The Last Changeling

by Chelsea Pitcher

  Don’t take her away from me, God. Do not take Elora away.

  But there was no one who would hear that prayer, because she was already lost to me. She’d been lost long before she came to the human world. Lost from the moment she’d been born. My God, she was one of them.

  She’d always been one of them.

  That’s when it hit me. They weren’t dead things. They weren’t even demons. They were dark things. Dark faeries.

  They were her family.

  Now they’d come for me. Now they’d make me dance until my feet bled and all the bones in my legs were broken. They’d scald the flesh from my body and make me smile through the pain. They’d bury me alive and have a tea party on my grave, sipping my blood from little cups.

  They were the cruelest creatures on the planet, and they were going to punish me for loving their princess.

  27

  ElorA

  When my feet hit the ground of the graveyard, I did three things to prepare for my confrontation with Naeve. I kicked off my shoes. I took off my gloves. And I tucked my wings into my back.

  I’d be using them plenty by night’s end.

  For now, I would use my eyes and my wits. The grounds were overrun with dark beings. Through the fog of their glamour, I checked off the list of the usual players: the Headless Hags, rolling in the muck like pigs; Carnivorous Jack, gnawing on his own arm to satisfy his bloodlust; and a host of would-be changelings: small, shriveled creatures we might’ve traded for children in the old days, before the rise of the courts.

  Before the dark faeries’ hatred blossomed into something ugly.

  Now I could see the ugliness, but it was too late. The twins were being held captive, and I could not free them by convincing the dark courtiers of their merit. I would have to fight, and that, too, would be ugly.

  At least Taylor was nowhere to be seen.

  I stepped closer to the fray. At my back, my servants prepared to depart, Brad in tow. Only Alexia was permitted to remain, and I prayed she had the good sense to stay out of the battle.

  But good sense goes out the window when love is involved.

  Alexia dove into danger, the pointed heel of her shoe held out like a knife. I could not hold her back.

  Now she was being surrounded by a host of feathery wings and sharpened nails. Now she was trapped, along with the twins. Humans might have knives and guns at their disposal, but faeries can walk into a battle unarmed and win. All we need to do is summon the elements to do our bidding.

  I watched as vines encircled the humans’ wrists. The faeries were tying them to a statue of an angel, no doubt to add insult to injury. Where are your angels now? the gesture seemed to say. Where are your gods and your free will and your protection?

  My heart went out to the mortals, and not only because their world had been turned on its head. The faeries were putting on a show for them, intuiting their darkest fears and using these to dominate them. So here came the spiders, here came the snakes.

  The faeries were playing Wicked Circus, one of their favorite games. Rather than sporting their garments of shadow and brambles, their necklaces of thorns, they now dressed as if they were a caravan of circus performers who had fallen into the gaping mouth of a grave, and died, only to rise again on this very day.

  It’s a good show when your life isn’t at stake. I walked across their stage with purpose. But whether I was to be the Surprise Act, or the acrobat who slips and falls to her death, I did not know. My survival depended on my ability to balance and never slip.

  To never look behind my back.

  Soon I entered their inner circle. Center Stage, where the magic happens. But before I could get to the Ringmaster, I would have to pass by the two main acts.

  If humans tame lions, what do faeries tame?

  We all knew the answer to that.

  Olorian held a whip, not that he would need it. His muscles could serve as an advertisement for magical performance-enhancers. But he wanted a weapon that matched the circus theme, and the whip would do perfectly.

  “Well, well, well,” I said, dipping my head as if to show respect. Really, I was shaming him, exposing the fact that he should have been bowing to me. I was his princess, heir to the Unseelie throne. Or had he forgotten?

  He stepped forward, a good little bodyguard. His inky black body was difficult to make out in the darkness. It didn’t help that he used glamour to flicker in and out of substance. One moment, his body was like an obsidian statue; the next, he was a shadow. Smoke.

  He was also an idiot.

  One flick of the whip, and I was yanking it out of his hands. “You’re swinging it like a toy,” I scolded. “Try circling next time. Back-and-forth is easier to catch.”

  Olorian sneered. In the space where his teeth might have been, there was an abyss, and his eyes burned like coals. “If I wanted to hurt you, I would have,” he growled.

  “Maybe so.” I stepped closer. “But I doubt that very much.”

  He snarled and lashed out with that bear claw of a hand. But he never quite made contact, and that told me all I needed to know. Naeve had ordered them to scare me, nothing more. He wanted me all to himself.

  What a sweetheart.

  I approached the next of Naeve’s underlings with little fear. Like Olorian, the Lady Claremondes need not utilize whips or chains to scare people. All she had to do was swing the noose she had grown out of her sugar-white dreadlocks, and wag her tongue. Even now, that tongue hung from her lips in warning, venomous drops laying waste to the flowers on the ground.

  One moment, alive. The next moment, dead.

  I’d never really understood how quickly things could end.

  I’d never had to. But as I approached the Ringmaster, passing through the Lady Claremondes’s ethereal lower half, I understood many things.

