by ERIN BEDFORD
“It is upsetting, really,” my mother continued, speaking directly to Chess. “She has such a nice figure, but she hides it behind all those frumpy clothes. It’s no wonder she never finds a date.”
“I attract guys just fine, Mom,” I growled, patting my lap with the towel harder than I needed to.
“No suitable ones in any case.” She turned her gaze to Chess as if realizing her mistake. “Of course not you, dear. Katherine certainly lucked out with you. But you should have seen some of the boys she would bring home with her. Remember, Linda?”
My sister gave me an apologetic look and muttered, “I remember.”
My eyes bore holes into my lap as my mother listed out all the boys I had ever brought home. Which wasn’t all that many. I learned quickly not to bring anyone I actually liked to the house, or they’d run for the hills before dinner was ever served. Except for one time.
“And what about that one boy? The one from the south side who lived by the railroad tracks? What was his name?” she mused aloud.
“Eric,” I reluctantly supplied, knowing, and yet dreading, what she was going to say.
“Yes, that was it.” She waved her finger at me. “He was such an attractive boy and had such great manners. It was too bad his family was such heathens. He would have been a great catch otherwise. I hear he went on to work at the mill just like his father. Sad, really.”
Anger pulsated through me, and my magic coursed through my veins. With my mother, my anger always just simmered below the surface. I was surprised it had waited that long to make its presence known. Now that it had, I knew I had to get out of there before I destroyed something important. Like my mother’s face.
I shoved back my chair, startling the whole table. Keeping my eyes down, I muttered an apology to my father as I hurried from the dining room. My mother’s voice called after me, but all I could think about was getting out before my skin exploded.
Chapter 11
Families Are The Worst
I RUSHED FROM the house, the front door slamming behind me. As I stepped off the porch, my heel snapped under me, throwing me toward the ground. I turned sideways to fall on the grass instead of the hard concrete.
The instant my hands touched the ground, my magic seeped out of me and into the lawn. I could physically see the pulse of my magic as it flowed from my hands and into the foliage around me. It was like little tiny green veins of energy were fleeing from me and going into the earth. I watched in amazement as the grass grew several inches longer and tiny flowers sprouted up from the yard.
The only thing that came to my mind was my mother was going to be pissed. She loved a well kept yard. She loved a well kept everything. When she saw that her immaculate yard was now a gardener’s nightmare, she was not going to be happy.
A small giggle came out of me. Then that giggle transformed into a full on laugh. A laugh that even to my ears was beginning to sound hysterical.
“Kat,” Chess’ voice was quiet behind me, but I paid him no attention, my mind high on the magic pulsing out of me. I would have thought using my magic would have tired me out, but all I felt was powerful. Indestructible. Something I had never felt before, but wanted nothing more than to feel again.
“Katherine.” His voice was closer now and more forceful.
Again, I didn’t answer. I watched the ground beneath me as it grew and changed. What would happen if I forced more of myself into it? With that thought, the green veins turned into thick ropes of power. It surged from me and forced a multitude of flowers and mushrooms not of this world to sprout from their earthly prison.
Even with the new force of power, it wasn’t enough. I needed more. I needed to feel the very core of the earth beneath my feet. I needed—
“Lynne!” Chess’ use of my Fae name cut through my power hungry haze.
I pulled my hands away from the ground and watched as the newly grown plant life began to wither and die before my eyes. A small part of me wept for the loss, but the other part was in horror of what had happened. I had never been so consumed by my magic as a human or a Fae. As a Fae, I had been limited by the rules of our world. Not as many rules as there were now, but rules that tired one out after a few minutes of full powered magic. The power I had just shown would never have happened in the Fae Realm. At least, not to a full-blooded Fae.
“Come, we should leave before someone sees you.” Chess ushered me toward the car.
Inside, I turned the engine and eased out of the driveway. I only remembered pulling onto the road before we were once again back in front of my grandmother’s small farm house. Just the sight of it caused exhaustion to press down on me.
The driver’s side door opened, and Chess appeared before me. I gazed up at him with weak eyes. The sudden use of all that power had been exhilarating at first, but now I just felt drained. The very act of breathing became a chore itself.
Without asking, Chess slipped his arm under my legs and pulled me into his embrace. My arms automatically wrapped around his neck, and I buried my face in his collar, the smell of him filling my senses. I let him carry me to the house, and then into my bedroom, where he sat me down on the bed as if I was the most fragile thing in the world. Kneeling at my feet, he unhooked my shoes and slipped them off, and then eased my legs onto the bed.
Usually, I was happy with quiet. Too much chatter gave me a headache, but right now, the quiet, more specifically, the quiet coming from the only male in the room, was killing me.
“I’m sorry about that. My mother…” I started, not quite up to defending her. “She’s kind of a bitch, but she does have her moments. Sometimes.”
I gave a weary shrug that even to me was not comforting.
Chess sat next to me on the bed, silently watching my face. I could see the wheels turning behind his sparkling green eyes. When he finally spoke, the words that came out of his mouth were not what I expected.
“You should go back.”
“Back? Back where? To my mom’s?” I scoffed, snuggling down under the covers. “I don’t think so.”
