Fairest 02 - The Frog Prince (5 page)

He shrugged, glancing back and
forth, eyes straining to peel back the layers of darkness in an attempt to see what hid in its depths. “I don’t want to lose track of you is all.”

“Uh huh,” she said doubtfully. “If I promise to stay close will you let go?”

“No,” he said simply.

“Glad to know you’re so reasonable.”

His lips twisted. “It’s a virtue passed down from my mother.”

Her brows rose at the heavy sarcasm in his voice.

“You and your momma don’t get along too well, do you?”

He laughed, and surprised himself by the sincere amusement behind the outburst.

“We don’t really see eye to eye,” he said finally, and the way his lips tightened told Rachel clearly that he wanted to leave the discussion at that.

“Uh huh,” she said again, more doubtfully. She didn’t try to shrug him off. His touch was comforting, especially given their surroundings. They
traveled in silence for a few hours before Rachel dared to voice the question that had been plaguing her since their escape.

“What happened back there?”

He hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said softly.

He really didn’t. It had been bad enough when the solid Rachel had disappeared from his arms so suddenly. But when he’d come into the entrance hall only to see Rachel under attack, something had shifted in him. It had been a subtle change, but the change it had wrought had been significant. His body had been
freezing, his skin soaking wet. He’d heard rushing in his ears and his head had felt overly heavy. The world had looked differently, as if he were viewing it through a fish eye lens. Much the same way it did when he was in his amphibian form. When the dragon fire had covered her, all Chris had been able to think about was the fact that he’d never get a chance to see her pretty eyes again. Or have a decent conversation with her. Or kiss her, really kiss her, without either of them having to pay for it with their respective curses. He hadn’t known her for long, but she was the first, and only, person he’d ever met that had made him want to change that. That made him want to learn everything he could about what it meant to be a human.

Chris hadn’t wanted her to go away. Not before he’d gotten a chance to…well he wasn’t sure. What he felt was very new.
Very strange. He just knew he wanted to have a chance for anything and everything with her.

He’d never had that before.

Then his mind had gone blank, and when he’d come to again he knew that they had to get away before the tidal wave came. He could feel it gathering before it ever reached them. It was like a voice whispering in his ear. A bone deep knowledge that the water would rise, conquer, and punish. Rather than ignore the warning, he had made a run for it. And he was glad now that he had.

“You were glowing,” she told him. As if this information would jog his memory. Instead of some insightful revelation his eyes widened.

“Really?” He looked slightly sick for a moment and he rubbed his free hand over his chest. “Did I look radioactive? That would be just my luck. ” He shook his head in disgust. “Great. Now I’m radioactive. Anyone else would be a superhero or something at this point. Swing from buildings at night and defeat bad guys. I however, get to eat bugs and scare squeamish housewives.”

Rachel rolled her eyes. “You aren’t radioactive.” Then she thought about it a little bit and corrected herself. “I don’t think so anyway. You weren’t green or anything.” Something about his fussiness, his
Eeyore-isc pessimism, reminded her of someone. Her mind was too fuzzy with exhaustion to drag forth a name though, so she brushed the half formed thought away. Instead, she reached up to grab Chris’s hand from the back of her neck. Before he could protest, she intertwined their fingers and squeezed his hand with her own. He gave her a grateful half smile, and they continued on their way, silent once again.

They traveled for most of the night.

Even when midnight came and went and Chris once again transformed into a tree frog, Rachel simply scooped him up and planted him on her shoulder. His cold little toes pressed against her neck and tossed her hair to curtain his small form inside of the warm cave of her hair. Rachel had no idea when, or even if, he nodded off. All she knew was that for the first time in forever she was up and walking. Free. She had too much energy to
lay down just yet. She wanted to enjoy the strain of her muscles as she pushed herself to keep walking just a little longer. The sharp, bright pain in her lungs as she gasped for air. She used to jog. Every morning before the sun rose and she had to head off to work. It had cleared her mind, helped her think, and it made her strong and fierce. But as she weaved down one path and then another, one thing became painfully clear. After months of inaction, her body was desperately out of shape. She was nowhere near her old stamina. But at least she was moving. She’d be back to her old self in no time.

The pouch in her pocket felt hot where it rested against her thigh and she glanced down towards it nervously. She had to stop doing this to herself. Worrying about the damn fairy dust wouldn’t do her any good unless she could properly utilize the time it had given her. She needed to do something to make sure that she never had to sleep again. Even if that meant that she and Chris had to glue their lips together. When she started fantasizing about how she’d pull off something like that, Rachel admitted grudgingly that she should probably rest. She told herself over and over again to stop being silly and to
lay down. Close her eyes for a few minutes. Let her body recover from the now unaccustomed exercise. But she just couldn’t do it.

She wouldn’t.

