Callisto…
A haunting voice whispered on the breeze, the name tugging at Flint’s soul in a way she could hardly understand but that made her desperate to follow.
That name felt like a string attached to her soul. Like she knew it, even though she didn’t know how. And suddenly all the fears of a chainsaw-wielding murderer were tossed far away.
Callisto…
The call came again, more urgent this time. She knew what she had to do.
Without a thought other than finding the source, Flint turned on her bare heel and padded slowly, following the echoing call as though she were in a trance.
But she was very much aware of what she was doing.
She had to know who was saying that name.
Callisto… Come to me… Callisto…
Curls of ivy slithered out from beneath her feet with each step she took, undulating like the writhing bodies of snakes, each leaf glimmering as though dipped in emerald ash and protected by large, thorny barbs along its stem.
As Flint moved deeper into the forest, she spied shadowy movement to her left and right and sensed that something, or someone, followed from behind.
Her breath came out a wispy curl of frost as she glanced over her shoulder, the temperature suddenly dropping to near freezing where she stood.
She frowned, oddly unafraid even though this was a time when she definitely should be.
If Grace were here, Flint imagined she might say something like “That’s because like is calling to like, Flint girl.”
And though Flint shouldn’t know that, she did.
Callisto…
She was definitely being drawn. Her name wasn’t Callisto, but that call was for her. But to what was she being called, and by whom?
Brushing her claws across her bicep, she took strength from the tattooed vines shivering beneath her flesh. It helped to ease the nerves tightening like bands in her belly.
Continuing her exploration, she figured that much like a game of Marco Polo, once the voice got loud, she was there.
Wherever there was.
On and on she followed the voice, sometimes hearing nothing but a vague whisper and then…
Callisto.
She gasped; the name had been so close this time. Twirling to her left, she peered through the thick shrubbery. Her vine wrapped docilely around her ankles, rubbing against her with leaves so petal soft they felt like fine cashmere on her flesh.
“Are you there?” she asked no one in particular.
All she saw was trees, trees, and more trees. Although just a few yards ahead sat one very different from the others. It was entirely white and glowed like it’d sucked all the light from the moon and pulled it inside itself.
Callisto.
Clutching at her chest, Flint watched as that strange tree quivered. As the dangling ropes of rust-colored leaves swayed gently around its massive trunk. Black specks moved up and down in uniform formation upon the weathered white bark.
She shuddered when it dawned on her that it was millions of marching ants.
Come!
The power of that command almost knocked Flint flat on her butt. The rippling waves of that call crashed into her, stealing her breath for a moment and making her gasp with relief when it was over. She shivered.
The voice came from the tree.
Swallowing hard, she finally felt the nerves she should have felt all along. But the ivy hugged her close, and its warmth flooded her senses, and in no time she’d grown calm again.
She was here for one reason. To find and save Abel. Everyone back home was depending on her to make this right. And deep in her heart, Flint knew she was his last hope.
“Abel.” She murmured his name low beneath her breath and wished with all her heart that wherever he was he would hear her and take comfort.
Wind riffled like fingers through a hedgerow up ahead. That sixth sense she’d felt for some time now that she wasn’t alone hadn’t abated in the slightest.
But whatever was out there, she was almost positive it didn’t mean her harm.
The vines nudged her forward. Squaring her shoulders, she followed where her plants guided, and in a minute she stood in front of the strange tree.
Her jaw dropped.
A breathtakingly beautiful woman with porcelain skin and large, haunting black eyes that seemed to take up most of her face stared back at Flint.
Tears trekked down her cheeks, but the tears were a rust-red color that looked more like blood, or maybe sap. Running horizontally across her cheeks were upraised twin scars. And the way they’d healed—it reminded Flint of tree bark after someone had carved their initials in it. Her nose was delicate and yet strong, and her full lips were a dove-gray color.
Her hair wasn’t hair at all but sheets of bark that flowed enchantingly around her svelte form. She was fully formed. That is to say she had a body with trim legs and arms. But they too were part of the tree. Her dress, just like her hair, was made up of tree bark the color of white birch.
Her arms were branches that tipped outward into gnarled, clawed tips that came to deadly points.
And for just a second Flint understood how Alice must have felt when she fell down the rabbit hole.
“Who are you?” Flint tentatively asked.
“Malise.” She spoke in the raspy, woodsy sounds Flint had expected to hear, and yet she couldn’t keep from shivering.
There was something darkly hypnotic about Malise, something that both terrified and intrigued Flint.
“I am the dark soul tree of Aduaal.”
Her brows twitched, and she couldn’t help but peek over her shoulder. The eyes boring into her back were heavy and oppressively piercing.
“You are looking for someone, dark fae, are you not?” Malise’s words snapped Flint out of her own head, and it startled her to hear herself referred to in that way.
Dark fae.
She glanced at her claws. But maybe that’s exactly what she was. That’s what Graham had told her, what all her visions kept leading up to… But this… this was so different. Before when she’d gone into the earth she’d never wound up here.
