Really? I toss the notepad onto the coffee table. “What’s that mean?”
Leaning over, he gestures at my drawing. “Do you know what any of this does?”
“A little. I know about the iron nail, and I don’t know exactly what’s up with the rock that looks like a donut, but I saw the guy wearing this necklace lift it up to his eye like it was a microscope or something.”
“A seeing stone,” Ash says. “If it’s a real one, it can be used to break any glamour.”
I remember how Dr. Gillespie found me even while I was wrapped up in my shadows.
“Okay. Yeah. It’s a real one.” I tap the page with the tip of my glove. “I saw this on the other side of the necklace, too. A pale pink crystal, just like Callie said. I had no idea what it was. But now… what do you think?”
“I think you might’ve saved us the trouble of actually searching for a relic of Brinkburn. Where is it? Where can we find this? Who has it?”
“It was my doctor,” I tell him again. “One of my psychologists—the last one I saw before Nine pulled me out of Black Pine. Dr. Gillespie. He yanked the necklace out from under his shirt right before he chased me into Faerie. If anyone has a Brinkburn thing, I’m betting it’s him.”
Ash thinks about it for a second.
“So this human…” he says, his raspy voice going soft. Thoughtful. “This Dr. Gillespie? You’re sure he wears the trio of charms around his throat?”
I nod.
“And he knows who you are?”
He knows every damn thing about me. It’s all in my folder—and that’s not to mention everything I told him during the few sessions we had together.
I nod again.
“That won’t stop me, though.”
Callie gasps. “Riley, no—”
Ash places his hand on her shoulder. She turns into him, burying her face in his chest as my dad peers over her head at me, his jaw hard and his eyes blazing like golden fire.
“So you understand what you’re going to have to do, don’t you? To free Ninetroir?”
I nod one last time.
“I’m going to have to go back to the asylum.”
6
Black Pine.
When Nine first grabbed my hand and pulled me into the shadows, forcing me to leave my room in the asylum, I was furious. Not just at the touch—though that hadn’t helped my anger—but because I didn’t want to be a part of any of this.
I still don’t. If I could throw the whole Shadow Prophecy over my shoulder and walk away from it, I’d gladly do so without ever glancing behind me a second time.
That’s not possible, though. I know that—now. Back in June, when I was counting down the days until I turned twenty-one and could finally be free—ha!—I whole-heartedly believed that, once I was released from the asylum, it was done. Over. I could start my life again without Madelaine’s death or Nine’s warnings to haunt me.
Of course, that’s when Nine found me. Then Rys.
One week passed. Then four months. Now it’s been three-quarters of a year, I’m closing in on turning twenty-two, and going back to Black Pine is quite possibly the most stupid, reckless thing I could do.
It’s a place where the fae put people to forget about them. Sure, it’s a psych hospital—sorry, a “facility for wayward juveniles”—but it’s also staffed by fae-touched humans, like Diana and Duncan. Shoot, if Jason and Carolina are any examples, I can’t even trust the patients.
And now I’m going to willingly return.
It all comes down to stealing Dr. Gillespie’s necklace to get my gloves on this Brinkburn thing. Ash is convinced that the crystal is all I need to reverse Melisandre’s spell. Since he seems to know what he’s talking about, I’m all aboard the ‘save Nine by any means’ train. A little petty theft? It’s better than the alternative.
Callie hates the idea. Honestly, I’m pretty sure Ash does, too, but my dad is way better at hiding his thoughts and emotions. He’s a fae. It figures.
Once I latch onto the idea, once I have even a speck of hope, I can’t be stopped. As much as I’d rather never step foot inside the Black Pine facility ever again, it’s all I want to do.
So I make plans. I make plans and I practice.
I know I’m gonna have to do this on my own. Ash won’t be able to travel with me. As a Light Fae, he has his own magic. His own powers. Callie wasn’t exaggerating when she told me that my shadows nearly killed him as we were escaping the Fae Queen. I saw it myself.
Taking a pocket to travel from the city to Black Pine? Even if he survived one of my shadows again, he’d be useless when we arrived at the asylum.
On the plus side, he’s a pro when it comes to being a teacher. He might not be able to use the sunlight to move around like Rys did—he can’t since he won’t risk returning to Faerie during the night to recharge his strength—but he can explain how to do it.
The principles for shade-walking and Light Fae travel are basically the same. Within a couple of days, he actually manages to teach me how to make the shadows work for me without them dictating where I’m going to end up. It’s touch, but I’m super fucking motivated.
Hey, anything to keep me from accidentally walking back into Faerie again.
It’s not just about shade-walking. I spend every free moment that I can working on gathering shadows. Dr. Gillespie might have the seeing stone that looked straight through the shadowy disguise I used in the alleyway the last time we met. That’s just one man. I still have the entire ward to worry about.
Now that I know fae-touched humans also are inside the Black Pine facility, I can’t be too careful. My shadows are the only glamour that I have. I need to be able to call them easily, using them to conceal me and hide me while I sneak around my old floor.
And that’s if I even manage to make it to the right floor in the first place.
