“We’re just trying to help you!” Ashleigh called behind me, but I just slammed the door.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Runaway
My mind reeled. My friends wanted me to break up my own parents and turn Mom over to the Fae, and I couldn’t convince them that they were wrong. I also didn’t know how to fix things by myself. I needed help, and I didn’t know how to get it. Was there anyone still on my side?
All weekend long, I avoided my family, locking myself up in my room without talking to anyone. I spent my time thinking about what to do. Go after the garden with a weed whacker? Go straight to Mom and beg her to stop the spell herself? Let the Council deal with it and accept the destruction of my family? I turned myself in circles, going over every idea a dozen times but unable to choose one.
By Sunday night, I had to do something to take my mind off of everything, so I picked up my clarinet and practiced my solo from school. I kept repeating the same tricky fingering run over and over, but I couldn’t seem to get it right.
Mom came and knocked on my door, then opened it without waiting for a response. I put down the clarinet and looked up at her, keeping my face neutral. “What?”
“I was just coming to tell you that dinner is ready.” She kept her face turned away from me, looking at a spot on the floor. “If you could please come down and join us for a little while, at least?”
I sighed. “Be there in a minute.” I started pulling apart my clarinet so that I could clean it and put it back in the case.
She walked away without saying anything else, which surprised me. I had expected a lecture for locking myself in my room all weekend. Maybe she was going to wait until I came downstairs, so she could do it in front of the whole family and get them to join in on telling me how much I was missed and how important it was to spend time with them.
But when I came down for dinner, everyone was quiet. We got through the entire meal without anyone saying anything except occasionally asking someone else to pass a dish. When I finally looked up at the others, I saw that no one was making eye contact. Dad sat stiff, like having dinner with a mannequin, and Mom kept dabbing at puffy red eyes. I glanced at Akasha, who made an unhappy face back at me.
What was going on with my family?
After dinner, Dad disappeared upstairs in his office, and Mom went into the kitchen to wash the dishes. Akasha started to go up to her room, too, but I stopped her on the stairs. “What happened?”
She half-turned and shrugged at me. “Haven’t you heard them? They’ve been arguing.”
I stared. “They never fight.”
“I know.” Akasha glanced downstairs toward the kitchen, then ran the rest of the way upstairs and shut her bedroom door.
I stood there for a long minute, wondering what to do. I could go into Dad’s office and talk to him, but what could I say? Maybe he had tried to talk to Mom about the spells, because I brought them up. But if she still had her hold over him, then he would be convinced to her side, and now he was probably mad at me. I couldn’t afford to try confronting him.
I went into my bedroom and locked the door.
I did not figure out what to do on Sunday night, and on Monday morning, I knew that I had finally run out of time. Today Mom would go to work and find out that I had broken her spell. I would be in major trouble—I didn’t even know what she could do to me, and if my protection would hold. In two days, my so-called friends would tell the whole Faerie Court what she had done, and if there was anything left of my peaceful life at that point, then it would really all fall to pieces.
I went to school and tried to pretend that everything was normal, but I could not concentrate. My mind kept drifting. I was a zombie, going through the motions.
Lindsey pulled me aside the moment she saw me. “Where have you been? I was trying to call you all weekend.”
I shrugged. “Sorry. I was busy with some family drama.” With everything else going on, I hadn’t been up to taking Lindsey’s calls.
“I need your advice really badly.” Lindsey gripped my arm tight in both hands. “You would not believe what has been happening. Robert broke up with Daniela and he came over to apologize to me for how bad he’s been acting, and then I was torn because things have been pretty good with Peter but I think that I might still be in love with Robert, and—”
I pried her hands off of me. “I can’t do this.” I took a step back. “I’m sorry, Lindsey, because we used to be really good friends, but I can’t do this anymore. You have to figure out your own issues. I have enough of my own problems to deal with right now.”
She stared at me. “What are you saying, Rosa?”
“I’m saying that we’re not friends anymore. When you have a boy to fawn over, you blow me off, and then you only come to me when you need help with a problem. You don’t even listen to my advice, so I’m not going to try helping you.”
Lindsey lifted her chin and folded her arms. “You begged me to take you back as a friend, even though it was awkward for both of us. Are you saying that I can’t date anyone besides you?”
I had to struggle to keep my voice down so no one else could hear us; I could see that we were getting some curious looks. “I’m not trying to be jealous of your boyfriends, just honest. I know that it was awkward. We tried, but it’s not working. I’m sorry.”
Lindsey rolled her eyes. “I’m sorry that I wasted my time trying to get our friendship back. I guess it just wasn’t possible given all of our history.” She turned and walked away.
At lunch, I checked my cell phone and found out that I had a new voice mail from Mom. I ducked out into the hallway so I could listen to it alone. This was it. I braced myself against a wall and pressed ‘play’.
Sure enough, she sounded upset. “Rosa, this is your mother.” Her voice shook. “I need you to call me as soon as you get a chance. Please don’t be alarmed, I just want to talk to you.”
