I reached out and took her hand, trying my hardest not to cry. "I need you to come back to the village. We have something for you."
She kept smiling, but she looked at me more closely. She seemed different here without her usual layers and layers of mascara. Younger. So much more vulnerable. I didn"t want to wake her up from this, didn"t want to shatter this dream reality for her. "Do I know you?" she asked.
"Yeah, you do. Come back with me."
"Oh, I can"t. I"m waiting for him. You can wait with me, if you"d like to."
I squeezed her hand. "He"s not coming back, Carlee."
When I said her name, her whole body stiffened, her eyes opening wide and clearing, as though a veil over them had lifted. "Carlee," she whispered.
I nodded and waited for her to freak out, to start screaming or crying, bracing myself and getting ready to hug her or carry her back to the village, whatever it took. For a few impossibly long moments she didn"t say anything, didn"t move, and I wondered if the shock had broken her brain. Then her brown eyes locked on mine again, narrowing into slits.
"I"m gonna kill that effing creep."
I laughed, relief flooding through me, and threw my arms around her neck.
"No, seriously. I"m going to kill him! I can"t believe I bought his stupid lines! I don"t care how pretty he was, I mean, have you seen what I"m wearing?"
Laughing, I nodded into her shoulder. "So not the style."
"I know, right? I look like an extra in some fantasy movie. Some stupid fantasy movie."
I pulled away, searching her face. "You"re going to be okay, right?"
"As soon as I figure out what"s going on, sure."
"Remember that cute guy, Jack?"
"The one who never called?"
"That"s the one. You and he are going to have a long chat."
Her face brightened considerably at the idea of talking with a cute boy. She really was still Carlee, and I felt about a thousand pounds lighter knowing that, regardless of what her life would be like from now on, at least she would be my Carlee.
"How does my hair look?"
"Fabulous, as always."
We started walking down the hill when Reth appeared in front of us. Carlee glared at him. "Oh, I am so done with your type!"
"He"s on our side," I said.
"Evelyn, the dancers are safe, but I think you and I should attend to the others immediately."
It took me a second to realize he was talking about the pregnant girls. My previously buoyant spirits plummeted. "Okay. Carlee, Jack and Lend are over there." I pointed to where you could just see the crowd. "They"ll probably need your help calming everyone down and getting you all moved somewhere safe."
"I can do that. But you and I need to have a talk, like, soon. Because this is some seriously freaky c.r.a.p, you know?"
"Oh, I know." I smiled sadly at her, and she turned and ran down the hill toward everyone else. Maybe besides totally underestimating paranormals, IPCA"s greatest sin was totally underestimating normal people"s ability to adapt and accept everything hidden going on in their world.
I gripped the bag of the last bits of bread in one hand and took Reth"s in my other. The scenery spun around us in a blur of gold and green, and suddenly we were smack in the middle of another meadow, next to the lavender stream and surrounded by girls pregnant with future little versions of me.
They blinked curiously, nonplussed by our sudden appearance. "h.e.l.lo," one girl, a brunette with a heart-shaped face who looked barely older than me, said.
"Here." I ripped off a piece of bread and shoved it into her hand. "Eat this. All of you." Lacking so much as a curious look, the other girls took pieces and put them into their mouths.
And chewed.
And swallowed.
And continued to look at me, without a single change.
POSSIBLY IMPOSSIBLE.
Shut up, okay?" I snapped, rubbing my temples. Jack was still coming back and forth, bringing two people at a time, and he was nearly done. Carlee and Lend were here in the meadow of orange gra.s.s and white trees, organizing the groups of people and trying to keep everyone calm.
Reth and I were unofficially in charge of the pregnant girls, and I was about to lose it.
"But he"s supposed to visit us today." A tiny blonde with tight spiral curls stamped her foot, her lips drawn in a pout. "I want to see him. He"s coming to see us, he said so, and I want to see him, and if we"re here he won"t know where to find us!"
"We should go back right now." Another of the girls, with perfect clear skin and a healthy glow, glowered at me. "I don"t want to be here. I liked where we were before. And he"s coming to see us."
"Just go sit-over there! And...he"s coming. Here. We told him you"d be here, and he"s going to come visit you here, okay?"
All six of the girls nodded, some more eagerly than others. I was pretty sure Tiny Blond Terror didn"t believe me, but she went with the others. There was something weird about them. Well, okay, there were tons of things weird about them. But there was a huge thing off. I couldn"t quite put my finger on it, but I knew it would come to me.
"What are we going to do?" I asked Reth, watching as the girls arranged themselves on the ground, playing with each other"s hair or lounging, staring at the aquamarine sky. "Obviously the faeries are bringing them food from the mortal realms, which explains why giving the girls bread didn"t snap them out of the faerie trance."
Reth"s expression clouded. He sat heavily, his legs at awkward angles like he didn"t know how to sit on the ground. "I thought perhaps it would be the case, the Dark Queen keeping them here for safety but not wanting to change anything else and risk changing them and the Empty Ones, too."
"Yeah, about time she exercised some caution." One of the Dark Queen"s early experiments to make an Empty One resulted in vampires. Brilliant move, that. "We can"t get them to come to their senses until we get their names."
"I doubt it will be that simple."
"Oh, because I thought tracking down the names of six anonymous girls when we have no idea where they"re from would be a piece of cake."
"You do not understand the depth of the change they"ve gone through. The others are connected through their need for faerie food, yes, but these girls have been altered forever by loving a faerie."
I thought of my mom, what had happened to her after loving my stupid faerie father and then being abandoned by him when he didn"t need her anymore. She had wasted away without him. "But their babies." My voice betrayed me by cracking. "They"ll be okay if we take them away from whoever this faerie creep is, because they"ll have their babies. They"ll love their babies. That"ll be enough." If my mom had been able to be with me, if Melinthros hadn"t taken me when he abandoned her, she would have been okay. She would have had something to live for.