When I’m not working with my shadows, I’m learning how to shade-walk while I’m conscious. With Ash’s instruction, I start by creating my own pockets and turning them into portals. It’s a struggle in the beginning. It leaves me so drained the first couple of times that I don’t even have the energy to move through them.
The pull toward Faerie is too great. It would be so easy to slip into the shadows and land on the other side of the veil between worlds. I can’t, though, and it takes everything I have to control where I end up.
I start with the inside of the apartment. Bedroom to bathroom. Living room to kitchen. It gets easier after a couple of tries. I keep on practicing. When I can shade-walk from our apartment to the abandoned lobby without a hitch in my breath, I begin to think that I can really do this.
I tell Nine every night that we’re working on saving him. He can’t hear me—my parents are proof since neither one remembers any of their imprisonment at all—but it makes me feel better.
Callie keeps track of the days. Every couple of mornings, I run down to the corner store and buy a newspaper so that we don’t lose any; after my experience with Faerie, I keep expecting it to be like December or something. We don’t, and as March turns to April, Ash and I agree that our best bet would be the second Sunday this month.
Easter.
It’s a holiday. Back when I was still a “wayward juvenile” trapped in the asylum, I remember how hectic it was during any holiday season. Family visits and day-time passes were at a high then, and the staff was always short-handed. I’m hoping Dr. Gillespie will still be there—he’s the one who has the Brinkburn around his throat, after all—and that any of the Fae Queen’s pets won’t be.
I don’t necessarily want to confront my old psychologist at Black Pine. I don’t know what he’s doing there, or who he might be working with—or for. But since I don’t have any other lead than that he worked for the facility as of October, it’s my only chance to get a Brinkburn without sending Callie out to find one.
I can’t do that. It’s not fair to her. I know there’s gonna come a time when she has to leave this apartment and realize
that twenty years have gone by, that the world kept spinning while she was frozen in time under Melisandre’s cruel curse. It’s… it’s just not yet.
Every time she looks at me, her dark blue eyes sad, I know she knows that twenty years have passed. I’m proof right here.
She doesn’t want to push me to confront the queen. I don’t want to admit that I’m still dealing with twenty years of feeling like I’ve been left to survive on my own.
We’re all living in denial.
Well, except for Ash.
On Friday, two days before I’m supposed to put our plan into place, he calls for me. I walk into the living room to find Ash waiting.
And he’s holding a sword.
One of those scary-ass swords that the fae guards carried with the silver hilt and the diamond blade.
Oh, boy.
My mom was in the kitchen, busying herself with reorganizing the drawers and making sense of the random groceries I keep bringing back to the apartment. When Ash called my name, she must have followed me because it’s her incredulous voice that breaks the quiet.
“Ash, honey. What’s this?”
“It’s a sword.”
No shit.
Callie frowns. “I thought you got rid of those.”
“I did. I tucked them away for safe-keeping.” His golden gaze dims to a simmering bronze. “Can’t keep a sword around a baby.”
Me. He’s talking about me.
Only I’m not a baby anymore—and we all know it.
The room grows heavy with an awkward silence as Callie purses her lips. She looks like she wants to say something more before she parts her lips and lets out a soft sigh.
“If you think it’ll help…” She shakes her head, her long white-blonde hair—the same as mine—swaying with the motion. “You two do this. I’m going to take a shower.”
Ash leans down, pressing his lips against her cheek. He murmurs something to her and the swaying stops. Callie nods and, pressing her hand to his chest, she rises up on the tips of her toes, shifting so that she could give him a quick kiss.
Feeling as if I’m intruding on something private, I turn away. My gaze searches out Nine. I lift my hands to my own lips, smoothing them with the worn leather, wishing it was Nine’s breath warming them instead.
I only kissed Nine the one time. I would do just about anything to have the chance to do it again.
As if Ash can read my mind, he waits until Callie has closed the bedroom door behind her before he taps the point of his sword on the wooden floor, catching my attention.
I spin, whirling on him. “Huh?”
He lifts the sword, grabbing it by the tang so that he can offer me the hilt. “For you. You’ll need this if you’re going to fight Melisandre.”
It’s a good thing Callie found a reason to leave the room. Over the last few days, we’ve all made it a point not to discuss the inevitable outcome of the damn Shadow Prophecy. It’s almost as if, if we don’t talk about it, we can pretend that I’m not inching closer and closer to another confrontation with Melisandre.
Because I don’t want to admit that, either, I do what I always do.
I scoff. And I definitely don’t take the sword.
“Who says I’m going to fight her?”
“She may look innocent, but I assure you, she’s not. She won’t stand there and let you lop off her head. To get close to her, you’ll need to get past her guards.” Once he realizes that I’m not accepting it from him, Ash adjusts his hold on the sword, angling it so that weak lamp light glitters off the diamond edge. “I was one once, in a lifetime ago. I can train you. When the time comes to face her, I’ll stand by your side. If the scheme to get the Brinkburn succeeds, we’ll have Ninetroir’s blade as well. Melisandre will regret targeting my daughter before her end.”
I look at the sword.
I don’t get it. First Rys. Then Carolina. Now Ash?
They don’t get that I don’t want to be a killer, do they?