  Naeve sat beside the great stone angel—and thus, the humans—on a throne his underlings must have thrown together on the spot. Mud and animal bones. What clever little beasts they were to think of that. A mile or so down the road, at the pet cemetery, someone’s darling Fluffy would be missing from her grave.

  Her limbs would be, anyway.

  The humans knelt in a half-circle before him. At the sound of my approach, they began to squirm. Yet try as they might, they could not turn to look at me. Vines and dark magic had them rooted to the spot.

  The beast requires an audience, I mused, looking coolly at the creature seated before me. With the greatest look of disdain, he met my gaze. His bulbous body was so large it oozed over the edges of his throne. A thin coating of hair covered him like dust. He had the appearance of a long-forgotten thing, something better left buried.

  I wondered at my decision to dig him up.

  “Pretty mask, brother.” I tugged at the strings of black hair that hung from his head like mold. “Pity it does not mirror the aberration within.”

  Naeve let out a sound like choking and a rat crawled from his mouth. “Welcome to the Wicked Circus, princess. Is the reception to your liking?” His face housed a family of boils, and when he smiled, they blended with his lips.

  “Utterly delightful. It’s clear you have gone to so much trouble.”

  He rose languidly from his throne. “Trouble?” he intoned, as the air around him began to shimmer. “Don’t be silly, child. You practically led us right to you.”

  I grinned, refusing to show weakness. “Wasn’t it nice of me to give you a fighting chance?”

  “That would have been nice,” said Naeve, his body undergoing a curious transformation. Pounds of flesh dripped from his frame, dissipating in the air. Golden wings unfurled behind his back. On another sort of creature, such wings would have been prismatic, reflecting every hint of light, yet from Naeve they cast elongated shadows. “But you have never been nice.”

  He circled the humans, his eyes never leavin
g my face. Waving a pale, gold-flecked hand, he twisted their bonds, and like pieces on a carousel they turned with him.

  Keegan’s terror transformed to awe. “He’s—”

  “Beautiful,” Kylie breathed, staring into Naeve’s golden eyes.

  “Am I?” Naeve asked, flashing a grin. It was the kind of look a snake gives before unhinging his jaw and swallowing you whole.

  “I bet you’re ugly on the inside.” That was Alexia, looking to get herself killed, no doubt. But I couldn’t really blame her, could I? If I were in her place, I would have said the same thing.

  I should be in her place.

  Naeve knelt before her. Bless her little soul, she didn’t blink. Not until his blue-black hair began to writhe like serpents and a line of blood trickled from his lips. “You reveal more than you realize. Be wary of that.”

  “I’ll write it down,” she snarled. “If you’ll just loosen my bonds … ”

  “Little lies, easy lies.”

  “It’s called sarcasm,” I said, stepping close enough to draw Naeve’s attention. “If you had any insight into the minds of humans, you would know that.”

  “And yet even I am smart enough to know that an unexplained meteor shower would attract their attention,” he replied.

  My heart skipped. His words were little claws in my chest.

  “I had my reasons,” I said flippantly. “But how would you know of my glamour’s effect on humanity? Have you been sipping tea with them? Sharing a bit of gossip?”

  “We came upon a group of them in the mountains, after that stupid little marsh sprite spoiled your secret.” Naeve laughed. “Surely you must have known that humans notice strange movements in the stars? Even the foulest, most inbred of the lot knew something was amiss. They pointed my courtiers in the direction of your little town. That is how you think of it now, isn’t it? Your town?” Naeve spat the words as if they had poisoned him.

  I wish they had.

  “What happened to you?” he asked. “How did you fall so far?”

  “I woke up,” I said.

  “And you thought you could live out your days in the wasteland? You did not think that we would come for you?”

  I shrugged with the careless expertise of a human teenager. “Doesn’t this all work out in your favor? You acquire your birthright, the position I stole from you. You become the Dark Lady’s one and only child.”

  “Ah, if only it were so simple,” he said. “But unfortunately, the Dark Lady has grown attached to your presence. She does not eat, she does not sleep.”

  “She always was good at keeping up appearances.”

  “Oh, what a tragic story! Poor neglected princess, who had everything she could ever want. But that wasn’t enough for you, you wicked little wretch. You had the Court, but you wanted the world.” He lashed out, barely missing my neck. Those long, spindly fingers curled in the air. “You insult your family. You insult your queen. You insult your people, and for that you will pay.”

  “You will have to catch me first.” I opened my wings. Naeve may have been cunning, but I had always been the better flier.

  “Oh, little Elora. I’ve already caught you.” He crouched down, laying a hand on Kylie’s cheek. Like a lion stalking its prey, he had sniffed out her sweetness. And he would use that sweetness to subjugate me. To try.

  “What do you want?” I asked casually, hoping he could not hear the hammering in my chest.

  “Not a big thing,” he said. “Just your life.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You would trade my life for the lives of humans? Are mortals more valuable than the fey, now?”

  He scoffed. “You misunderstand me. The lives of mortal babes are all but worthless. And yet, they seem to hold some meaning for you.”

  He bowed a little, as if to say: Your move.

  “And if I refuse?”

  Naeve beckoned the Lady Claremondes. “Won’t you give us a demonstration?”

