Rise of the Fomori: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Adventure (Faerie Warriors Book 2)

by J. A. Curtis

  “She fell. Who are you?”

  She danced back a step, and her wings spread. “Who are you?”

  I couldn’t see any reason to hide my identity from her. She didn’t appear threatening. She looked like she was about to fly away. “My name is Arius.”

  Her oval eyes contained deep shades of green. “Captain of the Royal Guard. I should have seen it. Now that I am looking for it, you have the unmistakable aura of the eldest son of the Ettemarch.”

  “Aura?”

  She laughed, emerald eyes sparkling. “Everyone has an aura. For example, your deep-brown hues suggest an earthy steadiness. An unmovingness. Once you recognize what you want, you lock it in here.”

  A soft finger pressed into my chest and my heart stuttered. I hadn’t realized she’d come so close.

  A rich flowery scent swirled with the surrounding mist. “And you don’t let go,” she added.

  Golden-brown eyes filled with a stubborn steeliness flashed through my mind. I cleared my throat and stepped back. “Who are you?”

  “I am Niamh, the oldest of the faeries, and it is an honor Arius, Warrior of Thunder.” She swept back and bowed. “I rarely get visitors.”

  Even with my enhanced vision, her youthful face defied any signs of aging.

  “Are you a prisoner here?”

  Her eyes grew sad and far away. “I have been trapped for a long time.”

  “How can we free you?”

  A small crease formed in her forehead as her eyebrows drew together. “We?”

  I’d included the rest of the faeries in my statement without even thinking, the result of being raised as part of an army. “We have a small force, about twenty-five faeries, although some are out of action. But we have General Jazrael—”

  She gasped. “Jazrael is supposed to protect my mother! Is my mother alive? Where is she?”

  “Y-your mother?” My mind reeled.

  She stepped close to me. “Is. She. Alive?”

  I nodded, still trying to grasp this new revelation—Niamh was the daughter of the faerie queen. “She’s alive.”

  She hung her head, her arms hugging her torso. “Is she with you?”

  “No,” I answered, and her head shot up. “But Jazrael knows where the queen is, and she is safe.” I was pretty sure of that fact.

  Her brow creased. “Nuada wants—wanted her dead.”

  “I know. But Mina—General Jazrael is the only one who knows where she is and she’s not telling.”

  She still looked worried. “Are you sure? Nuada’s clever. She didn’t discover any information that she might have passed on to others about my mother’s location, did she?”

  I lacked knowledge of what Mina had discussed with Nuada and Margus. The burning Rowan leaves from Nuada’s office had caused me to pass out for that part. Although I’d wanted to ask her so many times about the queen, I’d lost that right when my actions had placed Her Majesty in peril. Mina wouldn’t intentionally endanger her, but what if the queen wasn’t as safe as Mina thought?

  Niamh studied my face. “I don’t think Nuada was working alone.”

  A sudden pulling sensation pummeled my body, a pair of hands were gripping me, trying to lift me up into the sky. I fought to stay, an urgency growing in my chest. “What do you know?”

  Her eyes rose to the sky, then fell back to me. “You must go. This is the first time you have used this kind of magic, is it not?”

  “I can stay a little longer.” The tugging grew more insistent. I had been taught the faerie queen’s family had been killed with the destruction of the Otherworld. But here was the faerie princess, very much alive—and she was my chance to get answers.

  “It is not good to submerge yourself in any one magic for too long if you are new to it. Otherwise, you may lose yourself,” she said.

  “You mean get trapped here? Like you?”

  “You must go.”

  Still, I struggled against the pulling, falling to my knees and clutching at the grass. “I need to know what Nuada told you. It could help us protect your mother.”

  She dropped to her knees beside me. “You do not have time. Someone is trying to break your connection.” Her green eyes bored into mine. “But if you do not get to my mother before them, she will be killed.”

  I was lifted into the sky against my will. The woman and the world around me shrank, then grew hazy before vanishing.