Every time she thought about going to sleep, willingly, she felt sick to her stomach. So instead she kept walking. She walked and walked, and all too soon the sun was rising in the sky. A clear sign that if she didn’t at least sit down, she would find herself with a naked man on her back. Though, when she remembered how Christopher looked with no clothes on, she couldn’t help but think that having him shift back into a man while she was conveniently beneath him wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.

Eventually though, she remembered that she was supposed to be a lady, so she sat him down when the time came for him to be a man once more. He came back to himself still crouched on all fours, and knowing he wouldn’t like it if she stared, Rachel gave
him her back so that he could get dressed. It only took a few moments before he finally cleared his throat in a signal that he was decent. She turned to him expectantly, only to realize that he was eyeing her closely.

“Maybe you should get some rest,” he said.

Rachel shrugged to hide the shudder that passed through her. “I’m fine,” she said with a shaky smile. “I have too much energy to sleep.”

His jaw got tight and his gaze became disapproving.

“I didn’t say anything about sleeping,” he pointed out. “I said that you need to rest.”

“And I said I’m fine.”

He cocked his head to one side and glared at her through narrowed eyes.

“I don’t need you babysitting me,” Rachel snapped. “So just drop it and let’s go.”

She was about to turn to leave when he sat abruptly on the ground and crossed his legs Indian style in the dirt. Her mouth dropped open and before she could speak, he folded his arms mulishly across his chest. The look on his face clearly said that he wouldn’t be going any further until he got his way.

“You twice-damned, stubborn man-child,” she breathed. He huffed, but remained where he was. She should leave him. She should just walk away and continue on her own. She would have done just that, except…he’d waited for her when he hadn’t had to. Except for Alex, Rachel didn’t know anyone who would’ve done the same. So, grumbling, she stalked back to his side and threw their shared pack to the ground with a viciousness that had his eyebrows
raising.

“Now what?” she asked, clearly in a foul mood. He grinned, pleased with her, and Rachel felt some of her displeasure fade away in light of his natural charm.

“Now you sit,” he said calmly, now more closely resembling a Buddhist Monk than a bratty little boy. Rachel sat beside him, careful to get close but not too close. She gasped when he hooked a finger in the back belt loop of her jeans and shifted her body where he wanted her. Their shoulders brushed, their hips pressed against one another, and with a chuckle he wrapped an arm around her shoulder and pulled her upper body against his chest as he lay back in the grass.

“I’m not sleepy,” she reminded him again, alarmed by just how good it felt to lay down with him, to have him surrounding her on all sides like a big,
muscly blanket. A blanket with a penis and a nice ass.

“Ok,” he said simply.

“I’m just going to lie down for a minute.”

“Ok.”

“Maybe close my eyes for a second or two.”

“That’s cool.”

Rachel nodded decisively, her brow furrowing as she shut her eyes and snuggled into the crook of his arm, cheek resting against his chest. But in just a few seconds she felt her mind clouding. Growing dull and lazy with sleep. And when she finally gave in and let it come, it wasn’t nearly as frightening as she’d imagined it would be.

***

Under the influence of the sleeping spell, Rachel hadn’t been “asleep” in any traditional sense. It hadn’t been a restful, peaceful experience. It had felt as if her body was dead but her consciousness hadn’t caught up with the truth yet. As if she were trapped in a decaying, rotting prison. Her own body a tomb she couldn’t escape from no matter how much she beat against the walls and begged for release. Being able to leave her body astrally had been the only thing that had saved her sanity. If she hadn’t had that small bit of freedom, she would have lain in that bed and allowed her brain and heart to accept what the rest of her body was trying to tell her.

That she wasn’t really asleep, but dying
slowly, and there was nothing to be done for it.

She’d forgotten what real sleep felt like.
Sleep that released you when you wanted to wake up. It was a moment of peace, of allowing her mind to go quiet and sink deep into her own subconscious. It was nice, and Rachel had to squash a sense of disappointment when Chris finally shook her awake.

“Five more minutes,” she groaned.

“We might not have five minutes.”

Rachel’s eyes snapped open and she cried out when she realized that they were surrounded on all sides by water. The walls of the maze still stretched high into the air, but judging by how much more of the sky she could see, the water had obviously lifted them up at least a yard from the ground. She sat up and scrambled closer to Chris, realizing when they started to sway from her abrupt motion that the two of them were sitting in the middle of a giant Lilly pad. Rachel turned and gave Chris a look.

“This isn’t my fault,” he said quickly.

“Oh, I’m pretty sure at least the majority of this is your fault.”

He rolled his eyes. “Just start paddling,” he said, and Rachel allowed herself one more glare before moving cautiously across the smooth surface of the pad and dipping her hand into the water. As they began paddling she noticed that there were actually fish swimming beneath the surface, large, vibrantly colored koi fish that swam leisurely beneath them. They seemed to be following a current, and after a moment, it became obvious that the subtle flow of the water was dragging their lily pad though the corridors of the maze. Cattails stretched up around them, their tufts the size of small cars. They blocked out some of the sun’s light as it continued to climb higher in the sky.

