Orphan Lost, page 23
A rumble ran through the floor, so violent it clacked my teeth, and my ears popped at a sudden pressure change, the bathroom door sucking hard against its frame, the air pulling at us in a tangible mockery of the tornado ripping the building down around us.
The three guys just pressed closer, their knees digging into my shoulders and back. I shoved an elbow at them, but they didn't budge.
The room flared with light, the scent of green growing things cutting through water and dank toilet and fear. I looked up through the circle the guys made, their chins all I could see at the top, just in time to see the ceiling tiles wrench away, debris buffeting all of us.
I screamed and screamed and screamed, but I couldn't hear it. All I could do was keep clinging to their legs as vertigo hit.
The sky above turned impossibly blue, flaring with brilliant sunlight.
My scream rang out into the sudden silence even as Birch fell to his knees, his sudden weight throwing me into Wilder. He slumped over and pinned me between them and knocked the air out of me. In turn, I fell onto Oakley as he collapsed onto the grass.
I fought free of their limbs, pure adrenaline riding me, and crawled into a patch of taller grass in a gently blowing meadow, gasping, chest heaving. Small shrubs dotted the landscape of yellow flowers and flitting insects.
The panic in my chest was my own, no echo of Rhodes, that was the first thing I noticed.
Then I blinked and actually saw what I was looking at. Tall grasses, endless blue sky, and a forest in the distance. The air was fragrant with flowers, so thick each breath was like huffing perfume, numbing my nose rapidly.
There was no sign of the bathroom in my high school, only the three still figures slumped in the tall grass.
Something stung my neck, and I slapped at it, pulling my hand away to show something small and sparkly smeared with my blood across my palm. Tingles spread with my pulse from the bite site, and I shuddered.
The bug fluttered purple wings with silver veining before falling still, long legs curling up like a spider.
I jerked and dropped it, wiping my hand against my jeans. There was no bug that I knew of that looked anything like it. No bug that could explain the cool lassitude that was starting to spread through my limbs.
Several moving sparkles caught my eye, and I watched them warily as they kept their distance. "Guys?" I called, tongue thick in my mouth.
No answer.
I gathered my legs under me and scrambled unsteadily over to the nearest two. Birch lay draped haphazardly across Wilder's thighs, back arched and his head buried in the grass.
I rolled him free, arms shaking with the effort, and slid his head onto my lap. He groaned, eyelids fluttering.
There were probably a dozen nice ways I could have woken him, but instead I slapped him, hard, my hand stinging with the contact almost enough to ignore how heavy my limbs felt.
How tired.
I was just so exhausted all of a sudden, and I was terrified because there was no way that this could be natural.
He jerked, hand flying reflexively to the red mark I'd left on his face, as he opened unfocused eyes. I leaned in, more of a fall than a controlled movement. "Birch."
He blinked blearily at me before looking past me, eyes widening. He swore vehemently, and pushed himself into a sitting position. "Are you okay, luv?" he demanded, and then his gaze flicked to the blood on my neck. "Did something bite you?"
"Yes," I slurred, my head too heavy to keep up as I sort of slumped into him.
He called for the others, real alarm in his voice now, but his words were distant and echoed, and I was just…
So…
Tired.
Chapter 8
Waking came slowly, in stages. My body awoke before my mind, and anxiety rose in a belated surge of confusion.
I was moving, swaying, sort of like I was resting in a hammock, the sun burning my face. Had I fallen asleep reading? The heat was dry, the sun harsh, as Texas often was, and I was sure to get sunburnt if I didn't wake up and move to the shade.
"Mom?" I slurred and struggled to open eyes that seemed glued shut. "What…"
I stopped moving abruptly. There was the sound of male voices being raised around me, and a sudden drop found me lying on the ground, something sharp slicing into one elbow.
"Stella?" multiple voices said at once, none of them familiar.
"Mom?" I said again, forcing my eyes open and swallowing hard. I felt feverish, shaking with chills as I woke up some more.
The Texas sky was deep and blue above me, its endless depths suddenly cut off by three shadowed faces leaning over me.
"Stella," one of the voices said sharply. "Wake up."
