Flightless (Fairy, Texas Book 2)

by Margo Bond Collins

I knew that was the truth of my heart.

  Whatever was wrong with me—whatever it was inside me, making me feel so violently angry with Laney, it wasn’t real. It was a sickness.

  This—the fear that I might not survive if Laney didn’t make it through whatever stupid move she had made in a misguided attempt to save us all—was real and true.

  “Please,” I whispered, bending over her head in my lap to see if I could feel her breath on my face, “don’t leave me. I love you, Laney.”

  I don’t know if my words had any actual effect, or if it would have happened anyway, but at that moment, she drew in a huge, gasping breath, and her eyes popped open.

  My relief was short-lived, though. When she turned her gaze on me, her eyes blazed with a pure white light, like the light I had seen centered on her torso in the ethereal, but intensified.

  Without speaking, she rose to standing in one fluid motion.

  I scrambled to my feet after her. “Laney? You okay?”

  She turned that stare on me again, and this time I had to shade my eyes against it. When the light blinked out, I realized she had shifted into the ethereal, and followed her instantly. Even so, I was almost too late to see her as she left, flying through the ether—without a word, and more to the point, without wings. As she had in the battle against Bartlef, she simply moved through the air as if it were her element.

  And I remained flightless.

  Anger threatened to flare up again, but I pushed it aside. That would have to wait. Right now, I needed to call Mason.

  Wherever Laney was headed, it was back toward town.

  Someone needed to be on hand in case we needed to stop her from going full-on nala, and last time, Mason had been the only one who could do that.

  The only one who could keep her from turning into the monster I knew she feared becoming.

  Chapter Eleven

  Laney

  The world glowed.

  More colors flowed from everything around me than I had ever known existed, a riotous explosion of power, everywhere I looked.

  Except for a few places.

  One of them was Josh’s chest, the place of that cancerous vortex, sucking away at the energy around him and converting it into slow death.

  But Josh could wait. He had it under control, at least for now.

  Farther away, there were some other places of darkness. They were distant, however—threats to be dealt with another day. I dismissed them, as well.

  That left one.

  Thomas Gunn.

  I felt the deep black of his soul tugging at me, provoking an ambivalent reaction, part horror, part fascination.

  That blackness wasn’t like what was in Josh. It wasn’t a cancer eating away at Gunn. It was what a cancer like that might leave behind, when it had taken over and left nothing of goodness or light behind.

  And it called to me.

  Fine. I would follow it.

  Moving through the ether was suddenly as easy as thought, like a muscle memory I hadn’t known I had.

  I remembered how to fly.

  * * *

  Gunn landed at Fairy High School. I was absolutely certain it couldn’t be good. He left a trail behind him, glowing a blackened red, full of evil intention.

  It led straight to the gym, disappearing behind the closed metal doors. But I knew he was there.

  I heard the screams.

  I shoved open the double doors with all my strength—which evidently, when I’ve OD’d on fairy go-juice, is quite a lot, because they crashed into the walls on either side with an audible crunch. I imagined cracks running up the cinderblock walls.

  I didn’t look, though—all my attention was on Gunn, who held one girl by the throat. I didn’t know who she was, but from the colors of the power rolling out of her and into him, and from the hazy glow of wings I could see when I glanced into the ether, she was one of the People.

  My father had apparently interrupted girls’ basketball practice.

  A group of teenagers huddled in a corner, and an adult woman in gym shorts and a t-shirt lay passed out on the floor—I could tell she wasn’t dead by the way she glowed with life, but she wasn’t moving.

  Everyone except Gunn and his immediate victim had turned to stare at me when I crashed through the doors, and few of the girls began sobbing. Only two or three of them were fairies. The rest were terrified humans, as afraid of me as they were of my father. It flashed through my mind to wonder what I looked like, but I dismissed the thought. I didn’t have time to waste.

  I pitched my voice to carry. Like my strength when opening the doors, Oma Elaine’s herbs amplified it, so it boomed through the room. “Put her down, Gunn.”

  He looked up at me and laughed, his mouth an ugly slash across his face. In the ethereal, it even looked like blood on his lips.

  With a negligent motion, he tossed the now-unconscious teenager across the room. Where she landed next to the coach. She wasn’t dead, either, but her life-glow had dimmed to almost nothing.

  “I’d rather have you, anyway,” he said, circling around as if trying to get closer to me.

  I stepped to the side, unwilling to turn my back on him.

  “I wasn’t sure until now,” he said. “But the rumors were true. You’re nala.”

  Without answering, I took another step, working to put myself between the basketball players and Gunn. I glanced at the other exit, but it was chained, with some kind of heavy-duty padlock holding it closed.

  Maybe if I could get to it, I could use my newfound strength to rip off the chain.

  Gunn and I eyed each other warily, still circling. I felt a moment of triumph when I moved to block him from getting to the whimpering girls in the corner.

  Then one of the double doors behind Gunn opened a crack, and Kayla slipped inside the gym.

  No. We were just beginning to really get along.

  I would not allow him to hurt her.

