by E. M. Fitch
“I brought you out to have some fun, Sister,” Aidan said, frowning at Laney. “Don’t you feel their heat? I know it’s not the same, but it’s a comfort, isn’t it?”
Laney shrugged, forcing a smile. He sighed and turned, resting on the log beside her. It shifted and moved under his touch. Vines twisted up behind them, and soon Laney was cradled in the embrace of the dead tree. She brought her knees up and rested her chin, watching the other Fae by the fire.
“Nothing ever seems to bother Jude,” she said. Another girl had joined the first, and they were swaying together now. Jude’s gaze turned greedy, and he spilled the wine he tried to pour.
“That’s true. Judoc is old, and humans mean very little to him,” Aidan allowed. He bent and foraged in the earth, pulling from it two stone cups brimming with dark red wine. “Elderberry?”
Laney accepted it with murmured gratitude. She sipped, and the full flavor of the forest coated her tongue, sweetened by the juice of hidden berries. “I’d like to learn to make this,” she said absently.
“I’ll teach you,” Aidan promised. He leaned back, shoulder to shoulder with Laney. “I miss him terribly.”
“Me, too.”
“It’s hard to believe, but he kept me in line. I felt anchored with him near.”
“I believe you,” Laney murmured. She stared at the wine in her hand, no longer thirsty. “In a lot of ways, Cassie was that for me, too.”
Aidan nodded. “I could see that. You and I, we are alike. The forest, the wild, calls to us. We impulsively follow. This is why I can’t get her out of my head. I’m distractible, but only superficially. I feel called to her.”
“Corra won’t let you,” Laney murmured over the lip of her stone cup. Aidan hummed.
“But if she would,” he said. “Wouldn’t you want your friend here? Wouldn’t you want her as a sister? Wouldn’t that make it better for you? My brother is gone, and in time, you may find another lover—”
Laney looked up sharply, her jaw tight. Aidan turned to her, his knee pressing against her thigh.
“Not soon, Laney; I know this. But someday. In the meantime, you’d have Cassie. And you’d have Liam. If we leave now, you lose them both.”
“And you lose Cassie.”
“If I leave with you, yes, I’d lose Cassie.”
Laney felt a tug in the pit of her stomach. “If you leave with us?”
Aidan locked eyes with Laney. The icy blue seemed to see to the pit of her soul. “If,” he confirmed in a whisper.
Without wanting to, Laney could see it. She could see the endless green of Ireland, dotted with stone walls and rambling cottages. She could smell the sea spray and the salt, the depths of the ancient forests and the smoky peat. Soft heather and fragrant lavender would grow at her command, and the earthy wine she loved so much would somehow be richer, sweeter.
But she would be alone, more so than even now. She wouldn’t recognize the forests, the cadence of the voices. She wouldn’t feel at home on the hiking trails or in the clearings in the woods that acted as lovers’ lanes for errant teenagers. Cassie wouldn’t be there. Liam wouldn’t be there. And, somehow worse, Aidan wouldn’t be there. She didn’t love him, not like she had loved Corey, but he had become a brother to her. Through the months of intense love, and laughter, and sorrow, he had been there. Cocky, annoying, but there. He spent so many nights with her, letting her cry and weep and grieve, first over Corey and then over Liam. She couldn’t be to him what he was looking for in Cassie, but she couldn’t imagine leaving him behind, either.
“When is Corra planning on us leaving?” Laney asked.
“Soon.”
Laney left the fireside party early. Jude had been occupied with a small group of girls, Gaia had two boys arguing over her by the fire and seemed to be completely enjoying herself. The Boys had lured away one of the larger jocks, which Laney was relieved to see. She was sure he could withstand what the Boys had planned for him. They’d come back to the grove with their hats streaked red with blood, as was their custom, and the football player would sleep it off in the forest and awaken in the morning thirsty and with a splitting headache, but alive.
