9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

The darkness has spoken to me again. There's a solution, but the price is so high I'm not sure I'm willing to make that sacrifice. My Little Star…

~Queen Brenna, personal journals

The past few nights have been different. While the food is cooking, Cole talks. Not about him and not about me. We've kept our lives out of the discussions, but we both know that if I'm to survive this new world I'm in, I need to learn about the Fae. I don't know what it is about my desperate need for that information that spurred him to speak unbidden, but he no longer seems so annoyed at the mere idea of sound coming from my lips.

That's why, when I step into the campfire light tonight, I'm surprised to see him standing stock still, his eyes on a distant area beyond the trees. When I try to say something, he holds up his hand, silencing me.

What could it be that he's listening to? The seconds tick by as I stare at him, every muscle in my body on high alert. My thumb presses against the glyph on my spear, and I feel the magic in the spear activate. It's a feeling I'm growing more used to. As soon as I tried to feel it, it seemed obvious.

Then I hear it. An eerie silence that only happens when a storm is rolling in, but there's not a cloud in the sky.

"The Nothing," Cole hisses. He puts a hand out toward the fire, and it's extinguished in a second. He rushes to his things and wraps them up. "I don't know where it's coming from," he says. "But it's here, and we need to get away from it."

The Nothing? What is he talking about? Some new terrible beast that I couldn't have imagined while I was living a human's life? Or is it something else? Something more deadly? I don't say anything, though. I've learned enough from him to recognize that it's best to just trust the High Fae to know when danger is near. The moment that Cole is afraid is the moment that I should be petrified.

I grab up my bag and bedroll and sling them over my shoulder after shoving the night's squirrels into them. Cole is already running, and I have to sprint to keep up. We get back onto the path and continue to head north.

Cole doesn't seem to struggle to keep a breakneck pace, but after several minutes of continuous sprinting, I start to have difficulty keeping up. I've never run this far this fast in my life. My lungs burn from the exertion, but whatever is making him run has to be bad. I can't imagine what would scare someone like Cole.

It takes everything in me to keep my legs moving second after second. I just keep my eyes on Cole's back as we burn up the miles.

Then Cole stops so suddenly that I run into him. It's like running into a brick wall, and he doesn't so much as have to take a step to catch his balance. It takes everything in me not to fall to the ground when my momentum is thrown off that much.

I expect Cole to say something. Anything, really, to explain why he would just stop in the middle of the road. Then I see it.

I step out from behind him and understand what the Nothing is. The mists that swallowed up Riverside and so many other places in the world. In front of us, thick, rolling clouds crawl from behind the forest line. Tendrils of it creep along the ground. This is what terrified Cole. Not a creature. The mists that are slowly encompassing the world.

"We just go around it?" I ask, and he shakes his head.

"It's a trick. The Nothing is trying to catch us. Why else would it have left that child alive?"

I look to where he's pointing, and there, on the ground in front of us, is a boy no older than five. Walking around with a ball in his hand, he looks lost, but he's completely unafraid. Only a few feet away from the mists, he could walk into them at any point.

My heart catches in my throat. For that briefest of moments, the world seems to slow down. I've never been this close to something so deadly. It's like facing down a dragon. I can't do anything to keep the Nothing from going where it wants and killing anything in its path. All I can do is run.

Everyone knows that the people who go into the mists never come out. At least not alive. The images I've heard described are disturbing beyond imagining, and the thought of that happening to a child when I could stop it isn't something I can live with.

My legs move on their own, and I sprint toward the little boy. Even with how exhausted I am after our run, my feet move faster than I can remember. The boy looks up and starts laughing, falling backward onto his bottom. The ball slips out of his chubby little fingers and rolls closer to the mist, which just keeps edging closer to him.

"No, Maeve! Come back!" Cole's voice calls out to me from where we were standing, but I ignore him. There's no way I'm going to let this child be killed by the mists. He's so close…

"Hey!" I shout to the boy, but instead of listening, he rolls onto his hands and knees and crawls toward the ball that sits only a foot away from the closest tendril of vapor. Terror fills me, but it only pushes me harder instead of making me freeze. There's no way I'm going to let that little boy be lost to the mist when I can see him; when I can save him. I was given speed and strength and agility that a normal human could never imagine.

My Fae bloodline has made my life so much more difficult, but this is something good I can do with it. I can get to that child when a human couldn't. It won't take more than a few seconds to get there and get away from those deadly white mists.

I'm a hundred feet away from the boy when everything I'd thought I'd known becomes very wrong.

Until now, I'd thought of these mists as some kind of weather phenomenon. Something similar to morning fog. Except that it ate people. In my mind, it was like the Fae version of fog. Before I'd started running, it had been in the woods beside the road and in front of us, slowly crossing the road near the boy.

