Aurora looks stunned, and even I’ve stopped struggling so intently as I listen with half my attention to this awful story.
“So … everything you’ve always told me,” Aurora says, “about a witch coming to work with Yokshin for a while and then abandoning me there—that was all a complete lie? You never actually wanted me?”
“Me?” The king seems surprised. “No, I didn’t want to muddy our royal lineage. If we didn’t already have Roarke, I most certainly would have said no. But …” He shrugs. “You were a sweet child. Amusing. As long as you played by our rules and kept your mother happy, I didn’t particularly mind having you around. You were like a pet who just happened to have the label of ‘daughter.’”
I look at Aurora and see tears welling in her eyes. “If you’ve kept this from me my whole life, then why bother telling me now?”
“Because, my dear, you stopped playing by the rules. You leaked your brother’s plans, stole one of my dragons, and joined my enemies. And do you know what happens to those who stop playing by my rules?”
A tear rolls down her cheek. Her lips shudder as she answers, “You kill them.”
“I’m glad to see you’ve learned something in your time with us.”
I hear the word ‘kill,’ and I decide I’m done with trying to get this gag off. I know my skills are seriously lacking when it comes to combat magic, but if there’s no other way out of this, then I may as well try. I pull magic from inside of me as quickly as I can. It coalesces above my hand, and I hurl it at the king. Clearly he wasn’t expecting that, because he doesn’t get out of the way in time. My sparks singe through the top half of his left arm, causing him to cry out. Bolstered by the fact that I’ve actually managed to achieve something with my magic, I reach into my jacket for a knife.
But Roarke is way ahead of me. Not bothering with magic, he races across the roof and slams into both of us. Aurora screams as we go down, and Imperia, who I’d somehow forgotten about, roars behind us. I barely have time to wonder why she hasn’t done anything until now—perhaps because she didn’t see Roarke and the king as threats?—before Roarke slams his fist down on my arm, knocking the knife from my grip.
The rooftop shudders from Imperia’s movement. Scorching heat rips through the air as her flames head for Roarke. He pulls away from me and hastily raises a shield of magic above us. Somewhere behind him, the king yells out an angry command in a foreign tongue. The top of the roof shudders again, and Imperia lets loose a grating, wailing sound. The flames stop, Roarke knocks Aurora down again with his fist, and I fumble for another knife. Seeing my hand in my jacket, Roarke lunges for me again—
But something catlike pounces from the edge of my vision and lands on him. A small tiger. Then a panther. Then a blue cat with orange spots. It yowls and screeches and tears at Roarke’s chest. He strikes out with a bolt of bright red magic, throwing the cat through the air above me. Bandit! I shriek inside my head. I twist around to see where he landed and try to scramble toward him.
He begins growing, changing, shifting into my favorite form. Seconds later, a dragon with sleek black scales and burning red eyes stands beside Imperia. And unlike her, Bandit is free to attack anyone he wants on this rooftop. An ear-splitting roar issues from his mouth, followed by a stream of flames. The king darts forward, diverts the flames with a shield, then flings magic right back at Bandit. The magic transforms into glowing arrowheads, and every single one of them pierces through Bandit’s scales.
“Mm-mm!” I shriek from behind the gag. Then something wraps around my ankle and drags me backward. I grab onto vines and roots, but Roarke is stronger, and the plants tear through my fingers. I see the knife he twisted from my hand. I grab hold of it. As he flips me over, I drive the knife toward him. But he catches my wrist, squeezes impossibly hard, then tugs the knife from my grasp.
Aurora, who must have got to her feet while I was scrambling after Bandit, flings herself at Roarke with a wild scream. He shoves her back onto the ground, raises my knife, and brings it swiftly down.
Straight into his sister’s abdomen.
Aurora gasps. I scream behind my gag. Imperia releases a wailing cry.
And then Roarke is tugged roughly away from us. Black and purple hair whips past. A gold arrow zings through the air. I lift myself up in time to see Violet spin and kick, swing a punch, then drive an arrow directly into Roarke’s chest, the words “Not. My. Daughter!” punctuating each move.
