The Trouble with Fate (21 page)

Ridiculous. I wasn’t accountable to anyone anymore. No one except myself, and maybe
some knee-jerk reaction to the crumbling honor codes Mum and Dad had woven into me
when I was a kid. Courage, valor, and family all rolled up in one motto: Strongholds
hold. They don’t give up. They don’t run. They don’t relinquish.

I’m not much of a Stronghold. Given a choice, I ran.

But if I did a runner this time, Lou would die among Weres, frightened and defenseless,
and I’d spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, worrying. Eventually,
I’d die too. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in fifty years. Alone for as long as it took with
nothing more than an amulet who seemed strangely fixated on the corpse of another
amulet.

The knot in my throat swelled until it became a bulge around all the stuff I kept
swallowing down.

So. No running this time.

Problem one: I didn’t even know where to find Lou. None of her dreams had given me
a solid clue, and it wasn’t like we could converse when she was dreaming; I was just
a receptor to dreams—the earpiece without the mouthpiece.

She could be dead already; she hadn’t shared a dream in hours. No way to check unless—
Oh my.

No way to check unless I went to Threall.

*   *   *

I’d broken my pledge—
“I swear, Mum, I’ll never go to Threall”
—twice, both times quite deliberately. The first time the very same day Mum pried
the promise out of me. The second had been less than a year later. It had been a bad
day, followed by a worse night. I’d hit my bed knowing two things: Lou was never going
to open a portal and I was never going to speak to my brother again.

Traveling to Threall meant shearing my skin from my soul.

Nine years ago, I was too young to appreciate or anticipate the full horror of the
agony my body would experience. I’d lasted maybe six seconds, hands stuffed over my
mouth to hold back the screams, before I’d fallen back into my semimortal body.

With that, I’d closed the book on Threall. But now, things were different. Back then,
I’d had a child’s body, and I’d been completely ignorant of the fact that Fae gifts
don’t come into full power until after puberty. Imagine my shock when my talent for
magic doubled the day I had my first period.

I gave the hanging thread another savage jerk.

How long was six seconds?

One thousand, two thousand, three thousand
 …
six
. Surely I could endure six seconds? How much longer would it take to make it all
the way to Threall? Twice as much? I could stand twelve seconds of anguish in return
for a future of peace, couldn’t I?

What had I told Trowbridge? I am Fae. My eyes flared and the interior of the vehicle
turned briefly green as I remembered my announcement.

And today, I’d flared for the first time. If that wasn’t my body giving me the green
light to purchase a day pass to Threall, I was a full-blooded Were
. Enough.
I grimly booted thoughts of Trowbridge into the corner of my brain where I kept broken
things. Threall had been the catalyst for my flare, not my troublesome meet-up with
Trowbridge. Hell, I’d been thinking about the land of mists ever since Lou’s abduction—no,
even before that. A visit there had been in the back of my mind ever since I started
receiving Lou’s dreams.

I just hadn’t got past the point of toying with the idea, to actually doing it.

If Mum was right, then I’d be the Mystwalker in that realm, capable of traveling deep
into any Fae’s drowsing mind. Once I found Lou, I could mine her memories for details
of her capture and discover her location. I imagined hero-me using my Threall-gained
knowledge to slither in through a conveniently open window, tiptoeing past a sleeping
Were, rousing my sleeping aunt, and leading her to Bob’s car.

I could go digging for other secrets too.

How to open a sealed portal.

How to find a long-lost brother.

I could be a twin again.

*   *   *

Basic Fae magic is simple, or at least it has always been so for me. I focused on
a command—fetch, grow, squeeze, whatever—and then somehow that action verb became
more than a word as my wish melded itself onto the ball of Fae magic resting in my
gut. When I released my magic and told it to fetch, it was as if there were a layer
of my will or essence thinly spread over the line of magic spinning from my fingertips.
Safe to say, I extruded my magic. But going to Threall required the reverse action.
First off there was no word for soul separation, and instead of unleashing my magic
outward, I was asking it to turn inward—implode versus explode.

