Jack looked up at me with the most open and sincere look I’d ever seen on his face. “I will, Evie. I promise. You get the faeries out, and I’ll take care of everyone they hurt.”
I smiled at him, the cold soul seething in me pushed out of the way by my own warmth. “I know you will.”
The dragon yawned with a tremendous clacking of its tusks and teeth. “I should have eaten one of them,” it said, settling down to the ground and glaring in the direction of the police cars that were now executing three-point turns to get out of the driveway, all lights turned off.
“Sooner the better on that gate,” Jack said.
For once, we were in complete and total agreement.
SWEATY MESS
Hey, can you get Reth?” I asked the dragon. It gave me a look filled with such venomous disdain I half expected fire to come from its eyeballs instead of its mouth. “Just kidding! Yeah. Totally kidding.”
With a flick of its tail snapping the space right in front of my face, it ran, hopped a couple of times, and then snaked through the air back into the trees.
“Grouchy, that one. I asked it to roast some marshmallows earlier; it nearly ate me.” Jack scratched his head, then stood. “Right, then, I’m going inside where it’s warm.”
“Stick around, though. I’m going to need all the help I can get to figure all this out.”
“That’s me! Mister Helpful. Captain Dependable.”
“That sounds like a brand of adult diapers.”
“The nickname needs some work. Lord Wonderful? The Incredible Hunk?”
“Please, for the love, go inside.”
He laughed, then clomped up the steps and into the house.
“Reth,” I shouted. “Reeeeeeeeth! Reth! Reth, Reth, Reth! If you don’t come in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to go find David’s golf clubs!”
“That tone and level of voice does nothing attractive for you, my love.”
I jumped, startled, but of course Reth would be behind me, leaning heavily on the porch railing.
“You,” I said, glaring. “Fix it. Now.”
A look of disdain on his face, he leaned over and trailed his fingers across Lend’s forehead. A single whispered word, and then…
Nothing.
“You liar!” I shouted, standing so abruptly that Lend rolled off my lap and down a step. As he hit the first one, color bloomed through him into his usual glamour and his eyes flew open in panic.
“He was asleep, Evelyn.” Reth’s lips were pursed, but I knew he was smiling gleefully on the inside.
“Lend!” I lunged forward, knocking into him, and we both rolled down the next two steps, landing in a heap on the gravel at the bottom. “You’re awake!”
“Evie! I’m…wow, why am I so bruised?”
“Shut up,” I said, grabbing his head and pulling him in for a kiss. It was freezing and we were on the ground but I didn’t care, couldn’t care, not when I could touch my Lend and he was awake to touch me, too. I knew I’d missed it, but it wasn’t until now that it hit me just how empty and desperate it had felt to be separated from him like that.
“Maybe,” he said, between tracing my neck with kisses, “we could go inside?”
“Maybe,” I agreed, not getting up.
“Or maybe,” Reth said, his voice dripping with disgust, “Evelyn could come with me to determine how best to fulfill her end of the deal.”
Lend lifted a hand off me and held it in the air. I couldn’t see what he was doing with it, but I had a good idea, and I heartily approved.
“See what I meant about the ability to focus?” Reth snapped. “You two are ridiculous.” He was out of breath he was so angry. He stalked past us toward the trees, and then he collapsed in a heap on the ground.
“Reth?” I sat up, watching him, waiting for him to get up. It was a trick. Right? He was manipulating me again, or…
I stood up and ran to him, turning him over so I could see his face. His eyes were closed, his mouth drawn tight, and sweat was beading on his forehead.
Sweat. Faeries did not sweat.
“Something’s really wrong with him!” My voice was high with panic. All the things I’d noticed—the change in his soul, his heartbeat, even the way he walked and his voice being different—I thought he was kidding when he said he wasn’t dying yet.
I put my hand over his heart, letting out a relieved breath as I felt it beating, too fast by far but still steady. “Reth?”
His huge golden eyes fluttered open. “Perhaps I should have taken the couch.”
A laugh choked in my throat. “You’re not okay.”
“No, as I told you, I am not.”
“What’s wrong with you?”
His eyes didn’t leave mine, but they, too, were different. Before, they’d always felt like depthless pools. Now they seemed shallow, dim.
“I’m dying, Evelyn.”
KIND OF A BIG DEAL
You’re dying?” I shrieked.
Reth sat up and brushed off his clothes. “It’s not an issue.” Lend offered a hand to help him stand, which Reth ignored.
“Actually,” Lend said, “dying is kind of a big deal. Especially for an immortal faerie.”
“I already told you,” Reth said, only looking at me. “This will be fixed when you open the gate and we go through together. My connection to eternity will be restored and this will all be a horrible memory. Now come on.” He tried to project calm, but the same quivering, fraying-around-the-edges look his soul had was reflected in his face.
I stared incredulously as he stalked into the forest, pausing once to lean against a tree and catch his breath before continuing without looking back.
“Well, no pressure now. Not only does every paranormal in the world need me to open the gate so they can go home, but Reth will die soon if I don’t.”
Lend squeezed my hand reassuringly as we started walking after my fastly failing faerie. “You’ll figure it out. I know you will. What was he saying about going through together?”
