by Tori Smith
He sat back as if none of that happened.
I gazed around. Lucas said nothing but held a somewhat knowing smile and Derek did nothing but continue to hold his sour expression. He lifted his eyes.
“What Elia means to say is you’re a witch,” he said, coming over to me. He squatted. “You’re a witch and can do things like he can only better.”
“With some provisions,” Elia said to him this time. He swung his gaze to me. “But yes, it’s true. You’re of magic and noble blood and we are your protectors, our kind blessed with power from magical beings. We call those beings elves where we’re from, but they’re not the pointed-eared variety you’re used to in this time here I’m sure.”
“Definitely less Hollywood,” Lucas finally chimed in with, his eyes dancing with his smile. “But no less striking from what our history tells us.”
“And powerful,” Elia let me in on. “We were given our abilities directly from their kind and the royal family, you, Your Majesty, and your family hold the closest powerful connection to the ancient elves, your blood line one of the first to accept the gifts. Your family has an understanding of their power more than any of us, the same understanding you will come to have as you practice and train.”
Practice and train…
“Do you understand?” Elia added, his gaze traveling over me. “I know it’s a lot. But please, if you have any questions, my fellow guardians and I will be happy to explain—”
“Do I have any questions?” I asked, standing. I pointed to the cup. “About how you just did that to that cup?”
Elia stood as well as the others, nodding as he looked at me.
I shot to Lucas. “Or how you and I glowed. Freakin’ glowed.”
His hands came together, his bearded jaw moving a little.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he confessed, his gaze moving to the others.
They all went silent after that and I stepped back, the back of my legs hitting the couch.
“You’re crowding her, give her room.”
The three gave me a wide birth after Elia’s words and I used it to pace, stalk, and stamp my feet or whatever one wanted to call it. My hands balling into fists, I felt I was on the verge of a panic attack, something I would have after each of those spells I had as a child or a vision of something like magic and light took over my mind.
Because I would see that too, light… magic.
I pushed my palms to my eyes.
“Your Majesty—”
“I’m not that,” I said, hands up to Elia. “I’m not whatever you’re saying. Whatever it is that’s not what I am.”
He stopped the advance, the others the same behind him. Even Derek had gotten close, a concern behind his eyes when he seemed to have had none this whole time.
Elia patted the air. “Your Majesty—” he started, then bit his lip. “Arden, you are what we say. You’re of magical blood and if you just let us show you something—”
“I don’t want you showing me anything!” I quipped making them all jump and even myself. My heart raced. “I’m not this queen of the—”
“New Realm,” he finished for me. “The future. You come from a time, we come from a time of unrest and civil disobedience. Because of that, Her Majesty was sent… you were sent into the past to fulfill a prophecy that’s been around for centuries even before this time. This prophecy is the key to survival.”
“To our peace,” Derek said, causing us all to look at him. It’d been the first thing he’d said without aggression, a smidgeon of anger, or even sarcasm. He was serious.
Serious expressions covered all their faces and their hands lowered, waiting. They were waiting for me and wanting me to do something.
“I’m from this time,” I stated, more reassurance for myself. “I’m from this century. I have a life. I have a job. I have family, parents.”
“Norma and Franklin Beckler.” Derek’s quips had returned, his arms crossed tight in front of him, as he bounced his head with the names.
“Yes,” I told him, facing the group and Elia frowned.
“A host family,” Elia explained, his mouth thinning. “We all have them, people chosen to raise you and us as we grew in this time. They are also of magical blood, each of our ‘hosts,’ or what you call families.”
Hosts…
“Your Majesty, Arden.” Elia came forward, his expression grave. “I know this is probably hard to understand, but the three of us, Derek, Lucas, and myself have been with you your whole life, not all at the same time, but around and protecting you as needed. We went to school with you, have jobs near you…”
Jobs near me.
My thoughts traveled to Derek, those final moments before life turned on its head. He said he’d been working at the magazine for years.
Like he knew my thoughts he made no eye contact with me, his throat jumping before facing Elia.
“We came with you into the past,” Elia continued. “Born and bred to protect, born and breed to watch over the crown and one day help you fulfill a prophecy, a prophecy for peace for both magical beings and mortal men.”
“Eternal harmony,” Lucas said, stepping forward. “It’s true, Arden. Everything he’s said. We are here for you. We are yours.”
It had been the way he said it—yours like it was fact, no other possibly. They were mine, these… guardians.
“And you’re witches?” I asked the actual word coming out of my mouth, but what I hadn’t anticipated was a smirk from all three guys.
“Warlocks,” Elia corrected.
Warlocks, of course they were and their magic came from elves.
All of us.
I think that had been where something clicked for me and shaking my hands, I turned.
“Arden?”
Three sets of heavy footfalls followed Elia’s voice, but I didn’t stop, heading for the door.
Derek cut me off. “Where are you going?”
I shrugged back, not forgetting he took me here in the first place.
“If it’s true,” I said, giving myself a wide berth of him, all of them. “My parents, my ‘hosts’ should be able to tell me.”
