Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows)

by Aileen Harkwood

  He terrified me.

  Aril faced him squarely.

  “Gorsydd,” he said, acknowledging the fae by name.

  I recognized the name instantly. Gorsydd was head of the bright fae council. Though the fae no longer had their high court, this guy was the closest thing to unconditional royalty there was in Ashia Hollow.

  “You’ve done well,” the bright fae spoke. Musical in tone, the words flowed rich and masterful.

  Fuck. Even the voice is perfect.

  “Your task is complete. You can entrust her to me.”

  Task? Aril worked for the fae council?

  Again, Titus’s words from days ago surfaced, the Komodo dragon on a chain, thing.

  This was the person at the other end of that chain?

  I’d come to know Aril’s body language. He was prepared for confrontation.

  “No,” he told Gorsydd.

  The bright fae offered a condescending smile. “Your services are no longer needed.”

  “You ordered me to protect her, but you didn’t tell me why she needed protection.”

  “Not your concern,” Gorsydd said.

  “It is,” Aril said. “Lunari is absolutely my concern.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Bored by the delay in Aril turning me over to him, Gorsydd lifted a hand in the slightest of gestures. Another light went on behind him, a street lamp where there was no street lamp. Aril noted it and then twisted around toward us. Initially, I thought he would say something to me, but his focus went past me down the fondamenta where we’d just been. Geraint and I turned, gazing past Reeps and Bobi to where a pair of non-existent sconces mounted to a house’s wall came on. Two more pools of light without bulbs or lamp workings.

  A moment later the new lights transformed into more fae. One stepped up beside Gorsydd carrying a sword, longer and heavier than a human broadsword. Two boxed us in from behind, also armed.

  Aril assumed a fighting position, hands held up at his sides. Black fire set his palms ablaze with power.

  Geraint unsheathed a similar blade from spelled concealment in his coat that had to weigh fifteen kilos, if not more. Reeps and Bobi armed themselves with a gun and sword respectively.

  “Lunari stays with us,” Aril told the fae.

  Gorsydd’s expression grew as cold as the blade in the hands of the bright fae beside him. “You’re weak. You spent too much of yourself rescuing her from the doge.”

  “There’s more than enough left in me to finish you,” Aril said.

  “But at what price?” Gorsydd said.

  Gorsydd closed his raised hand into a fist.

  As if on a master switch, ten, maybe a dozen additional pools of light appeared behind the bright fae’s leader. Up and down the canal, which had no walkway or doors on the opposite side, more lights popped on in places where there should be none.

  “Too many,” Geraint whispered under his breath.

  Together, the lights streamed across brick and water, up paving stones and along bridge railings, morphing, one after another, into bright fae warriors. As many stood barring our way forward as did blocking our retreat back toward the quay.

  All stood ready to massacre Aril and his friends.

  “Could you survive long enough to defeat each of us?” Gorsydd asked.

  The black fire in Aril’s hands intensified. Geraint tightened his grip on his sword. Behind me, Bobi’s feet shifted as she took up a fighting stance.

  They don’t have a chance.

  Outnumbered and perhaps outmatched, I couldn’t let them fight. Not to the death, and that’s what this would be.

  I considered jumping into the canal but knew it would be wasted effort. I couldn’t swim faster than the brights could run and fish me out of the water.

  I raised my voice to the fae council’s leader. “I’ll go.”

  Gorsydd favored me with a look that sent ice stabbing down my spine.

  “Thank you, my dear,” he said.

  Geraint reached out to stop me, but I slipped by and walked toward the fae leader.

  Aril grabbed desperately for my arm.

  “Lunari, don’t,” he said.

  Those gorgeous, dark-lashed eyes of his pleaded with me.

  “Please. You don’t know what he’s capable—”

  I confessed my secret at last. “I don’t have long. Titus told me. My life was always meant to be short. This way, at least you get to live.”

