and lethally real.
The vampire’s face screwed up until his shoulders shook, his hands held in fists at his sides. Then his voice exploded from his snarling lips. “Where the hell have you been?”
Andy gulped, looking fearfully up at the undead stranger that had only hours before saved her life. But then his words abruptly ticked her off.
Who does this bloodsucking fiend think he is?
His eyes were green glo
bes of fire set into his handsome face, and she stared right back at him.
“Out. For. A. Walk.” she said evenly, then added, “Asshole.”
Luca’s flaming green eyes widened, and he growled like some sort of animal. But then those fiery eyes dimmed to their normal sparkling gemstones, and he started laughing. It was a delicious, touchable laugh that would be nearly infectiously irresistible—but he was laughing at her, and that just pissed her off even more.
Andy looked away, wishing she had a brick or a crucifix to throw at him. “Dick.”
That only made the vampire laugh harder. Bonelessly he poured himself into the booth, taking over the very spot the Summer Queen had vacated.
“It’s not safe for you out here.”
Ignoring the fact that a fae queen had just been there, Andy looked around at the empty diner and gave him the iciest of smiles. “That’s funny. Do you think I’m about to get attacked by a horde of coffee mugs?”
From the back came a clamor and Andy felt every muscle in her body tense. She glanced over at the vampire and found him pulling something sharp and deadly from inside his jacket, its sharp edge gleaming in the florescent lighting. He held perfectly still, his green eyes ablaze again, and focused on the door leading back to the kitchen area.
The swinging doors opened and a short, curvy middle-aged blonde appeared, laid eyes on the two of them and said, “Oh shit!”
Andy looked back to Luca, and magically the knife and his burning green eyes were gone. He didn’t look relaxed, but he didn’t look ready to kill anymore.
The waitress—Madge her name tag read—hustled over and snatching a pot of coffee from a burner on the huge, ancient looking industrial sized coffee brewer. Swiftly she came forward and said, “Sorry about that. I just stepped out for a ciggy. Coffee?”
Andy was about to say she already had some, but when she looked down her cup was not just empty but turned upside down on its saucer, untouched.
Guess my coffee split with the Summer Queen.
Andy and the vampire turned their cups over so the waitress could fill them.
“Can I get you two somethin’ to eat?” The waitress asked. “Henry, the cook, makes great waffles.”
“No thank you,” Luca said with a dazzling smile. “We’re not staying that long.”
“Andy shot him a look and gave the waitress a dazzling smile of her own. “That sounds great. I’ll have waffles with lots of butter. Thank you.”
The vampire glowered at her, but she couldn’t help but smile back at him.
“Nothin’ for you, honey?” The waitress looked like she was sensing the tension between the two.
“Coffee’s fine,” Luca said stiffly. “Thank you.”
When the waitress smiled and turned to go place her order with the kitchen, Luca shook his head. “We don’t have time for this. I talked to you sister and she says you need to get back to the house, immediately. It’s the only place where they can keep you safe.”
“Yeah, sure…they just want to keep me safe.” Andy cringed inwardly at how sharp her voice sounded. But the feeling behind that tone was no lie. “They aren’t even my—” she stopped. Good god it was hard to say. Her mother and her sister weren’t really her family. It was all just some elaborate, mystical joke. And now not only was she minus a family, but she had a faerie queen from the bitch dimension and her hordes hunting her down like a dog.
Luca sighed and his brilliant green eyes softened. “So why does this faerie want you so badly?”
Oh…so Min and her mother were as tight lipped with him as they had been with her. Cover ups all around.
“And they aren’t what?” Luca’s expression was so concerned, so genuine, Andy felt—though his treating her like an object to protect was just so middle ages—that she could truly trust him. After all, he’d risked his own afterlife just to save her from a faerie queen and her scourge.
So she told him, all of it. That six months ago Min and she had found their mother in the magic shop, in some sort of suspended animation, that they’d spent the last six months trying to cure her. That somehow her sister and he—and that was a whole other story she only had the cliff notes on—had somehow broken whatever spell that had kept her mother in that frozen stasis.
“And then came this faerie queen named Sliva, the spiders,” she raised her brow at him, “a vampire, and I was suddenly sucked back to the house using that ring you brought me. And there was Min and mom…and mom was good as new and telling me I wasn’t real.” Not real. Andy trembled. “That I’m some sort of ball of energy that the summer queen helped them mold into human form.”
Andy paused. It just sounded so freaking insane, like some sort of schizophrenic nightmare.
“Plus mom was burdened with the task of keeping my origins secret and me safe.”
