“Yes, about that,” I said. “If Luminata has a daughter, I won’t be coming back to Boundless. Which means you and I won’t be, um, getting together. I’m really sorry, Ryker, but I’m sure Luminata will find you another princess to marry.” I tried to look devastated to salvage his enormous ego. “Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be.”
Ryker, looking not at all devastated, grinned. “No, not that. And please stop playacting, Avalon. I know how you feel about our potential joining.”
“Oh.” My cheeks grew hot with embarrassment, and I studied the stone floor. Maybe Ryker wasn’t the only one with a giant ego. When I looked up, he’d lost his smile. I said, “Sorry, what is it you wanted to say?”
Ryker reached out and traced the curve of my cheek with gentle fingers. His hawk eyes drooped at the corners as if he was about to say something unbearably sad. “You will not like what I’m about to tell you.”
I caught my breath. Was Sammie dead? No, Ryker said he would take me to her. I swallowed hard and braced myself for bad news. “Go ahead.”
“When the girl you know as Sammie came to Boundless and joined her grandmother, she assumed her real identity. She is Feather Goblinwand.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s not so bad. She’s Feather Goblinwand in Boundless, and she’s Sammie Sullivan in my world. No big deal.”
Ryker shook his head. “You don’t understand. It is a big deal.”
My mouth went dry. “No, it’s not. Look at me. I’m Allie Emerson in Boundland, but I’m Princess Avalon here. Well, maybe not now, but I used to be before . . .” I knew I was babbling but couldn’t seem to stop the flow of words.
Ryker placed a finger over my mouth and said, “Hush. Let me finish.”
A feeling of dread swept over me. I bit my lip and waited.
Ryker said, “Feather Goblinwand has shed her human body and assumed her faery form.”
Sudden flashback. Six months earlier, Sammie and I were standing on a cliff overlooking a calm, moonlit sea. At that moment, I knew Sammie was the girl I’d been searching for, the girl whose destiny intersected with mine. Shortly after, I’d glimpsed a different Sammie. The baggy jeans and oversized tee were gone. Clad in a shimmering silver gown, she appeared to be growing wings. The moment was so brief, I’d begun to think it never happened.
Judging from the sorrowful expression on Ryker’s face, I knew something was terribly wrong. But, after all I’d been through, I refused to give up hope.
“But she can still come back with me. Right?”
“No, Allie. I can’t.” The words, spoken firmly in a female’s voice, floated down from above.
I gasped in surprise and looked up. Sammie, in faery form, was perched on top of one wall. I watched as she pushed off, spread her translucent wings and fluttered down to join us. Her spiky black hair had morphed into a cascade of ringlets. A wreath of tiny twinkling stars encircled the top of her head.
I shook my head in disbelief. “Sammie?”
“Yes, it’s me,” she said, twirling in the air. “You were wrong about Boundless. I love it here. Can you believe how beautiful I am? It took a while for my wings to grow, but now I can fly really good. Wanna see?” She smiled her old Sammie smile, the one that made her eyes crinkle shut.
“Oh, Sammie,” I said, fighting back tears. “You are beautiful, but you have to come back with me. Have you forgotten we have a job to do? I have the moonstone and you have the locket. I can’t do it alone. You do remember, don’t you?”
Her smile disappeared, and she clasped the locket that dangled from the silver chain around her neck. “Of course I remember. But you don’t understand.” She placed a hand on Ryker’s arm. “Tell her, Ryker.”
My anger flared suddenly. After all the crap I’d been through to get the moonstone, and here was Sammie, flitting around Boundless, enjoying her new wings. It was way beyond unfair.
Unable to stop myself, I shouted, “No! You tell me, Sammie.”
Sammie jerked in surprise. Her wings fluttered fitfully before folding into themselves. “I can’t go back. I would die.”
Furious, I turned on Ryker. “Is that true?”
Ryker nodded. “As a new-born faery, the iron in Boundland would undoubtedly kill her.”
“No way,” I protested. “You came to Boundland and you’re fine. And what about me? I’ve been back and forth a couple of times, and I’m still very much alive. This is crap and you know it.”
