Page 5

A isling wasn’t alone when she stumbled back into the trailer park.

A hunched figure lurked in the shadow of a double-wide and stepped forward as she passed. The home’s porch light flickered on, triggered by their movement, its fluorescent bulb humming loudly in the otherwise quiet night.

“Hello Aisling.”

She stopped dead. Something about the way Cole spoke her name—almost cooed it—set her teeth on edge and drew a chill to creep up her spine and run down the backs of her arms.

He didn’t wait for her to acknowledge him before speaking again. “All’s well with the trailer I assume?”

“Yes,” she responded tightly.

“And you still insist on keeping it, Aisling? On staying?” he asked.

Aisling. Aisling.

Cole had never once called her anything other than Miss Morrow.

As he blinked, before his eyelids closed, Aisling noticed a flicker of horizontal movement: a membrane swept across his eyes, darting from the inner to the outer corners. And when he smiled, she saw that his teeth were unnaturally small and pointed. They fit together like jagged jigsaw pieces.

This—whoever, whatever it was—wasn’t Cole. Not anymore. But whether it was wearing a glamour or wearing Cole himself, Aisling couldn’t tell. She didn’t care to find out, either.

The Veil will weaken further. The echoes will spread.

And then things will begin to come through.

The Shadowwood Mother’s voice in the back of her mind broke her out of the trance the faerie’s eyes had captured her in, and Aisling fell back a step.

It didn’t say another word, but drifted back into the shadows.

It beckoned her to follow, crooking the extra joint of one inhumanly long finger.

Its leering, predatory grin only widened when Aisling visibly shuddered.

She didn’t want to let it out of her sight long enough for it to snatch her up while her back was turned, so she stepped carefully backward, one arm outstretched behind her until she could grasp onto Rodney’s porch railing.

The faerie didn’t move, but watched her all the way, still smiling as she reached over her shoulder to pound on the door.

Rodney caught her when she fell inside. She rebounded quickly, shoving the door shut and sliding the chain lock into place with shaking hands.

“Aisling, what—” Rodney looked at her, alarmed.

“It was Cole,” she said through chattering teeth. She hadn’t realized how cold she was; her clothes were soaked through and her legs were covered in hardened mud where she’d knelt in the thicket. “It was Cole, but it wasn’t. It was something else.”

Rodney wrapped a blanket around Aisling’s shoulders then moved her back into the kitchen. “Wait here,” he said sternly. As though sensing something in the tone of his voice, Briar placed himself between Aisling and the door after Rodney stepped out and closed it behind himself.

Beneath the blanket, Aisling trembled. The trailer was warm, and her fingers were thawing, but the encounter outside had left her feeling frozen. She didn’t notice Lyre until he spoke.

“Have a pleasant walk?” he asked teasingly.

He’d moved to the couch, taking her seat in the corner.

Seeing him there, so incongruous with the scene around him, only further unsettled Aisling.

His ink-black hair had fallen loose from where it was usually slicked back tight to his skull and his pale skin was sallow under the trailer lights.

Still, his wolfish countenance never changed.

She thought of the footprint on the beach and the creature in the water and, for the third time that night, Aisling repeated, “I’ve done everything it asked of me. The war is over. Why are the echoes are still happening?”

“The Veil was very weak; it needs time to heal. Much like the Courts.” Lyre appraised her from head to toe, then added, “Much like yourself.”

Aisling shifted uncomfortably, sure his catlike eyes could peer straight through her skin and pick out all the broken bits inside her. His evaluation of those pieces was not one she wanted to hear. Before she could respond, Rodney stepped back into the trailer.

“I ran it off.” He patted Briar’s head, a dismissal from his protective post. Briar’s hackles lowered as he relaxed against Aisling’s hip.

“What was it?” Lyre asked.

“Nothing good.” Rodney reached out and pulled a twig from Aisling’s hair. “Where did you go?”

“To look for the Shadowwood Mother.” Aisling pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders and fixed her gaze on the raised corner of a linoleum tile. The subfloor was beginning to show beneath the peeling glue. “I couldn’t find her. She’s gone.”

Rodney shook his head. “Go take a hot shower, Ash. You can have my bed tonight.”

“But that thing….” Her attention strayed towards the window. The blinds were lowered, but she half-expected to see a long finger reaching between the slats to beckon to her once again.

“It’s gone,” he assured her, stepping into her field of vision to block the window. “It won’t hunt where it knows there’s other Fae.”

That word— hunt —set Aisling shivering anew.

Lyre rose languidly from the couch. “I’ll take a stroll around on my way out. I mean no offense, but you sorely lack the sort of deportment that we nastier Fae tend to find intimidating.” He smirked at Rodney.

“A bit of warning next time before you just show up, Lyre.” Rodney made no attempt to hide his irritation.

“Consider this your advanced warning, then: the storm has ended. I do believe I will be seeing the both of you again sooner rather than later.” With a characteristic flourish, Lyre swept his cloak aside and strode out into the night.

Once he’d gone, Aisling stood in the shower until the water ran cold, watching bits of leaves circle the drain. As the adrenaline from her encounter with not-Cole waned, her mind wandered back to Lyre’s revelation.

The Red Woman was not born, but made. Forged by the blood of the Unseelie King. In the end, as hard as Aisling had tried, her fate had never been hers. The ending written for her, for Kael, was never hers to rewrite.

Though she’d never say so out loud, healing might have been easier if this had all ended with his death.

Aisling could scarcely fathom what more she could give to the prophecy, which seemed only to take and take and take.

