The Last Faerie Queen (11 page)

12

E
l
o
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A

In the morning, I awoke to a gasp, but it didn't sound like Taylor's. I reached for my dress, which was covering me like a blanket. As my eyes tried to adjust to the hideous light, I caught flashes of the person peering down at me: her dark hair was tangled, and her brown eyes were narrowed into slits. That crystalline chair sparkled in the light.

“Kylie,” I said, scanning the space for Taylor. He was nowhere to be seen. “Where did—”

“He needed to take care of something,” she said. “And I offered to watch over you, because … ” She paused, studying my back. Studying whatever growth Taylor had seen the previous night. Or maybe there was more, considering …

“He told you?” I pushed myself to a sitting position. My limbs ached, but it was less of an all-consuming pain and more the feeling you get after a long night of flying. A welcome soreness in the muscles.

“He didn't have to. The whole forest is talking about it.” Kylie scoffed, a short, scalding sound. “I thought you'd already got them back, you know? Thought the Queen had sewed them on. But this … this is much more magical, isn't it?”

I was having trouble lacing up the low back of my corset, and suddenly I didn't want to use magic in front of Kylie. So I just held onto it, looking up at her as she blinked in the early morning light. Her hair was tufting up in the back, like perhaps she and Alexia had slipped away last night when Taylor and I did, but any joy it might've brought was gone now.

“You're angry with me,” I said.

“Oh, no.” She shook her head and just kept shaking it. “I'm not angry with you. I'm just angry.”

“What can I do?”

“What
can't
you do?” she responded, not really answering me. “What can't the Dark Princess do? You get love. You get your wings. You get everything you want. And I get nothing.”

“You have Alexia
,
” I said before I could stop myself. “You have us
.”

“Oh, good. I guess I'm set then.” She made a move to leave, but I stopped her with my hand.

I took it back when she glared at me. “But that doesn't change things, does it?” I asked. “Nothing you
have
changes what you
don't have
. Just like Taylor's love didn't make up for the loss of my wings.”

“But it
does
, that's the point.” She ran her hands through her hair. “You're going to get back your wings. You're going to get back everything they stupidly told me I could get back, if I just
prayed
for it. Or made up for what I'd done to anger God. Someone actually said that to me, do you believe that?” She looked up at the trees. “And I knew they were wrong, but they wouldn't let it go. If God didn't fix me, science would. There are so many new advances to science! They kept me locked in a fairy tale. Locked in a tower.”

“Kylie. I'm sorry. I—”

“I don't want you to be sorry. I want to be able to be myself without having my differences
thrown
in my
face
.” Her eyes shimmered with tears. “I mean, honestly, is that asking so much? I feel normal. I
am
normal. The only time I feel different is around
other
people, you know?”

I do,
I thought, studying her eyes. When I was a child, I realized there was something very different about my wings. Unlike my mother's, which were grand and full, mine appeared to have been sliced along their curves. They looked
tattered
, and the courtiers called me the Tattered Princess behind my mother's back.

Still, through it all, I had been able to fly. As for Kylie …

“I am truly sorry,” I said, reaching for her hand. “Honestly, if we could trade places—”

“Don't do that.” She pushed away my hand. “I don't want your pity. That's what I've been trying to tell you. I'm happy for you. I
am.
I just … ”

“What is it?” I said softly, worried the worst of it was yet to come. Worried she'd never forgive me, or she'd do something rash.

“I'm just sick to death of waiting for the slightest bit of decency from the world, and being disappointed,” she said, wiping away the tears. “I'm sick of being forced to live in a universe where the logic doesn't make
sense
to me, and when I finally get to a place where magic exists, the same stupid logic applies.”

“But—”

“Not for everybody. Just for me.”

“It isn't just you.”

“Okay, well, anybody who isn't a
faerie
. God, maybe I'll sew your old wings into my back, so that I have faerie blood running through my veins, and then I can be magical too.”

“
Kylie
—”

“But that wouldn't work, would it? The world changes, and you change with it. Only I stay the same. And I'm just
done
… ”

I knelt before her. I didn't even realize I was crying until my tears fell onto her knees. And when I reached up to touch her face, she didn't pull away. She just looked at me.

“I'm not making threats,” she said. “I just can't carry everyone anymore. It's too much weight.”

My thumb trailed across her cheek, catching a tear as it fell. “That is the secret, isn't it? Everyone sees you as the sweetest among us, and that is true. But beyond that lies something different. You are the strongest. Not because of what you've endured, but because you insist that we will win, even when none of us dares to believe it. You make it true, with that insistence.”

“Kylie the insufferable optimist.” She snorted. “Good riddance.”

“We all wear masks, and Faerie will strip them from our faces. That is the danger of bringing you here.”

“The danger and the power,” she said softly. “And what about those who've always been here? What about
you
?”

I laughed. “I had to go to the human world to shed my mask.”

“Which was … ?”

Elora the singular entity, never depending on anyone but herself. Denying the possibility of love to survive.

“The untouchable princess,” I said.

To my surprise, she laughed. Her eyes trailed to the place where my top threatened to fall away. “Not so untouchable anymore, huh?” 

I blushed, looking down. “I've been … working on it,” I said. “Sometimes it's hard for me. To trust him. I keep thinking the moment I do, he will disappear. Or betray me.”

“Why?”

I shrugged, as if we were discussing algebra equations or the process for making jam. “It's what I know.”

She was quiet a minute, studying my eyes with an intensity that made me nervous. Finally, she said, “Your parents?”

“Well, I only know my mother, but that's enough.” I huffed, a sharp sound. “It's more than enough.”

“That bad, huh?”

