by May Dawson
We emerged on the side of a highway. “Which way?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. All dirtside roads lead somewhere unpleasant.”
We picked a random direction and began to walk.
“I don’t think you give the mortal world enough credit,” Tiron chided. He paused as an eighteen-wheeler roared past us, so close that a hot breeze and grit from the street washed over us.
“Go on,” I said drily. Then my thoughts turned, and I said, “Maybe we could make use of the mortal world, actually. Before we go through—” then I broke off, thinking of how we’d left Duncan and Alisa. “No, we need to get back.”
If they weren’t dead, the odds were good they’d rescued themselves. But if there was a possibility they needed us, we had to help them.
“What were you thinking?” Tiron asked.
“We could track down Merlin, see what he has to say about how we beat the Shadow Man,” I said.
“But you’re worried about Duncan?”
“Always,” I said, then added, “No, Duncan is almost irrelevant to Faer—Faer only cares about using him to inflict pain on me. Duncan’s more useful to him alive, and the Shadow Man has no reason to target Duncan. But Alisa… I’m worried about Alisa.”
He nodded. “And you think Merlin will have a way to stop the Shadow Man?”
“He’s the most powerful magician in all time. More powerful than Faer, even with his borrowed magic from the North. Merlin is one who helped the old world split into all this…” I waved my arm, encompassing all of dirtside and beyond. “When magic threatened to tear it apart otherwise. If anyone can help us, he can.”
“Do you ever wonder why this world lost all its magic?” Tiron mused.
“Not really.” Not with the scent of gasoline fumes curling into my nostrils.
He hesitated, then confessed, “Alisa is fine. Unharmed. Definitely not scared, so that seems like a good sign… I’m mostly getting a sense she’s annoyed.”
I stopped and turned to him. He stuck his hands into his pockets and gave me an abashed look.
“What did you do?” I asked him, my voice coming out cool.
“I gave her a bracelet,” he admitted.
“That sounds sweet and besotted,” I said, not trying to keep the sarcasm out of my voice.
Tiron acted sweet and besotted around Alisa. But he’d given her a gift enchanted to funnel her emotions to him—and her location. I knew the spell, and it seemed damning.
No male who loves a female should hold her too tightly, after all. Love isn’t meant for a fierce grip, and I don’t trust any one who tries.
“I just wanted to know she was safe,” he said. “All the time. It’s useful now, isn’t it?”
“Where is she?” I demanded, breaking through his babble.
His lips parted, and he gave me a look that was hurt, as if my sharp words had cut him.
“She’s under the sea,” he said simply.
“With Raile, I assume. Well that explains why she’s annoyed.” But good; that meant she was safe. “Maybe they can work out that whole hobgoblin business.”
“She can’t marry him.”
“She can do what she wants.”
“She doesn’t want that.”
“You didn’t know Alisa before.”
“I know her now.”
He sounded fiercer than I’d ever heard him before.
“You plan to marry her, Tiron?” I asked lightly.
From the look on his face, he didn’t care for the question.
“Duncan made a bracelet, to give her once, too,” I said. I shouldn’t tell Duncan’s secrets, but the memory still nagged at me; he’d looked so happy for once, the day I came home from the rift. He’d hugged me and clapped my shoulder, not trying to hide how thankful he was to have me home.
I’d wondered what had changed, and then when he was talking about Alisa and his gift for her birthday, his face lit up, and I understood. “He was a different person then.”
“She made him soft?” Tiron asked jokingly.
“No. That’s not what love does to someone. But maybe she made him better… for a while.”
After that night, though, the light had left his face, and he’d returned to his old sullen ways with a vengeance. I still didn’t know what had happened; neither of them would talk about it with me. But Duncan had resented me for bringing Alisa back and forth into the autumn kingdom, for giving her a key to our castle.
And he’d been right, in the end.
We passed some houses, then entered the edges of town, including a broken-down looking bar.
“You should know,” I told Tiron, to change the subject because it did us no good to argue now, although I had no intention of tabling the subject forever, either, “my magic is running low.”
“Torturing me back to life took a lot out of you, I guess.”
“It did,” I said.
I would never admit how much it had bothered me how much more magic I had poured into Tiron, how many long minutes had ticked by while he seemed to float between life and death. His face had been eerily still, his eyes closed, and I’d wondered if he had them opened if he would have been staring into the great beyond.
It had been very lonely in that forest for a few long minutes as all my energy poured into his body, until suddenly he came to life, writhing in pain under my grip on his throat.
Killing is a strength of fall, not giving life. But death and decay, fire and smoke have their place too in the balance of things.
“The important thing,” I said, “is that if magic is needed, you might need to get us out of trouble.”
But that might not be too hard for him; the display with the ice outside the ship had been more power than I knew he possessed. It was more power than most Fae possessed, no matter how noble.
And the memory of it kept irritating me, and I wanted to poke at it the way one does a bruise or a loose tooth, no matter how much we know better.
