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

by Aileen Harkwood

  I had no real love for my fellow humans. They lived in families and gangs from which I had been excluded all my life. I had no close experience with any of them. I had been shown kindness, generosity and caring, however, first by Whisper and then by Aril and his fellow dark fae. Just like Aril, I had rules. I would not kill strangers outside the barrier who had suffered the same hardships I had. They’d done nothing to me, and if they ate their own, which could be total bullshit on Gorsydd’s part, that still didn’t give me the right. I did not want the weight of thousands of souls on my conscience. I would never be able to live with myself. How could I not become evil if I did that? My eyes would turn darker than Geraint’s. My own soul and mind would be fouled beyond saving.

  “No,” I said. I was vehement. I shook my head. “No. You can’t make me do that.”

  “And yet I just made you stuff your gullet with food.”

  Gorsydd stepped closer, his tall, slim frame towering over me. He took my hand and despite my resistance, forced me to stand and turn so my back was to him. Reaching down and around, he placed a hand on my distended belly and began to rub light, slow circles. His skin gave off its own cologne. Roman woodworm, bitter and flowery.

  “It’s time. Relax. Close your eyes.”

  I couldn’t move. My eyes shut of their own accord. His hand wouldn’t leave my stomach. Around and around, feather light circles. His magic held me in place.

  I whimpered. Sulla had done the same thing to me just before—

  Forget Sulla. He’s dead.

  I imagined the people I was about to kill against my will. The thousands of lives lost because of me. I thought about the puddle of blue I’d held in my palm before the door to the cell had opened and the food arrived. If I could just bring that back. If I could find the power within me to stop Gorsydd. My body was full of magic he’d shoved down my throat.

  Use it. Use that to find your power. You’re fae. Stop fighting it. Unlock who you are.

  The dream arrived.

  It was tentative, not yet fully formed. I still couldn’t open my eyes, but as happened with so many of my dream seizures, I didn’t need my eyes to view the cell, the lurid remains of its former occupant abused by me and tumbled in the sewage ditch, the bench beside me, repellently handsome Gorsydd standing behind me like a rapist sent from paradise.

  Everything I saw was blue, all of it ripe for me to alter to my desires in any way I wanted to hurt anyone I wanted. What I wanted was to rip Gorsydd a new orifice.

  Use it. You have the magic within you. Don’t hold back. Don’t resist. You are powerful.

  I flung out my hand, and the KILL ME wall rippled.

  Good, Lunari. Excellent. That’s right.

  My mind fell out of the dream just long enough for me to hear Gorsydd whispering in my ear, the same words I’d thought that very moment.

  “Good, Lunari. Excellent. That’s right.”

  It was his voice urging me on, not mine.

  No, it’s you. All you. You’re the one with the power here, the cloyingly hypnotic voice in my head chanted.

  “No, it’s you. All you. You’re the one with the power here,” Gorsydd whispered in my ear at the same time.

  You sure as shit know it, I thought back at him.

  My fear mutated into anger. I was ready to kill him. I wanted that frickin’ hand rubbing me hacked off at the wrist so it couldn’t touch another person again. Did fae have nightmares? God, I hoped so. This bastard was about to get one that would turn his balls to ash.

  “Excellent,” Gorsydd said. “Your time has come.”

  “No,” I said. “Yours has.”

  Gorsydd’s hand left my belly and settled on my temple.

  He forced me to dream.

  28

  Skilled fingers plucked a haunting, romantic tune on the mandolin as I rode past a sunny balcony off the Giudecca Canal. My gondolier caught the melody and hummed a fragment of it until we were out of range of the musician on our way to Stazione di Venezia. I had to catch the train to Mestre on the mainland no later than 9:30 if I planned to rent a car and make the drive north to deliver my talk in Udine by noon.