Ryker said, “Calm yourself while I explain, Avalon.”
“Calm myself? You’ve got to be kidding.”
Ryker placed his hands on my shoulders. “Sammie, aka Feather, is a brand-new faery. Believe it or not, I am a very old faery. Hundreds of years old. I’ve had time to evolve. While on assignment in the mortal world, I returned to Boundless each night so your grandmother Melia could protect me against the iron I encountered in Boundland. Do you remember?”
I pinched my lips together and nodded.
“As for you,” he continued. “You have Tuatha blood from your father’s side. The Tuatha have built up an immunity to iron as you well know.”
Well, damn. He’d just shot me down. Big-time. But no way was I giving up. I couldn’t give up. “Can’t Melia or Luminata do something to protect her? You don’t understand. I can’t go back without her.” My sudden burst of anger dissolved into a flood of tears. “I just can’t.”
Ryker pulled me close, and I sobbed into his chest.
I felt the brush of feathers and the warm presence of Sammie as she slipped under Ryker’s arm and pressed her cheek against mine. “I’m so sorry, Allie. I didn’t know this would happen. All I know is that I belong in this world, not yours.”
Ryker continued to cradle us in his arms. With the three of us locked together, I had the sense of time standing still, aware only of our hot tears mingling, the sound of my ragged breathing and the pulsations of three hearts beating in sync. I closed my eyes and felt my feet leave the solid stone floor. Strangely, I wasn’t alarmed. Surrounded by Ryker’s warmth and Sammie’s ethereal presence, I was in an altered state, hovering somewhere between dimensions in a new and improved form of transport. No more pink mud. No more dust devils.
Boom! The sound was painfully loud. Dizzy and disoriented, I clapped both hands over my ears and felt Ryker and Sammie slip away.
“No!” I screamed. “Come back.”
Another crack of thunder and I was facedown on sun-warmed earth, my cheeks still wet with tears. Wind chimes tinkled softly. Cars whizzed by on Peacock Flats Road. Blaster the bull bellowed and stomped.
I was home.
Chapter Twenty
“ALLIE, ARE YOU OKAY?”
I rolled to my back and opened my eyes. Through my tears, I saw Faye’s blurry image.
“No,” I croaked. “So thirsty.”
Strangely, I’d felt no hunger or thirst in Boundless. But now, my tongue felt like an enormous dry sponge, way too big for my mouth.
“I’ll be right back,” Faye said.
Two more faces came into watery focus. Beck and Nicole Bradford. Huh? You know how it is when you wake from a deep sleep and you’re not sure if you’re awake or dreaming? That’s exactly how I felt. All signs pointed to my being back home. It looked, smelled and felt like home. But why were Beck and Nicole here?
At some level, I was aware that Beck knelt, slipped an arm under my shoulders and helped me sit up. I blinked hard, trying to orient myself back into the mortal world. Beck looked me over, apparently checking for dings and scratches.
Nicole was checking me out too, but for an entirely different reason. She ran a practiced eye over my Snow White dress and said, “What in the hell are you wearing?”
Trust Nicole to ignore the big picture and go right to a fashion statement.
I struggled to my feet. “I have a better question. Why are the two of you here?”
Beck shrugged. “Junior called me about the summer solstice thing. We need to plan our strategy.” That was so Beck. He liked
his ducks in a row, even if he didn’t know where to find them.
Nicole chimed in. “And the astral travel thing?”
I nodded.
“It’s all connected. Right?”
“Right,” I murmured, wondering if I should be grateful or worried that Beck and Nicole were now involved.
Faye returned with a huge glass of water. I guzzled it down. When I came up for air, I saw Beck studying me and frowning.
“Is the moonstone inside that locket?” he asked.
Startled, I dropped the glass and clapped a hand over the moonstone. Instead of its satiny presence, I felt the scalloped edges of Sammie’s locket. Black spots appeared behind my eyes. My knees felt like wet cardboard. Had Sammie switched out the moonstone for the locket?
“No,” I howled. Sick with fear, I fumbled with the clasp.
Beck brushed my hands away from the locket. “Let me.”