As I run, the mists come alive, shifting and moving with purpose. They quickly slide in front of me and hook around me. I have to jump several times as thin strands of it slide across the rocky path in front of me. It's not fast, but there's no doubt what it's trying to do. The wall of opaque clouds is trying to catch me and swallow me up as it swallowed up Riverside.

"Damn you, Maeve!" Cole screams from where we were standing. I keep running, but I'm not making nearly the progress that I was, and as I get within the last thirty feet, I realize the boy is sitting near a corner of the mist. It's a trap. Just like Cole said. I can't just leave the boy there to be swallowed up by it. His village is gone, his parents probably with it. If I don't save him, there's no one else that will.

Then I hear it. A soft hum. A song that I might have heard somewhere before. A voice that seems familiar. Or maybe not? I certainly can't place it. It makes me hesitate for just a moment, and then I push the hesitation away. This is life or death, and absolutely nothing is going to keep me from reaching that little boy. I'm moving faster than any human I've ever seen, pouring every ounce of speed I have into my legs, but when I'm ten feet away from him, the mists roll over him, swallowing him up.

And he's gone. No screams or shouts. No cries or begging for help. Silence. Nothing .

I scream in anger and defiance, wishing that the magic that I'd had only a few days ago was there to help me protect the boy. But nothing happens. Pure anger rises in me, like lightning in a bottle, bouncing around and making me want to break things.

The mists keep moving, angling toward me, and while I want to let the anger and disappointment inside me explode around me, there's nothing I can do for the little boy. Cole was right. Without a doubt, this was a trap, and now it's sprung. The mists have curled around and closed me in. Ten-foot-tall walls of mist that are impenetrable and opaque have made a circle around me. The softest, gentlest trap imaginable.

The circle tightens, slowly but surely, and there's no escape. With the sand harpies, it had been so fast. I'd thought I was going to die in a blur of talons and wings, and I barely had time to comprehend it. Now, I'm staring at walls of mist that move slower than I run. My death lies behind them, and I have more than enough time to realize my mistake.

I couldn't have done anything different. Maybe I'd have taken a different approach if I'd known the Nothing would move like that. I wouldn't have walked away from that child. Never.

I feel beaten. I'm pissed because I didn't listen to Cole. Even a few seconds' worth of planning could have given me the chance to save the boy and myself.

That humming is the only sound in the world. It's a soft song that feels like something out of a dream. The haunting melody calls to me and pushes me to reach for the puffy white clouds. It asks me to accept my fate. The song is beautiful and compelling.

The walls continue to close in, slowly getting closer by the second. I attempt to relax, to let the song take over. I'm not an animal, and I'm not afraid of death. I try not to think about how the bodies look after they're found when the mists recede.

When the mist is only a few feet away from me on all sides, they pause. "Not today, bastard," a voice says. Cole's voice.

Then he's above me, soaring on solid eagle wings. Tendrils of mist fly upward, creating a net as he gets closer to the ground. He rolls, his wings wrapping around him, and he pulls to the side, barreling into the tiny clearing.

He hits the ground in a roll beside me. Leaping to his feet, he's immediately ready, and it's a good thing, too. The walls assault him. The tendrils of mist fly at him like tentacles from a furious sea monster. Thousands of them moving nearly as fast as him.

He leaps backward and the tendrils close on empty air. "Maybe one day you'll catch me, but not today," he says with a wide grin on his face. For half a second, there's a pause as he stares into the mist. The mist pauses as well, like it's staring back at him. I'd swear that there was a person on the other side of that fog directing it.

Then he's moving again. He turns, takes one bounding step toward me, grips my waist in his arms, picks me up, and jumps. It all happens so quickly that I barely have time to accept it, but then we're in the air, and everything slows down again.

His leap has us flying toward the wall of mist, and a thousand tendrils reach out to grab at us. It's during this split-second pause that I realize that I'm not actually saved. We might both die right here, right now.

Then his wings propel us skyward, the misty tentacles left far behind on the ground. "You're a very stupid Wyrdling," he says through a grin. I'm hanging from his arms like a limp noodle, and he wraps his legs around mine, holding them up for me.

His muscles are strong . Far stronger than I could have imagined before. I'm reminded of when he proved I couldn't fight him, how he'd held me in place. My body had warmed at just his stare. This is so much more intense.

"Yes. Thank you for saving me. Again." Then something occurs to me. "You called me Maeve."

He doesn't respond right away, almost like he hadn't realized that he'd done that. "I didn't want to confuse you. There might have been another Wyrdling around."

I ignore his insult. "How did you know it would try to trap me?"

The wind is whipping around us as we soar over the forests that we've been walking through for days now. We're so high that my stomach twists in knots at the thought of falling, yet somehow, I'm not afraid because I can't believe that Cole would ever drop me.

"I've been dealing with the Nothing for a long time. It's… persistent. Especially with me. I don't know why, but it wants me badly. Even though it's never actually touched me, the closer I get to it, the more power it drains from me. I don't know how it's doing it, but that's probably the most dangerous part of the Nothing."

