She barely touches me, and my power leaps up from inside, super-eager to burn her face off. “No!” I jerk away. My chest tightens, and it’s hard to breathe. A tear escapes down my cheek. Darn it! I’m a raging ball of teenage hormones.
And I want so much more than just fighting Moribund and Ouroboros.
I want everything with her.
But with my power going all murder-death-kill, even my positivity’s taken a hit.
“Syl…” Euphoria’s gentle. She senses I’m upset about tonight—about all the nights this summer. “We have to go. The Ouroboros…”
“I know.” A heavy sigh escapes me. Stupid Agravaine. This is all his fault—hiding Ouroboros throughout the whole city, setting them to spawn at random. Euphoria won’t rest until they’re all destroyed.
We have no idea how many there are, even.
“We’re running out of time.” Her irises weirdly bleed from deep blue to ghastly green, and she gasps in pain.
My heart jackrabbits, but I keep my cool. This is the new normal for us—Euphoria feeling the Ouroboros like a second heartbeat, where she used to feel the hearthstone.
Like feeling something rotting inside where healthy tissue should be.
Her eyes are creepy green, and she’s gripping her heart so hard her leather jacket creaks.
I shouldn’t get close, but I want to comfort her. “E?”
“This way!” Whoosh! In a rush of her chilly fairy wind, she’s gone.
I make sure Glamma’s ring is tucked away as we race down East Main and over the interstate at breakneck speed. I’m glad my mom’s not here to see me dodging cars.
And just like that, my crappy burner phone buzzes from my boot.
No choice. If I don’t pick up, she’ll come looking, and my mom? She walks softly and carries a really big gun.
I snag the phone out of my boot and hit Accept. “Hi, Mom!”
“Syl?” Her voice crackles down the line. “Where are you?”
Ugh. Of course she picks up the sounds of people, traffic, sirens—city noises. “At the restaurant.” I wince. I hate to lie, but Mom barely tolerates Euphoria living with us, never mind Euphoria leading me to fight Ouroboros, Circuit fiends, and who knows what other horrors. “I’m coming back from the restroom. There’s some accident on Main.”
“You sound out of breath.”
Seriously, the woman notices everything. “It’s…uh…a big restaurant.”
Silence.
She knows! I wait, my heart pounding as I race after Euphoria, trying super-hard not to breathe heavy into the phone.
Finally, “You ready for school tomorrow?”
“Oh, yeah. Sure.” Tomorrow is the first day of my junior year at Richmond Elite High School, but right now it’s the last thing on my mind.
“Okay. Just be home before eleven.”
“You got it. Bye!”
I sigh as I jam the phone back into my boot. I’ll explain everything to Mom later. Right now…
Hollywood Cemetery looms up out of the night, the silhouettes of mausoleums and statues sending chills shooting down my spine. Place is huge, and yeah, totally haunted.
“Holy… A graveyard?” I cock an eyebrow at E. “That’s pretty darn cliché, even for Agravaine.”
I mean, the guy did have a penchant for crappy 80s-style villain monologues. “You’ll rue the day” and “You can never defeat me.”
What a dope.
“Syl.” Euphoria turns to me, all serious. “You don’t have to come.”
Every line of her is intense and gorgeous, and I see through her Glamoury to the real her—pointed ears and fangs, her skin dark and glowing with an inner light, sapphire-blue eyes ringed in gold, piercing my soul, and full lips that I want so badly to kiss. Love washes over me, slamming into me like whoa.
“Rouen…I could never leave you.”
It feels like an age ago when she came to kill me, but now she’s my best friend, my girlfriend. I blush at that thought, and her lips curve in a soft smile.
“I could never leave you, either.”
A breeze blows her scent wild about me—crisp autumn leaves, amber, and bourbon-vanilla. The scent of darkness. Alluring, intoxicating. I step closer to her, basking in her scent. Her heat. Her.
Instantly, my power flares up, and I shove my hands into my minidress pockets. “Right. Ouroboros. We should…yeahhhh…” Suddenly, I find the iron fence surrounding Hollywood Cemetery super-interesting.