I dropped the phone on the floor, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. My heart was racing. I knew that if I called her, if I talked to her, she would find a way to get control of me again. I had to get away, to somewhere safe where my mother couldn’t touch me, to find someone that could help me figure it all out and fix it.
If only I had some kind of spell that would let me erase everything that had happened over the past month or take me back in time so I could do it differently—but that was impossible. Even magic couldn’t change reality. What I’d done was irreversible.
Then I thought about Mantis. He’d always been the one who had pointed me in the right direction when I was dealing with this. He had made the charm that protected me from my mother’s spell—and when I’d been visiting him in the Faerie Realm before, my mother hadn’t been able to track me. She couldn’t touch me there.
But running off into Faerie without a guide was reckless. I could get lost or trapped there; the stories said some people returned a hundred years later and found everything changed. I should go to Ashleigh or Glen for help—
No. I curled my fingers into fists and opened my eyes again. If I went to them for help they would just stall me by trying to talk me out of it, or tell the Court early to protect me, and I couldn’t afford to wait. I had to leave now, while my mother was still waiting for me to call her back, before she started to suspect too much of me or she could cast another spell.
I picked up the phone off the floor and started walking out of the school. I was rushing along a hallway without really paying attention to anything when I ran straight into Zil, making her drop an armload of books.
“Sorry,” I mumbled. I knelt down on the floor next to her and tried to help her gather the books back up again.
“It’s okay,” she said. Then she caught sight of my face as I handed her a book. “Are you okay, Rosa?”
I turned away from her and stood up. “I’m fine. I just have to go get something from my car.” I hurried outside into the parking lot before she could say anything else.
Outside, rain poure
d down on the parking lot, the first real rain of the fall. I put up the hood of my jacket as I walked to the car. I opened up the trunk and pulled out my broom. I hoped that Akasha wouldn’t be stranded at the school for too long before someone else came to pick her up, because I wouldn’t be around to give her a ride home today. I put my cell phone in my school bag and locked that in the trunk—I didn’t want to take it with me so no one could track me by it.
I went up the mountain to Doe’s Rest, flying low over the trees so that they couldn’t see me coming. Despite my coat, I was soaked through by the time I landed in the garden, hopefully out of sight of anyone in the castle’s buildings, and went to the rowan grove. I tried to remember every detail of what Ashleigh had done before we’d crossed over—I didn’t have the charm that I’d borrowed from Ashleigh last time, but I cast a simple protection spell on myself using one of the rowan branches. I tied white ribbons around my neck, wrists, and ankles. I also didn’t have a spell to call myself back at a specific time—but I didn’t know when it would be safe. I would have to rely on Mantis’s knowledge of keeping track of time in the mortal realm, and hope that he could bring me back if I couldn’t find my own way.
When I was ready, I looked at the ring of the trees. Well, it hadn’t been so bad last time, after all. It would be harder without Glen and Ashleigh’s help, but I thought that I had enough magic of my own to manage. It would also be harder to pierce the Veil because it wasn’t a particular between time like sunset or a full moon. It was just past noon and still raining. Last time, I hadn’t even noticed a difference when we crossed over the Veil. What exactly would be hard? Would I just be stuck here?
But I had to try. I took a deep breath, called on every bit of magic that I could conjure, and stepped into the Grove.
My stomach wrenched sideways as the world turned gray and upside-down. I blinked, trying to make my eyes focus on my surroundings, but everything kept changing. I felt as if I were falling—no, something pushed against, pushing me back the way I had come. Mist swirled around me, cold and wet and swirled by a freezing wind that roared in my ears and cut me to the bone. I tried to push forward and stumbled to my knees; sharp rocks cut and bruised the skin of my legs through my thin tights, but when I put my hands out to steady myself, they sank into a thick mud. I started crying, hot tears leaving trails of wet warmth down my frozen cheeks, wishing for it to stop—
“Please, let me through!” I shouted into that terrifying vortex, without thinking to hear an answer.
“You must turn back,” said a voice that was deep, yet unmistakably female, a throaty rumble that seemed to reverberate around me as if the very mountain had spoken.
I turned my head from side to side, trying to see who had spoken. “I can’t go back! Who is there?”
The wind stopped pushing me back, and I could feel solid ground beneath my feet once again, although I still could not tell where I was. Then the mists seemed to glow with the pale gold hues of dawn. They parted before me to reveal a terrifying figure—a head, larger than me, with thick curved teeth the size of my arm, huge slitted eyes like a cat’s, sharp golden scales—a dragon’s head, bent low to examine me, so close that I felt the heat of her breath scalding my skin. In my peripheral vision, I could see the huge form disappearing back into the mists, impossibly large. I flinched but stood my ground.
“I am Kaorinix, the guardian of this path,” said the dragon in a whisper that still roared in my ears. “You are too weak to travel here alone. If you do not turn back, you may lose your way and wander forever here.”
Glen had told me that there was a guardian to protect the castle, but I had no idea that it was a dragon. I still couldn’t let her stop me. I folded my arms. “I have to go through. I’m going to my friend’s house. I know where it is—I won’t get lost.”
