Endlessly (Paranormalcy)

by Kiersten White

  BREAD BASKET CASES

  Okay, yeah, this is freaky.” Lend’s eyes were wide as he looked around, drinking in the Faerie Realms in all their Technicolor glory. Down in the village, people bustled about, laughing and playing. The mood was like a holiday. Every day in faerie-glamoured happy land was a holiday, which made what we had to do even worse.

  Reth stood straight, alert, then relaxed, his shoulders slumping. “There are no fey here at the moment. I suggest you hurry.”

  “What are we going to do with them once we wake them up?” Jack asked.

  “Take them to a safe location protected by my queen, where we will have time to decide what to do next. Do you remember the meadow bordered by trees where you took Evelyn?”

  Jack nodded.

  “Sounds good to me.” I shivered, though it wasn’t cold. It was the perfect temperature, lazily warm, the air sweet and gentle on my tongue. This place creeped me the bleep out.

  Lend handed Jack and me a loaf of bread each. Reth turned away from it. He looked pale, with faint blue shadows under his eyes. “I shall be back shortly,” he said, then took a step to the side, shimmered, and disappeared. I hoped he was going to do some sort of faerie healing thing. He wasn’t supposed to be weak. He was supposed to be scary and intimidating and beautiful.

  “Keep your eyes out for Carlee,” I said. My stomach tied in nervous knots as we walked down into the small, green valley. I didn’t know which I hoped for more—that we’d find her here or that we wouldn’t.

  A small child skipped along a path ahead, stopping to smile when he noticed us. “Hello! Are you new?”

  Jack squatted down, smiling and reaching out to ruffle the boy’s head of thick brown hair. “Nope, been here for ages. Hey, I have something for you.” He broke off a piece of bread and handed it to the child, who obediently put it in his mouth. His face went white with shock and then he gagged, spitting the bread out all over the ground. Huge tears rolled down his cheeks and he started wailing.

  My impulse was to run forward and wrap him in a hug, but Jack beat me to it, pulling the kid in and standing up, cradling the sobbing boy to his shoulder. He patted his back soothingly, whispering words I couldn’t hear and didn’t think it was my place to.

  I had chosen right with Jack.

  He looked back at us, his eyes haunted but determined. “We’ve got a lot more to do. Come on.”

  Fortunately the kid’s wails had drawn a bit of a crowd, and people were gathering around us. Their clothes were simple and beautiful, all in creams and greens and browns. Each of them looked concerned about the boy, but their concern was tempered by a happy contentment they couldn’t help but glow with. We’d fix that soon enough.

  “Hello!” I smiled in a way I hoped was reassuring. “We’ve got something for all of you. If you’ll line up and take one each, and then when it’s time, we’ll tell you to eat it.”

  “What is it?” a little girl, her burnished copper hair spun into tight braids, asked. “Is it from the queen?”

  “Yup. From the queen. She wants you to eat this.”

  I tore off pieces of the bread and put it into hand after hand after hand, Lend and I going down opposite ends toward each other to meet in the middle. The little boy’s sobs were quiet, a background music to the disturbing scene. Each person smiled and thanked me as I gave them a piece, and I wondered whether or not they’d regret thanking me. Was it better to be ignorantly, blissfully, falsely happy, or to be awake and aware of the horror your life had become?

  I thought back on everything that had happened to me since that night Lend broke into the Center. It felt like a lifetime ago. Since then, I’d gone from being naive, trusting, and utterly secure about my place in the world, to being tossed around on a storm, losing who I was, losing my sense of purpose, even losing what I was when I found out my father was a faerie.

  But in the end, I was glad. I wouldn’t trade what I’d learned or suffered or become for anything. It was better to know. Because when you knew, you could choose. The faeries loathed and even killed humans for using faerie names for control—yet they thought nothing of taking even the choice to decide how to feel from people.

  I put a piece of bread into the last hand and looked up at Lend. Nodding firmly, I knew. This was right.

  “Okay, go ahead and eat it!”

