CHAPTER 14 #2
"It's a threshold marker. The fairy courts use them to mark passage points—places where the boundary between Esidarap and another dimension is thin.
" She touched the edge of the phone screen with one finger, tracing the symbol without pressing hard enough to change the image. "Or where someone cut through."
Lainie felt the pieces connect. The machinery behind her ribs—the locked-down, bolted-tight part of her that had been running since the video started—clicked into a new gear.
The Collector's vault connected to Esidarap.
Literally. As a doorway. Erasmus Thane hadn't just built a pocket dimension—he'd attached it to the fairy realm, the same dimensional space Felicity patrolled, the same boundary the well's ley line ran along.
His vault was a tick on the skin between worlds, feeding on the thin spots.
Felicity knew those boundaries. Felicity had been inside them. Felicity had pulled Kalen out of a book and dropped Lainie on a ley-line anchor and come when the timepiece called because she understood how doors between dimensions worked better than anyone alive.
"We need Felicity."
Lainie looked at Kalen.
"She knows the vault's territory. If it's connected to Esidarap, she can find the way in."
Kalen held her eyes. His golden irises were steady—no flicker, no flinch. He didn't say no. He said the truth.
"Felicity has never come on command. For me, for anyone—she comes when the relic calls her—when the magic needs something only she can do. I can't summon her, Lainie."
Lainie looked at the phone in her hand. At Brennon's face, frozen on the dark screen. At the symbol reflected in the glass case behind his shoulder—the closed eye, the three lashes, the mark of a door between worlds.
She put the phone down on the counter.
She put both hands on the timepiece.
The watch was warm against her palms. A different warmth from the hot flare of the crystal rescue or the sharp burn that had printed a red oval into her skin. The heat of something that had spent itself and was building again—the heat between reps, the muscle that has rested but not recovered.
She closed her eyes.
She didn't speak. She didn't recite a spell or draw a sigil or think the right words in the right order.
She did the only thing the timepiece had ever responded to—the thing that had no formula, the thing she'd been running on since the night she packed the van and drove her kids away from John while her ribs ached and her hands shook and every voice in her head said she wasn't strong enough.
She poured it in. The fear—the kind that moves rather than freezes, the kind that had driven her through a portal into Esidarap with a talking cat and a berserker and a sword she didn't know how to use.
The love that had no off switch, the love that looked at a boy rubbing the back of his neck in a windowless room and felt the floor drop out of the world.
The rage. Copper and heat, the same rage from the bathroom at the trailer when she'd counted tiles and promised herself she'd stop waiting.
The watch got hot.
Then hotter.
The red oval on her chest—still raw, still tender from the crystal rescue—flared.
Pain ran from her sternum to her collarbones, the same path the burn had taken when she'd pressed the watch against Sawyer's crystal.
The relic was listening. She could feel it—past sound, past sight.
As pressure. Something building in the mechanism. Something gathering.
But nothing came.
No Felicity. No portal. No fairy materializing between the kitchen counter and the breakfast plates.
The timepiece gathered and gathered and the heat climbed and the pain spread and the pressure built behind the face of the watch, and Lainie pushed harder, gave more, poured everything she had into the metal against her chest.
The watch held it. Took it. Stored it. And did not release.
Whatever threshold the fairy needed, Lainie hadn't hit it. But the relic had heard her—she could feel that. The mechanism was full. Charged. It sat against her skin like a battery loaded and not yet connected.
She opened her eyes.
The kitchen was watching her. Kalen's hand was still on her wrist, his cold palm against her pulse.
Jenna had moved from the counter to stand beside Hadlee, and her arms were no longer crossed—they hung at her sides, fists closed, the knuckles white.
Sawyer had lifted his head from the table, his marmalade face turned toward Lainie, his freed legs still against the wood.
Through the window, the crystal vineyard chimed. The sound and the silence occupied the same space. One wrong. One waiting.
Lainie kept her hands on the timepiece. The watch was hot against her palms. Engaged.
She could feel what she'd given it sitting inside the mechanism—present and intact, held in reserve.
Like a call ringing in a room where no one had picked up yet.
She ran her thumb over the jewels of the fairy wings. Sapphire. Emerald. Ruby. Diamond.
She looked at Kalen.
"She'll come." Her voice was steady. "The watch heard me."
Kalen's golden eyes held hers. He did not argue.
The timepiece sat warm and full against Lainie's skin. Holding the charge it had taken in. Waiting.
Through the kitchen window, the crystal vineyard sang its wrong song into the February air.