by Lucia Ashta
“Loud and clear.”
“Good.” She huffed and shook out her hands to the sound of bells. I searched for the source of the melody but didn’t find it. “Now I’ve got to save Fianna’s behind again. And when it’s all said and done, she’ll say she saved me instead—again. You just wait and see.” She sighed her torment, then flitted off to join the others. I hurried after her to remain close.
Fianna’s crimson hair stood in all different directions; plaster smudged her face and clothes. But the grimace on her face was determined and fierce as she shot blast after blast of red, sparkling magic at the walls and ceilings. Her magic coated the inside of the house, spreading across every visible surface in a thick layer of glowing scarlet. Nessa flittered to her side and started chanting another spell until blue light erupted from her palms.
Maybe the fairies could teach me how to do that…
“What are you doing, girl?” Naomi barked at me as she held a beam of green energy in both palms, connecting the floor and ceiling with it. I snapped my head toward her. “There’s no time to gape about like you have no more than two brain cells to rub together. Get to doing something helpful before my wards fail and the entire damn house comes crashing down at us.” Her cat screeched and jumped as a clump of plaster fell on her.
“Wh-what exactly should I do? I tried magic and that only got me in trouble with a vamp.” It was technically true. Even though I’d sung for less than a minute, it’d been enough to deliver me to the vamp’s hungry attention.
Naomi’s astute gaze whipped toward the sliding door. I looked too, disobeying Nessa, but the vamp was no longer there. Ah, so the witch had sensed the vampire there after all.
She scowled. “Nothing to do about that now. We’ll deal with whatever you did later. Now it’s time for all your powers.” She refocused her attention on the magic she streamed from her hands.
“But that’s what revealed who I was to the vamp earlier,” I complained.
Her head whipped back around to me so fast that clumps of hair ended up in her eyes; she blew out the side of her mouth and flicked her head to clear them. Then her light eyes seared through me. “The vamp knows what you are?”
I shrugged under the weight of her stare, ready to jump out of my skin. I was more than happy to leave my legs and wings behind, as long as I got to leave all the trouble behind too.
“Dammit.” She shook her head violently, her blond bob far from perfect now, and cursed up a storm like a sailor. She flicked her hands and the green magic fizzled to nothing. Petunia leapt onto her shoulder in a single bound at her mistress’ distress. The speckled cat proceeded to rub her face against Naomi’s chin.
The witch reached up to pet the cat absentmindedly. “That’s a problem. A huge one. That means they’re not leaving here until they break my wards. You’re too valuable to give up, and now they know it.”
She swore again and I took half a step back. I hadn’t even heard some of the words coming out of her mouth before.
She spun and called to the fairies. “Conference!” she yelled.
“Conference?” Fianna called back. “Are you out of your damn mind? We’re in the middle of a freaking battle. There’s no time for a conference. If we don’t keep reinforcing these wards of yours, they’re getting in!”
“Make time. You need to hear this.”
Fianna the Crimson cursed up a tinkly storm, using some of the new words I’d heard from Naomi. “Come on. Let’s go,” she told Nessa with an exaggerated scowl, and the two fairies flew toward our position next to an interior partition wall, as far away from the exterior windows as we could get.
The moment they were next to us, Fianna said, “Well? If we don’t fight back, this house is coming down with us in it. You’ve got thirty seconds.”
Naomi said, “The girl revealed her true nature to a vamp, and the witch they have with them is as strong as I am.”
“Dammit!” Fianna swore. “We have to get out of here. They’ll never give up now.”
“Precisely.”
“Can you do it?”
“Yes, as long as I can count on you to distract them, the witch especially. If she catches on to what I’m doing and blocks me, we’re done for.”
“Do you know who it is?” Nessa asked.
“I’ve narrowed it down to three possibilities, and all three options are bad.”
“All right,” Fianna said. “Where are we going?”
“Wait,” I said. “Going? What about Quinn and Irving?”
