by Alexia Purdy
“You seem to have found yourself in quite a predicament.”
I snapped my eyes up to Corb, who now stood in front of me like he’d been there the whole time. He looked pristine in his usual black riding outfit, as though he were heading out on a trek with the Unseelie army. His long platinum hair was swept back in several braids while a strand of black hung straight down his back. He was gorgeous and yet terrifying at the same time, not only for being the Ice King but also as the former commander of the Unseelie army. That’s where he’d gotten his liking for black riding gear. Those days were long behind him, but he still favored the look.
“Corb! What is this place?” I demanded. I still wasn’t sure who had sent me here in the first place, but I was willing to bet he knew.
He narrowed his gaze as he stood there, scrutinizing me with his mother of pearl-like eyes which eerily reflected what little light seeped into the cave.
“You don’t know where you are?” He appeared confused that I didn’t know about this place.
“Of course not! Why would I? I’ve never been here before.”
Corb glanced around. “It’s quite unsavory. I would have picked a much more charming atmosphere.”
“What?” I threw him an incredulous look. Was he kidding me?
“It’s a mind prison. A place only an Ancient of Faerie can conjure. Unfortunately, you’ve dragged me in here as well, though my body is not here. I’m just here in spirit.”
What the hell was he talking about?
“What do you mean? What’s a mind prison? I didn’t create it… Arthas threw me in here, and I need to find a way out. Can you please just help me?”
Corb smirked, looking a lot more like the evil creature I’d once known him to be. My soul quivered a moment, feeling icy, as it looked like he wasn’t going to help me at all. I immediately hated that I no longer held the reins of his magic. I’d unbound him before my wedding to Dylan, but it had been useful to have an Ancient on a short leash. Now he was as wild as the magic of Faerie.
“I can’t do anything to help you. It’s a place of your own creation, not mine. Not Arthas’s either. I suspect you’re blaming him in all of this. Besides, you’re not really here, after all. Like I said, this is a prison created for you by your own mind. A place an Ancient goes to when imprisoned or unable to escape physically from a bond.”
My eyes widened. A prison of my own creation? I shook my head. “No, I didn’t do this. Arthas overpowered me, and I woke up here.”
“You think he threw you in here?”
“Yes.” I straightened in my pathetic attempt to look confident in my answer. The truth was, I was more confused than ever. Maybe this fear was what I needed. It was something at least. Something more than indifference.
“You said he overpowered you, and then you found yourself here. Don’t you get it? It’s your safe harbor. When you’re in danger, you can transport yourself to this place. It’s impenetrable to your enemies. He did you a favor, really.”
“No! He’s a monster. I just want to get out of here. This is crazy.”
“It might seem crazy, but it’s a powerful tool to save yourself from harm. As long as you remain here, Arthas can’t touch you or your powers. I’m sure he’s quite upset you’ve escaped to this… cell, even though it seems to me, he pushed you into it.”
“Oh.” I was surprised. “You mean he sent me here on purpose?” Corb nodded. “And I really can make this place anything I want?”
He nodded again.
“Then why does this place remind me of a cell in the Withering Palace?”
“Maybe it was a place you were afraid of but where you also felt safe.”
“That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard,” I scoffed.
He shrugged. “Suit yourself, Shade. I’d like to return to my vessel, if that’s okay with you.”
“Wait! Please don’t go. I can’t be here alone.” I reached out my hand to touch his arm, but it passed right through him.
“I told you, Shade. We are nothing but spirit, unbridled.”
“I can’t do this.”
I eyed him as he gave me a gentle grin. There was the new Corb peering at me now. The kind one. The one I’d rejected because I couldn’t love anyone at all. I was relieved he didn’t harbor any hard feelings for that.
“Shade, it’ll be all right. When you’re ready, you’ll let yourself out. Just be patient. You’ll know when the time is right. In the meantime, you can make this place anything you want. Trust me. All Ancients have been here before, and we all escaped. Just give it a little time.”
“But—”
A moment later, he was gone, replaced by darkness and the sharp pang of loneliness clenching my guts into a knot.
I slipped to the ground once more, tears streaming silently down my cheeks.
Was this… pain? Longing? Emotion? Could it finally be surfacing after all this time? I shook, an ache zinging across my chest and down my fingertips. I cried and cried in the darkness as it poured out of my soul from some pent-up prison inside. It was freeing, as though I had no chains locked around my former self, and I felt all the emotions rushing back into me as I let the tears and hours pass. A good cry had always helped me as a human. Maybe, as a Faerie Ancient, it was nearly impossible to conjure such an emotional outpouring without a trigger.
So this place was a prison of my own making, some other power I had as an Ancient of Faerie. I was here now, and I hoped I could break out with all my soul and emotions intact. Only then could I face the worst of my fears: losing the ones I loved. Maybe, somehow, I could regain their love.
“But how do I get out of here?” I pondered out loud, wiping the tears away. I’d have to escape before I could see if my curse had broken. Looking around, I noticed a small hole in the wall—a keyhole I hadn’t seen before. I crawled over to it and peered through the tiny opening, where faint light streamed in. I couldn’t see anything and groaned as I looked around my chamber for the key.