  Thaya held my arm and jerked it. My fingers slipped off the glass.

  “Stop it.” I turned back toward the ball, reaching out.

  Thaya knocked my hand away. “You were in there for at least fifteen minutes. You were stiff and unresponsive. I worried you wouldn’t come out.”

  “I was getting answers. I was fine.”

  “You weren’t fine. You need a break.”

  I stepped close to the ball. Just a few more minutes. “You’re overstepping your bounds, soldier.”

  She threw her hands in the air. “Oh, now you want to bring up rank? After weeks of sulking away at your little hiding spot, leaving us with some newbie—”

  “Thaya,” I growled in warning.

  The winged warrior woman tattooed on her arm twitched as her hands dropped to her sides in fists. “Nuada left us too, Arius. And yet we do our duty. While that general allows you to do whatever you want. Get over yourself.”

  Thaya’s words stung. But we weren’t the same. Nuada had abandoned us, and yet what she had done went beyond that. “She didn’t try to kill you.”

  “No, she tried to kill our queen. Nuada betrayed us all.” Her voice was tight, a string stretched taut about to break. She backed toward the window. “You know what? Do what you want. It’s clear your own self-pity or self-loathing, whatever it is, is more important than any of us.”

  I held out a hand. “Thaya, I—”

  But she turned, released her faerie guardian, jumped out the window onto the flying warrior’s shoulder, and flew away.

  I STASHED THE OBJECTS from Nuada’s office in my tent and went back to debarking trees. After a brief break to satisfy Thaya, I tried going back inside the glass ball, but somehow, Niamh had disappeared. I didn’t understand and determined to try again later. The friction of the drawknife scraping across the tree was a better outlet for the frustration swirling in my chest anyway. I was pretty sure I could get ten more trees stripped before dark. Thaya couldn’t accuse me of hiding away or not doing my part, at least, not for the rest of the day.

  The groan of an approaching engine revved over the tracks that led toward the manor. I paused, wiping droplets of sweat from my brow. A large white box truck bumped along the path, Caelm at the wheel. The truck chugged up next to the other two half-semis before the engine cut, and Caelm exited the cab.

  The look on his face told me something had gone wrong. I dropped the drawknife and stalked in his direction. The door on the bed of the truck swung upward. Luchta and Veran hopped out. I angled to see inside of the bed, searching for the fourth person who should have been with them.

  “Where’s Mina?”

  “We had a minor complication,” Caelm hedged.

  “Caelm, where’s Mina?” My voice boomed louder than expected, and Caelm winced.

  “That was the complication.”

  The following silence roared in my ears. I hadn’t wanted to believe it, but deep inside I knew this was coming. “When did she leave?”

  Caelm raised startled eyes. “Sir, Mina made sure we got out safe. We circled back just in case she’d gotten away, but... they arrested her.”

  My shoulders slumped. Of course. That sounded much more like Mina. Why had I been so sure she’d left on her own?

  “Where did they take her?” I asked.

  Caelm’s face flushed. “Sh-she told us to go. I was too afraid to follow, lest we be caught, too.”

  I ran a hand over my face. The police had caught Mina. She’d do her best to keep our secret, I didn’t doubt that, but what would happen to her? Would they discover her identity an
d send her home to her human family? Would she tell them her identity?

  “Sir?” Luchta came up beside Caelm. “I know a way we can find Mina—”

  I headed for the cab. “Let’s go.”

  “But we’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  I swung around. “Why is that?”

  “Because the library doesn’t open until ten a.m.”

  3

  Family Versus Enemies

  Mina

  “Try to cooperate with those who try to help you.” —Nana

  I AM A FORTRESS. A fortress that cannot be breached. I repeated my mantra over in my head. The police tried to question me at the hardware store, but I’d been able to hold out on them. I hadn’t given them a single piece of information. Not my name, my age, why I was at the hardware store. Not even my height—although they had measured that anyway.