Nessa looked at me with wide, sympathetic eyes, and I had my answer. “No,” I protested. “We can’t leave them behind. I’m not leaving them behind. I can’t.”
“You have to,” Nessa said. “We have no other choice now.”
“And what if they’re out there getting hurt right this instant?”
The blue fairy flew over to me and placed a hand on my bare arm. It was so small I barely felt her touch. “Irving has a reputation for being fierce. The other shifters are scared of him.”
“Irving? Really?”
The fairies nodded, so I looked to Naomi. “It’s true,” she said. “The other shifters won’t mess with him unless they have to.”
“But what if they find out—?”
“Shhh,” Fianna snapped. “Don’t mention anything—or anyone—else.” Her meaning was pointed and clear. “Vamps hear everything.”
“Even this plan,” Nessa grumped.
The house shook again as if we were in the epicenter of a violent earthquake. Plaster rained down on all of us, coating each of us in white dust. I coughed so hard my esophagus hurt.
“Where do we go?” Naomi mouthed, Petunia still perched on her shoulder and pressed against the side of her head. The cat’s nails clamped into the witch’s shoulder so hard I was sure she must be hurting under the thin layer of her dress.
“I’m not leaving,” I tried again.
“Shh,” Fianna snapped, and flew over to land on my ear. She bent down and whispered as the house shook us again as if it were a giant whale and us no more than barnacles upon it. “Do not say another word. You’ll ruin it all.”
That smarted, but she was right. Still, how could I leave Quinn behind? I couldn’t, not when he’d protected me, not when I longed to feel close to him again and we’d only been apart for minutes. Not when I didn’t know if I’d ever see him again if I left…
“We have the experience and magic that you don’t,” Fianna continued. “Trust us.”
I didn’t want to trust them; they’d been little more than terrifying since I’d met the lot of them. But what choice did I have, really? Unless I planned to run outside on my own and probably get caught in the process, there was nothing I could do to save Quinn from anything. And the hunters outside were hurling nonstop fury at the house’s wards. We wouldn’t be safe for long in here, especially if they kept going until they reached me.
“He’d want you safe,” Fianna said in little more than a breath.
She was right, of course. Though it made no logical sense, Quinn wanted me safe. I nodded, unconcerned by the tears already welling in my eyes.
Fianna flew around to look at my face. Satisfied by whatever she saw there, she flew back to the others.
“There’s only one place to go,” Nessa said, but I had to stare at her lips to be sure. I scooted closer.
“Where?” Naomi mouthed.
“The Menagerie,” Nessa mimed. When I arched my eyebrows in silent question, she added, “Also known as the Magical Creatures Academy.” Or at least that’s what I thought she said based on my lip reading.
Naomi’s mauve lips pressed into a deep frown. She ran a hand along Petunia’s back while she debated. When the house shook so hard that it sent me tumbling to the ground, and Naomi had to brace herself against a wall, she finally nodded.
“Do your bit,” she told the fairies, “and I’ll do mine.”
Apparently, I no longer had a job other than to not make things any worse than I alre
ady had.
I stuck next to Naomi like a sticky sea slug and waited, unable to help that every one of my thoughts ended up with Quinn. He had to be all right. I needed to see him again. I needed to feel his touch and his eyes upon me once more.
Step one: Get out of this place before it finished falling down around us, and the vamps and the witch, and probably shifters too, swarmed in to scrape our bodies from the floor before stealing our magic from us—however power-hungry creatures went about doing that.
Naomi faced away from me when her body and Petunia’s flared in a blaze of thick, viscous green magic. I realized belatedly that she wasn’t aware I stood so close to her.
Her magic swept me up in it.
15
The shaking, crumbling house vanished in an instant, and I blinked stupidly at the all-encompassing green fog that replaced it. Naomi and Petunia, who’d been right next to me, popped up amid the green so far away from me that I had to squint to see them.