Aidan had snuck off again after his talk with Laney. He might still want Cassie as his mate, but he seemed accepting of other comforts in the meantime. It was a precarious situation, one Laney had no idea how to navigate. She could leave for Ireland, beg Aidan to forget Cassie and join her, maybe find new mates in a new country. The thought was physically painful for Laney; she wasn’t sure she would survive leaving her son, the living impression of her lover, behind. But staying meant Cassie was in danger; there was no way around that. Aidan might have stopped seeking her out for now, but that determination that had been present since the beginning, that hadn’t lessened. It might never lessen. Not until the day Cassie drew her last breath. Aidan had decided, he had committed himself to her without her consent. There was nothing that would sway him from this path. Except time and distance, which Ireland could provide.
Still, Laney wasn’t sure she could do it.
It was that indecision, in the end, that would change her world forever, though she didn’t know it that night. That night was sweet, fragrant wine, murmurings of love through the trees that surrounded her, and balmy air that sung to her softly.
A short blip of a siren sounded behind her. The pavement was bathed in red and blue light, and Cassie turned, throwing her hands up in the air. A light shined in her face, blinding her, and she drew her breath in hurried gasps.
“It’s about time you got back. I don’t even get a phone call?”
“Well, I would have texted, but it’s not raining this time,” Cassie called out.
The lights cut, and dim twilight descended, feeling darker than it had been just seconds before. Cassie smiled, near blind from the headlights, and she heard the squeal of a car window lowering. Moments later, the rough voice of Officer Gibbons sounded once more.
“Welcome back, kid.”
“Good to be back, though it was good to be out there, too.”
Gibbons nodded. “I’m glad to hear it. I thought your parents were nuts for letting you go.”
Cassie laughed. “They thought I was nuts for wanting to. But I’m glad I did. It was good.”
The night air still held the warmth of the day. Gibbons shifted the collar of his police uniform and grunted his discomfort, leaning out the open car window. Cassie was only three houses from her driveway. Just ahead, the Blake house stood, dark as ever.
“Well, I guess you don’t need a ride home,” he said. Cassie shrugged as she walked to his passenger-side door. She pulled the door open, and the overhead light came on, illuminating the cabin. The front seat was littered with case files, stacks of old newspaper clippings, and half a dozen manila folders. Cassie raised an eyebrow at the mess on the tan leather seat.
“Homework?”
“It never goes away, kid,” Gibbons said, leaning over to sweep the mess of papers into his arms. He balanced them on the center console, then gestured for her to take a seat. Cassie did, sliding into the cool air of the officer’s cabin. She shut the door, and the overhead lights dimmed. Only the dashboard remained lit, a wash of green in the fading summer night.
“New case?” Cassie asked, peeking at the files.
“Nah, old cases, actually,” Gibbons answered. The car idled, and neither occupant seemed to mind. “Your case is still active, by the way, but they yanked me off it.”
“They did? Why?” Cassie asked, not entirely surprised her report of stalking was still under active investigation, especially because of the baby, Liam.
“Politics,” Gibbons said, dismissing it with a wave.
“Because of me, right?”
“Because some officers are idiotic and can’t take it when I point that out.”
“What was the worst of it? Hit me,” Cassie said, turning in the seat and staring directly at Gibbons. He cleared his throat a
nd looked out his windshield. The humidity of the summer night wasn’t fading with the sunset; if anything, the air felt heavier.
“Do you check in on the Blakes ever?” he asked, diverting the conversation.
“Yeah, I do,” Cassie answered. “They’re still a bit of a mess. What got you kicked off?”
“They figured maybe the baby was yours, you know,” he answered softly, never looking her way. “Stupid, really.”
“I can see why they would,” Cassie murmured, looking down to her hands. “He’s not.”
“I know,” Gibbons assured her. “Hell, I know.”
In the quiet that followed, a fat raindrop fell from the heavens and spattered the windshield. In the space of a breath, a thousand followed, and the humidity of the evening was shattered in the rainfall. Cassie smiled in the dim interior of the police cruiser.