  My boss at the tourist bureau had scheduled me for a multi-day speaking tour through the northern part of the country starting today. I told him Venice had more tourists than it could handle, over twenty million a year, seventy-thousand day trippers invading the islands each morning. Inviting people to come here was a bad idea. I couldn’t explain why, but something inside me told me people would be hurt.

  “Tourism is our business, Lunari,” he told me. “It’s your job. I expect you to be in Udine at twelve to give your lecture encouraging more to visit our magnificent city. No one can talk up its amenities better than you.”

  This isn’t real. Don’t believe it! You’re dreaming. Gorsydd has created this.

  Morning light cast the canal in soft aqua. Shadows on one side painted the palazzos in cool blues, while on the opposite sun-drenched side of the famed waterway, the city’s ancient buildings soothed the eye in shades of cameo, camellia pink, and cream. Espresso and the scent of freshly baked cornettos perfumed the air.

  I slipped my cell phone out of my handbag and glanced at the screen.

  JULY 2, it read.

  We were already halfway through 2028. Where had the months gone?

  It was 8:27 am.

  A cruise ship flying the British Union Jack cut through the water behind us and would overtake the gondola in minutes. Instead of fighting the wake from the massive vessel, the gondolier paddled us to the side of the canal to wait for it to pass.

  A cat lazed by a cluster of pots overflowing with geraniums on a porch dock just a couple meters away. Cracked plaster had fallen off the wall behind the pots to reveal bricks more than five-hundred years old underneath.

  What a perfect portrait of Venice! I snapped a pic with my phone and uploaded it to Facebook, along with three others I’d taken of the canal and my singing gondolier.

  Only in enchanted Venice, I typed a post to go with it. Instead of a calico cat with four white paws, a white cat with four calico paws!

  Venice was heaven. I told myself that every day. How fortunate I was to call this place my home. Why wouldn’t everyone want to come here?

  The gondolier dropped me at the station. On the train, I sat next to a man holding a fawn-colored French bulldog in his lap. What an easy opening to flirt.

  “So adorable!” I said. “What’s his name?”

  “Napoleon.”

  The little animal’s ears perked up at mention of his name. He panted, tongue lolling from his doggy smile. The man’s smile wasn’t bad, either. Hot.

  Maybe, if he was getting off at Mestre like I was, I should suggest we share a caffè and pastry before I got on the road? I knew of the perfect outdoor café.

  What are you thinking? Dogs and cats are extinct. This Venice no longer exists. You have to wake up! Whatever Gorsydd is building with your power, it won’t be good.

  “Here’s your stop, Lunari. You better hurry. You don’t want to miss your speaking engagement.”

  He sounded exactly like my boss, down to the weirdly impersonal English accent. Ugh. Creepy. Maybe he wasn’t so cute after all.

  “Okay,” I said.

  My rented Fiat got me to the city of Udine with only minutes to spare. Depressingly, however, my audience consisted of just five people, none of whom was interested in day trips to Venice. I knew I couldn’t disappoint my employer, however. I had to do my best.

  “Have you ever tried the restaurants in Venice?” I asked the small group. “You may not know this, but we’re famous for our food. What do you like to eat? Are you hungry for fish, shellfish, pasta, chicken? We have it all, and I’m willing to bet you’ve never tasted anything more delicious in your lives.”

  “Food?” A woman who looked anorexic said. “You have food?”

  “Of course we do! All the marvelous dishes you can eat. Last night I had fresh seabream with orange sauce
and tagliatelle with artichokes and pecorino.”

  Five people stared at me, their mouths open in disbelief.

  “But we thought it was dangerous to go to Venice,” a man with hollow cheeks who could use a bath said.

  “I just came from there,” I said. “It was a beautiful trip.”

  “No. That can’t be,” the anorexic woman said. “People get sick. They die. There’s no way through. There’s a barrier between us and that other place.”

  “Barrier? What are you talking about? The road is right there. Venice is a generous host to any traveler.” I should have taken photos of the mainland on my way out here. “The farms are especially beautiful. Artisanal vegetables growing ripe in the fields and ready to be picked.”

