“Do you have a sweetheart back home whom your mind keeps wandering to?” the queen pressed, continuing to swirl around me even as her flailing hair tickled my sides unpleasantly.
“Yes,” I found myself replying, my throat hoarse.
I do have someone back home. My chest ached as I thought of my treehouse. Marion going about her day. Using my kitchen. Sleeping in my spare bedroom. I hadn’t longed for home so much since my imprisonment in The Underworld.
“Oh, well,” she said, with a high-pitched hiccup of a giggle. She stopped circling me and stood in front of me on her tiptoes. “We will soon solve that.”
As her face moved toward mine, I was sure that she was aiming for my lips… But then she stopped mid-motion just as she reached an inch away from me.
Her body froze, her eyes bulging. She jerked away from me and looked to the others.
All of them had stopped still as well, both their dancing and their humming.
“Everybody heard that?” she whispered so softly I could hardly hear her.
The marsh dwellers nodded.
“Then we must leave quickly,” she said. “We must move elsewhere for the rest of tonight.”
“What—?” I began, before she thrust herself toward me again, along with a male marsh dweller.
Their hands closed around my forearms and they dragged me away from the clearing, toward the small river that flowed by. All of the other marsh dwellers were already rushing in its direction. They dove into the water and then the queen pulled me down with her.
Ben
“Lucas!” we continued to roar, even though it was obvious he had gone.
“What the hell?” my father said, whirling on Ibrahim. “I didn’t know they could just vanish like that!”
“As I said,” Ibrahim said, who looked close to hyperventilating, “these marsh dwellers are a kind of spirit. That means they’re not wholly physical beings. That’s why they are so dangerous, and why I told everybody to stay within my protection.”
“Oh, God,” Jeramiah breathed. “What now? Where do we even begin to look for him?”
Ibrahim exhaled, rubbing his hands over his face. “We need to find their township. Marsh dwellers tend to live together, so there must be some kind of residential area here. I suggest that we take to the sky again and try to find some clues from the air.”
The warlock lost no time in raising the group from the forest ground up through the trees, toward the sky, while Kailyn and I moved up of our own accord.
“What do you think she plans to do to him?” Claudia asked.
“Let’s not think about what they might do to him, and instead focus on finding him,” Ibrahim said through gritted teeth.
We scanned the tops of the trees, looking for any telltale signs. The trouble was, I wasn’t even sure what telltale signs to look for.
“What kind of residences do they have?” I asked. I could hardly imagine them having buildings.
Ibrahim shrugged. “I guess they would be built from trees, and other natural resources available to them in this place.”
After ten minutes of scanning, we still hadn’t spotted anything. Ten minutes of God knew what kind of hell my uncle was going through. I didn’t think that an hour more of searching was going to make a difference either. The canopy of leaves was simply far too thick. There could be a teeming township beneath us right now, and we would never know.
Thus, we had no choice but to return to the forest, once again enveloped by the moist, tree-clustered world.
“It’s just my father’s luck,” Jeramiah muttered bitterly.
Yeah, I guessed one could say that Lucas’s luck in general was crappy. Anyone who had spent two decades in The Underworld would have to have some pretty inauspicious star alignments.
“So what now?” I asked.
“Just be quiet for a moment,” Ibrahim whispered, his eyes widening and his lips parting in concentration.
Everybody held their tongues, barely even breathing, as the sounds of the marsh dwellers’ realm engulfed us. The calm trickling of the brooks, the whispering of the trees, the chirping of insects.
And then there was something more that I picked up on. Something else… a humming. Low and melodious, it was drifting from somewhere in the distance, from the east.
Ibrahim jerked his finger in its direction. “That way,” he said.
We began hurrying through the wetland as fast as we could travel. Even now that we’d gained a sense of direction, we still had to travel beneath the trees or we wouldn’t spot anything otherwise.
The humming grew eerier as it grew louder. It was the combination of at least a dozen voices, all of them high-pitched.
As we continued to race, and the humming sounded like it was barely twenty feet away, it stopped abruptly.
Oh. Great.
“Can any of you still hear it?” I asked, wondering if any of the vampires or werewolves might pick up on it with their acute sense of hearing.
“Nothing,” they responded.
We stopped, our eyes raking over our surroundings as we wondered what our next step could be. Wait here and be quiet, and see if the noise started again? Or keep moving eastward blindly?
“Look up,” Rose whispered, indicating the treetops.
We all gazed up at once to see a shower of white flowers drifting down toward us. They landed all around us in a circle like oversized snowflakes. They brought with them the most incredible scent, so divine I felt the urge to bend down and pick one up, breathe the fragrance in more deeply… but I knew better than to do that.
“Keep away from the flowers,” Ibrahim warned, his forehead wrinkled with worry as his eyes darted all around us.
“Ugh, I’m so thirsty.” Kira spoke up.
She was eyeing the crystal-clear stream that ran nearby. As my own eyes fell on it, I realized too just how thirsty I was.
That was strange to me. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this dehydrated as a fae.
