by J. C. Nelson
If I’d eaten breakfast, I’d have vomited.
In flesh, Isolde resembled the paintings. Breathtaking beauty that seemed to only grow richer each time I looked at her, sleek white skin, and grace I could only dream of.
Through the veil, I saw the truth, a truth that would haunt my nightmares from that moment onward.
Isolde spent a few years trapped in a thorn tree, according to Grimm. Through the veil, I saw that perhaps she’d never truly left it. The best I can do is to say she looked like a thorn tree grew legs, borrowed a set of teeth from a shark, and grafted octopus tentacles into its branches. Actually, any self-respecting octopus would tear those limbs off and take up life as a jellyfish before waving appendages like that.
Ari shone like a spotlight, the source of the beam that caught my attention, golden light like a thousand suns welling up, churning inside her. And then the tentacles wrapped around her, pulling her in, breaking off chunks of light and swallowing them.
I once heard a witch claim the Black Queen could drink souls. Now I no longer considered it a euphemism.
Ari didn’t scream. Her body convulsed in bursts, the guttural moan from her lips telling me she had seconds, maybe less.
“Stop.” I don’t remember making the decision. Just knowing what I had to do. “I’ll do it.”
Ari went stiff, a convulsion gripping her.
Isolde, her lovely lady form cloaking the monster that lay inside, turned back toward me. She spoke with leisure, each word measured. “Yes, handmaiden?”
“Let her go. I’ll serve you. Just let her go.” The words left me winded, nearly broken. My left arm dropped to my side, like I’d been shackled to an anchor.
“Yes, you will, darling. We have an agreement.” Isolde jerked her hand at me, and the weight of a black hole forced me to kneel. She walked over, each step filled with menace, and raised my chin to stare into her radiance. “You have until the new moon to set your affairs in order. Arm yourself appropriately. The hand cannons you favor are no weapons fit for my servants.”
Ari collapsed to the floor, her head flopping to the side.
Isolde looked at her with distilled, frozen contempt. “There is no part of your friend’s training I have not observed. She had great promise, and so I will let her live with another promise: If she challenges me again, I will rend her soul from her body.”
Rays of light burst from the carpet around Isolde, forming a portal, turning her body into vaporous light. “When you see my father, tell him that he knows my only request, my only demand.” She dissolved into a river of light, leaving me to crawl over and cradle Ari.
I can’t tell you how long I held her before the voices and the shouting pulled me from the whirlwind of fear that surrounded me.
“Arianna? Where are you, Arianna?” Only one man called Ari that to her face without fear. Wyatt. Son of the first royal family, MBA major, complete wimp. He rushed over, straining to lift her from my lap.
“Marissa!” Liam roared, and I do mean roared, as the curse that shared his body fed off of emotions. He nearly tackled me, checking me for cuts (none) and bruises (a few new ones for the collection). “Fairy Godfather told us where we’d find you, but I needed Wyatt here to get me into the Court of Kings.”
“Tell him it’s worse than he feared. Get the Fairy Godfather now. I mean, if you don’t mind.” Wyatt’s tone bordered on panic.
Liam headed for a set of double doors with a sign that said “Men’s Room.” “I’ll handle it.” The sound that followed was either glass breaking or him tearing a wall apart. A moment later, he returned, carrying a shard of mirror the size of a guillotine blade.
From the mirror, Grimm watched, his eyes brimming with concern. “Stand clear. I need room to work.”
Now, here’s the thing: In nine years, I’d never actually seen Grimm work big magic. The odd potion or portal? Sure. Some of that came from the fact that he spent a few hundred years with his power constrained. The rest of it came from his stingy nature, unwilling to spend a fleck of Glitter where normal means sufficed.
A block of onyx erupted, oozing like lava through the carpet. Seconds later, a miniature blizzard formed overhead. Snow hissed against glowing hot stone, and a cloud of steam obscured the portal. When it cleared, a block of polished, black rock remained. Then runes slithered from fissures, crawling their way like snakes to coil across the stone. As each reached its point, it froze, dying, and locked the rune into place.