  Before I could say another word, I was alone, my audience on its way toward Venice, my work done.

  So it went, during two more talks that day, and five the next in Conegliano, another four in Cittadella and Padua each. My audiences started out small but soon grew to satisfying crowds, and then hordes desperate to taste the delights I dangled in front of their faces. My boss was right. I did have a gift. People who had been skeptical about visiting believed me when I told them about the wonders of Venice. I could sell it in ways no one else in the tourist bureau had been able to do before me.

  Wake up! Why can’t I wake up?

  Finally, I understood. Gorsydd needed my power and my ability to empathize with humans to trick the people outside the barrier. Though practically barren, resembling nothing like the Italy of old, the lands outside Ashia Hollow supported thousands in post-apocalyptic misery. Tragically, the people to whom I spoke were real. We may not be conversing in real life, but my power was to dream. He used it to invade theirs and convince them that paradise awaited if they dared to walk through the barrier. Fields of tomatoes and juicy melons and savory globe artichokes lay right inside it. Mouthwatering fish would jump into their hands on the shores of Venice Lagoon. In their sleep, the people listened to my siren call and began the journey the moment they woke.

  “Run to the fields!” my dreaming self shouted to the throngs. “Pick and eat as much as you like. It’s free, and it’s all yours.”

  I smiled warmly and waved them onward in their migration toward hell. I was so happy I could help, could feed them when they were suffering from starvation like I had as a child.

  “Just think,” my dream alter ego said, while my real self watched in abject horror from a distance. “An hour’s walk from here you can rest and experience hunger no more. Your hardship will be over. How good it will feel to be fat and full!”

  Having survived a wasteland all their lives, their abused souls cried out in relief, shouted for joy. Their voices bubbled with happiness.

  “This can’t be true?”

  “Dio mio. It is true!”

  “A miracle!”

  They didn’t just walk. Their listless, underfed bodies found impossible strength to rush toward the salvation I promised them.

  Stop. Wake up, I yelled at myself. You can’t do this.

  I fought to take control. I had to get the dream back from Gorsydd. I couldn’t lure these people to their deaths.

  Young men fantasized about what they would eat first. Woman with protruding ribs and knobby shoulders led children only marginally better fed than they were by the hand. Skeletal, ragged figures hobbled and limped, grinning to each other on the road, laughing for the first time in years. Bullies shoved through the crowds to get to the head of the pack. In case there wasn’t as much food as promised, they wanted to make sure they got most of it and controlled it like the wealth it was. Disabled elderly men and women left behind by their younger relatives struggled valiantly to get there on their own. They crawled when they had to, determined they would reach the food before it was all gone.

  The part of me not locked in the dream by Gorsydd tried to warn them.

  No! Go back!

  They couldn’t hear me. They spotted the fields at last and broke into a run.

  Acura’s dark energy welcomed them.

  Legs pumping and pushing through the vines, the people scattered through acres and kilometers of the plants. Soon their euphoria turned to confusion. Where was the food? Where were the tomatoes and strawberries, the melons and beans? Brushing through the leaves, their legs blistered and bubbled with poison. Nectar from the flowers ate holes through their hands. As they knelt down to search for hidden squash and potatoes, their faces and hair erupted into flame. Runners and roots curled and wrapped around the bodies, siphoning off each victim’s life force to pull it deep into the ground.

  Inside my head, I shouted for hours for people to go back, and none of them heard me. I couldn’t stop them. They kept coming and coming, and thousands more coming because the dream Gorsydd made me dream for them was more powerful than human survival instinct itself.

  Every life extinguished resounded in my heart. Their screams echoed in my mind and never went away. It grew too loud. I couldn’t absorb the pain. I felt myself shying away and detaching from the carnage.

  If you do that, he’ll win. Fight! Every life not lost is a life saved.

  My prison cell shuddered.

  You felt that. You aren’t as lost as you think. You’re waking. Wake up now!

