by D. N. Hoxa
“Not all?” I didn’t mean to sound cruel, but I needed to know.
“No, not all,” Julian said. “What do you have in mind?”
“Do they know you’re back?” My heart began to race. If someone from the outside knew we were there, maybe…
“As long as Galladar is here, nobody will be able to get through those doors,” Gerin said.
I’d completely forgotten about him. When Julian wouldn’t even look at me, I realized that Gerin was speaking the truth.
Desperation spread through my mind again. Even if there was someone on the outside willing to help us, they couldn’t.
Closing my eyes again, I went back to Earth. To New York. To Bloomsburg. I was with Amelia and with Bender, and with Lynn, too. I hadn’t been gone long, but I already missed them like I hadn’t seen them in years.
“Rest,” Julian said. “You’re going to need it.”
I agreed. If I was going to figure out how to get us out of there, I was going to need all the energy my body had to spare.
Nineteen
Hours passed. Maybe days? I was in a half-awake, half-asleep state until thirst woke me fully. My throat was dry, my ass hurt and my arms were completely numb. I could barely feel the tips of my toes.
The view in front of me hadn’t changed. All nine fairies and Julian were still tied to the chains and to the ravenstone that made the room glitter. When I forgot where I was, in that short second, that glitter gave me the illusion that I was in a happy place. What an illusion.
“I need water,” I whispered, and even my whisper sounded scratchy.
“Tough luck,” Gerin said. “I’ve needed water for thirty-one days.”
My stomach dropped. Thirty-one days?
“Look at me, Winter,” Julian said.
It took a while for me to be able to take my eyes off Gerin’s pale face. Julian looked like he hadn’t even been imprisoned. His hair was perfect. His skin was perfect. He didn’t even look pale! It wasn’t fair. His hands, up above his head, were stretched wide, and his fingers were pointing towards me. I raised a brow in question.
“Blow your breath,” he whispered.
“What?”
“Blow your breath out. Trust me,” he said.
If I’d had any strength, I would have laughed. Instead, I did as he asked. I opened my mouth, and I blew, feeling fucking ridiculous. When even my lips began to go numb, I stopped.
“Julian, please.” This was not the time to make fun of me, and it certainly wasn’t the place.
“I’m trying,” he said, somewhat desperate. That’s when I noticed that his forehead was shining with swear. “Just do it.”
I wanted to ask what he was trying to do, but the look on his face didn’t let me. Instead, I took in a deep breath, and I blew the air out. Holding Julian’s eyes was hard, not only because he looked like he was trying to come out of his body, but because I felt completely spent. Without water, my brain refused to cooperate. I’d lost all my will.
He never blinked as he looked at me. Eventually, he began to sigh every few seconds. Minutes must have passed. Blowing out the air in my lungs became the same to me as breathing. I could hardly feel any part of my face.
But then, I felt the cold.
Startled, I almost hit my head back on the ravenstone. When I looked down, I began to think I was in a dream.
A thin, blue ice shard was attached to my bottom lip, only barely. What the hell?
“Pull your head back and warm it with your breath,” Julian said, breathing heavily as if he’d been running a marathon.
Still shocked out of words, I pulled my head back carefully and looked up at the ravenstone ceiling. The first drop of water fell on my tongue. I could have cried from joy, but now that I’d tasted water, I was even more thirsty.
Blow, blow, blow, my mind urged me, and warm air came out of my lips in a rush. I didn’t dare move my jaw too much from fear the shard would fall off. Amazing, wonderful water trickled down my tongue and to my throat. My eyes filled with tears. When the ice finally broke from my bottom lip, I caught it with my teeth. Laughing like a lunatic, I licked it like it was my favorite ice cream. Ten seconds later, my thirst was almost completely quenched, and I moved the small ice cube back and forth in my mouth.
“Julian that was…” I didn’t have a word for it. I thought I’d been hurt and in pain before—and I had—but I’d never realized what it was like to be without water. Safe to say I’d never take things like that for granted again.
“Can you do that for me, too?” Gerin said, and Julian chuckled.
The sound was like a wave of energy against my chest. My heart stopped beating for a long second.
“I can open the lock,” I whispered. Holy spell! If Julian had told me that he could do something like this before, maybe we would have already been free! “If you put two shards in my hands, I can use them to open the lock of my chains.”
I was a professional when it came to picking locks. I’d picked the skill up as a teenager and never forgot it.
“I can’t,” Julian said, and he drained all of my joy with that look on his face. “I have to have a source. Something to sustain my magic. It’s why I needed you to blow. My magic was able to latch onto the cold air coming from your lips.”
“But I can blow against my hands.” I pulled my head up and tried it. Cold air touched the palm of my right hand. Yes!
“It’s not going to be enough,” Julian mumbled, shaking his head.
“It is! Come on, try it,” I said, and I blew up at my hands again.
“The witch is right. Try it,” Gerin said, and his voice sounded much stronger all of a sudden.
Julian said nothing, but his sigh told me that he was on it. So I blew with all my strength. The lock of my chains was right between my hands. I could reach it easily. All I needed were those shards.
But the ice didn’t come, and after a long time, my jaw began to block.