Euphoria wouldn’t go near cold-wrought iron unless it was one hundred percent necessary. “It’s here,” she says simply.
“All righty.” I leap the fence. No sense in lollygagging, Glamma would say.
Hollywood Cemetery is dark and deserted at this time of night, all creepy silence and jagged, stretched shadows in the thin moonlight. Euphoria leaps the fence, wincing as she lands. As a sluagh, which is a kind of dark Fae pariah, she has trouble being on holy ground, and the wrought iron doesn’t help any Fae. She’ll be weakened here.
Me, on the other hand? It’s been ages since a sleeper-princess Awakened, so no one has any idea the limits of what-all I can do.
Lucky me, iron doesn’t seem to affect me.
She glances at me. “Ready?”
“Bring on the Circuit fiends.”
Together we head deeper into the sprawling graveyard, dodging headstones, stepping over tree roots. Our guard is up, but we don’t come across any Circuit fiends.
No, the cemetery is deathly quiet. Weird.
“This way.” Euphoria beelines toward the older section, and we’re surrounded by towering pillars and grim mausoleums punching up from the ground like the teeth of some monster trying to devour us.
Quit it, Syl.
Euphoria stops at an old, crumbling mausoleum. A gnarled tree hangs over it in a tangle, the roots draped over the front door all creepy, like Spanish moss. I can’t even read the name on the stone, it’s so ancient and covered with tree gunk. The whole thing looks like one of those dark fairy mounds in a Brian Froud book.
Points for finally getting on-theme, Agravaine.
And the door is already open.
Not much, just a crack. Enough to let in someone small.
Someone like…Fiann?
My Spidey sense is tingling, and I see it like smoke hanging in the air—smears of a green and purple aura. The aura of Fiann’s special brand of crazy.
But no… Fiann’s supposedly in “rehab” (i.e., the hospital, recovering from her botched attempt to steal Euphoria’s gramarye), and Agravaine’s dead.
No one else knows.
Euphoria meets my eyes. She’s thinking the same thing: no Circuit fiends…the door already open. “Let’s be extra careful.”
“Oh, yeah.”
She grabs the door and heaves, her dark Fae strength working, all her muscles bunching in a way that makes my hormones sit up and take notice. With a crunch-crack like pulling out a giant rotted tooth, she yanks it out of the earth, taking a tangle of black roots and dirt with it.
The pitch-black tomb yawns ahead of us, and even with the moonlight and my enhanced sight, I see only darkness. Pulling out my track phone, I activate its backlight.
Euphoria and I head inside.
The stench of old earth and decay envelopes us, and my heartbeat ramps up to DEFCON 1. I hate small spaces. Suddenly, I’m panting and sweating like crazy.
Yup. Syl Skye, super-cool sleeper-princess, and I’m about to freak.
“Come on, princess. You’re not going to wimp out, are you?” Euphoria’s teasing is good-natured, meant to snap me out of it.
Flirty banter is kind of our thing.
I scoff. “You’ll wimp out before I do.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Yeah, we will, Miss Smarty-Pants dark Fae.”
She chuckles, the sound warped by all the earth around us.
We head deeper in, and I try my hardest not to look at coffins or crypts or anything that might possibly resemble a d
ead body. As soon as we step foot inside the main vault, the pressure changes, the air thickening.
A hollow moaning echoes in the darkness with the sinister creaking of tree limbs. Shivers spike my spine at a gooey sucking sound like sticky tentacles sliding against one another. My track phone can’t pierce the darkness.
“Hold up.” Euphoria stops and hums softly. A lick of purple lightning coils in her palm.
The area lights up in violet.
Hissing like a steaming kettle, the darkness recoils all around us. A gajillion tiny black circuits jigger and teem, crawling over one another, consuming the dead tree roots and rebuilding them into dark, soulless machinery. Circuitry glows green, threading through rocks, soil, leeching their way up toward the surface.
Crap! This Ouroboros has already hatched from its egglike ovo.
It’s spawning.
“Syl, target its master-key circuit!” Euphoria’s voice is weirdly muffled by all the shifting earth.
