Endlessly (Paranormalcy) (8 page)

I
was
laughing breathlessly—doing pretty much everything breathlessly—because I couldn’t seem to stop dancing long enough to catch my breath, but I didn’t want to stop, couldn’t even if I wanted to, everything was twirling and laughter and motion and my feet, my feet wouldn’t stop, and they hurt, but they didn’t hurt, they wanted to do nothing but this forever, and the pain in my side wasn’t pain, and I wasn’t gasping for breath, I was laughing, because I’d never been this happy.

The faces in front of me blurred together in light and
movement and sound, one indistinguishable from the next, only their hands mattering as we moved in and out and around in patterns while our feet tripped along the inevitable choreography. One of the faces looked familiar, triggered something in my brain, but then it was gone again and so was the thought, the wonder; there was only the dance.

Forever, there would only ever be the dance.

My hands met others and I prepared to spin, but these hands were wrong—they spun me the wrong way, tripping my feet that knew which way they were supposed to go. My feet kept moving, kept trying to tap out the story the music told them to, but now the hands were lifting me, and my feet kicked and turned and twirled in the air, desperate for contact with anything so they could keep dancing, because the dance was everything, I had to dance, I had to, if I didn’t dance I’d fly away into pieces, everything would stop, it would be dark forever, I’d—

“Neamh,” a voice like the wind through golden sheaves of wheat said in my ear. “Come back to yourself.”

The name coursed through me, lightning in my veins, pushing out the desperation of the dance. I blinked rapidly, shaking my head past the fog. “Reth?” His face was right in front of mine as he held me against his body, my feet several inches off the ground.

“There you are.”

“I—What on earth just happened?”

“Well, nothing on
Earth
, obviously.”

He set me down and I yelped, immediately collapsing to the ground. My muscles were trembling, my legs riddled with spasms of pain. I looked down at my feet and cried out in horror again—they were bleeding and raw, the bottoms one big mess of blister and ruined skin.

“I saw—there was someone there I knew. Is…oh, no, is Lend there? Is he in the dance?” I turned my face toward where I thought the dancers were, but Reth had brought me back into the trees and I could only see flashes of movement from the meadow. Now that I was out of it, the music was wrong, all wrong, all desperation and frenetic motion without any sense or beat or rhythm.

“Not Lend. Jack. Stay there,” Reth said. “I’ll see if I can recall him to his senses, although he never had many to begin with.”

I cried softly, lying back on the ground, every muscle in pain. Gratitude to my crazy faerie ex competed with the overwhelming pain for my attention. Pain won.

A body thudded to the ground next to me, and I heard a whimper like a hurt puppy. I opened my eyes and turned my head to see Jack lying there, his face screwed up against the agony. He was in as bad shape as I was.

“Reth.” My voice was hoarse and my throat raw from how hard I had been breathing. “How are we going to find Lend now? I don’t think I can walk.”

“Yes, that wouldn’t be advisable at this point.”

“I don’t suppose there are any unicorns here?” I asked, hopeful. If I could get a magic patch job, we could get back to the business of finding Lend.

“No.”

“Crap. How long were we dancing?”

“That’s not really quantifiable in terms you’d understand. Long enough that you nearly lost what little soul you have to the dance. But not so long that you weren’t retrievable. Honestly, mortals. You never understand too much of a good thing.”

“Jack? You okay?”

He moaned, turning and smashing his face into the flowered ground. “Mmmph.”

I took it as a yes. Or at least, that he hadn’t lost his soul to the dance and that eventually we’d both be okay. But we didn’t have time for eventually.

“Is there anything you can do?” I asked Reth. “This can’t be it. I need to find him. Now.”

“There is something. It will get you walking. But you won’t like it, and it will do more long-term damage than good.”

“Do it.”

He nodded, still hesitant, then reached out his perfect, slender, long-fingered hands and wrapped them around my feet. I expected more of his heat, the creeping warmth and
later burning that he used to put in me, but gasped as a searing cold left his hands. For an instant there was blinding pain, and then…nothing.

“That should hold for a while.”

I looked down to see my feet shimmering with what looked like a light dusting of snow. I stood, but the snow stayed put, not getting brushed off or melting. All my muscles screamed at me, but I could stand, which meant I could walk, which meant I could find Lend.

“Thank you. Do Jack.”

