[Creepy Hollow 02.0] The Faerie Prince

by Rachel Morgan

  Oh flipping hell. For a few terrifying moments, I consider the possibility that Ryn might actually be dead. My brain rejects the thought almost as soon as I allow it in, though. It’s too foreign a concept. Ryn has always been in my life, whether as a friend or a giant-ass thorn in my side. He can’t just be gone.

  And he isn’t. Instead of emerging miraculously from the burning house, I see him running around the side, the two Hart grandchildren in tow. “Look!” I say to Mrs. Hart, pointing at the three running figures. She makes a sound halfway between a wail and a laugh. She tries to run toward them, but I hold her back until they reach us. The two dripping wet children fall into her arms.

  I refrain from throwing my arms around Ryn because that would be weird. Instead I ask, “Why are you wet?”

  “Swimming pool,” he gasps, still catching his breath. “We had a few flaming clothes by the time we got out the house.”

  “Edgar,” Mrs. Hart whimpers as she clings to her grandchildren. “David. Where are they?”

  “We need to go,” Ryn says quietly as he takes my arm, which is a good thing because I feel a little bit like I might fall over. “I didn’t see the Queen or Zell anywhere, but they might be nearby.” Sirens echo in the distance as we slip away from the crowd. We run down the driveway, through the open gate, and onto the road.

  “How are we going to get back?” I ask. I’m struggling to keep up with Ryn. Every inch of my body aches from being slammed against that couch, and my skin is on fire wherever the ivy touched it. Blood trickles down my arm and drips off my fingertips. Nausea creeps over me. I wish I had my boots on. I wish I didn’t have a dress slapping around my ankles. And why is everything starting to look white?

  I don’t know how I wind up on my knees on the pavement with my stomach heaving, but that’s where I seem to be. I think Ryn is saying something, but I can’t hear him over the weird rushing in my ears. And everything seems to be getting whiter. Or blacker. Or white fading into black.

  I try to fight it because that’s what I’m meant to do, right? But it’s such hard work, and Ryn is right beside me, ready to catch me, so why not give in?

  I let the blackness take me.

  Ten

  I wake up with my back on something soft and my legs on something prickly. My head doesn’t feel weird and woozy anymore, but the rest of my body still aches. I blink a few times and the moon comes into focus behind a silhouette of tree branches.

  “Damn, I was hoping you’d stay knocked out a little longer,” Ryn says from somewhere beside me.

  I push myself up, wincing at the pain in my hands. “And why is that? Were you enjoying the quiet?”

  “No, I’m about to break into a house and steal stuff, and I figured you wouldn’t approve.”

  I look past the tree I’m sitting beneath and see a house. “Are we in someone’s garden?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re going to steal from whoever lives in there?”

  “Yes. There are things we need if we’re hoping to get home alive, and we need to make do without magic until we get there.”

  Remembering the deep gash across my right arm, I look down. The wound is hidden beneath a tightly-wrapped piece of fabric that looks suspiciously like my dress. Moving my gaze further down, I notice the dress is shorter than the last time I looked at it. “I see you’ve been busy tearing up my clothes.”

  “You’re not healing,” he says quietly. “I needed to try and stop the bleeding with something.”

  “It’s because of this.” I point to the narrow strip of metal wrapped around my right wrist. It’s in pretty much the same position as the first metal band Zell slapped onto me. I suppose I should be grateful I’ll only have one scar when this is all over. “Our magic won’t heal us while we have these bands on, and I don’t know how to remove them.”

  “That seems unlike you. I thought you knew everything.”

  “Well, I don’t know this spell, and I don’t have the special instrument, so bite me,” I say feebly as I lie down again. Weakness isn’t a feeling I’m particularly enjoying.

  “Okay, I’m going into the house,” Ryn says. “Just … don’t go anywhere.”

  Like I have somewhere to go. “For once, I’m happy not to argue with you.”

