History of Fire (16 page)

“You’re really leaving again?” Sary walked briskly next to me as I made my way through the gardens of the Scren Palace. I was leaving and had run into her exiting the palace. Seeing her was bittersweet, both exhilarating and sorrowful at the same time.

“Yep, really leaving.” I shifted my pack on my back as I peered around the shrubs. I decided to take a long walk around the palace grounds before leaving, just to take it all in, hoping to relax the tension in my body. It helped, but I hadn’t expected to run into Sary as I roamed about.

“You don’t have to.”

I stopped dead and turned to face her. She was beautiful. Her bright red hair looked like the fire that flickered along my Empyrean blade, and her green eyes were something I’d dreamt of many times. The thought made me blush, so I looked away toward the ground.

“I have to go. There are things I need to do. I’ve still got this mission to clean up the world from the escaped Unseelie who’ve not returned under Oran’s rule. Plus, our Pyren is unprotected. If anyone got hold of the magic there, it could devastate my family.”

Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, and the guilt ripping through me was just too much. “There’s no reason for me to stay here. I’ve got to go.” I gave her a slight smile. If only she’d give me a reason, any reason to stay, I’d consider it. “See you later, Sary.”

I stepped off and rushed through the labyrinth of orchids and shrubs which filled the air with their vibrant spring scents. I wanted to inhale the forest again, feel the mulch under my feet crunching away as I strolled through the Oregon woods. If anything, it would help me keep her off my mind. I also wanted that soda I’d left behind when Oran’s tribe ambushed Paki and me. There were so many things I wanted and so many things I couldn’t have. The pain of this made me fight back the sting of angry tears.

“Benton … wait!”

I kept on, not turning back.

“Benton!”

I halted and spun around, angered and anxious to leave. “What?”

“You should stay.”

“Why?”

I was furious because I knew she didn’t know what she was saying and didn’t really mean it. Staring at her gorgeous eyes, I desperately wanted to see more of them but knew we were worlds apart, even if I was related by blood to a Seelie queen. I was human and was looked down upon by her people. They’d never accept me, so we could never be together.

“I don’t want you to leave yet. Please stay.”

I exhaled. “I can’t, and you know it.”

“But you can’t just be alone.” She continued to look at me, but the longer she stared, the more I wanted out of there.

“Don’t do that, don’t say what you don’t mean.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re trying to keep me here. Trying to make yourself feel better when you know we …” I motioned to her and back. “We can’t be together. I got that. You made your point crystal clear.”

She looked hurt. “I know what I said. I’m just saying you don’t have to go yet.”

My blood was boiling, and I closed my eyes. “Stop. I don’t need you anyway. I can do this without you.” I swerved around and headed down a staircase where I almost tripped on the rough, uneven stones, but I made it down onto the main walkway near the main gate without making more of a fool of myself. The anger was surging though me, like an uncontrolled tsunami threatening to break the dam of the control I was desperately trying to maintain. How did she do that to me? How did she always know how to reach in and rip my heart out, draining the very blood from my veins as she watched me die a slow agonizing death from her words? She’d told me we couldn’t be together, that her people wouldn’t ever accept me. So why did it hurt so badly?

I hated her, but I loved her. I wanted to move on, but how did I move on from the only place I wanted to be? Even if I ultimately couldn’t let go of my feelings for her, I would surely try. I wished she knew me better than to string me along.

"Benton, stop!” Again, she hurried behind me, even as I walked out the gate of the Scren Palace. I contemplated using the summoning stone to escape her, but I couldn’t leave her like that.

“Go away.”

“You can’t live like this. Love is just anguish. That’s all it leaves you with. Nothing else, don’t you get it? You’re left empty, like a forgotten shell, a relic. It’ll kill you." Her words burned like acid.

"And you know me enough to say such things?" I asked. I stopped to drill my eyes into hers once more. I couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth. She didn’t even know me after all this time. She didn’t know what love really was.

