by D. N. Hoxa
I threw it at them, and the moment the first tried to move away, I jumped forward and attacked him. My sword buried in his gut. He doubled over with a cry, and I slammed my fist onto his face. He fell to the ground, and a wave of heat hit me on the left shoulder, but by then my fingers were already on the second fae’s neck. I brought him close and smacked my forehead into his.
He fell to his knees with a weak cry, and I kicked the side of his head hard. They both lay on the ground on their backs, breathing heavily.
By the gods, they were just boys. Some of the dust had fallen off them, and I could see their faces. They were both light haired, with wide amber eyes and long pointy noses. Definitely brothers, or closely related, and they were barely teenagers.
“Leave,” I said. “The Shade doesn’t want you to have whatever’s in that box. You can’t take it with you.”
But the one I’d stabbed in the gut shook his head. “You don’t understand. If we…if we—”
“Shut up, Milo,” his friend spit. Out of curiosity, I was going to ask him what he was going to say, but before I could say a word, I heard the noise.
It was coming from the tiny tunnel I’d come through, and it was unmistakably metal against rock. The man that fell out of it ungracefully and barely kept his balance was a soldier. The golden armor of the Summer fae on his body said so.
“Oh, gods, oh, gods,” the Summer fae on the ground said, and the one who wasn’t wounded immediately sat up and raised his arms over his head.
“Don’t move!” the first soldier said, and by then, another three had crawled out of the tunnel.
My options were limited. I couldn’t even give myself a second to get mad. I reached into the hole the boys had dug, grabbed the chain of the box they’d found, and I began to run toward the hole in the wall.
A bad escape route—very bad—but there was rope attached to a thick nail on the rock still. I had no idea if it would hold my weight, but I grabbed it anyway. As soon as I stood, Summer magic hit me square on the back, taking my breath away. I had the chain of the box and the rope in my hand, and it was a miracle it didn’t slip when I fell off the edge.
The air was colder out there, and I could hear the shouts and the calls from the Summer soldiers, but I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see very well, only darkness. Heat spread over me, drowning every bit of cold in my body. Even my magic was silent for a while. That soldier had been strong.
The rope in my hand slowed me down until it burned the skin on my fingers. I was falling, and it was only a matter of seconds before my hand was too weak to hold onto the rope.
I let go of my sword first, and then of the box, hoping to win myself some time to climb down the rope and get a little closer to the ground, but the fae magic was still in my system. It was worse than the hottest fever I’d ever experienced, and my body no longer cooperated with me.
The rope slipped from my hands, and I fell.
For the shortest second, the view of the open sky and the half-moon shining in it was majestic. I’d never seen a more beautiful view. Taran would have loved it. She was always looking out the windows at the sky when we lived in the same room. She saw beauty where there was none, but for that short second, I saw it, too.
Until I reached the trees. I hit my head four times before I began to even slow down.
Wood broke. My bones broke, too, but I couldn’t tell what. All I remembered was the pain and the Summer magic still wreaking havoc in my body, before all my lights went out.
Chapter 10
Chapter
* * *
Elo
* * *
When I heard the footsteps from inside the house, I knew it was Julie, but panic still made my heart skip a beat for a moment. She opened the door and looked at me, eyes wide, as if she hadn’t been sure that I would be there. When she saw that I was, her eyes closed with a breath of relief.
I was in the garden in the back of her house and her pub, watching the flowers, pretending to be home. Thinking of Mace. Out of everything that happened, even my coming back to life when I’d stared death in the face, his pull was the strongest. My mind wandered to memories of him if I forgot myself for a single second. I could dream about him with my eyes open for all eternity.
But now that Julie was here, I could focus on something else for a bit.
She sat on the chair on the other side of the table. Hiss must have heard her because he was already moving toward us. He’d been exploring the garden until now. He missed Gaena, too, even though he never said so.
“Here,” Julie said. She put a small bottle on the table and pushed it to the middle. It was a simple round bottle made of glass, but the blue and silver liquid inside it was what counted. I’d seen it before. I’d drunk a bottle of it every day for almost two weeks. It was altering potion.
“Is it going to make me look like the bartender again?” Until now, I hadn’t thought about the potion at all. But now that I saw it, it made perfect sense. The Guild—and everyone else—thought I was dead. A disguise was exactly what I needed—again.
“I think so. The maker of the potion doesn’t determine which appearance the magic gives you. Each has their own. For me, every potion I’ve ever drunk has given me this face.” She pointed at herself.
“What about the Guild?” I asked halfheartedly, eyeing the potion. “They know the face of the bartender. I worked with them before.”
“I don’t think the soldiers who survived the battle recognized you or thought to report you to the Guild after it,” Julie said.
“And they have no reason to suspect that you were a part of it. When you died, you wore your own face, and that’s all they saw,” said Hiss. “I think your disguise is safe for now.”
I was still skeptical, but then Julie took in a deep breath, drawing my eyes to her.
“I have news, Elo.” Julie sounded different.
“The Believer?”
But she shook her head. By then, Hiss was on the bench with me, all his eyes focused on her.
