And, in spite of myself, my foot takes an impulsive step toward the glow.
“No.”
The word comes from my lips, but I don’t remember saying it. Something makes me stop, and the moment I snap to reality I realize my forearm is burning with pain. I glance down—Zal is twisting and churning on my skin, his pale eyes wide. Kingston?
No, it couldn’t have been him. Could it? I can feel the traces of his voice, the faint impression of his cologne. It’s impossible to focus on his memory, though—with every second the music grows louder, the pull toward the promise of rest impossible to shake. Zal gives another twinge on my arm, reminding me of my duty, reminding me that so many lives rest on my shoulders. I can’t give in. I can’t rest, even though every cell of me wants to. Not yet.
I turn toward the main path.
And as one, all of the lights in the wood go out. So too does the music.
“Shit,” I whisper. Immediately, I drop into a crouch, my ears straining for any sign of movement. It’s darker than dark, like being stuck in onyx. The complete absence of sound rings in my ears like a gong. The silence doesn’t last for long.
Something scurries past on my right, making my heart jump into my throat. Seconds later, something wet drops from the trees behind me. I turn, dig my hands into the soil, praying for a sharp stone or some sort of weapon. Nothing: just grit and pebbles. Something giggles in front of me. Right in front of me. I jump back and raise an arm in defense, my mind already crafting a myriad of terrible monsters.
A light comes on.
It’s dim, more lines of light than a singular source, and when the lines shift I realize the streaks are cast from between tiny fingers. The figure opens its hands like its holding water, and the light illuminates a face that makes my blood run cold.
“Claire.”
My sister nods. She looks exactly as I remember her, and that makes it worse. Her brown hair is sticky with blood, her dress ripped and red from where I stabbed her. Her eyes are lost, almost white, and I want to cry a thousand apologies at what I’ve done. It can’t be her. It can’t…
“It’s okay,” Claire says. She lets go of the light; it floats up and hovers above her, the downlight making her even more eerie, her features even more sharp and frost-worn. Then she takes a limping step forward, toward me, and I scramble back. If she notices my retreat, she doesn’t show it. Another step forward. It’s then that I notice the dirt on her face, the scratches on her arms. Like she clawed her way out of a grave. “I’m okay here.”
“What are you?”
This makes her pause. Her eyebrows furrow, but her eyes still don’t focus. They are moons of the palest grey in a muddied red sky.
“I’m your sister,” she says.
“No,” I say. I scramble backward again and hit a tree. Am I still on the path? Is this still even Faerie, or have I somehow fallen into hell?
“I am,” she says. “Don’t you recognize me?”
“You’re not her,” I say. You can’t be her. Not here. Not now. But there’s a nagging in the back of my head that says I’m the one speaking lies.
“I am.” Her voice changes. Deepens. “At least, I am what’s left.”
I nearly choke.
“What do you mean?”
“You left her body in the kitchen,” she says. The voice is cold, scraped from the bottom of the Arctic. “You left her to rot. We saved her. Brought her here. Brought her here to play. Forever.” The thing that wears my sister’s skin takes another shambling step toward me.
She pauses. “Do you want to play with us?
Us?
But I don’t have to voice the question. Because at that moment, more lights flicker on through the trees. And under each faerie light, like some earthbound anglerfish, is a child. At least, they once were children. Dozens if not hundreds of broken bodies—children with stab wounds and bullet holes, boys and girls with missing arms or eyes or heads—fill the forest around me, each perfectly preserved in their moment of dying. Each glowing like cold death under the light of the faerie hovering above it.
I force myself to my feet and look around. I’m surrounded, completely surrounded. And what little path there was before is gone. The only way open to me is the direction the music was coming from—that path cuts through the forest, the end glowing as warmly as before. The moment my eyes land on it, I hear the music again.
“Don’t worry,” Claire’s body says. “She’s safe here. Your sister. She will always be safe here. This forest is for the lost ones, the children who were killed before their time. We take them in. We play with them. We give them another life.”
