Faery (The Faery Chronicles Book 3) Read online

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  Copyright Information

  This book is dedicated to Dayle Dermatis,

  without whom it would never have been written.

  For the brainstorming session

  on a rainy February night on the Oregon Coast,

  uncountable, uncontrollable laughs,

  and many years of dear friendship, thank you!

  PROLOGUE

  WE’D SAVED THE HUMAN WORLD, not that it showed. The whole city of Houston, Texas: a burnt-out shell of its former self. The office towers downtown looked like a bomb had gone off—steel frames bent and twisted, glass windows shattered all over the streets and sidewalks, concrete crumbled. Most of four-and-a-half-million people vanished without a trace. They were the lucky ones. The ones who remained became everything they feared in their darkest heart of hearts that they might become. They hurt each other. Killed each other, and themselves.

  All because of a girl named Melody I went to high school with. She had the kind of family you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. A drunken stepfather who liked to use his fists and a mother who took his side because she’d rather be bruised and broken—or dead—than alone. Melody discovered one important fact about her real father that she clung to like a lifejacket in a storm at sea. Her real dad was a Demon. She’d inherited his fiery, destructive powers.

  She thought that made her special, better than the rest of us. She never understood that better wasn’t the point. Us was. We lived or died together. We had each others’ backs.

  Melody learned all the tricks to summon the Demon and did it, damn the consequences. She’d rather be wanted and loved by someone even if that someone meant to destroy the world.

  We stood in front of the remains of her house, debris littering the perfect lawn, the roof caved in. Her family, dead. Melody dead, at seventeen. Whether she’d paid a fair price for her actions didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she was gone and nothing would bring her—or any of the others who’d died—back to life. I hated what she’d done.

  I grieved for her anyway, as did my friends—fellow Demon fighters. They stood on the lawn in various states of disbelief and horror. I blinked, realizing that the world had gone blurry because smoke and water filled my eyes. My heart felt like a gaping wound. I rubbed the heel of my hand across my chest, trying to ease the pain. I tasted smoke in the back of my throat. I didn’t think I’d ever taste anything else again.

  We’d saved our world, but nothing had changed. The suburban neighborhood with the beige, cookie-cutter houses and neat, over-fertilized lawns cringed under the cloudless sky. Flocks of grackles filled the branches of the oak and ash trees that lined the block. The air smelled like overcooked meat, as if someone had a roast chicken in the oven, forgotten to take it out, and left it to burn, baby, burn.

  Simone squeezed my hand. “Kev? We need to go.”

  I looked at her. Her very human eyes had softened from their original violet to doe-brown, with dark smudges hugging the real estate underneath. Deep furrows creased her forehead. The feathered edges of her peacock halter ruffled as she moved, her black leather pants and motorcycle boots scuffed all to hell. A smear of soot and blood traveled the length of her right arm, shoulder to fingertips.

  She’d said we had to go. “Now?” I asked.

  “You can feel it, can’t you? The need?” she asked. “I know it’s there because how could it not be? But I can’t actually feel it anymore. It’s awful. Like a word on the tip of my tongue that I can’t remember.”

  A few days ago, she’d been fae. Wings and magic. A member of the species that lived inside the planet and commanded the deep, abiding forces that governed fate. Then the Demon had turned our world upside down, tipping her nature toward human, playing on her greatest fear—that she’d lose her powers and her ability to help us.

  The realm of Faery needed us now. The edges of my skin, the marrow of my bones, pulsed with a need that didn’t belong to me. The need spoke to me—not in an out-loud voice, but one I heard like a whisper along my nerves: URGENT the realm’s on the edge of dying something’s killing us URGENT.

  I shouldn’t be able to feel or hear that. A few days ago, I’d been human. Granted, I’d had a little magic of my own, and a job I didn’t want as the go-between among fae and humans, but still. Now, white-feathered wings grew out of my back and when I looked at the world I lived in, I felt emotions that should’ve brought me to my knees: Despair. Terror. Grief. All of them with the volume turned up to ear-splitting, mind-numbing, heartbreaking.