  “Why does it matter if I’m nala?” I asked Gunn, working to keep his attention off of Kayla.

  My stepsister began sliding along the wall, and I watched her out of my peripheral vision. If she could get to bleachers, she could slip behind them and make her way to the terrified basketball team.

  “You don’t know anything, do you?” Gunn asked. “I want your power.”

  “So you, what? Lured me here by attacking a classmate?”

  “Exactly.” Gunn’s vicious smile spread.

  Ugh. I had hoped to draw him out into some sort of villain monologue, get him talking about his evil plan. But he seemed disinclined to discuss his intentions very much.

  Okay, then. I would have to keep his attention on me by doing the talking. “You can’t have anything of mine.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kayla emerge from behind the bleachers.

  Time to move.

  “Not unless you let everyone else leave. Then we can talk about it.” I moved forward and glanced at Kayla, waving at her to get everyone moving.

  Gunn stepped up close to me, blocking my path. “No one is going anywhere.”

  My voice dropped so low that he had to lean forward to hear me speak. “You can’t stop me.”

  The ugly smile on my father’s face grew wider, and he began to glow, the same way Josh and Mason did just before they shifted to the ether—but his glow was tinged in darkness, somehow, a glow so dark that it looked red. “Want to bet?”

  Without further warning, he reached out and took my head in his hands.

  For the second time that day, my world exploded.

  * * *

  Excruciating pain swirled through the light that poured out of me and into Gunn.

  It had probably only been a few seconds, but the agony of his touch made it seem like longer.

  Wrenching myself away from him was harder than it should have been, given the boost I had gotten at Oma Elaine’s.

  Then again, he had just drained a lot of that extra power.

  When I opened my eyes, I discovered
Kayla pulling on my waist, helping get me away from Gunn.

  Gunn threw his head back and laughed aloud as I reeled away, trying to reach down to find what magic I had left.

  I still needed to save these people.

  Even if Gunn had stolen what I had been counting on to use against him.

  I concentrated on pulling my own power into my body, just as Oma Elaine had taught me. I could feel that power roiling just outside of my reach. I knew that if I could only pull hard enough, I could draw it into myself.

  As it was, only the tiniest trickle made its way into me.

  Frustration foamed up inside me, filling up the spots that should have been bursting with fairy magic.

  Gunn watched me, his dark smile getting broader and darker.

  Bastard.

  Glancing around the room, I looked for a way out.

  None, of course. In my attempt to protect the girls still cowering and crying in the corner, I had fixed it so Gunn blocked the only exit.

  I waited for him to pull us into the ether, where he would have even more access to his stolen power—or at least, for him to flash his wings. I would be the only one here who could see them, of course. But it was the sort of thing he would do in his attempt to intimidate me.

  Instead of flashing his wings in the ether, though, he stretched out his arms and, with a strange flourish that seemed to suck all the air out of the room for an instant, he popped his wings into existence on this side of the ethereal line.

  The combination of red-black glow and giant bat wings definitely made him appear more demon than fairy. I could see how the People had gotten the additional, hellish nickname.

  As he stepped forward, I heard several gasps from behind me and the sound of people scrabbling back, away from Gunn.

  Instinctively, I threw out one hand, palm forward, and without any thought at all, I felt power roll through me, creating a translucent barrier between us and Gunn.

  Bartlef had done something similar the night he died. His power had been freezing cold; he had created an entire wall of ice to try to keep me contained.

  It didn’t work out so well for him.

  Would using my powers work out any better for me?

  Maybe the more important question was how much of this power was mine, and how much was left over from Oma Elaine’s herbal mix?

  I didn’t have long to contemplate the possibility. Not with my stepsister in the room.

  “What the actual fuck?” Kayla didn’t sound frightened, and she wasn’t moving away from Gunn. Instead, she stepped up beside me and pitched her voice so only I could hear. “What is that thing?”

  “Which thing?” I was afraid to take my attention from spooling the magic around me through my hand and out to the barricade I had created.

  “The monster-dad thing. I can see what the wall is.” Although I couldn’t see her, I could practically hear the eye-roll behind Kayla’s words.

  I puffed out my cheeks and tilted my head, then glanced at my stepsister. “Oh. That thing? Apparently, I’m from a line of fairy-vampires.”

  She waved her hand, one manicured finger pointing first up and down, and then back and forth, in order to take in the entirety of the creature on the other side of the wall in front of us. “So, do you think your mom knew about this … abomination… before she was with him?”

  Her question surprised a laugh out of me. “I have no idea.”

  She managed to quit looking at him long enough to give me a serious side-eye. “You get any of that?”

  That was a good question. “Again, I have no idea.”

  “Seems like it might be a good time to find out.”

  The strain of keeping the barrier up was beginning to tell on me—either that, or I was simply tired of Kayla trying to boss me around. “What are you going to do to help?”

  Stepping up so I would be sure to see her, Kayla examined her fingernails. “Other than getting Mason to drop me off so I could check on the school while he went to get the Council? I thought I’d make sure everyone on our side of that wall has a plan to take him down if he gets past your defenses.”