“No.” His voice was small but forceful. “Back to the Underground.”
I sat up from the comfortable blanket cocoon and glared at him.
He pressed his hand against my mouth. “Now before you get upset. Listen for a moment, Kat.”
Frowning at his hand, and half tempted to lick it, I nodded.
“Half-breeds,” he started, “we’re different—from other Fae. As you’ve noticed, we don’t have to obey the same sort of rules that are in place for the rest of our kind. Now, in certain circumstances, this wouldn’t matter since most of us don’t have much power to begin with.”
I opened my mouth to argue against him degrading his own power, but he cut me off.
“Not all of us, but some of us. Those of us that don’t have much power, well, we don’t live long. As you know, the Underground is not a forgiving place, and it seeks to destroy or conquer anything different from it. Now this might not be winning me points on my argument for you to return, but there are benefits to being back in our world.”
He reached his hand up and cupped my face. I watched his eyes for some sort of clue to what he was thinking but didn’t get much. I wished he had dropped his glamour so I could watch the telltale sign of his emotions in his tail and ears.
“What happened today, just now, isn’t something that should have happened.” He lowered his hand from my cheek and stared off into space. “You are more powerful now as a human than you could have ever been as a Fae, and because of that, the limitations you had before won’t be there to stop you.”
This time, I had to speak up, “Why should I need them? I don’t need anyone to tell me when I’ve had enough.”
“Is that how you felt today?” His eyes had a knowing look in them. “Did you feel like you needed to stop?”
“No.” I thought back to how I felt. “I needed more. Like I could do anything. I wanted to do it. I didn’t
want to stop.”
“And there lies the problem. We don’t have the fail-safe the full-blooded Fae do. I don’t know the mechanics behind it. Whether it’s brain waves, or just a hiccup in the womb, but what matters is we’re different. We don’t know when we need to pull back from the edge before we start siphoning others, and then eventually, our own life force. And that is exactly why the Shadows want us so badly.”
The new knowledge did not set well with me. I was a ticking time bomb ready to go off at the first angry fit. Not only that, but if the Shadow man somehow convinced me to join their little cause, they would also have unlimited power to bend to their will. That was something I wasn’t going to let happen.
“Your mother loves you.”
I snorted at his change in topic.
He narrowed his eyes. “She might not be able to show it in the way you want her to, but she does. You are lucky to have a family, any family that would pay you any sort of attention. Whether you want it or not. You happen to have two families. Two families that want you with them, even if it means being something you are not. I know I was the one who urged you to be a dandelion, but maybe being a rose is what you need right now. And what might be safer for everyone involved.”
“Is that what you did?” I argued. “Did what your family wanted you to do so you could fit in?”
A sad, bitter smile crossed his face. “I didn’t have the luxury of that choice.”
Remorse filled me for bringing it up, but I had to know. “Why?”
“Before you were a human, were there many half-breeds?”
I actually hadn’t thought much about it. I knew there were more now than there had been when I was the princess. Sometimes a Fae could mate with a human, or on a rarer occasion, a Seelie with an UnSeelie. But since the amount of Fae children born had declined, I had assumed it was because of all the mixing of the bloods and thought nothing of it.
“Why are there more now than before? I thought Mother wanted to stop all that because it was causing the Fae to become barren.”
Chess gave a disgusted laugh. “Not hardly. You, my dear princess, have it the wrong way around.”
“What do you mean?”
“Crossbreeding with another Fae and the humans was not the problem. The problem was too much inbreeding of the Fae amongst themselves.”
My brows furrowed together in confusion. “Then why wouldn’t they encourage crossbreeding if we needed new blood?”
“Power,” he stated. “Crossbreeding with the humans was lessening the magical pool of power in the Fae realm, and your mother couldn’t have that. So she stopped it.”
“Then why let them do it now? What changed?”
“Oh, she didn’t let them do anything.” He gave a dark chuckle. “After your unfortunate mishap, her plans to conquer the Shadows with the power of the combined realms were squashed. She needed someone that had unlimited power to use against the Shadows, and since she couldn’t get it from you, her own child, she forced it from elsewhere.”
A sick feeling filled me as the words sank in. My mother, the Seelie Queen, had orchestrated the creation of hundreds of half-blooded Fae children, all for the means to conquer the Shadows. While I understood the need to keep the realms safe, forcing the couplings was too much. But what didn’t make sense was if she made her power source, why was the Shadow man still a threat?
“What failed? Why aren’t the Shadows gone?” My eyes flickered toward my mirror as the words left my mouth. The very sound of their name made my skin crawl as if eyes were on me.
“Who knows?” He shrugged before he stood up from his place on the bed and moved to the door.
I could tell he was keeping something from me but didn’t think pushing would be the right answer. He’d tell me when he was ready. He went for the door, and panic rose up in me. The new knowledge coupled with my mother’s words had beaten me down and made me weak and frightened to be in my own head.
“Wait,” I said.
He paused, looking back at me.
“I don’t want to be alone right now.”
He let his glamour melt off him as he made his way back to my side. I shifted over on the bed so he could lie down beside me. Lying next to him in the bed, I was stiff as a board. I had asked him to stay, but I didn’t even know what that meant. Or what he thought it meant.