It hit me then; mom was gone. She was never coming back. And I knew these guys.
"Oakley," I choked out, lifting one leaden arm to cover my teary eyes. Mom was gone, Dad was gone, and I was alone.
"Oh, good," another breathed—Wilder. "She recognizes you."
"I think she only got stung once," the third said, Birch's smooth tones.
"You hope she only got stung once," Oakley grated out and snapped his fingers in my face. "Focus, come on, stay with us, brat! Please."
I licked cracked lips and shivered, awareness settling in more fully as I dropped my arm. "Where are we?" I asked, scrubbing at my face to hide the tears and blinking up at them, my voice shakier than I would like.
Wilder leaned in from above my head, brown and white woven ropes of some sort of bark reaching out from him to me. "We're in Faerie, sugar pie. We got lucky and landed somewhere sort of benign. I mean, you got stung, but—"
"Way to drop a bomb," Birch muttered and rubbed at the beginnings of scruff. He was wearing those ropes too, tangled with my legs.
I lolled my head to the side to try and focus on Oakley. "Faerie."
"Yeah," he said with a gusty sigh. "We couldn't let a tornado kill us all, so we opened a portal to Faerie."
Adrenaline flooded me with shaky memories of the ceiling above us tearing apart, rushing wind and gurgling pipes. I sat up, head spinning. "What?"
"Shh," Wilder hissed, pressing a hand over my mouth. "Keep it down. We're trying to get you to the castle before anything else can go wrong."
I blinked at the cuts adorning his hand and arm. In fact, all three of them looked scratched up and bloodied, their jeans especially torn and ragged in places. "What happened to you three?" I demanded in a hiss. "You look awful."
Oakley signed and rubbed at his face. "Faerie is a hostile place, even for fae. Now, hush; we have to hurry."
I pushed into a sitting position and realized I was reclining in a hastily woven sling made out of some kind of pithy bark, the braided straps were tying me to Wilder and Birch. "I can walk," I groaned.
"No," Wilder snapped, lunging and grabbing my hand before I could put it down to push up. "Razor grass. You can't walk through this. Look and see, because you already got your elbow good."
I stared at him and then lifted my arm to look at where my elbow was stinging. Sure enough blood flowed freely from razor thin cuts. "Razor grass," I said flatly.
"Yeah," Birch whispered. "That's why we're carrying you in the sling, luv. The sling will protect you and let us focus on getting through it without getting cut up."
Looking around, I could see that we were in a field of lurid purple grass, some of it taller than I was. It grew in clumps, but there was space enough to walk between clusters if you were careful. "I can—"
"For once in your life, shut up and let us take care of you!" Oakley snarled, pointing one shaking hand at me. "We have to get to the castle before dark, and we don't have time to baby your frail human flesh, we need you safe!"
My jaw dropped and I sputtered.
Wilder shot me an apologetic look. "He's right. Let us focus on getting you to safety, okay, Stella? It's our fault you're here. Let us protect you please, sweetie."
I snapped my mouth shut, giving the field another wary look and then testing the wounds on my elbow gingerly. The cuts were so fine they barely stung, but I was bleeding copiously.
"We need to get moving before her blood attracts predators," Birch said softly to Oakley while avoiding the glare I shot at him.
"Fine," I said. "But you'd better tell me when I can help. I'm not going to be a burden if this place is as dangerous as you say."
"Promise," Wilder said softly, and he and Birch tightened their straps, yanking me, and the sling, unceremoniously into the air. I gasped and clung to the edges, swaying above grass that crinkled and broke like glass shards when the sling touched it.
Whatever material they'd chosen for the sling, it was tougher than the razor grass. I kept my mouth shut and shifted to put pressure on my elbow.
Birch glanced down. "We'll get you bandaged as soon as it's safe. The grass is getting us too, but we heal a lot faster than humans."
No wonder their jeans were shredded.
"What bit me?" I asked, thinking back to the sparkling bug that had, I now realized, knocked me out.
"Pixie," he said with a grunt, the two guys working together to maneuver me around a taller patch of grass. "How many got you?"
