Chapter 22
Callum
The inside of the cottage is a wreck.
Furniture overturned, cabinets ransacked, broken glass strewn across the floor. Dust sits heavily on the few undisturbed surfaces, and most of the windows are shattered and open to the clearing beyond.
And yet…
It doesn’t feel empty.
Along with the chaos, magick hangs heavy. Fae magick, I suppose, but it’s bitter and caustic on my tongue and makes me want to get the hell away from here as soon as we can.
“I’ll keep watch,” I tell Seren quietly, still not entirely certain there’s no one around to hear us.
The fae are canny. Their magick is tied to their realm, all twined up with nature, as their queen so helpfully demonstrated back at her bower.
For all I know, there could be a hundred fae melted into the very trees, hiding in the shadows of the forest, watching and waiting for us to drop our guard.
Seren goes to work searching the cottage, and I start a slow circuit of the room, nudging aside bits of detritus and keeping my eyes trained out the windows and front door for any hint of company.
Despite my lingering misgivings, no one shows themselves, and I take a few brief moments to survey the inside of the cottage.
It’s a single room, with a kitchen and fireplace along one wall, a broken bed along the opposite. The remains of a splintered wooden table sit in the middle, along with most of a desk backed up into one corner and the lumpy wreck of what might have been two armchairs set before the hearth.
Back at my original post near the front door, I scan the clearing again. Nothing moves. Not a breath of wind, not a dead piece of foliage. It’s too still, almost as if the realm itself is waiting for something to happen.
Behind me, wood creaks sharply, and I nearly jump out of my skin whirling around to see what happened. Hand on my sword, ready to draw, all I find is Seren staring down at the floor with a puzzled expression on her face.
“Goddess,” I breathe as my overwrought nerves settle back down.
“Sorry,” she says sheepishly. “I think… I think there’s something here.”
She crouches down and presses on the creaking floorboard, testing it out in a few places before it pops free.
“There’s an opening under here.” She starts feeling around, and I make another quick check of our surroundings.
Still clear, but in the sky above, clouds gather.
Probably just the strange weather of this strange realm, but they have a greenish hue to them. Unsettled and roiling, a storm rolling in.
“I’m not sure how much time we have,” I mutter. “Looks like the weather is about to turn.”
Seren glances out the window and frowns. With a quick nod, she reaches further beneath the floor, furrows on her forehead deepening until—
“I’ve got something!” Her exclamation is muted as she draws out a small wooden box.
She carries it quickly to the nearest stable surface to open it up, and the sound of rifling paper fills the room.
“Callum,” Seren murmurs. “Look at this.”
I’m loath to abandon my post and the line of sight it gives me into the clearing, but I step over to the small desk where Seren is holding a heavily creased piece of parchment in her hand.
A letter.
“I think… I think the heart is a person.” She gestures to the paper. “This… it starts with the greeting, to my dear heart. And there are more. Dozens of them.”
She’s right. Scattered all across the desk are more letters. All of them written in the same hand and all of them well-worn, like they’ve been folded and unfolded, read and reread, a thousand times.
“I wonder who—”
A crack of thunder finishes her sentence for her, and I stride back to the door.
The heavy storm clouds are straight overhead, moving preternaturally fast through the fading afternoon light.
With them, a wind that whips through the forest, the clearing, rattling the few panes of glass still left in the windows.
“Time to go,” I say under my breath.
I start to turn back to Seren, when something else catches my attention.
My heart falls to somewhere near my feet.
I never thought I’d miss the lizards we ran into last time.
These fae are worse. So, so much worse. Twisted creatures rising from the woods and the forest floor. Snarling mouths filled with thorny fangs, bodies and limbs that look like gnarled tree trunks, vines, moss, abominations of the natural order.
It’s not hard to guess who sent them.
They’re all armed, carrying strange bows, knives, and spears made of the same plant matter as their horrifying bodies.
And they’re headed straight for us.
“Seren!” I shout, but she’s already moving, scooping the letters into her bag.
Until a fae bursts from the earth beneath the cottage’s floor. Sending clumps of dirt and debris flying, it lunges toward Seren and my blood chills.
But she deftly jumps back, fingers grabbing at something on her belt and—
“Out!” she shouts at me, spell in hand. “I’ll go out the back way and meet you around front.”
My immediate instinct is to refuse.
Leave her here?
Let her deal with it alone?
Unthinkable.
But when another fae bursts from beneath the floorboards between us and the terrible sounds of the horde descending outside grow even louder, I decide to trust her.
I have to trust her.
With a roar, I turn back toward the door and lunge for the nearest fae with my sword. Hissing and screaming, it counters with a jab of a crude wooden spear. I break the spear easily and then dispatch the fae, turning to face the next when a blast of flame brushes against the back of my armor.
Diving out of the way, I turn to find the entire cottage engulfed in flames.
“Seren!”
Before I can dash back into the burning building after her, the sound of her voice stops me in my tracks.
“I’m alright! I’m coming!”
I stay where I am, not wanting to risk going around either side and losing her, fighting back fae after fae, holding my ground, waiting until—
Seren’s beautiful face appears around the corner of the cottage, through the haze of the smoke, green eyes blazing and determined.
“To me!” I yell over the din, already moving toward her. “I’ll open a portal.”
She nods, lip caught between her teeth and sweat beaded on her brow as she slashes at one fae, then two with the knife I gave her, as she deploys another one of her defensive spells, this one a vicious blast of ice that hits all the fae within a six foot radius of her.
Their leaves wither, their cries turn into choked rattles, and it gives Seren just enough room to sprint the remaining distance between us.
In the span of a few heartbeats several things happen.
Seren grabs my arm, and a wave of relief like nothing I’ve ever known courses through me.
I raise a hand to open a portal that will get us the hell out of here.
Just before I can, my eyes catch on something at the edge of the clearing.
The arched wooden curve of a bow.
The glint of a metal arrow.
The terrible, twisted fae who nocks that arrow, points it directly at Seren, and lets it fly.