Page 45 of Faerie Fate (Fae Academy for Halflings #7)

Chapter Thirty

H elplessness capsized my heart and I sank in on myself.

Then, in a surprising rush, a different and darker emotion took its place. Wrath came in hot and heavy, leaving me spectacularly pissed, violent energy crackling around me.

My hair stood on end and red crept over my vision.

“You absolute dick !”

The curse spewed out as I curved up, using those abdominal muscles I never knew I had, to grab the fae holding my ankle. I squeezed his wrist, another bone-crushing movement.

The other time had been practice. This time I knew just where to squeeze.

“Arrgh!” The fae released me.

I fell onto my side and rolled up an instant later. Before the fae had time to recover, before he did more than clench his crushed wrist to his chest, I rushed him.

He hadn’t expected me to fight back. Hadn’t expected much of anything out of me, really. His shouts of fear were muffled and disappeared as I heaved myself onto him, ignoring the heated burn of the nearby fire. I pummeled him, my heart thumping an erratic beat in my ears.

The last morsana flower was gone. My curse would destroy me the second I returned to my own time. All this struggle and effort and death… What did it amount to? Nothing .

I bared my teeth and slammed my palms into him, my magic adding extra oomph to every hit as I beat the fae to a lump of flesh.

I was stuck in this hell on earth with the people I loved at the mercy of monsters. I was forced to watch the pixies die, and even the scream smoldering my lungs to a crisp wasn’t enough to make me feel better.

The fae went down, his eyes rolling into his head before unconsciousness stole him from me too soon. I straightened, dragging in a breath with my fingers clenching and unclenching. The stench of blood branded itself on the inside of my nostrils.

A pixie whizzed past me fast enough to ruffle my hair. “Retreat! Retreat!”

A furious unsettling took me off balance. “What’s happening?”

Mike skidded to a halt at my side, glancing at the unconscious soldier at my feet. “No. This isn’t how the fight happened.”

Nausea turned my stomach. “What?”

“The pixies are calling for a retreat, falling deeper into the palace. But…the first battle of EverRose was soundly won by the pixies because they still had their morsana weapons. They had no reason to retreat.”

The pressure in my chest deepened as Mike pulled me off my feet and found a way back toward Poppy and Elfhame.

One dead because of me. Another passed out from the walloping I just gave him.

Indignation and anger could only disguise the truth for so long: The sudden turning of the battle was my fault.

I knew it instinctively. Something I’d done shifted things out of the pixies’ favor and into the faes’.

“We’re not supposed to help because of changing the past, I get that,” I told Mike. “But what if something we’ve already done has changed the past? What then?”

Guilt swarmed me. Not we. Me .

“If the pixies were meant to win, then they have to win .” Mike’s attention splintered off toward the path of the retreating pixies. “Now we’ve got to help them get it back on track.”

It wasn’t just my urge to fight and spill some blood that won out in the end.

It was the worry for what it might mean for Mike in the future.

The fear of what might happen to the people I cared about who were waiting for us to come home.

They had no idea what was happening, no idea that the past was changing and the tide at EverRose reversed.

What if, with a little prompting, we could get this back on track? I was screwed, but there was no reason for anyone else to go down with me.

“We’ll fight, then. We’ll help the pixies. Mike.”

I’d do anything for him. Anything in my power.

He turned when I said his name and gripped my forearms, pausing in the middle of the raging retreat to stare at me for a single moment longer. My heartbeat stuttered at the expression, the love and the longing and the worry.

“Sure. Yes. I mean, let’s try. We have to try.” He understood the implications better than anyone else, given his upbringing. “What do you need from me?” he asked.

“See what you can do to keep the fae from advancing.” I said it like I wasn’t asking for the impossible. “I have to go find your grandmother. I think—I know if I can unlock my witch powers then I can make sure the pixies win.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

I lied without hesitation, and bolted before Mike could ask me to explain myself. It felt so strange to consider his grandmother here as a young woman, but the time had come for us and there was no more escaping. No more pushing it aside for more opportune moments.

We had to pivot to a new plan. Plan B. Which somehow happened to be the same as Plan A all along. Fight like hell and make the fae pay.

