Chapter 18
eighteen
Maera was sure that they left, even though I’d made her sit with me in an open field from which we could see the Chamber building.
It was just there, possibly not even fifty feet away, and it was dark, but the torches in the front still burned with that orange fire.
Impossible to miss in the darkness, when even the moon seemed intent on hiding behind clouds tonight.
I hadn’t seen the Council members leave. I’d been looking at that building almost all the damn time, not able to gather enough courage to run back, but not fully convinced to walk away, either. Not just yet.
But Maera, who’d stayed with me and looked so much more panicked than I’d ever seen her before, insisted that they’d already left. When I asked, from where? she just said, from the back.
How could I not take her word for it?
“If you don’t stop walking in circles, I’m going to throw up soon.” And I meant it. She moved so fast, almost like her feet were gliding on the grass, it made my head spin.
Maera stopped. Sighed. Sat cross-legged just to my left.
She looked back as if to make sure that the wolves and the people who’d seen us to the Chamber hadn’t come back—and they hadn’t. We were all alone with the night. And the occasional howl in the distance every few minutes, which was strangely calming.
“I’m sorry, Nilah. This is just…so much more than I imagined.” Coming from her, it was a big deal. Since I’d met her, she’d always been so composed.
“It is. It’s so much more than should even be possible, and I can’t even laugh about it because I’m pretty sure I’ll cry halfway through.
I mean, the Ice Queen whose soul I have inside me is pretty much a baby-killing monster, but then she…
had a change of heart? Regretted having made the deal with that devil?
And then she left me to pick up the slack—me! ”
“Yeah, the fae are fucked up like that,” she said, and this time I did laugh. Just the way she said it, like it came from her very soul, and I felt it in mine.
“You can say that again,” I said, and by some miracle, didn’t cry. “His sons. He killed his own sons.”
“Pretty sure there’s worse stories out there if we want to look,” Maera said.
“No thanks. I think I’m good.” If I never heard another fae story, I was perfectly fine.
My God, those tales I’d read in the Seelie Court, then in the Ice Queen’s bedroom—they were all based on real things. All those terrible tales I thought were just horror stories, and now I realized they weren’t.
“It’s only normal to be afraid,” said Maera. “I am, too.”
“It’s not just about the fear.” And I wouldn’t say it out loud to her, but it was me. It was how filthy and dirty I suddenly felt.
The soul of a queen—what a fucking nightmare. It was inside me, and I couldn’t get it out.
“Where are they?” I whispered to Maera, despite my better judgment. “The gates. Can I see them?”
Maera looked at me for a second. “I don’t see why not.”
A moment later, we walked in silence across the field to get to the other side of Thornevale.
We walked for half an hour, if not more. We were alone—no wolf or man or woman followed us. Maera seemed calm, not once looking over her shoulder.
We were in a forest somewhere, and I thought we still had a ways to go because all she said when I asked when we’d get there was ‘just a little more.”
But very soon we began to notice the blueish light coming from beyond what I thought were trees or buildings. They weren’t. The closer we got, the better I saw.
They were rectangular pieces of smooth grey stones standing twenty feet tall each, engraved with symbols I didn’t understand, and they’d formed some kind of a maze between them.
An open field. The structures stood alone surrounded by forests, like enlarged tombstones scattered onto the grass.
Maera walked slowly, her every step precise, and took us beyond the first two.
There were more of them, so much more, and the deeper we went, the more those symbols engraved on the surfaces pulsated with that same blue light that was burning somewhere beyond.
Then we saw the center. The ley line here stood upright, moved toward the sky and also back down toward the ground, just as tall as the pieces of stone.
Wider, and so much different than the one in that train tunnel.
This one sort of displayed an image in the middle of it, a dark sky dotted with stars, like it was a mirror into the very sky that was above us now. A reflection.
Fuck, I couldn’t breathe. The intensity of the magic that radiated from that ever-moving light nearly suffocated me.
It pressed against my skin like it had hands, even though we were some twenty feet away from it still.
It stood on a stone platform raised a couple feet off the ground and the light of it spread onto the pathways made of the same stones that led to the first circle of tombs.
