CHAPTER THREE

Mami’s lullaby holds me close in bright warmth. I have no idea where I am, and I don’t even care.

For what feels like the first time in ages, I let go. All of the burdens of the last few years fall away—the fight for scholarships, grades, study time, sleep. Mierda, the ability to do anything but grind, grind, grind, the promise of a future as a doctor constantly dangled as a prize just out of reach.

I long to help people, to be a healer, and I’m ready to be the thing, not just dream it. Patient, I’m not.

Eventually, I stop moving, but I can only tell once the light withdraws back into a ball that sails up and away into darkness, the last notes of the lullaby fading. Where am I? The air feels too cool and crisp for Miami, and it’s far too quiet. My fingers flex against the hard surface below me, scraping on the roughness of stone. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. I’m on my back, staring up into a deep-purple night sky, spangled with tiny, winking stars.

I sit up and try to pull my feet under me, but my ankle shrieks in agony. “Carajo!” I forgot all about it while in the soothing light, but it lets me know it’s not just a little hurt—it’s really hurt. I’ve torn ligaments, at a minimum. I need to wrap it and apply ice, lots and lots of ice. Then I should—

My crystal necklace starts to glow a pale blue, and crystals embedded in the surface I sit on brighten, too. Ay! I’ve worn it for years, and it’s never done anything like this!

An electric shock zips through me, and…

The pain in my ankle stops, like someone flipped a switch!

I reach out to probe the injury, bracing for pain, but there is none. No swelling, no tenderness, either. I rotate my foot gingerly, putting the joint through its full range of motion. It feels fine, as if I never hurt my ankle in the first place.

Holding up my necklace like a little lantern, I get on my knees. The crystals glowing in the stone below me extend only a few feet in each direction. When I knee walk over and pat at what’s past them, my hand plunges into open air.

“Carajo!” I’m on some kind of platform, who knows how high. The crystals dim, and I back away, even more wary without them to show where the edges are. When my necklace finally goes dark, I can no longer ignore the fact that it glowed and that I felt something when my ankle healed.

If you’d asked me only a few hours ago what I believed in, I would have said science. Blood work and x-rays and PET scans and all the different ways medicine has discovered how to heal a human body.

And yet, there’s always been a part of me that believed in something more. In the recipes in the old family cookbook that weren’t food, the herbs used to treat various ailments.

But this, this is something more. My fingers trace over the smooth sides of the crystal pendant I’ve worn ever since Abuelita gave it to me for my quincea?era. Most girls got crosses, and indeed, Mami gave me a little gold one on a dainty necklace I keep safe in my jewelry box.

But Abuelita pressed this solid pendant into my hand and curled my fingers around it. “Keep this with you always, mija. My grandmother said it’s magic.”

“Grandmother Abigail? The English one? The one with the stories?”

“Si. The one who spoke of Faeries.” Abigail emigrated to Peru in the middle of the 1800s. There, her talk of magic and other worlds were laughed off as British eccentricity, and the family still told stories of her wilder tales.

But what if they were true?

Magic.

This crystal is magical.

The warmth and rightness of the light that brought me here echoes through me again. But where is here?

Now that the crystals have gone dark, my eyes adjust enough to see deep night all around. There’s no golden glimmer of lit windows or streetlights anywhere close. No wait! Tiny blue dots move in the distance, zipping back and forth. After watching them for a bit, I settle back down onto the stone with a little laugh. Fireflies. Nothing to get that excited about.

No city lights, no heavy humidity coating the air, which smells sweet and fresh.

If the magic in the crystal is real, does that mean Faerie is, too?

Morning arrives with a trill of birdsong and sunlight warming my face. I roll upright and stretch my arms as a yawn cracks my jaw. My ankle still feels great. In fact, my whole body feels fantastic. I slept on hard stone all night but somehow don’t have a single ache from it.

“Dios mio,” I breathe, climbing to my feet. Trees stretch into the distance, pines shaped like tall Christmas trees mixed in with trees covered in… blue leaves? I spin, and mountains rise behind me, their rocky peaks cutting impressive lines against the bright-blue sky.

If this is Earth, it’s an unspoiled part. There’s not a single building or road anywhere. Could it really be Faerie? Time to explore .

It’s a good thing I don’t move much in my sleep, because I’m not just on a platform—I’m on top of a pillar of rock a good twenty feet high.

The sheer sides of the stone column taunt me as I lean over the side. If there’s one thing I’ve realized from all my hours volunteering in the ER, it’s that a certain percentage of people wind up there because they try something stupid they convince themselves will work.

Looking at the twenty-foot drop to the ground, I know there’s no way I can make it down on my own without breaking something.

“Hello! Can anybody help me?”

All the happy birdsong comes to an abrupt halt for a moment, as if the forest around me holds its breath.

I hold mine, too, ears straining…

There! A new sound. Some kind of repeated thumping. It gets louder and louder.

“Over here!” I yell, waving an arm overhead, even though I can’t see anyone yet. I’m just so fucking relieved someone found me.

A huge gray monster riding the horse from hell breaks out of the trees. A hairless head tops a crudely shaped face, complete with a blob of a nose and a ragged gash of a mouth. A horrible fascination lights his beady black eyes when he sees me, and he bellows a meaningless string of syllables.