My body seemed to spin in place, forcing me to fight the urge to vomit. What was this madness? And how on earth was I in the middle of it?
I searched for the fairies but didn’t spot them, though I could hear their signature tinkling that reminded me of tiny seashells chiming against each other. I lost sight of Naomi and Petunia as well and worried whatever was happening would end with me going mad. I searched for a point of stillness and came up empty. Everything that wasn’t supposed to move did, taking me right along with it.
Just when I believed I couldn’t stand a moment more, the surface beneath my feet, no longer any kind of floor I recognized, vanished, and I plummeted. My already knotted stomach launched itself into my throat. I opened my mouth to scream, but was too terrified to manage even that. This was worse than the vamp licking his lips like I was lunch. This was the worst thing I’d ever experienced.
I swung my arms wildly, working to do something, anything, to halt the momentum of my downward trajectory. The world continued to spin as I fell so fast that my waist-long hair traced a vertical line above my body. As if by instinct, I clamped my wings against my back so they wouldn’t tear.
Wait. My wings!
They could stop my fall, assuming I wouldn’t end up ripping them flush from my back. At the speed I was falling, it was entirely possible.
I shut my eyes in an attempt to close out the dizzying sights, then tilted my body so that it was horizontal to the fall—at least, I believed I was now horizontal, even that was impossible to tell. But with my body pointed in this direction, the air cut against a greater surface area, and my fall slowed, barely at all, but enough for a burst of hope.
Gradually, I lifted my wings. With my body to block the bulk of the air current rushing at me, I rose my wings painfully slowly, an inch at a time. Better to take it slow than too fast and have them shorn from my body. At this rate, the fall seemed as if it would never end anyway. Everything felt the same as when the fall had begun, and there was no end in sight anywhere.
I stretched my arms out to either side of me. Any additional resistance I could provide via my body would protect my wings.
The long violet strands of my hair whipped and tangled in the tops of my wings, but I pushed them open some more. They did nothing to slow my fall, but they were still attached to my back, so it was progress.
My eyes and nose watered as the air rushed past me at startling speed. My ears ached, and I pushed my wings open a little more. I was alone. There were no tinkling seashell sounds or meows or anything at all beyond the air and my thudding heart, threatening to liquefy in my chest or maybe explode or some other awful thing. No body, no matter what its nature, could possibly endure this for much longer. I sensed that my time was running out. Before I could talk myself out of it, I pushed my wings out in a burst.
They caught and tugged painfully at the point where they met my shoulder blades. I cried out and whimpered, then immediately forced myself to focus on controlling my flight.
My wings had caught me. I jerked to what felt like near stillness after my plummet, and now drifted downward without control.
I opened my eyes, noticed that the swirling green around me had subsided so as to be little more than a suggestion, and got to making my wings work for me.
There was no need to pump them. I glided downward, jerkily at first, then more or less smoothly. I could finally breathe properly again, and took big inhales that served to calm my thundering heartbeat.
I could do this. Heck, I already was.
The more I drifted, the smoother my flight became. Until it almost became enjoyable—almost, because there was nothing I wanted more than to get out of this bizarro world, get in the ocean, and go home, where I assumed I’d lose my wings and could work to put the events of the day behind me.
Except for Quinn. I didn’t want to forget him. I wasn’t even sure I could if I wanted to. But was this odd connection between the two of us important enough to endure all I’d been through?
Yes, it was. I knew it already. Whatever Quinn and I shared, he and I had to survive to figure it out.
I was finished with this crazy business. It was time to get back to Quinn.
Just as I thought it, a wave of green skimmed across my skin before flashing so brightly I had to close my eyes to it.
Then I was falling again before I managed to catch myself with my wings. I snapped a frantic look below. Finally! A tapestry of color spread far beneath me. There was an end to this…
As I neared the earth and it crystallized into focus, Naomi and Petunia fell past me. They were plummeting, just as I’d been, their screams and screeches distorted by the speed of their fall.
