Page 28 of Faerie Fate (Fae Academy for Halflings #7)

Chapter Nineteen

W ater pulsed through my mouth and nostrils, scalding down to the bottom of my lungs. My heart skipped a beat. When it finally roared back to a normal rhythm, I came to with a start.

Instead of water, I gasped out smoky air, the lingering scent marking my chest. The scattered pieces of my brain finally found a way to work together and I shuddered back into my body, remembering where I was.

Back in the circle, with Poppy, both of us soaking wet. My clothes clung to my skin and water pooled around the bottom of the cushions.

Her white eyes glowed, stark against the darkness. The play of shadows on the sharp angles of her face scared me more than I wanted to admit.

“Hey. Hey!” I shook her, her fingers frozen around mine, but she didn’t wake immediately. “Poppy, wake up.”

I pulled at her, hoping the movement would be enough to knock her out of her trance. She rolled with the gesture. Nothing else.

She wouldn’t move, or breathe. Her muscles were as still as her fingers, and if I had to guess, I’d say she was still trapped in the vision.

How much longer would she live? Or had she drowned in the water and her body needed time to catch up?

“I need you here. Okay? Poppy, please .”

Shivering, the water hardening like frost along my skin, I tugged and managed to free one of my hands from her grip. I tapped her on the shoulder. Shook her when she failed to respond.

My teeth clacked together hard. “Come on!”

Maybe she lost herself to the prophecy and for some strange reason I’d managed to get out without her. Terror turned my tongue to stone.

If I’d gotten her killed now… What would it mean for the future?

Barbara played a huge role in everything that happened. To me, to the others. Mike wouldn’t exist. I’d never get the potion I needed to suppress my shifter side and enter the Fae Academy for Halflings. None of it.

“Please wake up.” I shook her again and, taking a chance, slapped her. Flesh on fresh echoed, absorbed by the muffled line of the circle. “Come on! Wake up for me. Don’t die in your own prophecy.”

A long pink print decorated her skin where I made contact. I clamped down on my teeth, too worried to hit her again and mark her opposite cheek. Should I call the others?

Finally, Poppy drew in a giant breath and blinked. The white glow receded, there and gone so fast I might have missed its exit if I weren’t focused. Her normal eye color returned but the hand holding mine trembled.

“Did you…slap me, Tavi?”

“I had to. What the hell was that all about?”

She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she pulled free and took the last bit of my warmth with her before she stumbled over the line and broke the circle. The salt smudged under the rapid sweep of her foot.

Poppy snapped her fingers and the flames brightened further, dancing like sunlight beneath the bottom of her cauldron. The herbs still suspended in midair now plummeted down around us like dead birds shot from the sky.

I felt the same.

“What about unlocking my powers?”

The spell couldn’t have failed twice. Could it? I swallowed over bile.

Poppy ignored my questions. She walked to a cabinet on unsteady legs and drew out a couple of white towels, then sloshed back to me and tossed one my way. Only then did I realize the entire floor of the spell room had flooded.

I jolted back off the edge of the cushion.

She watched me, silently, keeping her secrets. We both understood it as we moved together, drawing off our wet shoes and clothes.

I shivered as I scrubbed the towel through my hair.

Poppy stood with her back toward me and I latched my arms around myself, wearing only my bra and underwear. My eyes widened when she tossed something at me and I moved automatically to catch it.

“A loaner.” Her voice sounded as unsteady as her legs. “Keep it as long as you need.”

I slid my hand down the front of the dress, brushing out wrinkles in the autumn-colored fabric.

The buttons were oak brown, with gold thread stitching them to rich ochre fabric.

The dress smelled like her, the scent of her embedded in the stitching when I drew it over my head.

It wasn’t enough to get me warm. I’d probably never be warm again.

My manners were slow to come and when they finally knocked me upside the head, I grimaced. “Thank you. For the dress.”

Poppy harrumphed something like an acceptance but the muffled sound made it impossible to distinguish.

I wrapped my hair in the towel, watching her totter as she moved to the fire beneath the cauldron and began tossing in the useless herbs. A new belch of smoke erupted every time the bundles disappeared.

“Prophecies aren’t passive,” Poppy suddenly blurted out.

I jolted at the sound of her voice. “Not like most people assume. Mine never have been, anyway. My prophecies are magical. I travel through time, through space, and it can be a harrowing experience if you’re not expecting it.

” She swiped her hand through her hair. “They’re dangerous, too.

It’s the price I have to pay for the information I receive from the universe. ”

I shifted my weight, feeling uncomfortable and almost indecent for spying on Poppy’s prophecy. I’d witnessed firsthand something I had no business seeing.

“Okay,” I said slowly, scrubbing at my temple. “Okay…so what was that one trying to tell you? It was just some awful weather, right? Faerie is going to get some storms?”

That had to be the answer.

“Although cyclones and mudslides and floods aren’t natural in Faerie,” I added.

