by brett hicks
“Looks like we have ourselves a captive audience,” The male voice belonged to the winter faerey that had attacked me several days ago. I couldn’t even grit my teeth in anger, or raise my sword!
I saw Francesca saunter into view and she was smiling like a Cait Sidhe with a canary.
“Oh, how I love loopholes. You see, these lot thought we would have to tolerate you traipsing about throwing yourself at every noble creature at the ball, but no, there is always a way in faerey.”
Francesca pointed her glittering fingernail down at the mushrooms in a neat circle at my feet. I remembered something, but it was already too late.
“These are meant to keep mortal filth from our dimension. I consider that fitting, considering your status as a mongrel-born.”
She preened as her friends praised her and the tall winter faerey captured her lips.
“I might not be able to hurt you; per se, but I can contain you in this mushroom circle for a few hundred years. I am terribly afraid that you will likely lose your marbles long before this circle finally breaks and you are once more free to whore about the face of this earth. Take comfort to know that your betters shall use your absence wisely.”
Like, go after the men I like?
I saw it in Francesca’s eyes, she might not speak the words in front of her date, but I knew that this was all about Dylan.
One dance and one kiss had bought me centuries of prison time!
Twenty-Six:
Being trapped motionless was humiliating and a lot more frightening than I ever could have imagined possible! My mind spun through the many possibilities and time seemed to be endless—meaningless.
There was nothing I could do. My father had told me bedtime stories about people being tricked into mushroom circles. He had said that they were primitive but clever traps. I remembered how he used to tell me bedtime stories about so many things I attributed to him being a book nerd. He told me about the boy who became the wolf. He used to tell me stories about the winter people and their beautiful disguise.
I remembered another, one he would tell me about only when I begged him to. Then there was the princess of blades, the girl who could shape metal and material with her hands, funny how I remember these little details now. My father had been describing my mother not some mythical person.
My body wouldn’t move, so fat chance shaping anything without my limbs! Besides, Francesca was a thorough little shrew; she had driven the mists back in every direction around me. I could not call them from this distance. I doubt she knew half of what my abilities were, hell I barely knew what my abilities were, but she had not wanted me to escape.
I seethed to myself and I cursed her name, swearing that I would bury my sword into her cold black pit of a shriveled heart. When this was done, I would literally crucify her with my blades! To say my thoughts were dark might be downplaying things a bit!
I heard a whistling sound behind me.
“Well, been a minute since I’ve seen one of these damn things!”
Gentry’s gruff tone was unmistakable.
I felt relief surge through me. The Cyclops would likely know how to break this stupid circle!
“Listen to me, kid; I cannot get involved because I’m a dimensional rift manager. We have to swear total neutrality. It is why no one can be mad at me for being your dad's best friend, yeah.”
My sails were deflated and the massive man came into view and he held up his palm like he knew my racing thoughts were bending towards misery once more.
“Ain’t no rule sayin’ I can’t talk about a girl I once knew. Stories are perfectly neutral.”
I felt warmth rush down my body at the implications. I had longed to know who my mother was all my life and here is one man who seemed to know her!
“I remember her, The Blade Princess they called her back then. She was an unrivaled autumn faerey of mysterious origins. She did not have proper elemental magic like her peers, but she could shape reality from her glamour and magic. She even once made physical duplications of her person.”
I felt my heart-rate thundering in my ears now. I felt magic stirring around me and crackling in my veins.
“One touch of any metal or alloy and she could craft anything. She even replicated me da’s blade a few times, but her copies lacked the blade’s divine powers inside. She could not replicate the curses or spells inside the metal, but they were still damn pointy! She even learned how to channel elemental magic into blades and armor, making her impossible to defeat in battle.”
If I just had some damn glamour to work with!
Gentry smiled broadly and his eyes studied me as he kept talking.
“I remember her eyes, blood-red and potent with power. She could see through any illusion and she could perceive even the fastest enemy moving at nearly god-like speeds. Yep, all she had to do was not glamour her eyes and that did the trick!”
His words were deliberate and I remembered the one place I could find glamour right now. My mother might have been the blade princess, and could shape objects without glamour, but I was a newbee at this!
I felt with my mind, the glamour I had coating my eyes. It was still there and I had grown so used to it that I forgot it was even here. I pushed at it with my mind, willing it to my hand and I felt leaking cold tears and the red glamour dripped onto my right hand slowly. Gentry’s eye and smile both widened further.
It took a minute to slowly drip the glamour into my palm and not lose any of it. I began to think of the shape of his dagger and I willed it to exist like I had last time in my father’s class. I felt the tidal surge in my right hand and pushed on the dagger with my mind, knowing it would obey my direction.
The dagger flew and impaled one of the large mushrooms and I flopped to the ground and sucked down a deep breath of fresh air. Gentry rumbled out a belly full of laughter.
“Took ya long enough to get that little bitty dagger girl!”
I gave him a bright smile.
“I really would prefer to thank you, Gentry.”