“My sister is dead,” I whisper, trying to summon some sort of resolve. I keep glancing between the dead girl and the side path. I don’t really have any options.
“Only because you killed her. But look. She has a new life now. A new life with all of us. Her friends.”
As she talks, her mouth slowly stops moving, like a windup toy running out of power. But the voice continues. The voice never stops. Then the other voices pitch in.
“You can play with us, too,” they say.
A boy to my right speaks, his tilted head connected by only a few fibrous strands of decayed muscle. “You’re already here. We don’t even need to dig you out. It’s so hard to dig them out. The fresh ones, they’re dug so deep.”
“You could keep your soul, if you like,” says a girl right behind me. I jump and turn to her. She looks normal. Save for the acidic froth trailing from her lips. “You don’t need to be filled. These bodies, they were empty. So empty and cold. So we filled them and brought them here, and now they can play.”
“You’re insane,” I say. I look back to Claire. Claire, whom I thought I was saving. Claire, whom I apparently damned to this. Is her soul still in there, trapped and watching and screaming? Does she know what’s being done to her body? “You’re all insane. You’re just possessing them. You’re nothing more than ghosts.”
“Be careful, Vivienne,” Claire says, her open lips still unmoving. “You’re in our world now.” She twists her ear to the sky, like she’s trying to hear the voice of God. “Do you know what she was thinking? Your sister. Do you know what she was thinking when you killed her?”
I take a step back and run into the girl behind me. I barely even notice her topple to the ground.
“She was hurt. So hurt. That’s why she called to us. That’s why all the children call to us. She wanted to be taken away. To a place where it didn’t hurt. To a place where she could always play. A place where she could forget that her big sister didn’t love her, that her big sister wanted her dead.”
“It’s not true,” I sob. Tears are pooled in the corners of my eyes, halos blooming in the lights above the possessed children. “It’s not true at all. I loved her. I loved her. I wanted to keep her safe.”
Another kid, this one with a hole in his face where his right eye should be, speaks up, “Liar.”
The others mimic him, their words becoming shouts. They shuffle forward. The music grows louder.
Don’t leave the path.
Claire, Claire. I’m so sorry.
The children crowd closer. They’re screaming at me now, calling me liar, murderer. Only Claire stays silent. From behind her back she pulls out a kitchen knife, bloodied from use. The knife I left lodged in her frozen chest.
“Join us,” she says. “Play with your sister. Empty yourself, and we will fill you. You want to run away. We can sense it. Let us help you. Let us take away the pain.”
“No,” I say. No conviction. No point. My forearm spasms with pain. Zal writhes like he’s stuck in a tornado. The music is loud, so loud, almost deafening, but I still hear it, in the back of the din: Kingston’s screams. Kingston, yelling at me to run.
My feet take another step forward, toward the glowing path.
“If you won’t do it, we’ll do it for you. It’s only fair. And then you’ll be free. Free from the guilt of what you did to her.”
Claire’s voice becomes her own. My heart rips and bleeds. “Free of the guilt of what you did to me. I thought you loved me, Vivienne. I thought you said you’d protect me forever.”
Run.
The voice isn’t mine, and I’m not sure it’s Kingston’s. But it grips me, seizes my terrified muscles. It spurs me forward.
I want to stay. I want to get Claire out of here. Everything in my mind and heart fight against the impulse in my bones, the urge that leads me toward the glowing path. I barely even notice the burn against my thigh as Claire slashes at me with the knife. I’m running. Running against my free will, barging past the dead children with their dead eyes and screaming lips. Running down the path and all I can think is, Claire, Claire, I’m so sorry.
Then the light of the path grows bright, and the sound of music burns everything else away.
