He gave me a warm smile and I immediately felt at ease, grinning back. “Don’t fret,” he said. “It’ll take time for you to learn what you can and cannot do.”
Without breaking stride he took my upper arm and jumped. We passed high over the wall then fell. Conall’s feet hit the ground and I was left dangling from the floor at an awkward angle. He carefully set me down and continued walking. To my credit I didn’t freak. I’d done the stunt before, and I was practically a veteran.
The sun had begun to set and the sky was sapphire, contrasting beautifully with the green of the treetops. We reached the Wall and Conall stopped, to stare hard at the buzzing wires, red hot with electric current.
“You’re doing what Breandan did last time? To the Wall, I mean.” Babbling beside him I straightened my clothes. “You somehow stop the current without tripping the klaxon. I think I’ve done it before, by accident.”
“Could you be quiet for a moment?”
Another blush crept up my neck. “Okay, shutting up now.”
“It’s done. In answer to your question, yes.” Conall pointed to a small man sized hole now in the Wall, moved through it and disappeared into the trees.
Biting my lip, I climbed through and stumbled after him. As we moved I entwined my hands in the coarse grass swaying about my waist. Tugging a few clumps free of the earth, I ran my fingertips over the petals of a wild flower that tickled my palm. The thrumming of crickets and rustle of life in the undergrowth made me smile. The air, heavy with the scent of soil, felt alive as we basked.
Conall breathed in deeply. A satisfied smile danced on the edge of his mouth.
“Do you know how drop your glamour?”
“No.” I slid up my hood.
Standing legs apart, his hands came to rest on his narrow hips. “You understand the physical of your nature?”
I let the clumps of grass fall and wiped my hands on my jeans. “I’m fast. I heal.”
“Have you measured your strength?”
Disconcerted, I rubbed my nose. I hadn’t thought of what being a fairy really entailed. I knew that they were fierce and hard. They healed fast and were the most powerful of the demons. They had strong characters and were beautiful. They had buckets of pride and protected what they thought was theirs. They had magic. I was one of them. But what did it mean to be a fairy? Was there a pecking order like there was within the Sect and who protected, and guided them? Did they really live as nomads and in small families by choice? Or was it a result of the Rupture, like the Wall was.
“I haven’t thought about it. I haven’t thought about much to be honest. Stuff keeps happening a tad fast.”
“If I was human,” he snorted, “and discovered I was much stronger, faster I would not be able to stop myself.” He shrugged. “My nature is proud.”
I thought on it for a while. “It’s hard to believe all of this. You all seem so real.” Conall gave me an odd look. “Understand, in my world demons are odd not humans.”
“A complicated way of saying you’re adjusting.”
I stuck my tongue out at him and placing my legs a foot apart, bent my knees like I was to do some damage. Balling my hands into fists, I pushed thought to the back of my head to clear up some thinking space.
“I’m ready. Let’s do this.” The sooner I got this done, the sooner I could get back to Tomas.
“You know you’re fast?” I bobbed my head. He grinned, a slash of white against the dark tan of his skin. “When the spell broke how did you feel?”
There was that buzz word again. Spell. Breandan had mentioned a spell breaking and something being painful. My heart picked up. Was this going to be painful? Is that the real reason why Breandan wanted this fairy to show me instead of him? I realized Conall was waiting for my answer.
“Uh…” I thought back to running away from the Clerics, their dogs chasing me down; believing I was about to be ripped to pieces by teeth. “Scared.”
His brows pulled together. “Scared? Not a strong emotion, and certainly not strong enough to break a spell.”
“I was completely bricking myself.”
I watched as he translated that into something he could understand. “Better,” he concluded and looked at me hard. “Before the speed what was your state of mind?”
I hopped from one foot to the other. “Did you not hear me? I was terrified. I wanted nothing more than to be far, far away from an ugly painful death.”
“Precisely. Your state of mind is crucial when conjuring. Glamour is no different.”
“Ah, no incantations over a cauldron bubbling with chicken feet and grave dirt?”
I had a flash of myself doing a tribal dance in front of an open flame with mud on my face, an animal fur slung about my naughty bits. and bones plaited into my hair. I muffled a snigger.
“If you are a witch laying a spell to hide than yes, but not fairy glamour. It is done with little concentration. Eventually you’ll conjure and drop your glamour with ease. When we glamour ourselves we suppress our nature. This cloaks our ears and makes us less otherworldly by fixing our features to one state. A safeguard is created around our being. Once sight passes through it makes us look more human. We dislike when people are in our,” he pursed his lips, “the humans call it personal space unless they have a close connection to us.”
I struggled to understand. “So, the ears and the glowing still exist but we just can see it?”
“The glamour disrupts what the mind perceives to be true. If you cannot see, smell, touch or hear a thing why would you believe it is there?”
I remembered the shield over Breandan, the pulsing around Devlin. “As fairies we can sense glamour.” I said and nodded.
I had definitely gotten it wrong. Devlin wasn’t human at all. He was a fairy, a fairy hiding in plain sight at Temple. How he had managed such a thing was beyond me. To enroll you have to meet the Priests and take a vow to uphold Sect Doctrine.