“Yes, I know you enough, though you may think I don’t,” she said. I wanted to shout at her and make her realize she was so wrong about so many things.

I shook my head. “No, you don’t, or you wouldn’t care what anyone else says. You’ve walled yourself up, using pathetic excuses to push me away. I still believe in love, not like what you’ve done to yourself since your chosen died. You’re empty, lost, and this close to withering away. What are you going to do with your life now? Without love, without anyone else allowed anywhere near your heart? You chose to push me away.” I wanted to run away and kiss her at the same time. “This is no way to live … without the hope to love again. Why can’t you let me in?”

Sary’s eyes showed no tears. She’d lived too long to allow them to slip out for a mere mortal man like me. She was icy, flat and apathetic for the first time since we’d met. I could feel the hollow where her heart had once sat, and it made me feel pity for her.

I’d never be enough. I’d never be the person she longed for. We’d be doomed before we even started, and every time she looked at me, I’d know it wasn’t me she loved. I’d never let her live with that anguish and knowledge that my life was really just a fleeting moment compared to hers. She would never tread such a path for fear it might break her down again. I knew it now.

I, on the other hand, lived without such regrets. Immortality was more of a curse to her kind than a gift. Especially when it came to love. In a way, I was the luckier one with a heart wide open, ready to give it my all, and an enlivened mind that the world had not hardened.

This wedge between us would never be removed. Still, I gave into my desire and reached for her, pulled her close and kissed her hard on the lips.

She sighed blissfully for a moment, letting the spark between us ignite. Then she ruined it by shoving me away, throwing me a vicious glare while turning an angry scarlet color that made her freckles stand stark against her skin. But her pretty eyes didn’t lie, and they told me a different story. They told me of an intense longing filled with despair and regret.

“Go home, Benton. You are not of my world. This isn’t your battle anymore.”

I didn’t move, daring her to continue. My eyes hardened as I pressed my lips tightly together. I wanted to pull her close to me again, but her slumped shoulders already gave me the answer I was seeking. She’d given up on love when Stephen died. There was no future for us, for her, for anyone outside her tiny, fragile bubble of this half-life she led. It would be pointless to try and break through her already cemented walls.

“In that, you’re wrong again,” I said. “I can’t just go home and forget about all this. This place. These people. My family. It’s my war, too, even if you don’t see it that way. I’m forever chained to the Land of Faerie, whether you like it or not. I’m here to stay.”

I swung around and took to the worn path into the woods, heading down the road I’ve used many times. It was a familiar road, but it never felt comforting enough for me to stay in Faerie.

Sary didn’t follow me after that. I wished she had. I wished she had fought harder to love me the way I knew she could, the way I loved her.

But she didn’t, and I wouldn’t be turning back now. Even if I saw her again, this felt like a final goodbye.

When she was out of sight and the thick of the forest surrounded me, I plucked a tiny blue orb out of my pocket. My heart was shattered, and I didn’t feel like seeing anyone, but I also didn’t feel like trekking the long way back home through Faerie with such sorrow plaguing my thoughts. I rolled the smooth stone in my hands until it turned a milky white before bringing it swiftly to my lips.

“Hey, Camulus. I could use a bit of help here,” I whispered into the tiny orb.

The elven-pixie traitor appeared in a vibrant flash before me, looking curious to find me asking him for help when I’d adamantly refused it before, but he bowed his head without so much as a protest at why he’d been summoned from the far-off Santiran Lands.

“Can you take me home? My human home?” I asked. My gut was knotted up in a ball, and my voice croaked as I gave him my request. I straightened, hoping I didn’t look too pathetic.

He bowed his head once more, never revealing any judgment against me. He held out his hand. “Of course, brother of Queen Shade. Just hold on.”

May 5th, 1703

At times, the world is quiet, harmonious and still. These are the moments I try to relish as much as possible, because there are never enough of them. Moments when everyone is well, everything is taken care of and nothing is wrong with the ones I love. These are the days I long for when things go awry and life feel bleak and treacherous, much like the grey-laced skies before a torrential storm.