  Aril still tried pushing me to safety behind him, but gloves that felt like they had steel in them instead of flesh circled both my arms. Two fae pulled me away from him and walked me over to the edge of the canal where a slender boat, empty and guided by no one, slid up to the stone foundation. I was handed down into it. The two fae joined me.

  I smiled as bravely as I could for Aril.

  And for the others, too. Geraint and Bobi and Reeps. Their brief company was the closest I’d come to understanding what it would be like to have family.

  The boat pulled away, ferrying me back down the canal and into the lagoon.

  Full Moon

  (Luna piena)

  25

  Somehow, I’d figured the fae’s cell would be more pleasant than the human one. Since the brights were perfect, and everything about them was perfect, I’d anticipated that they wouldn’t be able to bring themselves to build an imperfect prison. I was right. They excelled at making the foulest cell imaginable, exacting in its ability to reduce prisoners to the utter depths of despair.

  I was underground; that much I knew from the cool, dank air. My instincts felt the weight of the city above me. This cell wasn’t merely at storm drain level, it was located well below that, farther down than I had ever gone. Which of the fae districts lay above? Luminosa or Mare Scura?

  My journey here had been a lightless one, despite the brights accompanying me. Not long after I’d climbed into the boat and we’d left Oasi, a black fog had moved in so thick I couldn’t see my hand held in front of my face. I’d wondered how the fae could even know where they were going. It took me several minutes to figure out the mist was an enchantment. It enveloped me alone and clung about my head.

  I can’t explain what difference it made, but the fog unnerved me more than a blindfold would have. With a blindfold, you knew that if you could only get it off, you’d be able to see. My eyes were open, however, and no matter which way I moved, no matter how hard I tried to discern shapes or colors, I was blind.

  Neither of the fae spoke or touched me during the trip. I couldn’t even hear them breathing. I felt them there, though. Their power hemmed me in, front and back. After a while, I don’t know how long, sailing through open lagoon, water lapping against either stone or brick and echoing overhead told me we’d entered a tunnel. Several minutes later, the boat floated to a stop, and the two fae lifted me onto paving of some type. I was picked up and dumped unceremoniously into a cart made of freezing metal and scratched up plastic that scraped my skin, and then rolled along, still sightless.

  We traveled downhill, though it was impossible to judge how far. We went through several doors, stopped to open creaking iron gates, wound through a labyrinth of turns and switchbacks. Toward the end, the surface underneath the cart’s wheels changed. I heard grit being crushed, and the ride felt mushy.

  Bare dirt. That’s dirt.

  How far underground were we?

  I smelled the damp and little else. We halted. A door, gauging by the solid sound of it, was opened. My guards picked me up and slung me outward, where I hit slimy earth and rolled like a log until momentum gave out, and I lay face down in mud that smelled of urine. The door slammed, and I heard one of them whisper in a language I didn’t know.

  When I lifted my head, the black fog fell away. I could see again! I watched a line of red sparks follow the outline of the door, sealing the cell shut with magic. The fae’s whispering had been a locking spell.

  Rolling over, I sat up to inspect my prison.

  The words were the firs
t thing I noticed. One wall of the cell was emblazoned with them. I was sure they’d been drawn by hand. It had to have been someone with magic because the words glowed. It was old magic, almost worn out. Most of the letters had grown dim and their light murky. A few sputtered like dying fluorescent bulbs. All spelled out the same phrase, over and over again.

  KILL ME.

  My guess was the KILL ME toward the center, the writing strong, letters crisp, had been the first. Moving outward from those initial two words—mostly to the right, but with some KILL ME’s to the left, above, and below—the writing gradually turned sloppy, the letters becoming less and less legible, until at the outermost edges random, violent slashes no longer resembled words but still communicated all I needed to know about my future.

  I suppose I should have been grateful to whoever had posted this grim message as they slowly went insane. They’d provided the cell’s only source of light.

  I stood up and turned in a full circle, studying the rest of this dungeon. It had no windows, not even one in the door for a guard to peer through. Along the rear wall ran a shallow ditch from a rounded hole in the KILL ME wall on the right, to a hole in wall on the left. Human waste moved sluggishly along in the scummy water trickling along the channel, with a lot of it piling up along the sides.

