26. Miri
26
Miri
T he memory started the same. I was in the back seat, ducking down on the ground to keep the photographers from taking pictures of me. I didn’t like seeing myself in the magazines. I didn’t like it when they said things about me.
“Drive faster,” my father shouted. His big brown eyes were wild, looking around as he struggled to keep me hidden.
“Gerald,” Mum’s panicked voice muttered. “We’re already going too fast.”
“We can lose them, Emma,” Da replied. I sank farther and put my hands over my ears, trying to breathe through the hot slice of terror in my chest. I hated the people who chased us. Why couldn’t they leave us alone? Why did they have to do this to me? We were normal people like everyone else.
The noise was the part that haunted my nightmares, the sickening crunch of metal on metal as the car hit something hard and impenetrable. The world went topsy-turvy. In my memories, I blacked out and woke up outside the car.
The police had never been able to figure out how I’d done it, and I’d never remembered.
But this time…
This time, I kept my eyes open in the middle of the chaos. Everything circled around me in slow motion. The items from my mother’s purse hung in the air like outer space. Her arms and legs were suspended like a roller coaster. I couldn’t move, only hang there and marvel at the spectacle of it all.
Then I met a pitch-black gaze set in a face with a dark beard and matching hair. At the time, I didn’t know this person, but he reached inside the car while it tumbled to pull me from it. The moment he touched me, time sped up again. He yanked me out and wrapped me in his arms while the death trap whirled away from us, the sounds of my parents’ breaking bodies punctuated by metal on asphalt.
He carried me to the side of the road and delicately laid me in the grass. The earth was warm despite the chill in the air, and the sun beamed brighter and hotter on this side of my near-death experience. The sky seemed more blue than ever, the trees more potent, everything just…more.
“What’s happening?” I murmured, my voice weak with confusion.
“Shhh,” the man said. “It’ll be okay. It’s all going to be okay now.”
“Who are you?” I grabbed at the leather lapels on his black jacket, tugging him closer, keeping him there. “Please. I’m scared. Stay with me.”
“Listen to me, Miriam.”
How did he know my name?
“You won’t remember this for a long time. But one day, you will.” He brushed my curls out of my face as he frowned, his soft gaze radiating genuine sincerity. “And when you do, you’ll know the time has come to return the favor.”
“What favor?” I asked.
“I saved your life,” he said. “Now you owe me.”
I was so confused. I didn’t know what he meant. He saved my life? I hadn’t asked him to do that.
“Owe you?” I repeated.
“Yes, Little Thistle, ” he said. “You’ll come to owe me quite a bit before we’re through.”
“Who are you?” I asked again, tears making my eyes burn, my heart racing at the thought that he planned to leave me here alone.
“Rest now.” He pressed his warm, soft lips to my temple, and the world went dark around me.
When I came to, I remembered none of my encounter with the man in the black jacket. I lay in the grass ten yards away, staring into the lifeless gaze of my mother, hanging upside down in the car, her head bent at a wrong angle.
I wanted to cry.
I wanted to scream.
I wanted to yank them from the wreck and pray to a cruel, unyielding God to bring them back to life. Just bring them back. But unconsciousness took me again, and when I opened my eyes the next time, I was in a hospital bed with the entire world praying for my safe recovery.
* * *
When I woke, I was back in the room at the bed-and-breakfast in Killwater. Ivy and Carter slept across the room with Poppy between them, huddled together in the moonlight, their chests rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm. Lex was on the couch, his arm bent over his eyes, deep breaths humming from his torso.
What day was it? What time? Where were we?
I checked my phone.
November 13.
I gasped and covered my mouth with my hand so I didn’t wake anyone.
Twelve days.
We’d lost twelve days in those woods. Bleeding hell, it was a wonder Ivy and Lex could even sleep. They’d wanted to be back by the fifth at the latest. We’d overshot our landing by more than a week. My brain had gone fuzzy like I’d spent the last twelve days on a bender and sobered up on a stranger’s couch in a country I’d never been to before. That wasn’t too far from the truth.
I got out of bed and walked across the room, picking up Lex’s smokes from the coffee table and lighting one as I went to my perch by the window to overlook the trees. After what had happened, they didn’t hum the way they had when we’d gotten here. Instead, their silence deafened me with an aching tinnitus that almost screamed with its quietness.
Had I used all my magic on the thistle bushes? Or was the forest still healing from whatever the king had done to it?
I didn’t know, and as I inhaled deeply on the cigarette, I decided I never wanted to know. I never wanted to come back here. I hated this place and all its wretched mystery.
I took another inhale and pinched the bridge of my nose, remembering the dream, the one with the king, the one where he saved me from the car accident and told me I owed him a life for a life. But it wasn’t a dream, was it? It felt more like a memory. It had to be a memory.