I held my breath. Beck opened the locket. A sunbeam bounced off the surface of the moonstone and splintered into a prism of rainbow colors. Beck gripped my elbow and ordered, “Breathe.”
I took a deep, shuddering breath, weak with relief at the sight of the moonstone. I fought the urge to lapse into another fit of sobbing. Geez, it was bad enough to come back from Boundless without Sammie, but if the moonstone had gone missing again . . .
Beck led me to a rickety lawn chair. Nicole leaned against the spool table. Faye brought me more water and a peanut butter sandwich.
I took a bite of sandwich.
“Did you find Sammie?” Faye said.
Suddenly, I lost my appetite. I’d gone to Boundless to bring back the moonstone and Sammie. I’d only accomplished half the job. In other words, I’d failed. I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Sammie is now a bona fide faery called Feather Goblinwand. She can’t come back. If she does, she’ll die.” I choked up again and blinked hard to hold back the tears.
Apparently at a loss for words, Faye just stared at me, mouth agape.
“If you ask me,” Nicole said, “that chick is totally irresponsible. You’re better off without her.”
Beck patted my shoulder. “Obviously, it wasn’t meant to be. You’ve got the locket. Maybe that’s all that’s required.”
I pinched my lips together and shook my head. Beck and Nicole were trying to make me feel better, but the instructions were clear. One moonstone. Two girls. At the summer solstice. At midnight.
It was then I realized I hadn’t asked the most important question of all. “How’s Junior? Is he still in the hospital?”
Beck and Faye exchanged a glance. Faye said, “Today’s Sunday, Allie.”
“The same Sunday I climbed into the cistern?”
“Yep,” Faye said. “You’ve only been gone two hours.”
“Two hours,” I repeated, as I recalled an eerie purple sun zipping across a green sky, dipping into the horizon only to reappear a few seconds later to start a new day. No wonder my head was spinning. Part of me was still in Boundless.
I rubbed my eyes and tried to gather my scattered thoughts, bring myself back to the mortal world. I was like a deep-sea diver bobbing to the surface without decompressing. I had a serious case of the faery “bends.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Beck said. “There’s no time to waste. Nicole thinks she’s narrowed the summer solstice location down to two possibilities.”
I glanced over at Nicole. She and I weren’t exactly BFF’s. Nicole liked to hang out with her cool friends. I definitely wasn’t in that category. In spite of her shallow nature, Nicole’s psychic ability was awesome. I’d be crazy not to take her seriously.
“What did you find out?”
Instead of the bored expression she usually wore in my presence, her face was tight with tension. She gave a little shudder. “It was creepy. It totally freaked me out. I don’t even like talking about it.”
Was she really freaked out, or was she just being a drama queen? I must have looked dubious because Beck said, “She was shook up all right. I was watching her and she turned ghost white.”
“Where did you go?” I asked.
Nicole rolled her eyes. “Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. Do you have any idea how much concentration it takes to do astral travel to six different locations?”
“And we all know how hard it is for Nicole to concentrate,” Beck added with a wink.
“Screw you, Beck.” Nicole doubled up a fist and punched him in the belly, a powerful blow that would have flattened a normal person. But then, Beck wasn’t exactly a normal person, so he brushed her aside and laughed.
Nicole said, “To answer your question, Allie, I went to both Montana and Wyoming. Two of the places really got to me. The battlefield where Custer and his men got creamed, and the Devils Tower in Wyoming.”
“What did you see?”
The color left her face, and she swallowed hard. “The Custer battlefield was awful.” Her voice was hoarse with emotion. “Hundreds of men and horses dead or dying. Horrible screams. Blood everywhere. Even the sun was blood-red.”
Nicole turned away from me and swiped at her eyes. Nicole crying? Unbelievable. I almost felt guilty for asking her about it.
I said, “Sounds like a place the Trimarks would love. What about the Devils Tower?”
She took a couple of deep breaths and said, “It was way different than the battlefield. Totally silent. Spooky silent. At first, all I could hear was the wind through the pine trees.”
“At first?” I repeated.
“Yeah,” Nicole said. “Then something weird happened. I remember shaking my head and saying stuff like, ‘No way. How could they get clear up there, on top of that big old rock?’”
