by Kendal Davis
“No,” Ciara whispered, her hair flying out around her face, sparking with electricity. “You don’t need to do that. I will do it for you.”
It was a hostage crisis management technique that I’d made sure Ciara’s tutors taught her. When I’d sat in the head seat at the annual Directors’ meetings, working to prepare Ciara for the life that really awaited her as Tithe to the Queen, I’d made sure she got the bracelet. I knew it would be the tool that bound her to the Queen as a killer, and yet also freed her the same way.
As the Queen watched, aghast, her lips parted in surprise at having her best threat summarily taken from her, Ciara did just what she’d said she would.
She was luminescent. She held her palm out in front of her, and the bracelet left Hellebore’s grasp and appeared there. With her other hand, she worked a spell whose scope was beyond any history or understanding.
She encircled the entire land of the fae in her magic, in her burning, rushing, growing power, and she held that spell with apparently no effort at all. In her hand, she raised the bracelet, its own strength reaching for release. The shining metal of the bracelet gravitated toward the spell she’d woven, just as the mists of the old forest had once sought us out, drawn to the elemental heat that lay within Ciara. Then she let the golden circlet, the ancient artifact that stole magic, collide with her spell.
In a flash, the fae world, every fae there was, the castle, the mist-filled forests, the rolling hills, were all gone.
Blackness filled every void.
Every bit of fae magic, except for that belonging to Ciara, blinked out of the world.
We all died.
19
Ciara
I stood, unaware that I still could. But it was happening. I’d forgotten how to look around, how to even breathe. Black emptiness ranged in every direction. Sound was a thing of the past. I tasted my bruised lips, remembering the hours that Breze and I had stolen together. Even the thought of him made my body respond, bringing a familiar tingling to places he’d kissed.
Perhaps I was still alive.
I could feel. My belly was tight with desire as I remembered nights with all four of my men. The memory of the day that Rook and Owain first touched me on the train to Fae Academy slid through my mind. Nobody had ever touched me in my life after I’d received the Queen’s gift of magic as a baby. Until them. They’d helped me when I’d fallen to the floor outside their compartment. I’d been overcome by the way my golden bracelet made me want to kill.
But that wasn’t me.
I was no assassin. Or, at least, not at the Queen’s bidding.
I could breathe again. I blinked, taking in more of the landscape around me. Or rather, I tried, but there was nothing. Belatedly, I looked in a direction that I’d avoided before. It was a corner of my vision where one other person still lived.
Hellebore was very still as she looked at me. If she’d been disoriented after the spell I’d just wrought, she didn’t show it. “You’ve destroyed an entire world,” she said. “How could you be so reckless? In your petulant vanity, you have removed all fae magic from existence.”
“Not quite,” I shot back. Even if we were the last two people in this world, she couldn’t hold herself back from irritating me. “I still have my own fae magic. I worked this spell on everybody except for me. And without their magic, every fae has died.”
“I haven’t,” she sneered. She truly was insane now.
“You were always just a mortal. Like me.” A dreaminess took hold of me, as if time didn’t matter at all. “How did you first meet them? Alder and Breze, I mean. They were best friends, planning to room together at the Academy. Young and ambitious. I think it was longer ago than either of them want to say. How did you get your evil hold on them?”
“Oh, it was easy.” Hellebore lifted her hand to her throat as she spoke. She looked unbothered by it, but I thought I saw wrinkles appearing on the delicate skin of her neck. “They were in the woods near my house one afternoon, chasing a javelin that had been lost in their game. I was a dreamy young woman, fascinated by their powers. Two handsome fae men, carefree and careless. They were beautiful. And they thought I was as well.”
“Breze sounded more like it was charity work when he described it to me,” I dismissed her claim. “So you cosied up to them and flattered them until they accidentally revealed a fae secret?”
“It was no accident,” Hellebore frowned. “Breze was trying to get my attention, to annoy Alder. He thought very highly of his own charm, that scoundrel. He told me about a mysterious and valuable artifact, making it sound like it was just a legend. The fae had left the bracelet in a cave in the mortal world as a way of keeping it safe.”
“You were anything but safe. You found it and threatened your way into power, didn’t you? You thought if you kept waving it around you could make the fae do what you wanted.”
“Well, there’s no need to be snide,” Hellebore corrected me with raised eyebrows. “It worked very well indeed. Alder and Breze were suddenly willing to help me, not wanting their families to be hunted down and destroyed. All I wanted was a little bit of fae magic for my own. They were such gorgeous creatures, you know. Who could blame them when their plan to take and concentrate the elemental power from my world went wrong?”
“You tricked them, didn’t you? You begged them to do it. They didn’t know it would suck the life from your world, but you did. When it led to the Great Upheaval, you enslaved them all.”
“It was my right. I am a beloved Queen.”
“You don’t belong with the fae, and you know it. Shall I send you back to the mortal world now? Aren’t you so old that you’ll collapse into dust immediately?” I saw her hands, now spotted with age. She was gathering the centuries around her like a cloak as I watched. It was not going to be a good look.
Hellebore flinched. “Not that. Please. I never meant for it to all end like this.” She had lost and she knew it.
