Shards of white and teal stars pulsate. My gaze lifts from the forest to my immediate left, heat draining from my face. The narrowest ramp I’ve ever seen lurches ahead. It stretches over the valley and branches into a mineral-flecked web—a distorted, zigzagging network. Eventually, it condenses to a single plank on the other side, leading into a cluster of trees.
The ramp’s got no rails or handles. Nothing will keep me from toppling over.
Can’t go fast. Can’t go slow.
Sucking in a breath, I test the first the plank. It’s stout, bearing my weight as though I’m a leaflet of paper. I take another step, then another. This is higher than I’ve ever been, the elevation splashing up my calves, flooding my belly. I keep going, conjuring the memory of a chimney suffocating me, soot caking my face, the flakes stuffed down my throat, the bricks scrubbing my knees raw.
I remember hopelessness. I remember desperation.
I remember salvation.
I step, inhale, step, exhale. At the risk of self-destruction, I dare to peek down, but as I gaze at the drop, a sudden sense of calm warms my blood. I’m a tyke pretending to be a bird, and I’m soaring, and I won’t fall.
A heady thrill buffets the fear. I assess the snarl of mineral ramps, give my whip slack, and follow the current. Progress is agonizing. It takes several wrong turns, several slips, and several pauses to reach the halfway point. I tread carefully, then move quicker, then jog.
A whistling sound rents the air. A thin projectile shears through the sky.
It dives, lands, and impales the plank inches from my feet. I flounder for balance, staring at the javelin, its helix blade stymieing the way forward.
I twist but find no one there.
“Mutinous,” a voice observes, urging me back around to where Cerulean stands. “A mutinous one, indeed.”
He’s already dislodged the javelin. The weapon is longer than when fixed at his hip—much longer. Stalking my way, he twirls the weapon between his fingers, rotating it leisurely and executing a dizzying pattern meant to rock me off my feet.
“What can I say?” I grit while backing up. “I give as good as I get.”
“Oh, I hope so. So many clashes, so little time.”
“Why are you doing this!” I scream. “Why?!”
“Why not? You disobeyed our rules.”
“I had no choice.”
“Tsk, tsk,” Cerulean chides, flipping his weapon from hand to hand. “Did your elders not school you? There’s always a choice.”
“Easy for you to say. You’ve never been trapped!”
That does it. Malice scrawls across his features, and he lunges. With a cry, I yank out my whip and lash it upward. Strung in both hands, it pulls taut and blocks the javelin’s descent. With our weapons colliding overhead, the impact forces our chests together, our noses mashing.
“Do not,” he enunciates into my face, “tell me about being trapped.”
“Do not,” I spit back, “tell me what to do.”
Yet I remember. Yeah, he’s been trapped before, back when humans targeted the Fae fauna, back when he tried to rescue them, and my people caught him along with his brothers. He was captured, and he escaped, and he’s more than a little rankled. That’s why he’s doing this.
But it doesn’t excuse him. After what Faeries have done to mortals, it never will.
My arms quaver, laboring against his strength. On the other hand, I shouldn’t be able to put up a remote fight. He’s too powerful. His javelin is honed, and it’s getting the upper hand, cranking down on my whip.
Anger crimps his face. A muscle ticks in his jaw, and his pupils steel, because why won’t I crumple already? Why haven’t I buckled yet?
The skirmish turns into a contest of balance and dexterity. He charges, spiraling the javelin between his fingers. I hop from extension to extension, snapping my whip to block him and toiling for balance.
The only reason I haven’t plunged to my death is that I grew up with a pair of flexible feet. I spent a chunk of my childhood scaling chimneys, my toes poised on the slightest jut of a brick, the only thing preventing me from splattering to the bottom of every flue.
It’s effortless for Cerulean. The prick crosses each ramp as though on fully solid ground, as though the sky itself will catch him.
His weapon slices and spins. Mine whisks and lashes.
Leaping to an adjacent plank, I land and thrust. The whip gyrates, flogging the javelin’s next strike. Again, this smashes us together. Our chests pound, the weapons grinding between us, the pressure forcing my heels to skate across the plank.