My skin prickled. It might have been a figment of my imagination, or a consequence of the stubborn headache I’d yet to lose, but I swore I heard a voice in my head. It had no words, none I understood anyway, but it warned me to be wary .

The faintest trace of ash crept into the air.

Storms hadn’t been normal before I got to Faerie, anyway. Then the land fought back because it knew, or at least I thought it knew, that I didn’t belong. Goddess, was Kendrick somehow going to force his way back here and cause all those horrible things to happen?

My bones went brittle and the rest of me was too hot until I wanted to peel off the borrowed dress and shred it.

Poppy waited until I calmed down and met her gaze.

“Think about it, Tavi. Use your head. We were attempting to unlock your powers when we were thrust into the vision. All those things you saw?” She waited a beat and then scowled when I stayed silent.

“It’s what will happen in your time if we succeed. ”

I stared at her, through her, not understanding. “How did you get that from what you saw?” I asked weakly. “Those kinds of things can’t be linked to me and my?—”

“It’s a kind of knowing,” she interrupted. “I see the vision and I witness it with all my senses. I am physically in the reality that comes to pass when the prophecy is given, and my mind knows the rest.”

She was asking me to trust her, to understand her and take what she said as gospel, and I revolted. Every part of me fought against what she claimed.

Poppy held my gaze in a challenge, the obvious victor without having to touch me. She made sure there was enough space so if I wanted to reach out, she’d be a breath away.

Was it intentional?

The heat continued to filter through me, worse than the chill of the water in her vision. It was so much worse because it brought with it the familiar prickling of nausea and I wondered if I was going to spew all over Poppy’s cauldron.

“What are you saying?” My voice shook. “You’re going to have to spell it out for me because for some reason I’m having trouble processing it.”

Everything. I was having trouble with everything .

“If we unlock your powers now, here , in the past, then when you return to your time, your presence will immediately set off a chain of catastrophic events. It will cause mass casualties in the Faerie realm.”

She couldn’t be any plainer.

Floored, I couldn’t break eye contact. I couldn’t force myself to face it, either. I stayed trapped in indecision and panic.

“People will die ?”

I whispered the word and Poppy tried not to react. I saw the minuscule twitch near her eye followed by a glistening that no doubt heralded tears.

“The prophecy tells me that you would be the only one who can stop the consequences of this ritual. So it would be up to you to fix it.”

“Fix what?”

She seemed to be calm now, back in her body although she was spent, her face craggy with restrained emotion. Her fingers lightly clasped in front of her. The shadows in the room ran cold despite the fire.

“It would be perilous,” Poppy said, more to herself. “Fraught with danger, possibly deadly for the people you love. Something you must do, though. There really would be no other choice. It has to be done. I know that much.”

She was giving me a worse migraine with the information she kept to herself, expecting me to read between the lines.

Maybe something about the vision turned my brain into a frozen tundra and I had to wait for the spring thaw. Maybe I wasn’t following because I didn’t really want to follow her.

I worried the inside of my lip, chewing down until the coppery metallic taste of blood coated my tongue. “Faerie herself said we needed to unlock them.”

Had Faerie known about the casualties, though?

I had a really hard time believing the goddess would want me to have these powers if it meant such catastrophic weather and death for her people.

Poppy forced herself to pat me on the top of my head hard enough to jar my teeth. I wasn’t sure if it was comfort or chastisement. “On the bright side, in setting off these events correctly, you’d earn staunch support and precious allies for the upcoming battle.”

White spots flickered in front of me. “Battle? What battle?”

“I have no idea,” she answered with a shrug. “I just know there’s going to be one.”

Damn, my head spun. I’d done my level best to stay out of the line of fire but trouble found me no matter where I turned. Every direction there was something new, something awful, and I held tight to the knowledge that it wasn’t going to stop soon.

My path wasn’t easy. Hell, it was no path at all.

A long exhale hissed between my teeth. “So now we?—”

The rest of my question cut off under a fierce rumble, the ground bucking and throwing me off balance.

The shaking grew in intensity and Poppy reached out to pull me toward her when the floorboards were pushed free of the nails holding them.

“Tavi!” My name echoed from the other side of the door as Mike pounded his fist against it to get inside. “Tavi!”

Poppy and I both went down with the force of the second shockwave.

“It’s an earthquake!” she screamed beside my ear. “We have to get out.”

I lost my breath. Was this a preview? Was this some sort of warning to drive home the repercussions of unlocking my powers?

I inhaled forcefully and choked on a lungful of dust and plaster.

We crawled toward the door and Mike’s frantic pounding as the house reverberated. Debris fell from the ceiling and Poppy yelped, jolted to the side away from me.

Someone called out a warning, but my body, slow to react from the force of the vision, from the echoing word in my head—battle, battle —made it difficult to get out of the way. To do anything other than scream when the falling beam nailed me in the spine.