“Huh,” Chris said softly. Rachel continued dipping her hand into the water to help push the pad along, but turned her attention to her strange companion.

“What is it?”

He met her eyes. “It’s nothing much but…” He shook his head. “I could have sworn I dreamt about this.”

“You’re not helping your ‘this is not my fault’ argument,” Rachel confided.

He shook his head. “I’ll admit that the thing in the castle was probably my doing, but this is different.” He shut his mouth after that, but it got Rachel to thinking. She felt the fairy dust in her pocket warming, much hotter than her own body heat could account for. It made her wonder…

“What do you know about fairy dust?”

“
It’s wild magic,” he answered absently, his attention stolen by a dragonfly the size of a skateboard flittering around his head. “It’s not something you want to mess with.”

“Why not?”

He reached out and pushed against a nearby wall so that the lily pad floated back into the middle of the water again. There was a spot of blood on his palm where one of the thorns had nicked him and he licked the droplet away before speaking again.

“It’s not like in a Disney movie,” he said finally. “The dust is literally the bits and pieces of ground up
fae. It’s death magic, so only demons and Widows touch the stuff.”

“That’s horrible!” Rachel exclaimed. She wanted desperately to grab the pouch and toss it away, but was even more reluctant to touch it now that she knew what it really was. Why the hell would
Zaran give her something so awful? Where in the world would he have even found such a thing? Unless he hadn’t found it at all. Maybe he’d been the one to capture a fairy only to grind it into powder. But for what purpose? Surely it wasn’t just so that she could escape the castle. And if it was, why on earth would Zaran go out of his way for her? He’d already repaid his debt to her for releasing him from Danielle.

“Yeah it sucks,” Christopher said, “But ever since the fairies died off it’s become a moot point. Fairy dust is so rare these days it’s like spotting a…” He was obviously struggling for the right words and Rachel felt a smidgen of amusement worm its way beneath the worry. “A…beetle…no a mosquito…I mean a virgin…in a place they wouldn’t normally be found,” he finished lamely.

“You really reached for that one, didn’t you?”

“I think I swung too hard,” he admitted, shamefaced. “I don’t get out much, so I don’t have a good metaphor prepared that doesn’t involve bugs or movies from the 1980’s.”

She laughed. Despite his failed attempt to make a point through verbal exaggeration, her mind brought her right back to the point at hand. 

“The fairies are dead,” Rachel’s voice was flat and Chris nodded before looking at her curiously.

“Yeah. They were killed off a while ago.” His eyes narrowed. “Why are we playing twenty questions, again?”

Rachel shrugged and went back to paddling with renewed
vigor.

“Just making conversation,” she hedged. For some reason she didn’t want to confess to Chris about the fairy dust. There was a certain amount of disgust in his voice when he’d mentioned the type of creatures who would use death magic that made her hesitate. True, she hadn’t been the one to kill
Tinkerbell, but her history with Zaran was complicated. Something she didn’t want to have to explain. And she would have to explain, especially since she had no intention of getting rid of the fairy dust. It was wrong, and likely evil given its history, but that wasn’t enough to convince Rachel to let it go. It was keeping her awake, and she would keep it until she could find an alternative.

A wave lapped over the edge of their leafy raft and Rachel glanced about, curious as to what could have caused the disturbance. It had been smooth sailing so far and she expected to see a
koi fish leaping back into the water, or maybe a giant mosquito bearing down on them both. But what she saw was more alarming than that. Her jaw dropped and she jerked her hand out of the water. Reaching blindly for Chris, she punched him squarely in the forearm.

“What the hell-?”

She shushed him by pointing at what had caught her eye.

He turned, and she was satisfied to note that his jaw did its own share of dropping.

There was a woman swimming in their wake. Her pale skin morphed to a bright, true green around the edges of her hair and along her arms and sides. Her hair was the same sea green and she had it slicked back in a French braid to keep it out of her slanted, cat-like eyes. Eyes that were as black as anything Rachel had ever seen, the pupils about the size of silver dollars. Fish scales decorated her shoulders and collarbone. Her fingers were webbed, and fanning lazily through the water behind her was a tail that would have made any one of Ariel’s sisters weep in envy.

“Is that-?”

“Holy crap,” Christopher laughed incredulously. “It’s a mermaid.”

The girl chirruped, a note of curiosity morphing her too sharp features.

“Hello there, beautiful,” Chris said, looking dazed and enthralled all at once. He got on his knees and began to crawl towards the edge of their lily pad with his hand outstretched.

“Come here,” he crooned. “I won’t hurt you.”

“Are you insane?” Rachel gasped, gripping the back of his shirt and struggling to pull him back to safety when the giant leaf titled dangerously beneath the uneven distribution of weight.

“I just want to touch her,” Chris explained, ignoring her attempts to pull him back and stretching even further out over the water as if he could will the mermaid closer. He looked at Rachel and for an instant seemed heartbroken by her interference. “Why can’t I touch her?”