“I think we should send him back,” Reth said, glancing at poor, broken Jack with something that looked shockingly like compassion in his golden eyes. “He hasn’t your resilience, and, admirable as it was of him to join us, this isn’t his fight.”

I knelt down and brushed Jack’s blond curls back off his forehead. He opened his eyes. “You always did know how to have fun,” he whispered, trying to smile.

“I’m a laugh a minute. Can you get away from here? Back to your room, where you’ll be safe?”

“’M not going anywhere,” he mumbled.

“Yes, you are. And when you’re well enough to make it through the Faerie Paths, go find Arianna. She has a unicorn who can fix your feet. And tell her that when”—my voice cracked, but I hurried on—“when I get back with Lend, we’ll talk.”

Jack looked up at me, guilt on his features. “I really am sorry, Evie.”

“I know, you idiot. Now go.”

He nodded, huge blue eyes sad, then held up a hand and rolled to the side, disappearing in a shimmer of light.

I stood again, groaning as muscles and joints I’d never even noticed let me know in the most painful way possible they existed, and took a few deep breaths to push past it.

“Onward?” I asked Reth. He nodded, holding out his elbow like a gentleman, and I put my hand through it.

My feet didn’t hurt, but they couldn’t feel anything, either, which led to a lot of stumbling on the uneven ground. Without Reth I would have been flat on my face, but even with him progress was slow.

And so we walked, the forest around us shifting from brilliant reds, oranges, and pinks, to rich blues, greens, and violets. Just when I was sure I couldn’t go any farther on my trembling legs, we came to another clearing. This one had no music, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

It was filled with six women, girls really, all human, laughing and singing and lounging contentedly next to a babbling lavender brook. They glowed with health in clothes that looked like woven clouds.

And each and every one of them was pregnant.

“What—” I started, and then it hit me in a horrible rush of recognition.

“It would appear the Dark Queen has been busy
replacing Vivian,” Reth said.

“Empty Ones,” I whispered, unable to take my eyes away from the swollen bellies of the girls. They were making more of me.

I
couldn’t
move, frozen as I stared at this meadow of girls stolen from their lives and brought here for the sole purpose of creating more Empty Ones, more homeless, placeless, half-mortal half-nothing girls like me.

“Why so many?” I finally asked.

Reth raised his eyebrows, considering the scene before us. “Safer, I suppose. This way if one doesn’t work out, like Vivian, the Dark Queen has several others to fall back on. She is terribly efficient. Which is likely the reason why she has them here where she can keep an eye on them, unlike how you and Vivian were left in the mortal realms with
minimal supervision. Though the whole thing is pointless.”

“We have to save them.”

“Do they look like they want to be saved?”

I had to admit they didn’t. That was what was so horrible about it. They all looked so bleeping happy, so tranquil. One girl, a tiny blonde who was all belly, lay on the bank of the stream on a bed of flowers, smiling even in her sleep.

It was sick.

“We have to try, at least.”

Reth shook his head. “If you pulled them away, like this, it might kill them. I am afraid we have no help to offer right now. And, need I remind you, helping these poor creatures is not why we’re here.”

I felt angry and impossibly sad watching those girls, but he was right. They weren’t why we were here. That didn’t mean I was going to forget about them, though. “Okay,” I said, my voice hollow and quiet. “Let’s go.”

We skirted the edge of the meadow. I feared detection, but the pregnant girls were all so blissed out they didn’t even notice us. Back under the cover of the trees, I stumbled along in silence for a while until I couldn’t take it anymore. “Do you think she was like that?”

“I’ve found it is helpful when talking to use actual subjects and context so your listener can understand what, exactly, you are trying to convey.”

I rolled my eyes. “Like you’re so big on clear communication. I mean my mom. Do you think she was like them
when she was pregnant with me?”

“In what way?”

“You know. Happy. Peaceful.”

There was a long pause, and when Reth spoke again his voice had none of the sharp tones it often took on, only warmth. “Yes, I suppose she was.”

“Until he left her.”

“Yes.”

“But while she was with me, while I was in her, she was happy. She wasn’t scared, or lonely, or angry.”

“No, I cannot imagine she was any of those things.”

I nodded, unable to talk anymore. I didn’t know if it made me feel better or worse that my mom would have been happy about me, for a while at least, until my stupid faerie father abandoned her. I guess it made me feel a little bit better, in a very sad sort of way.

Up ahead I heard voices through the trees and I stopped, worried about what we’d run into next. “What do you think it is?” I whispered to Reth.

