The Faerie Wand (Dark World: The Faerie Games Book 4)

by Michelle Madow

  My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t eaten since the arepa in King Devin’s penthouse, and that had only been a few bites of food.

  Reed created balls of black smoky magic in his hands. “Wait,” he said, and I stopped myself from walking toward the table. “Those without fae blood can’t eat the food here. Not without risking becoming stuck here forever.”

  Ryanne looked at him and said nothing.

  “How do you know this?” Thomas asked.

  “We know more about the fae in Mystica than you do on Earth,” he said. “We don’t know how to travel to their realm, but we do know a bit about their customs, and what to be on alert for while here. This is one of them.”

  We all looked to Ryanne.

  “It’s true,” she confirmed. “Since this food is my creation—creating food is my unique magical gift—I wouldn’t hold you to it and insist you stay here. But others would, if you eat what they present to you.”

  “Then it’s a good thing my magic can neutralize yours.” Reed’s eyes flashed black, and he aimed the dark magic toward the food. The black smoke swirled around it, disappeared, and his eyes turned back to normal.

  “Dark magic.” Ryanne raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”

  “Useful,” Reed said.

  Haunted chills trickled down my spine.

  What does Ryanne know about dark mage magic?

  Ryanne gave Reed a single nod, clasped her hands in front of herself, and headed toward the table. “Selena’s been through a lot, and I have her best interests at heart,” she said. “You need to know everything before Aiden brings you to the Empress. So come, sit, and I’ll tell you all I know.”

  49

  Selena

  I’d told Elder Jartlath, and the rest of the Sanctuary to stay put until I returned with my army. We’d come for them when the time was right. Until then, they needed to remain in the Sanctuary, where they’d be safe.

  They thankfully—though reluctantly—agreed. To them, I was their queen. They’d do whatever I asked.

  They even gave me a pegasus, which made the journey to the citadel much shorter than it would have been otherwise.

  I held the wand with one hand as we flew, and Julian held onto my waist to keep me steady. With the wand, I’d been directing the wind in our favor to get us to the citadel faster. The weather listened to me, and while that was thanks to Jupiter’s magic instead of my own, I was just as grateful for it.

  Once we left the North, Julian and I used glamour to hide our new wing colors. No one would suspect that their colors had changed, so they wouldn’t know to look. The glamour was surprisingly easy to hold.

  It was just a small portion of everything we could do.

  The further south we flew, the more fae zombies we saw. They’d taken over entire towns. They trudged aimlessly through the streets, walking through thick black gooey puddles that looked like tar.

  As far as we could tell, no one had been left alive.

  Because the zombie fae were dead, right? They were animated corpses?

  If there were any remnants in their minds of who they’d been…

  I’d brought it up to Julian on the first night we set up camp, inside a cave on top of a mountain, far out of reach of the fae zombies. He was confident that their souls were gone. He said that was why their wings were black. The plague had destroyed their magic, and thus, killed their souls.

  I didn’t know how he could be so sure. But wondering wasn’t doing me any good. So I focused on what I could control—getting back to the citadel.

  As we continued south, the zombies grew so thick that there were forests of them. They were an infestation on the Otherworld. A cancer that couldn’t be stopped—not even with our magic.

  Wait.

  They couldn’t be stopped with the magic we had before freeing ourselves in the Sanctuary. But what about now that our magic was unbound?

  “Fly lower,” I told the pegasus. “I want to try something.”

  The pegasus spread his wings wider and did as I commanded.

  Julian held tighter onto my waist. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I have an idea.” I waited until we were about twenty feet above a field of wandering zombies. “Stop,” I said to the pegasus. “Fly in place right here.”

  The pegasus flew in a small circle, apparently unable to stay in one place like we could while treading water.

  “Our magic couldn’t kill the zombies before,” I explained to Julian. “But our magic is stronger now that it’s been unbound. And the Holy Wand amplifies my magic. Maybe—”

  “You can cure them?”

  I paused, taken off guard. “I was going to try disintegrating them,” I said. “But I suppose I can try to cure them. Although is that even possible, since their souls are gone?”

  “I think their souls are gone,” he said. “If I’m wrong…”

  “Then we have to know.” I cursed inwardly at how I hadn’t thought of that myself. But that was why Julian and I made a good team. We were always thinking of things the other didn’t.

  “We do,” he said. “But don’t get any closer than this. No need to risk them getting their claws in us. Or their teeth.”

  “Definitely not.” I shuddered at the thought. Then I raised the wand and gathered my magic until it filled every inch of my body. The sparkling blue, silver, and violet spiraled tightly around the wand, like a cord ready to be sprung loose.

  I’d cured the half-bloods from the poison inked on them by the fae.

  Why couldn’t I do the same for the fae infected with the plague?

  I envisioned myself healing them, just like I’d healed the half-bloods from the poisonous fae tattoos. Then I pointed the wand downward, pushed out, and all three colors of my magic exploded from the crystals in a nearly blinding beam of light toward the fae zombies below.

