A Faerie's Curse

Chapter 5

Five

I dash into the meeting room on one of the lower levels of the mountain and drop into a chair, noting that I’m the last person to arrive. The other five members of Chase’s team are already seated. Meeting time, I tell Chase. In case you want to add anything.

“Late again,” the elf girl with the spiked hair mutters from across the table. “You know some of us have actual jobs to be at in, like, ten minutes, right?”

I open my mouth to ask when last I was late, but Gaius gets in first. “Oh, did you find a new job, Ana? How wonderful.”

She absently twists one of the piercings in her left ear. “Yeah, well, we might be busy cooking up the biggest mission of our lives, but I’ve still got bills to pay.”

“You know you’re welcome to stay here if you—”

“Thanks, but no,” Ana interrupts. “I like my own space. Besides, Chase taught me well, so it wasn’t too hard to find work.”

“Oh, you’re also a tattoo artist?” I ask, working hard to keep my tone polite.

“Of course I’m a tattoo artist. Did you think I was just the receptionist?”

Darius, the blue-eyed faerie slouching in the chair beside Ana, snorts. “Receptionist,” he grunts in amusement. She flicks his arm with a tattooed finger.

“Perhaps we should begin,” Lumethon suggests, focusing her gaze on Gaius. With her perfectly white hair and colorless eyes a stark contrast against her dark skin, she might be a faerie with particularly exotic coloring or some other being entirely. I thought it too rude to ask.

Beside me, the drakoni man named Kobe who never says very much, nods in agreement.

“Right,” Gaius says. “Quick updates.”

I told you Ana doesn’t like me, I say to Chase as I fold my arms and focus on Gaius.

Give her time. She takes a while to warm up to new people.

The spider-like contraption I noticed on Gaius’s desk last night climbs onto the table. Lumethon snatches her hand out of the way as the device made of cogs, wheels, various pieces of metal, magic, and needle-thin sticks for legs moves past her toward Gaius. One spindly leg holds a scroll and another holds a quill. “Excellent, very good,” Gaius mutters with a smile.

Ana shakes her head and whispers, “Ridiculous.”

The spider raises the scroll and allows it to unroll, the bottom edge of the paper hitting the table and unfurling another few inches. Gaius leans forward to read whatever notes are on the scroll. “All other projects have come to an end, so we’re now focusing solely on Chase, the Seelie Court, and this terrible veil-splitting vision that Amon and Angelica are so interested in.” He looks around the table. “You’ll be pleased to know I’ve found some information on the prison beneath the palace. Most people don’t even know it exists, but it turns out an old friend of mine had a brother locked up there at some point, and he was allowed to visit before they, uh, carried out the sentence. And before you ask,” Gaius adds quickly, “he does not know how to get there. He was both stunned and blind-folded.”

“Seems excessive,” Darius comments.

“Indeed. Anyway, this friend of mine has agreed to put together some drawings of everything he remembers. We can examine the drawings in depth once I’ve got them.

“Next …” Gaius examines the scroll again. “Darius and Kobe met with the mer king last night and confirmed that the monument involved in the veil spell is under heavy guard. The king is still refusing to have it moved, though, and destroying it isn’t just out of the question, it’s apparently impossible as well.”

“I wish he’d at least let us try,” Darius says. “That would be fun.”

Kobe frowns, his reptile-like eyes narrowing at Darius. I see a flick of his forked tongue as he says, “Do you have no respect?”

“You know I have no—”

“What’s so magical about this trident monument anyway?” Ana asks. “I know the witch in the vision said something about magic of the heights and magic of the depths. And we all know the full moon can have a powerful influence on spells, so that’s the height part. Obviously the mer statue is for the depths part, but what’s so special about it?”

“As the name suggests,” Gaius says, “it’s been around since the time of the very first mer king. That was … oh, centuries and centuries ago. Every king and queen since then has added their magic to the monument in some way. That makes it a very powerful statue. Probably the most powerful object beneath the ocean’s surface.”

“Okay.” Ana sits back. “I guess that makes sense.”

“Right then,” Gaius says. “Lastly, we now have an invitation to Princess Audra’s birthday party at the Seelie Palace, so that’s our way in. It’s nine days away, including today, which means we still have time to find out how to actually get there. Ana and Lumethon, any luck with that?”

“Nothing yet,” Lumethon says as Ana shakes her head. “As we’re all aware, it’s a well-kept secret.”

“I think I can help there,” I say tentatively. Everyone’s attention focuses on me. “I know someone who works for the Seelie Queen.”

Ana’s hand slaps down on the table as her mouth drops open. “You didn’t think to mention this before?”

