by Quinn Loftis
“Fine, do not kill them. But make sure they will not be able assist Perizada for quite some time.”
She nodded, not really caring if he could see her or only feel her presence. “When do you want to do the dreamscape?”
“Tonight, we have no time to waste. Retrieve one of the healers,” he paused and Lorelle could almost feel his humor. “I hope you are not queasy at the sight of a little blood.”
Lorelle didn’t respond as she flashed from the disturbing nature that seemed to enshroud his essence. She considered all the ways to deal with the healers and though she could just force the girls to cooperate, she decided a little brain washing would be more effective in using their magic. A willing subject was much easier to draw power from, and attempting to use healing magic for the opposite of healing was no easy task. She honestly wasn’t even sure that it was possible but then she was not about to tell the world’s most malicious toddler, all be it in a grown up form, that he couldn’t do something. She was at times admittedly impulsive, but she wasn’t a complete and total idiot― at least not yet.
∞
“Though I hate to question your infinite knowledge from all of the books you must have read on escaping magical forests, but do actually know what you’re doing or are we just wandering aimlessly?” Kara asked Jewel who was in front of her, diligently traipsing through the thick foliage and unforgiving limbs that seemed to reach out and slap them periodically.
Jewel’s breathing was slightly labored, evidence that she indeed sat most of her day with her nose in a book instead of doing physical activity. Say for example lugging a tray full of food and drinks around for fourteen to fifteen hours a day. “I’m looking for higher ground,” Jewel explained attempting not to sound like a puffing freight train. “If we can get high enough to see over the trees, we might be able to see where the forest ends and normal, untainted land begins.”
“What do you mean by untainted?” Kara asked.
Jewel stopped, abruptly causing Kara to run into her back, bouncing off of her surprisingly sturdy frame. “You can’t tell me you don’t feel it.” Her eyes widened as she looked at Kara with alarming intensity.
“Feel what?”
Jewel shook her head and mumbled something under her breath that sounded like ignorant muggles. In the little time Kara had spent with the redhead, it did not surprise her that she used a Harry Potter reference in their circumstances, and maybe it was fitting.
“I don’t tell many people this, or at least not people I’m not close with,” Jewel stiffened her shoulders as if preparing for some sort of blow before she continued. “My mom is a fortune teller.” She watched Kara’s face carefully and Kara knew she was waiting to see if she was going to laugh at her.
“What does that have to do with the evil queen and her apple tree?” Kara asked, unsure of why Jewel’s mother being some quack that liked to convince people she knew something about their lives that hadn’t happened yet, mattered at a time like this. “No offense but I don’t really care what your mother tells or doesn’t tell. I just want to get back to my life, no matter how pathetic it may have been. I have a plan and I need to stick to the plan if I’m going to,”
“Get the hell out of Dodge?” Jewel asked with a small smile on her lips.
Kara laughed. “Exactly.”
“Just hear me out, and try to listen with an open mind. For these few minutes while we talk consider the possibility that there is more to the world than what we know. Consider that you are more and that you weren’t taken simply because you have great hair and a nifty nose piercing.”
“You think I have great hair?” Kara’s voice rose and octave.
“And a nifty nose piercing,” Jewel pointed out. “Because of what my mom does, I have always been exposed to the otherness in the world. I have always been aware that things are not always what they seem. People are often more than what we perceive them to be. When I first arrived in this lovely wooded prison I played dumb to Lorelle. I didn’t want her to know just how much I understood, because knowledge is power, especially to the fae.”
“Wait, hold up,” Kara blurted out. “You knew about this? You know what she is and you believe her?”
“My mom often kept tabs on what was going to happen in my life, though she rarely told me because she didn’t want to influence what was to be. On this instance she decided to break her code of silence because she felt I needed to know, needed to be ready. She said she had always known that I carried magic inside of me, but it was untapped and out of my reach. She began to tell me about the things in this world that humans did not know about and being the curious spirit that I am, I began to research it. It’s hard to find any credible information, but every now and then you come across a blog on the internet or a brief mention in an old book of someone encountering something or someone that they didn’t know how to explain.”
Kara stepped back and leaned up against a tree, needing to feel something solid and real as she listened to the tale Jewel weaved.
“My mom told me that soon I would encounter such a being. She said it was my fate, my path to follow and not to fight it. But she also said to keep my wits about me, to listen and to remember that sometimes the most beautiful things I would encounter were actually evil wrapped in alluring trappings. This Lorelle who has taken us is one such beautiful thing. This lush forest, is so much more than that. It is dripping like a festering wound with the infection of malice and if you will open yourself up, for just a split second to the possibility that you are indeed special as the fae has indicated, you will feel it and you will see it.” Jewel took a step towards Kara, her hand reaching out, imploring her to take it. “If you let me, I can help.”