  His footsteps are barely audible as he treads away. I try to get comfortable, but it’s difficult when it feels like the whole of my back is covered in bruises. I turn onto my left side and look down at the soft thing I’m lying on. It’s Ryn’s jacket. It smells like smoke, but it also smells like him. Weird. Not the smell, but the fact that I recognize it. It’s a nice scent, kind of woodsy and citrusy. I hold the sleeve to my nose and breathe deeply.

  Violet Fairdale, would you stop being weird?

  I drop the sleeve and close my eyes.

  I’m not sure, but I think I sleep for a while because it feels like only seconds later when a hand touches my arm and I open my eyes with a start. “It’s me,” Ryn says. He sits down beside me and places a backpack on the grass in front of him. “Turns out I’m an excellent burglar.”

  “No surprise there.” I turn carefully onto my back. “What did you get?”

  “Some food, a blanket, a map book, and their entire first aid kit.”

  “Ryn,” I groan. “You don’t think they’ll need their first aid kit at some point?”

  “Not as much as you need it right now.”

  “And it’s human stuff,” I add. “It probably won’t even work on me.”

  “Your magic’s blocked,” Ryn says. “Right now you’re as close to being human as you’ll ever get, so this stuff might just work.” He pulls out a white plastic box with a red cross on it and begins sifting through the contents. “Antiseptic,” he reads. “Sounds good.” He leans over and begins dabbing the cream onto the many small cuts scattered across my arms. “Can you sit up?” he asks. “I saw some cuts on your back.”

  The prospect of sitting up doesn’t seem that appealing, but I do it anyway. Ryn’s fingers move carefully across my back, applying the cream that will probably have no effect on me whatsoever. “I’m having a weird sense of déjà vu right now,” I say quietly. “Except last time it was me fixing something on your back.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he says. “The poisoned glass.” He moves to my side and carefully unties the black fabric around my upper arm. Blood starts oozing from the wound again.

  “I think humans get stitches for cuts this deep,” I say.

  “Yes, well, we’ll have to make a plan without stitches.” Ryn digs around inside the plastic box and removes a few things. After wiping some liquid over the wound—which stings like hell and makes tears spring up in my eyes—he closes it up by sticking a line of tiny plasters over it. He then wraps a bandage around my arm. “Anything else?” he asks.

  “Um, my hands,” I say weakly. I’m still a little shaky after the sudden spike of pain caused by the liquid antiseptic. This whole experience is making me feel vulnerable in a way I’m not used to at all—and that I do not like one bit.

  “Are they burnt?” Ryn asks, taking a closer look at my hands.

  “I think so. It was those vines she tied me up with.”

  Ryn reads the labels on a few more tubes before selecting one. He takes my right hand and squirts some clear gel onto my palm. I brace myself for more pain, but instead I feel relief. I breathe out a sigh as he gently rubs the gel into my palm, across my fingers, and up my wrist, moving carefully around the metal band. It feels strangely intimate. I’m suddenly aware of how close he’s sitting to me. I’m aware of his knee touching my thigh, and his hand carefully holding mine. I watch his face as he works, his beautiful blue eyes intent as he moves to my left hand and concentrates on smoothing the gel over it. My gaze falls on his lips. I wonder what it would feel like to—

  Stop it!

  I look away from his face and down at the ground. Ryn is my friend. My friend. The idea of anything more than that is so utterly ridiculous I want to laugh out loud. An
d yet I can’t help imagining what it would be like if—No! I’m not imagining that at all. It’s absurd.

  Stop being absurd, Violet. I close my eyes and silently chant, Friend, friend, friend.

  “Are you okay?” Ryn asks.

  My eyelids spring apart and I pull my hand away. “Yes. That feels a lot better, thank you.” I force myself to look at him as though nothing has changed between us. Because it hasn’t, right? “Are you okay? You hit the floor so hard you didn’t wake up for a while.”

  Ryn rolls his shoulders. “I’m a bit banged up, I guess, but nothing serious. I’ll just have to put up with the bruises for longer than a few hours.” He packs away the medical kit.

  “And are you okay with … what we saw when the Queen knocked us out?” I know I don’t have to mention Reed’s name; Ryn will know exactly what I’m talking about.