  I sat in an interrogation room with a table and two chairs. My shoes tapped on the tile floor. Stark, bare walls enclosed the room, holding me captive. The door was locked—I’d checked. I drummed my fingers on the table.

  Be patient, I thought. You’ll find a way out of this.

  The mustachioed man, Sergeant Anders, stalked into the room. Poor plan. They should have at least chosen someone new. I’d seen this guy’s tactics at the hardware store. But he was probably assigned to me because he’d been the one to arrest and bring me to the police station for further questioning.

  He brought someone else with him. The man pushed a television set on wheels into the room. Sergeant Anders slapped a manila envelope down on the table in front of me. I smirked. Classic.

  “We found some—interesting things on the video footage from the store.” The man fiddling with the television pushed some buttons, and the screen displayed an image of me, Luchta, and Veran making our way down an aisle. We paused, and I distinctly saw myself glance up to search for cameras.

  “Look here. You three are standing there, not touching a thing, but the parts on the shelves are moving. What did you have with you? Some sort of animal?”

  Something like that. I sat in stony silence.

  “And here,” Sergeant Anders said, pulling up a clip from a different angle. “There were three of you the entire time, and suddenly, in this image, there are four of you. She looks like your twin. And she’s carrying the boy out the door. What was wrong with him?”

  I glared at the screen, trying to hide my annoyance but knew it was showing through my folded arms and ticking jaw. I wasn’t angry at the video footage, or at the police officer for asking me about it. I was angry at the one person who should have been there to prevent this whole stupid thing from happening. If he’d come as I asked, I might not have gotten arrested.

  The Sergeant watched me from beneath large eyebrows. “If that kid needed medical attention—”

  “He’s fine.”

  One thick eyebrow raised. It was the first verbal response he had gotten from me.

  “I hope so.” He sat in the chair across from me. “Look kid, I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re mixed up in, but it must be bad to not even want to give me a pseudonym.” His head inclined. “Or you’re just stubborn. I can’t tell which.”

  I didn’t respond.

  He was half right on both counts. The faeries were amazing, but there was also a lot of danger involved in being a neo-soldier mythical being charged with protecting their ultimate leader from a mysterious enemy who wanted to kill her. But that wasn’t why I couldn’t make up a pseudonym. I thought about giving him my faerie name, Jazrael, but then decided the less I said about anything, the better.

  The second man exited the room, taking the television with him.

  “I want to offer you a deal, kid.” His large fingers worked a blank sheet of paper and pen from the manila envelope.

  A deal. He wanted me to write my confession like some hardened criminal. Tell me where the body is, and we’ll lessen your sentence. Except now it would be, give me a logical explanation for how this happened, and I’ll convince the judge to go easy on you.

  But I couldn’t. Because I couldn’t lie, and because it wasn’t logical. Or at least not logical to him.

  “You’ve got no record that we can tell. You’re not in any databases. Your fingerprints won’t run on any machine.”

  He regarded me, and I gave him a blank stare.

  After the machine had failed, they’d resorted to doing it the old ink and paper way. But it turned out, that it hadn't helped, either.

  “You know where that leaves me? I’ll have to send you to the juvenile detention center where you’ll go before a judge. We don’t charge kids for petty shoplifting, so you’ll probably be placed in foster care and live with strangers. I think you know that’s not a great option.”

  He slid the paper across the table. “So, here’s the deal. You write down one identifying piece of information on this sheet of paper. A phone number, an address, a name—it doesn’t have to be your own. It could be a parent or guardian. First name, last name, hell, whatever. We’ll contact your parents or guardian, and you can leave with them tonight.”

  Tonight.

  Blood pulsed in my ears. I licked dry lips. “You don’t get much out of that deal.”

  “I get to see you go home safe. That is reward enough for me.”

  I stared at the pen like it was a secret bomb about to explode. “The store, it's not what you think. We weren’t trying to—I didn’t want to... to take the stuff. We—I was desperate.”

