Page 27 of Faerie Fate (Fae Academy for Halflings #7)

Chapter Eighteen

P oppy had transformed her spell room for the ritual.

She’d expanded the circle underneath the cauldron to encompass the entirety of the room. The lines were clean and white and shot through with something gritty. Salt?

The circle didn’t scuff when I failed to lift my foot fully over the line. She’d anchored it in place against whatever the hell she’d find when she started rooting around inside of me, struggling to pull out the long-buried pieces.

“Hang tight. I’m almost done.”

Bronwen and Mike lingered in the doorway and watched Poppy’s practiced movements. She bounced from one end of the room to the other and when she turned, jars and bundles of odd-looking plants filled her arms.

She set them beside the cauldron. Every time I inched toward the door, she jerked, meeting my gaze, pinning me in place. After several tense minutes, she swung her arm toward the center of the circle and the two purple cushions there, waiting for us to use.

“We’ll be right out here waiting for you.” I caught a flash of Mike’s drawn features before the door swung shut. Trapping me inside and the others out.

I forced my leaden legs to carry me to the center of the circle and I sat, lowering myself to the cushion. I gasped as the ingredients and strings of crystals all lifted into the air overhead.

Mike was right. Our magical education had been interrupted to the point where I felt woefully behind on things I should have known. Things to shield, to protect…

Witches and fae may not differ much from each other, but the gap in my knowledge put them into two different worlds.

Why did I need to know about potions for luck or increased strength when I should have been learning about potions to hide me from my enemies?

I recognized some of the ingredients hovering above us, the lemonberry and wild rosemary. The night milkbalm. All those things Livvy and I gathered fresh when we attempted to do the spell. Poppy must have really studied the journal.

“Well?” She cleared her throat. “Are you going to do your part in this or not?”

“I’m here, aren’t I?” I hadn’t meant to sound so snarky. Nerves, I told myself. Nerves gave us all a different, harsher voice.

We glared at each other. Finally, Poppy settled across from me and with a thought, she cast the magic, the lines of the circle glowing.

“This will keep us grounded and safe while we work,” she explained. “You ready?”

“Don’t we have to?—”

“What? Go through the motions? The mumbo jumbo preparations? Amateurs do those things.”

With a scoff, she reached out for my hands and began without a countdown. My chest clenched, heart going a thousand miles an hour. The silence was an awful din throbbing through me, pulsating my eardrums and settling in my bones.

Livvy once said the ingredients would ensure the potency of the spell, but it hadn’t worked. The spell hadn’t done anything except erase the wild excitement in her eyes when everything failed.

I wasn’t ready then. I still wasn’t ready, not at all, but I’d backed myself into a corner where choice didn’t exist.

Whatever destiny Faerie had for me, I was about to find out, and there was no going back.

Poppy’s power rushed out of her and slammed into me, stealing the air from my lungs and taking me along for a terrible ride.

The magic she would unlock might be mine, but right now there was only her.

Only Poppy and the way she stiffened, her spine straight as the room darkened around us, plunged into an unnatural night until even the flames underneath the cauldron glowed ebony.

The stench of burning herbs stung the inside of my nostrils.

I heard the words written in the journal inside my head.

Poppy had no need to speak them out loud.

The ancient language echoed in the sharp corners of my brain, an unnatural breeze tickling the curly soft hair at my temples.

The foreign words of the spell lifted the hair on the back of my arms yet again.

Poppy’s eyes went pure white. Electricity zapped through me and I yelped, pulling back my hands, but her hold was unbreakable. Rather than finishing with the words, they began again, a ghoulish repeat.

Darkness built in the room and pressed in on me. Stealing my vision away and turning everything to the same nightmarish black.

Already, this was different. Deeper than I’d imagined. Rather than unlocking the hidden doors, it felt like pieces were stolen from the exact places where I needed them most. I tried again to tug my hands away from Poppy’s but she held firm.

The circle kept us muffled. The grunts I managed reverberated back to me, heard as if through a veil of cotton.

Help me .

Even if I’d gotten the plea out, even if I’d manage to scream it at the top of my lungs, no one would hear me.

Poppy’s fingers were like iron, crushing and grinding my bones to dust. In the middle of the darkness, growing closer with every heartbeat, there were only those terrible white eyes.

The only thing I saw. The only spot of brightness left in this world. Wind whipped my hair into a halo above my head.

This was a mistake. I never should have gone along with it. Never should have believed Livvy and her insistence that I needed the witch powers in my genetics unlocked. I gave one last tug to free myself from Poppy before the floor suddenly opened up underneath me.

I was falling, tumbling through the darkness, but not backward. Falling forward—into Poppy’s eyes and dissolving into those white pools.

My physical body filled with a sickening heat before that soon detached as well. I dropped into the abyss that quickly shifted to a blinding white as I fell inside the witch’s eyes.

I landed with an oomph in a chair at a table. The wooden legs rocked underneath me. Jolted and shaking, it felt like I’d left my form behind even though I saw myself as solidly as anything else.

The walls of the room were water, moving up toward the roofline. Great turquoise droplets moved together and disappeared into the ceiling overhead. I glanced around, taking in the space no larger than a typical bedroom.

A few inches of water trickled across the floor, with the level growing quickly. When I first landed, it was at my ankles. Now it was creeping up toward my shins.

