by Katie Low
As if in answer, she looked at their friends as if that solved all of their problems.
“Thad, I know that you don’t want to see her, but I just have to know.”
“Excuse me,” Gemma interjected, and it was then that Thad realized that he was still holding her around the waist. He dropped his hands and she turned to face him to speak. “Who are you trying to go see in North Carolina?”
“Our mother,” the twins said in unison.
Instead of satisfying her curiosity, their answer only seemed to raise more questions—if her contorted features were anything to go by. However, rather than ask her questions, she let her jaw snap shut. Thad almost wished that she would say something, anything to get his sister to change her mind.
It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see his mother, it was that he was afraid of what they would face when they did see her. Their dad had tried to tell them that she cared about them. He made up excuse after excuse for why she wasn’t around, but at some point, the two of them had put the pieces together. If she had wanted to see them, she would have made the effort.
“I just don’t want you to get hurt,” he said on a whisper.
“I need this, Thaddeus. Call it confronting your problems, call it looking for closure, I don’t care. I just…have to do this.”
He stared at her, studying her face. He could see the raw determination there. The look that she got when she was seeking answers to a problem. He knew that look. She wouldn’t be deterred. Anything that he would say, she would have a comeback for. As she said, she had to do this.
“Then let’s go.”
His words were met with four gasps, and it made him question if he was making the right decision.
Liliana didn’t know what she was expecting her brother to say, but it hadn’t been that. In fact, a small part of her had hoped that he could talk some sense into her and get her to change her mind, but the larger part knew that if she didn’t go now, then she would regret it forever.
“So, how do we do this?” Hannah spoke up. Liliana gave her a warm smile. They both knew that Hannah and Jeremy would get into a world of trouble from their mom for this, but she was willing to go anyway. She couldn’t have asked for better friends.
“Uncle Fearghus and the triplets have the clearing in the middle of their properties where they take off from. We could go there, since all four of them are here.”
Thad nodded. “That’s a good idea. We have to find a way to slip away unseen, though. It won’t take long for them to notice that we’re missing, considering that this party is meant for us.”
“We go one at a time,” Jeremy said. “Meet at your uncle’s front door. Gemma, when you go, slip through the trees on your left and walk about twenty steps in. I’ll come find you and show you the way. You two should go last.”
“Agreed,” Liliana said. “Gemma, you go first. Not as many people are familiar with you, and they won’t be looking at you so closely.”
Gemma nodded, and without hesitation, glanced around them before marching into the trees. Jeremy waited a few minutes, before he too faded into the forest. When Hannah followed her brother’s lead, Liliana began feeling nervous about her plan.
“We’ll be alright, sis,” Thad whispered to her. “Besides, if we need it, we have these amulets from Cardi. While I hope we don’t need them, perhaps we should at least text Dad when we land to tell him where we went.”
She nodded in agreement. “He’s going to be furious either way, but I think that you’re right.”
With a sweep of her gaze across the yard, Liliana nudged her brother toward the trees and watched him fade from view. Not for the first time since she came up with this hairbrained plan, Liliana hoped that she was doing the right thing.
It wasn’t normally like her to let Angela goad her, but the girl had some valid points. Her dad would have sent an invitation to this party down to their mother. It wasn’t like him not to do so, which meant their mother had made the active decision not to come. If nothing else, Liliana just wanted to know why.
She scanned the yard one final time to make sure that no one was looking at her, before she slipped into the trees and broke into a run in the direction of her uncles’ plot. The four of them had their own cottages, but they had decided to build them near one another in a large circle around a clearing. When Liliana and Thad had questioned them as to why they didn’t just live together, Uncle Ean had gotten this far-off look and said something about planning for their futures. She didn’t know what that meant, but with the way that his eyes had lit up at the thought, she really hoped that he found what he was looking for soon.
“Alright,” Thad started when she stepped into the clearing, “I think that we should each try taking off a few times first before we put our friends onto our backs. Then, when we feel we’ve gotten the hang of it, Hannah and Gemma should go with you, Lil, since your back is longer, and Jeremy with me. I grabbed Uncle Fearghus’s backpack from inside his house to put our clothes into, along with a few supplies that I took from his house. Jeremy can wear the pack. Gemma, while we change, could you stay in the clearing with the backpack, Hannah, you follow my sister and bring her clothes back to Gemma, Jeremy, you do the same for me? Does that sound okay?”
Everyone nodded, and then they put their plan into motion. On one side of the clearing, Jeremy and Thad disappeared behind Uncle Eoghan’s house, while Liliana and Hannah made their way behind Uncle Fearghus’s on the other side of the clearing.
As Liliana called on her dragon, her first thought was that she wished that her dad and Cardi were there to guide her through it, and help her with the pain. Without Cardi’s soothing touch, the snap of bones and stretching of her muscles was painful enough for her to let out a loud wail of agony.
Before long, her human body was replaced by that of her dragon. She took a few moments to get acclimated to the larger body, before she returned to the clearing and waited for her brother. When he emerged, the two of them took turns taking off in flight. Liliana’s first three attempts ended in utter disaster, but on her fourth she actually made it into the air. When her fifth and sixth attempts had the same results, she figured that it was time to put their plan into motion.