  “Yeah. Of course.” Ryn turns his back to me as he pulls a blanket out of the backpack and closes the zipper. I know he’s lying.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know if I should bring it up. I just wanted to make sure—”

  “It’s fine, Violet. Don’t worry about it.” With a tight smile, he hands me the blanket. “We can sleep out here tonight and get moving when the sun rises.”

  I know he’s trying to change the subject, but I’m determined not to move on until I know he really is okay. “Reed didn’t feel that way in real life. You know that, right?” When Ryn doesn’t answer I decide to plough ahead with my theory. “I know what’s going on here. You’ve built up this crazy situation in your head where you think that if your brother had ever had to choose between the two of us, he’d have chosen me. And that’s just not true.”

  “How do you know?” Ryn takes the folded blanket from me, shakes it open, and throws it over me. “The night that he died, he did choose you over me. I know he cared about you a lot, V.” Ryn’s voice goes quiet as he lies down on my left. “Maybe he did love you more than he loved me, his own brother.”

  “No.” I lie carefully on my side, facing Ryn. “Not possible.”

  “Oh, it’s definitely possible.” Ryn stares up at the stars. “And don’t worry, I won’t hate you for it. It isn’t your fault if the brother I loved and admired so much didn’t feel the same way about me. But I’ve spent many hours considering the possibility that he would have chosen you over me, and I think it’s true.”

  “Many hours?” I ask in disbelief.

  He looks over at me. “What? I have plenty of thinking time.”

  Plenty of thinking time? What does he do, just sit around and think? What about assignments? Training, studying, friends?

  I prop myself up on one elbow, trying not to lean on any bruises or cuts. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Will it make a difference if I say ‘no’?”

  “Probably not.”

  He turns his gaze back to the sky. “Ask away, then.”

  “Do you spend a lot of time alone?”

  A beat of silence passes before he says, “Why would you ask that?”

  “Well, there’s the fact that you can quote poetry, which implies you spend a lot of time reading. You mentioned yesterday that you hang out in people’s houses watching TV when you’re not on assignment. And now you’ve just told me about all the ‘thinking time’ you have. So I was just wondering why you don’t hang out with your friends more often.”

  His expression is incredulous when he looks at me. “You’re wondering why I don’t hang out with friends?”

  “Look, we both know I have zero social life, but this conversation isn’t about me. It’s about you.”

  He hesitates, then says, “Can we add this to the off-limits territory?”

  “But—”

  “What, you think you’re the only one who gets to have off-limits territory?” He grins, obviously seeing his way out of any future awkward conversations. “No way. If there are things you don’t have to talk about, then there are things I don’t have to talk about.”

  “Fine.” I roll onto my back, completely forgetting that I’ve got cream smeared all over it. Oops. Well, the jacket is probably dirty already anyway. “Are we allowed to talk about how we’re going to find our way home?”

  “We’ll have to get to Creepy Hollow the old fashioned way: on foot.” He shuffles around a bit, then reaches for the backpack and places it under his head. “Bran said this assignment was local, so I’m hoping it’s close to where the human realm crosses over into the fae realm. We can check the map book in the morning.”

  “Okay.” Fortunately, I know exactly where the human realm crosses over into the fae realm. That’s the way I was supposed to take Nate home after he followed me into the faerie paths. That all seems so long ago. Even Nate’s betrayal is starting to seem like it happened in another lifetime. It doesn’t hurt so much anymore. “I hope local means really local,” I say, “because if we don’t get back to the Guild by the cut-off time on Friday afternoon, I’m probably going to go into a serious depression. I cannot fail my final assignment.”

  Ryn sighs. “I think you should prepare yourself for possible failure, V. We’re already going to lose points for not being able to bring back the necklace, and we know nothing about it other than its name. If we return late in addition to all that, we’ll definitely be failing this one.”

  “We did get the necklace,” I tell him. “It’s hiding right here.” I hold up one of the silver balls around my neck, noticing that my burnt fingers don’t feel quite so sore anymore. “And we do know what it’s for. Didn’t you hear what Zell said while you were hiding in the faerie paths? He told his mother that she didn’t deserve to be immortal and that he’d never give her this necklace.”

