The Last Faerie Queen (17 page)

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means that dying is better,” Kylie said, simplifying in a way Elora couldn't. Or wouldn't. “If the choice is dying or killing your soul—”

“By killing somebody?” I said, because I wasn't sure souls could be killed. Stained maybe. Weakened or damaged for a time. But killed? No. I didn't believe that. I couldn't believe it, now that I knew I had a soul. Now that I'd felt it, through her. Through love.

Maybe that's the answer,
I thought, but like a butterfly or a raven made of smoke, it flew away before I could catch it.

Before I really understood what it meant.

“If a guy was bearing down on me, and I knew I had to kill him or die, I might die,” Kylie said. “I might do that, because my soul is more important than my body.”

Might
, Kylie had said. Not
would
.
Might
. Something had shifted. Faerie had changed her, made her harder, just like the rest of us.

“It doesn't call to you, does it?” I said, looking up at the fruit.

Kylie shook her head. “I already know what I'm capable of. I've known it since they took her, and it isn't pretty, Taylor. I may not kill to save my own life, but hers … ”

“You would?” I asked after a minute. I didn't really want to hear the answer, but I felt like I needed it.

“I would do things you can't imagine. Things I didn't imagine, before I watched the darkness swallow her whole.” She reached up, plucking a piece of fruit from a nearby tree. She brought it right to her lips and I feared the worst. Then she tossed it, so carelessly, behind her back. “That's why I'm not drawn in by the power of the spell. I don't need some psycho to show me the dark side of my heart. I know what I'm capable of.”

“And?” Keegan asked, shaking softly as he stared at her. She must've sounded like a stranger to him.
Still, her words were familiar. We'd all thought them at some point.

“And I would do anything
to protect the people I love,” she said.

“Do not forget mercy,” Elora reminded her. “There is room for both mercy and justice.”

Kylie huffed, and her horse trotted ahead of us. “Mercy is earned.” She tossed the words behind her like rotting fruit.

–––––

After that, we fell into a kind of dazed silence, and soon we were so exhausted, even the Dark Lady's whisperings couldn't get in. Elora walked beside us, using glamour to hide the fact that she was holding my hand. I wished I could lean into her and whisper helpful things like, “Remember the night I healed you with my tongue?” I wished we were alone.

I wished and wished, but under the cover of the Unseelie Forest, there were no stars, and no wishes came true. I felt alone, even though I was surrounded by friends. Then, just as I decided I'd never see any light again, I saw too much. I saw more light than my eyes could handle. Curling into myself, I
peered out under my arm.

“What is that?” I asked as colors sped past my eyes. Blue and green and purple, gold and red. Silver and white. Everything shimmering against the deep blue backdrop of the sky, like heaven falling down. Or, maybe, the place where heaven and earth met.

“That,” Elora said with a grin, “is the Aurora.”

“The what?”

“Aurora Borealis,” Kylie said. “Of course!”

“The Northern Lights,” Keegan simplified.

Slowly, cautiously, I lifted my head. And then I could see it pouring down, like a waterfall cascading through the sky. Every color in the universe, coming together over our heads.

“We're going past this?” I asked.

Elora shook her head. “Not past. Through.”

“Whoa,” Kylie breathed, as I looked around. The Unseelie Forest was at our backs, as ominous as ever, but it felt like the air had shifted. Like autumn was bleeding into winter.

“How long have we been walking?” I asked.

“It isn't an issue of distance,” Elora said cryptically.
Again with the faerie vagueness.

“Translation to Human?” I requested.

She laughed, glancing behind her back. The dark faeries were still following us, but they weren't close enough to hear our conversation. “Remember when I said Faerie is the place where the physical and spiritual worlds meet? That night in your bedroom?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, the spiritual realm makes for easy travel. It takes us where we wish to go. Call it concentrated will, or magic, or—”

“Flibbertigibbet,” Keegan said.

“Or that.” She smiled. “In the spiritual realm, one can pass easily from place to place, if one knows the way.”

“Enchanted wardrobes?” Kylie suggested. “Train platforms?”