As her brother landed beside her from his fourth successful flight, the two nodded at each other and hunkered down close to the ground.
Jeremy swung the pack onto his shoulders, and flung himself onto Thad’s back as if the two had been flying together for ages. As Hannah and Gemma scrambled onto her back, Thad prepared himself for take-off.
Aside from one brief stumble, the two made it into the air faster than Thad had done on any of his solo attempts.
Liliana took a deep breath which, in her dragon form, sounded like a low growl. When she exhaled, two small clouds of smoke puffed out of her nostrils.
She felt a small hand pat her on her neck before she heard Gemma’s voice. “You’ve got this. We have complete faith in you, Liliana.”
With those encouraging words, Liliana straightened her spine, and took off on a quick jog before thrusting her wings once, twice…and lifting into the sky.
She climbed higher and higher toward the clouds. Each beat of her wings was like a spike of adrenaline coursing through her veins. When she was far enough into the air that she couldn’t make out any details of the ground below, she gave out a victorious roar and watched in awe as flames shot from her maw.
It didn’t matter what happened in Lore, Liliana decided. She would always remember this day as the Best. Birthday. Ever.
Chapter Fourteen
Thad and Liliana had been flying for just over an hour before his wings started to feel fatigued. He could tell that he was losing altitude as Jeremy advised that they were somewhere over Pennsylvania. He glanced toward his sister, and noticed that she was feeling the effects of their flight as well.
As if he pulled the thoughts from Thad’s mind—or perhaps he saw it in the lethargic way Thad beat his wings—Jeremy called out to him,
“We’re coming up on a large State Park. We should be able to find a place to land for a bit to rest.”
Thad nodded his beak and followed the directions that his friend called out to him. When he saw an unpopulated clearing within the trees, he made his descent. The moment his feet hit the ground Jeremy jumped from his back. Thad stumbled his way into the line of trees and allowed himself to fall to his side as he called on his human form.
Unlike his previous shifts, Thad barely registered the pain of his transformation this time around. As he lay naked on the leaf-strewn ground, Jeremy pulled a towel from the backpack and covered him with it.
“Thanks,” he muttered, allowing his eyes to drift shut and his body to absorb the feeling of the cool ground against his skin.
Distantly he could hear Gemma approach them and ask Jeremy for a towel and bottle of water for his sister, but he couldn’t bring himself to open his eyes.
When they had come up with this outrageous plan of theirs, they never really took into consideration what an almost three-hour flight would do to their bodies. Every muscle in Thad’s body was sore. It was times like this that he was grateful that he was a shapeshifter, and his body would heal rapidly. After about fifteen minutes of rest, he and his sister should be ready to hit the skies once more and finish their journey.
As he lay there among fallen twigs and surfaced tree roots, Thad couldn’t help but wonder if his mother would even see the two of them once they arrived. He just hoped that his sister could get whatever closure she was looking for so that they could get home and face the music. He thought back to Payson’s questions about the severity of the punishments he had received up until that point and could only imagine what his dad and uncle would do to discipline them for taking off without talking to anyone about it.
Liliana couldn’t remember a time when she felt so much pain. She now understood the phrase “being put through the ringer.” It felt as if her entire body had been run through a medieval torture device, and then set on fire for good measure.
A large part of her was starting to regret ever taking this trip. She wondered if her brother was starting to resent her yet. She would if she were him. The two had a good life back in Fabled. A father and five uncles that treated them as if their world revolved around them, and yet, Liliana just couldn’t let it go that her own mother couldn’t love them as deeply as her cousins did.
She wondered, not for the first time in the past hour, if she was being completely selfish. There was one thing she knew, however…she definitely owed Thad a bigger gift than what she had gotten him for his birthday.
“I’m so sorry that I dragged you both into this,” she said to Hannah and Gemma. “I can’t even tell you why this feels important to me, just that it does.”
Hannah crouched down by Liliana’s head and placed her hand on her left shoulder. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry for. I know that if Jeremy and I were in your place, you and Thad would do the same for us. That’s what friends do for each other. No matter how crazy, or how impossible it may seem, friends stand by each other.”
At those words, Liliana felt the sting of tears in her eyes, and used the corner of the towel draping over her to wipe them away. That was the most that Hannah had spoken at one time in all the years that Liliana had known her.
With the help of her friends, Liliana sat up and wrapped the towel more firmly around her body before pulling the two into a tight hug.
“I honestly couldn’t have asked for better friends.”
The girls laughed together as they sat shoulder to shoulder in front of a large maple tree. “Just remember that when we decide to do something that would put us all in a world of trouble,” Gemma said.
Liliana snickered. “Don’t worry. I won’t forget.”
No longer than twenty minutes later, after Liliana had consumed at least two bottles of water, Jeremy walked over to where the girls were sitting, still making jokes about the trouble they seemed to get themselves in to.
