Faery (The Faery Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  He flinched. “You thought I’d prefer you dead.”

  “Would it be better to have me gone, so you could remember me the way you want and not be reminded that I can never be?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. No self-righteousness—just honesty.

  The tension seemed to leave her. “It’s hard for me to trust you.”

  Mr. Nance shook his head. “Maybe so, but I believe it’s just as hard for you to trust yourself.”

  She stared at him.

  “Mr. Landon,” he said, “why don’t you introduce me to the serpent’s apprentice?”

  “How do you know about Malek? About Beth?” I asked. As far as I knew, they’d never been introduced.

  “I pay attention to what happens in my city, Mr. Landon. To my family. Their friends. Their associates. And what information I didn’t already know, Mr. Davies supplied.”

  I couldn’t blame him, only marvel that he hadn’t gotten into serious trouble sooner. I took him by the arm and steered him toward Beth.

  Beth looked him up and down. “Don’t be an asshole and we’ll get along fine.”

  Mr. Nance offered his hand. “Same goes for you, young lady.”

  Simone descended to speak with Malek, whose head gleamed in the torchlight. For a second, I thought I could see his veins through his skin and the pulse of the blood pumping through them. Only for a second, then the vision was gone.

  Possibly, I was losing my mind. Possibly, there was something very wrong going on with the magic in this place. But if it was my mind, the timing was craptastic.

  I made my way toward Simone and Malek, too late to catch even a word about the location he gave her. Just as well since it wouldn’t mean anything to me.

  “Hold down the fort,” I said to him.

  Find Silver, he signed.

  She nodded. “We can be there in a hot minute.”

  “She’s close?”

  “She’s on the other side of the realm,” Simone said.

  “So you’re gonna beam us there?”

  “It’s not science fiction, Kev. Doesn’t need to be. We just happen to be in the one place in the whole realm that’s connected to every piece of it by magic. There are roads from here to everywhere.”

  Simone looked at Malek. “Be ready in case of trouble,” she said.

  He nodded. Go.

  Simone wrapped her hand around mine and spoke softly in my ear. “Hold on. If I lose you, I might never find you.”

  That added to my sense of urgency and my sense of panic. I squeezed her fingers.

  One minute, we stood in the great hall. The next, stood at the nexus of the Faery roads. This was nothing like crossing into the In-Between, or moving between the Faery realm and the Human world I belonged in. There was no fire. There was ice.

  The nexus was a crossroads, but not the kind I typically thought of. Instead of two roads that intersected, there were three, plus one that seemed to begin in the center. That meant seven possible paths leading out from the nexus. All of them glowed bright blue, the same color as the hottest part of a candle flame. And the center of the crossroads itself rotated clockwise, slow and steady.

  Waves of cold flowed from the paths. I could feel the chill through the soles of my sneakers. Everything around the roads—if there was anything—was hidden, wrapped in frozen darkness that felt slick on my skin. The whole of it, dark and bright, did something strange to my sense of direction, even my sense of up and down. My stomach did a slow forward roll and everything seemed to spin around me as if I’d gotten shitfaced drunk, but I was stone-cold sober.

  I felt no frame of reference. No context. We might as well have been floating in space, except no stars winked overhead. No moon. Just vast velvet night.

  When I spoke, my breath fogged the air. “Which one do we take?”

  Simone pointed with her free hand toward a path to our right. Or I thought it was to our right. The center of the crossroads moved as she gestured, so I couldn’t be sure.

  “Where does it lead?” I asked.

  “To the Door of Death,” she said.

  My teeth started to chatter. “Never heard of it.”

  “There’s a reason for that, Kev.”

  I bet there was.

  The circle turned beneath our feet, carrying us with it. As it brought us around to the path Simone had pointed to, we jumped onto it. The road felt no more stable than the circle had, but unlike the circle, it felt sticky. As if it held fast to my feet. Lifting them felt like prying two magnets away from each other. We took seven difficult steps. On the seventh, the road fell away under us. We dropped like stones through the chilled dark, onto a field of tall, thin grass.