They’d be able to explain some things, if all this about me being a… queen was true or just some utter bullshit. I still didn’t know if I was in my right mind. I had episodes before.
Derek grabbed me around the arm before I could get far and ended up dodging my right hook, my not so subtle attempt to make him release me.
“It’s not safe,” he said, letting go on his own accord. “There aren’t just our kind out there, but also people… enemies who want to hurt people like us—you.”
“Well, if Norma and Franklin are ‘our kind’ like you said,” I emphasized, air quoting. “Then they should be able to protect me just fine. They can also shed some light on all this virtual crap you’ve been telling me for the last hour and a half.”
I went to move around him, but again he stopped me.
“You can’t, Arden.” And Derek nearly looked sad when he said it, actually sad, his dark eyebrows descending above his equally deep eyes. He shook his head. “I’m sorry but we can’t let you. We have reason to believe the people against our kind already know about you. Not necessarily your connection to the crown, but that you’re a witch and if that’s true, they’ve no doubt already gotten to your hosts. They’ve…”
He panned to the others in a plea for guidance. It was like he needed to know what to do next and Elia provided, moving closer.
“Show her, Lucas,” Elia said and Lucas, behind me, lifted his hands.
He closed his eyes, his breath deep within, and when he opened his eyelids light outlined his irises.
I stepped back as his arm glowed, the mark on his bicep shining in full light.
Knocking back into Derek, I could go nowhere. He even put his hands on my shoulders, keeping me there.
Making me watch.
I watched as a stream of violet and blue light surged from Lucas’s finge
rtips, the shine pulsing in bright waves and he used it to split a cut into the room, the atmosphere actually breaking as if a breach was forming itself right in the middle of the loft.
I covered my mouth at the gold light that suddenly spilled out into the room, its origin directly from the breach, but the person walking out of it nearly caused me to fall back into Derek.
The woman was older with silver hair and when my boss fell to her knees in front of us I just about collapsed a lung.
“Marcine?”
“Arden, don’t!”
Elia lunged, the blade slicing through the air out of nowhere. I’d actually reached the middle of the room and was partway to Marcine before I froze in front of it.
The jagged knife paused directly in my face.
Elia held it there, his gaze concentrated while wisps of pure light stemmed from his fingertips. It’d been the same light Lucas produced, soft illumination through Elia’s shirt collar accompanying it. Full and exuberant, it filled the room, and I couldn’t breathe, the knife’s pointed tip still aimed directly at me.
And my boss behind it.
She’d… thrown it, her eyes cruel, cold, and narrow, and up on her feet, a battle cry followed her attempt to stab me.
She ran. She ran at me and just might have gotten a chance to get me.
Had I been with anyone else.
With a sweep of his hand, Elia dropped the control he’d had on the knife. It fell to the floor and a roar sounded behind me as Derek switched places with me. His fingers gripped the air. He forced colorful waves from his fingertips and suddenly my boss was no longer running at me.
But turning into dust.
Six
Arden
I felt my life transform, a fucking three-ring circus with myself as the main attraction and these random guys who picked me up the audience.
I could still… taste—my boss, the dust of her actual remains in my nose and throat and something I couldn’t shake no matter how hard I tried, my body in a constant state of shake.
Shock, the guys had told me. They told me I was in shock and of course I damn well was. The woman who had employed me for two years had suddenly come at me with a pocketknife and with an aggression unheard of even in the mornings when she hadn’t had her coffee. She’d been crazed, but even with the reality of that what ultimately ended up happening to her didn’t compare.
Witch hunter… the guys said, hunters of our kind, which was apparently mine. They still believed I was some long-lost princess or queen or whatever, destined to rule them and be a part of whatever sect they had drawn up. I had no power, never had and never would no matter what crazy things they were showing me. I wasn’t like them.
But that didn’t seem to matter.
They proceeded to tell me that Marcine had followed them to the loft, stalked them to apparently find me after seeing me with Derek, seeing me with my arm aglow and finding proof of my magical ancestry. As Derek said, they weren’t sure if she understood my connection to their… queen, but they acted anyway, feeling the need for it. They locked her up in some magical prison and only got her out to show me the truth, the fact that there were people coming for me no matter “what I was” and because they were alerted to my existence, contacting my parents was out.
Out for them anyway. I didn’t care what they said. Hell, I didn’t care what I saw with my own two eyes. If my parents were in some kind of danger by whatever these guys were going on about, I needed to get to them. I attempted to leave the loft immediately after the thing with Marcine, but again, met the resistance of three larger-than-life men. They wouldn’t let me go anywhere without them and I wouldn’t discontinue my fight to leave. There was just too much potentially at stake.
And so we went together.
Lucas and me in the back seat of an SUV, Derek drove, Elia beside him while they took me down familiar streets and towards something that raised the hairs on my arm the further we drove. We barely made it on the block where my childhood home was located before I was unbuckling my seatbelt. We actually didn’t make it down the block, the guys parking super far away, leaving me with only a visual of my parents’ house. I didn’t care and unbuckled anyway, which only received protests.
