Blood of the Fey (Morgana Trilogy)

by Alessa Ellefson

  There’s a knock at the door, and a gruff voice rings out, “Come down, now, Briana! You need to entertain our guests.”

  Bri’s face clouds over. “I’ll be right down, Father.” She turns to me with a strained look. “Time to go to the hyenas.”

  Downstairs, we find most of the adults congregating in the dining room behind closed doors.

  “It’s an informal Board meeting,” Bri explains, sounding sad. “Probably the last my dad will hold.”

  “What do they do?” I ask. I force myself to walk away before I succumb to the temptation of poking my head in.

  “Talk about the state of affairs, mostly,” Bri says. “Even though most of the Fey fled to the New World during the Renaissance, they’re still all over the world. So the Board keeps tabs on things here in the upper world to make sure the Fey aren’t up to something.”

  “What could the Fey possibly do that would be so terrifying?” I ask. “Change the world climate?”

  “That’s a possibility. But the Board’s more worried about human enslavement.”

  “Excuse me?” I sputter.

  “Yeah,” Bri says dismissively. “Let’s see what they ended up barbecuing. Hear there was some viral disease that wiped out the herds in Texas; all the ranchers were blaming it on illegal immigrants retaliating or something. If you ask me, sounds more like the type of pranks Fey like to pull instead.”

  We head to the back of the house. “It used to happen all the time back in the day,” Bri continues. She pauses, a smile dimpling her hollowed cheeks. “Ah, they did come!”

  Out on the veranda, shrouded in the last of the sun’s rays, stand Arthur and Jennifer. My heart skips a beat at the sight of them smiling into each other’s faces—they must’ve made up because I’ve never seen them look so close before—and it makes me want to gag. Can’t I at least get a break from loathsome people on weekends?

  “This is sure to be a good sign for my dad,” Bri says, excited. “After they got engaged, they became so busy.”

  “Engaged at seventeen,” I say, making it a point to look elsewhere. “It’s so…medieval.”

  “I find it quite romantic,” Bri says, hearts in her eyes. “I’m surprised they haven’t set you up with anyone yet. It is a custom with the old families of the Blood, after all.”

  “Pass,” I say. “They’re all a bunch of inbreds anyway.”

  I look back when I get no answer and find Bri’s been sucked away by the other guests. Left to my own devices, I grab a cup of tea from the waiter’s tray as he passes by, then stuff my pockets with pastries.

  Out of the corner of my eyes, I see Arthur detach himself from Jennifer and head in my direction. I gulp my tea down, burning my tongue, and nearly choke on it when our gazes lock.

  I panic and run away in the opposite direction. If Arthur’s found out about my morning exploration, I don’t want to hear about it. Especially with Jennifer around.

  I find a small bench outside, tucked behind wilting rosebushes. No matter that the spot is somewhat windy and humid, in the shade, and far from all the sweets, as long as it’s away from everyone else, and by everyone else, I mean two people in particular.

  “The whole family’s gone.”

  My ears prick up at the unknown voice floating in from above. I look up and find that my bench is situated beneath what I take to be the living room’s windows, which have been cracked open.

  Holding my breath, I settle further into my bench and listen in.

  “Now, now, Jorge,” says Luther’s voice. “They could very well have left on vacation without telling anyone.”

  “And leave the island without their boat?” Jorge asks back. “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think they’ve been murdered?” a woman asks.

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions here,” says Irene, her voice grating on my ears. “Something more mundane may have happened to them, such as meeting up with friends. However…we can’t rule out that possibility either.”

  “Especially considering the location,” Luther says.

  A tense silence settles on the assembly, and then somebody barks a laugh.

  “You can’t be serious!” says a man’s deep voice. “You really believe that, after all these centuries—what am I saying?—after over a millennium, someone’s going to be messing with Carman’s cairn?”

  “That is what we’ve been investigating,” Irene says, her tone so sharp the man’s ears are probably bleeding now.

  “Anything we can do?” someone else asks.