  Everyone raised their hands in unison, and Lend and I cringed in anticipation. A few seconds later half of them were on the ground, vomiting; the other half looked like they wanted to.

  “What did you do to us?” a black woman with closely cropped hair asked. “What did—Oh, dear heaven, where am I?” She put a hand to her heart and staggered back a couple of steps, looking wildly around.

  “I can explain.” Jack’s voice was tired but clear. “Please listen.”

  I put my hand on Lend’s arm while Jack detailed what had been done to them. “I’m going to look for Carlee, see if we missed anyone else. Stay here in case Jack needs help?”

  Lend nodded, his face troubled as everyone around dealt with their reawakened awareness with varying levels of shock and dismay.

  I hurried past them and into the village. A couple of stragglers were coming toward the group, so I handed them pieces of bread with the instruction to eat it when they saw the blond boy talking. I guess that was the only nice thing about people under heavy faerie sedation: they were conveniently complacent.

  I looked into every building that I passed, but they were almost entirely empty, and none of the new people was the one I was looking for. I was nearly out of bread, too, so I pointed them in Jack’s direction and told them to ask for something to eat. Finally I came to the end of the village, and I was sure that no one was left in it. My heart fluttered hopefully in my chest—maybe Carlee wasn’t ever here. Maybe she really had run away or made some other gloriously mundane, human mistake.

  Then I saw a teen girl standing on the lip of the hill at the other end of the village’s narrow valley. Her long, dark brown hair floated on the gentle breeze as she stared out, away from me.

  My feet felt like lead as I climbed the hill, past the gentle green and purple meadow flowers, to stand next to her. Blinking back tears I turned to face her, still hoping that maybe, maybe, maybe…

  It was her.

  “Hello.” She smiled at me without recognition. “I’m waiting for my love to come back. He brought me here, and he said he’d be back. So I’m waiting for him.”

  I reached out and took her hand, trying my hardest not to cry. “I need you to come back to the village. We have something for you.”

  She kept smiling, but she looked at me more closely. She seemed different here without her usual layers and layers of mascara. Younger. So much more vulnerable. I didn’t want to wake her up from this, didn’t want to shatter this dream reality for her. “Do I know you?” she asked.

  “Yeah, you do. Come back with me.”

  “Oh, I can’t. I’m waiting for him. You can wait with me, if you’d like to.”

  I squeezed her hand. “He’s not coming back, Carlee.”

  When I said her name, her whole body stiffened, her eyes opening wide and clearing, as though a veil over them had lifted. “Carlee,” she whispered.

  I nodded and waited for her to freak out, to start screaming or crying, bracing myself and getting ready to hug her or carry her back to the village, whatever it took. For a few impossibly long moments she didn’t say anything, didn’t move, and I wondered if the shock had broken her brain. Then her brown eyes locked on mine again, narrowing into slits.

  “I’m gonna kill that effing creep.”

  I laughed, relief flooding through me, and threw my arms around her neck.

  “No, seriously. I’m going to kill him! I can’t believe I bought his stupid lines! I don’t care how pretty he was, I mean, have you seen what I’m wearing?”

  Laughing, I nodded into her shoulder. “So not the style.”

  “I know, right? I look like an extra in some fantasy movi
e. Some stupid fantasy movie.”

  I pulled away, searching her face. “You’re going to be okay, right?”

  “As soon as I figure out what’s going on, sure.”

  “Remember that cute guy, Jack?”

  “The one who never called?”

  “That’s the one. You and he are going to have a long chat.”

  Her face brightened considerably at the idea of talking with a cute boy. She really was still Carlee, and I felt about a thousand pounds lighter knowing that, regardless of what her life would be like from now on, at least she would be my Carlee.

  “How does my hair look?”

  “Fabulous, as always.”

  We started walking down the hill when Reth appeared in front of us. Carlee glared at him. “Oh, I am so done with your type!”

  “He’s on our side,” I said.

  “Evelyn, the dancers are safe, but I think you and I should attend to the others immediately.”