Oakley ignored all of us and moved ahead to check for safe passage, mincing around grass and swearing.
"Just one, I think?" I said, swaying from side to side with their movements. Just riding like this was harder than I expected, seeing the guys flinch as the grass caught them and knowing the best thing I could do was be still and not cause more problems. "I got fuzzy pretty quick."
"Pixies," Birch grunted, the word an expletive in the way he said it. "I'm sorry they were your first introduction to Faerie."
The corner of my mouth quirked despite myself. "You mean I misunderstood the razor grass and Faerie isn't always trying to kill you?"
Wilder huffed a laugh. "No, you understood correctly. Faerie is… well, it's a challenge even for fae and our magic and healing. There's a reason a lot of us choose to live in your world."
"I didn't know you healed faster than I do," I said, staring up at the depthless blue sky. There was no sun in sight, no sign of where the light was coming from to cast shadows, but when I lifted my hand curiously to test it, it cast a shadow across my stomach.
"You've never been inclined to stick around long enough to ask or find out, brat," Oakley said affectionately enough, if a bit brusquely. He circled around and led the others, and me by extension, through a narrow gap in the grasses. I folded up as best I could so that the grass couldn't reach me, but the guys weren't so lucky, swearing under their breath and flinching. "Nothing in the human world is as dangerous as Faerie."
"Or as ridiculous," Birch said grumpily. "Did you know hummingbirds are dangerous here? They drink blood. Forget flowers and feeders. The whole place is like that, dangerous and beautiful."
"No wonder you spend your time on Earth," I said thoughtfully.
"They take up the same space," Wilder said, looking down at me and giving a half smile. "They overlap kind of so that everywhere you go, you can reach Faerie if you just reach through the veil."
"Is that hard to do?" I asked as we slowed. I peeked over the edges of the sling, and the razor grass was more and more spread out and easier to avoid. Maybe we had reached the end of it? Trees loomed in the distance, a crystalline sort of green that bent and refracted light.
"Piercing the veil is easy," Wilder said, and by some unspoken agreement he and Birch lowered me to the ground again. "But bringing something, or in your case someone, through is hard. We had to make a hole big enough to drag you through safely without, uh, losing anything."
I sat up as the sling collapsed around me. "You mean like, clothes?" Because as hostile as this place was, I didn't want to be naked or barefoot too.
Birch knelt next to me and used a pocketknife to saw at one of the woven straps from the sling. "I mean like limbs, luv. You like your feet, right?"
I gaped at him. "I could have lost my feet?"
"We were as careful as we could be," Wilder hastened to reassure me. "That's why we didn't get you out of danger faster. We wanted to make sure you wouldn't be hurt."
Birch pulled my arm to him and, after a moment's confusion, I let him. He wrapped my injury with the flexible bark, tightening it off and tucking it into itself. I'd bled enough to be crusty all down my arm and side. "We were lucky with the field we landed. Ironwood bark is pretty much the only thing we could have made a sling out of that would have stood up to the razor grass. Better?"
"Yeah, thanks for that," I said and awkwardly rolled into a crouch before standing on the remains of the sling. "Are we bringing this with, then?" I stepped off it carefully and looked over what they'd woven to protect me.
Quick thinking on their part.
Oakley frowned and studied it. "No. We could use the material, but it's too bloody. It'll just attract trouble. If we leave it here, maybe it will attract trouble to this location instead of to us."
"Right," I said, nodding like I understood what kind of trouble he was talking about. "I'm ready."
His mouth twisted into a bitter smile, and he gestured at the trees looming a short distance away, the sun breaking through weeping fronds and casting rainbows across a low dirt path that vanished into their depths. "I'd say follow the yellow brick road, but…"
"Will it take me to see the wizard?" I asked snarkily, and Wilder bit back a laugh.
"No," Birch said, uncharacteristically solemn. "It'll take you to the Fall Court and Rhodes' mother. But we're not powerful enough to get you home without help, so we don't have much in the way of options."
I gave a sharp nod. "Let's do this, then."
