Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

I ’d known a few beings with the power to open portals.

My mother, who went where she wished.

Kik, the last land kelpie, who’d simply had to lift a foreleg to access realms.

The Oracle, whom I’d never spoken to on the subject. Andas could portal, and Sigella had learned to portal through witnessing me doing so.

Maybe it was different for all of them. All I knew was that as soon as my magic was released, I knew how I could create portals.

With every breath of ocean air, I could feel an enormous presence within me that was almost as big as my being.

That presence wasn’t just within me, though, it was all around me. I could feel the presence most strongly in the main realms, Earth and Underhill. I could also feel a lesser presence in the scale realm. I pulled a face at the memory of the mass of black ribbons slicing through my legs. Not my favorite realm. I could also feel a tinier presence again in the very smallest of the four realms, the prison realm, that sat within the scale realm and held those fae who’d let too much darkness into their hearts.

This job probably called for finesse, but I didn’t feel equipped for finesse. I never felt equipped for much these days.

Fuck it.

I opened a portal to the fae realm and paused for a second to absorb my joy at the sight of purple water on the other side.

I’d start with the ocean creatures.

I threw a lasso of silver toward the biggest presence I sensed—something I’d practiced a few times in recent days. In that, at least, I was prepared.

I hooked a rawmouth, and the huge water fae didn’t need any encouragement to speed toward me.

A great eye filled the portal I’d opened.

“Hi Bawth,” his voice came.

Hi, Boss.

I dipped my head. “Rawmouth. Summon your kind. It’s time to leave Underhill for ruin.”

“Forr ruinnn, bawth?” he said sadly.

“For ruin,” I repeated. “Do it now. Do not delay.”

There was another who would not like my presence here, nor my intention to steal his future slaves.

I felt the surge of nearing rawmouths. Holding the portal to Underhill, I opened a second portal to a lake on Unimak that I hoped would be large enough to hold the rawmouths.

“Ready bawth,” he said.

I nodded and opened both portals wide. The drain on my essence wasn’t significant, but the job had only just begun. “Come now.”

The rawmouths dove into the cold sea before me, covering me in a seemingly endless wave of water that I breathed through without fear of death. They rose in a second dive to pass through the second portal to the lake.

I waited until the last fin had passed into relative safety, then closed the portal to Unimak.

Now came the harder task. Andas hadn’t noticed me yet, and I couldn’t risk alerting him by sending a pulse of my magic through the purple ocean. I lashed out the teensiest wisp of my magic and then cast a net when I located my target.

Like the rawmouth, she came willingly with my magic.

Soon a tiny cloud hovered in the portal to Underhill.

She didn’t speak, but glowed silver happiness at the sight of me.

I took note of the twin suns’ positions in the sky behind her.

“Little one,” I said to her. “You and your family must spread a message to the other creatures of Underhill for me. You must do this as quickly and quietly as you can lest darker forces suspect what is afoot. All land creatures must gather at Dragonsmount without delay. Any not there as the suns set will be left in peril.”

The tiny cloud began to rain.

“Yes,” I said. “I wish it had not come to this. I will help you along.”

I released the tiny cloud back to where I’d found her in the cloud forest where Peggy had lived until recent times.

Then I cracked my damn knuckles.

“That was one of the many bad habits I deplored in you,” someone said from my right.

I bared my teeth and whirled on the tea-drinking traitor who’d killed my mother—who’d killed the mother of all creatures. “Sigella.”

She waved a hand in the air. “Yes, yes, you want to kill me.”

“You killed my mother.”

“I killed your mother to spare her from a horrific end, as you know.”

Fury built in me, and yet…“I don’t have time for this now, Sigella.”

“Why do you think I chose this exact moment to leave Underhill? I have no desire to die, now that I’m free.”

“Go be free then,” I told her. “I will have nothing more to do with you.”

I faced the portal again, then reached my little finger through to dip it in the purple water. I drew it back, then squinted at my wet finger. “I know you are there, ones that connect the purple ocean and all its creatures.” Except for the rawmouths. They didn’t listen to anyone who couldn’t beat them—which is why I’d dealt with them first.