“It’s the weirdest thing,” my father said, “but I am too.”
The gushing water surrounding us seemed to grow louder, glistening as if in taunt. I was already imagining how blissful it would feel to take a swig, feel the cool water gliding down my hoarse throat.
Could the flowers have caused this sudden dehydration in all of us?
I already predicted what Ibrahim was about to say before he even said it: “Don’t drink anything,” he said. His cracking voice revealed that he too had developed a bout of thirst. “Just as the creatures are not to be trusted, neither is anything about this place. Don’t touch the flowers, the trees, the grass, and certainly not the water.”
“What might it do to us?” Micah asked, rubbing his throat with a grimace.
“Just… don’t trust it,” Ibrahim said.
It was as if The Dewglades’ very environment was conspiring to bring its trespassers’ to their downfall, designed to seduce at every turn.
“Let’s keep moving. I’m not comfortable with us standing here anymore,” Ibrahim said.
Thus, we continued on our trek through the marsh… But not for long.
On passing through a line of trees, we emerged in a circular clearing, scattered with flowers. In the center was erected a thick log. It looked like some sort of ritual had gone on here, a ceremony, perhaps. Had this been where the humming had come from? This was about the right location.
“Look over there,” Yuri whispered. He pointed to our left. Among the trees stood a house. We hurried forward, circling it cautiously. It looked like a house that belonged in a fairytale. Constructed entirely of wooden logs, it was bedecked with more flowers, the same white flowers that these marsh dwellers appeared to be so fond of. Two narrow staircases wound up the two side walls, and the door was small, oval and dyed moss green. Two narrow staircases scaled either side of the building. I wondered what it was like inside.
“Interesting,” Ibrahim muttered.
After exploring the circumference of the
building, we huddled together again. “Do we dare enter it?” Gavin asked.
“Yes, we should check it out. I don’t think all of us should go in, though. There won’t be room, anyway. You people stay here and I’ll quickly have a whizz around,” Ibrahim said.
We waited for two minutes and then he reemerged with a shrug.
“Clearly it’s recently been inhabited,” he said. “But it’s empty. Nobody around.”
“Let’s keep looking in this area,” my father said. “If we found one house, maybe there will be others too.”
Sure enough, we came across another building just a few yards away. It was of the same construction as the first. Ibrahim searched it, returning once again with a grim expression.
“Nobody at home,” he said
We passed a dozen more houses, which led to a dozen more. But after searching through almost thirty, all of them being empty, we gave up and retraced our steps back toward the clearing.
“Let’s have a look in some other direction,” Ibrahim said.
We had searched what I guessed was north of the clearing, and now Ibrahim pointed south, past the erected log and through the cluster of trees behind it. It looked to me like we were about to simply become engulfed in more endless forest, but to my surprise, on passing through the first stretch of trees, we reached a stone wall, a wall which was obviously very old. Moss and creepers that resembled ivy had overrun it, giving it a mysterious, foreboding appearance. Although there were many tall people among us, the wall was far too high for any of us to peer over. We moved further along the wall to find that it wound around in a circle, and after five minutes we were back where we had started. It’s some kind of circular enclosure. A secret garden of the marsh dwellers, perhaps?
“Just wait here for a second,” Ibrahim said, before lifting himself into the air. He stopped as he drifted over the top of the wall and then went quite silent. His breath hitched.
“What do you see?” several of us asked, our voices constricted with anticipation.
Still, Ibrahim didn’t answer.
“Are you all right, Ibrahim?” my grandfather Aiden called up.
When the warlock finally descended, his face had gone completely pale, shock in his eyes.
My heart plummeted.
“Say something, dammit,” my father said.
“I… I think it’s best you see it for yourself,” he managed.
He raised us all up at once, lifting us higher and higher until our heads, too, poked above the boundary.
I stared down over the enclosure, confused at first as to what, exactly, I was looking at. But after a few seconds, it clicked… and I, too, felt the warmth leave my complexion.
We were staring into a garden all right. A garden I doubted I could dream up in my worst nightmares.
A quaint stone path ran the diameter of the circular compound, in between bushes of vibrant flowers, and connecting what I had first mistaken for some kind of tall, upright, rectangular wooden blocks. They had stuck out to me as strange, like some kind of simplistic, contemporary art pieces that you would see back on Earth… until I had realized that the boxes were semitransparent. And within them were encased bodies.
As Ibrahim descended with us into the garden, I honestly wasn’t sure that I wanted to get any closer. Within the slabs of what appeared to be resin were preserved corpses of a myriad of supernatural creatures. Supernaturals who had been so unfortunate as to cross paths with these marsh dwellers. I even wondered whether all of them had trespassed in The Dewglades, or if the marsh dwellers had gone out hunting for them in other lands.
There were vampires, werewolves, merfolk, and even what I suspected to be a dragon in his humanoid form. There was probably also a witch or two.
All of them had two things in common, however. A string of white flowers bound around their waists, and smooth, hairless skin—even the males.
I felt like throwing up.
“What is this?” I breathed
“It’s like a trophy display,” Claudia said weakly. She was leaning against her husband for support.
