Lies of the Haven: A Young Adult Urban Fantasy Adventure (Faerie Warriors Book 1)

by J. A. Curtis

  “Prisoner escape!”

  As one, the faeries of the Haven turned to observe the lone figure speeding away from the manor. They burst into motion. They came from all directions, but faerie guardian Mina was faster than real life Mina. She outran them as she weaved and dodged around their attempts to intercept her. I saw through other Mina’s eyes as several faeries crowded at the window of the game room, and Caelm stared down in shock from the bay window of the hospital room above. Most important, the faerie on the manor’s roof keeping watch stared down, pointed, then blew the horn.

  Just what I wanted.

  Other Mina sprinted for the opening to the ravine. The time it would take for the faeries to catch other Mina and drag her out of the ravine would hopefully grant me enough time to escape. But right before other Mina made it to the ravine’s mouth, a dark form loomed up high in front of her. Solid rock, its feet pounded the earth, and a huge fist slammed down, blocking the entrance to the ravine.

  Other Mina didn’t stop. She was not only faster than I ever could be in real life, but way more agile. With a leap, other Mina launched herself up onto the golem’s clenched fist, landed with ease, and propelled herself off. The ravine floor came up fast, but other Mina landed without losing her balance on the loose rocky bottom.

  At this point, I pulled back. I didn’t sever my connection with other Mina, but I needed to make my escape. I had to be able to think on my feet. I stared at the closed, locked door.

  “Domovye,” I whispered. “If you want me gone, there’s one more door you need to unlock.”

  I felt a little silly whispering into thin air, but I turned the handle on the door and pushed.

  The door opened with ease, and I breathed, not realizing I had been holding my breath. I poked my head out. The manor was silent, the hallway devoid of faeries. Everyone still watched the action at the manor’s front. I snuck into the kitchen and made a quick pass through, grabbing bread, a couple water bottles and some rowan berries that I stuffed into a cloth sack laying out before making my way to the back of the manor where I slipped into one of the study rooms and opened the window. I swung my legs over the sill and dropped into the grass.

  I paused. The backside of the manor looked deserted, but there was no guarantee my distraction won the attention of all the faeries on watch. However, it was daytime, and I didn’t think Arius stationed a faerie at the forest's edge during daylight hours. The stymphalian birds were a sufficient deterrent. But I wasn’t sure about that. Plus, there was the faerie up on the roof. If whoever was up there spotted me, my escape would be foiled.

  Time was running out. They caught other Mina. In a strange double world way, I felt rough hands grab other Mina’s arms and shove her up against the ravine’s rocky side. Someone was talking to her, saying something, but it sounded like muffled gibberish in my mind. I needed to go in deeper to discern what was said, but I couldn’t risk that at the moment. I’d have to hope they interpreted other Mina’s silence as an act of defiance.

  They started to drag other Mina out of the ravine. If I was going to act, it had to be now. I took off, breaking for the forest at the back of the manor. My plan was to follow the tracks of the supply trucks down out of the mountains and to civilization. That way I wouldn’t get lost. I stayed at the forest’s edge and followed the deep grooves in the ground until long after the manor disappeared from sight.

  22

  Lost

  “When you’re in a valley, don’t be afraid to make the next climb.”

  “WHEN YOU’RE IN A VALLEY, don’t be afraid to make the next climb.” I was pretty sure Nana had gotten that advice off a postcard. Thanks, Nana. I already knew I was at a low point. The question was, which mountain should I climb?

  I had a family that loved me. A brother who needed me. People were in pain because of me. At least they wanted me.

  The faeries had thrown other Mina back into the prison, this time with a guard stationed outside her cell door. When I was almost to civilization, my connection with my faerie guardian grew tenuous, and I had to pull her onto my arm. I wished I could have seen the looks on their faces.

  I snacked on the food and water as I travelled. The rowan berries were particularly helpful. A couple of the small red berries could energize me for hours.