It all goes back to Madelaine’s murder. I spent more than six years feeling guilt for her death—to be honest, I still carry the blame for what happened to her—and it will forever weigh on me that everyone thinks I’m responsible for it.
And, well, I am. Without me and my connection to the fae, Madelaine would probably still be living happily with the Everetts. Maybe she’d be married. Maybe she’d be settled in a career. She always told me she wanted to be a vet because she loved animals.
Except she’s dead now.
Rys killed her. The golden fae who saved my life, saved my parents and my mate, killed my sister.
I can’t be like him. I won’t. Even if it means I end up a headless statue in Melisandre’s garden in Faerie, I won’t be a killer.
End her reign has to mean something else. It just has to.
Now if only I can figure out how to tell Ash that...
Because it makes him happy, I decide to just take the sword from him after all. I know, deep down, that I’ll never use it—he probably does, too—but I pay close attention as Ash teaches me how to open a pocket of my own to store the sword.
I try not to think about how I’ve seen this kind of parlor trick before. Except, as my dad shows me how to put the sword in, then take it out again, all I can remember is the coy and teasing look on Rys’s face as he pulled a lantern full of faerie fire out of thin air.
Shake it off, Riley.
Don’t think about Rys.
Focus on Nine.
I can do this.
The night before I’m going to shade-walk to the asylum, I decide that I should make a trial run to prove that I can cover the distance. I don’t risk going to Black Pine, just in case, though Acorn Falls is as good a test as any.
And, okay. Maybe I wanted to stop by Madelaine’s grave one last time
The trip to the cemetery is seamless. I land right beneath the overhang of the Richardsons’ mausoleum, picking up for the first time that the dark patch isn’t just dark—it’s another Dark Fae portal masquerading as part of the human world.
Huh. No wonder I always traveled here while I was sleeping.
I don’t stay long, crossing to the west side of the cemetery so that I can visit with Madelaine’s stone angel for a little bit, before returning back to the apartment with a sense of relief and a thumb’s up for my parents.
I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.
Bright and early the next morning, I wake up with a pit in my stomach. It’s Easter, but I’m not looking for any chocolate bunnies or hidden eggs.
I’m waiting to hopefully steal a necklace from my old psychologist.
Fun.
I choke down breakfast, my nerves making it difficult to eat. I repeat my silent promise to Nine that, if all goes according to plan, this might be his last day as a statue. After a quick shower, I change into a black hoodie and jeans I bought just for the occasion. I’ve practiced with my shadows enough that I’m confident they’ll cover me. Nothing wrong with giving them a little help.
I braid my long hair in twin braids, purposely plaiting the strands so that they cover my pointed fae ears. I’ve got my sneakers and my gloves and a really bad feeling about this.
It’s not gonna stop me.
Nothing can.
The three of us gather in the living room.
“Are you ready?” asks Ash.
Not even a little. But, since I’m pretty sure that I’ll never be able to answer that question with a yes and mean it, I shrug and lie. “Of course.”
“Good luck, sweetie,” Callie tells me.
Ash nods his head. “You can do this.”
I’m glad one of us thinks so.
Taking a deep breath, I lift my hand. Spreading my fingers as wide as they go before the leather glove groans, I twist my wrist and close my hand into a tight fist.
The portal pops into existence right in front of me as if it was only waiting for my signal.
Welp.
Here I go.
7
My old room in Black Pine is empty.
I let out a huge sigh of relief when I appear in the portal and see that no one else is sleeping in my bed. It was mine for two full years, ever since I aged out of the last floor and got moved to the nineteen through twenty-one group, and while I’m not so naive to believe that they’ve kept it for me, waiting for me to return, I don’t know what I would’ve done if I shade-walked here only to see someone else lying there.
I can sense something, though. Something… off. A prickle along the back of my neck, the tips of my freaky fae ears almost twitching.
Reaching up, I pat my fingers over my braids, making sure that the wind that accompanies my shadow travel didn’t uncover my pointed ears. If everything goes to plan, no one will even see me, but knowing they're hidden makes me feel a little better.
Only a little. My stomach is tight, nerves and anxiety and the familiar motion sickness making me queasy as I step away from the corner, fully materializing in the room.
It’s magic. That’s the only way I can explain it. Maybe because I was never really gone from the asylum long enough to notice it—or because I was stubbornly ignoring any sign that the fae were real—but I can feel the magic reaching out toward me as I look around the room.
Someone touched by the fae has been in here.
It only takes me a second to realize that that person is me.
At least part of this strange magic and apprehensive feeling is because of me. The echoes of the touch I offered Rys while I was sedated, plus the grab Nine stole the last time I was standing in this room… I can feel it.
That’s not all, either. With a jolt, I think of that first night outside of Black Pine, when Nine was warning me against returning. He said that the asylum was full of charmed and touched humans working with the fae.
Like Jason, who ended up as a statue in the Fae Queen’s garden when she was done with him.
And, I remember with a sinking heart, Carolina.
Surrounded by them, I never would’ve known that they were touched by the fae. It was only if a Light Fae or one of the Dark tried to—what did he call it?—enter my domain that I would be able to sense it.
Touch (Touched by the Fae Book 3) Page 6