When the portal exploded into existence, a wave of heat like a blast furnace singed the edges of my hair. Liam stepped between me and the portal, letting the heat soak into him.
“Do not panic.” Grimm’s voice barely registered above the roar of the portal. “I’ve summoned help. Wyatt, please accompany Princess Arianna. I will inform your mother of your unauthorized field trip.”
About then, the first figure stepped out of the portal, and my heart sank. Seven feet tall, willowy, with gray tattoos covering his face, I recognized him as fae. While the fae weren’t exactly enemies, they weren’t remotely friendly either. Another emerged, and another, fae warriors with weapons held at the ready.
Then another figure came through the portal, and my not-good-o-meter went from bad, straight past “ten-year audit,” and stuck so far to the right, I’d never come up with a term. The Fae Mother. Not quite queen, not quite prophet, one hundred percent alien.
“Rise.” Her voice echoed in my head, reminding me of the peal of church bells, or an approaching storm. She held her hand over Ari, and Ari’s limp body floated into the air, then back through the portal. Wyatt threaded his way past fae warriors, who regarded him like I did convenience store clerks, and disappeared into the portal. With Ari gone, the warriors stepped one by one, backwards.
“What did you do? What sort of stupid prophecy did you tell her?” I pushed Liam aside, confronting the Fae Mother face-to-face. Well, as close as I could come, given that she stood a foot and a half taller. Afraid? I would’ve been afraid, but I’d encountered her before. She had a habit of spouting lines that made me almost think I understood them.
She gave me a sympathetic look like I was a toddler in need of a nap. “That she would be the last to challenge the Black Queen to a duel.”
“I saw her. Through the veil, I saw her, tearing parts of Ari’s soul off.” My mind flicked from Ari to my harakathin, destroyed with only a word by the Black Queen’s power.
“I wish I’d been here. I’d like to see the Black Queen survive without lungs.” Liam shook with rage, a sure sign his curse just about had control.
“You must not come into contact with our half sister. If you come before her, there is no hope. To stand before her is to choose your own death.” The Fae Mother spoke softly to Liam, so my ears only rang a little. “You must protect the princess, until she can become what she is.”
I looked at Grimm, tears welling in my eyes. “You didn’t come. I thought you would come.”
Seconds, minutes passed before he finally spoke. “I could not. My daughter has consumed the power of another fairy, and I can no longer approach her.” His voice sounded hollow, defeated.
“You said I had nothing to fear from her.”
Grimm wouldn’t look at me.
Then Liam caught my arm, his grip stiffening until it almost hurt. “M, what is this?”
On my wrist, below the handmaiden’s mark, hung a gold band like a wide bracelet. Seamless, it fit so snugly it wouldn’t even rotate. “She was killing Ari.”
Liam looked past me, to Grimm. “What is this?”
The pain on Grimm’s face made him look even older than normal, his voice nearly a whisper. “Marissa has promised her services as the Black Queen’s handmaiden.”
Four
I MIGHT HAVE mentioned that Liam carries a curse older than fruitcake, with enough power to level several square blocks of fruitcake. I m
ight have failed to mention that he only carried it because I gave it to him. When we first got together, I figured his relaxed, calm attitude was just a side effect of being an artist. Over time, I grew to understand that in reality, it was his only hope of keeping the curse in check. Something he completely failed to do now.
His clothes caught fire, his arms grew even thicker, and red scales with a tint of green beaded his skin. I won’t lie—I loved the man either way, and found him attractive even as a reptile. He rampaged about the room, then pushed me with his nose farther from the Fae Mother and Grimm’s portal, setting the carpet in front of me on fire.
Not that I minded.
My engagement ring from Liam came with several nice side effects—first off, it made other women jealous, since my diamond looked like a baby tooth. The other key effect was even better, an enchantment that made me immune to fire. That’s an absolute necessity when your lover’s flaming passion isn’t just a metaphor.