Luca raised his own eyebrows and shook his head. Looked like she wasn’t the only one to think the whole situation was a head scratcher.
Andy sighed and rolled her eyes. Might as well keep him up to date. “Then enters the summer queen posing as a waitress.”
Luca’s head snapped toward where the waitress had disappeared to place Andy’s order.
“No, no. That’s a real waitress. The faerie queen took off when you came through the door. Well, not so much took off as simply vanished without a trace. Even took the coffee she’d poured me with her.”
Luca’s mouth was open, as if he was about to say something. Even the way his eyebrows were scrunched together made him look ready to say something. But nothing came out.
Andy cleared her throat, took a sip of her coffee, which was pretty good, and said, “So this faerie queen told me I was…” She started laughing uncontrollably. It was too stupid, too insane to be true. To think that any of this was real, that any of it could be serious. It just couldn’t be. Andy pulled herself together and started to speak again.
“She said I was a fallen star, and that…that I was going to stop this Sliva from causing a permanent ice age.”
Andy took a breath. She was about to say she didn’t know what Sliva was going to do with her, but it couldn’t be anything good, when the vampire reached over and put his cold finger against her lips.
“You never want to say something’s name three times. It can call them to you.”
“Too late.” A smooth, dark voice purred from directly behind Luca.
Andy’s eyes snapped past Luca to the woman suddenly sitting in the booth behind them, her back to Luca. But in the blink of an eye the woman stood, turned and grabbed Luca by the back of the neck, and carelessly tossed him some odd fifty feet to the back wall of the diner. The vampire hit with a sickening crunch and fell to the floor.
Andy looked up at the woman and gasped. She was tall and built with a mix of sinewy grace and luscious curves. Her hair was long and loose, black as pitch, and writhed like snakes around her face. Her skin was impossibly white and as smooth as ice, and her smiling lips were a frozen blue-red. Her crisp blue eyes stared down upon Andy, their pupils inverted slits.
Andy’s breath came out in frozen puffs, the air so cold the moisture in it turned to sparkling dust and drifted around as wind began to blow through the restaurant.
“Finally,” the Queen of Air and Darkness said. “I have you all to myself.”
Chapter 25
The faerie had a hell of a throwing arm on her. Luca had to have been traveling at about eighty miles an hour when he’d hit the back wall of the grungy little greasy spoon. He’d hit hard enough that part of the wall crumbled on top of him when he hit the blue and yellow tiled floor. It took a second, but he shook off the impact and pushed himself off the floor and back to his feet. He pulled the sword and dagger from their scabbards and started back to where the faerie queen still stood over Andy. The world pitched and he stumbled, but he didn’t fall.
“Get away from her, you faerie ice bitch!”
The Winter Queen barely even turned her head, but the smug, satisfied look on her face would have m
ade anyone sick to their stomach.
“So gallant…” she said to Luca. “You should be commended.” She smiled and looked around her. “Kill him.”
As if they’d been hidden behind a curtain of invisibility, which they obviously had been, a cadre of twenty odd wilde fae lurched out of nowhere and surged toward him. There were goblins, a goat-like gruff, a few elves with red eyes and pointy silver daggers, and one great green ogre—he looked like the Incredible Hulk, but with stripes of dried blood running over his arms and bare chest, and around his mouth.
They were all so very strong and quick, and though Luca was injured he smote three of their number in as many seconds, and barely kept to his feet when the gruff battered him in the chest with his horn-adorned Billy goat head. But it was the ogre that really rang Luca’s bell, bashing him with a boulder-like fist that flattened him to the floor.
Luca looked up in time to see a shimmering, web-like portal open in the wall of the diner. It was night on the other side of the door, and there was nothing but the harsh whiteness of snow as far as the eye could see. The winter queen had hold of Andy by the wrist, and though she was pulling against and fighting the fae, the Queen simply dragged her along through the portal.
The ogre stamped his foot down on Luca’s chest, causing ribs to crack and the world to fade out for a moment. When his vision returned he just barely saw the portal snap shut, and just like that the bitter cold that had permeated the diner just evaporated. Drool from the ogre’s gaping maw dribbled down into Luca’s face.
“Groth like tasty blood rats.” The ogre smiled with the most terrible dentition and pressed down with his anvil sized foot, making bones in Luca snap and cave in. “They taste like humans if they’ve fed recently. Have you fed recently?”
Luca could take in no breath to answer, so he shoved the dagger still in his hand to the hilt in the ogre’s calf, and flicked him the middle finger of his other.