“The Soul Splitter,” Julie said.
“Where is she?” Hiss asked.
“She’s dangerous,” Julie whispered, leaning closer on the table. She moved her fingers constantly, like she didn’t know what else to do with them when there wasn’t a glass of vodka in front of her. “She lives away from the Shade, somewhere in Belle Chasse. She’s really dangerous, Elo. The men who told me about her said that she can make people’s worst nightmares and best dreams come true right in front of their eyes.”
I swallowed hard. “An exaggeration, I’m sure.”
“Not at all,” she insisted. “Are you sure you want to meet her? Because I’m not.”
No, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to meet a woman that was called Soul Splitter.
But I also had no other choice. If Hiss believed that we needed her, I was going to go meet with her. “Then don’t come. Show me how I can find her, and I’ll go myself.”
But Julie didn’t like that. “I’m not letting you go by yourself. I just need you to be a hundred percent sure that there is no alternative.”
Hiss didn’t hesitate. “There isn’t. She is the one we must speak to.” I trusted his judgment completely.
“Then I’m a hundred percent sure, Julie. I want to meet the Soul Splitter.” My words sounded like lies to my own ears.
Julie nodded. “Drink the potion. We go see her tomorrow.” And she stood up.
“Wait—what about the death spell. Have they found a counter spell?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.
“No,” Julie said. “But there have been no new cases since the battle. Only the old ones.” She turned for the door, as if to tell me that that was all she was willing to say to me on the matter.
“Julie?” I called before she disappeared through the back door. “Thank you. For everything.” For helping me when she didn’t have to. For giving me a place to stay and food to eat. I would be forever grateful.
Surprised register
ed in her wide eyes, but she didn’t reply. She only nodded her head and left Hiss and me alone again.
I took the potion bottle in my hands and analyzed the blue liquid that shone silver under the green lights of the Shade around me. I knew it tasted like peppermint, and it wasn’t unpleasant, but I was still very reluctant to drink it.
“What if we fail, Hiss?” I whispered before I realized it. The question kept popping into my head, and my body had been desperate to give it sound. As if that was going to somehow take its weight off me. “What if something goes wrong?” What if everything went wrong?
“There’s very little of outside events you can control, child. But you can control your mind completely if you want to. You can control your reactions and act accordingly. Give it your best and hope that you will succeed.”
“It’s not that simple. How can I hope when I know who I’m up against? Why does it have to be so hard?”
I thought he was just going to tell me to drink the potion. After all, there was no true answer to questions like this. But he surprised me. He came closer until half his body was on my lap. I touched the top of his head with my fingertips the way he liked.
“You’re still figuring out who you are, Elo, and it’s okay to feel lost every once in a while. But these hard times, the times that keep you on your toes and challenge you in every way, are the times that show you what truly lies in there.” He pressed his head against my chest. “Don’t think too much. Overthinking never leads to anything good. Take it one step at a time and hope. And pray. Always pray. You never know who might be listening.”
Even though I sometimes didn’t understand Hiss, I always saw light when he talked to me. I smiled and kissed the top of his head. “A reward for making me feel a tiny bit better.”
“The best reward there is,” he said, chuckling, and moved away from me so that I could drink the potion.
The taste wasn’t bad at all. I found I’d missed it, too. The first time I’d ever drank that potion, I’d passed out and hadn’t woken up for hours. Now, I didn’t feel anything different at all, just its taste coating my tongue. We sat on the bench in silence for a bit and watched the garden. I had the feeling that Hiss was pretending to be home, too.
“You’ve changed,” he said after a while. “I’ve missed the fake you.”
I brought my hands to my face and touched my skin, hoping that maybe this time I’d see the change, too. Or feel it.
Everything seemed to be the same to me. I wanted to ask, what if somebody recognizes me? But I clamped my mouth shut. Enough questions. One step at a time.
It was a few minutes before we heard the footsteps coming from inside the house. I thought it would be Julie this time, too, but when the door opened, Charlotte came outside. Her smile was wide, her curls bouncing around her head cheerfully. Like that, she looked like a completely different person from the girl wielding a Heivar sword, killing Winter soldiers to protect me. My heart swelled with pride for the elf blood that was in her, even though I had no right.
“Hi, Elo,” she said, never even flinching at the new face Hiss said I wore. “You drank the potion.”
“I just did.” I showed her the empty bottle. “How are you, Charlotte?” We’d only seen each other once since I came here, and Julie had been in a hurry to get us to Mandar that morning. We hadn’t had the chance to speak at all.
“I’m okay. How are you? Must be nice to be alive again,” she said, giggling.
“It certainly is,” I said, hoping her good mood would rub off on me. She stepped forward, looking at the garden.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Very.” Everything about Gaena, and everything that had come from it, was beautiful to my eyes.
“You’re still going to keep that promise you made me, right?”
I smiled. When she’d told me about Manun’s Waterfall, I’d promised her that when this was over, I’d take her to visit Gaena herself. Back then, I’d had no idea what I was dealing with. But even though things had changed now, I would do my best to keep my word to her.