  “Immortal? I must have missed that.” Ryn rubs a hand across his jaw. “But earlier on he was going to give up the necklace in exchange for you.”

  “Well, he obviously changed his mind and decided immortality was more important than having me find special faeries for him.”

  Ryn rolls onto his side and looks at me. “So this necklace grants immortality. That’s pretty cool. I wonder how it works.”

  “Maybe when you’re wearing it you can’t die,” I say, “even if you’re injured so badly that the magic in your body is unable to heal you. The magic in the necklace must be more powerful.”

  “I wonder what would happen if your head were cut off? Do you think it would still work then?”

  “That’s just gross, Ryn, and don’t even think about testing it out on me.”

  A look of horror flashes across Ryn’s eyes before he shakes his head. “Do you honestly think I’d cut your head off, V? I thought we’d reached the friend stage by now.”

  Yeah, and then we reached the stage where your naked chest suddenly seemed appealing, and I started applying words like ‘delicious’ to your lips and—

  What. The. Freak? I slam a mental gate down on my thoughts, trying to force my brain back to neutral. I am not the kind of girl who thinks things like that, and Ryn is not the kind of guy I should be thinking them about. He’s the guy who threw my mother’s tokehari necklace away. The guy who made sure I had no friends at the Guild. I’ve seen his rudeness and condescension toward just about every Guild girl who’s ever had any interest in him, and I certainly don’t want to be on the receiving end of that.

  “Uh, yes, the friend stage.” I nod. “I know you wouldn’t cut my head off.”

  Ryn frowns as he watches me, as though trying to figure something out. Damn, am I blushing or something? Did I have a weird look on my face while trying to get my insane thoughts under control? I turn my head and stare at the sky, which is a lot safer than staring into Ryn’s eyes. It isn’t nearly as beautiful as a Creepy Hollow sky, but it calms me nonetheless. My gaze drifts slowly from one twinkling star to the next. “Remember when we used to draw star-to-star pictures in the air with our styluses?” I say.

  “Yes, and then we’d try to guess each other’s drawings.”

  “Remember th
at dragon Reed spent so long drawing one night?”

  Ryn nods. “And you and I were both adamant that it looked like a weirdly shaped pegasus because the legs were too long for a dragon.”

  I laugh. “He was so determined to make us see a dragon, but we were both laughing so hard we could barely follow what he was saying.”

  Ryn’s laughter joins mine, and it feels so natural, so familiar and comforting, that by the time our chuckles subside into silence, something feels different between us. As though we’ve finally got back to that place we were at before Reed died.

  “You should sleep, V,” he says quietly. “You need rest for your wounds to heal.”

  My wounds. I’d almost forgotten the pain, but now that he’s mentioned it, I become aware once more of the aching throughout my body. “Yeah, I guess.”

  He turns onto his side, facing away from me. His not-so-white-anymore shirt pulls tight over his back, but I don’t imagine the taut muscles just below it because Ryn is my friend, and it isn’t right to think thoughts like that about a friend.

  “You don’t want the blanket?” I murmur sleepily, realizing after a few minutes that he has nothing to cover himself with.

  “No, I’m fine, thanks. If I get cold in the night I’ll just pinch it from you.”

  Eleven

  In my dream I’m in a park fighting a goblin. It’s the same assignment I went on a few weeks ago, but the weather is different. Lightning splits the sky into jagged pieces, and deafening thunder causes the ground to shudder. Wind whips strands of hair across my face as I slash at the goblin with my sword. A trail of sparks follows the blade. I know I’m supposed to kill him with the sword—I remember that happening—but for some reason, I decide to do something different now.

  I let go of the sword, and it vanishes. Flames begin to dance and flicker across my open palms. They shouldn’t burn me, because they’re my flames, but they do. I run at the goblin, screaming both in anger and because of the pain in my hands. I wrap my burning fingers around the goblin’s neck. He’s strong and should be able to fight me off, but dreams don’t work the way reality does, and instead I find him struggling beneath my grip. I manage to force him to the ground, my hands never leaving his neck until he becomes still.