Rogue's Paradise

by Jeffe Kennedy

  A little fae girl wrapped her arms around my neck. I didn’t want to eat her so much. “Don’t hurt him, Gwynn. He knows how to help you.”

  “Goliath, come here,” the snake man ordered.

  The one who helped me destroy the evil one with his magic sat down next to me, scratching my ears in a delightful way that made me want to purr. He seemed familiar to me and, in my mind, I saw us playing like kittens together.

  “Inside out,” the snake man instructed. “Show her. If I can do it, she can.”

  Kitten-man showed me how he’d been inside a cat—so funny!—and then came out. But no. I didn’t want to. This was my turn. The woman could stay inside. Besides, she’d lost the kitten. I would not have.

  “It’s not working. She’s gone.”

  Another tall fae strolled up. I flattened my ears. We hated her. Sure enough, she smacked us on the head. I swiped at her but she danced away and the fae girl I didn’t want to eat held me back.

  “Wake up, Gwynn!” The mean woman snapped her fingers. “Or will you prove yourself the fragile human we all knew you to be? Our greatest failure.”

  Her I wanted to eat. I shrugged off the little fae, her strength no match for mine, and stalked after the cruel one.

  “You can’t best me,” she taunted. “Not like that. I doubt you could in your sorceress form either. You always were too meek.”

  Old rage flickered into life from some deep corner of me. She had not been meek or fragile. She—no, I—I’d done my best and, more, I’d survived and overcome what they’d tried to do to me. Hell, I’d sacrificed my life to stop their queen. And now she wanted to make out like I was the meek one? Fuck that.

  I flexed, stretching my own being outward, folding the cat back into my soul and reassembling my flesh back from hers.

  “Fuck you, Marquise,” I said, straightening and dressing myself with a thought, making sure my ring and earrings made it back with me, from whatever singularity of mass and space we’d been tucked into. “And your perverted brother too.”

  Starling, sobbing, launched herself at me. “You’re okay! How can you be whole again? Gwynn, you were—”

  “I know.” Torn asunder. Dead. And yet, here I’d managed to reassemble myself in total health. Surely that wasn’t possible. And yet, clearly it was.

  I surveyed the room.

  Athena, undaunted as always bounced up and sheathed her dagger. “Welcome back, Gwynn. About time.”

  Goliath, a gangly young fae with Darling’s green eyes, gave me a happy smile and a bow. A purr filled my head.

  “You’re welcome,” I told him. “And thanks for the help with the Queen Bitch. We’re even.”

  He nodded, beaming.

  “He’s not talking.” Fafnir eyed him with speculation. “It’s possible he never will.”

  Too long with a cat’s brain. I viscerally got how that could happen.

  A boom shook the castle. Something like fireworks shot overhead.

  Walter craned his neck back. “Shit’s getting real.”

  “What’s going on?” I could rewind some of the conversation, not all. I understood now more of what Rogue meant about being the Dog. What you did and didn’t know.

  “Gwynn.” Starling wiped her tears and squared her shoulders. “The baby—”

  “I know about that part,” I interrupted. And couldn’t think about it right then. Time for mourning later. Rogue would expect me to step up and defend his—our—castle. I seriously doubted he’d be coming back. “We’re under attack still? By whom?”

  Marquise, Scourge and Fafnir stared back at me. Goliath wondered if we’d have mice for lunch.

  “Pretty much everyone not in this room,” Fafnir told me in a dry tone. “It seems the...gap in leadership proved too great a temptation.”

  “Fortunately,” Scourge put in, “they’ve been busy fighting each other.”

  “What about Puck?”

  “That one.” Marquise shook her head over his imagined antics. “Who knows? We haven’t seen him in some time.”

  “And Lady Healer?” She should have been here long ago. Mistress Nancy lay on a pallet of blankets on the floor. I didn’t need to look at the blood-soaked bed to understand why. “Nancy needs her help.”

  Starling and Athena exchanged unhappy looks, while Goliath growled and Fafnir nodded. “One of the first to throw in with General Falcon.” Apparently she’d taken the opportunity to ignore Rogue’s summons in favor of her own ambitions.