  Simone landed on her feet, her wings moving to steady her. I landed on my ass hard, a jolt of pain flashing through my tailbone that made me grunt and curse under my breath. I scrambled upright with the scent of crushed green in my nose and mouth and a rime of frost on my face that I felt when I lifted my hand to rub the bridge of my nose. I inhaled the perfume of fresh air with a faint hint of cow patties. The fragrance didn’t do anything for my queasiness or my dizzy head.

  The perpetual twilight of Faery cast shadows over the field, but whatever uncanny mood it created didn’t hold a candle to the creepiness of the circle of giant stones that surrounded it. They looked like granite, or the Faery version of granite, anyway. The circle had to have been a hundred feet across, and the stones were too big for people to have carried, even fae people. They had to have been moved by crane or, given where we stood, by magic.

  I caught sight of Famine from the corner of my eye. She crouched near the ground to our left, a body at her feet. No, not a body—I could see the rise and fall of her chest. More than that, I could feel her breathe, the stabbing pain in her lungs and the ragged draw of air. There was blood in her spiky silver hair.

  Silver.

  I heard two words inside my head. Silver’s thoughts. Stupid, Kevin. Then she went silent.

  I was running before I thought I should run, my legs with a mind of their own. Simone called out a warning behind me. I wanted to stop. I tried. But my legs refused to obey. Not until my feet skidded to a halt directly in front of Silver and Famine. I fell to my knees beside the injured Queen of Faery.

  Silver looked up, wild-eyed and ghost-pale and not seeing me.

  I glared at Famine, who met my gaze. “What did you do to her?”

  The corners of Famine’s mouth curved. She didn’t answer. She reached out with her index finger and touched my brow with a spark that burned.

  The circle of stones began to shake with a rumble that seemed to come from under the ground. The one closest to me, to my right, cracked in half from top to bottom with a sound like thunder. The two granite halves fell away from each other. Where they’d been stood my mother. Not the dream of her. Not the memory of her. My actual mother.

  Her messy brown hair streaked with summer gold. Her sunburned, freckled face. Her bare, sandy feet and cut-off denim shorts and long denim shirt worn over her purple tank top. The wind carried her scent to me. She smelled of salt and sweat and diavolo spaghetti sauce. She blinked her brown eyes and started to walk toward me, her feet bending the tall grass, which bounced back in her wake.

  I tore my gaze away from her and turned toward Famine, but she and Silver—and Simone— were gone. There was only the grass and the stones and my mother and me.

  My mom came within a foot of me before she stopped walking. She focused her brown eyes on me and studied every inch of me.

  “You’re older,” she said.

  Than what? Than when she died? Simone had called this place the Door of Death. “You can’t be here,” I said. “It’s not possible. It’s not real.”

  “It is,” she said. “This is where I came after that drunk man took me out of the world.”

  I’d figured she’d gone to heaven. That was what I’d been raised to believe. But I knew a lot more about the world—all the worlds—than I had back then.

&
nbsp; “If I ever saw you again, I figured you’d be wearing the dress we buried you in,” I said. “The black one. And your pearls.”

  “I hated that dress,” she said. “I loved the beach.”

  “That afternoon—making dinner together in the kitchen—it’s my favorite memory,” I said.

  Her face softened, her eyes filling with kindness. She looked at me with so much love. “Mine, too.”

  Hearing her say that rocked me. My voice shook when I spoke. “Are you okay, Mom?”

  “No,” she said. “You saw me before, when you were in the In-Between. You had a choice to stay there with me and you refused to take it. You thought to yourself that nothing could ever bring me back.”

  Yeah, I had. I’d known the vision of my mom in the kitchen for what it was: a trap. Just like this was a trap. Famine was offering me a poisonous gift. I didn’t know what would happen to me if I chose to take it. Maybe it would kill me, or maybe it would just hold me in thrall, under a spell.