I searched every corner and crevice but found nothing. How was I supposed to conjure up a key when I had no idea what it looked like? I also had no access to magic here, so that was out of the question. What sort of mind prison would I have made which wouldn’t allow magic? I shook my head, groaning. If I was making my own prison, I would have left a way out that only I could access.
I peered through the keyhole once more, straining to see anything beyond the wall, when a blinking, solid black eye suddenly appeared on the other side. I jumped, scrambling away.
“Who’s there?” I asked, my heart fluttering. I had not expected to see another person here. Was it Arthas? It was my prison, wasn’t it?
“The question is, who is in there?” The woman’s voice sounded familiar in a way, but I couldn’t place it. I racked my brain to remember but came up short.
“I’m Shade. Can you help me get out?”
There was no answer, but I heard a snicker and some shuffling around before a scrape of metal. Was it iron? I cringed, wondering if it would affect me. That was one huge disadvantage to becoming an Ancient; I was now vulnerable to iron metals.
I heard a grunt as the lock shifted, and a section of the wall swung open like a door. I stared in horror upon the figure of Aveta, the former queen of the Withering Palace and the Unseelie armies. She held her hand out and dropped the iron key, blowing on her hand as it sizzled. The key clinked against the cobblestones, but her hand healed quickly from the burn she’d sustained while opening my cell.
The key was iron. Why would I conjure a lock with an iron key? Yikes.
“Aveta?” I whispered, my voice choking in my throat, afraid she was real. Or not real. I didn’t know how to feel about it. She could be just a figment of my imagination.
“Shade.” She peered at me, looking mighty smug. “I was wondering when you’d come here to let me out. It’s been far too long.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Dylan
My love….
I woke to dark
ness, which soon turned into a soft glowing blue as electricity sparked across my skin. I was sleeping on Shade’s old bed, and I could smell her all around me. For a second before I woke, I had felt her lips brush mine as she whispered to me.
But the light emanating from my skin told me otherwise. I lay alone in her bed, which had been moved out of her original room to Anna’s old one. This was Anna’s room, but the bed was all Shade’s.
I sat up, feeling the morning and the Land of Faerie calling to me across the boundaries nearby. Living so close to Faerie had its advantages, at least for elementals. But for a faery who sat just outside their homeland, like me, it was almost torturous. The call to return to its magic ached in my bones like a withdrawal I couldn’t shun. When I’d lived here with Shade without returning to the Teleen Caverns, it had left me morose and broody, missing the magic swirling in the air in Faerie. The human world had its own kind of magic, but it depleted faeries with a ferocity even I couldn’t fight.
I shook my head, rubbing my arms to sling the longing off of me. My body was alert, sensitive to the possibility of Shade nearby. Had she called out to me in my dreams? Had I made it up? I waited to see if her essence would return and seek me out, but nothing happened. I sighed at the silence.
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and groaned. I didn’t have to rest, but when I did, the sleepiness took a moment to wear off. Yet another quest awaited me. I had to return to the Scren to try the spell in the grimoire Ciaran had given me at the archives, but I first had to find out what was happening to humans in Faerie. Something was poisoning them, and I was sure there had to be casualties all throughout the land. If I was going to figure out what to do, I had to consult the greatest oracle I’d ever met: Ilarial.
Showered and dressed not fifteen minutes later, I headed into the living room and kitchen area to find Benton already awake in the dim light of dawn. He had a cup of coffee steaming in front of him. He drank it black without sugar. He was definitely more hardcore than I was; I loved mine smothered with cream and sugar.
“Good morning,” I said, grabbing a mug from the cabinet before filling it with the hot liquid. As I added my cream and sugar, he muttered a response I couldn’t hear, but I knew he was lost in his own thoughts. What was he thinking? What had bothered him so early in the morning?
I took a seat across from him and sipped my coffee, observing him tentatively.
“Okay, what’s going on?”
“What?” Benton finally broke out of his trance and flicked his gaze toward me. “What do you mean?”
“You’re gone, man. Someplace else. Where are you at?” I looked around. “Where’s Isolde?”
“She went on an errand. She wanted to send some care packages to her family and wanted to get to the post office really early.”
“Ah.” I checked my watch. It was eight-thirty. “The post office doesn’t open until nine.”
“Yeah, but it’s not close, remember? We live in Timbuktu here.”
I nodded. “Look, are you all right?”
Benton turned his eyes down to his coffee before shrugging. “I don’t know. I feel like I should be on this mission to find out what’s going in Faerie. I feel like I’m of no use staying behind, even though I want to watch over Anna and James. It’s just….” He sighed.
“You’re not used to sitting still for too long.”
“Exactly!” Benton’s expression lit up. “I can’t stand it. I’m going to go nuts here.”
“Look, maybe it’s a good time to train your brother a bit more in elemental magic. If something goes awry, you guys are going to need any defenses you can conjure up.”
“I suppose so.” Benton slouched once more, gripping his mug tighter. It wasn’t the answer he’d sought, but he was determined to protect his siblings. After a moment, he looked back up, scrutinizing me.
“Have you heard from Shade?”