“You destroyed everything you touched, ever since the day you met my two men. That’s right, they are mine, even if they are fallen and tortured now, because of you. You took their honor and made them swear fealty. You ruined your own world and bound all the fae to you.” I twisted my lips in disgust.
“You are still sworn to me, Ciara.” She said my name, invoking the power of my oath. “You can’t kill me. You are my Eternal Assassin. They may be yours, but you are mine.”
I nodded firmly. “Yes. I am your Slayer. Just not in the way you mean. It doesn’t matter that I swore to work for you. Know why? I don’t even have to kill you. The loss of your vampire magic will do that in just a few more minutes.” I straightened my shoulders as I looked around the black void that we stood in. I was remembering now. Coming back to myself.
“You said you weren’t a killer,” she persisted. “You’re a liar. You’ve killed them all.”
“To free them. All the fae will be cleansed of their allegiance to you now.”
“But they’re gone. No...” As understanding dawned in her eyes, she shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. Nobody could possibly expect to bring them all back to life. The magic, the sheer number of souls...it is beyond the scope of even imagining.”
“I have a pretty good imagination,” I said sharply. “You have approximately one minute, I think, before you collapse into a pile of nothing. Tell me. Why did Breze refuse to become an Eternal Assassin when he was at school? After he’d already helped you gain fae magic?”
Hellebore cocked her head as if she were listening to her memories. “He was willing to throw away his chance at the Academy to keep from giving me his oath. I thought it was odd as well. He said that he would help me with the fae work in the mortal land, but that he would not swear to me as an Assassin. He wanted to work with me on preparing Tithes. He’s the one who thought it up, actually. That we would raise up a Tithe woman with fae magic. I used many of them to bolster my own powers. And then the last one, with all four elemental affinities, well, that was yo
u. He did all that, just to create you. You were the pinnacle of his project.” She looked perplexed.
“That’s what I thought. He’s a long game sort of a person. But now your game is up.” I sighed as I looked at her. Her hair was wiry and white. “Last chance. Now?”
Hellebore’s form was wavering. Without the fae magic she’d had all these years, she could no longer stay here on this plane. I hadn’t been bluffing; if she appeared in the mortal realm, she would be ancient dust in a millisecond.
“Very well,” she sighed. “I can’t go back there. I will go on to the next dimension, the place where fae retire.”
“Do you think they’ll be glad to see you there?” I hadn’t considered that problem until this moment.
“No,” she whispered. “But let me have this future, even if it isn’t the one I wanted.” In her anguished eyes, I saw the truth of her pain. She’d never managed to win the hearts of the fae she admired. Breze and Alder had never loved her, and she knew it.
I nodded. At the second she blinked out of existence, I gave her the elemental push she needed to make it to the dimension where fae went when their work here was done. She could rest there and perhaps change. They would keep a close eye on her.
But there was no ‘here.’ Not anymore.
All fae magic in the universe had winked out. I’d destroyed it. For all my prevarications, I was in fact a killer on a scale beyond imagining. I was no longer a member of the Eternal Assassins, no longer bound by allegiance to the Queen, for she herself did not exist. But I was a Slayer. I was the taker of life, of magic, of trust.
Alder had told me to trust our bond.
He’d meant me to listen to his exact words.
Trust the connections between us, he’d said. They were stronger than life or death. My love for Breze and Alder, for Rook and Owain, was limitless. The men were gone now. But the elemental ties that fed our magic were still there. My fae power pulsed from every inch of me, calling out to those bonds for sustenance.
I let a smile spread across my face. It was going to work. It was just as I had imagined it, as I had hoped. This would happen.
And as I raised my arms to send the rays of my powers in every direction, turning all around me, I knew it was what Breze had intended twenty-two years ago when he convinced the Queen to gift me with so much power. She’d made a great error in listening to him. She’d been a stunted sham who thought she controlled everything. Now Hellebore was at the mercy of the fae.
My four elemental strengths worked around me into a multilayered braid of fusion. The void around me crackled with power as I reversed my spell. I’d gathered up so much, so many souls and eons of knowledge, and I’d tucked them into the magic of the golden bracelet. Just as I’d done with Alder last year, when I’d taken his life to free him from Hellebore, now I’d worked the same plan on a terrifying scale.
They were all there.
It was all inside, ready to be released.
Bringing Alder back from the dead now seemed like child’s play. I didn’t need the magic of the fae world to help me, for it was within me now. I was moving from the smallest of learning stages to the greatest possible, with the most risk. Professor Thorn had taught me the value of repetition, of practice. He’d been tangled in Hellebore’s web as her sworn man, but if I could bring him back, he would be free.
We all were, now.
I spun into a frenzy, magic pouring from my fingertips, shining from my being. When I thought I would collapse in exhaustion, I made one last scrape of the interior of the magic of the bracelet. I found more than what I’d just put there.
As everything reappeared around me, as I saw the first glimmering glimpses of the faces of my lovers and my best friend, and the classroom we’d been standing in, I realized there were other forces still trapped.
The bracelet still contained the essence of the mortal world, the spark that two foolhardy young fae men had helped a vain and black-hearted mortal woman steal.