I willed my eyes to roll, but everything felt so serious and heavy that I couldn’t muster the sarcastic energy. “He thinks I’m going to decide to go through with him.” Which reminded me that Lend and I hadn’t had a conversation we needed to. One I really, really didn’t want to. I stopped, pulling his hand so he’d face me. “Lend, I—Your mom, she said they were going to take all the paranormals. And I know she includes you in that group. What are you…I mean, they’re going to be gone. All of them. Forever. Every immortal creature on the earth.” He’d told me he wouldn’t go through, but he had to have been thinking about it. He needed to think about it. For a few brief seconds I was tempted to take Reth up on his offer of eternity, if only to spare Lend the agony of choosing between his two worlds.
But no. This was my home. This was who I was, and what I loved most about loving Lend was that I didn’t have to lose myself to be with him. Being with him meant I found myself. I wasn’t going to try and become something entirely new.
“Not every immortal creature. I don’t think they’re taking vampires,” Lend answered, avoiding my eyes and digging into the frozen dirt with his shoe.
“Yeah, but, Lend, you’re going to live forever—you know that, right? And once they’re gone, that means forever by…” My throat caught, trying to keep the word inside. “By yourself. Alone.”
“I know,” he whispered.
I squeezed his hands, bending my head until he looked me in the eyes. “Do you? I mean, do you really know? Have you thought this through? Because you’re going to have to—” I squeezed my eyes shut, hating what I was saying, hating this conversation just when I got him back. “You’re going to have to choose. And whatever you choose is going to be forever. I want to make sure you’re thinking about it. You need to make the right choice.”
“What do you think that is?” His voice was soft and vulnerable and already filled with pain.
I opened my eyes and let go of his hands, putting mine on his cheeks
to frame his face. I’d missed looking into his water eyes so, so much. “I can’t make it for you.”
“I didn’t think I’d be making this choice for years. Decades, even.” He stepped back and shoved his hands in his pockets, kicking angrily at a rock on the trail. “This is all happening so fast.”
“I know,” I said, miserable. “But you know whatever you choose, I love you. Always. And it’s important to me that you choose what is best for you. Okay?” I blinked furiously, trying to keep the tears back. I knew—I knew—if I asked him to stay, he would. But that wasn’t something I could ask him. I had to make decisions for the rest of my life. He had to make a decision that would last for all eternity.
Dude, it sucked.
“But, Lend?” He looked up and I pulled one of his hands out of his pocket and wrapped it up in mine. “No matter what? Whatever happens? You still owe me a Christmas present.”
He laughed, hugging me, and we stood there with our arms around each other for way too long and way too short. Finally I sighed. “We should get to the pond.”
We reached the end of the trail that I spent so much time on I saw it every time I closed my eyes. Arianna wasn’t kidding when she described the scene at the pond. A different creature inhabited every square foot. The pond was totally melted now and teeming with heads and bodies and fins and flippers. An impossibly huge, sucker-covered tentacle curled up out of the water, snatching a bird out of the air and pulling it back under.
“Holy crap, was that a kraken? How deep is the water, anyway?”
“As deep as my mom needs it to be, I think.”
We walked closer to a pit glowing such a brilliant orange it hurt my eyes; when I glanced to the side, I could see it was crawling with flaming salamanders. Reth stood next to it, his perfectly square, narrow shoulders slumped. Across the pond, at the edge of the trees, the sole sylph floated miserably.
I remembered what I’d seen in the faerie dream and wondered if this sylph was all that was left of the mighty wind that betrayed the rest of the paranormals and brought them all here. No wonder it had been so desperate to find me that Jack had been able to convince it to get involved. It probably wanted to atone for what it had done.
Or it just hated being stuck in this form. Now that I knew what most of them had been before, I couldn’t imagine how strange it would be to go from being limitless to being confined in a new, strange body, subjected to different rules.
I jumped back, startled, as a group of rabid pixies scrambled past, wrestling and biting and pulling each other’s hair.
“They can’t all be here.” I squinted at the far borders. I wanted to figure this out and do it as fast as possible. As much as Reth had been terrible to me and had made me crazy, I was shocked at how deeply the idea of his being hurt affected me. He’d taken that faerie magic in my place—he’d sacrificed his buffer from this world to be with me in the first place. It wasn’t that I didn’t want his death on my hands. I didn’t want his death at all. And to avoid that I needed to open the gate, and to open the gate I needed all the paranormals here.
Raquel walked over from where she’d been standing, talking with David, Arianna, and Cresseda. She beamed at the sight of Lend and me holding hands. “You did it, Evie! I am so happy.”
I grinned, leaning my head on Lend’s shoulder. “Of course. If anyone needs more beauty sleep in this relationship, it’s me. Where are the rest of the paranormals?”
“Not all of them want to go, apparently. Some are so far removed that they don’t remember or don’t want what they had before. Most of the troll colonies are staying. A few other types are mixed. About half the selkies are choosing to stay behind. A handful of nymphs. Mostly those that can become more human when they love a human.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Lend snapped.
Raquel looked taken aback. “Simply that some are choosing to stay and others are not.”