Across the roof, Ryn is fighting the king. They’re circling each other amid a swirling blaze of magic. Beside me, Aurora is trying to drag herself away from the fight and closer to Imperia. I move toward her—
And suddenly Violet is crouching in front of me, her wild purple eyes dancing across my face. A glittering blade appears in one hand. She raises it to the sticky substance covering my mouth. “I found you, I found you,” she gasps. “Finally, I found you.” Her guardian blade slices through the gag. I suck in air and—
Roarke looms behind Violet, an arrow still protruding from his chest and his own sword gripped in his hand. He strikes downward.
“FREEZE!” I yell at him, my magically enhanced voice echoing inside my head. And then: “Every Unseelie faerie in and around the Haverton Tower, stop fighting, stop using magic, drop to the ground, and stay there!”
Power races to escape my body. The force of it knocks me forward onto my hands. Then everything becomes still. I raise my head in time to see Roarke’s sword slip from his hands and clatter to the rooftop as he topples down among the plants. Across the roof, the Unseelie King goes the same way.
A beat of silence follows.
Then Vi is pulling me toward her and Ryn is racing across the rooftop, and soon the three of us are kneeling, crying in each other’s arms while Vi repeats, “I can’t believe we found you,” over and over again.
Then another pair of arms squeezes around us, and I catch a glimpse of golden hair. I pull my head back enough to see Calla, and then Chase standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder. And then into the picture crashes Dash, almost knocking Chase over as he swings his arm around him. Then the two of them are laughing, and I’m crying, and tears blur my vision as my family wraps itself around me.
Eventually, I pull away enough to sniff and ask, “Aurora and Bandit? Are they okay?”
“That’s Bandit?” Calla asks.
“Ah, I see the arrowheads in his chest,” Chase says. “He’ll be okay as long as he doesn’t shrink yet. I’ll remove them quickly.”
He hurries toward Bandit as Calla asks, “Did you say Aurora was here too?”
“Yes. Roarke stabbed her in the stomach. And Imperia was here. But …” As I lean to the side to see past Bandit, I realize there’s definitely no other dragon on this rooftop. And if Imperia’s gone, then … “Aurora must have left.”
“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Calla says. “Faeries can survive stab wounds, remember?”
I turn back to face her. I look at Violet, then at Ryn, truly examining their faces for the first time. Their red-rimmed eyes and tear-stained cheeks. Their beaming smiles. These are the faces of my parents.
“Everybody, freeze.”
Ice forces its way into the warmth saturating my heart. Despite being told to freeze, we climb slowly to our feet to face the owner of the voice. Head Councilor Ashlow, with her bow raised, takes slow steps out of the glass room housing the swimming pool. Guardians spill out behind her, two of them raising bows and pointing arrows at us. “Isn’t it nice that we can bag up all the Unseelies and a bunch of Griffin rebels in one afternoon?” Councilor Ashlow says.
“No,” someone answers loudly. From the crowd of guardians behind her, a man steps forward. Perry. And then another—Harryd—the man who rescued us from Noxsom. They walk forward before turning to face their fellow guardians.
“This won’t be happening anymore,” Perry says in a loud voice. “It’s time the persecution of Griffin Gifted fae came to an end.”
“Get out of the way, Perry, before w
e take you down too,” Councilor Ashlow snaps.
“Then you’ll have to take me down.”
“And me,” Harryd says.
“And me,” someone else adds.
Other guardians walk forward, and soon there’s a large enough group of them facing Councilor Ashlow that she appears to reconsider. She lowers her weapon slightly, then says, “Obviously none of you were at the Creepy Hollow Guild when that one walked in.” She points at me. “She is beyond dangerous and should not be allowed to go free.”
“Oh for goodness’ sake,” Perry says. “She only did that because of the way you’ve treated her and her family. And the way you’ve treated others like her for years! You can hardly blame her or any of the others for wanting to protect themselves. And she just saved us, I might add. Or did you think all these Unseelies suddenly decided to stop fighting and lie down because it’s nap time? No. So you’d damn well better let that girl and her family go.”
Councilor Ashlow lowers her weapon. It disappears as she lets go of it. The guardians behind her who have arrows trained on us do the same. “Fine,” Councilor Ashlow says, her jaw jutting forward slightly. “They’re free to go. For now. But this isn’t over yet.”