  “Take the silver off Walter,” I ordered.

  Scourge opened his mouth to protest, but Marquise stopped him. “He’s ready enough. He’s not like her. Not nearly so stubborn.”

  “I’m standing right here,” I reminded them and they blew me kisses.

  “We can’t help that you’re our favorite sorceress.” Scourge gave me a lascivious grin. “Now that Rogue is out of the picture, perhaps we—”

  “No. Never. Walter, would you see what healing Nancy needs and—what?”

  Walter looked deeply uncomfortable and Starling burst into tears.

  “Oh no.” Not Nancy.

  Athena put a hand on my arm. “I think she died the moment Titania struck her.”

  All my fault. If I’d left her at the inn, she’d be fine still. Happily making her very fine beer. And we hadn’t even saved my child. All for naught. Oh, God. Billy. Orphaned now.

  “What about her son? Does anyone—”

  “Safe with my kin,” Athena supplied.

  “He always has a home here. Make sure everyone knows it.”

  “I’ll look after him.” Starling firmed her chin. Then took Walter’s hand. “We both will.”

  “If I may point out,” Athena inserted, “if we don’t secure the castle, none of us will have a home here.”

  Time to mourn later. For them, not for me. “Walt’s right. We need the scepter.” Where the hell would Rogue have hidden it?

  “I know where it is,” Athena said. Then shrugged, maybe a little guilty. “Seems like once I keep track of something, part of me always knows where it is.” Another boom shook the tower.

  “Sooner might be better.”

  “Yeah. On that.” She dashed off.

  I assessed my energy levels. Surprisingly good, though I felt curiously unstable, as if half of me had been torn away. The Rogue half. And our daughter with him. Maybe that left me only one-third of a person.

  Should be enough to finish what I needed to do.

  Mentally, I checked in with Larch. The Brownies were still fighting for me. The humans appeared to be conscripted. Falcon, Incandescence and Healer had them throwing themselves at each other. Fafnir’s army had been divided up among his erstwhile generals, each of those having helped themselves to Titania’s crew.

  Not surprisingly, Rogue’s cyborg army had vanished with him, as I imagined many of his defensive spells had. With battles raging both inside and out, the castle wouldn’t last long. Utter chaos.

  “Seriously—don’t you people have anything better to do than fight amongst yourselves?”

  Walter shook his head. “Yeah, like we’re any different.”

  He had a point. And it made me think. What exactly had Titania’s plan been? If she’d intended to sow dissension in the human world in some way, it would likely be easy to accomplish. Not that I could do anything about it, if she had managed to pull the trigger. The world would have to save itself.

  I knew my limits.

  Athena, a streak of blood on her check, skidded back into the room. “I got it out of hiding, but I didn’t want to risk carrying it past any of the others, just in case they could glom on to it. Figured you could, you know, suck it to you and then give it to—”

  Indeed. The magic rose cleanly in me. It made a difference when you didn’t plan to keep any in reserve. I’d already died once today. It would make no matter if I did again. I really had nothing to live for at this point. Trapped in Faerie without Rogue or our daughter sounded like the worst of prison sentences. The
scepter appeared in my hand. Walt whistled in appreciation. “Nice trick, Gwynnie.”

  Athena dug her fingers into my forearm. “I was saying ‘and give it to Walt.’”

  “I can handle it.” I yanked my arm from her grip.

  “Like hell you can—you’re obviously crazed from losing both Rogue and the baby. You’re upset about Nancy. You couldn’t handle the scepter when you were in good shape.”

  “She’s right, Gwynn.” Starling stood, wringing her hands together. “If you use it now, you could—”

  “What?” I laughed and I did sound more than a little crazy. “I could die? Been there, done that. Frankly it didn’t suck. It was...restful.” It sounded so much better than facing the alternatives. “All of you stand back.”

  Unleashing the magic and pouring it through the scepter and thence in a focused arrow through the lens of the crystal dome, I sought whatever might help. Using my wish like a net, I gathered reinforcements to me.