“Got it!”
And then it’s on like Donkey Kong.
Before I can find the master-key circuit—much less target it—the entire mausoleum rumbles and quakes. The ground shudders, heaves, then slams sideways in a shower of flying dirt.
“Look out!” Euphoria shoves me one way, leaping the other.
Gnarled roots rip through the main vault, spearing in at us. Tree boughs tear through the ceiling, raining stone and soil.
Euphoria zigs, and I zag, but the tree bars our way with a tangle of roots and tendrils. They’re being rewritten into machinery-tentacles as they come, a darkling current racing over their circuits.
Crap, crap, crap…
The roots slam into the floor, rip toward us, hem us in, and then the tree grabs us up, squeezing the life from us while the branches plow the soil back in.
We’re being buried alive. Oh, happy day.
All around us, the infection of the tree continues, Moribund circuits eating up its bark, its branches, the creepy-green current from the key circuit racing along its boughs…
Rouen sings a note, blasting the branches with violet lightning, but they only grow back, splitting into two, three, four more branches, blocking her from me.
“Rouen!” I can’t see her, and I’m freaking. I don’t dare use my powers in such close quarters.
“Syl…” Her voice is strained in the darkness. “You have to find the key circuit…burn it down.”
If I do that, if I kill the key, the Ouroboros will stop spawning. It’ll turn on itself, devour itself.
I twist, fighting for leverage against the massive branches. E’s weakened by cold iron, unable to break free. Sure, I could light the tree on fire, but what if I lose control?
If she can’t break free…I could kill her, too.
But if I don’t, we’ll die here anyway. We are well and truly screwed.
All around us, the Ouroboros circuits knit and twitch, transforming the tree, the rocks, the earth into black-magic machinery.
It’s only a matter of item before it gets us, too.
We’ll all become soulless Moribund constructs.
Even now, the hungry rumble from the tree sends terror clawing down my spine. I can’t find the key circuit, can’t trace it back, a green glint flittering about in the darkness, fast as a firefly.
Euphoria’s struggling with a huge root. “Any time now, sleeper-princess.”
“All right, all right, hold your horses!” I switch to my Fae-sight, and whoa… The darkness warps and wefts, sending nausea rolling through my guts.
I strain to see…
There! The racing current and its source, the glint of a tiny intricate circuit.
The master-key circuit!
“Got it! But…” My sunfire barely touched Agravaine, and he went up like the Fourth of July.
“Do it already!” The roots wrap her tight, squeezing. I hear a sharp pop—ribs breaking—and her face goes white. “Syl! Do it now!”
There’s no hope for it. The roots lash at us, wrapping us tight. A branch slashes my cheek. The scent of blood and the bright-red fear of E’s aura shoot panic through me, making my heart rabbit-kick my ribs.
The tree squeezes, rumbling. Pain erupts through my body.
I can’t breathe. I can’t focus…
I can only hope my control doesn’t fail me now. All fingers crossed, I summon my white flame. “Burn, baby, burn.”
The power I’ve suppressed for so long leaps from my fingers. Joy fills me up to the tips of my fingers and toes, lifting me up. This is the only time I feel like my true self—the only time I feel at home in my own skin.
This is who I am. Brightness and fire and light.
I set the tree on white flame.
And hope Euphoria will be okay…
The Adventure begins in…
Moribund
Book One in The Circuit Fae
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Genevieve Iseult Eldredge
Raised by witches and dragons in the northern wilds, GIE writes angsty urban fantasy YA romance--where girls who are mortal enemies kick butt, take names, and fall in love against all odds.
She enjoys long hikes in the woods (where better to find the fair folk?), believing in fairies (in fact, she’s clapping right now), dancing with dark elves (always wear your best shoes), being a self-rescuing princess (hello, black belt!), and writing diverse books about teenage girls finding love, romance, and their own inner power.
She might be planning high tea at the Fae Court right now.
GIE is multi-published, and in her role as an editor has helped hundreds of authors make their dream of being published a reality.
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Derailed: A Prequel Novella Page 10