  “Was someone forcing you? Coercing you to take those things?”

  “No, it was nothing like that.” I rubbed my wrist where the bracelet Corbin made for me used to sit. Strange how the bracelet was gone, but the habit remained.

  “Are you afraid to go home?”

  I bit the inside of my cheek, unable to explain. I was afraid, but not in the way he thought. If I went home, I feared I’d never want to go back to the faeries.

  A full minute passed without a word spoken.

  “I want to help you.” He tapped the paper. “Write whatever you want. About the store. About yourself. Anything.”

  He stood and exited the room, the door clicking shut.

  So much for being an impenetrable fortress. The guy offered to send me home to my family, and already he was taking the parapets. But I had said nothing important.

  I left my family behind when I joined the faeries. My brother, Corbin, flashed through my mind. The small kid drew in bullies like a magnet. School had started only a couple weeks ago, and he’d be in seventh grade. The first year of middle school had been rough on him, and the second rarely got better.

  I wouldn’t be there for him.

  And my parents... they thought I was dead. My whole family thought I was dead.

  The brightness of the blank paper burned my eyes. My fingers itched to pick up the pen and write just one word. One thing that would relieve this weight crushing my shoulders and send me back to my life with family and carefree humanity, where I was a kid and adults took care of all the difficult things.

  I slipped my hands under my thighs and pressed down, hard.

  WHEN SERGEANT ANDERS walked back into the room, he picked up the blank sheet of paper and sighed.

  “It’s out of my hands, kid,” he said.

  He brought me to the juvenile detention center as promised, and placed me in front of a social worker who tried to get more information out of me. The woman was nice enough, but when she implied I was refusing to identify myself because my parents were abusive, I almost cracked. I hated the idea that anyone might think that about my parents. Them not knowing who they were didn’t even matter.

  When she promised me safety from their alleged abuse, I finally shouted at her to “just drop it.” And to her credit, she did.

  After I ate dinner in a cafeteria full of other kids, she showed me to my room. I lay on a bed of scratchy blankets and stared up at a white ceiling. Funny how lying on a strange bed in a strange new environment reminded
me of being taken to the Haven the first time around. That was only three months ago.

  The side walls of my room were painted a calming beige. I was scheduled to see a judge sometime tomorrow.

  The door buzzed and clicked open. I sat up as a girl walked in. A bulky girl with light-brown hair and exercise clothes kicked off her tennis shoes and set them under the empty bed.

  “Other kids said I had a new roommate. Said you’re mute. Won’t even tell people your name,” she said.

  My social worker had introduced me to a few other kids while we sat eating dinner together before she showed me to my room. The kids had tried to be nice, but I’d glowered at them in stubborn silence.

  The girl leaned against the wall, arms folded, and regarded me. “I’ve seen your type before. You go on and try ta hold out on them. They’ll figure out who you are. They always do.”

  There was a reason the police hadn’t found me in any of their databases, and it wasn’t because they couldn’t fingerprint me. I pulled at the ends of my hair as I recalled the painful shock of discovering that everyone I knew and loved thought me dead. The police hadn’t expanded their search wide enough. If they got the bright idea to search obituaries within the local communities from the last few months, I’d no longer be able to hide from them.

  My plan was to go before a judge and be placed in foster care, then run away and make my way back to the faeries. But what if they discovered who I was before then? Going home to my family was not an option. Better to escape from a secure prison than risk the emotional trauma of leaving those I love behind. Again.

  I stood and walked to the window. It looked out over a courtyard encircled by a high security fence.

  “Aw, you’re thinking of escape, aren’t you? That’s cute. These windows, by the way, open about two inches. If you break it, an alarm sounds. And there’s no way you can make it over that fence before getting caught. Nope, the only way out of here is the same way you came in, and you saw how much security they have. They pretty near strip search you. Visitors can’t even be chewing gum when they enter.”