by Leigh Evans
It damn well hurt. I struck out blindly, the side of my hand meeting hard bone, and then I gasped and curled in pain. My ribs were broken.
I’m back in real time and things hurt just as badly here as they do in Threall.
Reality sucks.
“I’d say she’s breathing on her own now,” Mouse said.
Yeah? Well, breathing suddenly got incrementally harder, because on the heels of that pronouncement I was dragged onto a pair of hard thighs and I found myself being held tightly—way too tightly—and rather violently rocked.
“Ribs,” I croaked.
His grip eased.
Trowbridge was alive and strong and now making an effort to cradle me gently in his arms. This was a good thing. I squeezed open an eye. I saw this—my mate’s corded throat splattered with Fae blood, and the shadowed walls of the mage’s room.
Some of my jubilation dimmed.
Well, Hedi, you’re still in Merenwyn.
Gone were the battle sounds—the grunts, the growls, the high-pitched cries. However, the land of the Fae wasn’t silent, at least not in the wizard’s lair. I could hear Trowbridge’s harsh breathing and beyond that the oddest hum.
I pushed slightly against Trowbridge’s chest, and he eased me away with acute care, like I was broken or fragile. Which I’m not—recent events having proven that I’m nearly indestructible.
A ring of faces looked down on me. Mouse, with Gwennie peeking over his shoulder. Danen, with his expression set to grave. Brutus and Lily wearing Super Bowl smiles.
I tested my voice. “Did we win?”
“We won.”
Gwennie shrank back as a wolf—dark snout, bushy tail—thrust himself into our midst. Lolling tongue. Blood on muzzle. Battle-gleam in his amber eyes.
I did not know him. “Who’s this?”
“My son, Tenu,” said Danen proudly. “One of our best hunters.”
Uh-huh.
The wolf had a wide face and a scent far more pungently lupine than any Creemore wolf I’d ever spent some time with. Tenu stretched his neck to sniff at Varens’s moccasin, then darted back when Trowbridge rumbled a warning.
This is my life now. I will be sniffed; I will have no privacy.
I looked up at the man who held me.
Blue eyes glared down at me, the comets in them as bright as the stars.
It could be worse.
“You wouldn’t wake up,” Trowbridge growled. “Your heart was beating so slow I couldn’t hear it until I put my ear to your chest.” His fingers dug into me. “Is that the end of it? No more going to Threall? Because if—”
“I’ll never go back,” I whispered. “I shut that place down.”
Which was more or less the truth. For centuries, the mages had searched for those born with a gift to mystwalk. Now there were no more mages left and, for at least a generation or two, none to step into the Old Mage’s empty shoes. Plus, given the scary stories and attrition rates associated with being a mystwalker, I couldn’t imagine a lot of people voluntarily going there. From infancy they would have heard and believed the tales spun on their mothers’ knees: Threall was a terrible place, with curved tentacle hooks that never let go.
Home to women who were lost and slightly mad.
My gaze moved from Trowbridge’s, taking in the disaster left in the wake of the explosion. Broken bottles, cracked crockery, strewn straw, a dead mage, and an overturned pine table.
Then suddenly I remembered taking Merry from my neck. Placing her down on the window ledge, turning from her, preparing the blast.
Goddess.
“Where’s Merry?” I whispered.
That’s when she spoke, and my thudding heart forgot how to beat all over again.
“I am here,” she said.
* * *
Imagine hearing an angel speak. A voice like a crystal bell quivering in the gentle wind.
My gaze had flown, searching for the source of that sweet voice, and had found her.
“You’re so small,” I said.
“Shut up,” she sang.
“You’re like the size of a Barbie.”
Absolute truth. Like the pose-able doll, Merry was all long hair, small waist, tits, and ass, but that’s where the similarities ended. For despite her lilting speech, my bestie had attitude written all over her. And instead of being Malibu blonde she was the burning shades of maple leaves in fall, brown skinned, her rippling curtain of dark hair streaked with vibrant oranges, searing yellows, and fiery reds. She wore a scowl and a simple long gray-taupe dress.
