Chapter 15
CHAPTER
It was like no darkness I’d ever experienced.
Not like the cloak of nighttime or the bottom of a lake or even the pitch-black of dreamless sleep. It was pulsing and whirling, yet empty and endless at the same time. Filled with far-off lights that didn’t quite reach us—wherever we were. Wherever we were going.
Because as much as I twisted and thrashed in Steeler’s grip, he was definitely succeeding in taking me somewhere. I felt the world whiz by with each step, and nausea clamped down tight in the base of my throat as if we were whooshing through the air in a carriage.
And suddenly, I was clinging to him, terrified he’d drop me into this abyss. Terrified this had just been an elaborate way of murdering me, of dumping me in a wasteland of darkness so that nobody would ever find my body.
A whimper actually left my mouth—
Just as Steeler wrenched us through a hole in the darkness and I landed on my hands and knees on solid ground.
It was still dark here, but… stars. God, yes, those were stars winking through gaps in the clouds above us.
Rain pattered my head, and waves of smooth gray pebbles stretched in every direction beneath me.
The crash of the ocean pulsed to my right, where a single abandoned lighthouse climbed toward the sky at its edge.
To my left, I could just barely make out the hazy outline of a jungle towering on a far-off cliff.
“Where are we?” I panted.
As soon as the words left my lips, however, I folded over and began to retch.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Steeler lurch toward me with his hand outstretched. I flinched, and he yanked himself back. Waiting. Wary. As if I were some kind of wounded animal.
Which, maybe I was. Because I couldn’t stop dry heaving until Steeler murmured, “Breathe in and out. The nausea will pass—”
“Don’t you dare tell me what to do,” I spat over my shoulder.
The idea that he was trying to console me after dragging me through… through whatever torment that had been—it seemed to snap my body out of it. I scrambled up to face him fully, a stark breeze from the ocean lifting up the hem of my dress.
Steeler raised his palms. That cut I’d made on his shoulder was still oozing blood, and now that we weren’t in a dark room, I could make out the pinprick wounds all over his wrists and hands, and the holes in his pants where the nepenthes had drenched him with poison. The burnt skin beneath.
Yet he didn’t seem worried about himself. He was still observing me as if I were wounded and depraved, and he answered my question with words as smooth as the pebbles beneath our feet.
“We’re still on Eshol. Just a little bit north of Hallow’s Perch.”
“North of Hallow’s Perch,” I repeated, feeling my jaw drop for a second before I snapped it shut again. I didn’t doubt that we were still on the island—past the lighthouse and horizon of seafoam, I could see the faint shimmer of Eshol’s protective dome. But…
If we were truly this far north… well, Hallow’s Perch, I knew, was about three hundred miles from the Esholian Institute.
And by the angle of the moon slathered in a thin film of rainclouds overhead, I knew it wasn’t even half an hour past the time I’d been in the boys’ Wild Whisperer parlor, playing mini pentaball with my friends.
Which meant we’d traveled hundreds of miles in minutes. Seconds, maybe.
“That’s not possible,” I got out. “What—how—”
I expected Steeler to make up more excuses, more nonsensical allusions that would leave me in a state of feeling crazy.
Instead, he dragged in a deep breath and said, “I’m a faerie.”
I stared at him. A flash of lightning forked between clouds in the distance. The wind seemed to howl and tug at my dress even harder.
“I’m a faerie,” Steeler continued, still holding up his palms, “the same as the ones of old, and I’m… maturing.” Here, his jaw twitched in… annoyance? Anger? I couldn’t tell, but I definitely wasn’t moving, wasn’t even breathing, as he said, “Which means I get a shiny new power of my own.”
I tried to find the twitch of his lips or that deadly glimmer of humor in his eyes to indicate he was joking, but… nothing.
And now I took a step back, my feet clinking over pebbles, as the full weight of what he was saying slammed into me.
“Faeries are extinct.”
Now Steeler pretended to examine himself, his pricked hands, slashed brand, and bare chest rolling with beads of rain.
“Are we? I feel alive enough. Although I suppose you could have actually killed me back there and I could be hallucinating all of this.”
Through the trembling in my bones, I willed myself to stop and think, stop and think, stop and think. For the first time, Coen Steeler had told me something of value. Something substantial.
“And your power is—what?” I asked hesitantly. “Ultra speed?”