Microscopic flecks glowed purple on my finger. The slightly acidic plankton pulsed in response to my magic and touch. It struck me how often the fates of realms so often depended on the smallest beings. “The ocean fae need your help,” I told the plankton. “You must carry a message to all to evacuate to this portal into the Earth realm. They must be here before the suns set. Do not speak this message to any dark creature, do you hear me?”

The creatures pulsed, burning my skin, which healed as quickly as it was injured.

I dipped my finger through the portal again and released them. Through my window into Underhill, I watched as the purple ocean lit up in a wave until the glow of the bright-purple plankton extended farther than my eyes could see.

“Very clever,” Sigella said. “Though you were always good at surviving. Towering amount of annoying, vile habits aside, I couldn’t have asked for a better prison.”

“You talk a lot for someone who murdered my mother and the mother of all creatures.”

I threw her a glare and caught the shrug of her shoulders.

“I meant what I said,” I repeated. “I will have nothing more to do with you.”

“No one, not even you, will dictate my life,” she replied.

I smiled. “You have wanted freedom for so long, Sigella. What a shame if word were to spread of how you killed the revered and beloved Underhill. You would be hunted and pursued for the rest of time.”

She didn’t answer.

“Nothing to say now?” I asked.

“I have belief in your determination to do good.”

I’d always had belief in that side of myself. I might be savage by Earth standards, but I wasn’t cruel. I loved all creatures, and respect for their role in balance had been carved into me nearly from birth. “You would like me to forgive you as easily as you appear to have forgiven yourself.”

“What I did was a mercy.”

“What you did was too hasty,” I informed her in a calm voice I didn’t recognize. Perhaps I was already desensitizing to suffering, because in the past, the fury I felt would’ve had me clawing for Sigella’s ruffled throat.

Sigella’s focus bored into my face. “You believe there was time to do something?”

“The right to try should have been mine, and you stole it from me. I think you’ve gone so long without having to answer to anyone that it didn’t occur to you to consider anyone other than yourself.”

She scoffed. “How many times have I saved your life?”

“To save your prison,” I said scathingly. “To preserve your new freedom.”

There was a slight sourness to the words which told me they weren’t entirely true. I tilted my head, watching as the tidal wave of purple shifted, heading toward the portal. Soon, the ocean creatures would gather. Andas couldn’t fail to notice that. What happened then?

“What will you do when Unbalance arrives?” Sigella asked.

I looked at her. “Maybe you could shoot an arrow into him too.”

“Gladly.”

I wanted to shout and scream at Sigella. I wanted to hurt her. Yet these parts of me were balanced by one annoying and persistent truth that I couldn’t quite deny.

I sighed heavily. “I can admit that mother might have suffered a horrible fate if Andas had succeeded in taking her.”

The ancient fae blinked.

“I will never know if Andas would have succeeded though. Perhaps I would have found a way to thwart him. And so I cannot forgive you for stealing the possibility of more time with her from me,” I told Sigella in the next breath. How different this battle against Unbalance would have been if we’d had my mother and her knowledge and experience on our side. “Begone, Sigella. I am done with you and your fucking teacups.”

She didn’t budge, but fae of all shapes and sizes were visible in the tidal wave careening ever closer to my portal.

The time for hiding was over.

I flung the portal wider than my mind could fathom. Perhaps the whole of Alaska could fit within the confines, I knew not. I just knew that some unlucky human fishermen were about to get the shock of their lives, along with any marine life in Earth’s oceans.

The tidal wave split to either side of me, hopefully collecting Sigella in its torrent, and as I held the portal of gigantic proportions open, thousands upon thousands of fae beings surged passed me, carried by the powerful swell of their own making and encased in water.

They looked at me for the split second they could, and I looked at them. I saw their fins and barbs, their gills, their teeth. I saw their colors like rainbow streaks against the purple canvas. I felt their awe and their fear and their hope. They stored that hope within me.