  A long stone bench built into wall on the left served as the cell’s bed. Unfortunately, a corpse was currently using it. Skeletonized long ago, that gag-inducing stink dead bodies usually gave off was absent.

  For the most part.

  Not enough flesh had mummified on the bones to help me identify the sex.

  With nothing else to do, I leaned against the KILL ME wall, hugged my arms to my chest to keep as warm as possible, and stared at the sewage floating along the ditch. My cell had no toilet, no spigot or basin of water. Was I meant to use the ditch and the water in it for both purposes?

  Little by little exhaustion claimed me. I slid down the wall into a squat, pushing my aching back into the stone. Bad enough I’d landed in it when I was thrown in here. I would not sit in the brown swill that formed the cell floor. I wasn’t that desperate yet. After what felt like half a day, but was probably a few hours, I pushed up to my feet and stretched.

  Then I kicked the shit out of the skeleton.

  Angrily, I shoved it off what I’d come to think of as my bench and punted the skull at the wall, where it cracked and the jaw broke off. The rest of the bag of bones went into the ditch. One rotted strip of clothing intertwined with bones caught on my toe. I swung my leg around and hurled it at the wall with an angry yell. Giving into this ugly tantrum was the alternative to accepting my fate, which would have been infinitely worse.

  Someday another person will come along and do the same to you and your bones.

  Finally, I had no fight left in me. My stomach cramped with nausea from lack of food. My mouth was dry. I wanted water but still couldn’t bring myself to drink from the ditch. I lay down on the bench and slept.

  26

  I dreamed I was back on the Island of Healed Sorrows, sitting in Aril’s lap under a peach tree. Sunlight filtered through the leaves dappling the ground with shadow. Faint breezes played with my hair.

  “Hold out your hand in front of you,” Aril said.

  I did as he asked. Leaves rustled in a branch above us, and a moment later, a peach dropped straight into my hand. My fingers caught and clutched it. I brought the fruit to my nose and inhaled the warm, seductively delicious scent. I squeezed it slightly and knew it was ripe. My mouth watered.

  “Here,” I said and offered Aril the first bite.

  “That’s for you. He’s starving you.”

  “Thank you, but I know this is a dream. It’s not like Reeps and the grape.”

  “Take a bite anyway. It might help.”

  I didn’t want to. I knew when I woke, it would only make me feel worse that it wasn’t real. But I humored him. So ripe was the peach, juice dribbled from the fruit where I bit it. Instinctively I sucked on it to catch the drips. My thirst wasn’t quenched, however sweet it tasted. I felt no relief. My mouth was still dry, my tongue raw. The insides of my cheeks burned from lack of moisture.

  “Where are you? Do you know?”

  “Isola di Guariti Dolori.”

  “No,” Aril said. “That’s where you’re dreaming you are. Where are you really?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think, Lunari.”

  His saying my name reminded me that he’d lied. “You knew my name all along,” I said. “You were down there in the storm drain hunting me.”

  “Not hunting, watching. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

  He looked down, ashamed.

  “I should have,” he said.

  “You killed Sulla, didn’t you?”

  “He was about to contact the human council guard. I got there too late. His wife had already done it. But I was with you even before that. Back when they tossed you out.”

  “Tossed me out? What, wait? Are you talking about the orphanage?”

  “Who do you think sent you your Whisper?”

  “You?”

  He’d been there, watching over me since I was six?

  “You needed to live your own life without me spying on you, but you also needed protecting. Whisper did that.”

  “You knew her?

  I struggled to wrap my mind around the concept of Aril watching me for the last fifteen years. Was I creeped out by it? Was it romantic? Did it please me? Or scare me?

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I was too late to stop them from hurting her.”

  He snatched the worthless peach from me and hurled it violently at the pines surrounding the garden. It flew out of sight somewhere down the path to the beach.

  His words grated through his teeth. “Always too late.”