Then Grimm spoke from the mirror, in a language I’d never heard. Like the sound a vacuum cleaner makes when it sucks up a penny, only it went on, and on.
And Liam answered. At least, the dragon did. Liam always said he couldn’t speak, but here they were, carrying on a back-and-forth conversation that I could only replicate with shop tools. After a soliloquy long enough to inflate a tire or vacuum out my car, Liam curled up in a ball around me, wrapping his stubby tail around to touch his nose.
“I didn’t know you spoke dragon,” I said to Grimm.
“I speak many languages, my dear. French, Spanish, Latin, pig Latin, all the useful tongues. It seems that both the curse and Mr. Stone would prefer to lock you in a tower and guard you.” Grimm looked around. “But as you can see, that will not work.”
And I think that’s the first time I actually noticed where I was.
The Court of Kings, incidentally, was a dump that more resembled the mess left by a group of teens in their mother’s basement than the seat of power for Kingdom’s government. The collection of beer bottles, the dozens of poker tables, a podium that sported a stripper pole instead of a microphone. While the Court of Queens resembled a mall and spa, the boys’ version left almost everything to be desired.
Hands down, the strangest part were the statues, gray metal statues of kings and princes playing poker or drinking beer. Then my skin started to crawl while my brain refused to accept what my gut said. I stepped over Liam, feeling him shudder and growl. “It’s all right. I’m just going to look at something.”
“What did she do?” The statues weren’t stone. I’d seen people turned to stone. The perfect details always gave it away, stone eyelashes, stone lint on their clothing. These looked like caricatures, or roughs that a sculptor would finish.
The Fae Mother answered. “She has quelled them. An ancient spell, beyond the capabilities of even the most powerful mortals. They are neither dead nor alive. The world has stopped for them.”
“The amount of power needed to quell someone is staggering.” Grimm spoke now, his composure recovered. “I once did it for an entire castle until the crop blight could pass. I couldn’t perform another spell for nearly one hundred years.”
“You mean, like Sleeping Beauty–style?” Grimm was, after all, the Fairy Godfather. No surprise he’d been involved, or at least acquainted.
“Like you, the young lady’s beauty manifested more on the inside. A charming personality, a sense of wit. Yes, I held their entire kingdom quelled until the wasted soil had years to recover.”
“And then a prince broke through a forest of thorns and ended the spell?”
Grimm’s eyes narrowed. “I told that idiot there was a perfectly serviceable road, just a mile down, but he refused to listen. Just like a man to ignore directions. He wandered around in a blackberry patch for fifteen minutes and came out looking like he’d fought a war with a polecat. And lost.”
I tried chipping at the spell covering a prince, but I’d have had more luck chipping off a rubber glove.
“He goes riding into the castle just as everyone wakes up and decides that because the alarm went off while he was near, he must have been the reason it happened. The point is, quelling these people must have taken vast amounts of her power. She is weakened.”
Again Liam hissed, the sound of teakettle filled with ball bearings.
Grimm shook his head. “Even weakened, she had the power to repel me. I appreciate the offer, but the result would be worse than suicide. The question, as always, is ‘why.’ My daughter has never been one to act without reason.”
“She says you know her only demand.” I rubbed at my wrist, rotating the golden band.
When the Fae Mother spoke, she sounded like a dozen voices at once, whispering to Grimm. When Grimm answered, it sounded like a sea of soccer fans, whispering in unison, all of them saying something different. She nodded toward me. “I go to tend the princess. Without her, there is no hope.” Then she rose into the air, drifting back into the portal, and it folded up behind her into a wisp of light that disappeared.
“I know her demand. She knows I cannot supply it.” Grimm spoke with an air of finality I didn’t expect.
Liam spoke once more, like a mountain of pots and pans being turned over.
Grimm looked at me instead of him and shook his head. “You are asking me to perform the impossible. When the harbinger Death spoke to you, did he ever explain why he takes the souls?”
