creepy hollow 03 - faerie war Read online

  “Okay,” I say. “How can I help you?”

  “Draven has been busy these past weeks getting all the Guilds across the realm under his control. Now that that’s done, he’ll come after the rest of us. He knows about the Underground tunnels. It will be easy enough for him to find all the fae who reside down here. So we need to move. We need a new place to hide. It is an enormous undertaking, though, to move our entire community. We are not even sure yet how to do it. One thing is certain, though: We will need protection along the way. And although we have warriors, no one can fight like a guardian. I would like you to assist them.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “So . . . you plan to go into hiding?”

  He nods.

  “But …” I pause, wondering if I’m allowed to speak my mind, or if I’m just supposed to say ‘Yes, sir’ and keep quiet.

  “What is it?” he asks. “Please speak your mind. Your input is valuable.” There’s a snort from someone sitting behind me. Asim looks past me and frowns.

  When his gaze returns to me, I take a deep breath and use my politest voice. “I don’t think you should be hiding. I mean, that won’t work forever. Someone will eventually find you.”

  Asim’s fist clenches slowly, but his face seems to remain calm. “And what would you propose we do?”

  Apparently it’s not as obvious to them as it is to me. “Well, you know . . . try to take Draven down.”

  From the chair on Asim’s right, Jamon shakes his head. “You think we haven’t considered that? Of course we want to take him down, but even if we allied with all the fae that Draven doesn’t yet have control over, we would still lose. Aside from the fact that he alone is more powerful than anyone else in the history of our realm, he also has the entire Unseelie Court on his side, as well as all the Guild members he’s managed to brainwash. Not to mention everyone he’s captured from the Seelie Court. That’s some serious power he has on his side.”

  Crap. That certainly is a lot of power. “How did he get the entire Unseelie Court on his side? Surely the Unseelie Queen doesn’t support him?”

  “Perhaps they’ve also all been brainwashed,” Jamon suggests.

  “And the Seelie Queen?”

  “She appears to have gone into hiding,” Asim says, “and has so far done nothing to try and end Draven’s reign.”

  Fantastic. “And this brainwashing you keep talking about. It’s real?”

  “It must be,” the man on Asim’s left says. “How else would Draven get everyone to follow him without question?”

  I nod. Some kind of magical brainwashing does seem to make sense. I cross my arms because I still feel a little weird standing in the middle of this circle, and I’m not sure what to do with them. “Okay, well, you said I should speak my mind, and I have. I still think you should fight Draven. The only alternative is to go into hiding, and he will eventually find you. Then he’ll brainwash all of you, and you’ll have to serve him just like everyone else. But if you ally with every free fae community still out there, you at least have a small chance of defeating him bit by bit. And even if it takes years, it’s better than losing your free will and basically becoming a slave.”

  “You make a good point,” Asim says as he slowly rubs his chin. “We will need to fight him at some point, but I still believe our first priority is to get our people to safety. It may not be common knowledge exactly where we live, but it’s no secret either. When Draven wants to know where we are, it will be easy enough for him to find out.

  “So,” he continues, and I step to the edge of the circle because I sort of feel like I’ve been dismissed, “as the rest of you in this room already know, we’ve found a suitable hiding place. I’ve also found several architect faeries who are not on Draven’s side. They’re already working on the hiding place to enlarge it and create suitable homes within it. We now need to figure out how to get everyone and their possessions there.”

  I feel my eyebrows knit together as I listen to Asim. I’m not quite sure why there’s a problem here. Can’t reptiscillas just do that thing where they vanish from one spot and reappear at another? I don’t say anything, though, because there’s obviously a reason why that wouldn’t work.

  “We’ll be meeting at the same time tomorrow to discuss that problem. For now, I need to visit our faerie prisoner.”