Patience, I remind myself. She’s a friend of Chase’s and I need to make an effort with her. “I did think of it,” I explain to the group, “but I decided there was no point in mentioning it since he hardly ever leaves the Seelie Court. It’s been months since I last saw him and we don’t have that kind of time where Chase is concerned. But I just found out that he’ll be visiting my brother and sister-in-law on Friday evening, so we have until then to come up with a way to get the Seelie Court location out of him.”

“Can’t you just ask him?” Darius says.

I try to keep my frustration in. “He’s a close advisor to the Seelie Queen. I am one hundred percent certain he won’t approve of a group of outlaws breaking into the palace to rescue the man who enslaved our world a decade ago.”

“I wasn’t suggesting you tell him that,” Darius says. “Just, you know, say that you’re curious.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Curious?”

“Okay, you have a point,” Darius concedes. “He’s definitely not going to just tell you.”

“I wonder if it might be possible to follow him,” Lumethon says. “You can keep yourself invisible so he doesn’t know.”

“I could, but what about the faerie paths? I assume they’d be involved for at least part of the journey, so I’d have to touch him in order to wind up at the same destination on the other side. How will I get away with that without him noticing?”

Lumethon looks at Gaius. “There are ways to follow him without being in physical contact.”

Gaius nods, and I remember Ryn telling me something similar once. “Yes, there is magic that will allow you to follow him through the paths without touching him. One of those unstable spells that relies on precise enunciation of every word—and if I remember correctly, there are many words involved. It can easily go wrong, which is why it isn’t taught in schools. I’ll have to look it up.” He nods at his contraption, which lifts the quill in one spindly leg and makes a note on the scroll.

“Does Chase have anything he might want to add to this meeting?” Ana asks, looking across the table at me. “Is his situation still the same? Would you even tell us if something changed?”

“Of course I would tell you. Why wouldn’t I?”

“You seem to be mighty possessive of that ring that doesn’t even belong to you. I just hope you’re not hiding anything from us.”

Breathing in deeply, I manage to refrain from crawling across the table and punching Ana. Instead, I tug the ring off and send it spinning across the table. She slaps her hand down over it, glares at me for another moment, then picks it up and swivels her chair around to face the wall.

I look at Gaius and mouth, What did I do wrong?

He shrugs. “Well, that’s all for now. Some of you have work commitments, and Lumethon and Calla have a training session. I’ll see you all tomorrow morning, unless something comes up before then.”

Everyone except Ana stands and moves toward the door. Darius complains about his boring day job and Kobe tells him to get over his laziness. Then they agree to meet later for a training session in the gym room next door. Lumethon greets me at the door, but before she can say anything further, Ana pushes her hand between us, the ring sitting on her open palm. “He says you shouldn’t wear it during training,” she tells me as I take the ring from her. “He doesn’t want to distract you.” Without waiting for a reply, she slips past me and out of the room.

“I know she can be … difficult,” Lumethon says, “but give her a chance. She’s had a tough life so far, and she doesn’t trust easily.”

I push the ring into my back pocket. “What happened, or shouldn’t I ask?”

“Well, it isn’t a secret,” Lumethon says as we leave the meeting room. “She lost her whole family a year or two before The Destruction in an accidental fire. She lived with friends for a while, but … well, I won’t go into details, but it wasn’t a healthy situation. A few years after Draven’s defeat, at the age of eleven, she ran away. She survived on her own for three years, becoming particularly skilled at stealing and even more skilled at evading guardians. When someone eventually caught her, Chase rescued her and gave her a choice: join his team or face the Guild.”

“And she chose you guys, of course.”

“Yes. She lived with me for a few years, then announced on her seventeenth birthday last year that she wanted a place of her own.” We head upstairs toward the mountain’s entrance hall. “I was a little worried in the beginning that she would simply run away,” Lumethon continues, “but she’s been fiercely loyal to us since the moment Chase took her in. And a valuable addition to the team. Exceptionally stealthy. The places she’s snuck into would blow your mind.”

Right, and here I am using invisibility to sneak into places. No wonder Ana looks at me with such disdain. “So she would have done a great job with last night’s mission.”

“Yes, she probably would have done that one if you hadn’t joined us, but since last night’s mission involved stealing from one of our own clients, we needed to be absolutely certain that whoever we sent wouldn’t be caught. Anyway, enough about that,” she says as we cross the entrance hall and stop by the faerie door. “It’s desensitization time.”

I shudder inwardly at the thought of the systematic desensitization I’ve been forced to endure every day since I admitted to the rest of my team that I have a phobia of confined spaces. “Yeah, I know. Let’s get it over with. Where are we going this time?”

