Atone: A Fairytale (Fairytale Trilogy) (16 page)

“I wish you could remember.” He glanced down at her and she elaborated, “If you’d seen the stone or not.”

“I do too.” His voice was wistful and yet resigned.

Becca forced a smile. “We’ll figure something out. You’ve got a bigger problem right now, though.” She rolled to her knees and pushed herself up to standing, looking down at him lying beneath her on the grass.

“What would that be?”

“How you’re planning to beat me back to the house.” Becca flashed him a wicked grin before beginning her dash back toward the front door. She heard his rumbling laugh behind her a second before he passed her in a blur.

~ Chapter Eleven ~

“
N
OT GONNA LIE;
kind of disappointed you didn’t just flicker here,” Becca teased as she opened the front door to Alex and Lilia the next morning.

“It takes more power for two people and Lilia wasn’t going to be helpful.” Alex gave Becca quick hug.

“I refuse to ‘flicker’ anywhere with her.” Lilia said dryly. “Since that one time we appeared mid-air and fell four feet to a concrete floor.”

“That was our first attempt; I didn’t know what I was doing then. I’m much better now,” Alex protested as they filed inside and closed the large front door behind them. “God, it’s cold here…not as cold as it was, but still, wow.”

“Four feet. Concrete floor.” Lilia reiterated.

“She really is much better,” Becca assured her. “Did you know she goes to visit Luke all the time?”

“I had my suspicions. I bet falling out of thin air onto Luke is more comfortable than falling onto concrete.”

“Hmmm?” Alex’s eyes took on a dreamy look. “What was that?”

“Mental images I don’t really need, actually.” Becca turned to Lilia. “By the way, Gabe says hi.”

Lilia stared at her blankly. “Who?”

“Ouch. My cousin. The one who’s half in love with you.”

“Oh, Gabriel. What am I supposed to respond? ‘Hi back’?”

Alex snorted. “That poor kid. No chance in hell.”

“That’s what I tried to tell him; he refuses to listen.” Becca poked Lilia in the ribs through her purple sweatshirt. “I see that you came more appropriately dressed this time. I’ve talked Nicholas up to sixty degrees, but that’s as high as it can go before he’s super hot and uncomfortable.”

Lilia raised a perfectly arched blond eyebrow at Becca as they started up the stairs. “Yes. I’ve no idea why I thought that shorts and a t-shirt was a perfectly acceptable outfit for a ninety plus degree day in Southern California. Silly me. But here I am in winter clothes, so that the person you regularly refer to as Nicholas ‘Creep’ Hunt can be comfortable.”

“Uh.” Becca was distressed to feel her face getting hot. She wasn’t blushing was she? Blushing was Alex’s forte, not hers. “Well, I mean, he’s, you know…”

“Big and hairy?” Alex supplied.

“Yes.” Becca agreed, relieved that Alex had taken over the explanation.

“No longer fully human and runs a bit hot?” Alex continued as they reached the landing at the top of the double stairs.

“Yes.”

“Totally making you fall for him?”

“Yes—wait!…No! What?!” Becca screeched. She clapped a hand over her mouth, looking around wildly. She knew Nicholas was most likely hidden away in the secret bottom part of the house, but she was still a bit freaked out that he may have heard not only Alex’s question, but her more than awkward response. “Why would you even say that?” she hissed.

Alex blinked at her from behind her glasses, her large grey eyes full of innocence. Too much innocence. “I was just drawing a possible inference from all the available data.”

“Yeah? Well, draw another one.”

Alex grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Alex has a point. This thing with Nicholas might actually be your longest relationship with a man.”

Becca stopped dead halfway up the stairs and glared at Lilia’s back. “I’m not
dating
Nicholas.”

Lilia looked archly over her shoulder from her position two steps up from Becca. “I know. You would already have called it off if you were. You have been here longer than four days.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You have a four-date policy.”

Becca felt her mouth fall open. She snapped it shut and huffed her way past Lilia on the stairs. “I’ve no such thing.”