  The flying monkeys arrived first. They swirled around the dome, bat wings blackening the sky and I laughed at the sheer power of it. Dragons roared, landing on every tower and a cry of battle fervor rattled through the mind web.

  Finding Incandescence, Healer and Falcon, I knocked the unholy trio on their asses, sending dragonfly girls to alert some humans to put them in silver until someone had time to deal with them.

  The rest fell like dominoes, frightened of the power I wielded. Titania’s erstwhile army erupted into chaos, regaining themselves as I ruthlessly emptied myself of power to burn away the last dregs of her control. I followed the oily lines through the mass mind, burnishing and purging as we’d done for our injured, but on a grand scale. At the ends languished those captive fae she’d fastened in place. Them, too, I liberated, setting them free to make their way as they would, giving them each a boost of power to do it with.

  None of them knew I used the last of my life energy to put things in order. Tying up my affairs, as it were.

  Even as I collapsed to my knees, the scepter eagerly drinking from me, I made one last effort, however. Maybe they had crossed the Veil. If I could only see...

  I looked for Rogue. For the Black Dog.

  For my daughter.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  In Which I Tie Up My Affairs

  The report of my death was an exaggeration.

  ~Big Book of Fairyland, “Immortality”

  Nothing.

  The emptiness of the word reverberated through my mind.

  What I had left. What my life had become. What I had become.

  I could let go now. Give up the struggle. All this time, I thought I’d been fighting Rogue, but it had never been him. Just the inevitability of this moment.

  Like Cecily, I could let myself dry up and dissolve into dust.

  Ashes to ashes.

  Someone tugged at the scepter and the pain penetrated my fog. I tried to hold on but the flesh tore from my palms as it was wrenched away from me. Then blessed cool healing replaced it, tasting oddly of hot chocolate and warm cinnamon rolls.

  I opened my eyes and Walt grinned crookedly. “Sorry, Gwynnie—no noble self-destruction for you. And it’s my staff. Ha-ha.”

  The blue sky, deeper sapphire than Rogue’s eyes, arched overhead in deceptive flawlessness. No booming or shouting. No wheeling dragons or flying monkeys. The castle had settled into something resembling peace.

  “Just leave me be.” My voice came out in a whisper, creaking over abused vocal chords. I seemed to recall shrieking as I called the monkeys, like some demented version of the Wicked Witch of the West. Which was redundant, most likely. I should be the Wicked Witch of the East, since I felt as though a house had fallen on me. Rogue would tease me for thinking so much instead of being dead. “Why am I not dead?” I wondered out loud.

  “Because you’re not mortal.”

  I struggled to sit up at the sound of Puck’s amused voice. “What?”

  He strolled into the room, hair cut short, Wall Street-style, and wearing, if I wasn’t mistaken, an Armani tux. “I told you. You can put a pig in a pond, but you can’t make him swim.” He waggled a finger at me. “Or her.”

  “Of course I’m mortal. I was born to human parents.” Wasn’t I? A sensation of falling gripped my stomach as my reality fell into pieces, reassembling into a different picture. “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you?” Puck’s mismatched eyes sparkled and he danced over to kiss me on the cheek. “I carried you over myself. You were such a cute baby.”

  Carried me over? My mind reeled. “I was—I am a...changeling?”

  Puck nodded. “I couldn’t tell you before, but I truly thought you’d remember. I visited you from time to time. That was one of my jobs, checking up on all of you. We had terrible problems with failure to thrive.” He waved at Walt. “Remember me? Your imaginary friend.”

  I’d had an imaginary friend too. I’d called him Casper and he’d had mismatched eyes, one grass green, one marble blue. Walter made a choking sound, half laugh, half sob that managed to articulate exactly how I felt too. “You mean that’s why I felt like an alien my entire life? Because I’m actually a fae baby?”

  “More than half, at any rate,” Puck qualified. “At least your parents are still alive. And your sister.”

  Starling realized first, horror, chagrin and astonished joy comingling in her being. I felt bad for her, but happiness seemed to win out over losing the possibility of romance. “Baby Brody?” she asked Walt and he winced.