Me, of all people.

Water pounded, and new tidal waves formed from the arrival of so many fae in one place, as much as I’d tried to spread the portal. Some of the fae would be crushed in the mass of bodies. Humans and other animals might die in the resulting tidal waves too.

The rush was slowing. The suns were just a sliver on the horizon of Underhill through the portal.

There was a tap on my shoulder, and I glanced at Sigella.

Her voice was impossible to hear, but I read her lips.

“He is coming.”

I nodded, shrinking the portal rapidly as the last creatures threw themselves into the Earth realm. I shrunk it to the size of my body, then opened a second, larger portal.

Andas appeared, and I threw the larger portal at him, promptly closing the entrance to Underhill afterward.

Sigella whistled. “Nice move. Where did the second portal go?”

“The waterhole in the prison realm. I’m hoping someone shat in there recently.”

She laughed, but said afterward, “That won’t hold him.”

“No shit, Sigella.”

I turned to face a literal sea of fae, hundreds of thousands that I could see and millions that I couldn’t. “Listen well. The daughter of Underhill has brought you to the Earth realm for a time. Stay hidden. Anyone who attacks the humans unprovoked will have me to deal with. We are guests here, and you would be wise to remember it. Spread out. Be safe.”

The suns had set in Underhill, and I didn’t have the luxury of a longer warning. Not if I wanted to save their earthbound counterparts. I’d dragged these fae from their homes into this foreign world, and now I would leave them, cruelly, to learn and survive as best they could.

Sweat beaded on my brow, and though my legs wanted to fold, I was surprised not to feel more of a drain after such a feat.

“Where to next?” Sigella shouted over the crashing waves as fae escaped in every direction to hide.

I portaled away.

There was a barren part of Unimak I’d noticed, where the court fae didn’t tend to go. Kallik and Faolan lived closest to it. I was sure they’d have something to say about their new neighbors, but so be it.

Barren land underfoot, I opened a portal to Dragonsmount and stepped into Underhill this time.

“Old Man,” I said. “You’re first.”

“I know of humans,” he replied from the depths of his hole. “I know they will fear me, and they are slaves to their fear. They will war against fae because of my presence. I cannot go, Mistress of Underhill.”

I didn’t have time for this. “You will go because you are too powerful for me to let you fall into the hands of Unbalance.”

There was quiet. “Wisdom that I see no path around.”

“No,” I told him. “And so go Old Man, and we will fight what wars we must together.”

There were no more arguments from him. I threw the portal wide, and the magnificent dragon slid from his huge den in the mountainside, dislodging razor-sharp shingles with his gliding exit, which was a mere whisper considering his size.

“Impressive.” The voice reverberated through the land and through my body. It plucked at the suffering in my heart.

I glanced over my shoulder and found Andas hovering in the sky. He sat upon a steed of skulls that I recalled the sluagh riding. The steed had found a fitting new master.

“Andas,” I called back. “Has anyone told you how similar your name sounds to ‘Anus’?”

“Childish remarks are beneath you, Underhill.”

I’d grown up with a land kelpie whose language was more colorful than a rainbow flock. A childish comment or two could sure help a person feel better.

I closed the portal after Old Man. “Been busy?”

“But of course,” he said. “Have you missed me?”

“You? No. Cormac and Aaden, yes.”

“You still live under the illusion that they’re within me. They are me, you fool. They are merged to become me, and they no longer exist as individuals.”

Yet my mother had said I could reach my men and undo the darkness of Unbalance. “They are within you, and I hope they know how much I miss them. What we had was taken too soon, yet I know that they were for me, and I was for them. I hold the beauty of that in my heart even as I mourn that we didn’t have more time together.”

I could hardly put a word to what had bound the three of us together, and yet I knew they were a part of me just like my arms were my arms and my brain was my brain.

Andas grinned. “You’ve spent the last month crying over them, haven’t you? You, the chosen of Underhill, a savage creature raised in the cold belly of the fae realm, brought to tears like a little girl over two men who barely tolerated you.”