Besides in my dreams?
I shook my head. “No.”
“Me neither. I guess we really are forgotten now. She’s moved on to better things.”
I exhaled slowly. “I don’t know about that. I think she’s struggling. I think she’s trying to fight an impossible force to get back to us. I don’t know if she’ll win, but Shade would fight. I know she would.”
“Yeah, she would.” Benton bobbed his head in agreement. “I hope she wins. I don’t know if I can keep them safe. I always had Shade to help me.”
“You’ve been doing just fine without her. Trust me. I don’t think she would’ve left as easily if she didn’t know you could handle everything, even though she wasn’t always rational.”
Benton chuckled. “Yeah, well, she may not always have chosen the right paths, but she chose them with us in mind. She sacrificed everything to save Faerie, which meant saving the ones she loved.”
“But Faerie almost killed you guys. How is that saving you?”
Benton’s smile faded as his eyes darkened. I knew speaking of Shade in any bad way wasn’t what he’d want to hear, but the bitterness, no matter how hard I tried to push it away, always crept in.
“There’s no way of knowing what’s going on with that. She’s probably trying to fix it.”
“She’s always trying to fix things. She fixes people, and she fixes everything. Why for once doesn’t she fix herself?” I breathed hard through my teeth, my heart beating hard as Benton stared up at me, his dark expression hardening at my outburst.
“James is sleeping.”
“I’m sorry.” I sighed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know what you meant.” Benton leaned back in his chair, crossed an ankle over his leg, and sipped his coffee. He pulled out his phone and stuck in his earbuds, turning on his music. He was done with our conversation. Even I could take a hint.
I took my coffee and went outside to the back porch, where I sat down and stared into the forest where the border of Faerie lay. I imagined Shade walking at the edge of the foliage and turning to wave for me to join her. Squeezing my eyes shut, I told myself it wasn’t real. I wished it were. For the first time in weeks, my heart ached like the wound had been cut fresh, bleeding crimson all over the ground.
“Shade, where are you?”
I heard a creak on the wooden boards of the deck behind me and quickly sipped the last of my coffee to mask my emotions. I hated being caught in the middle of a heartache. Especially when the person interrupting my thoughts was none other than Nautilus.
I cringed. He had probably heard Benton and me arguing. I wished I could keep my voice lowered when getting upset.
“Hey, Dylan. Are you about ready to head out?”
Good, he was strictly business. Maybe he was all right after all.
“Yeah, I’m good to go. You?”
“Yep, just having a bagel. Isolde and I stopped by that bakery down the road yesterday. Benton said you loved their bagels and cream cheese.”
I looked up, surprised as I took a plate with a sliced and toasted bagel smeared with veggie cream cheese. My confusion must have been noticeable, because Nautilus chuckled.
“Hey, he is your brother-in-law. He cares about you too. Try to go easy on him.”
He turned and re-entered the house as I sat there, baffled. Benton had requested my favorite bagel and spread. He knew me more than I gave him credit for. Suddenly, my determination to solve the riddle of Faerie’s screwed up magic reignited, and I began chewing on the bagel, ready to return to the quest.
Yes, I could do this without Shade. I didn’t want to, but we all had to do things we didn’t want. We were family, after all. And family always stuck together.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Shade
“Aveta?” I stepped back in shock. I wasn’t expecting the long-dead queen of the Unseelie. What was she doing here? I’d thought this mind prison was my creation, and there was no situation in which I would want to conjure up the dark queen.
“Hello, Shade. Not who you were expecting?�
�� She smirked, blinking her oily black eyes. No irises or whites could be seen. She wasn’t the only Unseelie with fully dark eyes. Arthas had the same ones.
“No. You’re not real though.” I was about to walk through her when instead, I bumped into her shoulder. I gasped, jumping backward as I eyed her up and down. “You are real!”
“Of course I’m real, foolish girl. I truly cannot fathom how you took down Arthas when you’re not as bright as I thought you were. It’s a paradox.”
“What are you doing here?”
“You put me here.”
I cocked my head to the side and threw her an incredulous look. “I did not.”
“You did.”
I scoffed. “Why would I do that? I don’t even know how I got here.”
“You shoved me in here when Arthas cut my throat.”
“Yeah. You’re dead. I saw your body burned with my own eyes. You should be ashes.”
“Well, my body died, yes. I suspect you didn’t know what you were doing when you imprisoned me here and somehow yanked my spirit out of my body before I died.”
I closed my mouth, realizing it was hanging open. There was no way I could do that. Never in a million years. I hadn’t been an Ancient when she’d died. How was it possible?
“No. I didn’t do that. I can’t do that.”
“You can and you did.” Aveta exhaled slowly, looking done with my questioning. “Now, if you’ll let me out of this place, that would be perfect.”
“I don’t know how I put you here… that’s if I even did what you’re saying. How would I know how to get you out? I don’t even know how to get me out.”
She pressed her lips tightly together before turning to her left and walking down the hall with her long black dress swishing behind her. She looked immaculate for a dead woman. She still had the colored streaks in her hair which she’d sported when I’d first seen her in a mirror with Ilarial.
