But before he could think of what to tell her, Minerva spoke again.
“But you sure came through,” she said softly, whispering her words now before they were eaten up by the desert breeze and carried to the coyotes’ ears half a mile away. She shook her head in bewilderment, her eyes as large and bright as the moon above. “How the hell did you do that?” A beat passed. “And, can you teach me?”
Chapter Eight
The diner reminded Minerva of that famous painting of the café on a dark street with Marilyn Monroe and James Dean inside. She was pretty sure there was someone else in there too, though she couldn’t remember who. Her sister would know; she was the painter.
She paused on the doorstep as Caliban filled the doorframe in front of her, his hand on the knob. He turned and glanced back at her as if sensing her hesitation, and once again, Minerva was struck with the extreme oddity of this situation. He was the Unseelie King. And he was alone with her in the middle of nowhere, leading her into a deserted café on a deserted street on a hot summer night that the desert had actually turned a little cold. He was doing these things rather than ruling, from a dark throne, a dark land filled with even darker wonders.
And she still had to wonder why.
Caliban opened the door, sounding the bell above the it like Christmas chimes in the strange silence. She followed him inside. He chose a table for them at the far end of the booths along the windows on one side, and she slid into the vinyl covered seat across from him. The floor to ceiling window to her right reflected the empty bar to her left, and behind that reflection, a vast and unyielding darkness awaited on the other side of the glass.
The difference between this diner and the one in the painting was that outside of this restaurant, there were no city streets or other buildings. This diner sat alone on the side of a dirt road that was literally in the middle of a desert in what Caliban had assured her was Nevada.
There was nothing else for miles around, and because of this, a pump with gasoline had been installed at the front of the restaurant for desperate, empty gas tanks. Maps were sold on a rotating stand by another window for the lost owners of those desperate, empty gas tanks.
There was no one at the counter, and no one had yet responded to the sound of the bell. Though the restaurant gleamed with cleanliness, she imagined that customers were infrequent; maybe the owners weren’t keeping an ear out for the bell.
She had never felt more isolated than she did out here, so far from the rest of humanity. It felt like the rest of the world had actually vanished. Like the yet-unscary, but sort of spooky-mysterious beginning of a Steven King novel.
In a strange way, she really liked it. It took some of the sharpness off the razor-edge of the shock the last forty-eight hours had given her. She even felt a little relaxed. Like she could exhale.
“I have to tell you,” Caliban said as he slid his jacket off and set it down beside him on the vinyl bench. “You are handling this transition exceptionally well.” He leaned back to drape his left arm over the top of the red sparkly seat, causing the muscles in his arm to flex against his dress shirt. “I’m actually a little surprised.”
Minerva bit her lip and tried to suppress a smile, but failed. “You mean that you expected me to faint a whole bunch? Or maybe run around screaming and pulling out my hair?” she asked softly.
Across from her, the Unseelie King blinked and went still in his seat. His eyes were fixed on her lips, and when she realized this, her smile slipped, becoming self-conscious.
He cleared his throat and shifted in his seat, then ran a hand through his jet-black hair. “Not in so many words.”
Minerva followed his movements, and found her attention glued to his biceps as he unconsciously flexed them in his movements. She swallowed hard and looked down at the plastic table top. “To be honest,” she said softly, “I’m surprised too.” Yes, she’d grown used to unpleasant surprises, but the murder of her parents was one was one hell of an unpleasant surprise, and it had been topped with the galactic revelation of her being a Wisher. He was probably in his rights to expect she’d be babbling and drooling by now. “Everything came into me at once,” she told him.
He leaned forward, placing his arms on the table-top and folding his hands together. She could feel his attention focus on her, almost as if it were a kind of heat.
She went on. “For thirty-six years, I thought I was a human being.” She paused, adding with some reluctance but absolute honesty, “I thought I was a very flawed human being, but still human.”
She shook her head. “And then, the day before yesterday… my adoptive parents are murdered….” The word left a strange numbness on her tongue, making her next words more difficult to form. “And suddenly I realized I’d been wrong all along.” She looked back up at him as emotion threatened, at last, to overwhelm her. “I’m not human after all.”
Still flawed, she thought. So very flawed. But not at all human.
Minerva warmed under the Unseelie King’s gem-like gaze. He shifted, straightening a bit, and Minerva caught a glimpse of something red in the folds of his dress shirt. She frowned and leaned forward. “You’re bleeding.”
He looked down – and then looked worriedly up at her.
A flood of numbing horror went through Minerva as she recalled everything she’d done to him on the back steps of her adoptive parents’ Oxford home. “Oh my god,” she whispered. He was bleeding from several injuries across his mid-section and up and down his arms. “Did I do that to you?”
What was the punishment for attacking the king?
She knew the answer to that. The punishment for attacking the king in any manner was death. And she had out-and-out tried to kill him.
A new kind of fear pierced through her with ferocity. The unseelie fae could be very imaginative when it came to killing. Thoughts came unbidden to Minerva’s mind – images of devices. And creatures. And “methods.”