Beck added, “It is a big old rock, Allie. I Googled it. If you measure it from the Belle Fourche River, it’s over 1,200 feet tall.”
I lifted a hand to hide my grin. Beck did love his research. “So who was on top of that big, old rock?” I asked.
Nicole said, “There were seven little girls sitting on top of the rock. Seven! But there’s no way they could have climbed it. They didn’t even have climbing gear. I must have been hallucinating.”
“Weird,” I said. “Now, if I could just figure out what it means.”
Beck nodded. “Can’t help you there. Besides, there’s another problem.” He glanced over at Faye.
I closed my eyes for a second to prepare myself and then looked at my mother. “Tell me.”
“Mike’s wife has been calling all morning. She’s frantic with worry.”
My father, Mike Purdy, was married to a woman called Lisa and they had three children. Half siblings I’d never met.
“Dennis McCarty picked up Mike early yesterday morning, supposedly for a fishing trip,” Faye said. “Lisa said Mike has never been interested in fishing.” She paused and looked up at the sky, a sign I knew well. She didn’t want to tell me the rest of the story.
“And?” I prompted.
“Apparently they were supposed to be back by nightfall . . .” her voice trailed off.
“But, they’re not,” I finished.
“Yeah,” my mother said.
“Did she report them missing?”
“No. She looked through the papers on Mike’s desk and found a note he’d written. It said, ‘Lake Simcoe. Call Allie.’ She said he’d also scribbled something else. She spelled it out for me. It said sum stol. Lisa had no clue what it meant, but the fishing trip must have something to do with . . .” she glanced over at Beck and Nicole.
Beck said, “The summer solstice.”
I tried to connect the dots, but some of them were missing. For instance, where the heck was Lake Simcoe?
Lucky for me, Brainiac Beck was on it. “Lake Simcoe is up in the mountains. It’s snowed in most of the year, but when the snow melts, the fish start to bite. You have to have a shallow draft boat, because the lake isn’t very deep. It’s full of stumps from when they logged it, then flooded it.”
I took a deep breath and let it o
ut. I was pretty sure I knew what came next, but I had to ask. “So we know Dennis and Mike went to this lake in the mountains, where you need a special kind of boat, and they haven’t come back. What am I supposed to do about it?”
“Find them,” Faye said.
Chapter Twenty-One
AFTER I HAD A QUICK shower and change of clothes, we piled into Beck’s Jeep Wrangler and headed west, toward the Cascade Mountains. I borrowed Beck’s phone and called Junior’s hospital room. His older sister, Silvia, answered and told me Junior was sleeping.
“Don’t wake him. Just tell him I called and I’m thinking about him,” I said, clicking off. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being responsible for Junior’s injuries.
Beck glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “You know what happened to Junior isn’t your fault . . . right?”
I was always amazed at Beck’s ability to figure out what was bothering me.
“Sure feels like it,” I said.
Nicole, riding shotgun because she claimed she’d get carsick in the back, twisted around to face me. “That’s crap, Allie. If they hadn’t grabbed Junior, it might have been your mom or Kizzy. How long do you think Kizzy would have lasted with the Trimarks beating on her? You saved Junior’s life and don’t you forget it.”
Strangely, Nicole’s lecture, delivered in her usual half-snotty, impatient tone, snapped me out of my pity party.
Faye reached over and took my hand. “Nicole’s right. I’m so proud of you.”
My eyes filled with tears, not bitter tears this time, but tears of relief. Swear to God, I’d become the human version of an automatic sprinkler system. Faye handed me a tissue. Nicole rolled her eyes. Beck made a face in the mirror, and I laughed through my tears.
Thirty minutes later, we veered off the main highway and started up the two-lane winding paved road that would lead us to the turnoff for Lake Simcoe. Thick dark clouds rolled in over the mountaintops. Sporadic wind gusts played hide and seek in the thick pine forest, occasionally touching down to swirl through the treetops like a giant invisible eggbeater. Beck jerked the steering wheel sharply to the left to avoid a tumbleweed rolling down the highway directly at us.
Midnight Moon (The Unbidden Magic Series) Page 12