  “Just keep your eyes and ears open,” Luther says, “and your head on your shoulders. A lot of strange events have been happening. It doesn’t hurt to be extra cautious.”

  The remainder of the meeting is spent poring over numbers and lists of people and places, a cue for me to zone out.

  “What are you doing here?”

  I jump to my feet and yelp when I crash face-first into something solid. Looking through my tearing eyes, I find it’s only Arthur.

  “You broke by doze!” I accuse him, holding my hand to my appendage.

  He raises an eyebrow. “Stuffing your face, I see.” He pats my head. “What a cute little hamster you make!”

  I slap his hand away, glowering. “No touchy!” I exclaim.

  Arthur shrugs. “We’re leaving in five,” he says, then leaves me to fume on my own. How does he always have the knack to be so annoying? Must be in his genes.

  “I never thought I’d say this, but I missed you, and I’m so glad the weekend’s over!” I exclaim when I join my friends by the dock.

  Keva stares at me like I’ve turned into a gargoyle. “Don’t go loco14 on me now. I’m not feeling well. I think I got food poisoning.”

  “I can make you a special tea to help,” I say, too chipper to be out from under my mother’s yoke to care about her tone.

  “Will it give her hives?” Bri asks hopefully.

  “It’s an infusion of tarragon, sage, and chamomile,” I say, “basic plants against food poisoning.”

  “That would be splendid,” Keva says with the fervor she usually reserves for members of KORT. Lower, she adds, “And if I do get hives, you’re dead.”

  Standing closer to Jack, Bri gives me a tight smile.

  “So how come you guys didn’t show up at the tea party?” I ask Keva and Jack. “I mean, you’re the ones who told me about it.”

  Jack blanches and wipes his glasses to avoid having to answer.

  “With your tact, I guess you didn’t have a lot of friends growing up, did you?” Keva asks me with a smirk.

  “You can’t expect Keva to show up at Bri’s place,” Jack murmurs in my ear, pulling me aside, “not after her family’s been demoted.”

  “But I saw lots of people from the Board there,” I say, incredulous. “Even Arthur and Jennifer showed up!”

  Jack nods. “Just because the meeting had been set a while back and it was too late to change it. But did any of them stay long?”

  My anger cools down. “I’m not sure…” But I clearly recall leaving as soon as the meeting was over. I sigh. This whole politics thing is so confusing and illogical, it’s giving me hives.

  “So what about you?” I ask him.

  “I, uh, I knew that Owen wouldn’t be there,” Jack says, evasive, “so there was no point for me to show up.”

  “So he’s still in the hospital?” I ask.

  Jack looks distinctly uncomfortable at the question. “In the ward, back at school.”

  “Well at least he’s in good hands, right?” I ask. “The doctors down there know what they’re doing.”

  “Not the hospital wing,” Jack whispers, looking fearfully at Bri who’s doing a good job pretending not to hear us. “The asylum. Where they put the mental patients.”

  Mental? “But I thought he was just injured,” I start. “All the blood…”

  Jack shakes his head, and an indescribable sense of sadness overtakes me. I’m saved from expanding on this painf
ul subject by the arrival of Lady Ysolt, the longboat floating silently to shore.

  The moment I’m inside the boat, I wave Dean good-bye and see him raise his hand in return. One by one, the cars leave, and we find ourselves in complete obscurity except for the hospital and city lights in the distance.

  “Everyone ready?” cries Lady Ysolt. “Righty then.”

  A now-familiar green glow surrounds our boats in an air bubble, and then we slowly sink into the lake.

  “Can I ask you for a favor?” Bri asks me while we’re making our descent.

  I lean back toward her so I can hear her better. “Sure, what is it?”

  “Could you come with me to see my brother at breakfast time?”

  I look back at the quiver in her voice. A useless act, considering all I can see in the murky waters is her jawline, outlined by the sylph’s faint green glow. “Of course,” I say, quailing inside at the prospect. “Whatever you need.”