  I hitchhiked my way onto a large semi transporting potatoes with a driver who looked like your stereotypical trucker, down to the plaid shirt and beer cap. As we drove west along I-90, I drifted off to sleep. I hadn’t allowed myself to stop to rest or sleep since I escaped. Now riding in the front cab of a truck with a stranger, I relaxed, and sleep overtook me.

  The trucker dropped me off at a gas station in Post Falls, Idaho. The sun had slipped below the horizon, and so I ate a few more rowan berries and walked to a park along the Spokane River. I washed my dirty, smelly body in the river, enjoying the feeling of freshness for the first time in what felt like forever. Then, I lay down on a bench and watched the calm, glassy water until I again drifted off to sleep.

  The next morning, I stood outside the nursing home where my parents had committed Nana to live. The new paint and fresh flowers in pots hanging from the fore posts made the place seem cheery and welcoming. And yet I knew the truth. The place wasn’t a paradise. It was a prison.

  I waited in the parking lot until a family pulled up and got out of their minivan. They walked to the door and pushed the intercom button. After a few words with the nurse, the door buzzed and popped open. I hurried forward, caught the open door before it shut, and slipped in behind the family.

  Because Nana had started to forget things, my parents placed her in a locked down facility. They claimed it was for her own safety, so she didn’t leave and forget where she was. But Nana and I both knew she wasn’t that bad. In fact, Nana’s memory was meticulous in most things. She could recite stories from when she was like six years old with perfect clarity. That didn’t seem like a failing memory to me.

  I had almost made my way to the hallway where Nana’s room was located when a nurse popped up from behind the desk. Her eyes took in my leather top and tattooed arm and she forced a smile.

  “Hi there. Who are you here to visit today?” the woman asked.

  I stepped toward the desk, eyes wide, trying to appear as innocent as possible, “My grandma.”

  I was glad I had taken the time to wash all the grime from my body and hair, otherwise she probably would have thrown me out.

  “Well then, honey, you need to sign in first,” the nurse said, appearing less suspicious from my unassuming response.

  “Oh, okay. This is my first time visiting on my own,” I said as I picked up the pen to sign in. I looked down at the sign-in book, my mind racing. I couldn’t write Mina. If my family ever saw... I bit my lip and signed:

  Jazrael General

  I flinched at my choice. The pen in my hand hovered over the name, about to cross it out and try again, but I glanced up at the nurse who watched me with curiosity. Backing out wasn’t an option. I wrote the time and date and Nana’s name. If my family saw the entry, they would wonder who Jazrael General might be, but at least they wouldn’t suspect it to be their dead daughter.

  The nurse looked down at the name I had signed. “Do you know where you are going Jaz—Jaz—”

  “Jazrael,” I said, “But I go by Jazzie.” Was I really making up nicknames for my faerie warrior persona? “I know where to go.”

  I hurried down the hall and stopped outside Nana’s room. What would she say when she saw me? The good thing about my parents thinking Nana was crazy was they would only believe it to be part of her derangement if she claimed their dearly departed daughter was still alive. And at the moment, I needed Nana’s advice. I took a deep breath.

  The door opened without a sound. Two women sat in the room, worlds apart. One had withered hair and sat in a wheelchair, staring at nothing. Unmoving and frail. The other woman was Nana. She sat in a high-backed chair with a cell phone pressed to her ear, ready to spit fire
.

  “Now you listen here, Helen. You come get me out of this hellhole this instant. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve—” she paused mid-sentence, then said, “Don’t give me your excuses. I am your mother, and my memory is perfectly—no this isn’t the fifth time I’ve called you today—well even if that’s true, you need to get me out of—”

  Her eyes fell on me and she looked startled. “Good, Mina’s here. Mina, talk some sense into your mother.” She took the phone from her ear and held it out toward me.

  My hand clamped over my mouth and I backed up till I hit the wall. My mother’s faint voice came over the phone. “Mom? Mom? Mina’s not there. I’ve already told you. She’s... she’s dead.”

  I bit my tongue so hard I tasted blood. The sorrow in my mother’s voice, her pain... I could end it all. I could end it all right now.

