6. Carter
6
Carter
“N ow that everyone’s reacquainted”—Lex stood at the head of the breakfast table, his hands splayed out in front of him—“anyone have any ideas how to end this fucker?”
Ivy told us about commanding the king to get off Mount Vernon. “That had just been Lex and me. With the four of us?” She shrugged. “We’re a lot more powerful.”
“Remember when I tried to compel the queen at Samhain?” Lex told our spouses the same thing he’d said earlier that day about her claim to be the Great Source. “I wonder how many mysteries are waiting to be unearthed in that noggin of hers.”
“You think if we fix her, we can get rid of the king?” Ivy pursed her lips, considering it.
“Maybe she knows how it was done the first time, how they banned him from our realm at the beginning.” Lex shrugged, indicating he thought it was a good idea. “She might even know a better option—something more than sacrifices and blood oaths.”
“Siobhan said they were equals, that one could not exist without the other. They create a balance.” Ivy pinched her bottom lip while she paced and thought out loud. “At the wedding, Alberich looked wrecked, barely a version of his former self.” She closed her eyes and squinted, like something was coming to her out of nowhere. “He tried to open the car door by the handle.”
Lex furrowed his eyebrows, and I waited for her to continue.
“But he couldn’t because it was locked.” She looked up when she realized we were staring at her. “Why didn’t he use magic to open it? Why was it just him and not his goons?”
“Are you saying he can’t use his magic?” Lex asked.
She shrugged. “Siobhan’s sister, Ashley, said they couldn’t be apart from each other without consequences. What if they’re like us?”
“Well, shit,” I said, rubbing at the back of my head as all this information fell into place. “If they’re like us, does that mean we’re like them?” Three sets of eyes turned to me, as if that had just uncovered something profound. “What?”
“Siobhan said the magic mutated when we took the vow in those ruins.” Ivy glanced at Lex. “She said when this all ends, it’s the four of us left standing.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Miri scrubbed her face, clearly exhausted by everything that had happened and everything left to come.
I understood. My agent had to cut my tour short because of this family emergency, but both back to back had turned me into a zombie. I’d need to sleep for ten years after this was over.
“It means we defeat him,” I said. “It means we were always supposed to do this.”
“Alright, Mr. Toxic Positivity,” Lex said. “We’re still trying to figure that out.”
“Siobhan said it was the four of us that ended this, right?” Miri asked.
“In the end, it’s the four of us,” I confirmed.
No one said anything for a long moment while we processed that. Could we bring him down? Could four measly humans do what had taken a powerful fairy to accomplish ages ago? Based on what we’d done thus far, we’d have better luck landing on the moon.
“Us being back together again means something, definitely,” I said, “but if we’re going to get rid of the king, we should start with the queen.”
“I’ve tried to use my magic on her. So did Ivy. It doesn’t work.” Lex shook his head.
“I felt something when I touched her yesterday,” Miri explained.
Ivy raised her eyebrows. “Felt what?”
Miri shrugged. “I don’t quite know. But I got a glimpse…a hint of something. Should we try?” Miri glanced between us. “Should we go upstairs and put our hands on the queen to see what happens?”
As if summoned by talking about her, Diana coasted down the stairs with one hand on the banister, giving her an angelic ambiance. Power and decadence radiated off her in powerful waves, but nowhere near as strong as it had once been.
She smiled and asked us something in her strange language before twirling around the table and opening the fridge to retrieve a juice box we kept there for Poppy. She opened the straw and slammed it into the hole, glancing up when she noticed all of us staring. Inquisitive, she made a bright sound and walked over to the table. “Dune-shatcha-thee?”
Diana put a hand on Lex’s shoulder, giving him a tender look that reminded me of the incredulous one she’d given us in Faerie the first time we met her. She’d mentioned cutting off his pretty head to hang on a spike in her tent if he tried to use his magic on her again. Even as she said the words, her eyes echoed with amusement and fascination. That same expression lingered there now, the one that was curious about Lex and wanted to know more.
“Are we doing this?” Ivy asked.
Lex answered that by giving the queen a gentle grin and taking her hand to bring her knuckles to his lips for a respectful kiss. I moved closer, putting my hand over his. Ivy and Miri did the same, and we stood in a circle next to the queen, all of us linked with her.
“Tell me the truth,” Lex said. “Are you still in there?”
Tightness squirmed in my chest, creeping up my spine and over my scalp. It was the same kind of tingling that coated my skin anytime we crossed over into Faerie. Magic. It pulsed between us like an electric current, bright and sharp and potent. My knees almost buckled as the shock hit me in the gut.
“Fuck.” I leaned over the table to hold myself up. A thunderous vibration shot down my legs, churning in my stomach, almost like when I let myself play poker, like luck was literally on my side, effervescent and overwhelming. I drank it in, pulling whatever it was over us, washing us with its majesty. We’d need it. We’d need all the help we could get. The bond between us burst open, pumping power through my veins and all around us like a hurricane. The queen moaned and tried to pull away, but Lex held her tighter.