Mike and I split in different directions. I knew it without having to look back at him. We’d somehow gotten on the same path again, where we understood without speaking what the other needed.

Poppy wasn’t hard to find. She stood in the middle of the fighting, her arms lifted and her spellwork glowing faint silver in the face of so much gold. Her witch powers slammed into several of the approaching faes going after the pixies.

If her power wasn’t a dead giveaway, her laughter was.

“Poppy!”

Cutting a path to the witch wasn’t easy. I struggled to get to her, punching one of the fae in the face hard enough to send his helmet skittering off his face.

“The war is shifting. The pixies are losing, and that isn’t supposed to happen,” I yelled. “We have to do something.”

Poppy grabbed my hand. “We have to unlock your powers. Now.”

I nodded, my heartbeat taking a rapid dive into slowness, my head going light. “Glad we understand each other.” It felt like whatever vision of hers I’d sunk into, whatever bond we’d created, made it easier to sense these things and each other.

The pixies continued their retreat and Poppy and I left the foyer, dodging through more fighting. She led the way like she knew the intricacies of the palace without a map.

The sounds of the battle slowly filtered away the farther we walked. A second staircase curved down from the first floor into the basement, deeper underneath the stony foundations.

Soon, the stench of burning flowers lessened. All those acres of beauty now lost. It broke something inside of me even as Poppy kept us moving down.

“We should be undisturbed here,” she said. “If the place is still intact. Why shouldn’t it be? The fae wouldn’t know to point a blast here.”

I wanted to go home. I wanted all of this to be behind me, to the point where even the thought of unlocking my witch powers wasn’t as terrifying as it used to be. Numbness took up space inside me where reservation used to be.

If I didn’t do this, Mike would be gone.

Then Poppy dragged me around a corner and the light disappeared. We went down another flight of stairs. But she seemed to have a destination in mind and I didn’t push or press. My tongue knotted itself and I let it stay that way. If we were doing this, then I had to trust Poppy.

Finally we came out at the bottom of the stairs and into a hallway. She marched at my side with her grip firm, refusing to let go of me even when the hallway ended in a set of double doors. A massive lock kept them firmly together.

“Watch for shrapnel, girl, in case this goes south.”

She said the warning seconds before holding her hands up and sending a blast of magic at the doors. The hinges rocked, then the lock fell away. It clanked against stone before stilling.

The doors swung open to the shadows behind and the hush turned reverent with each step we took over the threshold.

“What is this?” My voice didn’t reverberate back to me even though the ceiling was high enough for me to lose sight of the beams.

“A ritual room,” Poppy said briskly.

“How did you know it was here?”

“I’m a slave. It’s my job to know everything political. My master makes sure I do. I know the riches of every ritual room in the kingdom.”

Until that moment, I’d never considered her a slave slave. But it was true. She did have a master who controlled her movements and told her where to go, what to do. Who to kill.

Poppy strode confidently toward the far wall and tossed open the glossy panes of a storage cabinet. The offer to help died on my tongue and I watched her, caught in now-familiar helplessness.

Finally, unable to stop the frantic pace of my heart, I joined Poppy at the storage cabinets and marked her frantic supply run. She turned to me with her arms filled with bottles then hustled to unload them at the center of the sacred space.

“We don’t have the journal. I don’t remember the spell.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “I know what we need.”

She stopped suddenly, her fingers brushing against the side of a glass jar with floating bits of black suspended in liquid. Her eyes narrowed.

“You seem unsure.” My voice trembled.

“The details of my memory are a bit blurry. Ugh.” Poppy shook her head to dismiss those hesitations. “I’m not sure.”

Panic erupted. “Do you know or don’t you know? It’s kind of important.”

Our eyes met and latched, and in hers I saw the struggle. How she desperately wanted to believe her memory but couldn’t be exactly sure.

Her chin lifted decisively. “I’ve got this. Go sit inside the circle and center yourself. I’ll be there momentarily.”

I sat cross-legged on the ground with my palms resting on my knees and every part of me strung tight, pulled in opposite directions.

Glass tinkled against glass, followed by a muffled grunt. Poppy dumped several more wet ingredients and a slew of dried herbs at my feet, unceremoniously. Seemed to me like this time, the ingredients mattered even more to ensure the potency of the spell. We were out of time.