But Lyre was convinced that her role as the Red Woman was not merely in seeing Kael’s destruction, but further in bringing to bear his resurrection.

Revenant spring —it was staring them in the face all along.

Kael was meant to die so that he could return.

It was a cruel twist, really, and one that tore at her heart.

She was dangerously close to hoping the High Prelate was right.

To thinking that maybe, maybe, she truly could bring him back.

But hope was no longer a safe space, no longer a comfort to hold close.

It was a risk, and torturous—where once it let Aisling look bright-eyed at the future, it now left her fearful.

She knew what could come of feeling it, of clinging to it.

Hope was a set-up, and this was a stupid hope to cling to.

She had only ever been a pawn. All of her efforts and cunning and plotting had brought her right to where she would have ended up all along.

And that realization—the understanding of how little control she’d actually had the entire time—was a deafening roar that drowned out everything else around her.

Yet even still, the ember of hope burned on. It was dim, and it flickered often, but it remained lit despite it all.

After she changed into a pair of Rodney’s threadbare sweats, Aisling returned to the living room and wedged herself between Rodney and Briar on the couch. There was hardly space for the three of them with the way Briar had stretched himself out.

“You okay?” Rodney asked gently.

Aisling just shook her head. She wasn’t. She hadn’t been.

He held a takeaway bag full of cold fries out to her, eyebrows raised pointedly until she took one. When she fed it to Briar instead of eating it herself, he sighed. As if he could read her thoughts, he said, “You planned to go after him either way.”

“By choice,” Aisling shot back. “I wanted to do it—to do something —by choice. Not because a prophecy dictated it.” She was done with the prophecy and sick of fate. She wanted back control over her own life.

Rodney shifted in his seat to face her and waited until she did the same before speaking insistently. “Put aside the prophecy, Ash. You made this choice. You . Whether or not it was foretold doesn’t matter.”

“It does.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Rodney insisted. “When you decided you’d go into the god realm to find Kael, did you know it was a part of the prophecy?”

“No, but—” she started. But Rodney seized on the hesitation in her tone and stopped her with a shake of his head.

“You made that decision on your own. You fell for Kael on your own . The prophecy may tell us the end of the story, but you’re the one writing the book. You’re the one turning its pages.” To punctuate the sentiment, he tossed a cold fry in the air. He missed his mouth by a mile.

Maybe he was right—maybe she could somehow reclaim her role in all of this.

She hadn’t before considered all the choices she’d made in the dark.

Hadn’t considered that perhaps she had more room than she realized to steer and grow within the framework of the prophecy.

The parameters may have been set, but what she did within those boundaries was up to her alone.

Rodney tried again, this time landing a successful catch despite a lazy attempt by Briar to snag the fry for himself. He pumped his fist in triumph.

Aisling leaned her head back against the couch, suppressing a smile. “How can you be so wise and so dumb at the same time?”

Rodney grinned and said, “Lifetimes of practice.”

First thing in the morning after that long, long storm finally ended, Lyre returned to Rodney’s trailer.

This time, with Raif in tow. The soldier stood behind the High Prelate, eyes dark and face drawn, and Aisling avoided his gaze.

She hadn’t been able to meet his stare since they’d carried Kael’s body to the moon gate and set it ablaze.

And so amidst the silence that stood between them all, it was Lyre who spoke first.

“The door has been opened,” he said. Rodney ushered the males inside quickly.

Especially in the light of day, despite their human glamours, they looked as out of place as Kael had on the two occasions he’d visited the trailer park.

Even if their features had been more accurately composed—cheekbones and chins more rounded, eyes less upturned—their imposing demeanors would have marked them as something just this side of unnatural.

“Took them long enough,” Rodney grumbled as he shut the door behind the pair.

“What happens now?” Aisling rose from the kitchen table, balling the too-long sleeves of Rodney’s sweatshirt into her fists.

Her heart raced in her throat; though it had already been one agonizingly long month, she thought she’d have more time.

She’d wasted the days drinking and hiding herself away rather than preparing for this eventuality.

She had no plan. For someone accustomed to always having a plan, it was a discomforting thing to confront.

“We go through it.” Raif’s answer was matter-of-fact and delivered without pause. Finally, Aisling looked at him. The fury she expected to be met with had shifted to something more akin to fierce determination.

“We?” she asked. She hadn’t considered that they’d come with her into Elowas; when she pictured stepping through the doorway, she imagined she would be entering the god realm by herself.

“We,” Lyre confirmed.

Rodney nudged Aisling gently with his shoulder. “Obviously, Ash.”

Beside Her, a great White Bear shall tread, a guardian and companion through trials ahead.

Her breath caught as she looked around at the group crowded together there in her father’s trailer, and they all stared back at her with the same unwavering resolve.

Briar, her anchor. Rodney, who had been with her on her journey from the very beginning.

Raif and Lyre, both of whom had gotten her over various hurdles and obstacles with force or with cunning.

They were all her White Bear, Aisling realized, every one of them.

But Kael, maybe most of all. Though he wasn’t there, she could see him, too.

Bent over thick, dusty tomes, low candlelight casting a golden glow on his moonspun hair.

Sitting side-by-side with her before the Diviner.

Protecting her until the very end. Giving his life to see her become the Red Woman. Kael was her White Bear, too.

The swell of emotion in Aisling’s chest now wasn’t one of sadness, but a profound gratitude for this unlikely group cobbled together by fate.

The prophecy of the Red Woman and the White Bear was so much greater than she’d ever realized, woven so tightly into the fabric of her life that it was inseparable from her past and from her future.

If she truly was the one writing the story, she was glad that she wasn’t doing so alone.