  For the second time in as many minutes, my bitchy stepsister had made me laugh. If she wasn’t careful, I might actually start to like her. “You have your phone?”

  She shook her head. “First thing I tried when I realized what was going on. I think he’s blocking the signal somehow.”

  “Great. Well, then. You go muster the troops, train the cadets, whatever.”

  “Perfect. You keep working on being our first line of defense.” Her tone was as snarky as ever, but she placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed before she headed back to the group of girls huddled in the back corner, where she began organizing a group of high school kids into a demon-fighting force.

  We hoped.

  In the meantime, I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to hold him off forever. What I didn’t know is if I could pull on the same forces he did, find some way to manifest my own powers in this world.

  I don’t have wings.

  The thought made me blink.

  It wasn’t entirely true. I had never seen my wings, either here or in the ethereal.

  But I had flown over here. The night I drained the power from Bartlef and Biet and killed them, I had flown, too—or done something like it, anyway.

  And after Sarah’s funeral, I had developed a photograph she had taken—not a digital one, but one on actual 35mm film—and there had been the image of two giant, dark shadow wings stretching out behind me.

  After I saw it, I tore it into tiny pieces and threw them into several different trash cans and recycling bins all over the school.

  For months, I had tried not to think about that picture too hard, but now I tried to remember exactly what it had shown.

  The wings in the photograph were definitely like the ones of the People.

  In that picture, I had Fairy wings, just like the ones I had seen on Bartlef the first days I had walked down the halls of Fairy High School.

  So what did that mean?

  If I didn’t know how to see them—if no one else had ever seen them—could they even be real? And if they were real, what did that mean about the rest of my powers? Would I be able to do even a fraction of the things Bartlef could?

  It was beginning to look like I was about to find out, whether I wanted to or not.

  Chapter Twelve

  Laney

  I have no idea what I’m doing.

  Of course, Gunn didn’t need to know that.

  For all he knew, I had taken out Bartlef with my well-honed, fine-tuned skills, developed through years and years of training.

  Yeah, right.

  But I could pretend. Fake it ’til you make it, and all that.

  Okay, then. Here goes.

  Carefully, deliberately, I stopped pulling the magic through me, then froze the line of power leading from me to the wall.

  Gunn narrowed his eyes as he watched me from the other side, our view of each other slightly blurred by the swirling, slightly blue shimmer between us. As I stepped closer, I imagined the barrier between us hardening, becoming solid.

  As much as I hated to close my eyes with him watching me, I drew in a breath and let the wall in my imagination become the one in reality. As I let out the breath, I blew power into the vision.

  The spinning blue swirls in the partition dividing the room slowed, then stopped. The entire structure grew more opaque, like ice freezing.

  When I reached out to touch it, though, the wall wasn’t cold. It was cool and smooth, like plastic, or maybe glass, but harder.

  I rapped on it with my knuckles, the solid thumps echoing through my part of the room. Trailing my fingers across the surface of the barrier I had created, I walked the length of it, breathing power into its solidity. When I was certain that all of it was as solid as I could make it with my thoughts alone, I walked back to the center point, where Gunn glared at me through the distorting swirls frozen inside the wal
l.

  I knew what I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure I was even capable of it.

  I could almost hear Oma Elaine’s voice. Don’t think about it. Just do this thing you wish to do.

  I had solidified the wall almost as much to give myself the chance to do this as I had to keep Gunn on his side of it.

  Just do this thing I wish to do.

  But how to start?

  Breathing.

  That had been the key to solidifying the wall just now.

  And pulling on someone else’s power had been the key to what I had done to Bartlef.

  In both cases, I had burned with anger.

  Fine. I was the People’s nala. I could draw on my rage to suck the life out of other fairies and drop their broken bodies onto the floor beneath me. I could create a wall out of nothingness. Surely I could bend one man to my will, even if that man was my father, and also a nala.

  I closed my eyes.

  All I had to do was keep breathing as I remembered exactly how angry I was at Gunn for everything. For Oma Elaine, first. For terrifying my friends—and family, I thought, glancing back at Kayla, who was still giving the terrified girls in the back her version of a pep-talk. For leaving me when I was too little to even remember him. For coming back when I was too old to want to know him. And for coming back only because he wanted to take what he thought I had.

  Thomas Gunn had taken enough from me.

  He had given me nothing—other than a few cells, maybe some genetic tendencies, he had never offered me anything.

  Kayla’s father had done more than that for my mother and me.

  I needed to be able to take Gunn out of the equation. This man could not be part of the future of Fairy, Texas.

  He wouldn’t go on his own, I knew that—not as long as he thought there was a chance he could gain something from being here. Like Bartlef, he wanted power.

  And like Bartlef, he couldn’t be allowed to have it.

  All these thoughts slammed through me, pushing me down, hitting me harder and harder, until I knelt on one knee on the ground, my head bowed.

  Through the thick plasticized barrier, I heard Gunn laugh. “Having trouble keeping your wall up, little girl?”

  With that, I lifted my head and met his gaze with my own.