And he couldn’t blame her.
“That won’t be necessary.”
This voice, Caliban recognized at once. It was ancient and scratchy and beyond powerful. It filled the clearing with authority, and purpose. Cal turned to glance at the old witch over his shoulder.
“As our friend Pi suggested, I brought help.” Lalura held up her hand, where a flame danced nervously. It seemed to perform a bow of sorts before Caliban, then continued dancing in the witch’s outstretched hand.
Lalura stepped back, moved to the side, and Cal found himself looking up at the last of the Sidhe kings, Damon Chroi.
And his wife, Diana. Who was very obviously no longer pregnant.
Diana Chroi, the Goblin Queen, was a healer. So far, she was one of only two known gems amongst the magical kingdoms.
Diana strode to Minerva’s side and nodded respectfully at Caliban. Hope rushed in to fill the crack in Caliban’s heart like superglue. “Can you save her?”
“The physical wounds she’s endured are life threatening, but she can heal them herself with a little help,” she said. “The scars will take longer.” She squared him with a hard look. “But they’re nothing compared to what she is suffering – here.” Diana touched her own head and then her heart to symbolize the emotional attack Minerva had undergone.
“You will need to remedy that with great swiftness, your majesty,” said Lalura firmly, where she stood still holding the flickering fire elemental. “He was right, after all. The Tuath woman told her only half the story.”
“How long have you been standing there?” Avery asked Lalura.
Diana faced Minerva’s fallen form again, and nodded at Caliban. “Help me turn her over,” she instructed.
Lalura addressed Avery’s question by glancing at Titania. The two exchanged a secret look. “Just long enough,” she replied. “You’re all bleeding, by the way,” she added as she leaned a little on her cane and made her wobbly way to a large boulder that Cal was certain wasn’t there before.
He knew the old witch was referring to the fact that they all had nose bleeds; he could taste his own and he saw them on everyone else’s faces. But he couldn’t have cared less. He all but ignored the conversation going on around him. His gut clenched for the thousandth time in the last seventy-two hours, and his breath stilled in his lungs. His fingers gently curled around Minerva’s shoulders, grasping for that hold that was tight enough but not too tight.
So fragile.
She felt like a China doll. How much more could she take before those cracks in her split open and she shattered there before him?
Once more, his cheeks were wet, but he ignored it like the blood on his upper lip. His entire being was focused on Minerva’s face as she was rolled gently over onto her back.
Her hair had returned to its white blonde, and by some great fortune, none of the iron had touched her face, leaving it unmarred. It was the face of an angel. But there was a hollow darkness beneath her closed eyes. Caliban would have given his right hand just then for her to open those eyes and let him see her blue fire.
He bent over her form, instinct driving him to do what he both needed to do and what needed to be done. He closed his eyes and placed the gentlest of kisses upon her lips.
As he did so, a trickle of his magic entered her battered form. Caliban opened his eyes; he could actually see the power, a sparkling blue-black darkness that settled over her and began to sink into her body.
Diana pressed her hand to Minerva’s chest, and that power redirected itself to the glowing white beneath Diana’s magical touch. The sparkling black expanded, infused with Diana’s healing magic, and spread to encompass Minerva’s entire form.
Now Caliban allowed himself to view the rest of his queen’s body. He’d been afraid to do it before. But the burned welts and blackened scars and dried blood were not so frightening, not nearly so traumatic when they were smoothed over by the infusion of healing-fae power, which little by little closed up the still-bleeding wounds, mended torn flesh, and repaired what had been damaged.
Within seconds, the outward signs of her struggle had been reduced to countless red, puffy scars of all shapes and sizes. Diana lowered her head in healing exhaustion. She removed her hand from Minerva’s chest as Damon Chroi came up behind her and placed his palm gently upon her back. She turned to look up at him.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She nodded, and he helped her stand. They stepped back together as Caliban tenderly cupped Minerva’s sleeping face. At his touch, her eyelashes fluttered.
His heart and his gaze flared with hope.
Her eyes came open to reveal the deep, midnight blue he would have given his kingdom away to see again. At their centers flickered small, steady blue flames.
“I have to admit, that was quick thinking on your part,” Lalura told him from where she now sat on the very conveniently chair-shaped boulder that even more conveniently possessed several inches of thick moss in its seat. “Using that emotional attack. I’m not certain it would have worked on anyone else.” She made a small, contemplative sound. “But I’m afraid you can’t take all the credit for her freedom.”
Cal listened, but he couldn’t take his eyes from his queen’s gaze. She’d trapped him there the moment she’d opened her eyes, and she wasn’t letting go any time soon. There was incredible strength in the depths of those flames.
“She used a wish of her own,” supplied Titania, who had been silently standing to the side until that moment. She came forward, knelt on the other side of Minerva, and sighed a pretty, proud little sigh. “She’s already strong enough to cast her wishes without speaking. And that’s what she did. When she was trapped by the entity, she cast a wish.” She looked up at Caliban, and finally he found the will to pull his gaze away and meet the fairy’s. “I could hear it because it was what she desired in that moment more than anything else. Her wish was that whatever you decided to do to help her would work.”