“We’re going in first,” all three said to me, but none of us even got a chance to go in.
The flashes of lights held us back.
The guys held me back—Lucas’s arm over my front while Elia and Derek restrained me from their seats ahead. The two undeniably strong men held down my shoulders. None of them would let me move and they made me watch while the windows were shot out following sounds of gunfire and the house I grew up in overtook in a fiery blaze.
Parked up the street, the guys purposely kept us in the wings, kept me in the wings, a hand moving over my mouth shortly after the screams started in my throat. I never got a chance to let them out, the guys holding them back, me back. My parents’ cars were in the driveway. They were at home.
And they were dying.
There was something about all the things you loved disappearing in front of you that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, the product of true nightmares.
The men peeled off, traveling and so lost in my tears, I didn’t question the drive. I actually thought I cried myself out in the end, tired myself out because I didn’t even realize we arrived back at the house until we did.
The smoke had cleared by then, whatever fire trucks, and who’d ever originally been there before clearly gone, and that was when two of the guys chose to go into the house, Derek and Elia. Lucas stayed with me until the others returned. The pair handed back what they retrieved from the house, as we headed out on the road again.
A photo.
Charred, the ends were a burned-off mess, and though the image was bubbled, the visual could still be made out.
My mom and dad had me between them, myself a small child of not even ten. I had seen this photo a million times, a combination of two people I always felt were far more beautiful than me. My mom never had freckles dotting her fair skin, nor my dad with his darker complexion. I’d ended up keeping those freckles sprinkled across the bridge of my nose and even my wavy hair when I chose not to flat iron into adulthood. I’d seen many children’s photos of my parents and neither had freckles at all. My features were also quite different from theirs with my slender nose and full cheekbones and I guess I always figured I wasn’t supposed to look just like them. I had small quirks of my own I got to keep, which made me individual. They made me me from the curves of my hips and my height, which was even taller than my dad. Coming in at five foot eight, I was actually taller than both of them, but still believed I’d been the product of the two.
Reality ended up changing when I turned the photo in my hands, and once I did, I felt as if I stepped out of my body once more.
“They’ve come somehow,” the writing said, the words scrolled in red, blood. “Take her far away and let her know even if she wasn’t really ours, we were hers.”
We were hers…
I think I’d see those scrawled, hurried words in my nightmares for a long time.
Seven
Arden
They’d been the second set of people to claim they were “mine” in less than twenty-four hours, these men who couldn’t seem to stop.
These men who were trying to get me away.
We were driving for hours, had to have been because by the time I woke up from the bumps and movement of the literal tank we drove—a black Escalade—the lights were on where there’d been none, the sun out and bright in the sky.
Squinting, I thought I’d blind from it, my head on the seat and my hand tightening.
It tightened around another.
Lucas was sleeping, too, though, not so soundly. It seemed he was just resting his eyes with the way he turned restlessly in the moving vehicle and I knew because as soon as I moved his eyes opened. Gazing down, he extended his fingers to let go.
I didn’t let him.
I closed
my eyes quickly, hoping he didn’t notice I woke up. I had no idea if I grabbed his hand or he grabbed mine, but right now, I needed it. I needed to feel like I wasn’t alone in a car full of men.
His fingers resumed, relaxing, and when he squeezed back, I figured I got exactly what I desired. The last thing I saw before I fell asleep again was something I caught through the cracks of my eyelids.
In the driver’s seat, Derek had his eyes on me through the rearview mirror, his frown on Lucas and me apparent as I closed my eyes.
*
“Your Majesty?”
It felt like only moments later but probably wasn’t, the sun burning my eyes, but not like before. Its glow was higher and I pulled my hair away from my face, sitting up and finding a new world again.
And my what a world.
I questioned being on Earth at first. Especially after what the last twenty-four hours had brought me. I came from a place where concrete was the standard and wildlife even less, rolling waves of crystal blue water and leafy green hills the opposite.
In abundance that was all I saw now, those hills and wildlife plentiful from the birds in the air to the critters on the ground—feral cats. The meowing fur babies weren’t the standard, but they were magical to see nonetheless.
It’d been Elia to speak, holding the door open for me.
“Our safe house for a little while,” he said, holding out his hand. I bypassed it and used the door to get up and out. I may have held Lucas’s hand while I slept but I could pass that off as being in my sleep. Everything with them all was just too… much, and in the end, Elia chose to look past the denial.
His smile firm, he pretended it didn’t happen, but I noticed the frown on his lips after he closed the door behind me. It made me feel weird when I saw it and I looked away, framing my eyes from the sun.
The place was beautiful and definitely nothing as I’d seen, the house on the hill behind the Escalade sizable and large enough to accommodate three people easily, I supposed. Large in structure and even larger windows, the place was an abyss with a barn-style design, a stacked, stone fireplace on the outside with cobblestone rocks that led up to a set of French-style doors. They were open and Elia guided me there, the others not around.