  I’d always thought the fae had hearts of stone, Simone aside. Now I knew differently. If I felt a featherweight more, I’d explode. I’d die from it. So I locked it down as best I could and held on for dear life.

  Simone rose up on her toes and talked at someone over my shoulder. “Yes, we need to go. You have your own work to do, seer. But Kevin and I have got to go to Faery. There’s trouble there that whatever you do won’t fix. It’s up to us.”

  I blinked again and followed her gaze to see my best friend, Rude, walk over, the hem of his Hawaiian shirt flapping in the breeze. A thick layer of soot hid the color. Ditto with his shorts and sneakers. And, really his everything. Except the bright orange of his buzz cut. That shone through the dirt just fine. His eyes were black. All iris, no whites. He wasn’t his usual class-clown, lucky-beyond-belief, too-cool-dude self either. He was a faery seer, the magical law in the human world. He kept the peace. Or made war when necessary.

  “How long will you be gone?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” Simone said.

  Rude laid a hand on my arm. To keep me here? Or to tell me to be careful?

  “Tell my dad. Take care of Amy,” I said. The two people I’d be leaving behind who wouldn’t understand why I had to go. Dad had bad history with the fae. Amy was—had been—my girlfriend. More heartbreak there, but it couldn’t matter right now. It couldn’t change what Simone and I had to do.

  As sure as I knew the urgent need of Faery, I understood that Simone and I had to meet it. Others would try, and others would die. We might, too. But if we didn’t go, it meant more than the end of that realm.

  The realm of Faery determined the fate of all the worlds. The end of Faery meant the end of everything and everyone I’d ever loved.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE TWILIGHT felt charged, electric enough to raise the hairs on my arms. Doug fir and hemlock, their enormous trunks furred with moss, stretched higher than I could see. The crow that had been following me cawed on an overhead branch, taking off in a flutter of feathers and a shower of sap and needles. Its shadow flowed over me like water, then wheeled away to the north, leaving me alone in the Faery wood, the Forest of Dreams.

  I wanted it to come back. To land nearby and let me ask it questions. Maybe it would act friendly and answer. Then again, it might threaten to pluck out my eyes and eat them for dinner instead.

  I shoved my hands in the front pockets of my jeans. They’d been clean once upon a time, just like my white T-shirt and my jean jacket. My sneakers had been white once, too. We’d been too long on the run, with more important things to deal with than laundry.

  Faery was dying. It was doing its damnedest to take us with it.

  Simone had gone to get water an hour ago, leaving me to set up camp. She hadn’t come back when I expected. Or ten minutes after that, when I officially started to worry. Or twenty minutes after that, when I started to panic. So I’d gone searching. But the loam under my feet held no trace of footprints. No broken or bent branches stood out in the wild undergrowth.

  I shou
ld never have agreed for her to go out alone.

  The wind gusted from the west. It smelled like salt and impending rain. Last thing we needed: to end up soaked to the skin with night on the way and the temperature dropping.

  I sucked at this whole tracking thing. Ten to one I’d get lost and Simone would have to find me. If she was all right. If she wasn’t dead in a glade with her throat cut, or face-down in a river, her skin turning cold and white and wrinkled under the water.

  Nice. Way to freak out.

  I took a deep breath. It didn’t stop my heart from racing. It didn’t stop my hackles from rising. Fact of the matter was, there were worse things than straight-up death here in Faery. There were…things.

  This was my life now. In my former life, I was a senior at Houston’s own Cardinal High School, except I hadn’t been there since September something-or-other. Time moved differently here than in the Human world—faster, more fluid. By my reckoning, we’d been trying to save Faery for a handful of weeks, but weeks here could mean months back home. It might be spring break in the human world by now. Or summer.

  I could go crazy thinking about that. I couldn’t think about that.