“Just because they’re leaving doesn’t mean they don’t love people here.”
I looked at him sharply, wondering if that statement applied to more than his mom. Was he talking about himself, too? Thankfully David spared Raquel having to answer Lend by joining us and making me tell them how I broke the curse. They weren’t very amused by Reth’s clever prank, either, but we didn’t have time to dwell on it.
“When do we get this show on the road?” I tried to sound more confident than I felt. If they asked me to open the gate right now, I had no idea what I’d do, but at least I’d know one way or the other whether it’d work.
“There’s a problem,” he said.
People needed to stop saying that.
DUDE, FOR SERIOUS
The problem was this. Well, the problems were these:
Problem one, IPCA had managed to keep one of their containment facilities running in spite of the attempts by Seelie faeries and elementals to free whatever was there. And despite my time crunch to get them out of here and keep Reth alive, Cresseda et al. weren’t going to let any gates be opened until every paranormal that had been forced through had a chance to say whether or not they wanted to leave. Most had already made the decision; turns out they’d been gathering paranormals since Cresseda first met me. I really, really tried not to be annoyed by this fact. It was still my choice.
Problem two was how to convince the Unseelie faeries that they needed to get on the take-every-paranormal-but-no-humans-back bandwagon. No one had any idea how committed they were to the idea of taking humans with them to keep using their dreams, but faeries were generally loyal to their courts.
Problem three, and this was connected to two, was how to get the people the Unseelies had kidnapped back, most especially the women pregnant with more Empty Ones. The common thought was that the faeries were feeling desperate with their threads to eternity growing thinner every day, and if we took away their only option for getting home in the near future, they’d agree to our human-free terms even if it wasn’t what they had in mind.
And finally, problem four was that even if everything worked out in the best possible way, I still didn’t know if I could open a gate, and, if I could, whether or not I’d still have a boyfriend on this planet afterward.
Well, number four wasn’t on the Official Problems List. I wished I could talk to someone about it, but I didn’t want to bring it up with Lend, and I couldn’t very well call Carlee and whine about it.
Almost on cue, my cell rang in my pocket. I walked a few steps away from Lend, Arianna, Raquel, and David, who were going back and forth with ideas and strategies regarding the final IPCA holdout. Lend, unsurprisingly, shot down every suggestion of Raquel’s with barely concealed derision.
“Carlee?” I answered, seeing her name on my caller ID. “I’m so sorry I haven’t had a chance to call!”
“Evie?” It wasn’t Carlee’s voice. I frowned. “It’s Carlee’s mom. Have you seen her?”
“No, not since before Christmas. Why? What’s wrong?”
She sounded frantic. “She’s been missing since yesterday. We can’t find her anywhere—she left her cell and all her things. I found a text to you where she mentioned a new boy. Do you know anything about him? We’re so scared. This isn’t like her.”
“Oh my gosh,” I said, shocked. “She wouldn’t run away!”
“I know.” Her voice cracked.
I shook my head, confused and worried, my brain spinning through all the possibilities. Carlee was totally happy. She got along with her mom better than any other teenager I knew. She was doing well in school and got accepted to the community college’s dance program. It made no sense. “I remember the text, but we never got to talk. I have no idea who the guy was.”
Carlee’s mom started saying something, when I looked up and saw Arianna. What had happened to her—how she’d been changed by her then boyfriend—flashed through my mind and I couldn’t breathe through the panic. But no. Not here. The vampires here were the most self-regulating, careful, anti-harming-or-turning-humans-into-vampires
in existence. Carlee couldn’t be a vampire.
Just when I was about to sigh with relief I saw Reth speaking with a misshapen lump of moving rocks. Beautiful Reth. Enchanting Reth. Reth who was a faerie, who any girl would fall in love with. And a faerie would count as an older guy, like Carlee described her new love interest.
“Oh no,” I whispered, dread filling my stomach. I knew where Carlee was.
“Please, if you hear anything or think of anything at all, will you let us know immediately?”
“I—Of course. I’m so sorry.” I hung up, numb. Carlee. My precious, beautiful, funny, completely and utterly normal friend. I could be wrong, I desperately wanted to be wrong, but deep inside I knew I wasn’t. I stumbled back to the group and Lend put his arm around me, then saw my face.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “What happened?”
“Carlee’s missing. I think the faeries took her.”
“Are you sure?” Raquel asked.
“Pretty sure. She’s not exactly the teen runaway type. It’s all my fault.”
Lend squeezed my shoulder. “How is it your fault?”
“I put this place on their radar. They never would have paid any attention to this town if it weren’t for me. They never would have known about Carlee, or taken her. She doesn’t deserve to be caught up in the middle of this.”
“Who does?” Arianna asked quietly. “It’s not your fault. We’ve all lost our innocence in one way or another because of the paranormal parts of our world.”
She was wrong. I could have stopped this a long time ago. And I was tired of having to rescue the people I loved from danger that I put in their lives. I squared my shoulders and looked at David. “You and Raquel should lead the attack against the IPCA facility. Where is it? Iceland? Siberia?”
Endlessly (Paranormalcy) Page 18
