The Fallen Stars (A Star Child Novel)

by Stephanie Keyes

  This only served to make the situation funnier and I laughed along with Cali. When I noticed other patrons watching, I calmed it down. Picking up my own napkin, I raised it to my chin. “Wipe your face off, man.”

  Gabe did so, staring at the napkin before he put it back down. He seemed oblivious to the source of our whooping only a moment ago. Once cleaned up, he returned to our plans. “There’s a grocery store around the corner. I can get some milk and stuff. Can you hit the hardware store across the street? We’ll need some extra flashlights. I’ve got some oil lamps back at the house, but just in case. Sometimes the power goes out for a while when the wind picks up, and I don’t know how long we’ll be staying here or if we’ll be staying.” Gabe sucked down part two of his pancake.

  “Extra napkins?” A petite blonde waitress placed a pile of napkins in front of Gabe. She was kind of pretty, if you liked that sort of thing. Apparently, Cali and I weren’t taking to our breakfast as ardently as Gabe was; we weren’t offered any additional paper products.

  “Thanks.” Gabe smiled at her, which seemed to be the cause of the faint blush that crept up the waitress’s cheeks like a wine stain on a white rug. Turning away from her, the smile stayed stuck on his face. The waitress left our table, probably to gossip in the back about the nice, cute guy that had been a sloppy eater.

  Gabe opened the first napkin, looked at it, and blanched before crumbling it up quickly in his hand. He reached for a second, dropped it on the table, and got even paler. Then he reached for a third and let his fork fall onto the plate with a clatter. In silence, he inspected the other napkins quickly and discarded them, returning to the first three. Gabe stood up, all seriousness. “We need to leave. Now.” Without waiting for our response, he turned and stormed out of the restaurant.

  Scrambling out of our seats after him, I tossed some cash on the table and we followed him. Cali stayed right behind me, holding on to the end of my gray hoodie, which hung over the back of my parka, like she feared losing me in a crowd.

  By the time we got outside, Gabe had already started walking across the street in long strides. We trailed after him, moving well away from the restaurant and around a corner, to the large public commons area that we’d seen before. He kept going until he’d climbed up into a circular bandstand painted in hues of green. His breath came out in short bursts.

  “What’s wrong, Gabriel?” Cali stepped up beside me to face him. Her hands were in her pockets, shielding them from the cold.

  Gabe stared at her for a moment, and then took out the napkins, which had since been folded in half, from his pocket. I could imagine him folding them and running his thumb and forefinger along the crease as he walked to the commons.

  “What’s up with the napkins?” I asked.

  He opened the first one, holding it out to us. It had handwriting on it. Someone had written on the napkin in a fine-point black pen, in short, spiny script that looked familiar to me. Squinting, I read the words: Quit wasting time.

  Looking at Gabe, I drew back, but he pulled out another one and I was forced to lean in to read the second napkin: Protect Yourselves. My eyes met Gabe’s. “Wha—”

  He stared at me for a moment and pulled out the third napkin. “There’s one more.” The message on the third napkin was simple: They are coming.

  “Whose handwriting is that?” Cali sounded just as perplexed as Gabe looked. She reached up behind her neck, rubbing it as she stared at the napkins that Gabe now held out in front of him like a storyboard.

  “It’s Dillion’s handwriting,” I said.

  Cali looked at me. “What? How do you—right, your memory. I’d nearly forgotten, although I’m not sure how.”

  My photographic memory had helped me on more than one occasion. However, I’d put it to the greatest possible use in Faerie when I’d identified a painting that hung in my father’s study for a year. I read the engraving in the frame from memory to Dillion, even though I hadn’t seen the painting in over ten years. Dillion took notes, which is why his handwriting stayed with me, easily identifiable.

  Resting my hand against a post, I added, “Dillion helped me translate something when Calienta and I were in Faerie. I saw his handwriting then. It was…unique.”

  Gabe’s brow creased. “That’s the dude in the beret that blew everybody away?”