“I think I’m there, but what do you mean about fixing ourselves in one state?”
“You notice how in fairy form we are severe one moment then jovial in another.” I tilted my head to signal yes, and remembered Breandan’s crazy mood swings. “This is because of the depth of our temperament. Suppressing the fairy nature helps us blend. The drawback is you are slower, weaker. Your senses are dampened as is control over magic. Our power comes from the Source of course, and it is vast and limitless. It is energy. Energy lives in all things, constantly evolving and blending into something new. Fairies have the strongest natural awareness of the forces surrounding us and can draw from the Source, manipulate its power for our needs. The majority of us think of it in broad strokes. It makes for easy focus and quick action.”
“Source?” I grinned like a loon. “You mean you’re going to show me magic.”
He nodded manically, feeding off my enthusiasm. “The most simplistic way to conjure is to seek the power surrounding you, reach out to it and summon whilst channeling the energy. Watch me.”
A pinball of light appeared overhead, bloating to become a small ball of fire. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, cooler than seeing purple in the dark or bouncing over walls. Suddenly it was there, like it always had been my whole life. Like falling out a window as a child and not having a scratch on you. Like dropping a full cup of water and it landing right-side-up without spilling a drop. Like making a hole in the Wall without tripping the klaxon. My whole life the strange things that happened around me had been attributed to freaky good luck since I couldn’t be a witch. None of it was under my voluntary control, and never did I really gain anything. But now it all lined up in perfect order. The power was in my reach and mine for the taking.
Something pulsed close by, a mini sun of colour and heat that seemed to be nowhere and everywhere. Instinctively I drew from its warmth. It was like turning the faucet of an unexpectedly high-pressured tap. The flow of energy flooded into me, and spilled over the lip of who I was. To save myself drowning or burning up I changed t
he feeling into a thing. Fire. A ball of flame exploded into existence, hurtling toward us. I watched the self made instrument of my rapidly advancing death in awe.
An urgent sound muttered from Conall cut over the oncoming hiss, and just before impact, the fireball imploded. It left nothing but a ringing in my ears, white spots across my vision and enough heat to singe a few strands of my hair.
Conall’s ball of fire hovered mockingly above.
“That was not as good as I thought it’d be,” I said faintly.
Conall’s pupils were huge with shock and his pointed ears twitched. His face was stark white. He released the white-knuckled hold on my upper arms and eased himself away. He’d thrown himself at me and lurched into an odd crouch when the fireball was coming our way, ready to drag me out the way if needed.
“Why do you perceive a giant ball of death coming toward you as a good thing?”
I ignored him. “You call the energy to you then you make it into what you want in your head?”
“In a basic way, yes.” His voice returned to normal and the repressed panic in his eyes ebbed away. “You must give yourself time to focus on what you want to achieve.” The looked leveled my way was laced with warning. “The greater the focus the more effective the spell. It comes packing a punch.”
“More of a punch than the fire ball?”
“Yes,” he said wary. “We will leave further conjuring to another time. Agreed?”
I gave a thumb up. “Anything else I should know?”
“Our bodies are conductors. We can control as much energy as our body can withstand to channel, never more.”
“I can’t get better?”
“You can become proficient so spells are more effective and you can access as much energy as possible but in terms of measurable power, no.”
“How do you know when you’re at the limit?”
“Trial and error.” His voice had gone flat and the warning his eyes told me in no uncertain terms should he catch me being silly I’d be in major trouble.
“I’ll be careful,” I promised.
The breeze, lightly scented with lavender and periwinkle, caressed my heated skin. I was distracted by a random thought. I plucked at my sleeve behind my back, and decided to just throw it out there.
“Conall, you’re a boy.” I burrowed the toe of my boot into the undergrowth. “Am I nice looking? For a fairy, I mean.”
“You are beautiful.”
“You have to say that because Breandan will hurt you if you upset me.”
“No,” he said softly. “I admit I take his wishes into consideration when I speak to you, but my thoughts and opinions remain my own.” His eyes roamed my face.
“You have never seen yourself without glamour. And I have.”
I searched his face. I had never been slightly curious about my past. I figured if my family had been willing to give me up they weren’t worth my time. My necklace was my only connection to them, and it was the only connection I needed. At least, that was how I felt up until that morning. Learning I was a demon had changed a few things. Maybe I needed to re think the whole ‘my family suck and I hate them’ thing.
“You have?”
“When you were a baby.”
It took a while for me to be able to speak. “You knew me?” I asked. “I mean, you know me?”
His face had clouded, voice lowered. “Yes.”
“I get the feeling you don’t want to talk about it.”
“Yes.”
“Okay then,” I said slowly. It would do no good to push him. Besides, I was in no hurry to find out, and I was not sure if I was ready to hear what he might say. “Another time then. So, this glamour thing, I need to focus on nothing but stripping it away, right?”
“The spell was broken the first time you tapped into your nature. I’m sure of this. Breandan told me what happened this morning.” The uncomfortable moment had passed, and his lips curved. “I have never heard of a fairy fainting before.”
I gaped at him in horror. “He did not tell you that. I did not faint. I did not!”