  The moment we leave the chapel, Bri and I slip away and head west toward a wide, squat building with red brick walls. A single torch sputters as we arrive before the entrance, throwing deep shadows at a plaque hung beside the doorway that reads:

  BE SOBER-MINDED; BE WATCHFUL.

  YOUR ADVERSARY THE DEVIL

  PROWLS AROUND LIKE A ROARING

  LION, SEEKING SOMEONE TO DEVOUR.

  ~1 PETER 5:8

  “Lovely,” I mumble with a shiver.

  The inside of the asylum is as unwelcoming as its outside. The walls are smooth and barren, with sparse flambeaux in deep sconces the only source of light. How are people who are mentally ill supposed to get better in this oppressing environment?

  “May I help you?” a man asks, dressed in white garb and very square looking—square shoulders, square jaw, square feet.

  “Yes,” Bri says. She has to clear her voice before she can start up again. “We’ve come to see my brother.”

  “Name?”

  “Owen. Owen Vaughan.”

  The man looks through a ledger on a low table, then nods. “Only two visitors at a time,” he says, “so one of you has to stay back.”

  We both look at him with round eyes, and the man looks back down. “A Sir Hadrian’s already with the patient.”

  Bri’s face lights up. “My brother’s here?”

  Guess my usefulness has expired. “Do you want me to wait for you?” I ask.

  “Yes, please.” Bri squeezes my hand, then hurries after the attendant, leaving me to roam the lugubrious mental institute on my own.

  I end up in a small room with benches and tables set around the perimeter. At this time, I don’t expect many people to be awake, but I’m surprised to find that a good two dozen patients are present. Most of them, I realize with a pang, are staring vacantly ahead of them. I walk by a disheveled woman mumbling to herself in a tongue I do not recognize, but she doesn’t seem to notice me.

  “Is this seat taken?” I ask an old man sitting straight as a rod in a high-backed chair.

  As he doesn’t utter a word of protest, I plunk down into the chair next to his, rest my head against the wall, and close my eyes. At least the room is somewhat quiet, and I’m so tired I think I can manage a nap.

  But my brain won’t shut up, roiling with thoughts of my father, murders, and the Fey.

  Funny how that works, eh? my guardian angel says, mocking me. Then again, you are in a mental institute.

  “Which is precisely why I don’t like being here,” I whisper back. “What if, by some Fey magic, they find out about my split-personality disorder? I wouldn’t want to get locked up in here.”

  It might fit you better. You’d be the queen!

  “Thanks a lot,” I say.

  “It’s nice here, isn’t it?” the man next to me asks, startling me.

  I find him staring at me with moss-green eyes. Despite his mile-long beard, I can tell he’s smiling.

  “It’s got some comfortable chairs,” I reply, sitting up.

  “The best are the pies,” he says conspiratorially. “They’re too hot once they come out of the oven, but they get the perfect amount of time to cool down on the way over from the kitchens.”

  “Is that so?”

  There’s a short pause, during which I wonder whether I shouldn’t just wait for Bri outside. But the man seems harmless enough.

  “So how long have you been here?” I ask. I bite my lip—probably not the best question to ask anyone here. Keva was right—I am completely tactless. If only my tongue didn’t always beat my mind.

  “Oh, a few centuries, on and off.” The old man chuckles, a deep rumbling that makes his gray beard shake. “You wouldn’t be able to tell, though. This place does wonders on your aging process.”

  Oh-kay then. Moving on to the next topic. “How did you end up here?”

  Saint George’s balls, Morgan, I tell myself, can you please stop saying the first thing that comes to your mind?

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I meant, what do you like to do here?”

  But the man’s attention has sharpened on the woman at the other end of the room, the one talking to herself.

  “I said stop that!” he yells, spittle flying across the carpet. “You’re going to call them over!”

  I tense up. The woman’s now moving back and forth in her seat, like a pendulum on a tight cord, faster and faster.

  “You dumb hag!” the old man yells, getting up.

  In the blink of an eye, the bearded man’s standing next to her, shaking the woman by the shoulders so violently her eyes are rolling in her head.

  “I. Said. Don’t. Call. Them!”