  “Bad luck for us, eh?” He tugged on her hair. “But it explains why we get on so well.”

  “Not to make this about me...” I turned back to Puck, frenetic dread crawling up my spine. Though I knew. It explained so much. The formless longing. The never fitting in. I couldn’t look at Fafnir. “But...”

  He cocked his head at Fafnir significantly and winked. That cord leading from Cecily out and back in. No wonder I couldn’t find the end. It led to me. From my birth mother.

  Had I wept for her in my heart before? For that baby, ruthlessly wrenched away and consumed? I wanted to weep now. Or to shatter the dome in my rage. It felt possible and real in a way nothing else did. My human mother and father, my family—no blood relations of mine.

  I had no family.

  Fafnir cleared his throat and I stared at him, a bit wild, remembering dancing with him, slicing him apart with my claws. My mother’s mummified corpse drifting into dust before me.

  “I’m not sorry,” he got out. “I know you may be, but I can’t. I’m proud to call you my daughter. Cecily would be too.”

  He’d transformed in those brief minutes, the sense of time and defeat flaking away. He was no longer the one with nothing left to lose—and he shone with new life. As for me...I had no idea how to feel. Never in my whole life had the man I’d thought was my father said that he was proud of me. In fact, he’d always been vaguely disappointed in me.

  I had to turn away, blindly anchoring to Puck. Deeply ironic that only he made sense in this vortex of kaleidoscopic uncertainty.

  “She—Cecily—” I couldn’t call her my mother. “She was also a changeling?”

  “Yes, but with none of your magic. She passed for human quite nicely though.” Puck pondered. “Some thrive. Some die. The ones who need to make their way back here. But really, it was a bad plan all along. Eggs are better. Isn’t that what you discovered?” He waved at the bloody bed with distaste.

  “What about the baby my mother gave birth to—her human child? What became of her?”

  “She’s around here somewhere.” Puck shrugged. “Not my job to track the human ones. I mean, who really cares—”

  Athena coughed ostentatiously and Puck shrugged. “Not my job.”

  This, no doubt, was where the human population in Faerie came from then. How many centuries had Titania been running her breeding plan? And Puck—carrying the babies for her back
and forth.

  Back and forth.

  “Where have you been?” I eyed Puck’s suit with suspicion.

  He grinned sunnily at me and executed a little jig. “Babysitting. That Dog is terrible at it. And Blackbird and Fergus are too busy.”

  I stared at him, assimilating my sudden and desperate hope.

  “What about my—our—parents?” Starling glanced at Walt. “Is that where they went—across the Veil to find Brody?”

  “Oh.” Puck rolled his eyes with grandiose melodrama. “Fergus is ever the hero, isn’t he?”

  “What does he mean by that?” Walter demanded.

  “Fergus—your father—has an interesting magic.” Amazing how collected I sounded as I ran the possibilities through my mind. “He’s not a sorcerer like you, but he instead acts as a kind of conduit. It actually transforms him into a champion who can’t be defeated. If my theory is correct, then Tita—” even with her theoretically destroyed, I didn’t like to speak her name, lest it evoke her, “—our late, unlamented Queen Bitch had plenty of changelings still in the human world. Sleeper spies who would...what, Puck?”

  He gave me a weak smile. “Much mischief.”

  “An ominously vague assessment.”

  Puck nodded vigorously. “Oh yes. Very ominous.”

  Afraid to ask. Desperate to know if I might yet have found a loophole. “How did they cross?”

  Puck laid a finger alongside his nose like Old Saint Nick did in those rosy-cheeked paintings of The Night Before Christmas, mismatched eyes twinkling. I fingered the dagger I’d wished up when I dressed myself, taking Liam’s advice to keep one near, and contemplated stabbing Puck with it. Which would accomplish nothing.

  “Okay—can you take me? You took me over once before, right?”

  Puck clapped his hands and squealed. “Oh, pretty Gwynn, I thought you’d never ask!”

  Chapter Thirty

  In Which I Finally Figure Out How to Use the Ruby Slippers