  Did that matter? I couldn’t believe my mom was standing there, almost close enough to touch.

  For a second, I thought I heard singing. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place the words or the voice.

  My mother took a step toward me, then another. She raised her hands and cupped my cheeks. I breathed in her smell and looked into her eyes and my heart melted.

  “You did what you were supposed to do,” she said. “You grieved and you grew up and you became someone I could be proud of, Kevin. You thought about me and you missed me, but time dulled the pain. Time gave you a life beyond me.”

  That was the natural order of things: if not forgetting her, then forgetting the pain of losing her, or at least having it fade over the years. I hadn’t left her, though. She’d left me.

  She spoke as if she’d read my thoughts. “I’m sorry.”

  “You can’t be,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Sorry all the same. But that’s not why I’m here,” she said. “I’m a distraction you can’t afford. You’re about to be changed forever. Your spirit is here, but your body is still with Famine and your friends. Famine will do something to you. No one will be able to stop her, and no one will be able to fix it. You need to wake up, Kevin. Can you do that for me?”

  “Will I see you again?”

  She didn’t answer. Somehow that was worse than if she’d said no.

  Instead she said, “Hurry back the way you came.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “Your heart, Kevin. Follow your heart.”

  My heart was breaking. It would keep on breaking no matter what I did.

  Either I could let my spirit go with my mom while Famine did something terrible to my body, or I could turn around and find my way out of this vision or whatever it was and do what I could for Silver and Simone and Malek and Beth. They were still living, as far as I knew. My mother was not. I couldn’t help her, but I could help them.

  I looked at my mother. Her eyes were filled with unshed tears. A breeze blew from behind her, turning her gold-streaked hair into a wild storm of its own. I didn’t want to say good-bye.

  Follow my heart, she’d said.

  My heart was with my friends. One friend in particular.

  I thought about Simone. About who she was. How she’d held onto her humanity as tightly as she could until I needed her help to infiltrate the Wild Hunt and take my father back from the Faery King. She’d given it up willingly to help me. Even after that, when no trace of it should remain, she’d managed to find the tiniest seed of humanity, of love, inside her heart. She’d done more than hold on to it—she’d nurtured it until it grew as big and strong as she could make it.

  I could hear her heartbeat again. It was faint, but it was there, beating hard and fast, like jackhammer. I closed my eyes. I reached toward the sound and fury of it.

  Simone’s voice wormed its way into my brain as a whisper that turned on a dime into a shout. “Kev!”

  I opened my eyes and stared into her violet ones. “What happened?”

  She wrapped her hands around my shoulders and shook me. “Are you here? Are you in there?”

  I grimaced at the lightning pain that tore through my healing wound. “Yes. I’m here. Where’s Silver? Where’s Famine?”

  Simone loosened her grip. “Famine’s gone. She disappeared. Silver’s still here. Her mind is somewhere else, like yours was. And she’s bleeding out.”

  “Did Famine do anything to me?”

  Simone shook her head.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I think so,” she said.

  That would have to be good enough. I tried to get up.

  Simone rolled me to my left. “Silver’s right here.”

  Silver lay flat on her back. A pool of blood spread from her back. There was a knife in her chest, buried to the hilt. From the position, it’d been driven straight into her heart. How she was still breathing, I had no idea. But then I didn’t know everything about Faery anatomy or what it took to kill a Faery Queen. She was alive, and her eyes were open, but whatever she saw, it wasn’t us.

  I took her hand in mine. I called her name. She didn’t respond. I listened as carefully as I could, so carefully I swore I could hear the grass grow underneath us. I couldn’t hear Silver’s thoughts. Wherever she was, there was definitely imminent mortal danger, but she wasn’t broadcasting.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Simone. “Do you have any magic you can use to get her back?”

  Simone shook her head. “I tried singing to both of you while you were still out. It didn’t work.”

  I’d heard it, the singing. I’d never seen Simone’s voice fail to work when she put her will behind it. “Famine’s too powerful?”