Fianna, in a dive, passed me, then opened her wings to pull up next to me. Her mouth moved, and I was sure she was saying something. I just couldn’t make out what.
Nessa wove between my wings and pulled up on my other side. She too appeared to be shouting at me.
I pointed to the ground beneath us. Whatever it was, surely it could wait until we landed. We were almost there. A few more hundred feet of a drop I supposed, though it was hard to gauge distance like this.
A terrified shriek had me jerking my head toward the ground, searching for Naomi and her cat. Naomi was a witch. Surely she’d brace their fall, wouldn’t she?
I made out a speck of mauve and browns before Fianna tugged on my ear. I whipped my head around, shaking her loose, and scowled. What was with them? Jeez.
Where were they when I’d been falling to my death? Nowhere useful. And now that I had it under control, they wanted to bug me?
I pointed to the ground beneath us with importance and steadfastly ignored the fairies’ protests. They could deal. I needed to get solid ground under me immediately. There was only so much a half-siren, half-angel girl could take, and I’d passed my limit almost at the start.
Tears leaked in streams against my cheeks, but at least the air stung less now. I bit at my lip as Naomi and Petunia neared the ground and I saw no flashes of the witch’s magic.
I debated whether I should go into a dive to try to save them. I didn’t know how to control my wings well enough yet. I’d probably end up killing myself, and there wasn’t time anyway.
The fairies! Fianna and Nessa at least could do magic. I looked to them, but their attention was on the witch and her cat below us. Like me, they waited.
At the last possible moment, green flashed around Naomi and Petunia in a cloud.
An inhale trembled through me. There hadn’t been a moment to spare.
I drifted downward. Now that the world was not confined to the width of the green swirling whirlpool of Naomi’s magic, I spread my wings to their fullest. I rode the wind like a bird. I banked this way and that, exploring, and despite the horrific moments of before, I smiled. This was something I’d never anticipated.
I was a creature both of the water and the sky, and for the first time since discovering it I suspected I might learn to enjoy it … just as soon as I figured out how to survive it.
As the ground drew close, I prepared to pull my wings in at the last moment for a graceful landing. Yeah, it didn’t turn out that graceful. I barely managed to tuck my wings in before I tumbled, tripped over the feet I wasn’t used to having, and thrust my hands out to catch my fall before sprawling face-first on grass.
I lay on the grass for several long breaths, relishing the feel of its stillness. The ground wasn’t swirling or rushing past me in a blur; it was pure heaven. I couldn’t help but smile. I’d survived. I hadn’t torn my wings or vomited all over myself. Those were big wins.
I took in the beautiful, untouched landscape before me. When I went to stand, my legs wobbled and wouldn’t hold my weight. I rushed back down to my knees, and when the world spun again—just once, thank goodness—I sat back down—hard.
All right, so I’d need a few minutes. That was okay. It made sense that my body needed time to recover from whatever had just happened. And what did happen?
I turned, looking for the others, and found them all staring at me, even the cat. No, it wasn’t a stare; it was most definitely a glare. Not a single one of them seemed happy with me.
Naomi’s hair was a gnarled whip of tangles. The fairies and the witch were filthy, as I was sure I must be; the cat’s hair stood on end, pointing in a variety of directions.
Naomi fumed. Unconsciously, I pulled back, wrapping my arms around my knees and spreading my wings along my back. The witch’s murderous eyes bulged in their sockets, giving off a maniacal air. She pointed a shaky finger at me, huffed, pulled it back, brought both hands to her hips, and stomped in place.
She stalked right up to me; Petunia mirrored her movements. The fairies flew over. I suspected they were worried Naomi would kill me before they could complete their mission of delivering me to the Magical Creatures Academy.
I looked around. The open field didn’t look like a school, but what did I know?
“Don’t you dare look away from me,” Naomi seethed.