Beneath the trees were a million shades of brilliant, glowing green, and as we walked, I stared up through translucent leaves at the sunless sky beyond. The air here was fragrant with some sort of spicy flower, although I never saw the blooms.
The guys walked as though we could be attacked at any moment, but it was hard to genuinely feel threatened when it was so beautiful. Oakley led the way, holding a stout branch that he'd found near the beginning of the woods. Birch followed behind me, glancing back often, wary and tense, and Wilder walked at my side, quick to steady me if I stumbled.
And I stumbled more and more often, exhausted in a way I hadn't expected when I'd first stood up from the sling.
"It's the pixie sting," he said by way of explanation when I stumbled, again, over practically nothing in the path and swore in sheer frustration. "And days are longer here. It's already evening at home, but here it's just after midday."
"How far do we have to go?" I asked, wincing and hopping a few steps to let my other ankle recover from the trip. "And where's the sun?"
Wilder bit his lip and glanced at Oakley. He turned back to me after a moment and gestured around us. "We're in Summer right now. We need to make it to Fall so we can take shelter there."
"Each area has a season," I said, nodding. I'd read enough fantasy growing up for that to make sense. "How is it laid out?"
Oakley rolled his shoulders and cracked his back, eyes watchful of the treed depths around us. "Earth and Faerie aren't the same size, exactly. And distances warp in Faerie. We could be hours from Fall or just a few steps and it would be hard to know.
Overall though, it's a sort of a wheel with each season in order."
"Great," I said, unenthusiastically. "Are we going to have to spend the night out here?" I had a multi-tool in my pocket, my wallet, and a phone tucked in my bra, but that wouldn't do much for helping with fire or shelter.
"Stars, no," Birch exclaimed, bunching up with us. "We'd die before dawn. We need to get to Fall as fast as we can so we'll be safer. We can't stay in Summer." Oakley slanted a glance at Wilder, and Birch grimaced, correcting himself. "Well, Wilder could. He was originally Summer Court before he was gifted to Fall as part of a peace accord."
"Right," I said sourly. "Because that makes sense, just gifting people like they're objects."
Wilder just shrugged. "Politics. I'm happy in Rhodes' court, so it all turned out okay. That said, it's not like I'm entirely safe in Summer, but I'm safer than any of you. Seriously though, we need to get to Fall as soon as possible if we want to last the night."
"Less talk, more walk, am I right?" I said, setting off down the path, and Oakley hurried to get ahead of me.
Birch dogged my heels, close enough to make me edgy, and Wilder patted me on the arm. "The more you focus on how long it's taking, the longer it will take. Like, think nice thoughts or about homework or something, okay? We influence Faerie's space without meaning to."
I huffed a breath. "Okay. When we get out of here, I'm totally going to have a bonfire at the McCullicks' house and roast marshmallows. I've always wanted to do that and it's kind of frowned upon on military bases. Wrap up in a big sweater and sit by the fire and maybe I can talk Donna into making us spiked hot chocolate."
Striding along beside me, Wilder said nothing for a bit and then asked in a small voice. "Are we invited?"
I glanced at him slantwise and thought about it. "I mean, you did save my life and stuff. I guess you guys can come."
"And Rhodes?"
I made a face. "He's still on the naughty list. Juniper, too."
Wilder leaned in closer, speaking softly. "We want you to be our bonded."
My brows shot up and I pointed silently at Oakley, making the most exaggerated are-you-kidding-me face I could. Behind us, Birch huffed a laugh.
Wilder just rolled his eyes. "Yes. All three of us. Right, Oakley?"
The last was said with a certain threatening weight to it, and Oakley didn't even bother to turn around to answer as he spoke. "Yes, yes, we all agreed to it, brat."
He didn't sound enthusiastic though, more like he was between a rock and a hard place.
"I didn't agree to it," I countered. "Sleeping with Calix is still on the table."
Ahead of us, Oakley's shoulders stiffened, but he didn't turn, and Birch's murmured protest was nearly inaudible.
Wilder though, he caught my arm, careful of my bandaging, and walked with me. "Rhodes said Juniper was going to give you something to help you decide. Did she get a chance to get that to you before things fell apart?"
