Ashia quit laughing. In fascination, she continued to watch the golden hair on fire, the perfect skin crisp and fall away. The bright fae eyes cook in his skull.
This wasn’t just the best opportunity. It was the only one.
What did the immediate environment contain I could manipulate? The trees and roots were her psychic allies. The heavens over the grove were hers to command.
Her bed.
She’d spent more than a century and a half lying on the marble slab atop the pedestal at her back. That would have to do. While she was captivated by the plight of her loyal ass kisser, Gorsydd, I summoned all the ability I had in me and flung my will at the stone.
Marble spikes half the length of a sídhe blade sprang up out of the rock. I saw the stone rising up on its side, curling around Ashia’s body and impaling her forty times over.
Kill her!
Instead, the slab leaped up over her head. With a wave of her hand, it flew through the air straight at me.
Ashia had anticipated me with no visible effort. She didn’t even glance my way.
I was so weak, the reflex to dream the slab to dust before I could be gored by my own creation, triggered too late to completely dissolve it. Fist-sized chunks of marble stoned me in the head. I threw my arms up in front of my face, but razor-sharp pieces slashed me. Pain sliced into me a second later as my nerve endings caught up with damage to my arms and legs.
Another flick of her wrist, and Ashia sent me hurtling into a tree.
My back shattered. I heard bones crack inside of me. Shards of bone cut jabbed muscle and tore through skin. My body hit the ground and rolled. I came to a rest on my side facing her. I had trouble breathing. I suspected one of my lungs had collapsed.
Ashia still wasn’t interested enough to look at me. Her attention had returned to the oculus-like hole she’d made in the domed above, connecting this world to Venice above. She began writing in the air. Words flew from her fingertips, lengthened, spiraled, and twisted into strands of enchantment that replicated themselves with the ease of a virus without a cure. A moment later, she flexed her other hand and simultaneously scribed figures to join the words. Malignant cartouches and virulent symbols slid off her palm at a dizzying rate, and from the instant they were drawn, the threads her other hand had spun, curled toward them. They wound themselves into the spelled geometry, taking shape until the dark calculus of hundreds of thousands and then millions of individual spells could not be separated and formed solid clouds of magic, spreading out overhead.
Faster and faster, the clouds grew and solidified. Thunderheads billowed up that filled the entire domed sky. Nor were they normal clouds. Perhaps, because I was used to reality being unraveled by it, my dream sight gave me the clearest view of the coming storm she intended to unleash on Venice. Seeded in the clouds was magic that would shred the barrier. Fae would suffocate. Humans would drown in their own blood. Birds would rain to earth and the canals fill with fire, the lagoon turn to acid and the sky go black, the sun and the moon and the stars never seen over Venice again. Unlike the last apocalypse, nothing would survive.
Unexpectedly, the cryptic poem at the end of the jeweled fae history that had been my greatest treasure slid into my thoughts.
When fae hides in human and human in fae,
when the heavens grow weak and the vulnerable are drawn to hell
in cruel numbers,
Rasha’s light disappears below,
and the final darkness shall rise above.
Finally, the lines made sense.
The book’s prophesy was about Aril and me, the dead at the barrier, and Ashia Hollow’s last day.
I was the fae hiding in a human. Aril had been the human hiding in fae with his imperfect yet heroic soul. After years of war and meddling by the brights, the barrier or “heavens” enclosing our merged world had so weakened that the hapless survivors of the last apocalypse were able to pass through it and burn in the fields. Revived by that sacrifice, Lord Acura’s dark energy had flooded downward to extinguish the princess’s natural-born light.
Darkness would now rise above Venice and obliterate the barrier, kill everyone in the hollow to make a realm for one, Ashia. What came after that—conquering Queen Rasha’s other daughters and their hollows?—would happen entirely at this newly empowered freak’s whim.
I tried to stand one more time, but like Whisper, I couldn’t. My legs didn’t work. I’d been bled dry of magic as well, reduced, as I’d feared, to bones. Broken ones at that.
I slipped into shock. My mind wandered. Imaginary winds blew through the pages of the history book still embedded in my brain. I remembered the last scene with Queen Rasha saying goodbye to Ashia after she’d placed her in the enchanted sleep intended to sustain Venice. Thinking about it brought that page of the book zooming into focus. Certain lines caught my attention.
Tormented by all that her war against the dark fae had wrought, Rasha…made the ultimate sacrifice…
And later on the same page…
Her last act of love was to kiss each daughter and wish them well as they slumbered beneath the ground for the centuries to come. With that, she too, lay down to sleep, knowing she never again would wake.
I focused on the words…last act of love…
Suddenly, there she was. Courtesy of the book’s sorcery, Rasha hovered before me, or at least a holographic memory of her. Ironically, her majestic wraith overlaid the actual spot on the dais where she had said her farewell to her daughter. The original, innocent Ashia—partially blocked by the live one standing in front of the pedestal—was part of the hologram, too, lying in repose on her marble bed. Her hands clasped white flowers to her breast. She was already asleep. I watched the scene between Rasha and her daughter unfold.