“No,” Perry says. “It certainly isn’t.” He starts to walk away, but then he backtracks. “One other thing. That tracking enchantment they breathed in? The one that’s forcing some of them to keep moving every few hours so you don’t find them? It needs to go.”
Councilor Ashlow’s mouth presses into a thin line. “You do not get to issue commands to the Head of the—”
“He’s right,” one of her henchman guardians says. Moments ago, he had an arrow pointed at us, but now I watch as he breathes out a long sigh and walks past Councilor Ashlow. He stops just in front of her. “I know how to remove the tracking enchantment.” He looks past Perry and focuses on us. “I can give one of you the removal spell before you leave.”
“Cool,” Perry says. “All sorted.” He strides back into the crowd of guardians, and with that, they all begin to disperse.
With half-smiles and stunned expressions, my family groups together again. Ryn pulls me against his side for another hug. Violet takes my face between her hands and kisses my forehead. “Come on,” she says, reaching for my hand. “Let’s go home.”
Epilogue
Wind streams through my hair and blood races in my veins as Bandit soars through the air above the oasis. From way up here, I’ve got a great view of every part of the Griffin rebels’ home: the giant trees with houses cradled in their branches; the pavilion and hammocks and the various buildings on the ground; the orchard and the playground. The river and the enchanted beach.
A tiny part of me is still waiting for someone to tell me there’s been a terrible mistake. That these people aren’t my family, and that I should be tossed out into the fae world to fend for myself. But the rest of me is daring to accept that I’ve finally found the place where I belong. The rest of me is daring to be happy.
We near the edge of the dome layer, and Bandit banks, then takes a nosedive toward the ground. My heart pounds, and my shriek is lost in the wind. At the last moment, when it seems as though he may crash into the three people waiting for us below, he slows, pulls up, and does another small circle—narrowly avoiding knocking out the pavilion with one wing—before coming around to land.
“That was amazing,” Jack exclaims, clapping his hands as Bandit comes to a stop and I undo the straps of the saddle Chase found for me. “Can I have a turn now?” He looks up at Ryn. “Please, please, please, please, please!”
“Nope, sorry,” Ryn says. “When you’re a little older.”
“But my sister can take me. She’d never let me fall.” He beams at me as I slide down Bandit’s side. I try not to laugh at the way he keeps saying that—my sister. If I were younger, I’d probably keep saying ‘my brother.’ As it is, I keep looking at him, searching for any similarities in the way we look. His hair is different—dark brown streaked with an orange-yellow that he apparently gets from one of our grandfathers—but I wonder if perhaps our noses are the same shape.
Chase walks to Bandit’s side and runs his hand along his smooth black scales as Ryn says, “Okay, I’ll think about the possibility of you riding with someone, but you’re definitely not riding alone until you’re older. And we’ll need to find a saddle that can take two people.”
“Uncle Chase said he has one of those.”
Chase looks around, a guilty expression on his face. I suppress a laugh as Ryn narrows his eyes and says, “Did he, now?”
“I don’t know,” Chase answers in an innocent tone. “Did I really say that, Jack?”
“Yes you did!”
“How about you climb onto Bandit’s back and sit in the saddle?” Ryn suggests. “That’s all I’m allowing at this point.”
As Bandit bends a little lower and Ryn helps Jack get up into the saddle, Chase asks me, “Are you finding the dome high enough? If not, we can take Bandit somewhere else to really spread his dragon wings.”
“Yeah, we didn’t seem to have a problem, so I think there’s enough space here. Well, for now, anyway. When Bandit gets more adventurous, we can try somewhere new.”
“Perhaps he’d like to meet some of our dragons sometime.”
I hesitate for a moment, wondering if I’ve heard correctly. “Wait. You guys have dragons?”
“Not here,” he adds with a laugh. “Back at the mountain. The real mountain, not our little operations center here inside the oasis. There’s a huge cavern inside the mountain, and that’s where our dragons, nascryls and gargoyles live. Other than the gargoyles that now live here. They fend for themselves, and they’re wilder now than they used to be, but most of the dragons and gargoyles still answer to me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about these dragons when I first came here?”