Suffering was a poison.

I absorbed the blow of his words because they were a blow. They clawed at my fears. Cormac and I had only just found common ground shortly before the tree of life had killed him—or his body, at least. After the tree had injected Cormac’s soul into Aaden, Aaden had ‘barely tolerated’ me for the most part too.

And yet they were mine just as my arms were my arms and my brain was my brain.

I let myself feel the suffering invoked by his words, but I didn’t let that stop me from opening a portal to the barren area on Unimak. I pushed the opening between realms to the proportions of a country once more.

“Creatures of Underhill, it is time to leave this place.”

They didn’t hesitate, the fastest of them blurring through the portal ahead of the others. The sky was filled with as much of a stampede as there was on the surface—and beneath it.

Andas’s laughter was terrible, more terrible still because I could hear Cormac’s low rumble and Aaden’s lighter humor within it. “You think I’ll allow you to take my subjects?”

“Subjects is a loose term for what you mean to do with them.” I readied myself for his attack, knowing already that Andas was stronger than me.

His steed trotted through the sky toward me, and the moonlights caught at the angles of the cracked skulls that formed it. “I need my subjects just as you need yours. You’re no different from me.”

“With me, they might live and prosper. What life do you offer them, Unbalance?”

“I offer them the life that makes me powerful. With power, I am better able to do what I am made for.”

Oddly, his words made sense to me. “I understand you.”

There was a pulse in the air between us. A flicker in his eyes and a tightening in my chest.

I did understand him, if not the darkness that was his reason for being. But I comprehended the undeniable drive to fulfil his purpose. I felt that too. We just so happened to have completely opposite purposes, and there was nothing that could be done about that.

“And so we will fight now,” he said.

I gathered my magic in great gulping waves, but daggers of burgundy essence sang through the air. One lodged in the skulled steed, and its scream ricocheted through Dragonsmount. Andas was flung from the steed’s back, and I whipped out my silver power to grip his middle, then hurtled him into the deepest part of the dragon’s mountain den.

I wasted no time collapsing the mountain on him.

Another part of Underhill destroyed, and this time I was the one who’d done it.

I wiped sweat away, realizing then that the drain of maintaining the portal had driven me to my knees. “Move,” I commanded the creatures with in a roar.

There were so many of them left.

Polished, buckled heels came into view as I blinked through sweat.

“ You threw the daggers?” I grunted at Sigella.

“You’re welcome.”

She walked past me across the shingles and then through thin air as Andas burst from the collapsed mountain with a menacing bellow.

“Calm yourself, Unbalance. Goodness, she’s but a bumbling child. Don’t tell me she’s gotten the best of you.”

Andas turned black eyes on her. “Sigella, you are freed.”

“As you knew.”

“Of course. You gave this child of Underhill the key to defeating my sluagh, if memory serves.”

Sigella released more burgundy magic, and a table and two chairs appeared. “I killed Underhill also. You know better than to weigh unbalance on one act alone.”

Andas shot me a look, then glanced down at the disappearing fae below. Around half had made it through. “You seek to delay me.”

“And I am worth delaying things for, or you would not otherwise still be speaking with me. Tea?”

Andas focused on her, and in his black eyes I saw the calculation that Cormac and Aaden had never possessed apart. Combined, they’d created an ancient being—or become the vessel for one, if mother were to be believed.

Sigella sat at the table and a teapot and two teacups appeared.

My body started to shake as the tarbeasts stampeded their way to earth. The alicorns were behind them. I propped myself up on my hands, unable to keep my head raised any longer.

I listened instead.

“You expect me to believe that you deal truthfully,” Andas sneered.

“Everything can be seen in two lights at least. I helped Silver kill your sluagh. And now you are without any soldiers of darkness. Perhaps I was creating a job opportunity for myself.”

“I am not without any soldiers of darkness,” he answered. “But two are in their infancy again.”