Poppy threw a pinch of this and a drop of that into the bowl she’d gathered, mixing with a competent hand. She remained calm under pressure. I tried to take a page out of her book but fell short, because when she finished her mixture, when she reached for my hands to begin, mine were trembling.

Her grin failed to portray her earlier confidence. There was an expression on her face like she was prepared for the absolute worst.

This is it .

Poppy took a deep breath. “Prepare yourself, Tavi. This time we’re not leaving the chamber until your full powers have been unlocked. No matter what happens.”

Her power pushed through me, into me. Drawing us both down and together, around and around, entwining until we were one energy rather than two separate people.

This time, it wasn’t just Poppy and her magic. It was the two of us, and she melted into me. Into my head and my body and my soul.

I heard her words of power, the spell, inside my head as her eyes went pure white. Electricity ground us together better and stronger than those silver bangles around her wrists. The hair on my arms lifted and the hair on my head whipped around in the invisible wind.

I took up the spell refrain inside of me as the darkness in the room built, pressing and familiar. My vision went blank, the world nightmarish and awful, but the sacred circle of this ritual space protected us. From the battle overhead. From ourselves.

Our fingers crushed together until we were both nothing but stardust drifting in an infinite universe. The mingling of our power was intimate and necessary.

Poppy and I fell together. Backwards this time, with the witch tipping forward into me. I sucked in a breath and my physical body not only filled with heat but with substance. Instead of falling into Poppy?—

She fell into me .

We detached from our bodies at the same time, and the blinding white of her eyes replaced the darkness.

This time, the ritual took us inside of me. The impact of the landing sent a shockwave through my body. Poppy skidded to a stop beside me with her arms windmilling to slow her fall.

This was very different from her vision of the water rising in the small house. The intensity of displacement wasn’t as difficult to handle. Or maybe I just had a better clue what to expect.

I touched a hand to the top of my hair. If I looked half as bad as she did, then we were not going to win any prizes.

Poppy snorted when she looked at me. “Don’t think you’re looking as fresh as a daisy either, Tavi.”

The walls of the cave sent her voice echoing back to us from a thousand directions.

The first step Poppy took into the cave transformed it. The walls rose, lightening in color to a healthy green, a hedge reaching up into an interminably gray sky.

“Where are we this time?” I hardly dared to ask it out loud.

The leaves shivered in answer.

“Unless I’m off my rocker, we’re in a maze that represents your magic. Basically, we’ll have to get to the center to figure out what we’re working with.”

And her words left me with the clear picture that it wouldn’t be easy. Not by a long shot.

Poppy might have looked like she was ready to kick ass but she threaded her arm through mine. “Stick close to me.”

I jumped at the first turn we took that brought us to a dead end. Twists and more dead ends sent us doubling back on each other and I braced, waiting for monsters to jump out of the limbs.

There was nothing except the ragged pitch of my breath.

We were alone here. There was no rising water. Only stillness even the wind didn’t dare to break.

The maze was endless and seemingly stretched out into eternity. Poppy insisted we were getting close to the middle, but after what felt like hours of worry, of wandering, it was evident to me that we were going in circles.

“We’re making progress.”

I shook my head. “We’re going to be here forever.” How would we find our way out? “Are you sure we’re?—”

Poppy pulled up short. “Hush.”

Whatever she heard, I hoped she knew what to do with the sound because I sure as hell didn’t.

Fear victimized me in a way I hated. It took the last bits of strength out of my bones and left me with nothing to show for it.

The sky never changed color. There was no sun or moon to mark the passage of time outside of the leaden feeling in my legs. It intensified with every mistake we made, every wrong turn.

Finally the passage opened up and the hedges melted away. Poppy straightened, gasped, and I finally heard it. The dull grumbling roar from ahead.

The black dragon materialized out of nothing, from invisible to solid in a matter of seconds. It curved a scaly neck toward us with glinting ruby eyes and smoke pulsing angrily out of its nostrils. Claws dug into the ground around an iron chest. Bones curved in two horns running down its neck.

“Defeat the dragon,” Poppy said in a reverent whisper, “and you’ll unlock your powers.”

I blanched, color and life leaching out of me. No one said anything about a dragon .