He’s taller than the tallest human and at least twice as wide, heavy with muscle. He wears nothing but an animal-pelt loincloth and a big double-headed axe, leaving little to the imagination. For once, I find myself not curious about how a body is put together. There’s something about him that’s repulsive on a primal level. Dedicating my life to medicine means I’m supposed to be above such things, but I’m not—not when it comes to him.

And the horse! It’s yellow-green and covered in scales instead of hair, with a mane and tail made of waxy fat ribbons in dark olive green. Shark teeth fill its mouth, and I could swear it stares at me with malice.

“Carajo!” What is all of this? Mami always told stories of strange and fabulous things that happened to my long distant abuela, but those were just stories.

Weren’t they?

The monster leaps from the horse and runs up to the stone. I’ve spent the past several hours wanting a way down, but right now, I’m thrilled the sides are too steep to climb.

Or not. Just my luck. Monster man went to the same school of “why not try? I’m sure nothing bad will happen” as all those people from the ER. He wraps his too-long arms around the sides of the stone, grunts, and…

Mierda. Yep. He’s climbing.

More grunts, and he’s halfway up, grinning up at me in a way I don’t like.

I back away from the edge, but the top of the stone’s so small there’s nowhere to go. My hand wraps around my crystal unconsciously. I drop it as soon as I realize. Even if I didn’t imagine things earlier and it healed my twisted ankle, what’s it going to do to stop monster man? Nada.

He crests the edge, one long arm swiping out, only a couple of inches short of touching me. With another heave forward, he hooks my leg, yanking me so hard I fall across his shoulder with an oof of expelled breath.

His skin’s rough and thick, like a leathery hide. Mierda, he smells so sour and rank I gag. Thank god, various anatomy and physiology labs have given me a strong stomach, because otherwise I’d be sick all down his back. Actually, he might smell better covered in vomit.

But he’s climbing down to ground that’s still too far away. If he dropped me from this height, I’d end up with some kind of cervical fracture at a minimum.

Okay, Selena, let’s not throw up on the guy who literally holds our life in his hands. I swallow convulsively several times.

As soon as his feet touch the ground, I start to struggle. He’s so tall I’m still eight feet off the ground, but my skin’s crawling—my body wants away from his with an almost animal panic. “Let me go!”

A huge hand clamps over my butt, pawing at me, a deep voice saying something that sounds more like rocks crashing together than words. Monster man grabs me and sets me down in front of him. I thought being on his shoulder was as bad as it could get.

I was wrong.

He leers at me and runs a black slug of a tongue over his lips.

My heart lurches in my chest and starts racing like I’ve developed tachycardia. I keep having that visceral reaction to him, one of pure revulsion that shakes me to my core.

I rabbit to the side, and he catches me, his hands clamping around me in a vise.

My mouth opens on a wordless cry as my whole body screams NO !

But I’m not the one yelling.

A green man on a galloping black unicorn races from the trees, sword raised overhead. He barks out a challenge and leaps to the ground before the unicorn even comes to a full stop, landing with the perfect balance of an athlete.

Monster man lets go of me and whips around, pawing the axe from his back. They surge toward one another and meet in a clang of metal.

The unicorn lunges for the hell horse, and they start to fight as well.

Hemmed in on both sides, I backpedal until my shoulders hit the hard surface of the stone.

The green man is seven-feet tall and more heavily muscled than any human, but the monster’s even larger. Yet they seem evenly matched because the green man’s movements are fluid and precise, every strike a thing of beauty.

That’s such a weird thing to think, because this is violence, and I’m supposed to hate anything that can cause bodily harm. But I don’t. I might not want him to hurt the gray monster, but if that’s what it takes to get the leering thing to leave me alone…

The unicorn lets out an angry whinny, rearing up to thump hooves into the hell horse, which screams and wheels around to run into the pines.

The green man counters a vicious strike and spins, driving his sword into the monster’s shoulder. Black blood wells from the wound. That explains his skin color, but what in the world would make it black? If he doesn’t use hemoglobin, which turns red when it carries oxygen, what does he use?

The monster flails backward, and I have to leap aside to not get squished.

Focus, Selena! Now’s not the time for a comparative biochemistry lesson.

Another scream comes from just within the trees, and the monster man yells and goes racing over to meet the hell horse, swinging up onto its back and galloping away.

The green man turns to face me, his dark eyes raking over my turquoise scrubs with a frown. His voice is deep and resonant now that he’s not yelling. “Drevistie.”

He wears well-tailored clothes clearly cut to fit, the pants and boots brown leather, the shirt woven fabric in a dark rust red.

At his temples, silver strands lighten inky black hair that’s even longer than mine. His handsome face has a perfectly shaped nose, scowl lines bracketing an otherwise attractive mouth. He’s older than me, but it’s the seriously hot kind of older that some men grow into, where they’re even better looking than when they were young.

Now, him I wish I could study in detail. He looks like he’d be the perfect anatomy lesson.

My crystal warms on my chest as a zip of electricity shoots through me.

His shirt and pants disappear, leaving him standing in nothing but boots and sword belt, like some kind of naughty pirate fantasy come to life .

Medical curiosity—because of course that’s all it is—pulls my eyes down his muscular chest and rippled abs to…

“Dios mio!” My eyes widen.

He’s green. He’s huge. And he’s pierced .