  Nana snapped the phone back to her ear. “What do you mean she’s dead? I’m sitting here looking right at her. Mina, come over here and talk to your mother.”

  This had been a mistake. A horrible, awful mistake. My hand still covered my mouth. I shook my head. I tried to plead with Nana with my eyes. Please get off the phone.

  “Seems like she doesn’t want to talk to you. Not that I blame her,” Nana said, her eyes still on me. “Look, Helen, I gotta go. I expect to see you out here tomorrow. I can’t find my toothpicks anywhere. I think one of the nurses may have taken them. They are always—yes I’ve looked there—What do you take me for? They’re not here!” And with that, Nana held out the phone and jabbed at it with her finger before dropping it in her lap. “Now, Mina,” she said, “what is all this nonsense?”

  I dropped my hand, pushed off from the wall and threw myself at Nana, fighting back tears.

  “What’s this?” Nana asked, surprised, as she returned my hug.

  “I’m just—just—” I stammered. She was here, in front of me. The woman I loved, who could help me through anything. I sank down onto the carpet at her feet and confessed everything from the ill-conceived party to finding out about my supposed death to my escape from the Haven. I told her about Arius and Dramian and Nuada and Margus. I explained faeries and faerie guardians and special abilities and how I had finally discovered who I was. Everything.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I admitted as my story wound down. “I want to give up, but I still feel like the faeries need me. I am the only one who can tell them what happened when we all fell. I’m the only one who can expose Nuada and Margus for what they really are.”

  I was the only one who could bring the faeries together.

  But...

  “I also want to go home,” I said. I missed being a normal kid with normal kid worries. I missed Corbin and even my parents.

  I looked up at the old woman—my rock, my confidant. “What should I do, Nana?”

  My Nana regarded me from her chair. “Mina, stand up and listen carefully. This is what you will do.” I climbed to my feet and leaned forward. She took my hands in her aged ones. “You are going home, and you will tell your parents they need to get me out of this place.”

  I stepped back. “But they think I’m dead.”

  She released one of my hands and reached into her pocket and pulled out a toothpick and stuck it in her mouth. “Poppycock, why would they think such a silly thing? You’re standing right here.”

  “I just told you,” I said, a dread building inside me. “I just explained everything. Don’t you remember?”

  “Now don’t you get started on my memory too,” she said, the toothpick in her mouth bobbing up and down as she spoke. She started looking all around. “Now where is that blasted phone? My roommate, I tell you, very dishonest. She is always taking my things.”

  Disbelief, I expected—but this, a total lack of memory of everything I had told her. I glanced over at Nana’s roommate. The woman hadn’t even twitched since I came into the room. I stared down at the cell phone that was still laying in Nana’s lap. Heat rose into my cheeks. I jerked my hands out of her old gnarled grasp.

  “Stop it!” I shouted, “This isn’t you. Why are you doing this? Why are you like this?”

  She stared at me. Those gray eyes, which had always been so sharp and sure, were now suddenly large and afraid, as if she saw the truth reflected in my panic. Her frail frame shook, and she began to search in earnest. “Where is that blasted cell phone... that blasted phone...” she said over and over as if struggling to hold that one simple thought in her mind before it, too, slipped away from her.

  I refused to watch. I ran from the room and down the hall, past the nurse's desk. I rammed into the door only to remember it was locked. Locked to keep the residents in, to keep them safe... to keep them from forgetting and getting lost...

  “Honey, are you all right?” A nurse asked from behind the desk.

  “Let me out!”

  The door buzzed, and I was outside gulping fresh air. My parents had been right all along. I had been the one who couldn’t see what was happening to my confidant. My mentor. The lack of memory, the inability to care for herself, the memory loops she often got stuck in. If she was changing, then I was losing her. I was losing Nana.

  I needed a place to go, but I had none. No Nana, no parents, no home. No one.