He waved me off and huffed.
“Nah, none of that, little blade princess the second. You have places you need to be and very soon.”
I looked at him and I was about to ask him who my mother was when his phone rang.
“Oye, Maris, you won’t believe what I stumbled on, mate!”
Gentry went still and he grumbled something into the phone in a language I had vaguely heard a few times on the large campus at Cambridge Academy. It was the ancient language of the faereys.
“Okay, here she is mate.”
Gentry held out his phone to me and I took it and it shrank to fit my palm perfectly. It looked like any other black smartphone in the human market, but it was clearly something magical.
“Hello?”
“Oh, honey, I was so worried about you. When you went missing yesterday, I thought something horrible had befallen you!”
Yesterday?!
“Daddy, what time is it?”
“Midnight, Friday morning now technically.”
My body stilled, I had missed an entire day?!
Shit, I am so going to be kicked off the football team!
“That’s strange honey, because your friend Casey said she got a text from you. That she was headed out to find you.”
I felt my blood freeze at this.
“Did she say where she was going?”
“She said that you were spotted in the winter fields, back where the frozen lake and the hockey field are located.”
I swore in a tangent.
“Francesca, I’m sure of it. She’s the one who trapped me in that stupid ring! Now she’s going after my friends!”
“You don’t know that for sure honey. Just come back here and let me try to call your friends.”
“I’ll see you soon, daddy.”
Look at me, dodging like a real faerey! I didn’t lie, but I certainly wasn’t promising to come straight home!
“Okay, baby girl.”
We said our goodbyes and Gentry looked at me with his quizzical eye.
“Where to, kid?”
I grinned up at him wickedly.
“Can you take me to the frozen lake in the winter fields?”
Gentry smirked to match my evil glint.
“I can, but it might ruffle your da’s feathers, lass.”
I fixed him with a steely look.
“Leave that to me.”
Gentry broke the dark and grim mood with a belly splitting laugh. He touched a few options on his smartphone screen and within ten seconds the yellow cab came blazing through the forest to us.
I stared at the cab in open awe.
“Yeah, there are a whole lot of nice apps for the modern faerey these days. You really might consider getting one yourself, kid.”
I nodded dumbly and then I raced over to the back seat and opened the door. I slipped into the now, normal-sized cab and within seconds, Gentry threw her into gear and we shot off into the night’s sky.
When I say that he “shot off” I mean that literally. Where we were going, there were no roads. (Yes, I just sort of ripped off Back to the Future.)
I rolled down the window and I began to gather red mists into my hands. I first touched the sticky mists to my delicate heeled shoes and I envisioned sturdy black leather boots. I wasn’t even surprised when they changed shape and hugged my feet like leather armor.
Next, I slit my dress and re-wove the fabric until it was blue comfort-fit jeans. I re-wove the top of the fabric until it was a snug fit black tank top. Since I was headed to the winter fields, I pulled in more red mists and I began to weave a dark-brown leather jacket. I had always wanted to get one of them at some point, but I guess it took potential kidnapping to bring the jacket to the top of my list.
“Well, look at you, all dolled up.”
Gentry chuckled at his own little joke and I smiled at him.
“What can I say, big guy, I aim to please!”
He roared in another fit of laughter.
“You’re so much like her, you know.”
My eyes widened and he huffed.
“She made me swear to her never to reveal anything until you knew. I will regale you with tales of your mother’s bravery one day, but not yet, kid. Besides, you have some winter faereys to squish, right?”
His lips quirked into a very dangerous looking smirk. Gentry might be a nice guy to me, but he was still a very deadly being—the son of a damn god!
The mists around me shaped into a second blue dagger with a matching tidal surge to the first. Gentry looked at the dagger in his rearview mirror and he muttered something to himself. I had a feeling he had noticed that the magic inside the blades was being replicated along with the metal. According to him, my mother couldn’t do this. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew that I was the daughter of an illusionist and a mysterious autumn faerey who could manipulate matter. Perhaps it was the combination of the two that made my creations come out with more zing?
I felt like bottled thunder rushed through my body. We dropped lower and I saw the massive wards of yellow light above the enormous castle.
Gentry pressed that same button above his head and suddenly we were looking at the botanical gardens of Cambridge University. We flew lower and after about fifty feet of sharp and swift descent, he pressed the button again. We jerked back through into the mist-steeped world of the faereys.
“Did you just shift dimensions twice inside of seconds?!”
Gentry smiled toothily at me and I recognized this as the Cyclops version of beaming with pride.
“There’s a damn good reason why most folks just stay away from me, kid. They’re not daft enough to dare to be my friends.”
I chuckled at him despite the situation we were likely headed into.
“I’m guessing it’s less than safe to do what you just did?”
Gentry shrugged and waved me off dismissively.
“Only like a sixty-percent chance of us splatting all over two-dimensional spaces. We have a huge window for error!”
“Gentry, you do realize that that meant we only had a forty-percent chance of surviving?!”