“Of course.” His voice was serious, but the smile was still there. “Remove your glamour.”
I just loved how he said it like I already knew how. No pressure or anything. Taking a deep breath I cleared my mind. Emptying my head of the confusion over Devlin took moments and was easy. Clearing out thoughts of Breandan was hard. Memories of his hands on my body, lips on my skin were electrifying. The eyes that turned me inside out, and the smiles that dazzled took considerably longer to purge. Confusingly, the thoughts of my vampire-boy were also hard to shake. Tomas’s face kept popping into view every time I managed to get the thoughts of Breandan under some kind of control.
Achieving oneness I relaxed into a trance, and for time unknown I simply, was. As my consciousness floated I noticed a pulsing deep within me. I strained to touch it. Each time I thought I had a hold it slipped through my fingers. I tried again, and again, and began to feel sad; the pulsing glow looked beautiful and special. I had drawn from the Source easy enough before, why was it causing me trouble now? I reached and wished it in my palm, pleading meekly. Nothing. Oh for gods sake! The glow zapped into me and overflowed from my body to spill my aura into the air. A feeling of bliss trilled inside me as layers of the lie tore one by one. My true self clawed its way out.
A drowning woman breaching the surface, gasping for air, my nature broke free of containment and ran riot through my body in a frenzied burst.
My first urge was to run to a presence far to the north. A siren song my entire being hummed with wanting. So strong was the call, I teetered on my toes and forcibly pulled myself back to straight. I became conscious to the why the presence felt familiar. Breandan. Unable to make it go away, I ignored the need and focused on everything else.
I moved, and my skin stung as if a layer had been stripped with a knife. There was a heavy pressure at the bottom of my spine, and something soft thumped hard at my back, pressing against my top. A larger, burning pain gripped my shoulders in a vice until my back arched. Stifled, my back was stifled. Stomach muscles clenching my whole body quivered under the pain centering between my shoulder blades. The fabric of my top gave way and I surged forward at the force of the thrust from behind me. The pain in my shoulders was gone, but the awareness of more was overwhelming. Craning my head to look round my body followed until I was doing a crazy spin.
“Wings,” I choked as the golden tips extended to flutter into my line of sight. I blinked at my own voice, a resonating sound of chinking crystals. That was me talking?
Conall was beside me, holding me up. “Pull yourself together,” he said.
I held onto the sound of his voice, held on to his stern command. If he had molly-cuddled me, I’d have curled into a ball and cried. His matter of fact outlook kept me grounded. I tried to block out everything but that close to me. My body responded immediately and every sensation collapsed on itself.
“Oh,” I gasped and took another steadying breath.
Conall took out a knife, grabbed my shoulder and with a swift jerk cut a hole in my jeans. Slipping his fingertip through the hole, he pulled something through and springing free it thumped against the back of my thigh. I spun, and tried to catch the thick length of skin protruding from the base of my spine. Each extra vertebra was under my control right to the tip. I focused on the extra limb and it curled to hover by my waist. I clasped it and gasped. It was warm, soft and I stared dumbfounded at the hard, leaf like tip. It felt strong. The skin was the same colour as my flesh, but as it tapered the colour got lighter. Looking down at my tail, I noticed my nails had lengthened and thickened into talons. I bit my lip and sharp points of pain had me tasting my own blood. I ran my tongue over my teeth, less like teeth now and more like fangs. My bottom lip throbbed as it healed. Then I focused on the heavy weight behind me. The two limbs curved away from my body and looked like the wings of a dragonfly. Blood pumped through the veins and goose bumps appeared in the a
bsence of sun. My wings twitched. How the wind feels through your hair, such it felt as a gust passed over and under my wings. The instinct came to me and they twitched again. They spread, out and out, until I saw the great length of them either side of me. They beat once, slowly, then again and again. Tremendous power trilled through me and I leant my strength into the limbs attached to my back. They beat once more and my heels lifted off the ground. Shocked, I stopped and dropped back down to the floor panting from the exertion.
I couldn’t smile or cry or whimper.
And so I screamed.
Something stung my cheek and my scream cut off. Conall drew back his palm. but this time I caught his hand and held it. “I didn’t think it would be such a shock. Perhaps we should have done this differently. Breandan will be furious.” Conall frowned. “I want my hand back?”
I let him go, and instead held my hand out in front of me, fisted. I felt my tail doing some odd twisting thing and found to hard to keep my balance. Once I’d figured out how to hold it straight, I felt invincible. My wings curled behind me to rest snugly against my back and I rolled my shoulders. Flexing my toes in my boots, I wiggled my fingers as my tail curled round my legs. The tip occasionally brushed the floor.
“You should know wings are not gifted to all our kind and are great honor. You cannot fly, but you can glide. The tail will help with your speed and balance.” His head snapped to peer into the forest. “Breandan is to the–”
“Northeast,” I offered with certainty. It was weird because like a lens focusing, I could sense Breandan. I knew the direction he was in and how long it would take me to reach him. Taking a step away from where he was, my body resisted and fought to go the other way.
The fairy clapped his hands together beaming. “We’ve got time. What shall we do?”
The Demon Girl Page 10