I breathed out, and in, short little breaths, and then I took one last huge breath,
and visualized it sinking down to my lungs, and then going beyond that, right down
to my stomach, where it surrounded my ball of magic and squeezed.
Take me up to Threall.
A flare of heat in my belly.
Let my soul fly free.
A quick stretch of my skin as my Were backed away from whatever she saw going on
down there.

Up,
I thought, imagining flight.
Up.

Oh … I hurt. Like someone was pulling my head, and toes, and my ribs were starting
to crack, my ligaments starting to tear. My breath came out in short little pants.
Lexi. Lou. Up to Threall.
“Push,” I said, through my teeth. My voice turned into a whine of pain, high through
my nose. More squeezing, and then, the beginning of the rip.

There was a resistance, a grounding, tied to a piece of me that didn’t believe I could
do it.

Oh Goddess.

A slow laceration—like being caught in the ragged claws of a sluggish contraction—impossible
to stand. I sucked in some air, and pushed. One last horrific sharp rending, and then …
No sound. No scents. No sensation of pain.

Overwhelming terror.

I had no body. I was nothing but a mind … a soul … a thing.

A
floating
thing.

No weight of Merry around my neck. No Were warm in my belly.

Nothing to anchor me to either realm.

Oh crap
.

Chapter Twelve

Time passed. Not like eons, or days, or even hours. Just time. Long enough for me
to contemplate the awfulness of being neither here nor there. Long enough for me to
understand that minus physical sensation, emotions are blunted and muted—no aching
throat to deepen your hurt, no gooseflesh or hair rising along your neck to amplify
your fear—a concept, versus that marvelous gift of spirit and mind connected. Theoretically,
that should be good, yes? No needless suffering, no squeezing pain in your solar plexus
because you grieved for something you could never get back. And yet, it was worse.
Because with nothing to distract you, sadness lingered and pervaded. You couldn’t
self-medicate by feeding your taste buds ice cream or comfort yourself with the soothing
scent of lavender. Without functioning eyes, you couldn’t observe any other life than
your own interior one.

Nothing to hide behind. Nothing to do but think.

I want to have flesh again. Fingers and hands. Tear ducts and snot.

And then, another stretching feeling, and a swelter of crushing physicality—skeleton
and skin being sewn together, blood vessels and organs being added to the mixture …
too much, too fast, the sudden heat of my blood, the grave weight of my flesh, the
unyielding construct of my bones … I’d have screamed but I hadn’t earned my mouth …
a little more agony as details were added—pores and hair, teeth and lips … and then,
finally,
oh bless you, Goddess, bless you
. My body was returned to me. I had a heart. It was beating too fast. I was facedown—my
least favorite position—boobs uncomfortably flattened, but beneath my knees and hips
I felt solid ground. Gratitude and quick promises welled up.
I swear I’ll never curse my big butt again. I’ll be thankful for everything I have
from the swell of my upper lip to the dimples at the bottom of my spine.

I cracked open my eyes. My hand lay in a patch of sunlight on a small hummock of moss.
It was so good to have a hand again. I spread my fingers and watched the tendons flex
as my thumb pulled away from my splayed fingers. What a marvel of engineering and
beauty was the semimortal hand. I turned it sideways, examining my paw. It looked
pretty much like it did in earth’s realm, small and on the pale side. Except, my skin
felt different here. Thinner, more delicate. It tingled.

It was the magic-tainted air. I could smell it, sweet as freesias. I’d caught that
fragrance once before—the night a Were had leaped through Creemore’s portal—and had
always remembered it as a double whammy: not only a scent, but a skin-humming physical
reaction. Perhaps I’d remembered it wrong? Overemphasized its allure in my memory?
The sensation I felt now was milder, its impact reduced just to a mild tingle that
my body was already starting to ignore.

I sifted the air through my nose, testing for other scents beneath that sweet floral
Fae fragrance, but there were none. Threall smelled like … flowers, damp mist, woods,
moss … and nothing else. No humans. No Weres. No living creatures, big or small. And
yet, I sensed living things all around me, even if I couldn’t see them—the instinct
sharp enough to bring me up onto my knees. I looked around the empty clearing.