“Black holes and vortexes,” Keegan added.

“However you're able to understand it,” Elora said. “But magic is not science. It cannot be explained in simple terms of space and time.”

“Time … wait, did you Rip van Winkle us?” Kylie asked, looking around for signs that a century had passed in the blink of an eye. “If we went back home, would everyone we cared about be dead?”

Elora narrowed her eyes.

“Would years have gone by?” I said. “I mean, for every night we've spent in Faerie—”

“No, no, no.” Elora shook her head. “Nothing like that. Although time here
is
fluid and cannot be charted with clocks. In fact, clocks move backward here, or they don't move at all.”

“Okay, that's wicked,” Keegan said, which was funny because, you know, we were in the land of wicked faeries. Still, I knew what he meant. I kind of wanted to look for a clock.

“Of course, if I wanted to, I
could
Rip van Winkle you,” Elora said with a grin. “But those places are few and far between here.”

Kylie nodded, and I could tell she was relieved. I was relieved. I mean, yeah, I had no intention of running back to my folks, but I wanted to think I
could,
if something changed. If I stopped being afraid of them.

Afraid of their rejection.

Maybe get your insecurities under wraps,
I thought,
before we meet up with the Unseelie Queen.

After all, any weakness I had, any fear, she would use against me. I tightened my grip on Elora's hand just as she moved away from me.

“We'll need a little help from here.” She opened her hand to reveal a tiny black dot. The dot grew, taking over the rest of her palm. Turning to smoke, it fluttered away on wings.

“A butterfly!” Kylie gasped, temporarily forgetting her fury. Her anguish. That was the thing about magic: it could be horrifying or mesmerizing, depending on the minute. And now more butterflies peeled away from Elora's hand. I noticed the symbols on her arms were getting darker, and I thought,
Good, she's becoming her old self again.

Then I thought,
Shit, she's becoming her old self again.

Then I watched the butterflies disappear into the sky. Soon, two horses emerged from the darkness. Two
faeries
, wearing the shape of horses. Either way, I recognized them. They'd helped us carry Elora into the Seelie Court when she'd been on the brink of death.

“Lhiannon and Lamia,” Elora said, nodding to the left, then the right. “Well met, old friends.” 

“A pleasure to see you alive, princess,” Lamia said. And she dipped her black, massive head, rustling her wings.

Meanwhile, Lhiannon snorted, and smoke drifted from her nostrils. “Let me guess,” she snarled. “You wish for us to carry the humans up to the palace.”

“The humans, and your princess,” Elora said.

Their eyes trailed to her back. Before we'd left the Seelie Court, she'd reapplied the glamour that made it look like she had her original wings. She just wasn't ready to reveal the newly budding wings to the world. Besides, in spite of our healing sessions, she could barely hover above the ground, let alone fly.

I didn't know if she'd ever be able to.

Finally, the horses knelt, and we climbed onto their backs. It took a minute to remove Kylie's saddle from her mare. Ten seconds later, we realized there was
no way
it was going to fit on these massive horses, and we ended up slinging it to Keegan's back with vines. Then, impressed with the effectiveness of the vines, Elora summoned more to strap us to the horses.

Then we were off.

Kylie's mare bolted back toward the Seelie Court as the ground dropped out beneath us. Soon it was a golden dot on the landscape. Then the landscape itself disappeared as the Aurora Borealis poured over me. No,
became
me. I looked down to see that my body was changing too. First it turned blue, then green, then violet. Then everything, all at once, flashing and rushing over my skin, transforming me into something else entirely.

I closed my eyes and became one with the stars. The universe.

Sitting at my back, Elora pressed into me, holding me close now that no one could see us. But I couldn't even feel bitter about that, couldn't feel bitter about anything. I just felt … good. Like everything was as it should be, and everything was going to be all right.

I twisted around, as best I could without losing my grip, and I found her mouth. Her lips parted and she crashed into me. Her hair spilled over me. The stars poured down on me.

On us.

“I love you,” I whispered into her lips, and she whispered it back. And then she went back to holding me, leaning into my back, arms around my waist. We separated, but we didn't.