Because how else would we have traveled from one place to another so quickly? How else would he have escaped the sundew in less than the blink of an eye?
Steeler dropped his palms, something like relief flickering over his eyes before hardening again into that smoky quartz.
“Not speed, necessarily. But… I can cut through space to get from one point to another. Location hopping, if you will. It’s convenient, I’ll admit, but it’s still really new, and it does tend to give you the worst motion sickness.
” He didn’t chuckle, but I could hear one brimming in his voice, and it made me remember that wicked laugh of his in the alleyway moments before I’d whirled to face him for the first time.
He’d… he’d disappeared and reappeared so fast so many times that…
Yes, location hopping would explain everything. The way he moved from one point to another within less than a blink of a second. The way he’d materialized in the Shape Shifter’s room, dripping with wrath.
But for some reason my brain wasn’t catching up to the reality of what that truly meant.
Steeler surveyed me carefully now, as if waiting for some kind of explosive reaction. When my face remained immobile, that wall of ice wrapping even tighter around me, he sighed and pushed aside his rain-drenched, overgrown hair to reveal…
Ears. Sharpened ears. As sharp as his canines had become.
Now my knees hollowed out. I stumbled sideways before catching myself again.
Neither Mr. Fenway nor Mrs. Smetlar had ever described a faerie formally, but I had heard the rumors of those pointy ears back in Alderwick.
How faerie children used to look like humans, but when they had fully matured sometime in their twenties, all their features had become sharper. Wickeder. Stronger.
Almost like a vampire’s.
I couldn’t allow myself to wallow in this new information, however. Couldn’t try to piece together what it all meant if I wanted to get out of here. Because here was a place no one could hear me scream. Here was a place Steeler could still dump my body or keep me locked away or…
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked to keep my thoughts on track, trying to keep my voice as steady as his.
“I told you.” Steeler took a single, casual step toward me. “I’ve found an alternative to the weekly memory wipe. But you have to come inside with me.” He nodded over his shoulder at the lighthouse. “And you have to choose it for yourself.”
I let my eyes flick toward the lighthouse again, this time soaking in more of its details.
It sat on a mound of boulders, a column of gray stone that nearly blended in with the mist itself.
The cupola was dark, but small lights flickered in the windows of a keeper’s cottage attached to the base.
Two separate stone staircases wound up to different doors, one leading to the lighthouse base, the other to the cottage’s wraparound porch.
“Is this some kind of ambush?” I asked… for I could have sworn several shadows moved beyond those lit windows. Another thought ignited in my chest. “Are you using your power to help the pirates breach the dome?”
Steeler hesitated for only a moment.
“I can use my power to surpass the dome, yes. And I can take others with me, just like I took you. But we’re not breaching it in the way you think. And if this was an ambush, I would’ve Walked you straight inside.”
Walked. All my life, society had revolved around the five different types of magic. Now Coen Steeler was obviously carrying around a sixth one—as fully formed as all the others, and just as powerful. Maybe even more so.
I clawed a drenched curl away from my face impatiently. “Why not Walk me straight inside anyway?”
“Because, as I said…” Steeler’s voice held nothing but patience, the bastard.
“You have to choose this for yourself. But if you don’t…
” And now he winced as a forked tongue of lightning struck the sealine behind him.
“I’ll have to take your memories of the pills again.
I don’t think I’m currently capable of it—” A glance down at his oozing cut.
“But give me a few hours, and I think it’ll heal. ”
Was he admitting that his Mind Manipulating had been wounded but not fully destroyed? I folded my arms, holding back a shiver.
“What, no third option? Just this mysterious alternative or continue to endure your constant mind invasions?”
Steeler winced again, but this time it was gone so fast, I almost wondered if I’d imagined it. A smirk pulled up one of his cheeks.
“I suppose I could also just lock you up here forever.”
Exactly what I had suspected. I stomped past him, toward the lighthouse, willing myself not to lean toward him when I passed close enough to smell that rich, earthy scent of black bamboo.
“Then you aren’t giving me a true choice after all, are you?”
As much as I wanted to be the one to wrench open the door and face whatever—or whoever—waited for me inside all by myself, Steeler beat me to it.
In a heartbeat, he reemerged on the wraparound porch ahead of me, opening the door and holding it for me.