  I placed my hand on his cheek, feeling the tension in his jaw. My thoughts weren’t clear enough to say the right thing to soothe him. I could only show him what I thought.

  Not your fault.

  He looked away from the pines and back to me. “Where are you, Lunari? Right now. Where is he keeping you?”

  “Underground,” I said.

  “In the sewer? The storm drains?”

  I frowned. Suddenly, I couldn’t see Aril anymore. The island garden faded.

  “Deeper,” I said.

  The dream was ending.

  “Lunari?” Aril said. “Lunari!”

  27

  When I opened my eyes, everything in the cell was the same. I might have been asleep for twenty minutes or twenty hours. Time was hard to estimate in isolation. My hunger pains worsened. I was now dizzy with thirst. The longer I lay there, the more certain I was no one was ever coming back. They’d locked me up in here to die. I wouldn’t be leaving this cell. Ever.

  Unless you dream.

  Would that work?

  Not a dream like the one I’d had of Aril and the island. One of my blue dreams.

  Could I really get out of here if I dreamed myself free?

  I’d seen for myself that my dreams destroyed reality. They dismantled it. I’d torn apart a stately cork oak with one nightmare, and I’d almost built a tsunami out of a dream and a little sea water back in that alley on Oasi. Both those times, the seizures had started on their own, but if Titus was to be believed, I’d gained sufficient control over them to take down a gang of fireheads. I simply hadn’t realized what I was doing when I’d done it.

  I couldn’t go back to sleep and hope a dream would happen, though. I had to learn how to form one on my own.

  You tried that, remember? On the gallows.

  I’d been drugged then. I wasn’t now.

  I stared at the KILL ME messages and imagined the light in the letters turning blue. All I needed was one letter to turn. Or the bricks in the wall to wobble out of place, the floor to shudder. I concentrated and told myself I could do it. I lifted my hand up in front of my face and envisioned blue fire spurting up out of my
palm like the fae did it, like Aril and Reeps.

  You’re like them. You have magic.

  Deep in my chest, something stirred. A chill swept up my neck and fanned out into my hairline, levitating individual hairs away from my scalp and sending goosebumps down my arms.

  BE magic.

  I jumped when several bones in the nearby skeleton rattled. I watched and waited for more, thinking this might be the beginning of it, but the skeleton didn’t move again. Maybe I hadn’t done that. Perhaps the water in the ditch had tugged it, and that was what I’d heard. Not me performing magic.

  Sighing my disappointment, I gazed back at my hand.

  My fingertips were blue.

  Oh, my God.

  I curled my fingers and the blue flowed down them, seeped from my pores, and puddled in my open palm.

  It’s happening. I’m doing it. What now?

  Wood groaned. The cell door swung open.

  I jumped again. So intent had I been on summoning a dream, I’d missed the whispered spell unsealing the door and turn of the key in a rusty lock. My cupped hand twitched and the blue substance raced around like blobs of mercury, spilling from my palm. I didn’t take my gaze off it, yet nothing struck the ground. It simply disappeared. I looked from the floor back at my hand.

  Normal. No trace of blue.

  Was it ever there?

  Two uniformed fae each carried a large tray into the cell and set them in the filth in middle of the floor. The fae were tall, giants by human standards, and the trays huge to match. One tray displayed a glutton’s feast for ten. The other tray held more food and half a dozen pitchers of something to drink, plain water by the looks of it.

  Last meal?

  Without meeting my eyes or saying a word, the fae left, locked the door, and sealed me in again with magic.

  My parched tongue and lips cried out for the water in the pitchers. My empty stomach wadded into an agonized ball at the sight of the game bird on the tray. It was larger than a chicken or a turkey. They’d caught and cooked a fenix? Irresistible aromas from calamari and carpaccio and cicchetti appetizers wafted up to me. Prawns were heaped on a platter. Bowls of risi e bisi and risotto and plump clams steamed with lemon and pepper ringed the fowl. Baskets overflowed with pincia, fritole venessiane, and other breads. Ices and gelatos and tiramisu waited for dessert.