  It took me a second to realize he was talking about the pregnant girls. My previously buoyant spirits plummeted. “Okay. Carlee, Jack and Lend are over there.” I pointed to where you could just see the crowd. “They’ll probably need your help calming everyone down and getting you all moved somewhere safe.”

  “I can do that. But you and I need to have a talk, like, soon. Because this is some seriously freaky crap, you know?”

  “Oh, I know.” I smiled sadly at her, and she turned and ran down the hill toward everyone else. Maybe besides totally underestimating paranormals, IPCA’s greatest sin was totally underestimating normal people’s ability to adapt and accept everything hidden going on in their world.

  I gripped the bag of the last bits of bread in one hand and took Reth’s in my other. The scenery spun around us in a blur of gold and green, and suddenly we were smack in the middle of another meadow, next to the lavender stream and surrounded by girls pregnant with future little versions of me.

  They blinked curiously, nonplussed by our sudden appearance. “Hello,” one girl, a brunette with a heart-shaped face who looked barely older than me, said.

  “Here.” I ripped off a piece of bread and shoved it into her hand. “Eat this. All of you.” Lacking so much as a curious look, the other girls took pieces and put them into their mouths.

  And chewed.

  And swallowed.

  And continued to look at me, without a single change.

  POSSIBLY IMPOSSIBLE

  Shut up, okay?” I snapped, rubbing my temples. Jack was still coming back and forth, bringing two people at a time, and he was nearly done. Carlee and Lend were here in the meadow of orange grass and white trees, organizing the groups of people and trying to keep everyone calm.

  Reth and I were unofficially in charge of the pregnant girls, and I was about to lose it.

  “But he’s supposed to visit us today.” A tiny blonde with tight spiral curls stamped her foot, her lips drawn in a pout. “I want to see him. He’s coming to see us, he said so, and I want to see him, and if we’re here he won’t know where to find us!”

  “We should go back right now.” Another of the girls, with perfect clear skin and a healthy glow, glowered at me. “I don’t want to be here. I liked where we were before. And he’s coming to see us.”

  “Just go sit—over there! And…he’s coming. Here. We told him you’d be here, and he’s going to come visit you here, okay?”

  All six of the girls nodded, some more eagerly than others. I was pretty sure Tiny Blond Terror didn’t believe me, but she went with the others. There was something weird about them. Well, okay, there were tons of things weird about them. But there was a huge thing off. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, but I knew it would come to me.

  “What are we going to do?” I asked Reth, watching as the girls arranged themselves on the ground, playing with each other’s hair or lounging, staring at the aquamarine sky. “Obviously the faeries are bringing them food from the mortal realms, which explains why giving the girls bread didn’t snap them out of the faerie trance.”

  Reth’s expression clouded. He sat heavily, his legs at awkward angles like he didn’t know how to sit on the ground. “I thought perhaps it would be the case, the Dark Queen keeping them here for safety but not wanting to change anything else and risk changing them and the Empty Ones, too.”

  “Yeah, about time she exercised some caution.” One of the Dark Queen’s early experiments to make an Empty One resulted in vampires. Brilliant move, that. “We can’t get them to come to their senses until we get their names.”

  “I doubt it will be that simple.”

  “Oh, because I thought tracking down the names of six anonymous girls when we have no idea where they’re from would be a piece of cake.”

  “You do not understand the depth of the change they’ve gone through. The others are connected through their need for faerie food, yes, but these girls have been altered forever by loving a faerie.”

  I thought of my mom, what had happened to her after loving my stupid faerie father and then being abandoned by him when he didn’t need her anymore. She had wasted away without him. “But their babies.” My voice betrayed me by cracking. “They’ll be okay if we take them away from whoever this faerie creep is, because they’ll have their babies. They’ll love their babies. That’ll be enough.” If my mom had been able to be with me, if Melinthros hadn’t taken me when he abandoned her, she would have been okay. She would have had something to live for.