“Have they come back for you?” Gibbons asked, looking to Cassie for the first time since she sat in his car. She looked from the downpour coursing down the glass in front of her to his face, lined with stress wrinkles, the kind that bunched around the lips when he frowned, or gathered in the center of his brow. His hair was thinner than ever and pushed back over his forehead. His uniform looked a bit bigger on him than it had in the past; he was losing weight. He seemed more tired than he had the last time Cassie had seen him.
She shook her head. “He hasn’t come back,” she said. She sighed and turned her face to the windshield.
“If he does, you’ll tell me?”
She didn’t answer, and after a minute, he drove her the short distance to her house.
“You’re back so early, dear one.” Her dulcet tone felt as soothing as honey in a warm cup of tea, and it reminded Laney so forcefully of her own mother that she struggled to choke back tears.
“It’s not really my scene,” she murmured in reply.
“Sit with me,” Corra replied, drawing a chair from the depths of the earth directly in front of her faery throne. The grotto was completely still. Moonlight bathed the smooth river stone that lined the banks of the trickling stream and licked its way up the smooth trunks of the birch trees. Everything glowed pale but bright, a study of pearly gray, silver, and flashes of white in the ever-moving symphony of the water.
Laney sat, a little below her queen, but it felt right. Corra regarded her with kindness and understanding. “Speak,” she said, and the words were gentle and sincere. Laney couldn’t help but obey.
She spoke of sorrow, and of longing. She spoke of loneliness, and of passion lost. She spoke of confusion and her sense of being lost in the vastness of her new life. Corra listened without moving, though Laney knew this was just her way, and believed her queen heard every word. When Laney could speak no more, when tears had spilled and washed down her perfect cheeks, Corra spoke.
“You know how they took me? As a maiden, centuries ago?” Corra asked. Laney nodded, not acknowledging that she had only just heard this story hours before. “At first, I followed the Boys in the moonlight, concerned. They seemed so young to be out in the forest at night; I was convinced they had been lost in the wilderness. Of course they weren’t. They were leading me to him. And then I heard the music, and I couldn’t turn back.
“Finn was a commanding king, but a gentle lover,” Corra said as her gaze left Laney’s face and traveled over her shoulder. Her mind traveled as Laney’s often did, down secret pathways of memory. The night had sighed and shifted before her attention focused on Laney once more. “I didn’t love him at first, him or his sons. But I came to, and they came to love me. It was the loss of our child, our Saoirse, centuries ago that broke me like it has broken you.
“She stayed in her new world, even after we showed her ours. She stayed, married a boy, had a dozen fat, pink babies, none of whom I could touch or meet or smell or hold. Finn took us away then, the ones who would follow him. He took us here, to the New World, and we’ve stayed ever since, squirreled away in the forests, sleeping through the bitter winters, finding fun or mischief or love, whatever our fancy.”
“Did you find mischief?” Laney asked.
“I was never one to look for it,” Corra answered. “I was taken, not seeking. It was this, you know,” she said, pulling her long, thin fingers through her thick, auburn hair. “He saw me through the mist, ‘a beacon of flame,’ he said to me. I was taken that night from my bed in my father’s home. The meadow was soft with dew, tiny children darted ahead, and I followed in a trance, danced through the fields and into the forests, danced through streams that were near to freezing, mist curling around my body, nearly naked except for the night shift I always slept in. The earth embraced me, as it did you on that day you came to Corey, and I was one of them. In a way, I think I was always meant to be one of them, that some of us are, and that’s why we can stand that first night, the dancing and the raging excitement of new force and energy, the bleeding of the forest’s life into your veins. Or perhaps we are just more easily seduced,” Corra finished with a sigh.
Laney thought back to her own first day amongst the Fae, that real first day, after the trees and earth had accepted her as one of their own. She had been seduced, and not only by Corey. It was the call of the forest, that’s what drew her, the life force that ran fluidly in every living being, the force of their shared energy.
“Did it help?” she asked of Corra. “When you moved here and left your child, did it help?”