Cursing under my breath, I lowered my head. “I need a second.” But it didn’t matter. We could try it again. We had all the time in the world.
“Even if I manage to freeze your breath all the way to your hands, the ice will be too weak. It will break,” Julian said.
“Maybe. But maybe it won’t.” I was betting on the latter.
Adrenaline had already warmed my body. Excitement brought the feeling back to my arms. It dawned on me what amazing things just a little hope could do. Just minutes ago, I thought I was going to die in that place. If you asked me now, I’d tell you that we were getting the hell out of there alive, no matter what.
“How do you plan to get through the guards?” Julian asked. His words brought shivers down my back. He wasn’t being ironic. He wasn’t being funny. He was asking a genuine question.
I grinned. “Through Bone magic, of course. I don’t think Galladar is guarding the door. If he’s not here…” I didn’t see why we couldn’t make it outside.
“But Galladar can use portals in our realm,” Julian said. “If word gets out, he’ll be there before we know it.”
“So we make sure the word doesn’t get out.” I looked at the door and the fairies behind it. Lowering my voice, I continued, though they didn’t look like they were listening to us. “We kill everyone we see, no exceptions.”
Julian flinched. “He has a lot of soldiers.”
“And we have a lot of reasons to live.” That had to be enough. Maybe I was talking bullshit, but I was not going to allow anything to get me down. Not now. If I had a plan, nobody was going to stop me.
“True,” Julian whispered. “And if we don’t make it—”
“Don’t,” I cut him off. “We can’t afford to think like that.”
“But if we don’t, I want you to know that—”
“I’m deeply sorry to bother you, but I could really use some water,” Gerin said.
I looked at Julian, my eyes begging him to continue. What was he going to say? What did he want me to know?
But
with a shake of his head, he turned to Gerin. “Blow.”
Resting my head back, I watched him work his magic, his fingers stretched, sweat dripping down his hairline. He gave everything he had to what he was doing, and it made me smile. I analyzed his face, his thick brows and violet eyes, his lips that still made the butterflies in my stomach go wild, even in that situation. Maybe I’d fallen in love with Julian’s memory, but I’d give everything I had to get to know him more, because something in my chest was sure that I’d fall for the real version of him, too.
“Ready to try again?” he said, calling me back to the present. That’s when I realized that Gerin had an ice shard on his lips and was licking it like a mad man.
“Thank you,” I said to Julian before I could forget. “For the water.”
Red touched his cheeks, and the smile he gave me was made out of wonders. “I should have held you in my arms when I had the chance.”
It was my turn to blush now. “Is that what you wanted me to know?”
But he shook his head. “I wanted you to know how much I regret not coming back to you sooner. Like a fool, I thought time would erase your memory from my mind,” he said. “It didn’t. You came alive for me every night.”
“Julian, let’s not—” waste time, I was going to say, because I was dying from the need to be close to him, to touch him while he said those words to me, but he didn’t let me finish.
“I was also afraid because I thought you’d changed. I thought power had done to you what it does to everyone else. I was wrong about that, too.”
“We’ve both changed.” Life happened for the both of us. It left its prints on us, whether we liked it or not.
“I wish we’d changed together,” he whispered.
“Can you talk about this after we get out of here?” Gerin said, totally ruining the moment again.
Rolling my eyes, I couldn’t help but smile. He was right. Now was not the time to say what needed to be said between Julian and me. But now that I knew how he felt, now that he spoke the words that perfectly described my very feeling and thought of him, I was more motivated than ever. There was no way I’d allow the world to rob me of the end of his beautiful speech. No fucking way.
“What if I try a spell?” I said to Julian. “It probably isn’t going to work, but what if it gives you enough energy for your magic to stick to it?”
Julian thought about it for a second. “It could work if you focus it in your hands.”
I’d always focused all my spells in my hands. Didn’t everybody? But no time for questions now. “Go,” I said to him, and I began to chant an attack spell designed to push the opponent away with a blow of air. I’d only ever tried stirring this spell and putting it in a spell stone—and I’d used it against one of the Hedge witches before—but it didn’t hurt to try.
I focused all of my being and the magic inside my chest to the palms of my hands. I didn’t stop chanting. The words went back and forth in my mind, and I read them out in a whisper. It made focusing easier.
Eventually, after the fiftieth time, my tongue began to tie. I didn’t dare stop. I squeezed my eyes shut and promised to myself that I would continue to chant until I passed out.
But I didn’t need to.
“Winter, it worked,” Julian whispered breathlessly.
My eyes popped open and searched my hands. Two shards, one big and one small, were in them. I hadn’t even felt the cold, but who cared? Without another thought, I detached the shards from my skin and grabbed them in my fingers. The lock was right there, in between the heels of my hands, and I reached the keyhole easily.
My heart beat like crazy. Excitement made me want to throw up. I touched the metal with the tip of one shard and my whole body shook. But the shard broke. It slipped right off my hand and behind me.
“Goddamn it!” I hissed.
“Let’s just rest for a second,” Julian whispered, but I wasn’t having any of that.