The light then pulsated onto each line and each shape engraved on them. It wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined before when I thought of the word magic, but it came close. This came the closest.
“This is where it happened. That is where the fae king killed the dire wolf in front of his people.” Maera waved a hand toward the left, and I was almost surprised to find a wolf carved out of that same stone, looking at the moving light—no.
At the statue of a man that was on the other side, right across from the wolf. A fae with a crown over his head, the face long erased by time, a sword in his hand, his ears pointy.
“There are nine gates in Thornevale, and the fae king wanted to open this one. You remember the story. The king then slaughtered the dire wolf, and his people saw. The stars created these statues to forever remember what had happened here and trapped the people and the wolves into these tombs to forever bear witness of the slaughter. The same ones raised around the other gates as well. One in each territory of The Vale. Each pack,” Maera said in a hushed voice, like she was afraid she might disturb the dead.
I looked at the stone plaques with a new eye. They’d been fae and wolves once, all of them.
Good bumps rushed down my arms. “Why? Why did the king want to open the gate?”
“Nobody knows,” said Maera. “By the time they’d returned to the village, his wife had already carved out her own heart, and lay dead in her blood.”
“Fucking hell, Maera…” I did not need the image of someone carving out their own hearts to die spinning in my head.
“Suicide is difficult for a fae. Or at least it used to be.”
Now they had that drink—Iyandra, the end. “But she knew? His wife knew?”
“People thought so, but nobody knows for sure. He died, and the stars never spoke to any Council they gathered about it, or a seer.”
I sighed, moved a little closer to the light. It was a proper portal, just like one would imagine, only this one had a lot more blue light and a lot more magic radiating off it. I found out when it literally stopped me from going closer.
Then Maera put her hand over my shoulder. “It’s safer if we stay back. We have spells in place now. Magic to keep people away.”
“And it works,” I said, struggling to draw in air until I moved back a few more steps. “Fucking hell, Maera. This is…this is nuts.” There were no words to do this whole story justice.
“I know. But we still have time to find the Unseelie heir, Nilah. We still have time to make this right.”
The way she was looking at me.
I swallowed hard, bit my tongue to keep the rush of tears back.
Angry tears because I was pissed off. That the Seelie Queen thought she could just kill her husband and become queen until her son took over, and that the Ice Queen thought she could get away with postponing her death while she watched babies getting killed in her name.
That the Midnight King was a monster worthy of his own fucking horror movie, and that I was here now, stuck once again, though finally with a clear idea of what the future looked like.
Or what it should look like, at least.
Me. Nilah Dune, a human from Earth, sitting on a fae throne.
My eyes closed and I instinctively reached out to press a hand to the stone plaque next to me. It was so cold to the touch that I jumped back instantly in surprise. No charge of magic, though. No nothing—just cold.
“I’m going to the Midnight Court, Maera,” I said reluctantly, rubbing my hand to warm it up again. “I’m not looking for anyone until I’ve seen and spoken to Rune.”
“Agreed. The Seer of Shadows will be there, too. We can send word to the Seelie King to meet us—”
“No,” I cut her off. “Lyall will not come anywhere near us, not right now.” Not until I’d spoken to Rune. “He’s not trustworthy.”
Maera nodded. “Then we go to the Midnight King first.”
Midnight King. Seelie King. These were men I knew.
One I hated with all my being, one I loved with more strength than I ever thought possible.
We’d all become so different in a matter of fucking weeks—and I was just beginning to realize now that this wasn’t normal for Verenthia, either.
Things didn’t change here the way they did for me always.
I ended up here in the worst fucking time for the realm and its people, it seemed, and I had nobody to blame but two queens.
“Are you sure you want to join me? The Council said that the three of us should find the Unseelie heir. This is not your fight, Maera,” I made myself say because it was only fair.
“I can’t sit here and wait to hear if you’ve died every day, Nilah. I won’t.” She took my hand in hers, squeezed my fingers. “And this is everybody’s fight. If I can help, then I will.”
I’d be a fucking liar if I said I wasn’t relieved that I wouldn’t be alone on the way back to the Midnight Court.
“And your people?”