“Back to Rosenhill Manor Art Gallery.”

“Oh, I love it there.”

Lumethon smiles. “That’s why we’re going back.”

I follow her through the faerie door to the lake house, where I place my hand on her shoulder as she writes a doorway spell on the wall. Moments later, we walk into the exquisite gardens of Rosenhill Estate. Green lawns, rose bushes and weatherworn statues surround us as we walk uphill toward the old manor house that was once the home of a Seelie Court lord. Now it houses room after room of magnificent art.

Luna, the old elf lady who saved Chase from his own misery and despair in the months after he ceased to be Draven, knew about this place. She never had the opportunity to visit the manor house herself, but she’d heard tales of the breathtaking artwork contained within and told Chase all about it. After she died and Chase found himself with her artistic ability, he came here for inspiration.

Lumethon and I walk through the grand entrance of the manor house and pay for a ticket each. Wooden floorboards creak beneath our feet as we walk toward the first room. A kaleidoscope of color drips from every inch of all four walls, the pattern continuously changing as the enchanted paint shifts again and again into a seemingly endless series of designs. It’s mesmerizing, but not exactly relaxing. This isn’t the room we came here for.

We pass through a room with sculptures that move fluidly from one form into another, and then a room filled with floating glass spheres that each contain miniature scenes constructed entirely from pieces of scrap metal. Another room seems sure to burn up at any moment as flames lick their way across every canvas. It’s an enchantment of the paint, though—paint I’ve been lucky enough to use once—so the canvases remain intact.

We end up in the water-themed room—my favorite and the most suitable for our purposes. A stream of glittering, silvery water flows diagonally across the floor from one corner of the room to the other where it disappears into the wall. Flat round stones floating above its surface allow visitors to jump across from one side to the other. The canvases on the walls depict scenes of lakes, waterfalls and oceans with enchanted water paint twinkling, twisting and rushing but never leaving any canvas. Lumethon and I use the rocks to get to the other side of the stream where a tree trunk resting on its side serves as a seat. “Are you ready to begin?” she asks as I sit.

“Yes.” I try to clear my mind of all worries and distracting thoughts as I close my eyes.

“Breathe in through your nose,” Lumethon instructs. “Feel the air rushing into your body, feel it filling your lungs and expanding your chest. Now exhale, slowly, through your mouth, releasing all tension as you do so. And again, listening to the gentle movement of the water, slowly inhale. Focus on the air entering your body, filling you anew. Now release your breath and picture your lake, the place of relaxation you’ve chosen.”

I reach my imaginary peaceful setting quickly now that I’ve done this several times. It’s a version of the lake outside Chase’s home in the human realm. A wide expanse of water stretches out before me, gentle waves lap at the shore of the lake, a carpet of lush grass is wonderfully soft beneath me, and a clear blue sky finishes the picture.

“Now that you’ve reached a relaxed state,” Lumethon says, “think of your list. We’re moving on to a scenario that produces a medium level of anxiety. Imagine yourself in that situation for as long as you can.”

Doing my best to hold onto my sense of calm, I imagine myself standing and walking away from the lake. The scene melts away to reveal the lowest level within Gaius’s mountain home. The level where gargoyles and other creatures are kept. It begins with a small room with rough stone walls and a narrow slit of space in one corner. A tunnel so narrow I’ve never been brave enough to go through. I take in another slow breath as I picture myself approaching that horribly narrow tunnel. My heart rate kicks up a notch, but I focus on the soothingly repetitive water sounds as I keep moving forward. Breathe, I remind myself. In through the nose, out through the mouth. I walk closer. I place my hands on the wall on either side of the dark space and stare into it. The tunnel is narrow enough that it might touch my shoulders if I were to enter it, and so dark that I have no way of seeing the other side. But despite the fact that my heart is jumping faster than normal, I don’t feel overcome by panic. I take one step into the tunnel, then another. The darkness grows around me, pressing in, and that’s when I shake my head, shudder, and open my eyes.

“I can’t go into the tunnel yet,” I tell Lumethon, looking around and finding her leaning against the wall between two paintings. “I was almost there. I planned to go inside and the thought didn’t freak me out, but I couldn’t actually do it.”

“I know. You were projecting again. I saw everything.”

“Not again,” I say with a groan. “I told you this would be a problem. I can’t keep control of my ability because I’m too relaxed.”

“That’s fine, Calla. The point here is to get over your anxiety. Once you reach that point, you’ll be able to face these kinds of situations while retaining control of your projections. And you’ve already shown improvement,” she adds with a smile. “When we did this two days ago, you didn’t want to even approach the tunnel.”