  In all our time here, we’d never made it to the Court to talk to the King or the Queen. Every time we tried to head straight there, we ended up somewhere else, ambushed, fighting, or running for our lives from fae who’d turned sick and much worse—homicidal. It’d turned into a straight-up survival game with all comers playing for keeps.

  It felt as though any second, Faery would eat us alive. Swallow us whole. We’d never escape.

  Faery sucked me into its orbit a couple of years ago when the Faery King had kidnapped my father for leverage because he needed something from me. I’d been nobody—just some kid with a dead mom and an alcoholic dad, who wanted nothing more than to scholarship my way out, go to school as far away as possible. Instead, I came down with a magical ability. I could hear other people’s thoughts if imminent mortal danger was involved.

  To rescue my father, I needed help. Enter my best friend, Rude Davies, faery seer, enforcing the peace among humans and faeries and demons and God only knew what else, going on five years. And enter Simone, who lived in an old yellow school bus parked in a downtown alley behind an empty warehouse. Graffiti spray-painted on the brick walls, broken bottles, the whole works—and this girl’s bus had four good tires that mysteriously remained un-stolen, windows filled with strings of Christmas lights, seats populated with stretched canvases she’d painted on, air smoky with patchouli incense, and a whole wardrobe of hippie and leather wear hanging on a rack in the back. Oh, yeah. Also, the girl had very large, very delicate wings sticking out of her back.

  She used to sing in a rock band. She sang so well, in fact, with a magic in her voice that could make anyone who heard it feel whatever she wanted, that the Faery King wanted her for himself. So he cast a spell to turn her from Human to Fae.

  She gave me her name the first night I met her. She’d never given it to any other human. Having her name would give them the power to call her to them, and she’d have no choice but to show. She couldn’t have those kinds of strings. Except with me.

  Everyone else called her the Singer. Including me, if I had to refer to her in conversation with other people. I’d never give up her name after she’d trusted me with it. Not ever.

  Simone and Rude and I teamed up with a couple of other friends to face down the Faery King and take back my dad. No matter what kind of hot mess the man was, he was still my father. I went up against the King and surprisingly survived, sane. I got my dad back and I got a new job I didn’t want as a go-between for the Human and Faery realms.

  Through all of that, Simone fell in love with me. I fell right back, hard. But I had a girlfriend, Amy, who I also loved and didn’t want to let go.

  We tried to work it out through magical misadventures and then with a full-blown apocalypse bearing down on us, one that’d turned us into our own worst nightmares. I’d become fae, losing my humanity. Simone had become human, unable to lend us her magic. We’d stopped a Demon from destroying the world. Simone and I had come here to try to save Faery before our world righted itself, but Rude had seen to that—we knew he had because Simone and I had shed our nightmare skins and gone back to normal selves. She was fae once more, and I was human. Normal for us.

  I’d bet money that Rude had made everything and everyone else right if he could, but I had doubts that extended to Amy. When I last saw her, Amy was living in a bayou back home as some kind of mermaid. She wanted nothing to do with me. We were over. No talking. No closure. Just over. I dreamed about her sometimes, and when I did, I saw her in the water, alone and lonely, and at least some of the fault belonged to me.

  I couldn’t help her—not from here, not now, if she’d even accept my help. But I could help Simone. I hoped.

  A branch cracked. Loud like a gunshot. Very near behind me.

  I fought the urge to freeze. My first instinct. One that would get me killed one of these days.

  Instead, I ducked behind a fir whose trunk was more than wide enough to hide me. I listened with every fiber of my being, because my life depended on it.

  A twig snapped. I flinched.

  A drop of rain landed on the bridge of my nose and slid down slow, trickling off the tip.

  I heard three heavy, stumbling footfalls crunch on fallen needles. Underneath that sound, a moan of pain in a familiar, mesmerizing voice.

  A single word in the same spell of a voice bloomed in my mind like a poisoned flower. Knife.