“You know where Abel is?”
Malise smiled, and her teeth were rows of sappy wood sharpened to razor-fine points. “He did not belong.”
“What’d you do to Abel?” Her lips felt numb and her tongue two sizes too large when she asked the question, a cold chill zipping down her spine like the long fingers of death.
Flint couldn’t help but shudder as the long body of a millipede curled out from the corner of Malise’s mouth, its spiny little black legs clacking along the grain of the wood so loudly in the near-silence that it sounded like gunfire in her ears.
“It is not what I did, fae girl, but what you’ve done.”
That literally made no sense.
“Come closer, darkling.” Malise continued to whisper in her darkly hypnotic voice.
Flint’s toes curled into the soil and vines threaded tightly across her ankles as though the plants were sentient and knew she needed the comfort.
Flint sensed that showing any sign of fear here would be a bad thing. Drawing what meager source of strength she could from the ground, she squared her shoulders. “And if I don’t?”
The woods echoed with the thunderous boom of laughter. “You are so much like him. They await you now, halfling fae. You are who you are. You may pass.”
Then Malise’s beautiful face vanished as the tree gave a terrifying shudder and the trunk parted with a booming groan, revealing a spiraling golden staircase that wound down into infinity.
Instinctively she knew these stairs would lead into the dark court of Aduaal—clearly the given name for the dark court.
So many questions drifted through her head, but the only one that really mattered and the only one she would stop at nothing to answer was, where was Abel?
Wishing she had Cain with her, she tried to imagine what her boyfriend would do right now. How brave he was, even
in the face of insurmountable odds.
What he’d done to help free Abel. What he’d done for her. How he’d stopped his instinctual nature to destroy her when Layla had doused her in hive pheromone because Flint was his compass.
“I’ll bring him back to you, I promise.” She whispered the vow to the gentle winds that suddenly seemed to echo with the song of her voice.
Flint took the first step down into Aduaal.
54
Flint
The moment she set foot onto the top step, the tree closed in around her. For a second she worried she’d be cast into pitch darkness. But the glow of gold made her feel a little like she walked through the faerie forest from one of her mother’s old books.
Thinking of those books made Flint wonder whether the tales had been more true than not, whether Mom had read them to her to let her know in a roundabout way the truth of who she really was.
Dark, waxy flowers bloomed beneath her feet as she walked. And something powerful prickled along her skin, the feel of it reminding her of a lightning storm she’d once walked through and how the fine hairs on her arms had risen up when a bolt had struck within fifty yards of where she’d stood.
The deeper she went into the earth, the more powerful that sensation became. But it wasn’t just the hairs on her arms standing erect anymore, her hair danced like charmed red cobras around her shoulders and the glow that emanated from her eyes felt brighter, stronger.
Curious, she lifted the arm with the marking on it and was amazed by a sudden burst of flowers now dancing beneath her flesh upon the ropes of thorny vines.
The image wasn’t just on her bicep anymore either, it’d painted down the entire length of her arm, even down to her fingertips. And her black claws were no longer simply black, but each was tipped with what looked like a tight rosebud.
She was such a freak now, but… Strangely enough, it was also kind of freakishly pretty. Touching the tip of one bud with the claw of her other hand, she gasped as it bloomed open, parting like petals to the morning sun, and suddenly the air around her smelled like the perfume of ten thousand roses.
Down in this strange place her powers had definitely grown stronger. The robes she wore now writhed with masses of living ivy and tiny white blooms that hugged her slim curves.
Her contemplation of her altered appearance was put on hold the moment she heard the steady rush of water. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been following the staircase—several minutes at least—but she knew she was finally nearing the end.
White light glowed up ahead, and a black-and-gray-stained marble archway was faintly visible.
Picking up her speed, not sure where she was supposed to head to next, she stopped in her tracks just a minute later when she heard the faint, scratchy whispers of male voices.
“The lass approaches… Can ye no’ hear her?”
“Aye, I do. And yet still I say ye should get gone. She’ll not like the sight of ye, Wormwood.”
“I bathed for the first time in a century. I’ll be stayin’, and I’ll thank ye very much to stay out of me business, Phenome.”
Looking back the way she’d come, she wanted to cry bitter tears. The stairs were gone. The golden light was also gone. There was no going back. Only forward.
She’d hoped somehow to sneak through Aduaal, find Abel, and get the heck out of Dodge. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem likely or even possible.
From the words of the two men, it seemed she’d been expected. More and more it seemed going into the earth had been a trap, but why?
At the time, she’d been desperate to save Abel and hadn’t questioned the fact that basically her only reason for getting suckered into this was because a voice in her head had told her to.
Just hearing herself think that made her cringe.
She knew nothing of these people and they knew nothing of her. She was nobody, less than nobody. She was a halfling. She’d read Harry Potter. Mudbloods were hated for no other reason than because they weren’t pure.
What if they hated her the same way?
What if…
“Ye can come out now, dark fae. Waitin’ will only make ye doubt yourself more.”
She frowned. “What?”
She hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but she’d been so startled to hear that scratchy, old-man’s voice directed at her.
And then she stood rooted to the ground when they both rolled through the archway in tandem.
They were tiny creatures, and she hated to say it, but absolutely ridiculous-looking.
Their skin was deep brown and marked in deep grooves, reminding her yet again of bark. They had thin, angular faces with absurdly long and bulbous noses, and tiny little lips that curled upward, with beady little eyes. Their ears were like nothing she’d seen on humans—well humanoidish—creatures before. They looked more like mouse ears and were covered at the tips in a fine velvet of light tan fur. Sitting on their pretty large heads were equally large hats with a golden buckle pinned at the center. The hats were covered in buttons—tons and tons of buttons, all of them of varying shapes, colors, and sizes. Their hair was straw-like and silver, and it jutted out from beneath their hats like they’d stuck their fingers in a light socket.
But where their heads were large, their bodies were piteously small, almost withered. Neither of them walked, but sat upon wooden carts, their knobby knees and atrophied legs looking so doll-like she was tempted to believe they weren’t real. But each time the cart moved, their legs bounced and jostled with it. The wheels of the cart were made of large buttons, and they held on to leather reins.
Flint had to fight not to gag at the sight of twin rats with red beady eyes that pulled their carts. The animals were almost bigger than the men themselves.
The only differences between them was that one man—and she used that word lightly—had amber eyes, and the other jewellike blue eyes. The one with blue eyes also seemed to be covered in moist moss, like it grew right out of his bark skin.
Their eyes raked her, studying her at length as she studied them back. One of them, the one with amber eyes, licked his wormy lips with a forked tongue and whispered in a breathy, croaky voice, “She’s a bonny one to be sure.”
“And you are?” she snapped, annoyed that these little men creeped her out so much. She hated dolls. Freaking hated them, and they totally reminded her of porcelain dolls a demon child should be playing with.
“Phenome”—he nodded and then pointed a thumb at the man beside him—“and that’s me braether, Wormwood. Been asleep he has for the past century in the eternal forest of Nod, it’s why ’es covered in moss, he is.”
Wormwood bristled, curling his bulbous nose upward. “I were merely restin’ me eyes.”
Phenome turned toward Wormwood and opened his mouth wide, Flint sensed they were about to get into another spat.
“And what are you two exactly?” she asked. They weren’t human, she was in faerie, so clearly they were fae of some sort, but she’d seen nothing like them in her previous visions.
The only fae she’d really seen before had been Graham, who’d been basically human-looking, and the guy in the shadowy cloak.
Phenome shook his head in astonishment, then glared hotly at his brother as though he’d done something wrong. “She don’t know what we is, Wormwood. I say we kill ’er, kill ’er and eat her liver.”
Wormwood shook his head slowly, a forlorn expression on his face.
Flint took a step back, covering her stomach with the flat of her hand, ready to karate kick them into next year if they even tried.
“We do and The Ciardah will eat us. He awaits her. Besides, braether, she were raised by fleshies, how do ye expect her to recognize a brownie when she see one?”
“Fleshies?” She shook her head, completely confused.
“Humans.” Phenome spat, the spittle landing on the snout of the rat that was pulling his cart. She cringed when the creature’s pink tongue poked out to lick it away.
And they thought her kind foul.
“Pot meet kettle,” she muttered, but they heard her.
“Is it made o’ iron?” Wormwood rubbed his arthritic little hands together with avarice gleaming in his bright blue eyes.
“What?” She frowned.
“Ne’er mind.” Phenome smacked his reins down on the rat’s behind, causing it to rear up and squeak, but the little brownie kept his seat. Both carts turned quickly, and in moments were headed back through the archway. “Follow us, dark faeling.”
Hugging her arms tight to herself, she knew she had no choice. There was no way through this but forward.
Crossing her fingers, she followed.
Stepping through the archway was like walking through yet another dimension.
No longer was she entombed within dirt and stone, but now was surrounded by yet another forest, this one built of trees unlike any she’d seen before.
She gazed up in wonder as she ran her palm along the trunk of the one nearest her. It wasn’t wood or bark she felt but smooth, polished onyx. The leaves waving gently in the breeze were a dark, glossy raw emerald.
The only true grass here was what she created with each step; the rest of it was made of the same material as the trees. But she forgot about the trees the moment she spotted the waterfall.
It looked to go as high as the heavens and cascaded in glowing blues. Tiny orbs of dancing white light spun and spiraled around each flow, and in the air could be heard the echo of childlike laughter.
But every time she glanced at the brownies, neither of them seemed to be astonished by the dark beauty of this world the way she was. The trail she walked diverged off in several dizzying directions through the forest, heading off into banks of deep fog that curled in from nowhere.
The little rats kept a steady pace, and Flint walked for what must have been miles in near silence. But she wouldn’t have wanted to talk anyway. Not to the awful little brownies that continued to mutter grumpily between themselves about stolen “buttons.”
The Complete Tempted Series Page 62