  The Lady cackled, slithering across the ground. Before I could reach the humans, she had lowered her lips to Kylie’s neck. “One little lick makes baby sick,” she hissed, revealing her tongue. “Two on the neck means baby’s death.”

  “No!” Keegan screamed, but it was too late. The Lady slid her long, venomous tongue up Kylie’s neck. For a moment, everything went silent, and I thought this was some sort of trick. Then all the blood drained from Kylie’s face.

  The scream that followed did not sound human.

  “You’ve made your point,” I said, my voice trembling. Down in the dirt, Kylie was convulsing as black bile dripped from her lips. “But I will not succumb to a simple game of trades. You must fight me, and you must agree to my terms.”

  Naeve looked at me coolly.

  “First, tuck the humans away.” I nodded to the tree nearest to us, a great sprawling oak with claws for branches. “And tuck your beasts away as well.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “I cannot fight you fairly with them hovering about,” I explained, my stomach turning as Kylie begged for relief. “And I am not foolish enough to believe you will exclude them.”

  “Tuck them away how?”

  “Let me bind them to the trees with magic. They will not break my spell easily. And you will not release them.”

  “Very well,” he said after a moment. “This could prove to be very entertaining.”

  His courtiers laughed, but the laughter died the moment I took to trapping them. The surrounding trees bent to my will, extending long branches. Then, when the faeries were close enough to touch, the branches curled around them, dragging them into the air. The dark fey shrieked and screamed, but the trees showed no mercy. Soon the lot of them were trapped in makeshift cages high above the ground.

  I whispered a soft chant into the wind, strengthening the branches. Now they would be as steel, and the faeries would need to be clever to break them. When Naeve copied my movements, binding the humans in the nearby oak, he failed to duplicate the spell. Clearly, he thought he would not need it. Humans couldn’t break such thick branches without help. They would need an ax or a chain saw to get out.

  They were helpless.

  Or so they seemed.

  “Ready to play?” I asked, taking to the sky. In spite of the danger, I could not help but feel that familiar thrill. Too long my wings had been bound, by glamour and by apprehension.

  Naeve rose effortlessly into the air, matching my pace, and pulled a pair of thick gloves from his cape. By the time he was level with me, the gloves covered his hands. His heavy wing beats roused the stagnant air.

  It gave me an idea.

  Focusing my attention on the air itself, I warmed the space around me. When my warm air collided with Naeve’s cold air, the force of it shook his body. Thunder crackled around us.

  I laughed openly. I was only toying with him, giving him a taste of my abilities, but the gesture pleased me. It had been a long time since we had played this game.

  He appeared less entertained. Drawing a whip of liquid from the clouds above, he cracked it in my direction.

  The whip encircled my neck, solidifying. Naeve yanked me forward, cutting off my ability to breathe. Just as I reached him, I lashed out with my left foot, catching him in the temple. The whip leapt from his hands.

  Naeve sneered, but I was already planning my next move. Focusing on the symbols that pulsed beneath my skin, I began to recite a spell. Darkness curled out of my body until it surrounded me. Still, I chanted quietly, and that darkness filled up the entire space. The humans whimpered in their cage. Even Naeve, a child of the Dark Court, would have trouble penetrating this vaporous cloud.

  I slid through the air, navigating easily. How could darkness blind me? I was a part of it.

  Giddily I neared Naeve, sending the vapor into his mouth, his eyes, his pores, until it choked him from the inside.
He reached up, grabbing at his throat, but he could not break free, the poor baby. His wings fluttered weakly. The more he struggled, the weaker he became.

  He began to fall.

  Naeve was inches from the ground when the darkness disappeared. There was not enough time for him to gather his wits, and he fell into an open plot. Before he could climb out, piles of dirt poured over him.

  “Don’t be upset,” I called as he fought to avoid a premature burial. “It’s a great color on you.”

  The plot began to shake. A shower of dirt burst forth and I darted upward, evading the arc.

  “Ready to stop playing around?” I asked.

  Naeve pulled himself from the earth. “It would be inhospitable,” he spat, “to intimidate you.” Frustration was plain on his muddy face. Within seconds, he had risen into the air and was hovering beside the tree that caged his favorite courtiers.

  I feared a breach of our terms.

  “If you free them, you will prove your inferiority,” I warned.

  Naeve only smiled, reaching through the branches to stroke the Lady Claremondes’s face. She leaned into his touch, shuddering in pleasure.

  I followed his lead, nearing the tree that held the humans, though I kept my back to them. Naeve already knew I shared a bond with them; I could not reveal my true attachment. “Everyone here will know I bested you,” I called. “Is that what you want?”

  Naeve eyed me for a moment, lips twisted in a peculiar grin. “No,” he said, still touching the Lady’s face. She was practically purring, pushing herself against his gloved hand.

  My stomach turned as she kissed his fingers. “You gave me your word you wouldn’t release them.”

  “And I intend to keep that promise. Now I want you to do something for me.”

  His courtiers snickered, but I did not understand why. A train of whispering circled the grounds, skittering from tree to tree.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Turn around.”

  The hairs on my neck stood at attention. “I will not turn my back to you.”

  “I will not attack you while you are turned.”