I nod. “True. It is getting a bit easier.”

“Good. Now close your eyes, re-establish a relaxed state of mind, and go through the process again, imagining the same situation.”

“Okay, but you’ll watch the door, right? I mean, in case I project again, which I probably will.”

“I’ve had a shield across the door the entire time. You needn’t worry about anyone walking in.”

I repeat the exercise, approaching the tunnel quicker this time, my anxiety only spiking once I’m actually inside the dark, tight space. I try to push myself further, to remain in the tunnel for more than two or three seconds, but the fear of something pressing in around me—touching me, suffocating me—becomes unbearable far too quickly.

“Well done,” Lumethon says when I open my eyes and wriggle my shoulders as if to shake the fear away. “You’re definitely getting there. Now, how do you feel about doing a real life test?”

“Real life?”

“The log you’re sitting on is hollow. Do you think you can crawl through it from one side to the other?”

I stand up, walk to the end of the tree trunk, and peer down. Turns out it is hollow. Could I crawl through it? It’s a ridiculously simple task, one that just about anybody else could easily perform, and yet … “I’m not quite sure about that.”

“Why not try?” Lumethon suggests, pushing away from the wall. “We’re in a non-threatening situation. The log is wide enough that it won’t touch your back while you’re crawling through, and you can see the other side.”

I nod. Being able to see the other side and knowing how quickly it will be over definitely helps. I lower myself onto my hands and knees and look through. Lumethon crouches down on the other side and beckons with her hand. I eye the rough interior of the tree and let out a nervous laugh. “It’ll be quite a tight fit. Even though it won’t touch my head or my back, I’ll know it’s right there.”

“Don’t think of it. Look at me and think of wide open space. Tell yourself you’re crawling on the grass beside your lake and there’s nothing above you but miles of fresh air.”

I picture it—the blue sky and endless space—and slowly, carefully start crawling. Rough bark scratches my palms and Lumethon smiles encouragingly up ahead. I think of space all around me. Space, space, space and … the inside of the tree all around me. Closing me in. I suck in a breath and crawl faster. Faster, faster until I finally emerge at the other end. I grab Lumethon’s hand and let her pull me to my feet. “Phew. Okay, that wasn’t too bad. But, like you said, this is a non-threatening situation, so I had time to get myself into a relaxed state of mind first. That’s not always the case.”

“True, but we’ll keep practicing until the relaxed state of mind is automatic and you no longer see confined space as a cause for anxiety. You’re making good progress, Calla.”

“I know, I just … I feel so ridiculous celebrating something this simple. It’s such a silly fear. I know it is, and yet, when the panic takes over, all rational thought flees from my mind.”

“Phobias aren’t rational.” Lumethon moves to sit on the log. “And you have an entirely legitimate reason for developing this particular phobia.”

“Yeah,” I mutter, thinking of the hanging cage I was locked in as a child in the Unseelie Prince’s dungeon. The black water and the wailing prisoners and the stink of sweat and terror. I shiver. That scenario is definitely at the top of my anxiety hierarchy. I’m leaving that one for last.

“I’ve got about twenty minutes left until I need to get to work,” Lumethon says, “so let’s move on to illusion training.”

“More training. Right.” I push my hands through my hair. “Yes, okay. Let’s do this.”

Lumethon’s eyebrows rise. “Is something wrong? Have you had enough of our training sessions?”

“No, no. I’m very grateful for all the time you’ve spent helping me, and I know this is important. It’s just … Don’t you ever feel so overcome by impatience that you want to tear your hair out?” I tug at my hair again, as if she might need an illustration. “I mean, we train every day, and everyone goes to work like they normally would, and every night we go to bed, and all the while Chase is locked in a dungeon where someone could kill him at any moment. I know we’re doing everything we can, but it still feels like nothing.”

“I understand your frustration,” an unexpected voice says, and I look across the room to find Gaius standing in the doorway. “I feel as if we should be actively searching for the Seelie Court at this very moment, not sparing a second for sleep or rest. I have to continually remind myself that we’d never find it that way, and even if we did, we’d never get in.” He steps into the room, admiring the painting of water falling upward, crashing into quiet foam and the top of the canvas instead of the bottom. “Lovely art gallery, by the way. I’ve never been here.” He leaps onto one of the floating stones and jumps to our side of the stream where he takes a seat on the tree trunk beside Lumethon. “So. Ready to trick my mind with your latest illusion?”

“You’re here for my training? I thought Lumethon was doing that.”

“We both are,” she says to me. “Today we’re attempting the one thing you keep telling me is impossible.”

Wonderful. I tilt my head back with a groan and mutter, “Simultaneous illusions.”