The palms of her hands began to sweat. A coldness swept through her, and she wondered how far she would get trying to run from someone like the Unholy King in a desert the size of Nevada.
But then, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, Caliban reached out and grabbed her hand. It was a tight grip, but not a painful one. Rather, it was tender.
She tried to pull away as heat moved from her chest into her neck and then her cheeks. But he held her fast, and pointed firmly to his chest with his free hand. “This isn’t your fault, Minerva.” His unnatural violet eyes had hardened into amethysts, faceted and multi-dimensional, sliced through with shards of emerald. “This is my fault. For not finding you and helping you sooner.”
Minerva heard his words and processed them in a slow kind of wonder. As she did, the cold fear that had all but engulfed her thawed. Once it did, she found, quite unexpectedly, that she was worried about him. She actually felt guilty.
“Why didn’t it heal?” she asked. “Why is it bleeding now?”
Caliban’s eyes shimmered. They glittered with something untold. Minerva absorbed the details…. His skin was more pale than it had been before. There was a new darkness under his eyes, too, that gave his handsome features a haunted quality.
“You’re weakened, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question. She was simply putting the pieces together and expressing her findings out loud. “That’s why you can’t heal yourself. I attacked you with iron.”
The king sighed. “It’s a number of things.”
“That spell you cast to make the plane vanish. It was a big one, wasn’t it?”
He didn’t reply, but from the way his eyes cut to her and his lips parted, she knew she was right. It was the magic he’d used on the plane that was further weakening him.
A new and horrible idea occurred to her, and she felt the blood leave her face. “Oh my God… you didn’t transport it, did you?”
She’d assumed he’d transported the pilot away, then moved the plane somewhere safer to crash, maybe even a different realm. But now she realized she’d b
een wrong. “You disintegrated it.”
Caliban’s pained expression was again all the answer she needed.
She stood up in new fury, leaning over the table. “There was a pilot on that plane!”
“No,” he corrected. “There wasn’t. Not any longer. He was already dead when I destroyed the aircraft.”
Minerva went still. That coldness was back, working its way diligently into her chest and heading for her heart. “He was dead?” She felt bewildered. “How?”
“Dark energy, dark magic,” he replied simply. “I’m uncertain what kind. There wasn’t time to study it. But suffice it to say, he died quickly.”
“Why would someone want to take out the pilot?” She asked the question even as she realized there was no need. It was a stupid question. Taking out the pilot would put the plane in jeopardy. And that meant….
“Someone was trying to get to you,” Caliban filled in for her. “They knew they couldn’t do it directly, not with me protecting you. So they did the next best thing.”
Minerva very slowly sat back down. “But… why?” She felt like a child suddenly, asking such a thing. Were they after her because she was a Wisher? Was it a fae of some sort? It would make sense. The fae feared her kind.
But what fae was powerful enough to take out the Unseelie King’s private jet pilot? She knew he had to have been protected too. “Who?” she asked next.
“That is the trillion dollar question, my dear,” said Caliban absently as he again glanced down at his own chest to see that the blood stains had spread. “We’ve been under the impression that the queens were wanted by Kamon very much alive. This would seem to indicate the contrary.”
Mentally skipping over all of the very important things he’d just said in order to focus on the single most important thing, Minerva asked, “They want me dead?”
Caliban looked up, and this time when he did, he captured her gaze with a kind of power that immobilized her in her seat and opened her up to him like an open book. It would have been impossible for her to look away now, and she realized he’d been going easy on her all this time. This was the real Unseelie King. Relentless. Even cruel.
“Oh yes,” he said, in that faintly accented voice that made goose bumps rise across her flesh. “Very much so.”
Chapter Nine
It was approximately five or six seconds later that Minerva was able to digest the rest of what Caliban had just told her.
“Wait….” Queens? Kamon? “Run that all by me again.”
Caliban’s gaze narrowed. He studied her carefully, then leaned over the table toward her. “You really don’t know, do you?”
“Don’t know what?”
He shook his head. “How can you be aware of what you are, of the fae, and of the unseelie and even of who I am, but not know this?”
“What’s ‘this?’” she asked. “What is it that I don’t know?” She waited as he sat back again and seemed to puzzle over something. He absent-mindedly touched his hand to his chest, and then winced. More blood soaked through his shirt. It was going from white to red in record time.
He was hurt because he was guarding her from something, from someone.
“Why are you protecting me?” she asked then.
“Where the hell is the waitress?” he demanded suddenly, ignoring her question and frowning toward the back door. His eyes hardened into purple diamonds. “Someone should have been out by now.”
“I have the right to know,” she insisted, leaning toward him. “What’s going on? Who is this ‘Kamon’ person? And what do you mean by ‘queens’?”
“Something’s wrong,” he said, and his gaze focued. In one graceful move, he slid to the end of the bench and stood up, rising to his impossible, indomitable height.
Minerva blinked. He was intimidating without even meaning to be.
But then she glared. She scooted to the end of her own bench and joined him, jumping to her feet. “What do you mean?” she asked, looking from him to the double metal doors at the back of the café. He was contemplating them in stern silence.