As much as it chilled me to the bone, I realized that all of us had been searching for Lucas.
Thankfully, we didn’t find him. But how long did Lucas have? It was pretty obvious from just a few seconds of gazing around in this garden what fate all trespassers had in store for them. That humming, had it been the spirits performing some kind of preliminary ceremony for Lucas to prepare for his encasement?
How, exactly, did they kill their victims?
None of the corpses in this garden appeared to be grossly injured. Their bodies looked quite intact… Oh. Except for the vampires. Now I spotted narrow stab wounds through their chests, above their hearts. But the rest had barely a scratch on them.
Lucas was a fae. He would be all right if he managed to stay in his subtle form, but that marsh dweller had already grabbed hold of him. Would he be able to reassume his subtle form? Had he already done so? I suspected that my uncle’s survival would lie in the answer to that single question.
“We’ve got to find him!” Jeramiah wheezed.
“Well, he’s not in here, thank God,” Ibrahim said. “So I don’t see a reason to stay in this ghastly place any longer.”
He lifted everyone back over the wall and planted us on the ground outside. I was sure, however, that the vision of that garden would remain imprinted on my mind for a long, long time to come.
“Okay,” my father said, rubbing his temples and pulling his focused expression. “Let’s think. Let’s just think.”
I gazed around the trees again. The chilling thought occurred to me that the marsh dwellers might even be watching us now from some secret hiding place, waiting for another of us to slip up so they could pounce on us. If Ibrahim wasn’t with us, at least a few of us would likely already be decorations in their garden.
Decorations. No. That would be far too cruel a fate for Lucas. He’d already spent twenty years as a decoration in the ghouls’ ponds.
“Let’s move around the back of this garden again,” Ibrahim said, glancing furtively around, as though he too feared that marsh dwellers were spying on us.
We bundled around the back and then left the wall altogether and traipsed deeper into the forest. We walked until we were a good half mile away from the clearing. We passed no more houses, or any other gardens—thank heavens—and we had plunged back into the deep, mysterious forest.
“Maybe our best strategy is to wait,” Ibrahim said. “When I was in one of the houses, the one nearest to the clearing, I noticed a bath of resin. Maybe that’s where they plan to do the encasing.”
Waiting seemed like the hardest thing we could possibly do. And yet I thought we all sensed that Ibrahim was right. We had found a township. The marsh dwellers had obviously heard our approach and run off. But this township was their home. They had to return sometime… After all, their garden was here.
“I’ll cast invisibility over all of us,” Ibrahim said. “Then we can wait in front of the garden, near that house, with a good view of the clearing. We’ll be able to see when they return.”
I gulped. So many things could go wrong with this plan, but what choice did we have?
We just had to hope that the marsh dwellers wouldn’t decide to carry out their encasing procedure elsewhere… before they even returned.
Lucas
I had no idea what mysticism was contained within the waterways of The Dewglades, but it was akin to no magic I had experienced before. The moment we’d hit the stream, the queen’s body wrapped around mine like an anaconda, and some kind of metaphysical pull whooshed me through the water along with her. We twisted and turned abruptly at corners, traveling who knew how many miles per hour… and then just as suddenly it was all over. We stopped abruptly mid-flow. I opened my eyes underwater to see the queen had reached out and gripped a root jutting out in the bank. Gripping hold of it with her arms, her strong legs wound around my waist, she pulled us both out of the water.
We rolled onto another mushy bank, where she immediately stood up and pulled me to my feet.
Laughter and singing filled the air again as the rest of the marsh dwellers emerged from the water with us.
The queen led me to a nearby tree and climbed up onto a thick low-hanging branch. She snapped her fingers and three male marsh dwellers immediately hurried to escort me up onto it after her. We sat a few inches apart. She gazed down at the ground as the marsh dwellers beneath us resumed their dizzying dance.
Her being distracted allowed me to turn my mind back to the few seconds before I had been dragged into the water. They had heard something, something that had unsettled them so much that they had paused festivities and abandoned the clearing. What else could they have heard but Derek and the rest of my family looking for me?
As my eyes returned to the queen, who was thankfully still keeping her distance for now as she enjoyed the performance, a thought struck me. A thought that was so obvious it would certainly have occurred to me before, had I not woken up to the horrors of Ottalie.
I was sitting right next to a marsh dweller. A creature we had been scouring this realm hoping to find. And this was the queen, no less.
I needed to stop thinking I was a victim—something Sofia had never needed to be reminded of, even after I had kidnapped and, well, treated her in rather a similar way to how this queen was treating me now…
It might turn out to be a useless conversation if I never managed to reunite with the others, but I had to live one moment at a time.
I also figured that keeping this marsh dweller talking could only work to my advantage. She was a female, after all. And what female didn’t like to be charmed?
“What is your name?” I asked the queen, trying to even out my voice and deepen it.
She looked quite delighted by my question as she fluttered her eyelashes and tilted her head to face me. “Bria,” she replied. Her cheeks even flushed.