We never would entirely.

Then, just as I realized this, we came into the darkness again. The Unseelie Mountains rose up before us, jutting into the clouds. And there it was, that familiar black forest. But this time, red rivers cut through the darkness.

“Is that … are those … ?” I leaned back, into Elora.

She rested her head on my shoulder, just long enough to say, “It's not what you think. Look closer.”

I did, peering at the rivers of red that crawled across the landscape like veins. I mean,
exactly
like veins. The pattern was so similar, it made me feel queasy. Or maybe that was because the rivers looked like rivers of blood.

Well, they did and they didn't. A closer inspection revealed water that sparkled like rubies, rather than the thick, sticky substance that ran in my veins. Still, the Dark Lady must've been going for a blood-in-veins motif, and I couldn't help but think mortal blood
did
stain those riverbanks, even if the main substance was something else.

Elora spread her hands over my stomach as if to soothe me. She leaned in, speaking in my ear, “She told us to think of this land as her body, and warned us never to sully her form with human filth.”

Subtle
, I thought, and looked to Keegan, but he was too far away to laugh along with me.

We laughed to shake off the terror. The sickness.

We loved to scare off the hate.

I tilted my head back farther, thinking Elora might bury her face in my hair, when the stars caught my eye. Even though we'd passed through the Aurora some time ago, the stars still seemed to be falling. When I squinted my eyes, I realized that smoky black hands were reaching up and
pulling
them out of the sky.

Probably just a glamour
, I told myself. I mean, you couldn't pull stars out of the sky without it affecting the universe. Still, the metaphor was effective. I heard Keegan whispering
subtle
in my mind. The Dark Lady not only hated the sun, and the bright Seelie Queen that represented it; she hated
all
suns (that is, all stars warming all galaxies) and was desperate to banish them from the sky. But she wasn't content simply glamouring the sky to look black—she wanted to show herself actively snuffing them out, wanted to show that her reach extended beyond the known world and into the sky. There was nothing she couldn't reach, touch, and destroy. She was omnipotent.

Yeah, in your dreams, lady
, I thought, because the glamour was impressive, but it wasn't real.

I started to wonder if most of her power came from her ability to create terrifying illusions. When the dark faeries had captured us in the graveyard, they'd been quick to pull out the spiders and the snakes, since humans feared such things. But spiders and snakes didn't scare me.

Only one thing scared me, at this point. And the Dark Lady wouldn't have to be a genius to figure out what it was.

Now Elora leaned closer, brushing her lips across my cheek. She did it so fast, it would've been next to impossible for the faeries following us to see. Then she whispered, “Not long now,” and as soon as she did, I felt us speeding toward the clouds. But rather than stopping at the mountain's highest point, which seemed like the best course of action, we stopped several hundred feet below it, in front of a great, twisting path that got thinner and thinner as it went.

Elora dismounted from our horse, holding out a hand. “Are you ready?”

My gaze trailed to the structure up ahead, forged out of the darkness and hardened into obsidian. Twisting spires slid into a scarlet sky, like a sword into the belly of a beast. I thought of blood dripping down. Of muscles tearing and bones breaking.

Unsubtly, I shook my head.

Elora laughed. “Welcome to the last seventeen years of my life,” she said, helping me down, because really, I couldn't stay there forever. “Now, come on. Let's go meet my mommy.”

20

E
l
o
r
A

When the road narrowed to a razor-thin ledge, the mortals began to fret. First Taylor faltered, then Keegan, and Kylie, the only human permitted to ride up the path, kept peering over Lamia's back at the darkness below.

“Trust,” I said softly, all-too-wary of spies listening in. The servants of the Dark Court still followed us in a swarm. And between the spindly branches of the nearby trees, snowy tree owls peeked out with impossibly black eyes. This close to the mountain's summit, everything was black on white. Tufts of mist drifted across a landscape of jagged stones, while the snow-capped mountain rose up into the twisting black spires of the Unseelie Castle. Of course, the great obsidian structure up ahead was merely the tip of the Unseelie stronghold, its inner workings weaving all the way down into the mountain.