Kaorinix swept her wings forward with a dry rustle, and there was a great rushing of wind as the mists swirled around us wildly. I pressed my hands over my ears at the noise. “Now is not a safe time to travel,” she said—loud enough that I could still hear her clearly over the roar of the wind. “Turn back, or you risk losing your mind forever.”
“I don’t have a choice!”
The wind stopped—I could hear the rustle again as she folded her wings onto her back—and she pulled her head back from me a little. Now I had to crane my neck to look up at her, but her breath was no longer searing my skin, and I could breathe a little easier without having to look directly into those teeth. “Why are you here?” she asked.
I tried to explain about my mother—how she had placed an enchantment on my entire family, how I had broken some of her spells behind her back but now she had found them, why I could not break the final spell on my own, how Mantis had helped me before. The entire situation struck me as bizarre: telling a dragon about my family problems.
Kaorinix listened patiently to my story. Her face didn’t seem to change, but then I’m not sure what kinds of facial expressions a dragon can make. When I’d finished, she said, “I think you are afraid. You want to run away from your problems and ask someone else to help you. Why didn’t you ask your friends in your own world?”
I grimaced. “Well, I tried to, but what they said was wrong.”
“What did they say?” Her voice was pointed.
“That we should leave my mother.”
“So you asked them for advice, and you didn’t like it, so you are looking for a better answer from someone else. I think that you did not really want to hear the answer.” The dragon turned her head to stare at me out of her huge right eye.
I clenched my hands into fists. “I can’t destroy my family!”
“The other way is to submit to your mother’s control and stop fighting her.”
“That’s not a choice!”
The dragon responded as calmly as ever, “Then you must leave her.”
I shook my head. What did a dragon know about human families? “She’s my mother. We all love her, and she loves us. She’s done so much for all of us. We can’t just walk out on her.”
“She is using you,” Kaorinix said. “All you can do is give in to her will or leave. You cannot make her change her ways.”
Tears stung my eyes. “That’s not fair!”
“It’s the reality.” Kaorinix turned her head again so that she faced me straight on. “It is not fair. It is the situation created by your mother’s actions. She has made her choice, and now this is what is open to you.”
I thought about my sister and my father, and wondered how they would react if I told them we had to leave. “I can’t make this choice for my whole family. I don’t know if they would want to leave.”
“It is your responsibility. If you break the spell their lives will change. If you let it stand, then things may continue as they are, with your family still trapped. But you have already chosen to break some of the spells. How do you know that things are not already changing?”
I was silent, unsure about how to respond. I thought about how quiet and tense my parents had been the night before. Were they fighting? Was my mother’s hold over Dad and Akasha weakening as well? But was that enough?
Kaorinix made a deep rumbling noise in her chest, almost like a growl. “You’re still hesitating. If you didn’t know what you wanted, you shouldn’t have come here. Now it is too late to turn back.”
Those words made panic rise in my throat. “It’s too late? But—”
“Three times I told you to turn back, and three times you refused. Now, you will wander and become lost.”
I looked around, squinting my eyes to try and peer through the mist, but it was glowing with the dragon’s light and I could not see anything else. “How am I supposed to know where to go? I can’t see anything.”
“I warned you.” The dragon raised her head and took a step back. “If you would pass, do it.”
Then there was a great rush of air and heat. I smelled it as I saw it spread around me—fire, hotter than anything I had ever felt before
. I threw my hands up to protect my face. I tried to turn away, but it had surrounded me. The air filled with smoke that made me cough and stung my eyes, and the light blinded my eyes with its shifting colors.
I tried to yell above the roar of the flames, to tell her to put out the fire so that I could pass, but my throat was dry, and my voice cracked so that I couldn’t hear it.
There was no time to think, no time to cast a spell or do anything, even if I had known a spell to save me. I could not see which way too go, because the flames blocked everything, and they were getting closer to me.
One direction looked just the same as any other. I closed my eyes, held my breath, and tried to jump forward as far as I could, hoping to pass over the worst of the flames.
When I opened my eyes, I was lying on my back. I felt cold all over. I put my hands down to push myself up and felt damp grass. I blinked and looked around. Twilight filled the forest glade; when I looked up at the sky, I could see neither sun nor moon, no clue about whether it was morning or evening.
It took a moment for my mind to clear and for me to remember where I was. I did not recognize the trees and plants around me, so I must be in the Faerie Realm. Somehow, I had made it. I looked down at myself to make sure I had made it all in one piece; my school uniform was there intact, showing no signs of scorch marks or even smoke, and my hands were fine—in fact, I felt no pain anywhere. I stood up, a little shaky and stiff, as if I had been lying there for a while—had I blacked out?—but once I stretched my muscles, I felt fine.
I looked around again to find my way, and I saw several paths stretching away through the trees. There were no landmarks I recognized, nothing to tell me which was the right way to go. Should I just choose a direction at random and start heading down it? That sounded like a good way to get lost.
Small Town Witch (The Fae of Calaveras County) Page 23