I cling to the one fact he can’t deny. “I got out fair and square. You have to let me pass.”
Cerulean’s wrath ebbs, his features contorting with realization before darkening with pleasure. He withdraws the javelin and settles it against the plank like a scepter.
I stumble, taken off guard. Shit. What’s he got in mind now?
“You’re right.” Sparks crackle, the weapon shrinks to a compact size, and he affixes it to his hip. Prowling backward, his jaunty fingers stir up a feather from thin air, which he juggles without making physical contact. His digits flex into a dizzying sequence, the feather flipping and revolving. “Indeed, I do have to let you pass.” Then he hurls the feather into the welkin. “But they don’t.”
Carefully, I turn on my heel and watch the plume. It catches on the gust and pitches into a buzzing swarm of creatures that appear from nowhere. Fibrous antennas and spiky limbs hatch from their droning, insectile bodies. Their wings dither from azure to gold with every rapid beat, forming a meteor shower of fluctuating colors.
Hornets. Colossal hornets.
I back up, then stutter in place, in case I bump into my nemesis. But as I pitch around, I already know. He’s not there.
A thousand wiry wings beat the evening sky, a giant reverberation that stirs up a cyclone. The legion splinters and synchronizes. The hemisphere may as well be liquid as they tilt and vault into a complex pattern.
I whirl and race down the rampart, then jump sideways onto another one, and another one. I lose my sense of direction. Logic’s a lost cause, and I don’t have a second to gauge the wind with my whip.
The predators corkscrew, their stingers jabbing. They expect me to keep running, so I drop and crash onto my stomach. My arms and legs flop over the platform, the hornets swooping past. The cloak and my hair thrash around my face as I glimpse illuminated treetops, the forest hundreds of feet under me.
I tremble violently, scoping out the remaining distance to the opposite landing. As if tethered to a hook, the swarm of insects loops around and launches toward me. My eyes trace the movements, locate the last plank, and mentally backtrack to where I’m dangling.
An idea plops into my head. They can catch me if they want, but they can’t keep me. Tottering to my feet, I unravel the whip and await their approach. I lash the cord upright, hooking it around one of the creature’s limbs. It buzzes in offense, but it’s got me, as far as it knows.
My feet leave the ground. I hang on, kicking at nothing as the swarm twists toward the thicket. The woodland below swims by and vanishes as I plow into a crust of shrubbery.
The whip gives slack. I’m suspended no more than seven feet off the ground.
Wrapping my fist around the handle, I give the weapon a deft jerk. The rope releases from the hornet’s limb. I go down, smacking into the grass, the rope flopping across my back.
The whir of wings recedes into the landscape. Either they didn’t realize I jumped ship, or they’re about to start looking. I gather the whip, lurch off the ground, and check the perimeter of lanky spear trees. From the other end, this area had appeared denser and emitted a glow.
But now I survey only a handful of trees, a vertical bluff, and another signpost, which points up. Chunks bulge from the escarpment—tiny steps reminiscent of the bricks from my chimney days.
Nothing else. No other way to go.
I ram my heel into the grass.
“Fables curse you!”
A faint chuckle interrupts my tantrum. When this is over, I’m gonna disembowel him. Wherever he is, I hope he’s ready for the privilege.
I hitch the whip, tighten the chest strap of my pack, and prepare to suffer. The cliff is as straight and flat as a board. The slabs protract far apart and form a sloping path, except there’s hardly room for my big toe, much less my whole foot.
I’ll have to dig my fingers into whatever notches I find, as I used to with the masonry inside the flues. Terror tingles my nape. Cramped or not, I haven’t made this type of climb since my knees were smaller and bloodier.
Papa’s dark face floats through my mind, followed by Juniper and Cove. I think about scuffed ankle boots—the shoes of my family, because we wear the same ones, because we walk this world together, because we’re a band unbroken.
My sisters are depending on me as much as I’m depending on them. We’re in this together. All or nothing.
Furious tears prick my eyes. Wiping them with the back of my arm, I plaster my body against the wall, wedge my digits into the first groove, and clamber up the bluff. On either side, ivy trickles down the edifice.