  I moved the wand around in a small circle, hitting the closest zombies in what must have been a fifty-foot radius. They fell to the ground, and I kept going, waiting for the poison to leak out of them like it had for the half-bloods I’d cured.

  It didn’t happen.

  So instead of focusing on such a wide circle, I zoomed in on the ones directly below. I waited and waited, far longer than I had for the half-bloods. But the poison wasn’t coming out.

  “Selena,” Julian murmured in my ear. “I think that’s enough.”

  I pressed my lips together, because he was right. I wasn’t curing them.

  Time for plan B.

  Disintegration.

  I threw more magic into the beam of light, and it was so bright that I nearly had to close my eyes. Thunder rolled in the sky. The wind gathered up speed around us, bringing the rotting corpse smell with it. I held onto the magic like a laser, pushed more energy into it, and kicked it up to maximum voltage.

  Turn to ash, I thought as I stared down at the zombies. DISINTEGRATE.

  That should have been far more than enough.

  So I sucked in a deep breath and pulled my magic back inside of myself. The beam disappeared, the crystal stopped glowing, and I gazed down at the carnage beneath me.

  The zombies were lying down on the ground, like they were unconscious. Their wings were still black, and their skin was that same corpse-like, chalky white it had been before.

  Disappointment crushed my chest. It was just like when I’d blasted them with my lightning.

  But I had more magic this time. Even though they weren’t ash, maybe they were permanently down.

  I held my breath, waiting. It hadn’t taken them this long to get back up before.

  Did it work?

  It seemed like it might have.

  Then, a few on the outside twitched and slowly pulled themselves up. More and more of them got up, a wave moving inward to the center of the circle that I’d blasted until the final ones in the middle were pushing themselves up from their palms.

  Defeat slammed into me, and I slumped back into Julian’s arms. “It didn’t work,” I said. “I
tried. But it didn’t work.”

  “You did your best.” He ran his hand through my hair, like my mom used to do when I was a kid and couldn’t fall asleep at night. “That’s all you can do.”

  “My best wasn’t good enough.” My heart dropped at the sight of the zombies trudging beneath us, unchanged even after such a huge blast of magic.

  Julian didn’t deny that my best wasn’t good enough.

  We both knew it was true.

  A single tear rolled down my cheek. I wished I could do something to help. I might not have grown up in the Otherworld—in fact, I had every reason to hate it there—but I was half-fae. This realm was a part of me. Plus, it was Julian’s home. I didn’t want his home to be destroyed.

  And what if the plague seeped out of the Otherworld and into Earth? Maybe one of our supernatural races had a type of magic that could kill the fae zombies, but what if they didn’t?

  We’d all be screwed.

  I gazed down at the horde of zombies below, but it was no longer the fae I saw. In my mind, I saw everyone I loved on Avalon—my mom, my dad, Torrence, and even the mages—aimlessly walking around like this. Unable to be cured, yet unable to move on. Stuck in a strange, cruel limbo.

  But the picture in my mind wasn’t quite right. Because there was one big thing the fae had that everyone on Avalon didn’t.

  Wings.

  “We’ve only seen full fae like this,” I said what I should have noticed sooner. “Have you thought about what happens to the half-bloods who get the plague?”

  Julian stiffened behind me. “I have,” he said.

  I waited for him to continue.

  He didn’t.

  “Tell me.” I rotated halfway around the pegasus’s back and faced Julian, unprepared for the torture and pain I found in his eyes. My breath caught in my throat, but I forced myself to continue. “I want to know.”

  He swallowed and glanced down at the mess below. “You noticed the thick black puddles in the towns, right? And the black stains around their feet and the bottoms of their clothes?”

  “Yes,” I said, since how could I miss them?

  “Those puddles aren’t natural. And they had to come from somewhere.”

  He waited a few beats, and the horror of what he was implying set in.

  “No.” I shook my head, unwilling to believe it. “You’re not saying…”

  “I think those puddles are half-bloods,” he said flatly. “Well, I think they were half-bloods. What’s left of them.”

  I glanced down at the zombies below—at the black stains on the bottoms of their torn-up breeches and dresses—and swallowed down disgust. “How’s that even possible?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But we haven’t seen any half-bloods in the hordes, and we didn’t see any in the towns overrun by the plagued fae. They can’t have all disappeared. They have to have gone somewhere.”

  “Maybe they’re hiding out,” I said, although I knew it was wishful thinking. “Maybe they found someplace safe to hide.”

  “Or maybe they contracted the plague and melted into puddles of black sludge.”

  Unable to look at the zombies beneath us any more—or at the certainty in Julian’s eyes—I sighed and buried my face in his chest. He wrapped his arms around me, and I focused on the steady beats of his heart to drown out the pained, hungry moans of the zombies below.

  We stayed like that for a few minutes.

  But we couldn’t sit there forever.

  Eventually I pulled away, pressed a light kiss to his lips, and rotated back around to focus on the giant mountains in the distance. The Eastern Mountain Range.

  The barrier that protected the citadel and its surrounding countryside from the rest of the infected Otherworld.