Chapter Fourteen: Figure 8
Somewhere between light and dark, there’s a change to the music. What was once a din is now a carol, a jaunty jig spurring me onward. The forest changes, too. Dark trees grow warm and brown, their boughs filling with leaves the color of emeralds and dusty jade. But the main change is the children; they’re gone. No little bodies follow me through the forest. No screams or knives are hurled at my back. The only trace they left is the slash bleeding red down my thigh. The cut isn’t deep, and it doesn’t hurt as much the farther I jog, but it’s a reminder that the encounter was real. Claire was real.
And something in her remembered what I did to her, all those months ago. Something dark will never let her, or me, forget.
I don’t even realize there are still tears in my eyes until a voice calls out from the branches of a willow.
“Girl, why do you cry?”
I slow my jog and stare up at the voice. There, in the branches, is a faerie. A real, bona fide, Disney-style faerie, with butterfly wings and a pink petal dress and a lithe figure no bigger than my hand.
“What are you?” I ask. She’s too cute to look like a threat, but that might just make her more dangerous.
“I am a pixie,” she says. She flutters down from the branches and hovers in front of me, swaying back and forth like a hummingbird. “And my name is Meadowsweet.”
“Meadowsweet, right. Of course it is.”
She cocks her head to the side. “You are not like the other humans. You know of us.”
“Understatement of the year,” I say. I wipe the tears from my eyes and check my pocket. The vials are still there. Mission is still a go.
Her tiny blue eyes look down at my leg. Her gasp is like a flute.
“Oh no! You’re injured.”
She darts over to me in the blink of an eye. I try to swat her away, but she’s already reaching out with her hands, a warm yellow light blooming from her thumbnail-sized palms. When she darts away again a second later, the wound on my thigh is perfectly healed.
“I didn’t ask for that,” I say. “I know how you faeries work. You’re not getting anything in return.”
Her features are small, but it’s easy to see she’s crestfallen.
“Who has done this to you?” she asks.
I glance at my leg.
“My sister,” I say. “In a sense.”
“Not your wound,” she says. “Who has tainted your heart? Who has twisted your innocence and joy?”
I chuckle mirthlessly, forcing the weakness from moments ago into the deepest shadows of myself. “Innocence and joy aren’t exactly words I associate with anymore.” I shake my head. I don’t have time for this conversation. Austin’s still in Lilith’s clutches; the demons are still readying for war. Kingston is still awaiting my rescue, and this Tinkerbell is just getting in the way. The music in the background is distant again, barely a whisper in the breeze. But it’s there, inviting me deeper into this sunlit world. “I need to get going,” I say.
“But where will you go?” she says. “This is the only part of Faerie you need to be. Everywhere else is dangerous. Scary.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes dangerous and scary are part of the job.” I start walking the direction I was going—annoying though she is, there’s no way I’m letting this pixie turn me back to the way I came. Those freaky children could be anywhere.
“You’ll be lost forever,” she says. This makes me pause. “The land of Tír na nÓg has no paths or exits. It simply exists where one needs faith.”
Tír na nÓg? What fresh hell is this?
“I don’t need faith,” I say. “I need to rescue my ex’s corpse before demons burn down my show.”
Words I definitely never expected to leave my lips.
“Oh but you do,” she says. She sounds so hurt by it, like admitting my flaw reflects her own failings as a faerie. “Otherwise, Tír na nÓg would never have opened its doors to you. Perhaps it is faith in the goodness of your heart. Or in love. Yes. I think you must remember the goodness of love.”
I scoff.
“Love? Listen bitch, I’m not here to be lectured about love. I have a job to do, and you’re either helping me or getting in the way. Right now, it’s the latter, so you better use those little faerie wings of yours to show me the way out, or I’m going to show you why they called me the assassin.”
I don’t know where the confidence comes from. Maybe it’s sheer exhaustion—physical and mental. I’m tired of being dicked around. I want to get in to Summer, get Kingston, and get this over with. Now that there’s a chance of having a real life, I want it more than anything else.
Another flute-like gasp from Meadowsweet. “That is no way to speak to the princess of the Honey Court.”
I laugh. I can’t help myself.
Hate her though I do, I’ll take Mab and her icy kingdom over this fluffy faerie bullshit any day.