I yelp as my foot slips. Clinging to the crags, I rest my forehead against the stone. Of all things, I think about a Fae boy peering at me from a cage.
I never saw him again. I’ll never see him again.
He’s dead. Because of me.
A dry sob topples from my mouth, but I suck it up. Clinging to visions of him is safer than conjuring memories of chimneys. Rubble presses into my fingers as I locate clefts. The uneven bluff lacerates through the slit in my skirt and the folds of my dress, which is now in tatters, the navy material torn and ripped.
I should have predicted this would be a problem. I should have listened to Juniper, anticipated these scrapes, and picked sturdier armor.
Who knows how much time passes? But with that boy’s visage locked in my head, it goes faster. I creep to the apex, fall into a heap, and flop onto a patch of dewy grass. I gawk at a canopy of slanted rowan trees, their berries glistening in the dark. I’m still here, alive and breathing on solid ground.
Finally, the tears leak down my face, my voice reduced to a whimper. “I miss you.”
The words filter through the branches. For a moment, everything goes silent. Even the wind goes still, as if caught in a net.
I’ve never said that. But it’s true.
I miss him. I miss that masked boy, the exception to my rule, the Fae who’d turned my hate into something precious. Something lost.
I miss him. I miss my sisters. I miss Papa.
I miss the sanctuary. I miss the aviary.
Noises of the wild return, the boughs trembling and a distant bird cawing. I sit up and gape at the scene. “Oh.”
Woods cleave through the mountain. Brambles drip with jade leaves. White trumpeted flowers glow in the dark, their petals perfuming the air with a verbena mist that blades of grass visibly strain to catch, the verdant leaves straining. Wind chimes clatter from the branches.
What I’d seen from the other end of that web must have been a deformed perspective. It had indeed been a wooded area, only higher than it appeared.
My shoulders sag in relief, then lock back into place as waspish drones pierce the environment, buzzing, searching. I scramble from the ridge and dash into the forest. A crooked lane winds through the rowans, their trunks frozen in place unlike some of the others I’d seen. The path is uneven and strewn with twigs that crack under my soles. I stop, pivoting this way and that, mindless, delirious.
The world goes hazy, blurring at the edges. I break into another run at the approaching whirr of hornets. Knolls swell from the ground, and the route slopes downward. It leads to an impasse, at the end of which stands another hill and a round cottage.
The smooth-stone dwelling perches atop the knoll, its curved walls rising from the ground and capped in a miniature spire of ivy, the tip aiming toward the sky. Flagstones lead to an arched doorway—without an actual door. Instead, a curtain swings from the frame. A torch sconce above the archway blazes, and the matching windows—more curtains instead of glass panes or shutters—simmer with badges of gilded light.
Somebody’s home.
Before I can second-guess myself, I bolt toward the walkway. My mind runs amuck, leaping from one choice to the next. Once more, my vision slants, the landscape whirling out of proportion, spinning like a disc.
I stumble to a halt. This isn’t smart. Whoever lives in this cottage is no human, and that nonhuman isn’t gonna be welcoming. Not for free.
That’s assuming they don’t kill me on sight. Thinking better of it, I need to keep running, but fatigue unhinges my limbs. I’m desperate to faint right here, right now, and sleep forever. The temptation crawls along my calves and shoulders, both howling with pain.
More spinning. What the fuck’s wrong with me?
My wrist smolders. I glance down to where mottled red punctures the flesh. The gash of a stinger. One of the insects must have gotten me, and I can’t…I can’t…think.
Light bleeds onto the flagstones. Curtains shift, and a winged silhouette fills the arched doorway. The woodland capsizes.
And I collapse.
12
And I stir from a dream, something about wings—a mosaic of wings flapping over a mountain steaming with mist. I haul myself out of the ether. Noises overlap through an enclosed space, a pallet shifting beneath me, a set of footfalls approaching, and a pair of wings reverberating.
“Wake up,” a grumpy feminine voice snaps. “Are you alive? Because five minutes ago, you were.”
My eyes blast open and slam into a pair of topaz ones, a menacing glee crystalizing within those irises. Moth’s wings fan out. Despite her wee size, I reckon those silk flappers could crush me to a pulp.
