Page 9

eight

Silence in the kitchen, deep enough that I heard the beating of my own heart, and that dragging sound, too—just my thoughts beating up one another, dragging each other across my skull, trying to make better sense.

Needless to say, it wasn’t working, and it was a bloody mess in there.

“How?” Dad said, and I’d almost forgotten that he was there, sitting next to me. “How would Nilah be able to heal someone like…like you… ”

“A fae, yes,” the man said with a nod.

Fae— just like in the books. The fucking fantasy books that weren’t supposed to be real.

“How can my daughter heal a fae when she’s…she’s not one?” Dad continued.

“Because she’s Lifebound to my nephew, Mr. Dune,” he calmly said. “Before, when they first met, and your daughter was dying—our seer couldn’t really see from what?—”

“Snakebite,” I said, and my own voice took me by surprise.

“I see,” the man said. “Well, when they first met, and your daughter was dying from a snakebite, my nephew created a life-bond between them when he healed her. It’s very complicated magic so I won’t attempt to explain it to you, but those who are bound cannot die by disease or magic while the other lives, and they can be healed from anything—save from a beheading—by their Lifebound. Does that make sense now?”

It does.

My God, it actually made sense.

I shook my head and breathed and blinked.

“But…but how is this possible?” Dad said. “I never…I never really…I…” He couldn’t finish speaking.

I knew what he was thinking—he had never believed me when I told him about the boy and the snakebite.

“All is possible through will and magic,” the man said. “So goes a saying from home. I’ve left my nephew’s side so I could come here personally and speak to you, Nilah. Plead with you to come save him while there is still a little more time left.” The man slowly rose to his feet, and my dad followed. My legs wouldn’t have held me if I’d tried, so I stayed put.

“He saved your life once without hesitation, without asking for a reward. That is my nephew—his heart is carved out of the same gold that makes his eyes.” He nodded deeply. “Now, he is the one in need of you. Will you choose to save him?” The words weighed a hundred pounds each on my shoulders. “Or will you let him die?”

Someone must have pulled the ground from underneath my feet and the chair from under me because I was no longer sitting down. Or standing. Just…floating somewhere in the dark.

Dad spoke—I recognized his voice, though his words couldn’t quite reach me. Light couldn’t get to me, either. This darkness that came over me so suddenly was unforgiving. Fi took my hand in hers, and I felt her skin against mine while the man said something, too.

Echoes in my ears. A tiny bit of light was coming from somewhere—far away, I thought at first, but it wasn’t. It was shining from my own hands instead, right there underneath the skin of my palms. Like my veins, my flesh, my bones were really made out of gold, and that gold was ignited. Ablaze.

Just like the light of the boy who saved my life.

No hesitation.

He didn’t ask for anything in return.

He just healed me, hid me, and left.

The memory of his young, beautiful face stood at the center of my mind and forced the darkness to let go of me. Something inside me moved, something deep that I could feel even if I didn’t know what it was. A voice in my head whispered words I had never heard before, but somehow, I understood their meaning.

It was a calling. I was being called to save the life of the boy who saved mine, and the strangest, most powerful urge to do just that came over me in an instant.

Sound reached me abruptly.

“—expect an answer—this is all so very sudden. My daughter has a life,” Dad was saying, and he and the stranger were still standing face-to-face. The men I assumed were the guards had stepped a bit closer to the table, too.

“So does my nephew. He has a Court to rule, Mr. Dune, and he has been sick for far too long now. There simply isn’t more time,” the stranger insisted.

“Nonsense—if he’s waited this long, he can wait a few more weeks or-or months. You can’t just show up at my door and demand from my daughter?—”

“I am not demanding anything from her—she is Lifebound. Her bond to my nephew demands it!” This the stranger said with a slightly raised voice.

“Nilah, are you okay?”

Fiona was still sitting beside me, my hand between hers, her eyes wide with fear now. Her excitement gone.

“Of course,” I told her. “I’m fine, Fi.” I wasn’t sure if she believed me.

“She didn’t ask for it! My daughter did not ask?—”

“Dad.”

Finally, I convinced my body to move, to stand up. My legs shook but held my weight.

“It’s okay, Dad.”

“No—it’s not okay,” he said, and his cheeks had turned a bright pink now, his eyes bloodshot. Even his hair seemed to be standing in all directions, and the bruise around his eye was even more pronounced. “They can’t just come here and ask that of you. It’s absolutely insane! ”

He really was worked up all the way. So much more than yesterday.

Again—because of me.

“I know that, but let’s just talk for a minute. I want to hear more,” I said.

His lips opened and closed, and his eyes widened. Before he could say something, though, I turned to the man again.

“Tell me exactly what you want from me, Mister. In plain English—tell me what you need.”

“Save him,” the man said, and he suddenly sounded desperate, like he just now forgot to put up his walls and appear calm. Like he just… slipped.

Which made that something that had awakened inside me react. Suspicious, said the voice in my head. A man like him, who hadn’t changed a tiny bit in the past thirteen years, and who claimed to be a creature of myth, wouldn’t have simply slipped , would he? Which meant he did it to try to manipulate me.

“That’s all I want from you, Nilah,” he continued. “Come to the Seelie Court with me and save him. Heal him like he healed you.”

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin to do that.” I was no healer—the best I could do was make shit float in the air when I lost control of my thoughts and emotions, and even that was probably only in my head.