“Let me in,” Ivy said. “Just let me in.”
“I can feel it,” Miri said. “The sickness. The evil. Whatever he did to her, it’s gripping her tight.”
“ Tell me,” Lex bellowed again. “Are you in there?”
Diana shouted out in anguish and ripped her hand away, clutching it with her other fingers. Her guards rushed down the stairs at the sound of her scream. Where once they had worked for Lex, protecting her because his Uncle Dmitri had ordered them to, now they seemed like she had transfixed them. She spoke to them in her strange language, and they did her bidding, which suited us fine as long as they didn’t turn on us.
Diana didn’t say anything, just glanced between the four of us with narrowed eyes and pursed lips. She didn’t seem mad, at least not now that she realized she was safe. She was more confused, her eyebrows furrowed and her lips slightly parted. Then, she turned on her heels and marched upstairs, muttering something low under her breath.
“Did it work?” I hissed, glancing at the other three, arguably the most powerful out of the four of us. “Did we fix her?”
Ivy grimaced and ran a hand over her neck. “I don’t think so.”
“Fuck,” Lex snapped, rubbing his face.
“She’s better,” Miri said with a small nod. “We helped.”
“How can you tell?” I didn’t feel any different, and the queen hadn’t suddenly returned to her old self.
Miri shrugged and said, “I can see it,” before heading outside to the porch.
I looked at Ivy, who gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder before following our princess. Lex met my gaze with a cynical one of his own. It was true that Miri had some connection to their realm that we didn’t understand. When we were in Faerie, she could tell who was fairy and who was human. She said the trees talked to her, told her things about her life that turned out to be true.
If she said we’d helped the queen, I believed her. But I also worried about our princess. I didn’t know what strain this was putting on her, and I didn’t want to lose her. Never again.
* * *
We ate dinner together and schemed the rest of the night. We needed to contact Siobhan, but we couldn’t count on her being alive or still willing to assist. Ivy’s siblings, Abigail and Henry, could be useful in keeping Ivy’s mother distracted, but other than that, we didn’t want them involved. We talked in circles until we couldn’t see straight, but ultimately went to bed with nothing more than conjecture and a list of possibilities.
Without Siobhan and Poppy, we were on our own. Without the queen, we had nothing but each other.
Ivy and Miri curled up in the middle of the mattress with Lex on the other side, protecting our most valuable center. The four of us hadn’t reconnected the way we used to, and the tension between Lex and Miri hadn’t fully healed. I wasn’t sure they’d even talked alone since their argument in the tub.
It could be good again, if we tried. If we defeated the king. If we still had our bond after all this was over. If we still loved each other.
The thought that this might end ached deep in my gut. I loved my spouses, each one in their own way, and I sure as hell liked being lucky. Maybe it wasn’t as useful as being able to detect lies or as powerful as invading someone’s mind, but I lived an easy life because of it. I liked having my gift, and I liked the people I shared it with.
I woke up around 3 a.m. parched, and I went downstairs for a glass of water where I found Miri out on the patio, her hands splayed out to either side of the railing, her skin glowing in the moonlight. She wore a floor-length lavender silk nightgown, mirroring her dark hair as both floated around her in the breeze.
For a moment, I paused to watch her, memorizing the slender slope of her neck as it became her shoulder and the way her spine rolled down the middle of her back in a delicate curve. She looked like a goddess, like the queen of the night come here to destroy us. She glanced over her shoulder and caught me staring, her eyes illuminated from within. In the months apart, she’d lost the fleshiness around her hips that had once made her soft and pliable. Now all hard edges and sharp corners, she seemed more evil than she was. But Persephone was the Goddess of springtime and the underworld for a reason. Both could be true.
“What are you doing awake?” I asked as I took a few steps closer.
She hummed and returned to admiring the cool night air, lifting her chin as the wind picked up the pieces of curly chestnut locks around her face. “Listening.”
The trees rustled, whispering secrets only Miri could understand. Still, I closed my eyes anyway, hoping that I might get lucky, that I might be given a rare opportunity to see behind the curtain. An owl hooted in the distance, and the crunch of last autumn’s leaves hinted at a larger animal moving close by—maybe a deer or a mountain lion.
“What are they saying?” I murmured.
“They’re coming,” she said.
I snapped my eyes open and looked at her, my heart rate starting to skyrocket. “Who’s coming, Miri?”
She shrugged, but didn’t seem bothered by whatever it was. “Don’t be scared. They’re not here to hurt us. The trees will protect us.”
I thought about running back inside to wake up Lex and Ivy, but I wanted these few moments alone with her. I understood why she had pulled away, and I understood how she could believe she was a danger to us. Furrowing my eyebrows, I cleared my throat and stuffed my hands in my pockets, hoping she took what I said next with love and not accusation. “Why didn’t you tell me…about your memory…about what you suspected? Why did you keep it from me?”