Overhead, a conical ceiling supported by a starburst of wooden beams pitches upward, one section laced in a cobweb. Flat cream stone forms the rounded walls of a cottage. The dwelling lacks a solid entrance or glass plates in the windows, yet the draperies insulate the place from outdoor sounds or elements.
Soot mingles with the essence of clematis that nets up one side of the home. I’m resting in a living room, sprawled on a cot that’s stationed between two button-tufted chairs upholstered in a faded rust color. The seats front an unlit cobbled fireplace, a torch sconce projecting above the mantle, a wan oval of light twitching from the encasement and waxing the walls.
This cot seems set up for temporary use. I squint in time to behold Moth scuttling on all fours across the mattress. “Welcome back, little mortal.” She produces a fruit I’ve never seen before, as ruby red and bulbous as an apple but with the pitted flesh of a prickly pear. She cradles the orb in her palm, tipping it from side to side. “Hungry?”
What she means is, Stupid?
I slap fruit from her grip. It shoots across the room, splatters against the nearest wall, and dribbles down the stone while squirting a cringe-worthy glop of slime. Tempting on the outside, cruddy on the inside.
Moth hisses. On instinct, I reach for the whip still blessedly attached to my hip. I bolt upright—and immediately regret it. My skull pounds, a motley jumble of spots bursting behind my eyelids.
The nausea ceases right quick, but I clasp the cot’s frame for balance. Everything hurts like a son of bitch. My skin chafes from a dozen wounds, dried crimson speckles my arms and limbs, and my dress and cloak have disintegrated into muck-stained rags.
My stomach howls. For a malnourished second, I wonder if that prickly mutant fruit had been safe to eat. If so, I wouldn’t be starving right now, and Moth wouldn’t be about to say—
“You bitch of a mortal,” she trills. “I shall pick the petals of your fingernails one by one, fashion them into charms, and string them around my throat.”
I keep my hand braced atop the whip. “Keep talking, whippersnapper. Just keep talking, and someday, that’s not all that’ll be wrapped around your throat.”<
br />
“I am not a whippersnapper!”
Regardless, my pain seems to appease Moth because she backs off and squats on the floor. Other than the cot, I doubt she’s interested in supplying me with creature comforts, much less bandages or a swig of water
Moth flicks another threat my way. “If you value your tongue, do not call me names, other than the one I give you. Understand?”
“You helped me,” I blurt out.
This earns me a scowl, distorting the raccoon-like stripe of nutty brown skin marching across her pale face. “Not out of pleasure. You should have eaten my offering. The pome would have cleared your mind and given you stamina.”
“So I can put up a worthier fight?”
“Precisely.” Her wings snap, flaring with a boastful slap of sound. “That way, you’ll feel acutely the injuries I inflict upon you. I’ve always loved the sight of humans weeping their hearts out.”
Why do I get the feeling she’s all bark and no bite? Nonetheless, I scoot farther into the cot, not because I’m keen to show fear but because I don’t like merging with her shadow.
It’s a relief to see my pack on the floor beside the cot. I snatch the bag and rummage through its innards. The last of my offerings are gone, which is Moth’s fault. She’s decorated herself with the trinkets Juniper had stuffed into it: a jute bracelet wrapped around one wrist; a string pouch of stones wrapped around the other; a rope necklace of chestnuts; and pressed flowers that Moth’s pasted to her arms.
My sisters and I used to decorate parchment with similar dried blossoms, using a sticky combination of flour and water. The florals trickle up Moth’s elbows. The ribbon sash she’d accepted from me at The Black Nest slumps around her waist, the knot beginning to loosen.
Correction. One object remains safe in my pack: the blue feather, stored in the fabric. That’s one item I won’t give up without a catfight. The feel of it against my fingers saves me from attacking Moth and getting my neck broken.
I’d make a fuss about the baubles she took it upon herself to steal, but that’ll rile her up. Plus, she hasn’t demanded payment for sheltering me.
Kiss the Fae (Dark Fables: Vicious Faeries Book 1) Page 10