Maera smiled and her eyes sparkled yellow once more. “My people will be all right.”
And so it was decided.
We stayed there by the gate for a little longer, not speaking, just looking at the light, feeling the magic, looking at the statues of the dire wolf and the fae king when they were separate beings.
I wasn’t sure how to explain it, but it was the light of the ley lines that gave me strength.
Gave me motivation. I was here now, wasn’t I?
And I could take it one step at a time. I didn’t need to panic about what would happen with my family if I was indeed to stay here in Verenthia forever, or what would happen between Rune and I if we were both to sit on different thrones, or what would even become of us, and of Earth, if we didn’t find the Unseelie heir that the stars were so sure was out there.
One step a time, I thought. My panic, my anxiety was slowly fading away little by little as I looked into the piece of night sky surrounded by moving light.
That’s why I saw it the moment it happened.
It was a lightning strike—that’s the only way I could describe it. A spiraling lightning strike that seemed to come from the very calm and very quiet sky, from the very middle of the gate, and it shot out toward us.
It came into our side of the world—exactly as fast as a lightning strike would—and I couldn’t move back in time because I was too shocked to witness the way it moved.
That’s why, when something pushed me to the side, I fell, toppled over, hit the ground instantly.
My body felt weightless, like it didn’t belong to me at all.
And the spiraling light slammed onto the very stone tomb I’d tried to rest against before.
The sound of it was like a mountain breaking in two.
A crack appeared on the tomb and the light that pulsated from the symbols burned brighter.
“Move!” Maera shouted and pushed me to drag myself farther away, behind the tombs.
By some miracle, I was able to get my body to obey me, even though I couldn’t breathe through the magic.
It was too thick, had coated my throat, had zapped all the air out of the world when that light came, but I moved.
And I got behind the second row of tombs—but not before I saw that same spiraling lightning strike moving from one plaque to the other, breaking the stone of each one it touched, lighting them up like fucking Christmas trees while the ground underneath vibrated like someone had gripped the edges of Verenthia and was shaking it with all their might.
A hand around the back of my neck, and I was pulled behind the tomb. Maera’s wide yellow eyes were on me.
“Run,” she whispered, and in the next second, she let me go, threw her head back and howled at the dark sky while the ground shook still. She was shifting right in front of my eyes.
Clothes tore and fell to the ground. Her skin, pale and smooth, broke everywhere at once, and fur sprouted out of her while she howled away at the starless night.
Her hair fell, disappeared before it hit the ground, and her bones broke and rearranged themselves as I watched in shock.
This was never going to seem normal to me, no matter how many times I witnessed it.
Her jaws extended, elongated, and her limbs took on a different shape, and her tail extended, her ears perked up—but her eyes remained exactly the same as that of the woman.
One second she remained motionless as she looked at me. One second, and I felt her like I was a part of her body, an extension of it. I felt the wind and the magic beyond those tombs. I felt her strength, the power that coursed through her veins.
And I heard the footsteps of the wolves that were running toward us, in the same rhythm as the earth shook.
Maera ran back where we came from, straight for the spiraling lightning strike.
Disoriented, I tried to hold on, tried to make it to my feet, to run after her, make sure she got back here where she was safe. Was she nuts to run toward that thing?! Couldn’t she see what it was doing to the tombs?
But by the time I was on my feet, the wolves had already arrived.
By the time I used one of the tombs to help me keep my balance, more than two dozen werewolves were howling and running toward the light where Maera had gone.
I wanted to follow them. I wanted to help.
After all, I knew what ley lines felt like, had come all the way here through one.
But the moment I let go of the cold stone and made to push my way through the wolves who were easily three times my size, I was pushed right back and thrown against the ground within seconds.
Cold grass against my cheek. The howls took over the night. The ground stopped shaking abruptly, and it felt like I’d just been thrown off a fucking roller coaster all of the sudden.
Silence for a heartbeat, before that same howl that had come out of Maera’s jaws a moment ago took over my mind.
She was alive, and more wolves were coming to join her, calmly now. Not running. That’s how I knew that whatever had happened with that gate, it was already over. They were all safe.
For now.