Chapter Twenty-Six

 

 

 

 

Shade

 

I frowned at the silhouette of the Withering Palace before me. My magic allowed me to jaunt only to the borders of its stone walls, but not within. Of all the disadvantages of becoming an Ancient of Faerie, running into an equally powerful entity like this palace and bumping heads with it was the worst.

Aveta stared lovingly at her castle, reaching out to touch the rough stones of the exterior wall. She closed her eyes and smiled before whipping them open with elation.

“It remembers.”

“Will it return control to you?” I asked, more out of fear than curiosity. I hoped it didn’t. Something deep down told me Aveta would keep her word and stay away from my family, but there were always ways to torment people without lifting a finger.

“Yes, it has.” She turned to me, her oily black eyes dampened with happy tears. I’d never seen her so exhilarated. She was practically drunk with emotion as she turned, hiked up her skirt, and dashed to the front entrance where the Unseelie guards almost messed themselves at the sight of such an apparition. Some of them righted themselves in time to stand between her and the gate and hold out their spears and swords.

“Who goes there?” one hollered.

“Fools! You forget your queen so soon?” Aveta snapped her fingers, and the soldiers dropped to the ground, immobile but grunting with the effort of fighting against her curses. She pressed on, muttering as she passed. I walked behind her, glancing at the guards and wondering if she was going to release them or let them rot.

“Don’t worry, they’ll be fine in just a bit. Come along, girl. You’ve much to learn.”

I threw her an incredulous look. “What are you talking about? I didn’t come here to learn things from you.”

She stopped and swiftly turned, drilling her dark eyes into my very soul. If looks could kill, I’d have been a goner. I straightened, reminding myself who I was in the spectrum of Faerie powers. She may have been powerful for an Unseelie queen, but she was not as powerful as an Ancient, no matter what she thought.

“You’ll bring me what I want, and I will show you what you need to return to your whole world.”

“And what would that be?” I crossed my arms, knowing there was no way she knew what I truly wanted. How would she? She had been trapped in that prison when I’d married Dylan, when I’d become engaged to Soap, and when I had given birth to my daughters. She knew nothing about me, and yet she eyed me like she held an invisible sword, slicing into my insides and studying what lingered there. Maybe she was intuitive, but there was no way she was omniscient.

“It’s what everyone wants: love, belonging, happiness. I’ll show you how to take it back, grasp it with your hands, your mind, heart, and soul, and never let it go. For one so young, you’ve lost so much hope, Shade. I find it hard to believe how little faith you have.”

I pressed my lips together as she turned back around and headed deep into the castle, not to the throne room, where Evangeline and Jack might be waiting, but to the dungeons beneath the castle.

I’d never been down there. It was not a pretty place to linger. Most of it was collapsed, with one side of it full of rubble. The rocks were impassible. It was this side of the dungeon she led me to, past long-forgotten cells with iron bars, filled now only with cobwebs, dust, and ghosts that cried out of the violent past of this place. I shivered as we walked past them, whispers floating in the air. Hauntings were very real in Faerie, but I’d never been in a place where I’d shivered at the caresses of unseen beings. It was rather unsettling, and I wondered if the spirits had the power to harm anyone.

I hoped not.

Not that they could do much to me, but Aveta wasn’t an Ancient. She… what was she now? I cocked my head in her direction, and for the first time I realized she was a fully tangible being again, with a living body. How had this happened? I wondered if my magic had revived or conjured up a mortal body for her to inhabit. There was no other explanation. No wonder she’d had to wait for me to leave the mind prison. It was the only way she wouldn’t come out the other end as a ghost to join the others hanging in the musty dungeon air. The fact that I could do that both thrilled and frightened me at once.

“Here.” Aveta motioned toward the wall of rubble. It was massive and blocked the entire expanse of the dungeon on the west side. “This is it.”

I studied the boulders of black obsidian. They had formed part of the original castle, and what lay above had been built later. Most of the boulders were taller than both of us, and some were as high as a two-story building. I let my eyes wander up the rubble to find an end of it. There was no defined edge on any side of it and nothing to reveal that there had been a labyrinth behind the collapse.

“This is going to take a lot of power,” I said, my voice echoing across the stones. They vibrated under my words as though they knew who I was and what I could do. They were listening for a command from an earth-powered elemental. I turned toward Aveta when something occurred to me. “Why have you not asked the palace to remove the debris?”

“Because it can do nothing for me. My mother cursed the rocks as they fell on her body to make it impossible for me to remove them. I spent years running through witches, sorcerers, and faeries alike, trying to find someone powerful enough to remove the rubble, but no one could break through. That’s when I figured out I had to ask someone far more powerful than anyone else in Faerie to do it. I was going to finesse Arthas into it, but that proved intangible.”

“You’re not kidding. That was a dangerous proposition.”

“It cost me my life, yes, but inn my time in that prison of yours, I figured it out. You were destined to become an Ancient of Faerie, that much I knew. When you did, I would be able to escape the prison and then I would ask you to help me.”

“You mean threaten my family if I didn’t comply?”

Her face darkened, but instead of a frown, her lips upturned into a sheepish grin. “I’m not used to asking kindly.”

“You should try it sometime.”

“I’m an Unseelie queen. I do not ask.”

I sighed, tired of ever trying to change her mind. “Very well. Let’s get this started; I’m sick of being here. It may be your home, but this place is nothing but misery to me.”

Aveta scoffed as I stepped forward and placed my hands on the glassy obsidian boulders. It felt sleek, like I was touching a mirror instead of rock-hard stone. It was smooth enough for me to see a dark reflection of myself in it. Oddly enough, the rock felt alive beneath my fingers and pulsated with life as I closed my eyes, channeling my earth magic, which I rarely used, straight into it.

I felt the ground rumble as Aveta grabbed my arm, screaming. She pulled me back as the boulder split, the crack expanding upward toward the ceiling, raining more dust and debris down upon us.

“Stop! The rest is collapsing!”

I barely heard Aveta’s words as the rocks pelted us. She conjured a shield to keep them from injuring us. The bubble of the shield held, but it wouldn’t if we became completely buried under the rock.

She turned, her eyes wide and wild as her face purpled with the strain of holding the rocks off of us.

“You need to break through now, or we’ll be buried alive!”

I reached out again, pressing my palms into the rock as it shattered, cutting my hands with thousands of shards. I screamed, trying my best to not pull away as blood streamed down my arms. My power finally fused with the obsidian, sweeping the jagged shards up into a funnel that swept around us in a roaring wind.

My arms, my face, and my dress were ripped nearly to shreds as tiny slivers of obsidian sliced at us. Aveta screamed from the pain as her shield dissipated. She covered her head with her arms as she dropped to the ground. I held my arms up, attempting to focus my energy into my untamed earth powers to move the stones away from us and create a stable arch leading into the cavern now widening before us.

The rocks shattered as they crashed into each other. I willed the pieces to fuse together and take the shape I held in my mind. The rumble and roar of noise was deafening until, after several minutes that had felt like hours, the dungeon grew eerily quiet, and I collapsed to the ground next to Aveta, cut, bleeding, and completely drained. I closed my eyes and plunged into stygian darkness.