  Cali spoke up. “Yes. He probably couldn’t risk being here himself, so he sent the message another way.” She looked around the square, despite her words.

  “How does he know where we are?” I asked.

  “I’m sure my father told him. He’s probably going to come here and help us,” Calienta said.

  There appeared to be a nervous edge to Gabe’s stance as he bounced on the balls of his feet, searching the commons. “Well, he’s right. We haven’t taken any of this seriously. Me especially.” He held up the napkins.

  Cali looked at me, worry smacked onto her face like a mask. “We should be. I don’t have powers anymore. If they’re coming already…I can’t protect us.”

  I touched her shoulder. “Cali, we’re not helpless. There are things that we can do to protect ourselves. We don’t need powers to repel them.” Careful not to say “faeries” or “the Children Of Danu” lest they pick up on my mention, I stuck with “them”.

  “I hate this,” Cali whispered, staring at her shoes. Had I not been standing directly next to her, I might have missed her declaration.

  Gabe, perhaps sensing pending drama, took action. “I’m going to the grocery store. I’ll meet you at the car in twenty minutes, K.”

  “Sure.” My focus stayed on Cali, so I didn’t look at him when I responded and he didn’t wait for confirmation. A moment later, the crunch of grass broke the tense silence as he left us alone.

  Don’t ask the question. Don’t ask the question. “You hate being mortal, you hate being with me, or both?” I asked. Argh! You asked the question.

  Cali looked into my eyes.

  Nausea made my stomach roll. Eating those blueberry pancakes was something I really wished I hadn’t done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CALI—CARVINGS

  Standing with Kellen on the bandstand, I watched him, longing to touch him, but he’d pulled away. “Of course I don’t hate being with you, Kellen. I hate not being able to do anything to help. I’m worthless now.”

  I threw my hands up in the air, letting them fall back down at my sides. I remembered when I’d used my arms to fly Kellen out of the cove and away from danger.

  “I mean, I can’t do anything. I just have to sit here and wait. It’s too much…” I didn’t know what else I could say. My headache returned and I put my head in my hands to block out the light.

  Kellen spoke softly then. I barely heard him. “You think I’m worthless?”

  Instantly, a wave of remorse hit me. Oh, no. “Kellen, I didn’t mean—”

  He gripped my arms. “But you said it, didn’t you. As I recall, my mortal ass saved your family.”

  His anger took me by surprise. “Kellen, I didn’t mean—”

  “Then choose your words carefully. They’re the only things that you can’t take back.” That sounded like something Kellen’s Gran would have said. Were those her words that he used? As soon as he had voiced that thought, his anger seemed to dissipate.

  Carefully, I lowered myself to the cold ground and hugged my knees close. Kellen didn’t touch me, but instead looked on as though detached, though the expression on his face implied he felt anything but. This had become a nightmare, with no apparent way out. If Kellen lost his faith in me now, then we might as well surrender. We needed to stick together.

  Kellen kneeled on the ground at my feet and took my hand. Something stood between us now that I hated, and I wanted it to go away and never come back. The words I’d chosen had hurt him and I longed to return to just two minutes ago, before I’d said what I had. I looked into his eyes, my own silently pleading with him.

  “You don’t understand. You’re smart, ki
nd, caring, gifted at everything, and you’re so…handsome. Kellen, you’re everything. I’m the one who doesn’t have a purpose,” I said. And they’re coming for us right now. “I never meant to imply that you are worthless or that other mortals are. You’ll think of a way out of this for us, but I’m nothing without my powers,” I said.

  “You can’t say that about yourself. You’ve been the most incredible goddess, but you don’t yet know who you’ll become as a mortal. Give it time.”

  “But how can I do that when time is the one thing we don’t have?”

  Leaning in, he kissed my cheek. “You may not have a choice.” Standing, he reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet. His arms fit around me and he held me close to him while my breathing calmed. “Promise me you’ll give yourself some time,” he whispered.