Instead, I kept it in the back of my mind for later. I needed to know Tiron’s secrets, but I needed to be his friend, too, for the two of us to make it back to the Fae world and rescue the people we certainly both loved.
And I could use a friend, anyway, even if I hadn’t had a specific purpose for him.
“I won’t let you down,” he said.
“I know you won’t. Never have.”
“What are we waiting for, anyway?”
One of the humans from the bar was sauntering toward his car. His steps were loose, and he looked a little bit surprised every time he lurched forward successfully without falling.
“Oh, fantastic, a drunk,” I said, with genuine delight. I clapped Tiron’s shoulder. “Now we get ourselves a car.”
Chapter Thirty-One
Alisa
Outside the door was air.
But the rest of the palace looked different from my room. What little wood was in the castle had the gray look of driftwood; the floors shone underfoot in shifting iridescent colors, as if they were made of shell or some strange stone, and the walls were the soft colors of pearl. Vibrant coral structures seemed to have grown where flowers would have in my court, reminding me that I was deep underwater.
The décor reminded me that Raile could drown me in a heartbeat, if he chose, that some lazy movement of his fingers could bring water crashing through the walls. We were so deep under the sea that there was no hope I could find my way out of this castle and swim up before I lost consciousness.
“Easy,” Raile said, glancing at me curiously. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m deep underwater where I can’t breathe, and that makes me nervous?” I answered curtly.
“I can’t believe you gave me an honest answer.” Raile pushed a shimmering gray door open to my right, and held it open, clearly expecting me to pass under his arm. “I know my word means little to you, but I’m not going to harm you.”
“Yes,” I said, as I ducked under his arm, trying to exhale so I wouldn
’t breathe in that fresh, appealing scent he carried. I found myself in the library. “You’ve made it clear no one is allowed to break your toys. But I have to hope that mood holds.”
“You were never afraid of the undersea before,” he said. “What changed?”
I walked deeper into the room, then turned to see him leaning against the doorway. “I’ve been in the undersea before?”
“One story for another, and I believe I asked first.” He flashed me a smile.
I didn’t want to tell him that story, and instead I asked, “You think we’re going to find answers in the library? You know we have those in the summer court too.”
“Not like this,” he promised me. “I’ve preserved all kinds of books lost in the above.”
He snapped his fingers. I stared at him, waiting for the next trick, only to feel warmth fall across my face. I tilted my head back and looked up into far-distant sunshine.
Some ceiling above us had slid away, revealing far away glass that broke the surface of the sea; the sun shone down as if it were a mile away. And every inch of that space between me and the brightly-lit world above was lined with books.
“That should be impossible.”
He shrugged.
“But then,” I looked at him hard, “It should be impossible for you to open portals that easily between worlds. Were there rips there already and—”
“You know the answer to that,” he interrupted. He began to wander along the shelves as if he was looking for something. “Help me look for useful books. And make yourself useful twice over and tell me a story. I hate to be bored, and I barely know New Alisa.”
“That hasn’t stopped you from wanting to marry me.”
“Well, to be fair, I didn’t know there was a New Alisa,” he chided. He walked his fingers along the leather bindings. “Besides, tell me a story and I’ll tell you one. Maybe I’ll even tell you about those portals.”
“Do you promise that Az and Tiron are okay?”
“I can promise you they landed safe and sound in the human world, and if I know Az, he healed Tiron straightaway with all that awkward painful fall magic he has.” He sounded amused by the mental image. “Whether or not they’re still okay or have gotten themselves in some kind of trouble, well…. That I can’t answer with those males of yours.”
“They’re not mine.”
His lips curled up at one corner, but he didn’t say anything else.
I heaved a sigh. “What books am I looking for?”
“Useful ones.”
Of course. I went to the other side of the room and began to study the shelves. Maybe something would be helpfully titled Defeating the Shadow Man 101. A girl can dream.
“I was on a hunting job,” I began. “It got really messy. We were dealing with a family of ghosts.” I paused as the memories washed over me. “Three kids. A wife. The story that had been reported was that this mother murdered her kids to get back at her cheating husband, a hundred years ago.”
“I thought at first that it was the wife, replaying the scene. There’d been all these bodies—she haunted the woods near the lake where her home had been, and there was a campground there, so people kept going missing at night and turning up floating in the lake.”
“So I found her cottage and pulled out all her belongings, anything her spirit might still be anchored to, and burned them. She came out and tried to kill me, which certainly cemented my perspective seeing her as the villain.”
“But it was more complicated than that?” Raile prompted.
“Isn’t it always? The kids… man, kid-ghosts are both the saddest and the creepiest of ghosts… they attacked too. Or at least, I thought they were attacking. I tried to gather their stuff to burn but I ended up having to run. I figured I’d go regroup, call in reinforcements, come back in the morning.”
“I headed back to my motel. Thought I was safe when I left the woods behind me. I had to cross this bridge, and when I did, I realized there was a ghost in the car with me. I fought to keep the car on the road but he was controlling the wheel and he took the car over the side of the bridge, into the water below. The same lake where his wife and kids had drowned. Where he had drowned them.”