  “Look at them, Evelyn.”

  I did, and for the first time it clicked for me what, exactly, was off. They didn’t do anything that pregnant women did. I hadn’t been around many, but some came into the diner occasionally. They couldn’t go two minutes without resting a hand on their stomachs. I doubted they even knew they were doing it, but the need to touch the baby, to feel that life moving inside them, was a compulsion. I even caught a woman talking softly to her belly once.

  The six girls could have had pillows under their dresses for all they cared. None of them had mentioned anything about needing to be cared for, or needing to eat or drink. The only thing I’d heard from them was whining about when they’d be able to see their faerie lover again.

  “They don’t care.” I felt like my soul had been sucker punched. “They don’t care about the babies at all, do they?”

  “They cannot. They’ve been consumed. Even if we find their names, I doubt they will ever be any more than empty shells. Being loved by the fey is not something a human can recover from.”

  She wouldn’t have loved me. I never would have been enough for my mother. Melinthros had truly destroyed everything about her, and I’d never been loved by either of my parents. Rage and sorrow deeper and hotter than I knew how to handle warred inside me, all the extra souls I was carrying around rising, agitated, and flowing through me.

  “Would you have done that to me?” I glared down at Reth. “You wanted me to love you. Would you have destroyed me?”

  He waved a hand, dismissing me with a single annoyed gesture. “I never wanted you to be mine in that way, my love. How many times must we go over this? I want to make you whole, more than you are. Not less. I’ve no interest in a human girl as a toy. It’s distasteful.”

  I gritted my jaw. “Distasteful. Yes. That’s not an understatement or anything. These girls have been destroyed. Destroyed. Do you understand that? Whoever they were, whoever they could have been? That’s gone. Forever.”

  Reth raised an eyebrow at me from beneath his disheveled hair. “Well then, I suppose it’s a good thing you are going to open the gate so we can all leave this realm. And perhaps if you had listened to me sooner and let me fill you, none of these girls would have ever come into contact with the Dark Court’s machinations.”

  I could feel my face turning red. “Don’t you dare try to say I’m guilty of this!”

  “Were you not trying to make me guilty? I did no more harm to them than you. If I am culpable in this, you are complicit. At least I’ve tried to
fix things, while you have dragged your heels and whined and fought me every step of the way.”

  “Because no one would tell me anything! You all made plans and stuck me in the middle of them without a single explanation! My whole freaking life, my entire existence is just a pawn on a stupid faerie chessboard! So you’ll have to excuse me if maybe I wanted to make my own decisions rather than blindly accept the directions of the very things that have been hurting me and everyone else since they showed up on my planet!”

  I stalked away from him to the far edge of the orange-grassed clearing, then sank to the ground and wrapped my arms around my knees.

  “Evie?” Lend sat next to me and put his arm around my shoulders. “What’s wrong? Did Reth do something?”

  “Is this my fault?”

  “What?”

  “Those girls. Reth said…if I had listened to the faeries from the start, let Reth fill me up with his creepy burning soul, opened their stupid gate when they wanted me to, none of this would have happened. Those girls will never get better. They’re as good as dead if we take away the faerie they love. And I think it’s my fault.”

  “You can’t really believe that.” He pulled me closer, trying to get me to look him in the eyes, but I wouldn’t.

  “I didn’t tell you about the werewolf, either. A security guard in the Center. He told me that one of the werewolves I let out bit him. I ruined his whole life because I was trying to help someone else. Even when I think I’m doing good, I hurt people!”

  “You haven’t hurt anyone.”

  “I have.”

  “You haven’t. You make the best choices you can based on what you know at the time. You can’t blame yourself for the choices other people make. You were right to free those werewolves. If one of them didn’t take precautions at the full moon, the blame is on them, not on you. You were right to reject Reth, to wait to make a decision about opening a gate until it was your decision. If you had gone with the Light Court’s original plan, who knows if they would have taken all the other paranormals with them? And you didn’t make the Dark Queen a freaking psycho witch.”