Corra’s brow furrowed into fine, even lines. The corners of her mouth drew down, and she hummed softly as she considered. “I had two children with me, Aidan and Corey, and though they were grown and older than me, I always thought of them that way. And I had the wild, forested New World. That was enough. My own child is long since dead, and her descendants scattered to the four winds.
“But I think it would help you, my dear. I think it would. Corey, my beloved son, is gone. His brother is angry with me. And you are left adrift. There is history in the homeland, other Fae you could come to know. There is the land of Tír na n-Óg. There is healing there; I feel it. It’s home.”
“When would we go?” Laney asked softly. In the very deepest part of her gut, she felt pulled north. Pulled by the winds that blew her toward her son. But the logical sliver of her mind that remained whispered that this might be a beautiful idea, a new start, a chance to heal.
“Lucas has left already, just a few hours ago,” Corra answered gently. “He goes to make our way for us. A few of the others have joined him already. They were eager to leave this place, which made me glad. It’s become unwell for us to stay.”
“Aidan won’t want to leave,” Laney said.
“My son,” Corra sighed. “He is lost, and I fear for him. Change will be good, good for all of us who remain here. These forests have been our home for many years, but it is time to haunt a new wood. Aidan was barely grown when we came here; his soul will reconnect with his homeland. I know it.”
The woods around her seemed to whisper and rush, Laney assumed from the tumultuous emotions crashing against one another inside her chest. The plain tunic she wore shifted with her sighs, the soft fabric caressing her skin underneath. Soon she would learn to spin the finest silk and draw the sweetest wine. Soon, at least speaking from the scales of eternity, but for now she felt like an orphan in a cruel, cold world.
Corra’s face took on that glazed and vacant look once more, an eternal look—she was neither here nor anywhere else, she simply existed, and she gave off the impression that she had existed for countless lifetimes. The beginning of a new dawn started its eternal creep into the sky, stretching gauzy fingers of the palest pink. The trees sighed with the changes.
Corra grunted. The sound was so rough, so visceral, so unexpected from the soft and eternal mother, that Laney looked up, confused. Red wine spilled over her lips, dribbling in a thick line past her chin and onto her chest. Her expression twisted, confused to horrified, and Laney felt confused at first, too, unsure why the spilling of wine
would cause such a reaction.
Corra’s flawless white hands reached up to her chest, and Laney’s gaze followed the motion.
She spilled a lot, was the first thought to tumble through Laney’s brain. Red spread in a slow stain from between her clutching fingers. Then realization dawned, as slowly and completely as the sun that rose every morning.
Corra’s delicate fingers, stained red, grappled at the piece of metal that protruded from between her ribs. Even as Laney watched—lips parted in understanding, her body tensed and poised—the metal twisted, and Corra lurched forward. Blood spilled from her mouth now, drops sizzling when they hit the cold earth that stretched between Laney and her queen.
She fell to the ground as Laney dropped to her knees. Tiny roots sprang from the cold soil, twining together and seeking the cooling flesh of their faery queen. Dark blood fed the soil, and the earth churned in response, pulling the viscous, salty liquid into its decay. Small rocks embedded themselves into Laney’s kneecaps; a bramble of thorns raked its way up Laney’s shin as she scurried closer to Corra’s body. She didn’t notice the pain of her torn flesh, nor the discomfort of stones pressing against the flat, triangular bone that protected her joints. She noticed only her queen’s flesh ribboned with vines and roots and twists of branch, the vacancy in the eyes that were, just moments ago, regarding Laney with a warm, motherly stare, one of comfort and understanding.
Corra’s name fell from her lips, but the faery queen would hear no more. Already, the burgeoning dawn reflected in her glassy eyes, glowing sunlight and weaving branches, and—at first Laney didn’t understand, but soon she would—a dark silhouette holding a fire poker.
Cassie awoke with a start. She had no way of knowing it was the exact moment that the earth reclaimed the lost faery queen. She had no way of knowing what woke her at all. All she knew was the rapid breath she sucked past her teeth, the sharp pain in her chest, and the creepy-crawly sensation that had her reaching out, fingers seeking for the warmth of the embrace that was no longer available to her.