  23

  Kris

  AFTER A FEW HOURS OF wandering aimlessly around downtown, I figured out a place to go. Risky. She most likely thought me dead—but only one person I knew took confidentiality to heart to the point she might not out me. The only person I trusted with such a big secret.

  Kris.

  She always slept with her window unlocked. A tree by her window with long strong branches made an easy ladder in and out. I hoped she’d be home tonight.

  I caught one of the lower branches of the tree and hauled my body up. I swung up to the next highest branch that hung right outside Kris’s bedroom window, which was, as usual, raised open a crack. I peered into her room and saw a form under the covers. I scooted to the end of the branch, grabbed the window, and pushed it up.

  The form in the bed moved, and I felt relieved Kris wasn’t a decoy of stuffed pillows under the covers.

  As I came into the room, that strange shifting sensation I got before a vision pulled at me, and I stumbled. My foot bumped against a small wastebasket. Tissues and several issues of the Timberwolf Times, Kris’s high school newspaper, fell to the floor. The shifting sensation passed. Strange, usually something happens, or I see something. But nothing. With a sigh, I knelt to pick up the garbage. The moonlight from the window highlighted a headline on one paper and caused me to pause.

  Too Good to Be True? Freshman Homecoming Queen, Valedictorian, and Student Body President Chelsea Herrington—Lake City High’s Rising Star.

  My heart pounded as I drew the page toward me. The picture on the front was of a flawless young woman in an evening gown wearing a crown and a sash that read “Homecoming Queen.” Could it be? Was this going to be that easy? The name was the exact same.

  “Who is it?” Kris mumbled.

  I crumpled the paper, shoved it back into the trash, then stuffed the rest of the tissues and paper back in the wastebasket as she rolled over and reached for the lamp on the table by her bedside.

  She turned to face me in the low glow of the lamplight, squinted, then shook her head. “What a terrible dream.”

  She lay back down and pulled the covers over her head.

  “Seeing me alive is a terrible dream?” I said, offended. I walked over to her bed, reached under the covers, and pinched her arm.

  “Ow!” she said.

  “You’re not asleep. It’s me, Mina. I’m alive. I’ve come to talk.”

  She threw down her covers to glare up at me. Her eyes grew round, “Mina? What the—is that really you?” She shot into a sitting position, alert. “Everyone thinks you’re dead.”

  I paced back and forth across the floor of her room. “I know. That’s not why I came. Well, I mean it is partially but...” I growled in frust
ration. “I need you to listen to me for a moment without judging, okay?”

  Her eyes were a little glazed, still in shock, but she nodded. I took a deep breath, “There is this group, and I didn’t care about this group of people at first, but then I started to care. And I am supposed to lead them. Their old leader won’t step down, and she has their loyalty, but she has been deceiving them, taking advantage of their trust. And the more I try to help them see the truth about this person, the more I turn everyone against me.”

  Kris shifted. The glazed look changing into one of worry. “Are you in a gang?”

  “What? No, that’s not it.”

  “Are you sure? Because we can call the police, get you help. If you want out but are afraid—”

  “I told you, that’s not it,” I snapped.

  Kris sighed. “Trying really hard not to judge here. But you show up, out of nowhere—what do you want me to do?”

  “I’ve tried my best. They’re just not listening to me.”

  “That’s nothing new,” Kris said, and I threw her a dirty look. She shrugged and gave me a look that said, ‘What? It’s true.’

  “I should give up on them, right? Move on. There’s nothing I can do. I’m just not good enough.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not a leader. I try, I even want to, but nobody follows me. I just make people hate me,” I slumped down against the wall across from her bed. That was the way it had always been. How naïve was I to think my time with the faeries would end any different? Whatever qualities made a leader, I didn’t have them.

  Kris didn’t answer. She must have agreed with me. Or perhaps she still believed I was in a gang and refused to give me advice that might make me want to consider going back. Then I heard a snort that turned into a giggle that turned into outright laughter. I looked up, and Kris was wiping her eyes on her bedsheet. What was wrong with her? Kris never laughed at my problems before.