Kara considered the innocent looking girl before her wondering if she was one such beautiful thing that was attempting to lure her into a magical world she had invented in her little head. But then she sensed goodness in Jewel that she had rarely come across in her life. Jewel was pure, untainted, even though she talked of magic, malice and otherness, she was light, warmth and peace. She looked around the forest with the firm tree at her back. She couldn’t deny that this was real, it was truly happening and if that was the case then what Jewel said might be true. She didn’t like the possibility of things she couldn’t explain. But as her eyes returned to Jewels hopeful green ones she inwardly shrugged thinking what else did she have to do than attempt to feel the evil that Jewel spoke of.
She took Jewel’s hand and wasn’t surprised to find it soft and warm, unlike her own that were rough from being washed constantly because of clearing nasty tables and washing dirty dishes day after day. “What do I need to do?” She asked her.
“Close your eyes and picture yourself opening a door in your mind.” Jewel waited until Kara complied. “Take a deep breath and let it out slowly and picture yourself walking through that door into the forest, but as you cross through speak these words in your mind; reveal the truth, remove the lies, unbind the light inside of me to shine through the darkness. Then open your eyes and tell me what you see.”
Kara did exactly as Jewel told her, and because she truly wanted to know what was happening, what she had been literally snatched into, she believed for just a minute that anything was truly possible. Reveal the truth, remove the lies, unbind the light inside of me to shine through the darkness, Kara chanted to herself as she pictured a white door opening before her. She lifted her foot to step over the threshold but the second her foot was beyond the threshold, she nearly jerked it back. Before she even saw it, she felt it, her skin crawled and she gritted her teeth forcing herself the rest of the way.
She opened her eyes once fully through the door, just as Jewel had instructed and she could see it. Black ooze dripped from the trees burning holes into the leaves that it touched, and grey fog rippled through branches and under bushes. A pungent odor rushed into her nose causing her face to scrunch up as though she’d sucked on a lemon.
“This is what you have been seeing the whole ti
me we’ve been trekking along?” Kara stumbled over her words a bit as she continued to inspect the seemingly changed forest around her.
“No, not the entire time. I only see it that way when I open myself up. You can keep the door closed, so to speak, so that you aren’t bombarded with the nastiness of this place. So, do you believe me now?” Jewel’s eyes narrowed on the former waitress.
“I have to admit that your argument coupled with the evidence is quite convincing,” Kara admitted.
“What are you, pre-law?”
Kara let out a snort of laughter. “First of all, how old do you think I am? And second, the lady I live with is obsessed with crime shows and Judge Judy.”
“Would you like to close this off,” Jewel offered, “before we continue to chat?”
Kara nodded and closed her eyes once again. She took hold of Jewel’s hand and pictured the door. As she pushed it open and stepped back through she let out a breath and with it all of the nastiness that she had breathed in.
When she opened her eyes she was once again in the forest that, though still dark and uninviting, no longer dripped with black nasty stuff or had rippling fog that was seriously just wrong in so many ways. Somehow this version felt much less threatening.
“Now,” Jewel interrupted Kara’s thought of, thank goodness I’m back in the tad bit less evil forest, moment. “Your disposition indicates that you are eighteen or nineteen. Your appearance, however, does look a little younger than that. The way your eyes narrow like a hawk’s and dart around, constantly watching your environment reveals a much older soul and one who has seen too much for her few years.” Jewel clucked her tongue as she examined Kara and then said, “I’m going to go with sixteen or seventeen.”
“You’re good,” Kara smiled but it did not meet her hawk like eyes. “I’m sixteen going on fifty.”
“I’m seventeen,” Jewel divulged as her eyes drifted up and her lips pressed together.
“There’s nothing wrong with being seventeen.” Kara grinned.
“Maybe not but it’s just so, so…,” Jewel stammered. “Mundane, that’s what it is. I mean it isn’t sixteen which is supposed to be sweet, and it isn’t eighteen which is supposed to be the coming of age, leaving your childish ways behind you to become a mature woman.”
“Maturity is overrated,” Kara grumbled having experienced firsthand that sometimes maturity comes much too soon to the innocent.
“Maybe for those who have had it thrust upon them,” Jewel said knowingly. “I’ve seen things in my short little life that most will never see, but I imagine from the haunted look in your eyes I’ve never seen what you have.”
Kara pushed away from the tree deciding that the conversation was veering in a direction she did not want to go. Her past was her past and she wouldn’t use it to gain sympathy or pity.
“So if we’re going to find this higher ground to see if we can get out of this cesspool we should probably keep keeping on.” She motioned for Jewel to once again take point and began to follow her. “So what do you think Lorelle wants with us anyways?” Kara asked.
“Probably to hook us to some machine and suck the power from our bodies until all that is left is flesh withered like a dried up prune.” Jewel’s tone was so straight forward that Kara didn’t know whether to believe her or not.
“Uh, are you being for real right now or is that something you read in one of your books?”
“Nope, saw it on the Princess Bride, only Westley, that’s the guy who got captured and attached to a machine, was having his lives sucked from his body, not power.”
Kara cleared her throat. “Okay, but are you insinuating that based on a movie, our outcome could be the same?”
Jewel turned back to look at Kara with a mischievous smile and gleam in her eyes that showed a slightly different side to the studious girl. “Rule number one when dealing with smart people, do not believe everything they say. In fact believe only half of it and consider the rest dressed up with big words that are meant to keep you from understanding what part is truth and what part is not.”