“Those aren’t faerie voices.”

We walked forward and peered through the edge of the trees to see a small valley with homes, quaint and cheerful cottages in perfect rows. Outside, around those homes, were people.

Dozens of people.

People
people, not faeries. I scanned the ranks, panicked, but none of them seemed to be pregnant. They were all
colors, men and women, from children on up to middle age, going about what seemed to be a perfectly sedate farming life. Women in plain spun but beautiful dresses trekked back and forth from a stream, carrying buckets of water and baskets of brilliant yellow berries. Kids laughed and chased one another in the cobbled street.

It was like looking back in time at some medieval village. Except it was more like the Middle Ages on Prozac, where everything was clean and everyone was shining with good health instead of dirty and diseased.

“What are they all here for?” The only reason faeries kidnapped humans was to use them for their own purposes, as servants or slaves, or to torment them for fun. And they didn’t do it very often, either, most faeries never bothering to come over to the mortal realms. This community free from faeries and filled with people doing relatively normal things made no sense whatsoever.

“Yes, what could they possibly be here for,” Reth said, but his tone of voice was sarcastic, like he already knew. “Again, evidence of the Dark Queen’s innovation and efficiency. And very bad for anyone who is unfortunate enough to be a part of it. She is—” He stopped, then pulled me behind the trunk of a tree. “Someone is coming.”

We peered around the edge of the trunk to see a door open up in a flash of light, about fifty feet away. A faerie I’d never seen before, tall and thin as a reed with flowing emerald-green hair stepped through, and holding his
hand was a young girl, and holding her hand was an older woman, and holding her hand was a teenage boy, and holding his hand…I watched, aghast, as a train of twenty people came through, each holding the hand of the person in front of them. When they were all out of the Paths, the faerie spoke to them; they all watched with rapt attention.

A few of the villagers, for lack of a better word, had gathered as well. The faerie nodded and gestured to them, and the villagers walked forward, smiling, their arms open in welcome. The new people filtered through into the crowd.

One little girl sat on the ground, crying as the faerie left, and a plump blond woman rushed over, taking her in her arms and patting her back soothingly.

“Reth, I can’t—Please, we have to find Lend right now. I can’t see anything else, I can’t handle knowing this stuff and not knowing what it means or what’s going to happen to them. Please, please, can’t you find Lend faster?”

He stopped watching the people and turned to me. “I will do my best. The only way onward is forward.”

I was so tired and numb I didn’t even hurt anymore, my mind shutting down so I wouldn’t have to think about what I’d seen or ponder its implications. Lend. Lend.

The trees shifted again, this time from cool colors to pure white. White trunks, white leaves, and white flakes drifting and sparkling in the light. I held out a hand to catch one, expecting snow, but it settled there like a little drop of sunshine.

I hated this place. I hated that it was beautiful and warm and welcoming, and that it hid so much evil inside. Well, duh.
Faeries
. Of course it was that way.

Reth stopped suddenly and I drew up short, almost losing my balance again on my sensationless feet.

“Can you feel her?” he asked, and his tone chilled me in spite of the flakes of warmth swirling around us.

“I—” I paused, and closed my eyes. And there, yes, I could. It was like a tug, a pull toward emptiness, toward blissful oblivion, pulsing out and with every beat telling me that I was nothing, nothing, nothing, hers, hers, hers.

I squeezed Reth’s hand, hard. “I’m scared.”

He laughed his silver laugh. “High time for that.”

“Don’t—Please, don’t let me lose myself, okay? The first goal is to save Lend, but I’d rather die than lose myself to her or help her in any way.”

He locked my eyes with his. “Evelyn, my love. I will not let that happen.”

I nodded, biting my lip. He wouldn’t, not if he could help it. I trusted him on that. “Okay. Okay. Any tips?”

“Remember who you are.”

I laughed, part shrill panic and part bitterness. “And what if I have no idea who I am?”

He shook his head, exasperated. “Repeat your real name in your head. Don’t say it aloud; whatever you do, don’t give it to her. But hold on to it and it should help.”

I took a deep breath. Neamh. Neamh. Neamh. I was
me, and she couldn’t have that, just like she couldn’t have my Lend. Another deep breath, and another, all the while holding the image of Lend’s true face in my head. “Let’s do this.”

Reth put my hand in the crook of his elbow again and we walked forward, together, through the trees and into the heart of the Dark Queen’s court.