  My face against his coat, I said “I will” in a muffled voice.

  Pulling back, we kept our hands linked together as we headed in the direction of the shops. We’d taken only a couple of steps when Kellen stopped abruptly.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Without a word, he raised a finger and pointed to a tree with a carving near its base. It looked like someone had taken a knife to it. As we walked closer, I picked up the pace when I recognized his name in the carving. Kellen, it read, they want you.

  The message shouldn’t have been a surprise to me, but something about the format in which it had been delivered chilled me. “It looks like Uncle Dillion wants us to get a move on.”

  “Yes, it does,” I said, but neither one of us spoke of this last message as we left the area. No matter what had been carved on the tree, I didn’t care. They couldn’t have him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  KELLEN—PROTECT

  Cali and I went to the ATM so that I could get some cash. Though I doubted very much that the Children of Danu were tracking my credit card transactions, cash gave us more anonymity. After I withdrew three hundred dollars from my account, I looked at the receipt and checked my remaining balance.

  Good; my inheritance from Gran had finally cleared, after taxes of course. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about money for a while. When my Gran passed, I found out that she’d banked all of the money that my father had given her over the years. She’d invested it wisely, which meant that I now had an account with a little over a million dollars in it—and that gave me a lot of options.

  As we walked through the town, we kept looking over our shoulders. After Gabe’s napkins from Dillion and the impromptu tree carving, there seemed to be urgency to everything. The tourists with cameras could be taking our pictures and posting them on the Internet. The fisherman selling Maine Lobster Rolls To Go could have been a faerie. Everyone had converted to potential enemies. Every person had become a threat.

  We met Gabe, loaded down with supplies including flashlights, candles, about a ton of salt, and probably anything else that we could find. The salt we could use to protect the house. It served as a purifier that repelled faeries, though whether it would be powerful enough in this instance, I didn’t know. Gabe had the food, of course.

  The three of us piled into the car and headed back in the direction of Gabe’s family’s house. “This place is really pretty.” This came from Cali in the backseat.

  “Yeah. It’s cool,” Gabe admitted. His voice seemed forced, like he had to convince himself of this obvious fact.

  The place seemed nice to me, too. “What don’t you like about it? Is it just the cold?”

  Gabe glanced at me sideways before turning back to the road. “That’s mostly it. It’s cold and I don’t do cold. I want the sun, the sand. Do you know, the water doesn’t even get warm enough to swim here? I mean, the tourists try, but they’re nuts. They run into the water and scream and stuff. It’s crazy.”

  “So why’d you pick it?” I leaned forward toward the direction of the heater.

  Gabe stared out the windshield, as though pretending not to hear me. Then he muttered a response. “It’s my Mom’s favorite place. It felt…safe to me.”

  In minutes, Gabe pulled down the drive. We got out of the car and unloaded the bags, then crossed the short bridge to the front door and entered the house.

  Gabe took groceries out of the bags and began putting them away. “Okay, so what do we need to do to protect the house?” he asked as he stashed the milk in the refrigerator.

  The house had warmed up, so I assumed that Gabe had arranged to have the utilities turned back on at some point. Wow, the new Gabe threw me for a loop. He seemed so much more responsible, and all it took was for Lugh to have faith in him.

  “I’ll look around. I want to see the place, maybe think about what we can do to add some extra protection to it. Cali, do you want to come with me?” I offered.

  “Kellen, I don’t have powers anymore,” she reminded me.

  “No, but you’ll remember what we can do to repel them. You probably know more about that than I do.”

  “Of course,” she agreed, though an unexplained look of hesitation seemed to appear on her face.

  Taking a further step into the kitchen, I rested my elbows on the hard butcher-block counter surface opposite from where Gabe stood. “Gabe, what about saying that phrase you said on the plane? The one that Lugh gave you?”