Now that he mentions it, I feel exhausted as well. "Why do you call it the Nothing?"

Cole tightens his grip around my waist, pulling me harder against his body, and I can't stop the shiver from crawling up my spine. I can feel so much of him. The hard muscles of his chest and legs. The… stiffness pressing into my back. I've never been touched by a man like this, and while I know it's obviously a functional way to carry someone, I can't keep myself from enjoying it.

"Because when it comes, everything gets quiet, like it's even absorbing the sound of the world. It leaves nothing behind except death. When it moves, no living creature ever comes out. Not squirrels or birds or even insects. It is the end of everything. The only thing saving us is that I don't think it can get very much bigger. At least I hope it can't."

That's a terrifying thought. "But it's still swallowing villages. How's that possible if it's not growing?"

Cole's chest presses against my back with every breath, and those breaths are coming more often. Like he's getting tired. He has to readjust his grip again, and his hand slips a little higher, nearing my breast. The feelings coursing through my body are very foreign, and I feel even more lightheaded.

"It's moving. Not growing. It swallows up a village and then it makes its way to the next. It mostly leaves the main roads clear, but I guess that's changed. I think we should veer off our path for a while. The Nothing took a lot of power from me, and I don't know if I'm ready to go back to Draenyth. It's not safe for me to be there while I'm weak."

Cole is the only reason I'm not dead. Twice now. "Take all the time you want. I doubt your emotions would survive me saving you for once."

He laughs. What's different about this compared to our days and days of silence while walking? He was smiling when he saved me. He smiled when he fought with the harpies. Now he's happy, too.

But when we eat, talk, or walk, it's like there couldn't be a more miserable person in the world. Every noise from me is annoying. He hasn't complained at all even when he feels exhausted since we started flying.

"Wyrdling, the day you save my life is the day that the world really has turned upside down." He pauses for a moment before saying, "You know, I'm a little surprised at you. Why did you try to get to that boy?"

It's a sobering thought. In all the chaos and terror of nearly dying myself, I'd forgotten the child. "Because he…"

"Was going to die? Of course he was. He was bait for us."

"So? That doesn't change anything. How did you not try to save him?" Now that I've had a few moments to breathe, the realization that the little boy is dead hits me hard. Harder than I'd have expected. I'd done everything I could to save him. I'd put myself at risk, but it wasn't enough.

Just like with the baby turkeys and the starving wolves, I want to help. I want to make things better, but these aren't things that someone like me can deal with. Only someone with genuine power could do that.

I hate it so much. I grit my teeth and wish there was something that I could do. This isn't as simple as that. These are things that are wrong with the world . I'm just a stupid Wyrdling.

Cole shakes his head as he turns east, heading off the path. Far in the distance, I can see the ending of the Nothing. The ending of the white clouds that cover the ground. "This is a human weakness, Wyrdling. You're not in that world anymore, and you'd do well to stop thinking like them. Think of how people will use something against you before you react. People die. That's a simple fact, and the only actual goal you should have is to make sure it's not you that dies."

"You're telling me you'd have let that child die?" I respond. "That you'd leave him there?"

Cole doesn't respond for several long moments. "Maybe. I certainly would not have gone after him as you did. Maybe I'd have flown. Maybe I'd have called him to us. There are plenty of things I could have tried, but I wouldn't have attempted to catch him that close to the Nothing. Don't even try to tell me you didn't know that it was dangerous. You saw how it was trying to catch you, and you kept going. You let yourself fall into the most obvious trap. It's a good thing I had enough sense not to follow you. We wouldn't have had time for me to grow my wings if I'd done the same thing as you."

That thought's terrifying. We would have died. I just couldn't imagine that baby dying. The Nothing got him anyway. I've been surrounded by death all my life. It's not a new thing. I kill animals regularly, but children…

I think I could have handled seeing a man or woman die. If it had been a grown man being used as bait, I could have accepted Cole's criticism. But a child? No. I had to go to him. If I were in exactly the same position, I'd probably do the same thing. My heart is breaking thinking about him. He didn't deserve this.

I know that no matter what happened, I wouldn't have been able to protect him. Maybe Cole could have, but I'm in a world of magic, and I feel absolutely useless. "I know you don't enjoy talking to me," I say as I make a decision. "But maybe you wouldn't mind teaching me some things. How to move like you. Maybe how to do magic? I… I don't want people to die because I'm acting like a human would. I don't want children to die because I'm too weak to protect them."

Cole is quiet for a while, his enormous eagle wings gliding toward the area not covered in the unnatural mists. "It's going to be painful. I've never taught someone who wasn't even fully Immortal. I think you're going to get hurt. Regularly."

"I don't care," I say. "It seems like I heal quickly."

Cole chuckles. "You're the strangest Wyrdling I've ever met."

I'm okay with being strange. It's all I've ever been, after all. As long as I'm strange and alive and strong , I think that will be fine with me.