Two are in their infancy. He was either referring to himself as the only mature henchmen or there was a third I hadn’t known about. Damn it. I’d assumed that Andas was the final one.

“Infants aren’t much use. If Silver is a child of Underhill, she herself has seasoned henchmen.”

Henchmen. I’d never thought of my friends that way.

“A bat who’d prefer to braid hair, and—oh, wait, I believe my sluagh killed the land kelpie.”

I shut my eyes against a wave of grief, resting my forehead against the jagged shingles. The ground shook with the movement of the fae creatures. That would need to be my assurance of their passage.

Sigella snorted. “Good riddance, but you must know that the previous Underhill replaced him before I killed her.”

There was a heavy pause. “Who has replaced him?”

“Won’t you sit down to tea?” Steel entered Sigella’s voice.

“If you were interested in joining me, then you wouldn’t stand between me and securing my subjects below.”

“I will keep my options open until my decision is made, and you know I’m powerful enough to stand in the way for long enough for them all to depart anyway.” She paused. “You also know that whether they are here or on Earth, you will have them eventually.”

“Yes,” he said. “But the notion of waiting is bothersome…You forget that just as Silver is mistress of balance, I am master of unbalance. I see your path, and it does not join mine. You have come to trick me, and I shall take your life for it.”

There was a clink of a teacup against a saucer.

“You should have chosen to drink tea, Andas. A bit of lemon balm might’ve calmed you.”

I couldn’t keep this up for much longer. I was almost drunk with the spending of my power.

Out of nowhere, paths burst from under my hands in a criss-crossing maze. My magic. What had I done to summon it forth? Or had it exploded of its own accord? This was the magic of Underhill—the magic my mother had possessed, and I had no idea how to begin unwinding the maze of pathways.

But even I could sense who the paths belonged to.

Three shone bright silver and ran parallel to the path that I could sense was mine. Another of the paths was connected to Orry in the earth realm. One belonged to Peggy, and her path wove around another that had withered—the one that had been Kik’s.

The third path led directly to Sigella.

I groaned. A warning indeed. Sigella was one of my fucking henchmen. My magic was warning me that she had to live.

Black exploded as Andas surged forward in attack.

Sigella flung up a wall of burgundy but was belted down the collapsed mountainside in a blur. She didn’t stand a chance, and she’d known that.

She’d done it anyway.

And I still hated her for killing my mother before I had a chance to save her.

The ground continued to rumble, and the mass of creatures thundering through my portal blurred in and out of focus. I couldn’t tell how many remained. Less than one-third, maybe.

Yet now I found myself in the same position as Andas, weighing the worth of a henchman against the lives of those who trusted me to save them. I could only save one or the other.

The path to Sigella’s broken form below shone silver.

I followed her path into the future, seeing how my path almost appeared to lean against hers for support at points. Her purpose was to strengthen me. I would need her help…if I could let myself do so.

My gaze fixed on Kik’s withered path. That would be Sigella’s fate if I didn’t act. What was more, if I had three henchmen, then I could assume that Andas might have a third helper too. Great.

"Thank you,” I whispered to my magic as the tangle of paths faded from my sight.

There would be death today, but it wasn’t Sigella’s. Such was her importance that the demand of balance was a horrific one. An unimaginable one.

Her path must continue, while another one—belonging to thousands—would not.

Suffering.

How much of it could I bear?

I gathered my remaining power, closing the gigantic portal. “I’m sorry,” I said hoarsely.

I heard their screams as the portal disappeared. I heard their confusion as I shot myself toward Sigella like a bullet. Andas would soon enslave them to darkness, and from this moment, they would believe that their chosen Underhill had abandoned them to save her own skin.

Latching onto Sigella’s ankle, I opened a smaller portal ahead of us, feeling Andas’s power try to snatch at me.

He hadn’t expected me to leave anyone behind. Because Silver wouldn’t have.

But I didn’t know who I was anymore, and as I passed through the portal into the unknown beyond, I didn’t know much of anything at all.