  From what I’d seen on the journey back, the fae zombies mainly stayed on flat land. They struggled with hills, and while they could clearly get by them eventually, hills seemed to be a major factor in keeping the plague from spreading as quickly as it otherwise would.

  Hopefully the giant mountains would hold them off indefinitely.

  But there was only one way to find out.

  I took a deep breath and stroked the fur on the pegasus’s neck, the soft silkiness giving me comfort. “We’re done here,” I said, and I forced myself to focus on the mountains ahead instead of on the zombies below. “Let’s continue on to the citadel.”

  50

  Selena

  The mountain range did provide a barrier for the East.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  Zombies had congregated in hordes along the western side of the mountains. They walked into the walls of rocks, their feet dragging so much that they were unable to climb up. It looked like something from a video game, with mindless lemmings walking into the same thing and falling back down over and over.

  But there were a handful of roads that wound through the mountains, designed for carriages and horses. Our pegasus flew right over one. The road’s gradual twists and turns were far less efficient than the way Julian and I had climbed straight over the steep, rough terrain, but it was walkable.

  And the zombies were funneling into it.

  Many of them slid back down when the road sloped up. But the more muscular, stronger fae were making progress. Slowly, but they were managing. It was like they sensed that on the other side of the mountains, there were fae that were still alive.

  Well, that were hopefully still alive.

  Who knew what had happened while Julian and I had been gone?

  The strongest of the zombie fae persevered and made it to the crest of the mountain. Once there, they slid and rolled their way down the road.

  There weren’t nearly as many of them on the eastern side of the mountains as on the west, but given that they couldn’t be killed, it was enough to cause serious damage.

  The half-blood farming villages near the mountains were overrun. Puddles of black sludge dotted in and around them. Now that I had a good idea about what those puddles were, sickness rose in my throat whenever I saw one.

  The villages eventually gave way to countryside estates. Villas, like the one I stayed in with Princess Ryanne and her family. Many of the smallest ones on the outskirts were overrun with black-winged zombies. But transparent domes surrounded those on top of hills, and fae and half-bloods lingered in the courtyards and gardens.

  They waved and cheered our names as we passed, like we were gods coming down from the Heavens to save them.

  I wished I could. As it was, I yearned to fly down and use my magic to free the half-bloods from their bonds.

  But no one in the citadel could know what I could do. If they did, it would mess up our entire plan.

  As difficult as it was, I needed to be patient.

  We also couldn’t spare time to stop. So I raised the wand and aimed my magic at their villas. The blue, violet, and silver sparkled across the domes, strengthening the boundaries. It wasn’t much, but I hoped it was enough to keep them safe until we learned how to beat this plague.

  I passed over one villa as a fae climbed to the top of one of the towers, aimed her magic toward a zombie fae that was making progress up the hill, and blasted it down. She didn’t have to leave the barrier dome, since it was spelled to keep people out instead of in.

  Even though they couldn’t kill the zombies, at least they’d figured out how to temporarily protect themselves.

  But how long could they survive without leaving their homes?

  We flew closer to the city, and the villas grew grander, all of them mounted on the tops of large hills for the best views. Some were so big that they could pass for small villages. These estates were mostly intact, and as I flew over them, I aimed my magic at their barrier domes to strengthen them.

  Like in the smaller villas, the fae and half-bloods inside cheered and waved as we approached. But when we continued on without stopping, a few of their cries turned angry, and the fae inside attacked us with beams of magic.

  I blocked
their shots with magic from the Holy Wand, until we were far enough away that they couldn’t reach us anymore.

  “Damn,” Julian said after we passed a particularly angry villa. “That’ll teach them to mess with the Queen of Wands.”

  My throat tightened, and my heart stilled. “I’m not the Queen of Wands,” I said.

  “Are you so sure about that?”

  No.

  But I pressed my lips together, since there was no point in arguing over the subject. I had the Holy Wand, and that was all that mattered.

  Finally, we approached the walled capital city. It went on for miles. The tenement apartments on the outskirts were as narrow, cramped, and dilapidated as Julian had described. The marble, red-roofed buildings further in were as pristine as they’d been when we’d left. The fae inside the walls had bright, vibrant wings, and no black puddles sullied the streets.

  I breathed out a sigh of relief. The capital was safe, thanks to the massive transparent dome around it.

  It must have taken a lot of magic to create it, and to maintain it.

  The few zombies that had made it past the country villas walked into the barrier, fell down, got up, and walked into it again. They grunted and snarled like rabid animals. Piles of ash dotted the road leading to the main entrance, and the zombies dragged their feet through it so the soot trailed behind them.

  The fae must have tried throwing giant balls of fire at the zombies to hold them off. A valiant effort, but if my lightning couldn’t kill the zombies, I doubted fire would be any different.

  I could knock down enough zombies around the entrance with lightning to give us time to bang on the barrier and be let in. But getting close to the zombies was always a risk. There had to be an easier way.

  “Fly over the dome,” I commanded the pegasus. “Don’t stop until we’re above the Empress’s house.”

  The flying horse pushed off with his wings and did as I asked.

  I gripped the pegasus’s mane with one hand and the wand with the other, focusing on gathering as much magic as possible.