  He stands, signaling the end of the meeting. The rest of the reptiscillan leaders rise, some chatting, others leaving the hall quickly, as though they have somewhere important to be. I want to thank Jamon for standing up for me during the meeting, but I know I can’t do so without revealing my eavesdropping. He’s busy talking to someone else anyway. “Okay, if you think it’s a good idea,” he says to a woman I can’t see properly. He touches her arm. “I’ll see you later, Mom.”

  Mom? I wasn’t sure at first that Jamon still had a mother; he never mentioned her to me. But I’ve heard others speak of her since I arrived here weeks ago, always with the same respect they afford their Leader Supreme.

  As Jamon steps away and heads for the door, I get my first good look at her. I’m startled to find she’s already watching me, almost as if she were waiting for me. Ice shoots through my veins, drenching me in goose bumps.

  I recognize her.

  I recognize the shape of her face and her slender form. I recognize the hundreds of braids in her hair. Not from now, but from my previous life. The life I don’t remember.

  I walk slowly toward her. I open my mouth to say something, but she holds her hand up to silence me. I can only stare. My encounter with her in my previous life was brief, and the edges of the image appear fuzzy in my mind. But I remember her exactly the way she is now. Fire in her black eyes. Tight, dark clothing. Hair separated into many thin braids, each with a silver ribbon running through it.

  When there is no one left in the hall but the two of us, she lowers her hand.

  “I remember you,” I say faintly.

  “And I you.”

  “I fought you, didn’t I? I . . . almost stabbed you with an arrow. But you disappeared.” I remember the slicing pain of her incisors when she bit my arm.

  She nods. “I was trying to kill someone. You stopped me. In doing so you brought destruction upon all of us.”

  My eyes widen and my mouth drops open. “Excuse me? You were trying to kill someone, but I’m the one who brought destruction upon everyone?”

  “The person I was trying to kill was Draven.”

  I didn’t think it possible, but my mouth drops open even further. “But . . . why would I stop you from killing Draven? And why was I anywhere near him?”

  She sighs, then indicates that I should sit down. Good idea, since my legs are starting to feel like they aren’t entirely attached to my body. “He wasn’t Draven back then,” she says. “He was just a boy who had no idea he had magic inside him. You were sent to his home by your Guild to protect him from me, and I was there because of the vision I’d seen. The vision in which he took on the power of the evil halfling Tharros and became evil himself. I decided to kill him before that could ever happen.”

  “But I stopped you,” I whisper, feeling my back begin to bow beneath the enormous weight of responsibility.

  “Yes. You were simply doing your job, and you did it well. I had to vanish or you would have killed me. When I returned a few days later to finish off what I’d started, I found protective spells around his home. There was no way I could get to him.”

  I lower my head into my hands. “So . . . it’s all my fault? The Destruction, everything? All because I saved his life when he should have died?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Or no. There are many answers to that question, depending on which part of his life you look at. You could blame his mother for wanting to have a baby. You could blame anyone who may have saved his life after you did. You could blame me for knowing from the beginning that I would fail.”

  I raise my head. “What do you mean?”

  She lowers her eyes. “In my vision, I saw myself
attacking you first in the boy’s garden, hoping to get you out of the way before I went for him. But you defeated me. So in reality, when I arrived in the garden and saw you there, I waited for you to go into his room. Then I went straight for him, hoping I could kill him quickly with one snap of his neck before you could even get involved. But, once again, you defeated me and saved him.”

  “As if he wasn’t supposed to die,” I say quietly.

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. I’ll never know. It doesn’t matter, though. The fact remains that he lived to take on Tharros’ power.”

  I close my eyes and slump lower in my chair. “Why did I have to be good at being a guardian? Why couldn’t I have messed up just that one assignment? Then none of these awful things would have happened.”

  “No one will ever know what might have been if I had managed to kill him,” she says.

  She. The reptiscilla whose name I don’t even know. It seems silly to ask her now. Her name is completely insignificant next to the fact that I saved the life of the boy who turned into the most powerful and evil guy in our realm.