I could return it.
This would never happen again. As I felt my knees buckle and the ground come up to meet me, I used one last push of my fourfold magic to atomize the bracelet. The damned thing had twinkled its urge to destroy for the last time.
The bracelet broke apart in a smear of light.
And I collapsed.
20
Ciara
I woke in Alder’s study. Somebody had carried me from the classroom where Hellebore had tried to force my hand. She’d succeeded at that, all right. Even in my groggy state, I felt a smile tug at my lips. Were we finished with her?
Alder had me on his lap in one of the comfortable chairs we’d often used for our tutoring sessions. When he saw that my eyes were open, he used his fingertips to stroke my hair from my face. “Welcome back, Ciara,” he said gently.
I sat up, looking around the room. It would be too much to hope that I’d made my crazy plan work. But here they were. Evana sat across from me, leaning forward to look me over. Rook and Owain were on one side of me, their faces anxious.
And Breze stood at my other side, his eyes kind as he watched me. “We’ve been waiting for you to return to us, my love.”
“Did I dream it all?” I felt my head gingerly. When I thought to check my wrists, there was no bracelet there. “Wait...did I bring it all back?”
“Yes,” Alder said firmly. “You don’t need to worry. We’ve sent out sentinel spells already to check. You single handedly destroyed a whole world and then brought it back unscathed.” He couldn’t help grinning at me in jubilation.
“But where is the Queen?” Evana still looked wary, as if she thought our insane adversary might reappear at any moment.
“She chose to retire to the next world with the fae. I sent her there,” I said.
“That’s far more than she deserved,” Evana answered. “But if I know anything at all about our people it is that they will not let her forget who she is. She will pay for eternity.”
Breze’s hand rested on my shoulder. It was a simple gesture that might have seemed comradely to an outside observer, but the touch was much more to me. If I’d needed any reassurance that I was all right, it came in the form of my leaping desire for my men. I felt my face flush at the thought..
Before I could say anything more, a knock came at the door. It was Finley, his eyes wide with worry as he rushed to Evana’s side.
“Are you ok?” He held her face in his hands and kissed her gently. She nodded, getting up from her chair to leave with him.
First, Evana turned to me. “You were right about Hellebore. She was a fraud, and she took us all in, somehow rising to power and making us believe she was our rightful ruler.” She bowed her head in acceptance that her people had somehow accepted such evil amongst them.
Finley held her hand tightly. “The way you’re talking...are you saying she’s gone now?” He hadn’t been in the classroom like the others, witness to my determination to destroy her or die trying.
I nodded. “Hellebore was nothing but a thief. She stole the elemental strength of her own world to build her fae power. Her perfidy is what ruined the environment of the mortal land.”
Finley was serious but unsurprised. “That’s what I wanted to tell you earlier. Remember I said I’m a bit of a hobbyist when it comes to what you call the Great Uprising?”
I stared at him. Had he known this all along?
He continued. “I’ve always been super into finding documents about that time in history, even though it was so long ago. And my sources agree that the environment failed because energy was removed in a cataclysmic moment. That was when earth power became unknown to the fae, when those who held it left this world. And it was right after that that our history seems to first mention Queen Hellebore.”
Breze looked at Alder. The two men were solemn, ready to turn themselves in for the judgment of both worlds.
“No,” I shook my head at them. “Nobody needs to know how it happened. It was too long ago for that to matter.
Let it lie.” A general murmur of assent filled the room.
Redemption was ours.
Over and over.
Finley moved toward the door, tugging Evana playfully with him. “I think we have things to do.” It was true for all of us, then. The intense magical changes of the day were leading to certain urges of the flesh.
First, though, Rook lifted a hand toward Finley. “Wait a second. Did you get into that historical stuff because you wanted to learn more about the family name?”
“Yeah. You too, huh?” Finley was offhand.
Rook settled his shoulders back with a teasing gesture to his cousin. “It’s not every fae who can say they belong to the former royal family. I don’t mind being part of a junior branch, but your lineage is the real thing.”
“What in the world are you talking about?” I asked.
Rook ran his hand through his dark hair, looking more rakish than ever. “Why, don’t you think our people had a ruler before crazy Hellebore got here? There was another royal family that she pushed out of power. It was so long ago that most people consider it to be the stuff of fairy tales, like the spirits that used to dwell in important magical places.”
Owain nodded in approval. “But we all know the story. The legends say that the fire fae of the high mountains are the closest thing we have to direct descendants of the kings and queens who came after King Regis. And, well, I guess that’s you, isn’t it?” His question was nonchalant.
Finley shrugged. “I’m the eldest in that line, so I suppose so.” A light kindled in his eyes as he teased Evana. “What do you think, my love? Shall we take the throne together?”
She gulped. “Maybe not. Our people have had enough of royalty for the moment, don’t you think? Perhaps...a Prime Minister.”
Finley’s perpetual dishevelment did nothing, it turned out, to make him look less of a leader. We had been so busy chasing our own problems that we hadn’t noticed it. Evana had, maybe. He squared his shoulders and sent me a look that let me know we would be in good hands.