“But you won’t need to do anything—the bond will do it for you. All it requires is for you to be near him, to connect with him physically,” he said. “One touch will suffice.”

One touch —just like the boy had touched me.

My heart hammered, shook my entire body. “And then?”

The man paused for a good moment.

“Then you can come home. The prince and I will personally escort you back here, if that is your wish,” he said. “It will be entirely up to you, but whatever your choice, you will forever be celebrated in Verenthia as the prince’s savior.”

Prince’s savior. It did have a nice ring to it.

“This is absurd! ” Dad cried, and he stepped back, shaking his head. Fiona was by his side in an instant, whispering in his ear.

“How long?” I asked the man.

“It takes approximately three to four days to reach the Seelie Court from the Aetherway in these forests,” the man said. “By horseback, that is.”

I squinted my eyes at him. “Aetherway?” Was that even a word?

“The passage between our realms, yes. There are two on Earth, one in Verenthia.”

The way he said all of this and expected me to just go with it was incredible. I wasn’t sure if he’d even get the sarcasm if I said what was on my mind right now.

“So, eight days,” I said instead. “I would need to be gone for eight days.”

“Approximately eight days in Verenthia, yes,” the man said.

“And…on Earth?”

He thought about it for second. “Time moves a bit differently in our realm. Not too much, but you can come back to find that less than eight days have passed here—or a bit more.”

“Nilah, we need to talk,” Dad said, coming to stand beside me, his eyes on the man. “Right now. In private. I want to speak to my daughter.”

“As is your right,” the man said, and there was something in his eyes now. Something close to anger, but again, I couldn’t be sure if that’s what he wanted me to think he felt, or what he actually felt .

“But I’m afraid I’m going to need an answer from Nilah tonight. Like I explained earlier, there simply isn’t more time.”

“But she doesn’t even know where she’s going. What will she need? Food? Clothes? Phone charger?”

This from Fi.

“I will explain everything about Verenthia and the ways of our world on the way, if Nilah chooses to join me. We will provide everything she needs and more,” the man said. “But I’m afraid technology cannot make it past the Aetherway. We have tried many times in the past—it does not survive the energy shifts.”

No phone. What a strange idea. Did I even know how to live without a phone?

“One more question, Mister,” I said—and I called him Mister on purpose again, just to see if I could get an honest reaction out of him.

He gave me none.

“Of course,” he said with a deep nod, folding his hands in front of him.

“What if it doesn’t work? What if I can’t heal your prince?”

It was obvious that he stopped breathing, stopped moving completely for a moment. Even the energy that was coming off him changed, became cooler . His pause gave me a moment to focus, to try to better understand who he was and what he was, the energy he let off, the way he looked—like a drawing rather than real. Just like that boy in the meadow all those years ago.

His skin didn’t look like skin and the golden rings he wore looked too perfect to be real and even his hair shone the way hair didn’t—or did in shampoo commercials and heavily Photoshopped pictures. The same could be said for the guards as well—smooth skin, unreal eyes, strange aura.

“It will, ” the man finally said in a whisper, but his whisper had power. It was warm, and it pulsated in my ears. “It will work.”

“But in the event that it doesn’t,” I insisted.

“A life-bond is not a joke, Nilah. It will work as it has for millions of years.” I opened my mouth to speak again but he didn’t let me. “ But in the event that it doesn’t, you will be brought back home at your request any time you choose,” he finished, and now that golden shimmer to his cheeks was gone, replaced by a pink as bright as the flush on my dad’s face.

He looked at me. “Nilah, we speak in private.”

But the stranger said, “First, I will need to know your decision, Nilah. Will you save the prince, or will you forsake your debt?”

“ Now that’s not fair!” my dad exploded, and he said a lot more words I didn’t get because my eyes were locked on the golden ones of this stranger, and I tried to see, tried to find anything that would give away his true intentions, if the ones he gave us weren’t it.

I’d spent my whole life drowning in guilt—for Mom, for Dad, for Fi, even Betty. I dreamed of a day when I wouldn’t have to live like that anymore, a day when life would be easy. Beautiful. Like it had been in what little I remembered before that snake bit me and sent things spiraling out of control.

And maybe this was it. Maybe this was my chance to take back control of my life, to do the right thing, to own what happened to me once and for all and be unapologetic about it.

The boy existed. He had saved me. The fae were real, too, but that was a whole other story.

The point was that I wasn’t crazy. I hadn’t lost my mind.

The point was that Mom was right to believe me.

And while Dad argued with the man to try to win me more time, I realized that even if he didn’t much like me, he’d come all the way here to find me. To talk to me. To tell me about his nephew. Even if he really didn’t seem to like my dad, it didn’t matter because the boy who saved my life needed me.

If I said no now, I would have to live the rest of my life with his blood on my hands. I would have to live with even more guilt on my shoulders, and that I simply would never accept.

“I’ll do it,” I suddenly said, the words sliding off my tongue with perfect ease because every instinct in my body knew that it was the right thing to do. All the voices in my head agreed, too. If that boy needed me, I would go to the end of the world to help him.

Or, you know, to another realm.

The stranger smiled. It was genuine. His eyes sparkled, and for a moment there I could have sworn that his canines were pointy. Must have been a trick of the light because when I blinked, all his teeth were perfectly square again.

“On behalf of the royal family of the Seelie Court—thank you, Nilah Dune. Your kindness will not be forgotten.”

Meanwhile Dad stared at me with unblinking eyes, unable to say a single word.