Caliban stared at the fairy. Her words ran through him a second time. But it wasn’t until he processed them a third time that the reality of what she’d just said hit him: He hadn’t saved his queen. She’d saved herself.
In awe, he once more peered down at his beautiful, amazing, brilliant mate. Minerva smiled, but it was a sad smile filled with the pain of a hundred deaths.
She truly was more powerful than he was. Which meant she had taken her place at his side.
“Hi Moonbeam,” he whispered, as he gently brushed his knuckles across her cheek. They were words meant for her alone.
She blinked her response, and the corners of her mouth curled up just a touch more.
She was alive. She was free of the entity. She was going to heal. And now it was time for him to tell her the whole truth that Dahlia had not told her about the Massacre Between Realms.
And hopefully ease away most of the pain he saw in her eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“So… they’re alive?”
“The Twixt is home to many creatures, but I took you to that particular part of it for a reason. The Duwomm make their homes there, and as I said, they have two lives. Since they almost never leave the Twixt, that I know of, the only Duwomm to die even once so far is Drummar.” Caliban gave a nod of recognition to the old man who stood by the door, and the old man smiled and nodded back.
“Taking you there was a lesser of risky decisions for me. There was always a chance there would be no one in the clearing or the forest beyond, and that would have been ideal. We didn’t luck out in that arena. But they were Duwomm. And they still have one very full, very long life to live.”
Minerva processed this. She still had all of that terrible knowledge inside her, all of that destruction to face up to, along with the fact that if she didn’t learn to properly control her powers and one day lost control again, she could make the same horrible mistake.
But the harder, sharper edges of that knowledge were blessedly smoothed out by the fact that the wo
men and the children, the fathers and brothers who had been in that part of the Twixt that day were alive.
“How long?” she asked, wanting to know exactly how many years they’d been spared.
“Longer than you can fathom,” Caliban chuckled.
“And I can tell you from experience, my lady,” said Drummar in his ancient, gravelly voice. “When you only have one life to live, you treat it with a bit more respect.” He moved closer to the bed. “And if you’re smart, you fill it with a lot more fun.”
He smiled a weathered and truly happy smile, and Minerva couldn’t help but smile back. It was the first true smile she’d managed since coming out of the Twixt and… away from the Slenderman.
“The Slenderman,” she whispered aloud, not meaning to.
Caliban frowned beside her. “Why do you call him that? Your sister was calling him that, as well.”
Minerva took a deep breath and shook her head. “It’s nothing. It’s just that he very much resembles an urban legend in the mortal realm. He looks a lot like a monster made up by someone online. Tall, skinny, dressed in a dark suit, pale face – the whole shebang. People call him the Slenderman.”
“And he causes nosebleeds,” chimed in Lalura from where she sat in a rocking chair not far from the bed, knitting what honestly looked like a small sweater with six armholes. Caliban didn’t even want to know what it was for.
Minerva nodded. “Yeah, that’s part of the legend, too. He really fits the bill.”
“Well…” Caliban sat back a bit on the bed. “At times, mortals spy something unnatural, and if their memories aren’t properly erased, they might later believe they imagined what they saw. Either in a dream, or in a drunken stupor, and sometimes they even believe they made it up, just out of nowhere. Some of the most creative mortals are those who have been fortunate enough to witness things not of their world.”
“So you’re saying, the Slenderman is real and has visited the mortal realm?”
“He might have been, as you say in your world, ‘just passing through’,” offered Drummar. “And a creative mind took it and ran with it. Some of the best mortal stories begin this way.”
Caliban smiled. “Drummar is another who has read every book in my library. He’s addicted to words.”
“I am,” the old man grinned. “In fact, I’m hoping you’ll one day introduce me to the Vampire Queen. I hear she’s a bestseller on those new fangled eBook devices. And if I play my cards right, I might even get to meet Malcolm Cole.”
Now Minerva laughed. She was familiar with the author Malcolm Cole, but had no idea who the Vampire Queen was. She was sure she would find out soon enough. Selene had already filled her in on so much.
It had been two days since the attack in the Twixt. Caliban hadn’t returned to the mortal world to find out why his businesses had suddenly been in so much danger; he hadn’t been willing to leave her side. However, he had deployed several very talented “people” to deal with the problem head-on, and at the moment, everything was once more stable. Cal very much suspected the entity that attacked Minerva had also had something to do with the trouble with his corporations. It had coincided with the airplane attack and the black diamonds. The entity, it seemed, was going to come at them from all angles, and it also seemed he – it – had an inexhaustible supply of helpers. All kinds of helpers.
In the fae realm, things had returned to “normal,” as well. The platform had been repaired, as had all of the damage it caused when it went berserk. Dahlia Kellen was still missing; she hadn’t been seen since she’d disappeared spouting gibberish from the Mover that night. Her sister, Violet, was apparently asking around for her.
Though Dahlia’s actions that night still stung Minerva, and it would be a while before Minerva could get past the malignant envy the woman had shown toward her, she found herself feeling for Dahlia as well.
She couldn’t help it. It was just who she was.