  “I’ve never battled a Horseman of the Apocalypse before, Kev.”

  Simone couldn’t wake Silver up. I had no powers to counteract the spell the Queen was under. I was just plain Kevin Landon, the guy with the important job that didn’t mean anything anymore. Silver was done for and I couldn’t do a damned thing to stop that.

  Except follow her into her mind.

  I’d done that only once, and I’d done it with the Faery King. But he’d been in my mind at the time, so I had a trail to follow. Here and now, I had no such thing and no hope of finding it on my own. But I wasn’t on my own.

  “Simone, you said you can’t sing her awake,” I said. “Can you sing me into her vision? Can you sing me to where she is?”

  Simone sucked in a breath. “I don’t know. It’s still Famine’s magic.”

  I nodded. “Designed to keep people in the traps she lays for them.”

  “But not out?” Simone asked.

  I prayed that was the deal. “Let’s find out.”

  Simone rested her hand flat on my back. I felt it fever-hot through the fabric of my jacket and shirt. She took a deep breath and began to sing.

  Oscail do shúile.

  Into Silver’s stream

  Into the river of dreams

  Into the twilit wonder

  Flash of light and roar of thunder…

  I didn’t hear anything else. I didn’t feel my body fall or my eyes close. I only smelled sulfur. So strong, so pervasive, that I could only have followed Silver into one place. The In-Between.

  A one-room cabin in the In-Between. Two sleeping bags sat in one corner, rolled up and packed away. A milk crate served as a table, a whole lot of seven-day jar candles lit on top of it, the candles’ flame jumping with disturbed air currents, throwing shadows on the dusty floor.

  Silver huddled in the far corner, holding her head in her hands. She glanced up at me, her eyes rimmed in smeared black kohl. “I was waiting for Max.”

  I remembered him. Her boyfriend, the one with the black feathers for hair. “You two got back together? You left him, right? When the King exiled you?”

  She nodded. “A lot’s happened since then, Kevin. Your friend Stacy the Witch helped to cure me, but I had to pay a price for it.”


  “That sounds like something Malek would do. He makes people pay, not Stacy.”

  “Well, he was there. And the cure involved his blood. The ashes from his blood, anyway. But the price had to be paid because the thing I was asking for—the cure—was huge. I had to give up something so important to who I was that its value would match the value of the cure. You understand? The scales had to be balanced.”

  I got it, sure. But it made me nervous, the way she talked about it. “What did you give up?”

  “My memory,” she said.

  My body and mind and soul—my whole being—rebelled at the thought. “No.”

  “Yes, Kevin. I remember nothing from before the spell Stacy cast. I only have what Max told me about what happened, about who I am. That, and what I’ve built since I came back to Faery.”

  “You’re the Queen.”

  “Some job I’m doing in that department,” she said.

  I narrowed my eyes. “If you don’t remember anything that happened before the cure, how do you know who I am?”

  She blinked. “That is a very good question. I shouldn’t. I mean, Max mentioned you when he told me the story of how I came to lose my memory, but he didn’t give me any detailed description or show me a picture of you. You should be a stranger, but you’re not.”

  “Or maybe it’s because I’m the liaison and you’re the Queen,” I said.

  She shook her head. “It hasn’t worked that way with anyone else. I know that much from watching my stepfather rule.”

  “Then what?” I asked.

  She took her time answering. “I think I’m dying.”

  “There’s a knife in your heart,” I said.

  “It’s more than a knife.”

  Oh, shit. “A blessed blade?”

  “How do you know about those?” she asked, then answered her own question. “Oh, because of Simone?”

  I flinched as she spoke Simone’s name. I wasn’t used to anyone else using it. Then again, anyone else was usually human, and Silver was fae, and she was the Queen. She would know. “It happened to her. Famine tricked her father into blessing the knife.”

  She grimaced. “There’s only one person in all the worlds that matters to me like that. Only one person who she could’ve gotten to do it.”