“No. Let’s try again. All we need is one.” It should have been easier than the first time. Without warning, I began to chant again, the pain in my jaw forgotten. Freedom was so close, I could taste it. It was even better than water.
A long time passed before I felt my right hand freeze again. By then. The other shard was half gone and water dripped down my arm. It didn’t matter, though. I was going to use it as it was.
With my head back, I looked up. If I saw what I was doing, maybe it would be easier. This time, when I reached the metal inside the keyhole, I didn’t dare acknowledge the excitement.
As if it had read my thoughts, the old shard broke.
I caught half of it.
The small piece of ice now had an even sharper tip where it had broken. I was calling it luck.
When the lock turned, I bit my tongue until I drew blood to keep from screaming.
Free. I was free.
Tears washed down my face as I, as silently as I could with extremely shaking hands, pull the lock off and got my hands out of the thick cuffs.
Neither Julian nor Gerin made a single sound as they watched me, eyes wide and mouths agape. A huge smile took over my face when my hands were in front of my face again. God, it had felt like forever. I could kiss my own wrists if I’d had the time. They were red, the skin almost completely gone where the cuffs had touched me, but I’d heal.
Standing up would be a bad idea. The fairy guards might notice me. Putting the two shards inside my mouth, I slowly dragged myself over to Julian. He still looked at me like he couldn’t believe his eyes.
I left the melting shards on his thigh so I could dry my hands on my shirt and pants. Those little devils were slippery as it was. I nodded for Julian to keep his eyes on the guards while I picked the lock that held the cuffs around his wrists together. I could see what I was doing much better now, but the shards were smaller, the tips rounder. It took me a while before I heard the lock click— and the tip of one shard broke and fell in the keyhole.
When Julian pulled his hands down, he grabbed me by the shoulders, pulled me until I sat on his lap, and hugged me like we hadn’t seen each other in a hundred years.
Surprised, I held onto his arms with all my strength. A sigh escaped me. So this is what I’ve been missing. The world—both the fairy world and ours—were far from right, but in that moment, as Julian hid his face in the crook of my neck and pressed his lips against my skin, it felt right to me.
“If you could free me, too…” Gerin whispered. Pulling my lips inside my mouth, I stifled a laugh. That fairy should get an award for ruining moments.
Julian pulled away from me and took my face in his hands. His wide eyes, pouring violet onto mine, seemed to have the whole world in them, and they sparkled even more than the ravenstone.
“When all this is over, I’m coming back to Earth.”
My mouth fell open and the tips of my toes curled. “You are?”
His answer was a cheeky grin. He was.
Twenty
Three of the other fairies were dead. They weren’t breathing, their hearts weren’t beating, so we concluded that they were indeed gone. The other six, except Gerin, were all unconscious. We took off their locks, anyway. When they woke up, they could get the hell out of there.
Now, we needed a plan to get out of the prison—and preferably the castle. A distraction. Two sets of thick steel bars separated us from the two fairy guards, and who knew how many more were outside? But if we did manage to see the light of day, there were a lot of abandoned houses behind the castle we could use to our advantage.
“My beads,” I whispered to Julian. We’d taken our places again, keeping our arms up, just in case the guards suddenly decided to throw a look our way.
“Go,” Julian said, and with a deep breath, I sent the beads for the steel bars.
Guiding them with my fingers, I slammed them hard against the steel.
The sound that reached our ears was pathetic. The bubble—or whatever was wrapped around them—wouldn’t even let them make a de
cent fucking noise! I turned to Julian, eyes wide with panic.
“If you can get close to the door, far enough from the ravenstone, maybe you can spell them with your Bone magic,” he said.
“But my Bone magic is weak.” The words tasted like dirt on my tongue, but it was the truth. My fairy magic made me strong.
“All we need is a minute,” Julian said, and as if to tell me he was ready, he blew onto his hands, and two small shards with very thin and sharp tips appeared in his palms.
“I’ll throw myself in front of them if needed,” Gerin whispered. More alert than ever, he nodded his head with a smile on his face.
“Are you sure?” I asked Julian because I wasn’t. Not for this.
“We don’t have a choice,” he replied. That was enough of a motivator for me.
Without another word, I rose to my feet and slowly walked to the bars. By the time I made it to them, I was sweating like a pig, my heart hammering in my chest. Julian was right behind me, ready to pick the lock of the first door as soon as I took the fairies down. If I took the fairies down.
I never wanted my magic to work more than I did in that second. Focusing on the head of the guard on the left, I began to conjure Ashes. It was the only spell I knew that worked perfectly, and that would give us enough time to get to them and finish them off with our bare hands.
I chanted the spell, but the guard didn’t even move an inch. I looked at Julian to tell him what a shitty plan this was, but he only nodded. Try again. So I did.
I focused all of my magic in my words. I even dared to close my eyes just to picture the words of the spell in my head, but there was something wrong with my magic. It didn’t rush to lace itself to them like it normally did. Instead, now it stood silent and floated from one side to the other, seemingly uncaring that I was calling out to it with everything I had.
Opening my eyes again, I chose to believe that I was imagining it. My magic worked. It was there, I just needed to unleash it. The guard was right there, twenty feet away from me, and my spell could reach him easily.