Poppy landed across from me and grabbed the edge of the table to steady herself, her hair disheveled and her eyes looking just as confused as I felt.

Our gazes met. “Oh, shit.” Her lips thinned into a tense line.

“Please don’t say oh shit,” I blurted out.

“We’ve fallen into a prophecy. The same way I received the one about the shifters.” She erupted out of the chair and walked to the wall with her hands on her hips, studying the water.

“You mean the Faerie Prophecy,” I corrected automatically. My hollow voice reverberated back to me.

The water pushed at me with cooling waves, now up to my knees. It seeped into my clothes, my skin, eager and hungry to consume everything in the room.

“We need to get out of here,” Poppy called. “We can die in a prophecy as well as in life.”

“Wha— Are you kidding?”

The pulsing water made it difficult for her to move. She turned and trudged back toward me, the effort causing a vein to pulse on the side of her head. “Do I look like I’m kidding to you?”

Together, we splashed to a door, the only thing not covered in water, and Poppy pulled on the handle. It stayed locked and immovable. The play of light on water, from a source I didn’t see, cast shadows on the brass knob. White paint cracked along the splits in the panels.

Grinding her teeth, Poppy threw her powers at it, the wood heaving and groaning until the space between it and the water widened.

Unfortunately, as I should have expected, a torrent of water raced inside the room and knocked my legs out from under me. The wave carried me under, rolling me, filling my nostrils in an attempt to invade my lungs.

A memory flashed: a trip to the beach with Uncle Will.

I’d been about five years old and eager to play in the waves.

I’d turned my back on the ocean, something I wasn’t supposed to do.

The foamy whiteness broke over my head and pushed me face first to the sand, beating against my spine to keep me there.

Now, I couldn’t stand under the weight of the water, bearing down harder, stronger, and I was losing air. My arms flailed, searching for purchase, and my knees cracked against the floor, the wave tumbling me in useless circles.

Then Poppy yanked me out. She held me by my hair, the strands clenched in her spidery fingers. Her wide eyes searched my face as I sputtered and coughed up a mouthful of water in her face.

Her hand slipped from my hair to my back and she pounded the last few droplets out of me.

“I shouldn’t have to warn you not to drown.”

I blinked, my eyes burning, but the water was fresh rather than salty. “I’m trying my best.”

She scoffed. “Your best is pretty pitiful. Now, please? Come on,” she grunted.

She jerked her head to the door. I lost my footing immediately and my knees buckled, but I kept myself upright. I refused to die in this prophecy, whatever it meant, whatever Poppy’s visions of the future were trying to tell her with this horrible house of death.

She kept her fingers fisted in my shirt, practically dragging me out, and pushed through the door before we were finally able to leave.

The whole world outside was under water.

My eyes burned as I scrubbed them with my knuckles. “What kind of prophecy is this?” I managed.

“The kind that will only get worse if we can’t manage to navigate it effectively.” Poppy glanced left, right, up.

Here, she looked years older than the witch I sat across from in the real world. Creases lined her lips and forehead as though the burden of seeing aged her.

Not helpful.

We braced ourselves against the current and pressed on, along a short path leading away from the house of water. The tide rose with us until the water reached my hip bones and froze me. A glance behind showed the house, the water rising up into the sky along the curves of its roof and eaves.

Everything became a blur. Looking around, the sickness I’d felt before returned a hundredfold and I doubled over, coughing up more water than I’d inhaled.

The house stood alone in a field of froth. Detritus marked the edges of the foundation and the tree at the front spit of path twisted in a sharp breeze.

The water kept rushing, but outside the property there was nothing but gloom.

Poppy gasped and grabbed my hands. “Hold on.”

She linked us together and unbidden, against my will, images came. Unable to be stopped. My eyes closed, but painted on the inside of my eyelids were several different scenes flashing one right after the other.

Dry peaks of sand larger than a mountain washed away under a blinding drive of torrential rains. Individual grains scattered wildly and those that weren’t gobbled by the water whipped into a driving frenzy and made the invisible wind a physical presence.

Mudslides buried waterways in rich brown muck that sucked at the banks and dissolved them, taking the trunks of old-growth trees with them in such a destructive force I knew nothing could stand against it.

A swirling cyclone the size of the Chrysler Building razed a village and cut through the main road. It took houses with it with such ease they might as well have been made of matchsticks. Roofs collapsed and brick and stone were tossed as if in a child’s tantrum.

There was a palace crafted with grains of sand rising into coral-colored skies. The golden hour. Sunlight off the sand lit the world in rainbow hues and the windows of the palace were like empty eyes staring out from the walls. It toppled, too. Delicate and fragile and erased.

Then I was back in the water beside Poppy, now up to my ribs.

Her eyes were pure white again and her fingers manacles around my wrists.

I didn’t expect her to drop, to fall and sink beneath the water, dragging me with her. She simply collapsed. Terror was bright and sharp and tasted like salt. I pulled my arm hard enough to dislocate my shoulder and still there was no getting free.

My muscles ached, lungs struggling from the tiniest sip of air I’d managed before we sank under the waves. Going down further. Faster. Swirling through terrible currents.

It was the second occasion where I almost drowned, and this time I knew I wasn’t going to be saved by Faerie. I was going to die in this prophecy, taking Poppy with me.