“Absolutely. One day, you and I are going to walk the lands of Gaena together. You just wait,” I promised her.
She came back to sit across from me on the same chair Julie had sat in just minutes ago. “Grandma says he speaks,” she said, looking at Hiss, bundled next to me on the bench, his head resting on my thigh.
“He—”
“Only when I have no choice,” Hiss cut me off. With a sharp intake of breath, Charlotte leaned back on her chair. I thought she was scared, but no. Her smile had only gotten bigger. “Did you know that these flowers grow twice their size in Gaena, young one?”
“No,” Charlotte said breathlessly. “What are you?”
“I’m just a collector,” Hiss said, lazily rubbing his chin on the rough denim of my jeans. “What are you?”
“I’m part elf, part shifter, part witch,” Charlotte said. “My grandma’s an elf. My grandad was a werewolf. My mom was…well, half elf, half werewolf, and my dad was a wizard.” There was no pain inside her as she spoke, only longing. “I didn’t really know them. They died when I was two.”
My heart broke for her. I’d had my parents until I was eighteen, and their deaths had nearly broken me. It was still hard to think I’d lost them, and she didn’t even know what it felt like to have parents in the first place.
I wanted to ask her how her parents had died, but I was too afraid of her reaction, of the pain she might feel if she was forced to talk about it. I would feel it all, too.
“I’m so sorry, Charlotte,” I whispered instead.
“So, what can you do, young one? Can you shift? Can you do magic? Are you resistant to it?” Hiss asked.
“None of the above,” she said, looking down at the table for a second. “At least so far. My mom could shift but only sometimes, and she didn’t start until she was twenty, so there’s still hope. Grandma says I am a bit resistant to magic but not like her. And I can’t do any spells, even though the Guild has classified me as a witch.”
“Think of it this way: you are one of the few lucky ones out there who get to decide what they want to become, instead of being what they are by birth,” Hiss said. “I think you’re going to do just fine, young one.”
“I think so, too,” I said, and I meant it. There was light in her. So much kindness. My mother used to say that the gods never forget kindness. They never miss it. In Charlotte’s case, I believed it wholeheartedly.
“I want to show you guys something,” Charlotte said, her cheeks bright pink now. She turned to look at the back door of the house, then whispered: “Grandma wouldn’t mind if I take you out for a bit, right? I mean, you’re an adult, Elo.”
“I’m certainly curious,” Hiss said. I was, too.
“Where do you want to go?”
Julie was very protective of her granddaughter and with reason. People were always looking for trouble in the Shade. I’d met more than my share of them in the two weeks I’d been there.
“The Aderian Circus is in the Shade tonight. It’s been there for the past two hours, but I still haven’t been able to sneak out. I’m going to see it, but if you want to join me, it would be a lot more fun,” she said.
“What’s the Aderian Circus?” I’d never heard of either word before.
“It’s the best magical circus in the world. You have to have heard of them. They move from country to country to perform their tricks every year,” Charlotte said.
I shook my head. “I never heard of a magic circus before.”
Her eyes lit up. “Then you have to see it!”
“I’ve always wanted to see a circus, too,” Hiss said, and he spread his wings before he jumped off the bench. “Lead the way, young one.”
“What if Julie comes looking for us?” I reminded them. “She will freak out.”
“It’s almost midnight,” Charlotte said. “She’ll be busy at the pub for at least another two hours. C’mon, it’ll be fine!” Sh
e was running after Hiss now, toward the door in the fence behind the garden.
I didn’t want to go out there, with Charlotte of all people. If somebody found me and she was with me, what if I couldn’t protect her? Julie would kill me with her bare hands, and I’d let her.
But Charlotte was already out the door. “C’mon, Elo!” she called, so happily it was easy to forget about reason. I ran after them before I could change my mind.
Nothing was going to happen. We would be back within the hour.
“The Shade opens up this space only for special occasions,” Charlotte said. “You can never find it on a normal day, but the Aderian Circus has made a deal with it. They’re always welcome here, once a year. C’mon, you’re going to love it.”
I had no doubt about that.
The space she spoke of was about three feet lower than the rest of the Shade. Seven stairways made of stone led to it. It was a perfect circle, with torches all around it, burning with white flames. People were there—a lot of people—but that was not what made me stop in my tracks.
When I told Charlotte that I didn’t know what a circus was, she said the best way to learn was to see it. Now, I was seeing it, and I couldn’t decide what to think yet.
Charlotte grabbed me by the hand and pulled me down the stairs and into the cobblestoned space. We were still in the Shade, but it was different down here. It was like a different Shade altogether.
Performers were all around us, doing things I’d never seen done in my life. We had entertainers back home, plenty of them, but nothing they did came close to what I was seeing here.
“So many people!” Charlotte said, and she never let go of my hand as she pulled me forward. Hiss was wrapped around my torso, and his head came out of the black shawl that covered my head. He was very curious to see, too. “Check these out!” Charlotte pointed right and started elbowing her way through the crowd of people. There really were a lot of them here. “Excuse me—coming through!” she called every few seconds.