The memories crowded me. I could still feel the sense of panic and the frail sense of ego that always fought to keep my fear under control, as if I couldn’t bear to be anyone else but who I saw myself as, no matter how terrifying and dark life became. It felt as if my throat were closing up.
I could feel Raile move closer to me, although he didn’t touch me.
“I tried to roll the windows down, but I couldn’t. Everything I tried to do failed, and the car was slowly sinking, and the ghost was laughing and laughing and laughing.” The sound of that laughter filled my ears. “For a hundred years, people had blamed his wife for murdering their babies even though she’d fought him with her last breath, trying to save herself so she could save them. They cried and pulled at his sleeves as he murdered their mother. And then we blamed her ghost. She was always innocent.”
“And then the kids were in the car too, and they helped me fight him. The car filled up with water and I thought I was going to drown, but they held him back long enough for me to finally be able to open a door and swim up and out. I lost everything in my purse so I had a long-ass walk into town, and then I still had to go dig up his body. He’d married someone else, had other kids…” Fury tightened my throat. “I dug him up and burned his bones and he finally left this world.”
“And when he did, his kids finally rested. I hope they found their mom in the afterlife. I’m not sure I believe in one, but I hope there is, and I hope she knows that people finally know the truth. She never hurt her kids, she never would have.”
I cleared my throat, because embarrassing emotion had just flooded my voice. “Anyway. I almost drowned that day. Even once I made it out of the car it was pretty… ugly… until I made it to shore. So! Now I’m a little nervous around water.”
“The undersea is not the ideal place for you,” he observed.
“No, no it is not.”
“It’s a good story,” he said.
“Which part did you like? The part where I came oh-so-close to drowning, as you’ve said perhaps I should?”
“Not that part,” he said. I waited, but he never told me which part he did like. Maybe I had to ask. Maybe he was just insufferable.
“You owe me a story,” I reminded him.
“I do.” He pulled a book from the shelf, then another, and carried them toward the table. He set them down with a thunk. “It’s amazing how many mysteries can be solved with a book.”
I scoffed at that. “Did you solve my Shadow Man problems already, Raile?”
“You’re right,” he said, and slid the thinner book on top of the pile into his jacket, tucking it into an inside pocket. “I’ll save this answered mystery for later. For now, yes, I think there’s several possible solutions to the Shadow Man situation—although I don’t like the odds enough to stake my life on any of them.”
“Well, luckily for you, it’s not your life being staked. And what are these possible solutions?” I asked.
The Shadow Man was my priority, but I wanted very much to know what was in the slender book Raile was hiding from me.
He perched on the edge of the table, crossing his arms over his powerful chest. “Here’s one. You bind him to your own employ instead of your brother’s, of course.”
The idea of commanding the Shadow Man sent a nervous thrill down my spine—half excitement and half dread.
“I’d like to just send him off into the afterlife.”
“Well, that’s step two.” He pushed a book my way. “Make yourself useful.”
“Fine. But I do want my story later.” Getting rid of the Shadow Man was the most important thing of all. “And I want to know Duncan is all right. Can you send some kind of spy to the castle?”
“I can go myself,” he said, “if I can trust you to stay out of mischief.
”
“I can’t imagine you’re on Faer’s good side right now.”
“Worried about me?” He sounded touched and inordinately pleased, and I rolled my eyes.
“Only because I don’t know how I’d escape the Undersea without you, Raile.” But I hoped I could figure it out.
He smiled faintly. “I’ll send someone above, if it will make you happy.”
“Thank you.” I wasn’t sure if I could entirely trust him; he could just tell me that Duncan was fine and I’d never really know for sure.
But he had saved Az and Tiron. He’d even called Duncan to come with us, though Duncan had chosen to fight, not flee. Raile could have tried to steal me away and left them to face Faer.
That had to be just another of his tricks, I reminded myself. He was making himself harder to hate.
The door clicked softly shut behind him as he stepped into the hall to summon one of his spies.
I leafed through the pages, searching for the answers I needed. When my eyes began to ache from the small script, I looked up at the sun, so distant beyond my captivity.
Strangely enough, I felt a little bored…almost lonely…without Raile.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Duncan
Seven Years Earlier
A few hours later, after Zora had finally been allowed to limp shivering into the house, I was sipping wine with my father in his study. He liked midnight wine, a thick, bitter drink made from the purple-black grapes that grew along the border of autumn and winter.
“You haven’t mentioned Zora,” he observed, glancing up from his book. The two of us had been reading in silence; I might have been gone for four months, but he still had nothing to say to me.
“I didn’t think you’d be particularly interested in my opinion.”
He smiled at that and certainly didn’t disagree.
A hurried knock came at the door, and my father tilted a brow. “Yes?”
The servant who opened the door bowed, but there was no hiding how flustered he seemed.
“Prince Faer has arrived, sir.”
“Prince Faer?” My father rose. “There’s been no diplomatic communication about a visit, no permission—”