  My brain taunts me with words I don’t want to think: My fault. My fault. Even my heart seems to beat it out. My. Fault. MY. FAULT.

  No wonder there are people down here who hate me so much. I open my eyes and ask, “Does everyone know about this?”

  She shakes her head. “Not a soul. I was alone when I had the vision, and I certainly didn’t want to tell anyone about it after I’d failed.”

  Oh. So people really do hate me simply for being a guardian.

  “Did you vote to have me locked up here as a prisoner?” I wouldn’t blame her.

  “Actually, I voted for you to stay here and help us.”

  I pull my head back in surprise. “Why?”

  “It’s quite simple,” she says. “There is no one here who wants to defeat Draven more than you do now that you know you played a part in keeping him alive when he should have died. You will stop at nothing to rid the world of his evil because you have everything to make up for.” She pauses, and her voice is quieter when she says, “As do I.”

  I sit up a little straighter and nod. “I’ll do whatever I can. I’ll try to help you form alliances with other fae. I’ll fight beside you.”

  She reaches forward and touches my hand. “Good. We’ll bring him down if it’s the last thing we do.”

  *

  After leaving the hall, I wander around the market for a while, thinking. It must be early evening by now because people are beginning to pack their stalls away. I head toward the playground. Farah’s home is nice enough, but I’m tired of spending so much time there. Besides, Farah can talk as if it’s her last hour on earth and she has to fill it with as many words as possible. That’s great for someone like me who’d rather listen than talk, but right now all I want is to sit quietly somewhere and process the fact that I’m partly to blame for The Destruction and everything bad that’s happened since. Because that is a BIG DEAL. The kind of big deal that makes me want to do something to fix it right now. Because if I don’t, I might just shrivel up from all the shame and guilt eating at me.

  I sit down on one of the swings and lean forward. Okay, so I let the bad guy live. Big mistake, obviously. But I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know the world would just about fall apart because of it. So instead of berating myself, I should be thinking about how we can defeat him. Yes. That’s what I’ll think about. I’ll try to be as—

  “Violet?” I look up and see Jamon and the girl with green ribbons in her hair—Natesa?—strolling toward me. “Are you okay?” he asks.

  I sit up straight. “Um, yeah. Why?”

  The girl smiles. “You’re staring at the ground as though it’s done something terribly offensive.”

  Right. I make a conscious effort to smooth out my features as I say, “Uh, no, that’s just my thinking face.”

  She laughs. “Well, anyway, I’m Natesa. We haven’t actually met yet.”

  “Oh, yeah, hi.” I should probably say something else, but I have no idea what. I think Natesa is the girl who dropped off some clothes for me at Farah’s house during my first week here, but I’m not certain. It would be weird if I thanked her and it turned out to be someone else. I wind a strand of hair around my finger and try to think up some appropriate words. Have I always been this awkward around people I don’t know, or are social skills are just something I forgot along with the rest of the details of my life?

  “Okay, well, I need to get home.” She rolls her eyes. “My mother’s expecting me. She’s been seriously overprotective ever since The Destruction.”

  “Oh, okay.” I give her a little wave as she hurries away. When she’s out of sight, I say, “I didn’t scare her off, did I?”

  “No, no, she was telling the truth about needing to get home.” Jamon sits down on the swing beside me. “Natesa is one of the few people who isn’t scared of you, actually. She’s been telling me for weeks to get over myself and stop treating you like someone who’s about to attack us all.”

  I scoot backward with my feet, then let myself swing forward. “I like Natesa.”

  “Yeah, everyone does. She’s pretty awesome.”

  I swing back and forth, watching the dreamy look on his face each time I pass him. I want to tease him about her—I mean, it’s so obvious he likes her—but I’m not sure we’re at the point yet where I can do that. He might lose his temper and threaten to lock me up.

  I bring the swing to a stop, then turn in the seat to face him. I want to know where we stand with each other, and there’s only one way to find out. “Do you still hate me?” I ask.