“No one came out to greet us when we sounded the bell at the door,” he told her.
“No, but….” That was true. Someone probably should have come out by now, but shit happens. “Maybe they didn’t hear it, or maybe they’re in the bathroom.”
“I don’t hear anyone in the kitchen at all,” he said. “I also don’t sense any life in this establishment beyond us.”
Again, Minerva blinked. “You don’t sense any life?”
He turned and regarded her, tilting his handsome head to one side to contemplate her with the same intense scrutiny that he’d used to study the back door a moment earlier. It made Minerva feel trapped. It was strange to suddenly realize she was completely alone in a deserted café with a man who was half a foot taller than her, and who no doubt weighed a hundred pounds more, all of it muscle. To say nothing of the magic he harbored.
“You could do the same with a bit of training,” he told her, interrupting her thoughts. “You possess the natural talent, the natural magic. You’re simply undisciplined.”
Minerva’s adrenal gland came wide awake, and she was suddenly very much unafraid of him. What fear there had been a moment ago was hastily overrun with mounting outrage.
“Excuse me?” Had he just called her undisciplined? “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” she demanded. If anything at all, she was the most disciplined person on the face of the fucking planet! She put up with humanity’s bullshit every single day and she had yet to stash a single body in her trunk! That was pretty damned disciplined!
The corners of Caliban’s mouth curled up in an amused and secret smile.
Minerva took a step back. “Are you baiting me?” she asked him.
“Not at all. You’re simply too sensitive. That’s typical for a Wisher,” he replied matter-of-factly.
Minerva’s blood stream filled up with even more adrenaline as Caliban turned and strode purposefully toward the double doors at the back of the café. She looked after him for a minute, stewing in an increasingly strong cocktail of emotions, before she finally jerked herself out of her own anger and stormed off in the same direction.
He pushed through the metal double doors and into the kitchen beyond. Minerva had caught up and was stepping into the kitchen right behind him when the darkness hit her.
It would have been difficult to describe it any other way. It wasn’t actually dark. It wasn’t as if the lights grew dim or the shadows grew long or anything so poetic. It was simply that everything felt as if it had been cast into doubt. It was too quiet. The air felt thick with something wrong.
“What is that?” she whispered as her gaze combed over the very still, very sterile kitchen. It was patently clear no one had been in here cooking any time recently.
“Magic,” Caliban replied. “You’re becoming increasingly capable of sensing it because of your proximity to me.”
Minerva let most of that go and focused on the important bit. “Someone was casting magic in this café?”
“No, not was,” he corrected. His gaze was focused on the back door to the kitchen. It was slightly ajar. The night beckoned beyond it, eerily illuminated by a flickering light that most likely hung over the back doorstep. “Someone is casting magic in this café.”
Minerva was reminded of the Goldilocks fairy tale. Someone’s been sleeping in my bed, father! And she’s still here!
Caliban moved like a shield in front of he as they crept toward that back door. If the moments of her life had been a horror movie, she would have imagined ominous music playing just then, increasing in volume and key to indicate approaching danger.
She could also swear she felt waves of jagged power coming off Caliban. It was different than it had been when she’d first met him in Oxford. It wasn’t nearly as strong now, but it was more ragged and sharp. He was irritated. Agitated.
“Stop,” she said suddenly.
A whirlwind of things occurre
d to her at once. It was like someone had turned on a movie projector in her mind. It had happened to her before. She felt like Shawn Spencer from Psych when it happened: Little bits and pieces of things she’d unconsciously noticed before would suddenly spill out into her consciousness, making her aware of them and their meanings.
She saw the front of the café and its lighting that reminded her of that painting. Then she saw the red, sparkling vinyl booths. Next was the bar at the back of the café, where she could imagine truckers taking in a fat-heavy breakfast, and weary travelers filling up on countless cups of fresh, hot coffee.
She turned back toward the kitchen behind her. It really was pristine. It really did look like it had never been used.
She felt Caliban turning to face her; she could feel his eyes on her like laser beams. “What is it?” he asked.
“I’m not sure.” She moved like a zombie back through the gleaming stainless steel countertops and un-scratched pots and pans that hung from a holder in the ceiling. She pushed through the swinging double steel doors and into the dining area beyond. Her eyes raked over the seats – seats that would have been sitting in the hot Nevada sun for months at the very least, but which bore not a single crack, or even any fading.
She turned her attention to the ground. There was no dust, no crumbs, no footprints or dirt blown in from outside.
“It’s impossible,” she whispered.
“It’s not real,” came Caliban’s assessment behind her.
She spun to face him, and her own panic matched the new emotion on his face. “None of this is real!”
“No, it isn’t,” he agreed tersely. His gaze left hers to slide along the same tables and windows and floor. “It’s all an illusion.”
Chapter Ten
Cal rushed to the diner’s front doors and reached out to grasp the handle of one – but stopped just short of touching it. Minerva was right behind him.
“What?” she asked, breathless with fear. “Why did you stop?”