“Thad thinks that he’s ready to go again and wanted me to see how you were feeling.”
“I’m good. I feel almost back to one-hundred-percent. Let him know that we can change and start heading out.”
With a jerk of his head, he turned and made his way back to the other side of the clearing, where she had seen her brother go when he had landed.
As she rolled to her hands and knees, she looked one last time at her friends. “Thank you, again,” she whispered, before calling her dragon forth.
In no time at all, the girls were mounted on her back, and the three were in the air, circling as they waited for Thad and Jeremy to join them, before they headed southwest once more.
Chapter Fifteen
The second half of their journey felt even longer than the first half, but Liliana and Thad found a way to push through the pain and make it onward to Lore. She felt the magical barrier of the reservation tickle at her scales and she passed over the town’s border.
The moment that they crossed into Lore, Liliana felt herself gaining a second wind. Her heart rate kicked up in excitement as she and Thad descended near the outskirts of the main part of town. When Hannah and Gemma slid from her back, Liliana trotted off to the nearby trees so that she could shift back to her human skin.
Her heartbeat thundering in her ears had her almost missing the sounds of Hannah walking off and returning with her belongings. Her hands shook as she attempted to spear her legs through the opening of her jeans. She didn’t know why she was so nervous all of a sudden, but she couldn’t stop the trembling as she emerged back onto the main street of town.
As Thad came into view, a woman with luminescent blonde hair stepped out of the diner across the road and marched in their direction. In the distance, her heart-shaped face was familiar, and her violet eyes were a dead giveaway. They were busted.
However, as the woman drew closer, Liliana noticed slight difference between the woman in front of them and Cardi. The shapes of her eyes were different, her cheekbones were sharper, and her skin was a few shades darker.
“Thaddeus, Liliana?”
The twins looked at each other before Thad answered the woman. “Yes. And you are?”
“My name is Cori. I’m Cardi’s sister.”
Liliana remembered Cardi mentioning her sister on the day that they had met, but she had no idea that the woman lived in the same town as her mother.
She reached out her hand, and when Cori took it said, “It’s nice to meet you.”
A grin tilted the woman’s lips. “You as well, only I wish it would have been in different circumstances. I hope that you know that you have a lot of people worried sick about you.”
A heavy feeling of shame settled over her, and with a glance to her brother, she saw that he felt it too. “We never meant to cause any trouble; and we planned to text our father as soon as we arrived. We just wanted to see our mother.”
Cori nodded. “I know, sweetheart. I just hope that you know, that had you only asked, my sister would have done anything in her power to get you here. She cares a great deal for you, you know. Every time I talk to her, she goes on and on about the two of you, and even your friends.” She glanced over Liliana’s shoulder to address the three of them. “You must be Hannah, Gemma, and Jeremy. As thick as thieves, she said, and it appears that she was right. As for your father, you needn’t bother. I already spoke to my sister, and they are on their way here.”
With an audible gulp, Thad addressed Cori. “Do you think that we could go and see Charlotte before my dad arrives? I’m thinking that we had better be ready to get our butts hauled back to Maine the second that he gets here.”
At that, Cori gave a true smile and for a split second she looked almost identical to her sister.
“Cardi already let me know what you would be doing down here, and I did some digging to find out where she would be right now. Her mate, Xylander, is in town taking care of some business today, so she is at the griffin alpha’s house, visiting with so
me of her kin. I can show you the way.”
They followed Cori to her sedan, and the six of them found a way to squeeze into the tiny vehicle. While they drove down a gravel road, Liliana turned as much in her seat as she could manage in order to speak with Cori.
“So, are you a witch too? You don’t have the same glow that Cardi has.”
Cori barked out a laugh before answering. “Yes, I’m a witch as well. I don’t have the same glow as my sister because we don’t have the same father. Cardi’s father is an elf, and she can tap into both types of magic, which rarely happens. My father was a Kelpie, and before you ask, I got absolutely nothing from him. In fact, I can’t even swim.”
Everyone in the car laughed and it was the first time since they left Fabled that Liliana felt the weight of her guilt ease off of her.
During their drive, Cori made several more jokes, and kept the mood in the car pretty light. Most of what was being said, however, seemed to go right over Liliana’s head as her anxiety kicked up with each passing moment.
It had been about seven years since her mother left them. For a while, Charlotte had made a bit of an effort to see them, but in the last four or five years she hadn’t really tried contacting them much at all. Surprisingly enough, the minimal effort that their mother had made seemed to be instigated by her mate, the leader of Lore, Xylander.
Liliana had met him a few times, and in those times, she decided that he was a decent enough man. He was a vampire, and in their first meeting, Thad had asked him if they could see his fangs. Liliana remembered that he had made a huge production of it just to make them laugh, as he extended his fangs, and pretended to chip a tooth when he sank them into a soda can. Every birthday and Christmas they would get a card with money in it, and both signatures were always written in the tight script that belonged to Xylander. It was then that she wondered if Xylander even knew about her and Thad’s birthday party, because if he had, he probably would have made sure to be there.