“Good-bye, princess. And fuck you very much.”
I keep walking. I may not have the path, but I still have Zal—he’ll guide me back to Kingston come hell or high water. The tattoo glares up at me, like it, too, is upset I’ve pissed off royalty. Get over it, I think.
The branches around me shiver. And between one footstep and the next, every leaf from every branch falls off in a rustling avalanche. The warm sky turns cloudy.
“Oh, that simply will not do,” says Meadowsweet. She flutters around and hovers in front of me, arms crossed over her chest. “One does not insult the royalty of the Honey Court. But I am not like your Queen Mab. I am loving. I am generous.” She says it like she’s hurling a spear. When she smiles, there’s a wicked twist to it, one I’ve seen on Mab and Oberon more times than I can count. For the first time in this entire interaction, I have a fleeting glimpse of what madness I’m truly dealing with. “I will not kick you out, no, even though you deny my aid. I will open you to the heart of Tír na nÓg. I will grant you every hospitality. Stay as long as you wish, Vivienne. Stay forever. I dare say, after Tír na nÓg has shown you its truth, you will never want to leave at all.”
Then, with another flick of her wings, she vanishes in a puff of glitter.
“Weirdo,” I mutter. My wrist gives a throb and I look down: Zal is twisting like mad again, and in the back of my mind I hear a voice. I’m not certain if it’s Kingston or Zal screaming, “You idiot!”
A step later, I figure out why they were yelling.
The forest stops being a forest.
I’m in the kitchen making coffee. The walls are a pale robin’s-egg blue I'm still trying to get used to, even though we repainted last month, and copper pots and pans hang from pegs along one wall. Everything is immaculate and lovely, as if for a Better Homes and Gardens cover shoot. There’s even a pile of biscuits on the counter, half draped by a clean white towel.
I turn around. No forest—just another wall and an open door leading into a living room as cozy and quaint as the kitchen. Why would there be a forest in my kitchen? Clearly I haven’t had my first cup of coffee.
“You’re up early,” says a voice from behind me. I jump.
He’s no longer the boy I fell for freshman
year of high school. But when Austin strides up to me wearing only a pair of sweatpants, his shaggy brown hair still mussed from sleep and stubble on his jaw, I know he's still the boy I fell in love with. The ring on his left hand, the lazy smile on his lips. My heart warms. Every inch the man I married.
“Morning honey,” I say, wrapping my arms around his waist and pulling him in for a kiss. He chuckles and pulls away.
“I have morning breath,” he says.
“I don’t care.”
He relents with another laugh and kisses me, hard, then pulls back and yawns. “Sorry. Still not a morning person.”
He walks over to the counter and pours two cups of coffee. I look behind me, the tingle of memory hidden in the corners of the curtains. What was I looking for earlier? I wipe my hands on my apron and watch him work for a moment before going back to making breakfast.
“I was thinking,” I say as I whisk the eggs, “maybe we could go out for dinner with the Richardsons later tonight.”
“Great idea,” he says. He walks over and kisses me on the back of the neck, reaching one hand around to set my coffee on the counter. I glance down. It’s not coffee after all. It’s a black box roughly the size of a checkbook.
“What’s this?” I ask. “It’s not our anniversary.”
“Just a present,” he says. “Open it.”
I open the box. Inside is a necklace, resting atop a plane ticket.
“Prague?” I ask. The word catches in my throat.
“For a start,” he says. “They call it the Winter Wonderland tour. Seven days and seven nights in Prague and Amsterdam and a few other places in between. You always said you wanted to see a European winter market.”
I pick up the necklace with shaking hands; it’s a snowflake of silver and diamonds.
“This is too much,” I say.
“No,” he replies. He reaches around my waist and pulls me tight, kisses me on top of the head. “It’s not enough. I don’t think it will ever be enough to show just how much I love you.”
The Immortal Circus: Final Act (Cirque des Immortels) Page 14