  He’s silent for a moment, then shakes his head.

  “So it’s really that easy for you to change your mind about me? All I had to do was shoot our common enemy?”

  He shrugs. “I suppose so. In my head, I’ve separated you from the rest of your kind. To me, you’re not really one of them.”

  “So you still hate guardians in general?”

  “Yes.”

  I wrap my hand around the swing’s linked chain. “Why? I don’t get it. Farah told me that guardians fight evil in order to protect people. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  He shakes his head slowly, but I can’t tell if he means no or if he just means that I don’t understand. “They protect humans. They protect themselves. Occasionally they protect other fae. Mostly, though, they seem to wind up killing or capturing fae creatures for crimes that I would hardly call evil. They dish out so-called justice to everyone else, but who judges them? Who do they have to answer to?” He raises his eyes to look at me. “I wonder how many you’ve killed.”

  His words startle me. Killed? There’s a possibility I’ve killed someone? My hand slips down the chain, and I watch it, trying not to imagine it covered in blood. I have faint memories of fighting various creatures. Memories that dance at the edges of my mind, flitting away when I try to grasp at them. I suppose it’s only logical that I ended up killing some of those creatures. “I don’t know,” I admit. “But I’m sure I wouldn’t kill anyone unless they deserved it and they gave me no other choice.”

  “You’re sure, huh?”

  “Yes,” I say with more certainty than I feel.

  “Well, anyway, I have to get going.” He stands up. “We’re making preparations to move our entire community. It’s going to be a major mission.”

  “Oh, I wanted to ask you about that,” I say. “Your dad was saying you don’t know how to get everyone to the new hiding place. Why can’t you all just do your vanishing thing and end up there?”

  “The children haven’t learned how to do that yet. And what about all our belongings?” He looks at me like I’m stupid. “We may know some magic, Violet, but we can’t do the things faeries do. We can’t recreate everything from scratch with a snap of our fingers when we get there.”

  Right, like it’s really that easy for faeries. “Am I missing something here?” I ask. “Why can’t you take your
stuff with you when you vanish?”

  Now he’s looking at me as though I have the intelligence level of a troll. “We can’t take things with us when we vanish. We take ourselves and that’s it. That’s the way it works.”

  “Oh. So . . . you’ve obviously tested that out?”

  He rolls his eyes. “Obviously. Reptiscillas have known about this limitation for centuries, Violet. Anything bigger than, I don’t know, a loaf of bread gets left behind when you vanish with it.”

  I stand up quickly, leaving the swing’s chains rattling against each other. “You know what? I think I can help you.”

  Two days later, more than two thousand reptiscillas living Underground have packed up their belongings. They can’t vanish with them, obviously, but that’s where I come in. Being a faerie, I don’t have the reptiscillas’ limitations. I can take anything I want through the faerie paths with me, as long as I keep hold of it. So I told Asim that if everyone loaded their stuff onto carts, I could open a really wide doorway to the faerie paths and pull the carts through with me.

  I was excited about my idea, as were Asim and the other leaders, until I calculated that it would take me about ten hours of continuous work to get the hundreds of cartloads through the faerie paths. But I’m a guardian, so I can handle it, right? And doing this will prove to the remaining reptiscillan doubters that I can be trusted.

  The only thing I can’t help them with is moving their children. Reptiscillan children haven’t learned how to vanish yet, and they can’t travel through the faerie paths because it would kill them. So every child under the age of ten left on foot early yesterday morning for the new hideout, accompanied by their parents, several leaders, and a whole lot of warriors.

  Things have been tense down here ever since.

  “Okay, every family who owns a cart has finished loading up,” Jamon says as he walks toward me. “You’ll need to bring empty carts back for everyone else.”

  I nod. I’m standing in the middle of the Circle, and every tunnel I look down has carts lined up as far as I can see. Each cart is big enough to carry at least twenty people. Reptiscillas use magic to move their carts around, and I’m obviously going to have to do the same thing.