Today is such a day, filled with a bluebird-colored sky without a cloud to mar it in any way. The children play with their games and laugh, letting their happy voices echo through our home. My wife tends to the fire and prepares dinner, singing that song that fills my mind up when she’s gone, even as death calls to me while I sit in my favorite rocking chair on our porch, observing the sun set over the tree tops and hearing my children play. I’ve made certain there are no other dark beings lurking, but there is no more time to discover the origin of the curse that steals my life force every waking moment.

My son will inherit the Empyrean blade and shall pass it on to every firstborn male in our family. I pray it will keep them safe for generations to come. Its magic is pure and worthy of an elemental. I am proud to have it protect my loved ones when I am gone.

There is no other moment in time I’d rather live in than this moment, and if I die today, I will die a most joyous man.

~Brendan

There were no more journal entries in the grimoire. Even though I’d read it dozens of times by now, it still left me feeling lost because I didn’t know if my uncle died after that day or what had happened to him that was killing him. He lived in my mind forever now, like so many people I’d met along the way. Even though I’d never met him, he was as real as any other person and gave me a new goal to look forward to: discover who had waged the war to exterminate the elementals. Somehow, I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but at least I now knew why there were so few of us left.

Time blurred into a mess of jumbled memories, candlelight and days locked in the Pyren, reading scroll after scroll. I could read them easily now with Braelynn’s spell still working for me. It was a good thing, because reading and studying the scrolls ate up the hours well enough as it was.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t much else in the scrolls that hadn’t been revealed in the grimoires, so I found very few new spells I could get any use out of. Still, wasting my time was the only thing I could do to keep my mind occupied and unnoticing of the endless hours.

Sometimes it sucked being all alone.

I flicked the lights back on in my house as evening morphed into nightfall. The grey of the days outside filled me up with the perfect amount of glum to match my mood. It wasn’t that I didn’t have tons to do—there were still hundreds of escaped Unseelie still wandering about the world that I could track down and either imprison and ship off to Oran, or exterminate. No, I just didn’t care.

A knock on my door jerked me back to the present as I reached into the fridge for another cold can of Coke. I listened for a moment and wondered who could be visiting me. Unseelie couldn’t get through the barrier dome my family had set up before my mother died. Humans could walk through it since they lacked any magic and were barely a threat, but other faeries? Only those who’d been invited there before could return, and only when I was in residence. Otherwise, the dome didn’t allow anyone access.

I headed toward the door and peered out through the peephole, curious about my visitor. Rylan stood there shifting on his feet. Rylan, nicknamed Soap, was a friend of Shade’s and a good friend to me, too.

I unlocked the bolt and swung the door open to greet him.

“Hey, man.” Soap grinned and held out his hand. I gave him mine, expecting a shake, but he pulled me into a firm, manly hug with a rough pat on the back. Once he let me go, I moved to let him pass, and the scent of the forest, freshly cut grass and wildflowers followed him in as he stepped into the living room.

Faeries had some permanent nature smell to them. It always surprised me when I’d been away from Faerie for a while, and it took some getting used to. Soap had lived in our house for a time when he and Shade had dated. I often wondered how he felt about her leaving him for Dylan, but he hadn’t sulked too long and appeared cozy the last time I’d seen him with Brisa, Shade’s best friend, around his neck. Now I wasn’t sure what was going on between the two. Brisa was a pretty girl, but I’d always found her too harsh with words for my taste. I liked girls who were confidant but not overbearing.

“How’s the hermit life treating you?” He sat on the couch, sprawling his arms along the back and crossing his foot over a knee, looking quite comfortable. I took the recliner, which used to be Shade’s favorite spot but was now all mine. Everything in the house was mine now. For a while, it’d been fun to be the master of my own domain, but the novelty had worn off quickly.

“It’s fine,” I answered. “What brings you here? The Scren Palace suffocating you?”