Talking to the manifestation of death had almost always left me feeling sick to my stomach, so I avoided question-and-answer sessions. “He said he offers them the choice to go. And that only hate or love could pin them to the world.”
Grimm nodded. “Truth, but not all of it. A soul could remain, absent enough love or hate to keep it intact, but only for a month. On the thirty-first day, it would dissolve. So the choice is to go onward with Death, or face true oblivion.”
I had a feeling I knew her demand now, which implied that something else Death told me was also true. “Can you raise the dead?”
Grimm always told me that he wouldn’t raise souls, never couldn’t. For the longest time, I thought it was to make him appear more powerful. “Yes, if the soul is still available. Creating flesh is easy, those bodies humans wear are little more than primitive, chemical machines. Without a spirit to guide it, the flesh is empty.”
“And she wants you to raise someone from the dead. Someone dead more than thirty days.” The pieces fell into place now.
Grimm nodded, his eyes downcast. “Someone dead more than four hundred years, Marissa. And since you will ask, she wants me to resurrect Rouge Faron. Her mother. My wife.”
According to the history books, Grimm once allowed a princess to work for him as his agent. He considered it similar to keeping a pet lizard, except that this lizard talked and wore pink dresses and so on. After seven years of service, he granted her a wish.
“I wish you loved me” was never on the list of things he expected, but Grimm followed through, seeing it as an opportunity to learn more about these ridiculous humans. Together, they had a daughter, Isolde. Princess of Roses, according to the doorman. Later, Queen of Thorns.
On my right arm, the golden bracelet I wore fused into a seamless band, as tight as the manacle on my other arm. I shook it and pulled uselessly. “What are you doing?” When I first worked for Grimm, the bracelet had been our link. Fear of once more being Grimm’s slave swept me, making me shake.
“You are bound to my daughter as her handmaiden. Now you are bound to me as well. It will prevent her from making more—drastic—changes to you. It will also give you respite, as for at least some of each day, you must be available to my commands, and I would command you to rest.”
“Take it off.” I yanked at the bracelet, pulling until it cut my skin.
“I will not. As her handmaiden, you would be subject to her spells, her changes, her desires. She would
mold you in her own image. As long as I maintain a grasp on you, neither of us has complete control. You are, to the best of my knowledge, the only being ever bound to two fairies at once.”
“All I ever wanted to do was be free.” I stumbled backwards, holding on to Liam while I pulled at the golden manacle.
Grimm spoke softly. “That bond between us is your life preserver in a sea of magic, not an anchor meant to drown you. In this matter, I must insist that you trust me. Will you agree to it?”
The logical part of my brain knew the alternative was worse. My heart, on the other hand, didn’t care about alternatives. It cared about now. I swallowed the fear inside me and forced myself to open my eyes as I nodded. “Only until—”
“Absolutely, Marissa.” Grimm’s power surged out, connecting to me in a way that I could only feel.
I shrugged it off like a mosquito bite, turning fear to anger, and anger into determination. “I’m not going to serve her. Don’t you have anything you could kill her with? Bullets? Bones? Some blessed sword?”
Liam swept his tail around me, pinning me against him.
Grimm flashed to a bottle on the table so he could look me in the eye. “You are her handmaiden. A handmaiden’s fate is tied to her queen. What the queen experiences, her handmaiden bears as well. Without a doubt, this is why she chose you to begin with.”
For nearly ten years, I’d lived with realities so strange they made weird seem normal. Always facing the truth, always taking things as they were. Now I wanted, more than anything else, to hide away and pretend this wasn’t happening.
Between being used as a repo man by the Adversary and as a human shield by the Evil Queen of Evil Queens, I’d nearly reached a breaking point. But the key to not breaking was to bend. I’d done the whole “bound to a fairy” routine once before, and hiding, running, those things never worked. This time around, I’d try something different. I’d fight her every step of the way. I pushed away Liam’s tail. “So tell me, Fairy Godfather. What’s the plan?”
