Authors: Elizabeth A. Reeves
Tags: #urban fantasy, #Fantasy, #witches and wizards, #Romance
Shoes. When this was all over, I was never going to wear shoes again.
The first stretch of traveling hadn’t been so bad—we’d mostly gone by car—but, once we had reached the Middle Lands everything had changed. Not only did we have to go on by foot, but also we had to be on high alert for anyone who would turn us in to the authorities.
We were like the Von Trapp family, if they’d had a pink miniature mastodon, a cat, and seven zombie chickens traveling with them.
All they had to climb were the Swiss Alps.
Two weeks. That’s how long it had taken us to get from my poor little preserve to the barrier. Two weeks of trying to force-feed Thomas, of taking turns carrying him on our backs until we had figured out how to make a sort of travois that Petunia was more than happy to pull for us.
All of us felt the strain in different ways. We didn’t have the energy to bicker or disagree about things like zombie chickens sleeping arrangements and who was going to start the fire that night—or if we were even going to have one.
We had settled into a pattern, a rhythm. We trudged along, my brain humming a song that had been stuck in it for what felt like an eternity.
My feet hurt. I didn’t really mind the hunger, or stinking so bad that I knew a bath wasn’t going to cut it. It was my feet that bothered me the most.
And I could be irritated with my feet all I wanted without bothering anyone else.
So, coming up to the barrier was actually a bit of a shock.
It had taken us two weeks—fourteen and a half days—and sometimes nights—to travel a distance that would have only taken hours, if we had been able to use our Magic undetected.
It was still ugly, even though getting there meant we were one step closer to making it to Faerie.
We all paused, even Petunia, looking up the slope of the glossy rather viscous bubble that stood in our way. The barrier gave off a Magical sense that felt something like a houseful of skunks smelled. Even before we approached it, it coated my skin and made me feel like I was trying to breathe in gelatin.
I didn’t look forward to stepping inside.
This was it—this was the imaginary line. Once I crossed this boundary, I would be considered a criminal. I would never just be ‘Goldie Locke’, my father’s daughter ever again.
I looked down at Thomas’s face in the travois, pale and still, and knew it was worth it. I would have walked twice as far to help him.
Owen Dark looked over his shoulder. Unlike the rest of us, he looked as unruffled and smooth as the day we had left home. “Are you ready?” he asked.
I wasn’t feeling very ready, but I nodded.
We crossed the border.
I didn’t even look back. I was actually rather proud of myself for that. What was I really leaving behind, anyway? Kodi? Nat? The rest of my family was with me.
I was carrying no regrets with me. I had dropped them off at the door, when I had decided that nothing mattered more than my brother did.
The Wild Magic surrounded us.
As Owen Dark had warned us to do, we linked hands together as we walked forward.
“I can see through the illusions better than the rest of you,” he had explained, with no hubris. “The power of the Wild Magic can’t trap me. You just have to trust me to get you through safely.”
I didn’t trust him—not entirely, but he had proven to be an ally thus far. I didn’t believe he had brought us so far just to leave us wandering around in the Wild Magic for eternity.
Desperation made for unlikely companionships.
The Wild Magic was just that—wild, chaotic, unpredictable. There was no doubt in my mind that, without Owen, we would have been lost within moments.
There was no telling what was real and what was not out here—I supposed that was why the barrier was so effective. The monster butterfly with the mesmerizing wings and the three-inch long fangs had been real, while the swarm of dragons-flies, complete with tiny riders with tiny, sharp swords, was not. The swamp had been real—the mountain had not.
The apples on the tree were poisonous.
The bats were friendly and offered us a safe place to sleep.
The wolf-headed men with spears, the miniature Chinese dragon, the boiling rainbow river, the chimera… I never knew how many of these might be real and how many were illusion, or completely different places and things cloaked in some sort of disguise.
“I leave you here,” Owen Dark announced.
I stared at him with horror. Was this it, then? He was really going to abandon us out here? Had we trusted him with our lives all this time for nothing?
He’d obviously read the horrified look on my face
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, his voice offended. He flicked an invisible bit of dust from his jacket. “Do you see that shimmering in the air over there?”
I nodded. I had noticed it, but had paid no attention; never really knowing what was real—and what was not—out here.
“That is Faerie,” he said. “I can go no further. I have been exiled—to cross into Faerie would mean certain death for me.”
I stared at him. “So, you never intended to enter? Why did you help us, then?”
He gave me a rather enigmatic smile. “I have my reasons. When you cross into Faerie, find a creature who can guide you to Lenus. You will be safe with him.”
I nodded. The name sounded familiar, but I wasn’t sure why at the moment. I knew it would come to me.
“Good fortune,” he said. He tightened the straps of his pack around him and turned back the way we had come, whistling a jaunty tune.
“This is it,” Gwyn said, her voice wavering.
The traveling had been hardest on her, but she had never complained. She looked more like a wraith than a woman these days—with her pale hair and pale eyes.
I thought the only reason she had been able to hang on so long was for Thomas.