  Gabe stuffed his hands in his pockets, the grocery unpacking temporarily forgotten. “But I don’t even know what it means. I feel weird saying it. What if it’s something…evil? It seems like it’s not, but after I said it in the car again, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

  It occurred to me that Gabe probably carried a great deal of worry on his shoulders. After all, how would he know if anything that Lugh had told him was the truth? How could he know whether Cali’s family was good or evil? “Lugh would never tell you to say anything if it was evil,” I said.

  “I know. I think I do, anyway. I just…I feel weird when I say it.”

  “Weird how?” Cali’s voice barely concealed her curiosity.

  “Like…” Gabe looked around the room, out the windows. “Like something is going to happen to me, if I only let it. It freaks me out.”

  Cali walked around the island and touched his arm. “All of us have some magick within us, Gabe. I think you’re just calling upon that when you say those words. I don’t think my father would have given those words to you if they would cause something bad to happen.”

  Air left him in a whoosh. “Wow, that’s good. Then maybe I’ll try it again. But later,” he added.

  Nodding, I looked to Cali. Gabe probably just didn’t want us around when he said the words on the aged paper. “Okay. We’re going to scope out the house,” I said. Turning, I left the kitchen, Cali beside me.

  Once we were back outside, I found out that there was no way that we could truly walk the perimeter of the house. Built into the hillside, craggy rock bordered it for a short span, only to end abruptly in a perilous drop-off towering above the bay. There wasn’t any way that we could sprinkle salt completely around the building; nothing existed for it to cling to. This left me with an uneasy feeling of being exposed. “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do to protect this place.”

  “We can place salt at the entrance to the house, and the window sills. The running water will help, but it doesn’t surround the house,” Cali said.

  “There’s saltwater in the bay. That probably couldn’t hurt, right?”

  “I don’t know if it will help. You’re right, though, it won’t hurt,” she agreed.

  On the walk back to the house, I noticed the material used in the construction of the walkway. When I reached the bridge, I touched the cool metal of the supports. “Is this iron?”

  Cali touched the railing, testing. “I think so.”

  Looking up at the house, I noticed that more iron had been used in the construction of the property. There were iron lamps, iron fixtures, horseshoes above the doors and windows. Even the balcony in the back had iron rails, I remembered. “That’s interestin
g. I wonder why the builders would have used those materials? It just seems unusual.”

  Cali had moved ahead of me on the walkway. “Well, it’s our good luck that they did, with iron being a repellent for those from Faerie. There’s not much else that we can use to protect us.”

  Movement in my peripheral vision caused me to look up. On one of the many balconies stood Gabe, clearly concentrating hard. His lips moved but I couldn’t hear him. He had to be saying the words that Lugh had given him. As I looked on, Gabe seemed to…glow slightly. If it had happened on the plane when he’d spoken the words, I hadn’t noticed. Now he looked like a golden boy, like Gabriel the Archangel, more than Gabriel Stewart. As he read the words, his face took on an exultant expression.

  Looking away, I faced Cali. Watching Gabe seemed like an intrusion. “I wish we knew what those words meant. It’s old Gaelic, I think.”

  Her brow furrowed. “No, it’s another language. It looked familiar, but I just can’t remember what it means.”

  Turning, we walked back toward the house. At the base of the door, there were several small pieces of what appeared to be iron. I picked up three of them, placing a piece in my own coat pocket and then handing one to Cali. I’d stick one in Gabe’s pocket later. We needed all the help we could get.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CALI—FORGOTTEN

  Kellen and I walked back into the house. Though I tried hard to remain calm, I’d never been so afraid. My parents had told me that I would forget things, but try as I might, I couldn’t interpret what spell or charm Gabriel had been saying to guard us. When I’d been an immortal, I would have said something similar. At least I believed I would have. How could I do anything to help if I couldn’t even remember a simple charm?

  Gabe came back into the great room a few minutes after we returned. His skin no longer carried the golden cast that it had on the balcony. Now he seemed pale, a bit shaken. He looked like he might vomit at any moment. He went to the kitchen and started to make something at the stove. Tea maybe?