Rylan laughed. His long, golden-brown hair was tied back and ran down to past his mid-back. He had all sorts of crap laced through it, too. Thin braids, shells, trinkets. He reminded me of a caramel-headed Jack Sparrow. I wondered how he was able to walk about as silently as he did. It was truly baffling.

“Nah. I don’t hang around there much.” His eyes drifted off into the distance and flicked toward the TV I’d left on mostly for background noise. I never watched it.

“I hear ya.” I placed my soda on the dusty wooden table between the couch and recliner. “Want a drink?”

“Yeah, man. I’ll grab it.” Rylan hopped to his feet before I could even think about getting up, so I let him get his own can. I stared at the screen where an old rerun of a long-running game show was playing, the one where contestants spun a wheel and tried to guess a word or phrase. It was perfect to zone out to, but Rylan returned before I could even guess what word they were trying to figure out.

“So what brings you down here?” I asked.

Rylan snapped the can open and took a long swig. “Man, I miss soda. It’s one of my favorite things about visiting the human realm. I just got back from the Eastern states after cleaning up a mess of Unseelie there.”

This piqued my interest. “How’d that go? I got into a nest of them just around here. Can you believe that crap? Right here, near my house.” I shook my head, still steaming about Oran’s tribe.

“Yeah, Shade filled me in. Sorry to hear about Anna, but I’m sure she’ll hold her own against Oran. When’s the wedding?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m sure Shade will definitely remind me about it. She’ll make sure I attend.”

Rylan grinned as he finished off his soda. “Yeah, she’ll keep you on your toes.” He sighed and lay back onto the fluffy couch. “I kind of missed this place, though it was sure more alive with Shade here.” He sounded sad and less like the mostly happy Rylan I’d gotten to know in the past.

“Hey, how’s Brisa doing?” The small talk was exhausting, but I figured there wasn’t anything better to do.

He slumped even more. “Good. She’s back at college now. She’s adamant on finishing her degree and becoming a pediatrician. After working as an intern volunteer for a couple weeks, she said it was her calling. I haven’t gotten to see her much since she enrolled in pre-med. She’s always pretty busy. Frankly, I think the world of Faerie freaked her out.”

I nodded. I couldn’t blame her. “Yeah. It’s not for everyone. Especially non-magics. Even with the sight.”

He crushed the can between his palms. “So the real reason I came here was to drag you out of this misery pit.”

I huffed. “Hey, I’m just taking a break, man.”

“I know. But you’ve got to get out of this gloomy place.” He took a look around and shook his head.

“Sary sent you, didn’t she?” I asked. My flat voice came out dry and bitter. Damn, how had I become so jaded?

Rylan frowned. I was on to him. He wasn’t used to humans not falling for his persuasive tricks. His glamour tricks and charms failed miserably on me.

“Close, but not quite.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Don’t try it on me, Soap. You know just as well as I do that elementals don’t fall for faerie glamour stuff. Just don’t already.” I sighed and rubbed my face as Rylan tapped his fingers on his thigh. “All right. Who sent you then?”

He perked up and pulled a mirror from a small sack dangling from his belt. I hadn’t even noticed it before and was pretty sure he had a shrinking spell on it and kept all his gear in it.

He waved his hand over the mirror and placed it onto the coffee table. A bright beam of light shot out of it, up toward the ceiling, and flickered a few times before the image of a teenaged girl appeared.

I inhaled sharply. It was a faint image, and it flickered in and out constantly, but I knew who it was. I’d met her before—twice actually—but just briefly. The hologram showed her smiling at me and waving, running fast down a sidewalk. Seeing her again made me feel suddenly better, less dreary and more energetic. That is, until I realized the only reason Rylan would show me her photo was because she was in mortal danger.

“That’s Zena. How do you know her?”

I turned to face Rylan, who was sitting up and looking at me with a very interested expression on his face. I wondered why it was that he’d waited to tell me exactly why he was there. It heightened my suspicions, but I held back my tongue so I could hear him out first.

“I’m sorry to have to ask you to help us after all you’ve been through, but I was asked to find her.”