Queen Rasha’s gentle fingers smoothed a stray lock of chestnut hair into place on the princess’s head.
“Some day you will wake, my daughter,” the queen said. “And I won’t be here to greet you. I pray everything that is within me now will be reborn in you that day so you will never forget I loved you.”
Rasha bent over the tomb-like bed on which her adult child rested and kissed her high, sharp cheek, which was intensely covered in freckles.
“May your world be one that is forever bright, my love, and let darkness never best you.”
How lucky Ashia had been to have family who’d loved her.
She should see what she’s thrown away.
Couldn’t she, though? If I really wanted it?
I was still here. While I breathed, there had to be some magic left in me I could summon, even if it was dregs. What was the difference in dying five minutes from now or fifteen?
My mind made up, I drew a final breath and then tapped the life force that kept my good lung functioning. I wasn’t going anywhere, so I stole my ability to move. I shut down my heart and took that energy, too. I would have seconds of consciousness at most.
Not enough. It wasn’t anywhere near enough to do what I needed to do.
My entire life, I had looked to La Luna for guidance. I had lived by her light rather than the sun’s. She had guided me with her own subtle magic for twenty-one years. I was always aware of her, always knew exactly when she rose and set. At that very moment, the full moon sailed through blue sky over Venice. I might not be able to see her because of Ashia’s toxic clouds, but I sensed her mysterious presence as strongly as ever. No dark magic existed that could make me lose sight of her.
Please, la Luna. Please.
Without oxygen, my brain started shutting down.
I’d been an idiot to imagine a white rock in the sky could—
Power surged into me, cool, sweet, and sure. If I’d been standing, I would have fallen over.
Grazie, mia signora.
I wasted no time. I used la Luna’s gift to plunge and trap Ashia into my dream world, turn her reality inside out and lock the mental hologram of her mother into an unending loop she couldn’t escape watching over and over for
eternity.
Ashia’s face snapped in my direction.
“Choke on it,” I told her.
Her startled eyes were the last thing I saw.
31
Waves lapped gently at rock, soft ripples of sound in the night.
A tiny splash was followed by another. I opened my eyes in time to see a coral-red fish with silver eyes about the length of my hand leap free of and then plop back down into the water. A second fish, this one gold with white plumage-like fins, jumped up a few inches above the surface before splashing down and sending concentric wavelets rolling outward.
I lay on mossy ground. Slowly, I sat up. That I could do so was a miracle. I waited for pain, but there was none.
I recognized where I was right away: the Island of Healed Sorrows. I lounged at the edge of the pool where Aril had rescued me from drowning weeks ago. As usual, the waters gave off their hallowed radiance.
I felt distanced from myself. Groggy. What was I doing here?
Two more fish leaped into the air and then a third one seconds later. I didn’t remember them doing that when Aril and I were here. How odd.
“They’re catching insects,” said someone to my right.
Normally, I would have flinched at the unexpected voice, but I’d been through too much. I honestly didn’t care if I had company here or who she might be.
That shackle of guilt around my neck hadn’t loosened. Twenty-one thousand deaths. If anything, depression ground into me. In my head, the screams of the people catching fire were as loud and sickening as ever. These were the types of memories that would not fade.
Maybe I wouldn’t freak out as much as the last time I’d dived into the pool. Maybe my drowning would go more quickly since I knew what to expect. Or did I? Fae magic wasn’t a model of predictability, especially here in this garden. Maybe whatever enchantment charged the waters would require a longer, more drawn-out death as just punishment for my crimes.
“The pool will bring you peace,” that voice intruded again. “If that’s what you want.”
I finally turned to look at the person who’d spoken. She perched on a nearby rock, closer to the water than I was. Undersized and sickly, her body type didn’t fit the fae ideal. Which didn’t mean she wasn’t stunning. I’d never seen bones that moved with such innate grace. She gazed down at the pool, her face hidden by chestnut hair with glints of sunset, and dipped a pale toe into the water. She swirled it in circles.
She looked vaguely familiar.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“An orphan,” she said.
She looked up and over at me at last. She was dark fae, but her indigo eyes were still impossibly bright. I saw the sharp cheekbones, the dusky mask of freckles.
“Princess?” I said.
She smiled, lips only, a sad expression really that acknowledged her identity. Gone was the demonic Ashia who ruled the underground forest, and in her place, a version closer to the original, if obviously unwell. She left the rock and approached me.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
I remembered the last thing I’d said to her, after La Luna helped me make her a prisoner to her mother’s farewell, replaying on and on.
Choke on it.
“You stopped me,” she said. “Or more precisely, you brought my mother back to life to do it. No one else could have, I think.”
“I don’t want your thanks,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to help you.”
“I know. Yet…” She gestured at the garden with its perpetually ripe fruits and fragrant blossoms. “…here we both are. Thanks to you.”
“Then this is real? This place still exists?”
“It all does. Venice and the Hollow are safe.”
“But I’m dead, right?”
I could think of no other explanation why I was now pain- and injury-free.