Lovely. Merry was utterly lovely.
I blinked, then searched for Lexi and found him slumped against the wall, his legs spread out. Soot on his jaw. A scorch-mark on his shoulder. His wound had stopped bleeding. His wolf was healing him.
“Hey,” I said.
Lexi looked at me for a long moment. “It’s so quiet,” he said with an air of discovery.
“That’s how it should be,” I told him. “Can you walk?”
“Of course I can,” he replied, a Stronghold through and through.
I turned back to Merry.
“I want to get this over with.”
Two tiny perfect eyebrows raised in query. “Ready?”
For what?
She rolled her shoulders forward; then with a grimace, she snapped them back.
My mouth dropped open. “You have—”
Her finger lifted in warning. “Not. One. Word.”
I said two.
“Angel wings!” I crowed. “You’re like every myth come to life. You’re the real Tinker Bell, complete with the—”
I jerked back in alarm as the appendages in question blurred in indignation, hummingbird fast. She zoomed upward until we were more or less nose to nose and eye to eye. She had soft brown irises and large pupils.
“Snap out of it, Peacock,” she said, dead serious. “You have a window open, but it will close soon. Do you hear me? It will close soon.”
Automatically, I glanced to the mage’s window. Night had fallen; the stars were shining. “How long was I gone?”
“Too long,” said Trowbridge. “At least a half hour.”
It had been minutes in Threall. None of the time lines synched.
A form flitted past the window, then returned to hover. The Asrai stared at me, arms folded, wings blurring. He was Ken-sized, wearing a blue jacket, thigh-high boots, and what was either a pair of hose or some really tight pants. His hair was white, and it flowed down past his hip.
“Ralph?”
He dipped his head in a curt nod. And with a small motion I knew all I needed to know. But in honor of my mom, who was a princess and a woman who always had a gracious word, no matter what the provocation, I said, “Thank you for all your help.”
His eyes shone white.
That’s creepy.
I was glad when he flew away.
My friend Merry had tiny, tiny white teeth. “You must leave. Now. We could kill only those we could reach. Those who are blinded will recover soon and your chance to leave this world will end. There are three miles of Fae land to cover before your people are safe.”
“Agreed,” said Trowbridge. “Mouse, if you’ve got people you want to bring, you get them now.” He gazed at me. “Ready to book it to the Safe Passage?”
Oh hell yes.
* * *
Lexi was unsteady on his feet, so the best horse in the Royal Court’s stable carried him all the way to the Gatekeeper’s swaying rope bridge. And there, in front of his Merenwynian pack, my lover did something extraordinary. When Brutus moved to help Lexi off Jaden’s personal mount, Trowbridge stopped him.
“I’ll do that,” Trowbridge said.
He didn’t say that Lexi was forgiven for his dark past. He didn’t have to. The pack watched as the Son of Lukynae looped my brother’s arm over his shoulder, and then they followed their Alpha, and Lexi, and me across the swaying bridge and up the mountain, all the way to the narrow stairs cut into the rock
face and from there up to the wide ledge that looked over a vista of improbable beauty.
I understood another truth during that hurried retreat to the Safe Passage: what people do means more than what people say.
And perhaps Merry figured that out too, because she stayed beside me, her wings a golden blur, her presence a continuation of a lifetime of belligerent devotion. Yes, she stayed by my side—seeing me all the way to my own freedom—but she didn’t sit on my shoulder. She hadn’t touched me, not once, since she’d gained hers.
An uneasy silence had fallen between us.
She was the being who’d witnessed every good thing I’d ever done—a ruefully short list—and all the bad things I’d ever done: the thefts, the lies. She was the sister who had been there for all weak moments in my life, to comfort me through the whimpers, the tears, and the fears.
I knew that I was going to lose her.
I was both glad and heartbroken.