Miri didn’t say anything, just looked back out to the woods and took a long, deep inhale. “What would you have done?”
“Something,” I said. “Anything besides leave you alone all this time.”
She made a sad laughing sound, shook her head, and wrapped her tiny, delicate hand around the inside of my elbow before leaning her head on my shoulder. “No, my darling. You couldn’t have done anything at all.”
“I would have tried. I would have…” Fuck, I didn’t know. “I would have taken you on tour with me. We could have been safe together.”
“Romeo.” She gave me a soft smile and leaned in to kiss my cheek. “The same reasons we could never be together are still there. You’re you, and I’m me, and that will never change.”
Once upon a time, I’d been a lowly nobody from Chicago and she’d been HRH Princess Miriam, and we’d run away to California together with nothing but our heartbreak and a promise not to hurt each other. If we were ever going to give it a go, just the two of us, that would have been the time. Still, I fought it. If she had just told me what was going on, I would have insisted. I would have figured out how to delay filming or perhaps persuaded them to recast me altogether. I wouldn’t have cared because we both would have been safe.
I took a step closer, pressing against her so I could wrap my arms around her from behind, pulling her closer to me. Resting my chin on the top of her head, I inhaled her deeply, devouring her flowery scent, letting it ease my nerves.
“All we have is us, Juliet,” I said, kissing her crown.
She nodded and relaxed back against me, intertwining her fingers with mine. “I’ll miss nights like this with you, Romeo.” Her lips brushed my knuckles with a warm caress as she kissed each one individually. “When all this is over.”
I thought again about what she’d said in the bath.
“It’s not safe for me to be here. I should go back to England as soon as we figure out how to break this curse.”
This was never going to be over. Siobhan had told us back in March. The bond we’d formed during this ordeal would never go away, not completely. I tried to imagine my life without her in it, without Ivy or Lex, and the thought made me so hollow, I wanted to curl into a ball and die.
I opened my mouth to respond, to tell her she’d never be able to get rid of me, no matter what her stupid grandmother tried to make her do, but something moved near the tree line, startling me enough to push Miri behind me.
“What is that?” I said. “Did you see that?”
She nodded and walked toward the stairs, despite my attempts to grab her arm and stop her. Miri descended a step before blinking up at me with owlish brown eyes and a devilish smile. “They’re here.”
A familiar figure finally stepped out of the shadows, holding up a hand in peace and solidarity.
Siobhan.
Her dark brown hair hung around her face in thick waves, much longer than the last time I’d seen her, and bruises marred her cheekbones and jaw. Her commander and lover, Finn, appeared next to her, his once short platinum hair now down to his shoulders. His face looked beat to hell as well, but he certainly seemed healthier than when he’d been stabbed through the chest by one of the Fianna a few months ago. Now, he stood upright with a huge round metal shield in one hand and an enormous axe in the other. Finally, Donnelly appeared on the other side of Finn, tall and lithe and quiet. His obsidian hair had also grown to his shoulders, a scowl between his eyebrows. Icy eyes peered at the two of us as he put one hand on the arrows in his quiver and the other on his bow.
“Miri?” Siobhan said, taking another hesitant step forward. “Is that you?”
Miri nodded. “That’s right. It’s me.”
“Fucking hell.” Siobhan took a long, deep inhale and let it out on a sigh. “It’s about damn time. Do you know how long we’ve been waiting for you?”
“Her?” I cut in. “You’re two days late.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Siobhan walked past Miri and climbed the stairs, her warrior lovers following her. “But we got what we needed.”
“The Fianna? The battle maidens? You got them?” I looked between her, Finn, and Donnelly, trying to verify I understood what she meant. When they’d helped us plan to bring down the fairy king, they had taken the responsibility of getting reinforcements. The Fianna were the king’s most loyal soldiers, his army of henchmen that had done whatever he’d asked for centuries. As commander of that army, Finn had their loyalty through a blood oath sworn to him before Alberich. Siobhan had also promised to find the queen’s battle maidens, the ones who had dedicated their lives to protecting Diana.
Finn nodded in answer to my question, the lines of sweat and mud on his face indicating how far they’d traveled and how exhausted they must have been. “We got them.”
I didn’t see anyone behind them.
“They’re waiting in Killwater,” he explained. “They’re ready when we are.”
“Killwater?” I blew out a breath. “How the hell is that supposed to help us here?”
Footsteps from inside the house drew my attention to Weeds, wrapping a robe around herself as she blinked and stepped outside. Lex followed behind her, his features rumpled and puffy with sleep.
“Jesus Christ,” Lex said, brushing his hair out of his face.
“I’m so happy you’re okay.” Ivy pulled Siobhan into a hug before going to Finn and Donnelly to do the same. “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Ivy.” Siobhan gave her a gentle smile. “You have no idea how much.”
“Come on,” Donnelly said, eyeing Miri suspiciously as he walked up the porch steps. “We’ve got a lot to catch up on.”