I’d materialized in a open space roughly the size and shape of one of Deerfield’s
hockey rinks—about two hundred feet long, and less than half as wide. My lips curved
into a smile. Mum had been right in one respect: Threall
was
a land of mists, but in this realm, the haze was predominantly bluish, not white,
and it didn’t hover like a heavy layer of fog, it moved in streams. I watched a ribbon
of blue haze drift across the glade before it ran a sinuous finger of smoke up over
the sharp tangle of an overgrown hedgerow. My eyes followed—

Sweet Fae Stars.
I sank down onto my heels in wonder.
The lights.

The sky was full of them. Soft hazy balls of gold light—some sun-yellow, some as tepid
as weak green tea, others defiantly peach toned, and a few, a blushing primrose. There
were other colors too; shades of green-mottled blue, a pinch of pink, and even some
that were decidedly earth toned, their faint amber glow almost lost beneath the soft
blue smoke of Threall’s mist. Oh, even more lovely—in the far distance, just where
fog-wreathed land met horizon, a handful of counterfeit blue moons twinkled. I wanted
to pluck those blue orbs from the sky and pocket them like jewels.

My connection to this landscape was immediate.
This belongs to me
.
Each and every light.

I watched their glow for a while, my fingers curling into fists, wanting to reach
and touch. The sight of them roused an instinctive sense of destiny.
Mine.
There were no attached wires or electrical lines to explain their luminosity. The
perfectly round balls—all of them roughly the same size, with skins as translucent
as vellum—either hung from a branch by a strand of the same stuff covering their surface,
or were jammed into the fork of a fantastically old tree.

Those trees.
Even without their glowing lamps, the ancient specimens were the stuff of fantasy.
What mortal had ever seen anything the size of these old elms? Their trunks were wide
enough to drive a Hummer through and still have room to spare. There had to be hundreds
of them. The vista of lights stretched for miles.

Mum was so wrong. This is where I belong
.
Watching over these soft hazy balls
.

I took stock of my new empire. If the clearing was about the size of a small ice rink,
then I’d say I was near the boards at the center line—at approximately the midpoint
on one of the longer sides of the rectangular open space. When I glanced right, to
the goalie area one hundred feet away, I got a quick impression of two enormous black
walnut trees sitting in the shadows. I then turned to the left. That end of the clearing
was better lit, and a great deal less green. A near vertical wall of sheer rock soared
fifty feet into the sky. Above its cliff, the sky was purple-black.

Interesting. I returned my attention to the mossy meadow that surrounded me.

Someone had taken care to add a sense of symmetry to the field by planting two long
rows of hawthorns, one on either side of the clearing. Back in the day, they may have
been nice hedges, but now they were just a thick border of shrubs that had been allowed
to grow into a dense line of ground-sweeping short scraggly trees. They were overgrown,
but they still did their job of holding back the trees attempting to encroach on each
side. They too were inner-lit, though their illuminations came from deep within the
thicket, and were not as colorful nor as varied as the ones in the dark sky, and definitely
not as accessible, thanks to the sharp thorns of the hawthorns. Their glows were golden
toned, but—and this distinguished them from all the other balls I’d seen—their surface
had been treated to a wash of red. The overall effect was watchful and brooding.

On the heels of that thought, a curl of blue mist emerged from the small gap in the
row of shrubs. It wafted along the hedges’ tangled top, skimming the curved thorns,
until it found a clump of red berries. Then, with a pirouette, it disappeared deep
into the cluster. Less than two seconds later, it emerged in another spiral of now
mauve vapor, before it streaked down where the two enormous black walnuts—one nothing
more than a wind-nibbled, dying husk and the other, a robust living duplicate of it—held
court.

The stream of colored smoke vanished inside the healthier walnut’s dense foliage.

Even as I told myself to relax, I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise. That
tree gave me the willies. How could a bunch of leaves and twigs arouse the fight-or-flight
response? Yes, it
was
the biggest, baddest walnut tree I’d ever beheld—sky-tipping, with heavily foliaged
branches stretching out perhaps sixty feet wide. And it
was
decidedly ugly; misshapen bulbous growth erupted from the knotholes on its thick
trunk. Not only that, its light set it apart from the other specimens in the forest.
It was purple—not violet, or velvet pansy hued, but a deep eggplant with a throbbing
blob of red in the middle of it. That freaking globe didn’t just glow, it glowered.