Chase shrugs. “I guess you didn’t tell us you liked dragon riding. In fact,” he adds, “I’m not sure you even knew you liked dragon riding back then. You first rode dragons when you were with the Unseelies, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. That’s true.” I watch Jack patting Bandit’s back as my thoughts turn for a moment to Aurora and Imperia. I haven’t heard anything from Aurora since she vanished from the top of Haverton Tower Hotel two days ago, and Perry says the Guild knows nothing about her either. But I’m convinced she’s alive and well. I think she enjoyed her freedom more than she expected, and she decided to disappear before anyone could take it away from her.
“Hey, Em.” I look to the side as Violet comes toward us. “I saw you up in the sky a few minutes ago,” she says as she puts an arm around my shoulders. “So the dizziness has definitely passed now?”
“Yes, thank goodness.” I loop my arm around Vi’s back and give her a sideways hug, resting my head on her shoulder. When we returned to the oasis after leaving Haverton Tower, dizziness hit me. According to Ana, it was due to overuse of the elixir that stimulated my Griffin Ability. It came in waves, each one not quite as bad as the one before it, and by this morning, it felt like it might finally be gone for good. “If I can sweep through the air and plummet toward the ground and still feel great by the end of it,” I say, “then I think the dizziness is definitely gone.”
“Fantastic. Flying on Bandit looked like amazing fun. Do you think he’d mind if I took him for a ride sometime?”
“No, I’m sure he’d love it.” I lift my head from her shoulder. “So you like dragon riding too?” In the same way that I keep examining Jack and the rest of my family members for any physical resemblance between us, I keep looking for other things we might have in common. Similar likes or dislikes or skills.
“Yes, I’m definitely a fan of soaring the skies on the back of a dragon,” Violet says. “Remind me to tell you about Arthur at some point. He was seriously cool.”
“The list of stories I’m supposed to remind you about is getting longer and longer.”
Her beautiful purple eyes sparkl
e as she laughs. “Just wait until we get to our other celebrations outside the oasis when you meet your grandparents. Loads more stories are going to come up.”
My smile feels impossibly wide as I say, “I can’t wait. Oh, and speaking of celebrations, do you need help with any picnic stuff?”
“Thanks, that would be great. We just need to get all the food down to the beach.” She leaves her arm around my shoulders as we head for the tree houses. “Ryn said he and Chase will move the chairs, blankets, games and all that. Calla was going to help me with the food, but she’s gone to fetch Perry.”
“Fetch him? Has he never been here before?”
“No, he actually hasn’t. It’s never been necessary for him to come here, so we decided it was safer if he didn’t know anything about our haven.”
“But now?” I ask. “Do you really think things are safer now?”
“Honestly, I think it would always have been safe for him to know the location of this place. The protection we have on the oasis is pretty much unbreakable. But I guess things do feel a little safer now. The real reason he’s finally coming here, though, is because we really wanted him to join our celebration. He knew about you back when we all thought you died, so he’s obviously excited about that. And he’s busy doing so much to help make this world safer for Griffin Gifted fae. Not to mention all the risks he’s taken for us over the years. I feel like we have a lot to celebrate with him.”
I nod as we reach the spiral staircase leading up and around the tree. And then, since Ryn taught me yesterday how to launch myself up these stairs with magical super speed, Vi and I decide to race each other all the way up to her house. We’re neck and neck the whole way, until I smack my hand against her front door split seconds before she does. Then I turn, gasping for breath, and ask, “You didn’t let me win, did you?”
“Let you win? Emerson.” Vi places her hands on her hips as she catches her breath. “Clearly you have no idea yet how competitive I am.”
I grin. “Awesome. You know what? We should go into a city sometime and race each other, parkour style, like Val and I used to do.” At the thought of Val, though, my smile slips. I turn away and push the door open into Vi and Ryn’s kitchen, wondering when I should go and visit her. I haven’t seen her since the night I discovered her connection to Ada, but I meant it when I told her I understand why she did it. And she’s the closest friend I’ve ever had, so we should probably try to make amends. I have no idea how much she’ll remember about magic and the world I now live in, given that the Guild’s memory-altering enchantment has finished spreading. Everything that came before the tear in the veil, I hope.
Rebel Faerie Page 28