After a moment or two of awkward silence, he wrapped his arm around me and pulled me to his chest. His finger covered my mouth to any protest.
“Sleep, my dandelion. Just sleep.”
I let the sound of his heart beating against my ear rock me to sleep, but my head was heavy and full of thoughts of magic and darkness to come.
Chapter 12
What’s Done In The Dark
THE SOUND OF my name being whispered in my ear tugged me from my sleep. A light wisp of a touch trailed down my arm, and I shivered. I fought to stay in the dream I was having about a certain cat, a tub of rocky road ice cream, and a deliciously cold wrestling match. The voice wasn’t having any of it, though. I cracked my eyes open.
I glanced to my right to find Chess still in my bed, curled up in the fetal position, his tail flicking back and forth in his sleep. A small smile played on my face, and I almost lay back down next to him. Something in my peripherals moved. The mirror I kept covered in my bedroom was bare, the sheet nowhere in sight. Creepy smoke spilled off the surface.
The smoke rolled across my ankles when I lowered my feet to the floor. It was cool against my skin but didn’t lash out, instead urging me forward toward the mirror.
The mirror reflected the bedroom with Chess’ form in my bed, the room darkened by the night shadows. Then the mirror rippled and flowed, flickering between my room and the mushroom town, before finally settling on the orchard.
Stepping up to the mirror, I gazed into it, trying to depict what it was trying to show me. Was it the Shadows finally coming for me to claim their queen? Or something else altogether? I reached my hand up to touch the surface, and as if sensing my movement, the scene changed. Speeding up like a moving car, it zoomed through the trees, ignoring the door to the Between, and aiming for a hidden alcove that was covered by overgrown bushes.
All at once, I knew who was calling out to me. Even though the voice that had said my name wasn’t the same voice I had heard before as it tried to coax me back to Iowa, it had the same sense of urgency to it. The same need for me to be there. One thing I had learned out of all my recent adventures was to listen to that voice. So, as the image came to a sudden stop in front of the all-knowing tree, I stepped through the mirror’s surface.
My bare feet landed on the dirt ground before the tree. The stone walls that closed it off from the rest of the Underground stood tall and imposing. The area seemed darker, more foreboding than the last time I had been there. No doubt because of the wilted vision of the tree in front of me.
Before the tree hadn’t seemed so decrepit, just barren of fruit or leaves. Now, it seemed to bend as if it was too much effort to stand tall. I felt a sudden urge to touch the trunk, as if I could somehow discern what had happened to it.
I moved toward the tree, but a voice resounded around me.
“You have come to us.”
I halted, and then stepped back at the voice coming from the tree. Part of me was hoping to finally get some answers, while the other half was mostly wondering where the heck it was talking out of.
“Well, you didn’t give me much of a choice.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Do you always hijack people’s dreams to talk to them?”
The tree didn’t answer for a moment, and then it finally spoke, sounding weaker than before, “We are not long for this world. Speaking through dreams is easier.”
“You’re dying? But what am I supposed to do? I don’t even know how to defeat the Shadows yet.” I was beginning to feel a bit screwed over. They were the ones who had brought me here in the first place. The ones who wanted me to ‘save them.�
�� Now they were going to go off and die on me without so much as a way to save them? Hell no.
“Our time is coming to an end. We are no longer needed. But your time is still to come. There will be much need for you from both Fae and human alike.”
“Yeah, yeah. Everyone loves me. But what am I supposed to do about the Shadows?” Irritation scratched at me.
“All will come to pass in time. You will find your strength but a sacrifice must be made. Debts must be repaid.”
“That is not helpful at all!” I cried out. I didn’t care if they knew it would be all right. I needed to know what was going to happen. What sacrifice? What debts?
“We help when needed.” The sound of their voice became more distant and hollow. I had to strain to hear them at all. I tried to step forward to demand them to tell me what was happening, but the moment my foot moved the scene changed.
I was no longer in the alcove where the tree was withering away but in the middle of a forest. I turned in a circle, frantic to find my way back to the tree. To demand it to give me some answers. With nothing but dark trees surrounding me, I had little choice but to pick a direction and start walking.
“You don’t want to be going that way, Lady,” a familiar voice said behind me.
I spun around to find the Shadow man lounging in Hatter’s chair, where it and the table had not been before.
“You never know what kind of baddies could be lurking in the dark.”
He had traded out his black suit for one of a more eye-catching blue, his feet were propped up on the edge of the table as he leaned back in Hatter’s chair as if he owned it. The curve of the smile on his face caused my skin to crawl. He had that look that tiptoed the line of wanting to fuck me and devour me at the same time. For all I knew, he probably did.
“What am I doing here?” I edged around the other end of the table, where Door Mouse usually sat, to keep a safe distance between us.
“Why to have tea, of course?” He gestured to the table where it had been laid out with a tea set and cookies. My stomach rumbled a thanks when I didn’t see any jellied sandwiches. I’d learned the hard way that I didn’t want any food the UnSeelie had to offer, especially not from the Shadow man.