We dark things needed a place to hide in the summer months, when the veil that covered our land could not keep out the light. And in the winter months, when the world was cloaked in glorious blackness, we climbed out of the earth like dead things, and we danced. We would dance tonight.

“Come along,” I said, walking ahead of the group, showing them how it was done. Even without my wings, I had little fear of falling. I'
d walked this path since I was a child, hurrying down the winding ledge until I reached the forest below, the snow-tipped trees that rose black and leafless no matter the season. To the mo
rtals it must've looked like a lifeless wasteland, but they did not understand the things we did. Without death, there would be no new life. No growth without the decay. If nothing ever died, the earth would've been overpopulated centuries ago.

None of us would've been born.

And so the snow falls over the world, quietly lulling its creatures to sleep, so that all may be reborn in the spring. So the rocks sit, the blind and silent judges of the world, cold as the faeries here and almost as endless. And so my feet curved over the stone, like a seashell curving over a pearl.

“Faith,” I said softly, and my voice carried on the wind to the mortals behind me.

“Trust.” I wobbled playfully, and then caught myself when the mortals gasped.

“And connection.” I took a tiny leap and landed on one foot, perhaps showing off a bit. I just wanted them to get comfortable, to believe in the earth's protection. Ironically, the only way for a human to travel this path successfully was to believe the earth would protect them on their passage. Most humans had long since lost their connection to the planet. Lost their faith in her goodness. Stopped trusting themselves.

Those humans would fall.

I slid my foot across the path, fast enough for the ledge to slice me, and as my blood slipped over the rocks, disappearing into the crevasse below, I turned to the humans and smiled. “And, if all else fails, a little gift is always appreciated.”

Taylor let out a sound of disapproval—not, I think, because he was angry with me, but because he hated to see me hurt. Chances were, he'd be making that sound many times in the coming days.

A shiver went up my spine as a dark thought blossomed in my mind.

Five mortals enter the Unseelie Court. How many come out?

And, if I tip the scales, what will the cost be?

I glanced back at the faces of my friends. Kylie, who would do anything to protect the people she loved. Keegan, who had no vested interest in the High Faerie Courts or their subsequent downfall, and was only here out of loyalty to his sister. Perhaps, also, to me. And last, but never least, Taylor. My love. My heart.

How many lives would I sacrifice for him? Here, as the leader of the revolution, in a position of near-absolute power, I had control over who lived and who died. Who stood at the front lines, and who lingered in the back. Certainly, I would stand among the first wave, as any leader should, but Taylor? The boy who'd saved me so many times, in so many ways? What would I do to make sure he survived? Or, in uglier terms …

Who would I place in front of him?

As we entered the Unseelie Palace, the servants pressing in around us, I saw the answer to my question right in front of me. She sat in the entryway, in one of the many thrones situated throughout the castle. Red velvet curtains hung on either side of her to illustrate her importance.

“Don't look into her eyes,” I warned quickly. “She can intuit your darkest fears and use them to break you.”

“Wait, that's a person?” Keegan muttered. “She looks like a statue.”

It was a fair point—
until
she stood. The Queen of the Dark Faeries towered over us in layer upon layer of black. Ribbons laced up her bodice and her arms. The tops of her snowy breasts billowed out of her corset, bluish-gray veins crawling like lines through marble, and her ebony hair was lined with scarlet. Oh, she was beautiful.

As beautiful as death after lifelong starvation.

I took a step forward, my gaze trailing from her face to the humans resting at her feet. Alexia knelt in her burgundy dress, a crown of crimson flowers in her hair, and farther down, in a kneeling-dog position, was Brad.

I opened my mouth to speak. But before I could give my mother a false offering, Alexia looked up at me, her eyes narrowing into slits. “
You!
” she shrieked.

I gasped, Alexia lunged, and together we slammed into the wall. One of the curtains came crashing down, wrapping around us like a blanket, and as we rolled across the floor, pulling hair and gnashing teeth, it covered us completely. That's when she covered my mouth with her hand and whispered dirty secrets in my ear.

“Follow my lead,” she said.