  I wasn’t waking.

  As hard as I tried, I couldn’t lift my eyelids.

  She was the shudder.

  Ashia stirred.

  Energy savaged from those in the fields soaked down through the earth. Lord Acura’s malignant roots were old and powerful, and the victims nourished them, causing them to grow. Urgently, they nosed their way down through rock and under the lagoon, and then deeper still to where Rasha’s daughter slumbered in the forest beneath Venice.

  Venice was built on trees, millions of them cut from Slovenia, Croatia, and Montenegro. From the fifth century on, tree trunks up to twenty meters long were used as pilings and pounded into the mud below the waterline to form the city’s foundations. Wood platforms were laid atop the pilings and marble above that, more stone and brick, until the fabled “floating city” was born. Never exposed to oxygen, the trees didn’t rot, and most petrified into stone. When our two worlds merged, fae and human, it made sense that this ancient forest would be brought to back to life, thriving underground. The fae loved secret places. They equally loved violating science to hide them where nothing like them had a right to exist.

  I didn’t know how a forest could grow without sunlight, but that forest fed Ashia. I knew because my dream showed me the entrance to her grove.

  I didn’t think I could have hated Gorsydd any more than when my dream body dove down into the ground, passing within hand’s reach of a child’s skull burning amongst the nightshade’s gentle black flowers. My spirit was the banshee that wailed and shrieked over that death and that of the little girl’s mother, her brothers, and a legion more. No one heard me, I knew, but I would not let their passing go unmourned. I keened in outrage for them as I sped along the networks of fine roots at the surface, down to the junctions with larger roots and down, down, down to even larger roots, following the river of energy streaming toward Ashia’s resting place.

  There.

  Thick roots angled upward, a great ring of them that shot through the soil and upward still, as a crown of evergreens that formed an underground clearing. At the center, a female fae lay atop a coffin-sized pedestal. Her still figure was softly lit, and though her skin was dewy and her clothing without a speck of dirt or wear, roots older than I was, probably older than Titus, grew over and across around her lower body. Every square centimeter of the forest floor was carpeted in roots all leading to the princess, every root sheathed in tough, scaly bark, dark as cinders. Gorsydd and his fae had been feeding Queen Rasha’s daughter on their own for years.

  Her hands clasped a bouquet of white calla lilies, amaranth, and cinquefoil to her pale breast, the stems and petals of which withered before my eyes. I didn’t need her to open her eyes to know what
color they would be. It was just like Reeps had said: the hollow had been growing darker for years, as the good in Ashia was slowly consumed by Acura’s evil.

  His back turned to me, Gorsydd held his sword in a stiff pose reminiscent of a crusader carved into a niche of a Gothic Era cathedral. Twelve more fae stood in attendance, all fearsome, all bright like him.

  Again, Venice quaked.

  Ashia’s hand twitched.

  I gasped.

  Gorsydd pivoted, sword raised.

  “You,” he said, lunging at me.

  I was a wraith, a figment from a dream. What could he do to a figment?

  His blade struck the side of my head, and shock exploded behind my eyes.

  29

  “Lunari? Can you hear me? We’re coming for you.”

  Chalky mist and smoke mingled together on the road to Venice. I stood in the center of the crumbling highway, my flowing shirt and pants fluttering in the wind. I couldn’t see for more than ten steps in either direction. I’d been told I would be here all week, directing visitors on their way to the train in Mestre. We didn’t have enough tourists yet, and a bridge was out ahead. People couldn’t use their cars.

  Clumps of people straggled out of the dirty white clouds blowing across the road, sometimes whole towns’ worth. How could they be so beaten down by the trip in so short a time? They only had to walk the final mile to the station, but once they did, they would be fine.

  “Welcome!” I said and put on my brightest smile. “You’re almost there.” I pointed behind me. “Just keep going. We have refreshments waiting for you ahead.”

  Why did they look more like refugees from a war zone than tourists?