“Denial.” Lilia shook her head sadly. Alex stifled a giggle.

“I don’t have a policy.” Becca insisted.

“Not a spoken one maybe,” Alex half-agreed.

“Derek, four dates. Micah, four dates. William, four dates. What was his name, the one with the weird hair?” Lilia looked at Alex as they came up to the landing.

“Taylor,” Alex supplied helpfully. “He only got three dates.”

“That is right, Taylor. And that is just this year.”

“I’m busy. I’ve got a lot of school work…” Becca stopped herself before she launched into full defensive mode. “I don’t have to defend my dating habits to you. I’ve dated more than both of you put together. It’s not like I’m closing myself off or something.”

Alex rubbed Becca’s back comfortingly. “Nobody is criticizing you. We’re just both…” she trailed off as they walked into the mirror room.

“Why is the mirror thing laying on the floor? I thought you went through it like a portal?” asked Lilia

“I did. And then Nicholas knocked it over once I came back through.”
And by knocked it over, I mean picked it up and threw it,
Becca added silently.

“Because why, now?” asked Alex as she slowly circled the mirror.

“He was…a bit upset…that I decided to just go through it without regard to my…uh…safety.”

“Hmmm, maybe I was wrong,” Alex said as she bent over to look in the smooth glass. “Oh, you’re right, I can see my power like an aura in the reflection. Cool.”

“Wrong about what?” Becca asked uneasily.

“Maybe I had it backward. You’re making
him
fall for
you
.” Alex straightened back up. “How are we going to put it back upright? Lilia, want to try out a levitating spell? Or do you think we could just hoist it up between the three of us?”

“I think we could manage picking it up,” Lilia answered. She was standing a few feet away from the mirror, arms folded across her chest, looking at it in distaste. “I’m not entirely sure I trust everything this ‘fera’ fae person told you. How do we know he is reliable? I have never even heard of anyone called a fera…or of animal powers for fae.”

“He seemed to know a lot about you; well, mostly about your family. From what I gather, only the earthy type fae hung around in our world a lot…he called them terres and verdes, and apparently the sisters and you—and, I guess, me and Alex, are a mix called terre-verde. He called you the little terre-verde princess.”

“
Hmph
. He sounds like a horrible creature.”

“Want to go through and ask him about it yourself?” Becca suggested with a wicked grin. Lilia’s annoyance with a fae she’d never met was entertaining. Part of it had to be that he seemed to know more about her mother than Lilia did herself, but somehow Becca didn’t see Lilia and Talon getting along under the best of circumstances. As acclimated as Lilia had become to the modern world, she still occasionally reverted into ice princess mode, and Talon seemed to have as much natural arrogance as she did. Even though Becca had no desire to go back to the Fae Realm, it might be worth the price of admission to watch Lilia inform Talon that he was a “horrible creature.”

“I do not. I would rather just close the portal so we do not have to worry about it again.”

“Why don’t we stand it up so we can see the spell properly?” Alex suggested.

Lilia sighed as she pulled the sleeves of her hoodie over her hands. Becca could tell she didn’t want to touch the mirror, and honestly, she couldn’t blame her.

The three girls gripped the top of the mirror and pulled it upward. The base slid on the hardwood, and Becca let go of the golden claws to crouch down and hold the base steady as Lilia and Alex pushed the top. After a brief struggle, they got the mirror upright.

“It’s good that it’s freezing in here or I’d be sweating.” Alex brushed her bangs off her flushed face.

Becca laughed and then turned her attention back to the spell she could see shimmering in between the curved claws of the mirror’s frame. “See the space at the top?”

“Yeah. If you didn’t know something else went there you wouldn’t be able to tell. The spell seems complete. And I guess it is, for an open portal that’s protected against human interference.”

Lilia had resumed her arms-crossed position, and Becca noticed she was staying out of the direct line of the mirror’s reflection. “Nicholas has no idea where this gem is?”