“You are in a place in time between life and death,” she said. “And you have two choices to make.”
“What’s the first?”
“The pool or life.”
Allow the Pool of Peace to grant me death, she meant, but mercifully cleanse me of the stain. Or to live with mass murder on my soul.
“If you choose to live, I will take the weight you carry onto myself,” Ashia said. “It was for me they lost their lives.”
“You can’t,” I said. “Mille perdoni, but you aren’t strong enough. No one is.”
“The pool is there for me. I will welcome it.”
So she would commit suicide and take the darkness infecting me with her? As much as I’d loathed the Ashia I’d been engineered to bring to life, I couldn’t hate this one. She’d been asleep. What had been done to her by Gorsydd was just as bad as what had been done to me.
In all of this, the one question I had that no one had answered or even considered asking was, where were the brights when their world was at risk? Or the dark fae for that matter? Why had no one but Aril, Geraint, Bobi, and Reeps intervened? I would not, for a second, believe the fae population was blissfully oblivious to the darkening of the hollow and the battle that had raged under Venice.
“I choose life,” I said, “but on one condition. I won’t let you take that horror onto yourself. You don’t deserve it any more than I do.”
Her brow furrowed in confusion. “You just said no one can live with it.”
“I did, and no one person will. I propose the guilt of this holocaust be shared by all. Every fae alive, bright or dark.”
Ashia’s frown grew deeper. “You would willingly dim so many souls?”
“There are more fae in the hollow than there were victims in the fields. It will be shared equally so that as a whole we—”
“Shoulder the burden,” she said. “And no one is alone in sharing it. But that will mean no more brights. Everyone will be dark to some degree.”
“They already are,” I said. “Where were the brights when you lay on that marble bed of yours, and Gorsydd fed you Acura’s evil? Gorsydd had his council guard, but where were the fae who should have been looking out for you? And for Venice? They all bear responsibility.”
Ashia inhaled sharply and looked aside. She was quiet for several moments.
“So be it.”
I was glad. This, at last, was justice.
“You said there was a second choice?” I asked.
“Yes.” She paused and looked down at her bare feet.
The hesitation and embarrassment were not something I expected in a royal. Finally, she looked up at me again. For a moment, it was like being with someone younger than me, filled with insecurities, though I knew she had to be hundreds of years old.
“I would like to give you back one of the things that was forcefully taken from you by Gorsydd,” she said. “I wish I could give you more. I’m sorry. I don’t have…I’m not feeling…I need to rest after this. Probably for a long while.”
“Yes,” I said. “You don’t look well.”
She shrugged that off.
“You were robbed of the right to be born fae into a fae body,” she said, “and that you shall have. However, you were also never given the opportunity to know what it’s like to live as bright fae. It’s…”
Ashia closed her dark fae eyes.
“It’s hard to describe the loss,” she said finally.
She swallowed while trying not to cry. She was right. I had no idea what it must be like to live a perfect and illuminated life, only to have it ripped away from you.
“So,” Ashia said. “The choice is between two things stolen from you that you deserve to have back. I can only give you one.”
“Yes?” I asked.
“Purity or love.”
“Do you have to ask?” I said.
This time, her smile was a happy one.
“Look behind you,” she said.
I pivoted and looked toward the far side of the garden, back where fruit trees gave way to tall pines and beyond that the path down to the beach. At first, I saw onl
y shadows and moonlight, and then a figure appeared on the path.
I knew his walk. I knew the way he held those broad shoulders and the conceited, superior, wonderfully irritating confidence with which he carried himself.
I hyperventilated, half-believing it wasn’t true.
“Aril.”
I took a step.
It can’t be.
I started walking, and then faster, and then I broke into a hard sprint. As I ran, I felt myself changing. The shackle weighing me down fell apart and flew off, leaving behind only a fraction of the torments I’d had to shoulder by myself. My strides lengthened. I flew over the ground with more ease than I’d ever felt running before. My body became more like me, what I, as a fae, should have been.
Almost to the trees, I saw Aril carried something with him. Something alive. I slowed. What was that? It struggled and wanted to get free of his hold. He released it, and it bounded toward me on four silver striped paws as big a little girl’s hand.
“Whisper!”
She scampered up to me, and I crouched down on her level. I had to be sure.
“You are,” I said in wonder.
She was real. Her head butted my knees. She blinked at me and then, hearing rustling in the needles beneath the pines, she darted off on the hunt.
Watching her go, I pivoted in place and glanced up into the most gorgeous eyes I will ever know. There he stood, healed, whole, no longer a slave to the Scar of Judgment. I rose from my crouch into his arms.
Our lips touched.
He held me as if he feared I was the one who wasn’t real.
“My love,” he said. “My love.”
Acknowledgments
This book never would have happened were it not for Rebecca Hamilton, who handed me the amazing opportunity to write for the Charmed Legacy Dark Fae Hollows world, as well as the benefactor, who shall remain unnamed per her wishes, who donated her spot in the collection. Rebecca’s support throughout the entire publishing process has been invaluable. Both these ladies have my profound gratitude.
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 24