* * *
It’s ridiculously easy to open the Safe Passage once you have the right word and the right coin. I paused to toss another pebble through the cave’s mouth. The wind caught the piece of quartz and took it fast, and judging from the pings and dings echoing down the black tunnel and the sudden sweet burst of scent that followed the eventual silence, the current had carried the small stone all the way back to the Peach Pit.
I inhaled deeply. “Smell that?”
Trowbridge nodded. “Apple pie.”
I blinked hard against the sudden burn in my eyes.
“You go first,” Trowbridge said. “Show our pack the way. I’ll watch for the Fae, and be the last through.”
Oh Goddess, this was it.
I looked over Trowbridge’s shoulder to where Merry hovered. The motion of her wings caused her hair to feather. It was bewitching to watch, as colorful as the maple trees in the fall when their leaves rustle in the wind.
Trowbridge rubbed his mouth. He jerked his head at Lexi and Danen. “I need to talk to you before we start the evacuation. Let’s take a little walk.” He led them to the edge of the promontory. Mouse kicked a clod of dirt, then followed.
Chapter Thirty-one
“Alone at last.” I lifted my shoulders at Merry, helpless in the need to find the right words to say. I needed good ones, multi-layered and multi-meaning. Ones that were easy to say because I had a freakin’ lump in my throat.
She flew closer, bridging the gap between us until she was so close I could have balanced her on my palm if I’d lifted it and turned it upward in appeal. I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I looked past her, to the trees. “You’re not coming with us to Creemore, are you?”
“No,” she replied, her voice a musical sigh.
I couldn’t get used to hearing her talk. I’d imagined her voice so many times—my fantasies providing her with a gruff growl or perhaps a rasping purr. Never once had I given her a celestial one. And yet why hadn’t I?
She’d been my angel with bloody knuckles.
“This is where I belong.” Her arms rested by her sides, oddly lax. Those years of forced immobility had left her stiff. Perhaps one day her limbs would move as fluidly as her amulet once did.
I just wouldn’t be there to see it.
“I don’t see Ralph anywhere,” I said with a touch of bitterness. He’d stayed long enough to make sure that the King of the Royal Court was thoroughly dead—according to Trowbridge Ralph had taken a piss on Jaden’s body—before he’d flown away, without so much as another kiss-my-royal-ass good-bye. “Couldn’t he have waited to accompany you home?”
Unless she wasn’t welcome home. And if that was the case, then—
“I don’t need to be led home,” she said.
I picked up another pebble and jammed it into my pocket. “I don’t either.”
Silence greeted that.
I glanced to her.
She looked away first, refocusing her gaze on Merenwyn’s hills. “It’s so green,” she mused. “I’ve seen everything through brown glass. The colors of my home world almost hurt my eyes.”
My grip tightened on the stone.
“The Asrais have been without the prince’s leadership for a dozen or more of your lifetimes,” she said, returning to subject of Ralph. “He has returned to gather them into a strike force.”
“Lucky them.”
Her profile was to me, but her mouth lifted in a faint smile. “The Royal Court has, to use your language…”—she paused to make a deliberate switch into English—“got their asses kicked. This is a wonderful opportunity for my people.”
“The Asrais are going to war?” I asked.
“We’ve always been at war.” Her gown swirled as she pivoted back to face me. “It is our way.”
“You’re too good for him,” I told her, meaning Ralph.
“I know.”
“He doesn’t deserve you.”
“I know that too.”
“And if he doesn’t—”
She interrupted me. “There are people I have missed,” she said. “Ones that mean the world and beyond to me. I’m going to find them, and when I do, I will stay among them for the rest of my life. I don’t want to travel anymore.”
“Your family.”
“My loved ones.”
Did she have a Trowbridge? “You’ve missed them.”
“Always.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.
And then, because she was who she was despite how she looked—and that meant forever fiery, feisty, and impatient—and because she would always be who she was, whether imprisoned inside a hunk of amber or free to roam the worlds, my dearest friend delivered upon my cheek one of her trademark slaps.
“What was that for?”
“Don’t get weepy on me. For I can’t cry. None of the Asrais can.”
