Page 6

Chapter six

A Deceptive Goodbye

I t was cold and dark and the two Fae I’d come here with had lost their patience for my fear of shadowstepping. So before I was even finished arguing for the path up the mountain, Lark grabbed my hand and the world squeezed in around me. Reeling and choking, I collapsed into the snow at the top, hands splayed out before me as I fought to catch my breath.

“Bastard,” I spat, which only earned me a chuckle from Rook.

I rose to my feet again, knees wobbling, and brushed the snow from my coat, my legs, grateful for the thick turtleneck that Rook had supplied when some of the powdery substance stuck to my neck where it melted against the warm skin there and dripped down onto my high collar.

“We’re alone,” Lark said, keen eyes searching the deserted camp.

I looked up from my task and did the same.

“I told you I could do it,” I muttered.

I lifted a boot and set it down in the deep snow, then another. It was much harder to walk now with the freshly fallen snow but I was too stubborn to ask for help so I took my time reaching the camp itself instead. Then I moved to the machinery and instruments that Wyn had left on for our use should we need them. I checked the gauges, walking among them in examination.

“Whatever those are,” Lark began, “we don’t need them.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but snapped it shut a moment later as I watched him peel off his coat. Beneath that elegantly embroidered black tunic, he wore a black button-up shirt, the top button undone, the skin of his chiseled chest peeking through. He took his time, methodically rolling up his sleeves so that his muscled arms were on display as he gazed up at the rift, face contorted into an expression of purpose.

“It’s not polite to stare,” a voice muttered beside my right ear.

I jumped and turned to find Rook standing beside me. Scowling at him, I whirled around to check another instrument but found it had been unplugged when the hulking Fae brute at my side had trodden over the cord. I sighed, placing my hands on my hips, and turned back around to face him.

“Don’t you have better things to do?” I snapped. “Like maybe help him?”

“He doesn’t need my help,” Rook replied with a shrug. “And besides, he told me to look after you instead.”

“Look after me? Why would you need to—”

But a horrible groaning sound interrupted me. At first, it sounded mechanical, like an engine grinding to a screeching halt. But there was something deeper to it, something more sinister, more alive. I felt a chill in my very bones at that sound but watched, frozen in my tracks, as Lark raised both hands, and then pulled them together as though it took everything in him to do so.

The rift above came careening to a halt, crying out its dissent as it did. Then it reversed directions. For a moment, the surrounding air seemed to be sucked in. Then it froze again and there was no movement at all, just a huge blot of inky blackness pigmented against a brilliant night sky. Lark dropped his hands, letting them hang at his sides. He tossed his head back, his eyelids fluttering shut. And that darkness, it leeched from the sky, slithering downward in wispy tendrils of smoke, first toward Lark and then into him.

Gasping, I stepped forward but was stopped from going any further by Rook’s warning hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t,” he said.

I glanced at him once to find his lips set in a firm, grim line. It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a warning and one that he intended to enforce should I decide to disobey him. He took his orders to look after me quite seriously indeed.

I turned back to Lark. He was shaking now, his arms and legs twitching as if his body was fighting the rift, the darkness he was absorbing. His jaw clenched, his throat bobbed, but his eyes remained closed. He did not cry out even when it pulled him from his feet, lifting him a few inches off of the ground, levitating him above the powdery drifts of snow. That inky black clung to him, enveloping him, suffocating him. But underneath it all a purple glow emerged and began pulsating brighter and brighter until it shot from him in a blinding beam of light. I gasped, raising an arm to shield my eyes, as Lark dropped back to the ground, steadying himself. I blinked away the silhouette of that light and opened my eyes to find that the rift was simply… gone.

I ran forward before I could stop myself and, this time, Rook made no move to stop me. I reached Lark a moment later and, thanks to my snow-induced clumsiness, barreled into him much harder than I had intended. But he didn’t fall. He merely caught me by the shoulders and helped me to my feet.

“You did it,” I gasped, gaping up at him in awe. “I can’t believe you did it.”

“Your confidence in me knows no bounds,” he drawled sarcastically.

But I couldn’t stop smiling. This was it. This was the solution. He was the solution. For all of our equipment, all of our studies, we had never closed a rift as efficiently as this single Fae male had. I knew I had promised to take him home, to get him back to his plane, but maybe I could convince him to stay a little longer. Maybe I could convince him to shadowstep to the other rifts, to heal them all. Maybe…

A slow clapping sound from somewhere nearby interrupted my thoughts. I whirled around to find Wyn emerging from the brush, a smug grin on his lips, surrounded by a dozen soldiers who all emerged at the same time, their guns trained on us, though I noticed the barrels were shaking even worse than they had been when facing the minotaur.

“Wyn?” I asked, stunned. “What are you doing?”

Rook was by our side in an instant. Lark stepped protectively in front of me, shielding me.

“I have to hand it to you, Ren. I didn’t think you could actually do it,” Wyn spoke differently now. His voice was not the same stuttering, uncertain whimper. Now, it was oozing arrogance and that grin, I wanted to slap it right off of his face. “My superiors were right. Never trust a Half-Fae.”

My world came crashing to a screeching halt. Half-Fae. He knew. He knew what I was. He knew what existed out there beyond the bounds of our reality. And if what he was saying was true, so did his superiors. I stopped breathing. For how long had the leaders of our country, the elite of the world, known about the existence of magic, of these supremely powerful beings, and kept it from the masses? And how long had they suspected I was one?