Now that we were here, facing the end of our long journey, I couldn’t seem to make my hands stop shaking.
What if it didn’t work?
What if, like Kodi had said, I had come so far only to watch Thomas die?
I couldn’t just stand here so that I wouldn’t have to find out.
It was time. Time to let go of the world I had known, time to cross into a world I knew nothing about.
Maybe it was a sort of coming of age—this fine line between worlds.
I squeezed Gwyn’s hand on one side, holding onto Petunia’s trunk with the other. Fred and Silas sat in the travois with Thomas, keeping an eye on him, while Fred’s little minions—that really was the best word for them—perched like so much dandelion fluff on our shoulders.
I took a deep breath.
We crossed the line together.
As a family.
Epilogue
The new reaper stood on the crest of a hill, watching as the small group disappeared into Faerie. For no reason at all, he felt a longing to be there with them.
He shrugged the feeling away. There were souls to collect, after all.
Death could wait for no one.
~The End~
About the Author
Elizabeth A Reeves is a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife, and a writer. She tries to balance all the aspects of her life. She is the author of Adrift (The Last Selkie), Running, and the Cindy Eller Cupcakes series. She is also the author of the new Goldie Locke and the Were Bear series
You can reach her at the following links:
Twitter @SelkieHorse
Want to Read more by Elizabeth A Reeves?
Cindy Eller:
Cindy Eller Short Stories:
Goldie Locke and the Were Bears:
Baehrly Alive (Coming Soon)
Goldie Locke Short Stories:
Linked
(Prophecy Book 1)
by
Hope Welsh
Prologue
2,000 years ago...
The Evil One stared through the invisible walls holding him and laughed.
They would never be able to vanquish him. Their powers paled in comparison to his.
With no other option, they had constructed this prison.
Even though the Druids tried to hide it from him, he still heard of the prophecy. His spies were everywhere. He came to force answers from the Druids, but they had been ready for him.
Before he discovered the Druids’ intentions, he had been trapped. Their blood sacrifice had been unable to destroy him, but they ensured he would remain imprisoned here for the next two millennia.
He actually laughed at the Druids when they trapped him. Time was of little consequence to him, as it would pass in the blink of his eye.
He had existed since the beginning of time and they were mere mortals. Never would they have the power to destroy him—but something apparently could.
He managed to read only a small part of the prophecy before he had been detected.
When two become one.
He needed to recover those two pieces before anyone else found them. He vowed to make sure they would never have the chance to become one.
He would not be destroyed. And now that he knew what to look for, nothing, and no one, would ever be powerful enough to vanquish him.
Humankind would pay for the Druids’ audacity. Did they think to imprison him and not pay the consequences? Did they think he would suffer their insolence?
He hoped they did. Almost hoped they thought themselves safe from him.
True enough now. For the time being, they would be out of his reach. As time passed, they would forget about the threat which lingered over them like a black cloud, circling, gathering speed and force…waiting for the right moment.
Yes, revenge would be his, and humankind would once again bow before him.
This prison would not hold him indefinitely. Eventually, he would escape. Then he would find the pieces and destroy them.
Nothing would stand in his way.
Chapter One
“
Run
!”
Lana Summers shot awake in a cold sweat, her arm outstretched, reaching for someone who wasn’t there. She sat up and brushed the hair away from her damp face.
“What the...?” She glanced around the dark room, half expecting to see her mom. That’s whose voice had screamed in her head.
No, not in her head.
It was from her dream—just a dream. Her mom wasn’t there.
God, it had been so real. Too real.
She shook her head in immediate denial. Her mild psychic abilities never progressed to the same level of her mother’s, thank God. It had only been a ridiculous dream. She refused to accept it as anything paranormal.
I won’t be like you, Mom. I love you, but I won’t be you. I won’t live my life always wondering what horror I’ll see next.
But the dream…it had been so vivid. It had seemed so real. And this wasn’t the first one she’d experienced. She’d had the first one a week after her mother’s death. Though, in that one, her mother hadn’t screamed at her or scared her half to death. All she could remember about it was her mother’s tone seemed urgent, but she couldn’t figure out what was wrong or what her mother wanted to tell her.
Not that she had tried that hard, nor had she wanted to.
Unable to shake it off, Lana put her feet over the side of the bed and slowly stood up, still looking around the room. She slipped her feet into her slippers and had just reached to turn on the bedside lamp when she heard a strange noise.
Her breath held as she listened. Hearing strange noises in an apartment wouldn’t have bothered her, but this was different—closer.
It took only a matter of seconds before she recognized the sound of footsteps. Someone was in the hallway headed toward her bedroom.
Someone was in her apartment! A scream slowly bubbled up in her throat unbidden, but she suppressed it. She had to get out, but how?
The window was her only chance.
Thank God for first-floor apartments, she thought as she grabbed her robe off the foot of her bed and made her way, quick and silent, toward the window. She held her breath again and tried to open the window quietly. It finally opened with a creak, causing her to wince as she slipped one leg over the ledge.