  It was a thought, and not mine. It belonged to Simone. She was in danger. Mortal danger.

  I broke cover in time to watch her stagger out of the brush and fall face first into the dirt, her long purple and black hair fanned out like a lion’s mane, her wings folded up tight against her peacock-feather halter. Blood dripped from thorn scratches on her arms. Her black leather pants were sliced through at the right thigh. More blood welled through the tear—made by something other than a thorn. Something bigger, sharper. I leaned close and caught the stink of fear beneath the copper-penny scent of her wounds. Her fear turned mine up a hundred notches.

  She grabbed at my shirt collar and whispered. “Kev.”

  I spoke low in her ear, scanning the woods for any movement. For anything at all. “What happened?”

  She opened her mouth to answer. Nothing came out. Her eyes closed. Her body went limp. She’d passed out.

  I slipped my hands under her arms and dragged her toward the shelter of the fir, the toes of her boots carving grooves in the soil, making it easy for whoever had hurt her to follow. I couldn’t carry her and cover our tracks at the same time.

  For the thousandth time since we’d arrived in Faery, I cursed my lack of offensive magic. No spells. No skills. No way to fight off an enemy. Only the possibility that I might hear them coming.

  We couldn’t go on like this. Something had to give. I hoped to God it wouldn’t be us. I wasn’t ready to give up my life. Or hers.

  Simone came to halfway to the tree, struggling against me until I sat her down with her back against the rough bark. I hunkered down beside her and brushed her hair away from her face. She turned her head to look at me, a crease forming down the center of her forehead. She narrowed her eyes, focusing hard on my face. The violet color of them darkened to something stormy and unpredictable.

  “Kev, there’s a—”

  Lightning pain exploded in my shoulder. The world turned grainy for a split second, then spun into razor-sharp focus. I ducked and spun and—whoosh—something cut the air where my head had been. I couldn’t see anything except two wiry legs and a blade arcing into a blur, aiming low for me.

  Simone couldn’t fight. She was hurt. Vulnerable.

  I went for the clumsy tackle—only chance I had. I hit the wiry legs hard enough to knock the breath clean out of me. I sucked air and coughed and wrapped my arms around them tight as we went over. The owner of the legs struck t
he ground with a grunt. A heartbeat later, I piled on top.

  I braced for the blade to come down hard and slice between my shoulder blades. But it didn’t. The knife’s owner went absolutely still.

  I pushed up on my hands and gazed down at them—her—a girl whom I’d have pegged to be thirteen if she were human. Tangled waves of brown hair brushed her freckled shoulders. The tips of her ears were pointed, and the gauzy tops of wings stretched at a disjointed angle above her head. So, not human.

  She wore a short, brown silk dress. The soles of her bare feet were thick with callouses. Her skin was so pale, I could see the black fae blood that ran in her veins. In her right hand, she held a carving knife with a yew handle. Black and red smeared the blade.

  Simone’s blood. And mine. The girl had stabbed me in the shoulder.

  She didn’t appear to be breathing. I reached for her throat to check for a pulse, but found none, only a final stillness. The girl was dead.

  Before my eyes, the black blood in her veins brightened to white. Vivid markings rose to the surface, the same bright white. Spirals. She had the demon disease that had invaded Faery. Simone and I had come here to stop it from spreading. Clearly, we were far too late.

  Why hadn’t I noticed before? Why did the markings come up only now, after the girl died?

  I stopped wondering for a long minute, because something else happened right in front of me. As I watched, the girl wasted to almost nothing. As if she’d starved to death in seconds. What the ever-loving hell?

  I pried the blade from the girl’s fingers and wiped it on her dress. Smearing the silk with blood made me want to throw up. But the knife was better than anything we had back at camp.

  I sat back on my haunches and glanced back at Simone, who leaned far to her right, balancing on her elbow.

  She met my gaze and finished the sentence she’d started. “There’s a girl. With a knife.”

  I white-knuckled the blade. “Not anymore.”