“So you’re saying I shouldn’t believe anything you say?” Kara asked attempting to clarify Jewel’s statement all the while wondering if what had just happened indeed had been some mind trick.
“No, I said smart people, I said nothing about dealing with geniuses.”
“Modest much,” Kara mumbled.
“Confident,” Jewel corrected. “I may have grown up with a crystal ball reading, tarot card shuffling, scry throwing eccentric lady, and maybe sometimes I’m ashamed of how weird people considered her and consequently me. But having knowledge and exhibiting the ability to use it, not just obtain it, now that is something I can be proud of.”
Kara said nothing in response to Jewel’s passionate explanation. What could she say? I’m proud to be an orphan, or waitress. Nope, that wasn’t going to fly, which was exactly why it was hard to believe that she, Kara Jones, could possibly be special in any way particularly a magical one.
∞
Lorelle followed the two healers, unseen through the forest, listening and observing the girls. She had definitely been surprised at what the one called Jewel had revealed. She had not let on in any way to Lorelle that she knew what she was or what was happening. That was one she would have to watch. It’s always the quiet, smart ones, she thought.
Just as they rounded a corner she stepped out from the trees directly in their path, so close that Jewel nearly ran right into her chest.
“Is it possible that maybe you could put up a fae crossing sign so we are better prepared for the sudden appearance?” Kara asked as she stepped up next to Jewel.
“So you’ve decided you believe in all of this then?” Lorelle asked raising a thin, perfect eyebrow at her.
“I’m getting there.” Kara shrugged.
Lorelle studied them, looking past the human covering to the gypsy magic inside. Jewel was slightly more powerful than Kara, but she suspected it was because Jewel had been exposed to magic her whole life. Decision made, she grabbed Kara’s arm moving as quick as a viper strikes.
“Well, lucky you, I have something that will completely convince your little mind that everything your intelligent gypsy sister told you is indeed true.”
Before Lorelle flashed, she heard Kara tell Jewel, “I guess I’m about to find out if there is a magic sucking machine or not.”
Lorelle rolled her eyes at the healer as she flashed them back to Volcan’s mansion. She laid the girl on the table in the large dining hall as he had instructed her and put a binding spell on her. Lorelle could tell the moment Kara realized she couldn’t move, her eyes took on that deer in headlights look and the vein in her neck began to pulse as her heart sped up. Lorelle had also put a hold your tongue spell on her because frankly she was tired of listening to the incessant chatter.
She felt Volcan’s presence enter the room and her back immediately went rigid. A strange screeching sound began to rise and Lorelle realized it was coming from a very frightened Kara. Her eyes were looking around wildly, like a cornered animal searching for a way out. She must sense Volcan, Lorelle decided, or maybe he was speaking to her in her mind, it was quite the open book after all. She was the youngest of the healers, and her lack of knowledge made her vulnerable to intrusion from other magical beings.
“Is the other one as powerful?” Volcan’s voice graded like sandpaper across her nerves.
“Even more so,” Lorelle told him, when she wanted to say I’m not a freaking idiot, you told me to bring the weaker of the two and looky-there that’s what I did. She once again held her tongue, just barely.
“She knows nothing of her heritage, of her abilities,” Volcan said as if Lorelle didn’t already know.
“Correct.”
“She will not be able to heal herself and I’m not ready for her to die just yet. What of the other one,” he snapped. “Is she aware of her power?”
She nodded. “To an extent she is.”
“Bring her. She will keep this one alive.” Volcan waved her off like a common servant.
Lorelle flashed herself to the power and energy she knew to be Jewel’s. The girl led her there like a beacon and didn’t even know it.
Jewels eyes widened at Lorelle’s once again sudden appearance.
“Hope you learn as fast as you claim to, little healer,” Lorelle muttered as she snatched the girl and returned to Volcan.
Chapter 14
“You know how you believe that you’re too powerful for anyone or thing to be able to touch you? No? Okay let me briefly explain. I am one such as that. Powerful, cunning, vigilant, never defeated―until I was. And let me tell you, it freaking sucked.” ~Peri
“The first wisecrack Costin makes I swear I’m turning him into a rock and tossing him into a lake,” Peri grumbled as she and Lucian finished dressing. The morning had come much too fast and with it the painful reminder of what was before them.
First, she had to face the wolves, literally, and her two comrades, and three clueless healers after completing the bonding and Blood Rites with Lucian. She imagined this is what new brides felt like when it was customary for the newly married couple to live with her parents for a time. It just wasn’t right. Nobody should have to look in the eyes of people they truly knew after a night like that, especially if said people had already experienced a night like that.
“The blush on your pale skin is lovely,” Lucian purred.
“Just because you’re my mate doesn’t mean I won’t turn you into something unsavory,” she warned.
“Maybe,” his voice dropped even lower. “But I’ve no doubt you would not leave me in such a state for long, not after…,”
Peri put her hand over his perfect lips stopping his words. “I get it; you are the only one truly exempt from my wrath blah, blah, blah. Try not to gloat, okay?”