He shrugged and said, “Better than the odds of your friends surviving the hour kid. Those little winter faereys are not ones you want to piss off.”
I narrowed my eyes at him and I ominously stated, “Neither am I.”
Twenty-Seven:
Signs of the impending apocalypse include hale the size of softballs, moon turning to blood and apparently, a yellow taxi falling from the sky.
We landed with a crushing impact that nearly sent us into the icy depths of the lake. Gentry hopped out and helped me to my feet. Somehow, the interior of the cab was unscathed from the meteor-like fall.
“You’re not going to have much time before that sound draws all the little winter faereys out to investigate. You had better hurry and I would suggest keeping your eyes unglamoured for the time being.”
He suddenly spoke very smoothly and he lost all accent, sounding very ageless and deadly serious. Gentry’s deep single-eyed gaze bored down into me. I could almost feel the countless nightmares that one large eye had borne witness to.
He bent down and lifted his cab out of the icy water. He began to refreeze the water around the tires to give him traction. Intellectually, I knew he had watery powers, considering the dagger her gifted me, but seeing them was awe-inspiring. He held back the raging tempest of water beneath the frozen lake.
The lake was like a swirling maelstrom under the icy surface. It was honestly a bit freaky to witness.
“What is that?”
Gentry shrugged and said, “Da got mad and smite the earth right here.”
I gulped and he pointed off into the distance.
“Ye should get going lassie, I smell vampire blood nearby and I mean that literally.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice, I shot off like a cheetah on the prowl for a midnight snack. I swore to myself that I would make that bitch bleed and I intended to keep my word, even if the promise was only spoken in my own mind.
I had never been in the winter fields before now. I just opted to follow Gentry’s vague direction and trust that the man crazy enough to crash his cab into a frozen lake just to help a little faerey girl, was not likely to mislead said faerey girl.
***
An icy stadium of pure sheet ice and snow spread out before me. The ground was petrified with permafrost. The mists were dense with blues and even white around the stadium.
I heard echoes of laughter and very familiar cackling sounds that sent my adrenaline rushing through my veins. I stalked through the front entrance and out in the center of the field were two beings staked to the ground with white ice spikes as long as daggers. They were staked by the palms and their feet were secured with several inches of hardened ice.
“As much fun as this has been, I’m going to take my time and relish your agony. Perhaps we will play the videos back for your little bitch friend while she stands there with that bloody stupid expression on her face!”
Hissing sounded up and I heard someone spit out at Francesca.
“You’re going to bleed for this.”
Casey said it with a cold fury that was so inhuman you would never mistake her for a mortal. Francesca cackled loudly again and she cracked a white whip across Casey’s torso.
“No, you’re the one bleeding, vampire.”
She spit the word like it affronted her just to say it.
“This one’s trying to break free again!”
The male voice was the tall lanky winter faerey from the two previous times I had been attacked. Beside him was a pair of smaller goons holding down a tiny red-orange haired girl. She was snarling at them and gnashing her teeth. Her savage blue eyes bore in on them like twin lasers.
My heart stopped in my chest at Naomi’s bloodied form. She was a mess of blood and slow-healing wounds.
“It’s too bad you’re stuck in your human form, l
upine whore. Your pack’s not here to protect its omega now!”
Francesca cackled again and her eyes were gleaming with her sadistic pleasure at their suffering.
“You shifters are practically immune to magic in your animal forms. Good thing you seem to be a defective little bitch. I loathe watching all of them fawn all over you. Poor little Naomi, the poor, poor broken shape-shifter omega.”
Francesca’s vitriol wrath at not being the center of attention was well beyond the realm of insanity. She was just this side of megalomania already.
She’s never going to see another sunrise.
I promised myself.
I began to gather up the mists around me and I envisioned a glowing white-silver sphere. Shifters of all kinds were drawn to the full moon. I pushed a lot of the sizzling power in my body into the sphere and I focused on only one thing, “Shift!”
With the pungent command embedded into the glowing beach ball-sized moon, I threw it and it soared over to Naomi. It didn’t hit the ground, but rather floated right in front of her eyes. And for a moment nothing happened.
“What the bloody hell?!”
One of the goons exclaimed and the others began to turn and look around for the source of the new threat.
I pulled in more red mists and I rushed towards Casey’s bloodied form. My steps were light and I lashed into Francesca with a powerful right knee strike to her temple. She flew a dozen feet back and slammed into the icy ground. I slashed out with my sword and the blue blade drank up the water and the icy spike dissolved into vapor.
I slashed out at her restrained feet and the ice began to melt, as three figures rushed me at once.
I ducked and twisted, tracking the motions of multiple sharp objects lashing out at my flesh.
A whip cracked and I slashed through it with one of my now full-length blades. The ice vaporized on the water blade. The tides rushed and splinters of scalding water shot out of the left-hand sword all on their own. I had no idea how the blade had known to do that, but I was suddenly in love with an inanimate object!