She imagined Dahlia laying down and opening her legs for a man all those years, giving and giving and giving and hoping against all hopes that the act would instill some sort of deeper emotion, only to find that it had never meant anything at all to him. Granted, sex for the unseelie fae was a restorative act much like eating was for a mortal, or drinking blood was for a vampire. But it was still sex, goddamn it. In the end, and deep down, it was still a very real violation of a man’s body upon, and inside of, a woman’s.
Dahlia only wanted what every woman everywhere wanted in exchange for that sacrifice. She just wanted it to mean something.
And Minerva also couldn’t help empathizing with Violet. She could only imagine how desperate she would be to find her own sister if Selene were in very real danger.
As far as Minerva herself was concerned, she still had physical scars, and plenty of them. But they were slowly fading. What would never fade was the memory of how much those scars had hurt to earn. She could never have imagined that kind of pain. It was like being on fire, inside and out.
What she couldn’t admit to anyone just yet was that the physical pain had been almost welcomed at that point. When the entity that she called the Slenderman first invaded her body, Minerva had known she had sheer moments, less than seconds, to do everything she could to win that battle. She’d pulled her magic together and made a wish. She couldn’t say it out loud; by the time she knew what she was going to wish for, the Slenderman already had control of her mouth. All she could do was think it. But she’d thought it with every ounce of her will, every single last tiny bit of it. She’d wished that whatever Caliban was going to do would work.
Because she’d known he would do something. In her heart, she knew. And she didn’t have time to come up with anything herself. So, she’d cast the wish spell, and stepped back, weak and spent. The entity had taken over full-force.
But when Caliban had used her own wish magic to throw the knowledge of what she’d done to the Duwomm into her head, it was amplified by the spell she’d just cast – and she’d wanted to die. There was no other way to describe that amount of pain. The strength of the two wishes together made it unbearable.
So the agony of the iron chains was, quite frankly, a welcome distraction, the lesser of two god-awful hells.
There were few things as effective as physical pain to even things out for a troubled mind. The other was pleasure, but pleasure was so terribly rare. And doctors sure as hell weren’t going to provide it for anyone.
So those in agony turned to pain. It was one of the reasons cutters hurt themselves. There was a part of them that wanted to hurt as badly on the outside as they did on the inside. They were unbalanced, tipping the scales of agony, and it was too much to bear. A slice here and there, though, and there was something else to feel, and things were just a little more even.
Now, Minerva glanced at the tall window that graced her room with beams of sparkling light through breaks in the rich, brocade curtains. She took a deep breath and ran a hand through her silver-white hair. “I think I want to go outside,” she said.
Cal straightened where he sat beside her on the bed in one of the smaller rooms in his palace. It was a guest bedroom, and Minerva preferred it because it was “cozier.” That was the only way she could describe it. After the events in the Twixt, she’d just wanted to feel closed in, protected on all sides.
But now…. Sunlight streamed in through the window, and she knew there was a world more magnificent than she could imagine just beyond the glass. She’d only seen it at night.
It was time to see it for real.
Cal looked deeply into her eyes and gently cupped her face. The heat from his hand seeped into her, warming her to her core.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
She threw the bed’s soft covers off of her, noticing flashes of scars along her arms as she did so. But she simply pulled the long sleeves of her hooded sweatshirt over her arms to hide them, and looked back up. She smiled. “Never been more sure of anything.”
Chapter Thirty
/> No one knew where she was. She was probably going to die here, in this absolute darkness. She could hear things moving around her. Slippery things. Maybe clicky, crawly things. But she couldn’t see them. And thank the gods, she couldn’t feel them either.
For Dahlia, there was only the cold and the dark. And time.
*****
Violet Kellen stared into the surface of the liquid in the goblet and tried to keep down the revulsion she felt knowing it was blood. It was her blood. It had been the only way to complete this particular spell.
Her reflection on the liquid’s surface was oddly clear for the blood’s thickness, but this was magic. She’d come to expect the odd things.
Her face had always reminded her of those China dolls mortals kept, too smooth, too heart shaped, too perfect. She was a Tuath. Her sister had always tried to tell her that perfection was simply the Tuath way. But to Violet, it was distracting. Her lips were too symmetrical, too pink, her eyes too large and far too bright. They looked like smokey quartz to her that had been lit from behind by a candle’s flames. No one’s eyes were supposed to look like that. None of the girls in the books she read about looked like that.
Her hair was so thick, it could be braided into the width of a human arm, and it shimmered like satin – literally, like satin – in layers of dark brown to light gold that framed her face in long, straight layers and fell about her like a veil to her waist.
Still, even though her beauty was strange enough to Violet that she rarely looked in mirrors, she felt that her sister Dahlia was far lovelier. There was a mystery to Dahlia that added to her beauty. She was the dark one, black hair like a waterfall of night, eyes as green as Dorothy’s Emerald City.
That was one of Violet’s favorite books.
Concentrate, Violet, she scolded herself. Magic like this did not abide distraction. It wanted all of your attention for itself. One slip, and darkness slid past the boundaries of a spell to disappear out into the world. And that was the last thing the world needed more of.
Violet chewed on her bottom lip, narrowed her gaze, furrowed her brow, and leaned in – to see past the reflection on the blood’s surface.