“They knew you’d have friends on the other side,” he boasted now, his former tone of academic congeniality entirely gone, replaced by something unflinchingly wicked. “They merely waited for a situation desperate enough for you to call them. And now that they’re here, they won’t be leaving anytime soon.”

My face burned with anger and shame as a feeling of foolish stupidity washed over me.

Sixty years. I had lived at Hadley University for sixty years and I still looked like a student. I taught classes, I interacted with pupils, I attended faculty meetings and required training. I hid when the more distinguished visitors came, of course. And I lied about who I really was from time to time, donned disguises when someone I had met before came back decades later.

I should have left. I should have started a new life somewhere far away, created a new identity for myself. But I hadn’t. Because I was weak. Because I had people in my life that I cared about, connections and relationships that I didn’t want to leave behind. And because I knew my uncle would never live as long as me and I didn’t want to miss even a moment of his fleeting mortal life.

“I hate the DAA,” I muttered.

“Men,” Wyn barked and the soldiers strode forward, guns still trained on the two Fae.

Slowly, tentatively, they raised their hands. Gawking, I did the same.

They had to have a plan. They had to. Lark could summon whatever he wished into existence, could swallow up enormous rifts in the fabric of space and time. Rook could turn invisible. They could shadowstep and whatever else I wasn’t even aware of. Surely, they wouldn’t allow themselves to be taken by DAA soldiers, by the man who couldn’t even defeat a minotaur without the help of a hapless professor and a cache of C4.

“How did you know?” I called out because keeping Wyn talking felt better than doing nothing and, if they had a plan, they might need time to make it work. I could give them that, at least.

“You trust too easily, Professor Belling. I always warned you about that.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. Someone had told him. Someone had told the people above them. Someone I trusted. Someone I knew.

“Who?” I growled.

“Where’s the fun in that? How about you convince your little friends to surrender to us and I’ll tell you everything you want to know.”

I had no intention of doing that but I had to keep Wyn talking. I had to stall him for as long as I could.

“Where would you take them?” I asked, pretending not to notice the way Rook glanced my way, the way Lark’s fist clenched at my side.

Wyn grinned as if he had won. I wasn’t so sure he hadn’t. The Fae behind me had barely moved. Any hope I held that they were formulating a plan was fading fast.

“Back to headquarters,” Wyn answered as if it was the stupidest question in the world. Perhaps it was. But, if he would not tell me anything about who ratted me out, I was running out of subjects to broach with this traitor. “So that they can tell us more about these rifts they seem to have no trouble getting rid of.”

“More? What more do you need to know? They’re rifts, natural phenomena.”

“Please don’t insult my intelligence, Professor.”

I blinked at him. He couldn’t be insinuating that these rifts, these holes in the barrier between our worlds, were being created on purpose. It was a wild enough theory when my uncle had proposed it but my uncle was a dreamy academic. This was the DAA.

“What we are certain of,” Wyn continued, “is that they know more than they’re saying.”

My lips parted slightly.

“Men,” Wyn barked again and the soldiers lurched forward and then suddenly, so suddenly, fell to the ground, their throats all split open, gurgling and choking on their own blood.

I let out a scream as my eyes darted from the dying men to the bloody knife in Rook’s hand, his hair gently flowing in the breeze he must have created with how fast he had moved. My eyes bulged from my head as I stared at him.

But then something else drew my attention. A familiar sound that caused dread to pool in the pit of my stomach. A low groan, a sinister whirring. I turned to find Lark standing nearby, his hand outstretched. From it poured the darkness.

Wyn screamed something and his men backed away. He backed away, running again.

“Lark,” I screamed over the groaning. “Please, don’t do this. Don’t bring it back.”

But it was already forming. Not in the sky, but in front of us. A flat plane of black swirling and contorting into a familiar shape. Realization hit me hard, like a punch in the gut, as I stared at the dark shape. A door.

Oh.

I understood just a moment before Rook was stepping through and I hadn’t gotten the chance to say goodbye. I scrambled forward, stumbling in the snow, as Wyn commanded his men to aim, to stop the Fae. I hardly heard him as I reached Lark, gripping him by the sleeve and staring up into those dark, churning eyes.

“Thank you,” I whispered, a tear freezing on my cheek.

He raised his hand in a caress against my face, running the warm, calloused pad of his thumb across the tear. It melted away. He cocked his head to the side, that penetrating gaze still firmly on my face.

“Goodbye,” I told him softly.

He didn’t say a word, just turned and stepped toward the darkness.

I turned away from him, not wanting to see the moment he disappeared, already preparing myself to be captured and questioned by the DAA. I would tell them everything now. It couldn’t hurt for them to know about Lark’s banishment or that he and his friend hadn’t told me anything at all about their plane, about the deal I’d made with them to ensure the safety of the mortal realm. They couldn’t fault me for that. They would question me about my parentage, about the other half of my ancestry, but they would find that I knew even less than they did.

Perhaps capture was my fate. Perhaps this was always how it was going to end for me. I had been a fool for believing that I could live in the mortal realm forever, could work with the government and the academic institutions without the longevity of my life ever being discovered, ever being questioned. So if this was my fate, I would meet it with my chin held high, knowing that I had closed at least a few of these rifts, had helped my people significantly, before they caught me.

But before I could say anything, before I could call out to Wyn and tell him not to shoot, someone grabbed me by the elbow and jerked me forcefully backwards.

I only had time to gasp before I fell into that swirling vortex and darkness swallowed me whole.