I knew it deep in my gut. That was the truth. That was how I’d made it out of the car alive. That was how I didn’t have a scratch on me. All this time, I’d been right. All this time, the world had tried to gaslight me into thinking I’d survived the wreck by circumstance. I must have been awake, they told me. I must have crawled out. I’d insisted I hadn’t. I never would have guessed it was because a fairy king saved my life. If he hadn’t, I would have been crushed in that tin metal can along with the rest of my family.
And now you owe me one.
You’ll come to owe me quite a bit before we’re through.
What was that supposed to mean? Owe him what?
A life.
What life? Mine? Why didn’t he take it when he had the chance? And more importantly…what would I tell the others?
The thought filled my stomach with sawdust. They already had enough to worry about with Poppy and what to do next. They didn’t need this drama. They didn’t need to know I might be accidentally in an arrangement with the demented king of the fae.
Was I? Did it count if I’d been a child and hadn’t consented? What were the fairy rules around entering into an agreement without the full knowledge of all parties involved? I hadn’t asked for him to save me. What choice was there if I was never given one to begin with? He had been cast out of the human realm at the time. How, then, could he have been there to save me?
It wasn’t real, my rational brain said, reaching for any straw of doubt, any seed of dissent that could explain this away. He planted it there when he made eye contact with you. He’s manipulating you. It’s not real. I wanted to scream that it felt real. It explained everything I’d never been able to figure out, everything I’d always wondered.
I hated him for it. I hated him for giving me this glimpse, this sneak peek, without explaining himself. But that was the point, wasn’t it? If, indeed, he was manipulating me, it was to his benefit to keep me questioning, to make me come to him for answers, to keep me barely satisfied, always hungry. If I were him, it was what I’d do.
I took a deep breath and calmed the rise of panic in my chest. He couldn’t cross over into this realm. Not only was he cursed, but I’d also grown the thickest patch of thistle thorn bushes in existence. It would take them eons to get through it.
As long as he didn’t find the ring.
We were safe for now.
I expected Lex to hear me get up and move around; he was the closest. But a soft, feminine hand landed on my shoulder before she reached for my cigarette to stab it out. Lost in my thoughts, I’d let it burn down to the filter.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she sat down facing me, “about Poppy in the woods.”
I cleared my throat, remembering she’d taken Lex’s side when it came to bringing the child with us.
“You both were right,” she said. “Siobhan wanted us to protect her, to bring her here.” A pause before she added. “But you know what this means, right?”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“We’re in this,” she continued, “for better or worse. Whatever was going on with the queen and the king, we now have the biggest chess piece.”
“We’ve been in this since you did whatever you did with Siobhan,” I said, my tone perhaps a little too curt.
“I know,” she said, hanging her head, “but Siobhan covered for us when she could have handed us over. We can still break this spell. We have to be patient and play this out.”
I wanted to be vengeful. I wanted to blame Ivy for all of this, to put the reasons for our unhappiness on her shoulders, but none of that was true. I’d known what we would find in those woods, and I’d gone anyway. I’d stolen a child and created a physical barrier around the entire fairy realm. I had no idea if it would keep them out, but I’d seen the rage on Alberich’s face before Lex yanked me home.
I’d kicked open a hornet’s nest.
“Thank you for protecting us.” Ivy grabbed my hand, brushing the words of our scars up against each other. “I saw what you did. You’re powerful…and incredibly hot.”
I cracked out a laugh.
“Even with the bloody eyes and ears and mouth and whatnot.”
I giggled harder.
“I love you, Miri,” she said, leaning in to kiss me.
“I love you, too,” I said against her mouth.
The anxiety in my chest lessened because, even if the king came for us, we had each other. And maybe with a bit of luck, and a bit of truth, and a bit of telepathy, and a bit of mother nature, we could take on whatever he brought with him.
I softened at Ivy’s touch. Sure, Carter and I had our star-crossed friendship from California, and Lex had always been my prince of darkness. But I’d met and fallen for Ivy first. She’d come a long way from that naive, innocent teenager I’d seduced on our last night at Mount Oberon. Now, she was a powerhouse, an Amazonian warrior that could read minds and fuck like a goddess.
I may have two husbands, but there was only one woman who held my heart tenderly in her embrace. Our love wasn’t like what I had with Carter and Lex, and I never wanted it to be. It was more precious and tender, built on our shared experience of being in the public light. Only I could know what it was like to be her, and only she could know what it was like to be me.
She held me close, massaging the back of my head with her talented fingers, and when I finally broke away, I leaned against her chest to borrow her strength.
“We’re in this together,” she murmured. “Please don’t forget that.”
Her words sounded prophetic, like perhaps she was the one that could see the future.
“I won’t,” I murmured. “I promise.”