“She's the Queen of the Dark Faeries,” I said, as if that explained it. And I suppose it did, if you knew the slightest bit about her.

“And you never met your dad?”

“Plenty of faeries grow up only knowing one of their parents, or none. We're all related, all connected by the same earth, which is our original body, and so we raise each other. The specifics of our parentage aren't fussed over like in the mortal world.”

“So not knowing your dad is normal.”

“It would've been normal if we hadn't been forbidden to speak about him.
That
made his absence clearer than anything else.
That
made me wonder why he'd left. If I'd simply had a bit of information, I could've let it go.”

Instead I'd obsessed over it. Obsessed over the coldness of my mother. Obsessed over the idea that my father would save me from her. From being alone.

“It makes you hate yourself, doesn't it?” Kylie asked softly. “Or, at the very least, you question your worth. If you can even
be
loved.”

“Yes.”

“My parents are jerks too. I mean, maybe not jerks-with-magic, but still. They made me hate myself for a long time.” Her gaze shifted down. At first, I thought she was looking at the grass, but then I realized she was looking at herself. “You're never going to ask me, are you?”

“Ask you what?”

“If I was born this way, or … ”

“You can tell me if you like.”

“Well, we were talking about our parents,” she said, tugging at a thread on her dress.

My eyes widened, and my heart nearly stopped. “
They
did this? Your parents—”

“No. Not exactly. It's just … ” She shook her head, and I feared she was going to stay silent. But after a moment, she said, “My dad used to hunt.”

“Like … animals?”

“Yeah, like deer,” she said. “He'd go on these weekend trips with his friends. And when Keegan was old enough, he'd take him along, because you know, boys hunt! Girls … gather, I don't know. Like we were all cave men.” She laughed, and I laughed with her.

Then, nothing. “And this bothered you?” I pressed. “This inability to hunt?”

“Not that. Just feeling inferior. I mean, I was
eight,
and I already knew he loved me less.” 

A shiver, slow-starting, skittered up my spine. “You offered to go with them,” I said.

“I thought I could win him over.”

“By hunting?”

“I wasn't going to
hunt
,” she said, as if it were obvious. “I was going to swim and eat s'mores and they could go hunting down the road … ”

“But they didn't?”

She fell silent again, looking off into the trees. “That was probably the plan. But the second morning we were there, this deer came into our camp. A girl. Fully grown, you know, but without any horns. I thought,
Aw, maybe it's a mama deer searching for food.
I thought I could follow her back home, real quiet, and catch a glimpse of her fawns.”

This time, I waited a beat before saying, “Did you?”

Kylie blinked her eyes, but no tears fell from her lashes. “Everybody was drunk. I mean, not me and Keegan, but the guys would bring, like, four eighteen-packs and stay hammered the whole time. One of my dad's friends picked up his shotgun and fired without even batting an eye. He caught her in the leg.”

“What did you do?” I asked. I could see it all so clearly. The panic. The blood. And eight-year-old Kylie trying to make sense of it.

“I just
lost
it
,” she said. “I started screaming and running over there, waving my hands. And my dad was yelling at me to come back over, but I didn't. The second I moved, the deer was dead, you know?”

I nodded, closing my eyes. “And he … shot you?” I asked.

“It was his friend. He wasn't trying to shoot me. He was just drunk, and he thought he could hit the deer behind my back. When the shot fired, the deer took off, and he hit me here.” Kylie twisted, pointing to her side, down low. “You'd be surprised at how many people suffer spinal injuries that way. Except mostly it's guys shooting their girlfriends. Or wives.”

I winced, fingers tearing at the grass. I'd come so far, gained so much faith in humanity. But faith could bleed into fury in an instant.

“Did he go to prison?” I asked softly. Perhaps if humans had taken vengeance on the man, I wouldn't feel so angry. I wouldn't ache to see his blood running over my hands.

Kylie shook her head. “When the whole thing happened, everyone was screaming, and my dad was yelling at the guy. Saying he was going to kill him.”

Perhaps he should have,
I thought. I kept that to myself.

“When I woke up in the hospital, things had shifted. I could hear my dad talking to the nurse, saying, ‘Why did she step in front of the deer? Why did she insist on coming?'”

“Oh, Darkness,” I breathed. But it was a foolish thing to say. Darkness hadn't done this. People had.

“I think it was easier for him, you know? If he blamed me, he didn't have to blame himself.” She sniffed, tilting her head to look up at the sky. “I just needed him to say that he loved me no matter what had happened before. No matter what happened after.”

“But he never did?”

“He didn't say much after, in general.” She lowered her head. “And then Keegan came out, and our parents kicked him out, and … I was just done waiting for them to come around, you know?” Her eyes shimmered again. “To
see
us as we were, not who they wanted us to be.”

“I see you,” I said. “I know it isn't the same thing. I
know
it isn't. But we're making a family, the five of us.”

She nodded. “We are making a family,” she agreed. “And families stick together in times of turmoil. In times of battle … ”

“Kylie.” I froze, my chest tightening. “We've been over this. Each one of you is helping me—”

“We are,” she said, flashing a mischievous smile. “I'm making you a secret weapon that'll knock Naeve on his ass. But I'm also making armor, made out of iron—”

“Iron is forbidden.”

“Not to humans. It'll keep us protected.”

“Kylie, please! You cannot go to battle. It is too dangerous.”

“Alexia's going. Keegan's going. I don't even know what Keegan's plan is, but I know it's a big one. Can you stop all of us?” She paused, staring into my eyes. She wasn't crying anymore, but those eyes were bright. Filled with possibility. “I know you're letting Taylor go.”

“Yes, because I need … ”
An offering.
But was that really why? Or had I simply realized that I couldn't make the decision for him?