  “Stop!” I run over to the woman’s aid, but the old man is surprisingly strong and pushes me away hard enough that I trip and tumble to the floor. “Somebody help!” I yell, my knees smarting from the fall.

  Two burly men in bland white uniforms hurry in. They quickly seize the situation and rush over to the old man, whose face is now carmine.

  “Calm down, now,” one of the attendants says, grasping the old man by an arm.

  “You can let her go,” the second man says, grabbing his other arm.

  Finally, like a balloon that’s been popped, the old man becomes limp in their arms.

  “There now, we’ll just take you to your room,” one of the nurses says as they drag him away. “You’ll be able to get a nice rest.”

  It takes me a moment to recover from the shock. The woman’s still lying halfway out of her chair, saliva foaming at her mouth. I limp over and struggle to get her back in her seat, then finally slide down to the floor next to the wall.

  A quarter of an hour later, Bri finds me still sitting in the same position, unmoving.

  “What happened?” she asks, helping me up.

  I shake my head to wipe the slate of my mind clean of the incident. “Just exhausted.” I don’t want to have her worry more about Owen than she already does. “I do wish they didn’t have that ‘maximum two visitors’ policy, though,” I say when we reach the exit.

  As the morning bells ring the start of class, I breathe in deeply, letting the dawn air clean out the asylum’s cloying smell of antiseptics and herbs out of my lungs.

  “Come on,” Bri says, picking up the pace. “We’re already late for Sir Caradoc’s class.”

  We wait for Sir Caradoc, our Runes teacher, to turn his back before we sneak in.

  “Miss Vaughan,” he says without turning around. “I see you’ve managed to join our class. Along with Miss Pendragon.”

  Dean sniggers while Ross and Brockton pelt us with just-made papier-mâché balls as, red-faced, we head for our respective seats.

  “Now that everyone is here,” Sir Caradoc says, facing the room again, “I want everyone to go to the comparison table between the Futhark runes and the Beth-Luis-Nion runes. Can someone explain the difference between them?”

  To everyone’s surprise, Bri’s hand shoots up. “They’re both different runic systems, used by different people,” she says. “The firs
t one is the most common and has been most prevalent amongst the Fey as well.”

  “Precisely,” says Sir Caradoc. “Though the Futhark runes are commonly found amongst the Fey, however, we cannot ignore the Beth-Luis-Nion runes. The reason is that, though much rarer, a number of earth elementals and other Fey linked to the woods respond better to the older runes. And as we all know, we cannot control the Fey without knowing and understanding their names.”

  Eyes flashing, Sir Caradoc pauses in the middle of the room. “Well, why isn’t anyone taking note of this?” he asks.

  There’s a mad scrambling to get our pens and notebooks out. As I write the final word, a flash of inspiration strikes me. Was that what I was missing to make that old glove work?

  Exhilaration washes through me. I wish I could retrieve the gauntlet, but unfortunately, it’s tucked safely away under my mattress back in the surface world, so I won’t be able to test out my theory until next weekend.

  I’m so excited I don’t even protest when Sir Caradoc tells us to spend the rest of the hour translating the ogham found on standing stones around the Isle of Man, off the coast of Great Britain, nor does it diminish when I realize I have no clue what I’m reading.

  “Sir?” Laura asks, raising her hand before the hour is over.

  “There’s a small dictionary at the back,” the teacher answers without looking up from his book.

  “That’s not what I wanted to ask, sir,” the curly-haired girl says.

  “What is it then?” Sir Caradoc asks, lifting his eyes to her face disdainfully.

  “Is it true what that we’re no longer allowed on Island Park?”

  “That’s in no way relevant to class, Miss Adams,” the teacher retorts.

  “But we thought maybe the message was wrong,” Dina says.

  “You can read, can’t you, Miss Gonzales?” Sir Caradoc retorts, annoyed.

  “Yes, sir. But—”

  “But I believe the post was very clear,” Sir Caradoc interrupts her. “There is no strolling to be done among the island’s trees. Is that clear?”