Perhaps not but they can express themselves. As I watched, the hues that twisted in her hair—the burnt browns, the bright golds—became suffused in a warm flush of red.
“That changing-color thing—that was never part of being enchanted, was it?”
“No,” she said simply.
The color of love is, and shall always be for me, a deep hearth red. The same shade I’d seen beating from the heart of Merry when I was just a dumb kid, scared of the shadows in my bedroom, and all I had was her light.
A red, protective, loving glow.
I swallowed against the hurt in my throat. “I’m going to miss you forever.”
Her mouth thinned in pain; then she said in a tone so low that I knew only I could hear her, “Try not to get into too much trouble. I won’t be there to fix you anymore.”
“I know.”
“We do not say that we love,” she whispered.
I nodded.
She didn’t say good-bye; she just patted my face again—an angel’s kiss—before she flew away. I held on to my tears until she was naught but a tiny fading light in a sky full of celestial lights.
She was going home.
It was time for me to do the same thing.
THE LEAP HOME
I took one big step into the portal, holding Lexi’s hand, leaving behind my love, and the gathered throng waiting to take that fateful step into the Safe Passage.
The first twenty feet of the windy ride back home were horizontal and painless. Then, the Safe Passage curved sharply downward and Lexi and I were free-falling.
Lexi and I plummeted in absolute dark, with no sense of how long our descent would be. I’d used up all my breath on my first shriek and was sucking in the required oxygen for my next when I saw a faint light below. That source of illumination grew as we whistled toward Earth, and made it possible to note the Safe Passage’s walls in better detail.
They were highly polished.
I thought I saw shadows moving behind their reflective surface and I swear, I heard people crying from behind that smooth wall of rock. Those lost cries should have wrung pity from me, but all I could think of was this: Get me the hell out of here. I want to go home. B
ack to Ontario, and the Trowbridge manse, and even the League of Extraordinary Bitches. Please, my kind and wondrous Goddess, return me to the small-world worries of Creemore, and let me enjoy once more the blessed world of cars, and refrigerators, and chlorinated water that came out of a tap.
Yup. Totally done with the hero shit.
Lexi’s legs were longer; thus he hit the ground first with a grunt and a pillow of dust. My own landing was a trifle softer—mostly because I fell on him. He swore in Merenwynian, then choked out, “Move your knee.”
My knee complied, which earned another pained hiss from my twin.
Four shallow stairs led to a doorway and my own particular promised land. Through it daylight spilled and blue skies beckoned. Cold air stretched icy fingers toward us, announcing that it was late fall in Ontario.
Home, home, home.
I shoved Lexi playfully aside to double-time up those stairs. But since I knew what obstacles were waiting for us aboveground—the preserve of stone statues, the miniature train tracks, the chain-link fence, the total glory of the Peach Pit—I slowed down as soon as I cleared the last step.
My twin didn’t. He’d found his second wind, and he thought he was home, you know? He could smell pie. And earth. And—
Lexi skidded to a stop a scant five inches from the iron rails. He stared at them for a split second, his expression perplexed; then his eyes slowly rolled in disbelief to the wolf monuments and thence to the fence.
Trowbridge had torn up the chain-link fence when he followed me to Merenwyn. Two posts had been completely unearthed. They lay on their sides, their ends heavy with cement. A third and fourth post had been partially excavated; these leaned drunkenly to one side, still connected to the twisted carnage of the remaining chain link.
However, in our absence repairs had commenced.
An open-bed truck had been driven down the Peach Pit’s sloping hill (the bakery’s owner was going to have a hissy fit about the flattened grass) and parked on the pedestrian pathway between the exhibits. The printing on the side of the Chevy read: “Gene’s Fantasy Fences.” In smaller print, it said: “Unique custom wrought iron.”
Poisonous cold radiated from the truck. With it came my halfling reaction to the Fae’s kryptonite: numbing fatigue and shivers. So much iron inside, all of it nearly pure. A barrier made from such pure iron would slow down a horde of incoming Fae.