“Who asked?” I crossed my arms, worn out by all the faery runarounds.

Rylan’s frown made me feel bad for being so rude.

“Her mother is looking for her. I ran into her on a routine stakeout of Unseelie activity down south. She and her mother have the sight but are both human.”

“So how’d she know you’d be able to help her?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea, but she was wearing a strange stone around her neck. I think it wards off evil ones.”

My thoughts ran back to the green stone around Zena’s neck. “Zena had one, too, but it didn’t keep a night elf from tracking her.”

“Where’d you last see her?”

“Vegas. But I had to mind wipe her.” A sudden guilt hit me as I remembered I’d promised to help keep her safe after the ordeal with Oran ended. I’d already broken it.
Crap.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have the right kind of help. I need a human warrior to track and find her,” Rylan said. I groaned quietly but didn’t say a word. “Will you help me?”

The girl’s projection flickered again. Her eyes seemed to call to me. Then the image broke up and dissipated. Where her beautiful face had once been was now empty air. Rylan cursed and shook the mirror. It had malfunctioned somehow, leaving me to wonder what was going on with it. I thought faery magic was a bit more stable than that.

Finally, I straightened once more and spoke. “Okay. I’ll help, but don’t make me regret this.”

Rylan gave up on the mirror projector and threw me a wide, toothy grin. “Awesome! I can’t promise you anything, but you won’t regret helping. I swear it’ll be like old times hunting Unseelie, except we don’t have to execute her.”

“Okay … that’s a relief.” His sense of humor was wacked.

“Oh, there’s one more thing,” he said.

I groaned and leaned back in the overstuffed chair. “All right, go ahead, hit me with it.”

“I left the girl’s mother with Queen Aluse, the Raven Faery Queen, for protection.”

I lifted my eyebrows in surprise and glanced at Rylan, who shrugged. I’d never met Aluse, but I’d heard many stories about her from my sister. From the look on Rylan’s face, there was more than one task at hand.

“Okay. What do I have to do with that?”

“She needs a curse broken on her younger brother, Trey, before we can help Zena’s mother. We need a warlock to do it.”

Not much to go on there, but I didn’t want to make her wait. “Okay … how do I get to her?”

“Our rides are waiting for us outside the dome.”

He pocketed the mirror and muttered something about it not working right. I tossed him a questioning glance and decided it wasn’t worth pursuing. I slumped away to get my stuff together and refilled my travel pack. I also strapped my Empyrean blade snuggly onto my back. Finally ready, I followed him to the front door, and we both stared at it apprehensively. We’d been in too many battles to turn back, but it never made leaving into the unknown any easier.

“Ready?” Rylan asked.

“Always.”

I reached out and unlocked the door, swinging it open to peer outside. Seeing nothing out past the dome’s boundary on our lawn, I shut and locked the door behind us before we stepped out onto the driveway, exiting the boundaries of my home and sanctuary. I glanced back one more time, mentally saying goodbye to the Pyren.

As we crossed beyond the dome, two black-winged faeries slammed into the ground before us, making us both jump. They’d hidden in wait just at the edge of the dome. Their wingspans were wide, but they’d tucked them in behind their backs as they landed. Even so, the longest of their feathers dragged on the ground and appeared dusty from the dirt clinging to them. One was a woman with long, rich brown hair and tanned skin who gave me a flirty smile and lifted her eyebrows as she fluttered her pretty brown eyes at me.

It was nice to see a pretty face in such desolate times. I hoped to find out more about her on the trip. I threw her an equally wide grin and waved. The other was a male with dark black hair cut just under his ears and equally dark eyes. Both looked like they worked out, encased in lean, hard muscle.

I didn’t think the woman was Queen Aluse. She’d never come fetch a person herself. She was a queen who could send an underling to pick up a person. I turned and sent my magic toward the barrier, reinforcing the protection spell. Satisfied it would hold while I was gone, I faced the beautiful winged faery again.

“Hi,” I managed to say, holding out my hand. “I’m Benton.”