“No. His memory of everything surrounding the mirror is hazy. So it could’ve been there in the cave where he found it and he could’ve not noticed it or just forgotten.”

“What was this doing in a cave? Who puts such a valuable piece somewhere like that?” Lilia asked.

“Someone who wanted to hide it?” Alex guessed. “If you were a fae, you wouldn’t want any human getting near it, and if you were human and knew what it could do to people, and you couldn’t close it or destroy it, wouldn’t you want to hide it? I’d have dumped the damn thing off a cliff into the ocean if it was me.”

“If it was someone with fae blood that hid it, they must have wanted to keep it open. Otherwise why not close it? Unless even they didn’t have the gem.” Becca ran her hand through her hair in frustration. “And if they didn’t have it, then making Alex flicker to France to look for it isn’t going to work.”

“Flickering only works if I’ve been somewhere before or can see it really clearly in my mind. I’m not sure how close I could get even if Nicholas described this cave to me. And you would all be coming with me. I draw the line at being sent off to scavenge around in caves by myself.”

“What are the odds it is even there?” Lilia asked. “Nicholas did not see it; whoever hid the mirror did not use it to close the portal. We have no idea where it is. It could be anywhere in the world. Humans do not sense the magic in gems. Someone could have picked it up and thought it was merely a beautiful stone. We do not even know what it looks like!”

Becca’s frustration was mounting. “Exactly. It’s a complete needle in a haystack. The only way this works out is if either Nicholas had seen it or that it was still in the cave. Neither of those seem very likely.”

Alex walked over to Becca and wrapped an arm around her waist. They stood, silently looking at their reflection in the mirror. The aura of Alex’s power shimmered around her—a soft white shot through with glittering diamond streaks.

“And Talon was clear that closing the portal was the only way to break the spell on Nicholas?” Alex finally asked.

Becca nodded and felt Alex’s arm tighten around her waist. She hoped Alex wouldn’t turn it into a full on hug. That might make her collapse into frustrated tears, which would just stress her friends out. Frustrated tears were not part of Becca’s M.O.

“I was thinking,” she finally managed, “that we could try to alter it. We’ve—well, Alex has altered a spell before.”

Alex was silent for another minute, and Becca knew she was going to try to talk her out of it. Lilia came forward and wrapped her arm around Becca’s waist as well. It was as if her friends were supporting her between them in preparation for bad news.

“I didn’t actually alter it,” Alex said softly. “Luke managed to resist being woken up when I kissed him and ended up pulling me into the Fae Realm, but the original enchantment didn’t change. It accepted that the kiss was true love once it had proof.”

Becca closed her eyes briefly, and when she reopened them she refocused on their images in the mirror. The reflection of Lilia’s magic, a pale, fresh green that always reminded Becca of spring was spiraling lazily around the edges of her own violet aura. “I want to try to change it. The spell knows it has a piece missing; maybe we can add to the spell to fill it in. To close the portal. And then maybe the curse on Nicholas will break even without the stone.”

She could tell that Lilia and Alex were looking at each other’s reflections, as if having a wordless conversation with each other. She knew she was asking a lot of them, but she couldn’t come up with any options.

“It means a lot to you,” Alex said.

“Yes. I mean, we can’t just leave him here as an animal, right? We have to try to do something.”

“Is that the only reason?”

Becca turned wide eyes to Alex. She knew what her friend was asking. But she wasn’t sure if she was ready to admit to herself much beyond altruistic reasons for wanting to save Nicholas. “I don’t know if I can answer that. I don’t know why you want me to.”

Alex tilted her head toward the mirror without taking her eyes off Becca’s. “That right there is some big, bad magic. It’s not malicious like Briar Rose’s was, but it might be more powerful because of it. That spell is very deliberate. It’s very strong and precise, there aren’t any worn or frayed places in the weaving. There’s really only one reason I was willing to take on Briar Rose, and only one reason I was able to access the full depth of my power and defeat her.”