"Look at them, Evelyn."
I did, and for the first time it clicked for me what, exactly, was off. They didn"t do anything that pregnant women did. I hadn"t been around many, but some came into the diner occasionally. They couldn"t go two minutes without resting a hand on their stomachs. I doubted they even knew they were doing it, but the need to touch the baby, to feel that life moving inside them, was a compulsion. I even caught a woman talking softly to her belly once.
The six girls could have had pillows under their dresses for all they cared. None of them had mentioned anything about needing to be cared for, or needing to eat or drink. The only thing I"d heard from them was whining about when they"d be able to see their faerie lover again.
"They don"t care." I felt like my soul had been sucker punched. "They don"t care about the babies at all, do they?"
"They cannot. They"ve been consumed. Even if we find their names, I doubt they will ever be any more than empty sh.e.l.ls. Being loved by the fey is not something a human can recover from."
She wouldn"t have loved me. I never would have been enough for my mother. Melinthros had truly destroyed everything about her, and I"d never been loved by either of my parents. Rage and sorrow deeper and hotter than I knew how to handle warred inside me, all the extra souls I was carrying around rising, agitated, and flowing through me.
"Would you have done that to me?" I glared down at Reth. "You wanted me to love you. Would you have destroyed me?"
He waved a hand, dismissing me with a single annoyed gesture. "I never wanted you to be mine in that way, my love. How many times must we go over this? I want to make you whole, more than you are. Not less. I"ve no interest in a human girl as a toy. It"s distasteful."
I gritted my jaw. "Distasteful. Yes. That"s not an understatement or anything. These girls have been destroyed. Destroyed. Do you understand that? Whoever they were, whoever they could have been? That"s gone. Forever."
Reth raised an eyebrow at me from beneath his disheveled hair. "Well then, I suppose it"s a good thing you are going to open the gate so we can all leave this realm. And perhaps if you had listened to me sooner and let me fill you, none of these girls would have ever come into contact with the Dark Court"s machinations."
I could feel my face turning red. "Don"t you dare try to say I"m guilty of this!"
"Were you not trying to make me guilty? I did no more harm to them than you. If I am culpable in this, you are complicit. At least I"ve tried to fix things, while you have dragged your heels and whined and fought me every step of the way."
"Because no one would tell me anything! You all made plans and stuck me in the middle of them without a single explanation! My whole freaking life, my entire existence is just a p.a.w.n on a stupid faerie chessboard! So you"ll have to excuse me if maybe I wanted to make my own decisions rather than blindly accept the directions of the very things that have been hurting me and everyone else since they showed up on my planet!"
I stalked away from him to the far edge of the orange-gra.s.sed clearing, then sank to the ground and wrapped my arms around my knees.
"Evie?" Lend sat next to me and put his arm around my shoulders. "What"s wrong? Did Reth do something?"
"Is this my fault?"
"What?"
"Those girls. Reth said...if I had listened to the faeries from the start, let Reth fill me up with his creepy burning soul, opened their stupid gate when they wanted me to, none of this would have happened. Those girls will never get better. They"re as good as dead if we take away the faerie they love. And I think it"s my fault."
"You can"t really believe that." He pulled me closer, trying to get me to look him in the eyes, but I wouldn"t.
"I didn"t tell you about the werewolf, either. A security guard in the Center. He told me that one of the werewolves I let out bit him. I ruined his whole life because I was trying to help someone else. Even when I think I"m doing good, I hurt people!"
"You haven"t hurt anyone."
"I have."
"You haven"t. You make the best choices you can based on what you know at the time. You can"t blame yourself for the choices other people make. You were right to free those werewolves. If one of them didn"t take precautions at the full moon, the blame is on them, not on you. You were right to reject Reth, to wait to make a decision about opening a gate until it was your decision. If you had gone with the Light Court"s original plan, who knows if they would have taken all the other paranormals with them? And you didn"t make the Dark Queen a freaking psycho witch."
I snorted. "Pretty sure she came that way."
"Definitely sure she came that way. She did that to those girls. It has nothing to do with you. You"ve made the best choices you could."
I nodded into my knees, still not looking up. I"d made the best choices I could have. But none of them seemed to be the right ones. Maybe I wasn"t cut out for this world, after all. What if by staying on the Earth I shouldn"t even exist on I just screwed things up even more? And did I even want to try to stay if Lend didn"t?
Then again, an eternity in that other place, the one I"d been shown in my dream...well, to be honest, it seemed impossibly boring. And I definitely didn"t want to become this eternal creature Reth seemed to think I should be. Thinking two or three years in the future was overwhelming enough. I couldn"t even figure out what I wanted to major in next year at college. I didn"t want to make a choice that would last forever.
"Do you know what you"re going to do?" I whispered.
He was quiet for so long I thought maybe he hadn"t heard me before he finally spoke. "I want to be with you, and have my life here, but the idea of being alone, forever, after you..." We didn"t need him to finish the sentence. After I died. It"d be the opposite of Cresseda and David. I"d be the one to leave Lend alone, but he"d be alone forever. I smiled bitterly, remembering when I tried to break up with him because I thought he"d leave me behind. It was the other way around, it had always been, which made Lend far braver than I"d been.
"Are you sure?" he asked. "About me being immortal, I mean? Because I don"t feel immortal."
I turned my head toward him, able to see his soul, reflecting light like a stream of water under the brilliant summer sun. It was the most beautiful thing I"d ever seen, and I wouldn"t change it for anything, not even if it would mean something could finally be easy for us. "I"m sure. And we have no idea how long I"ll live."
"But really, we have no idea how long I will, either. I mean, sure, I"m immortal, but a gas pipe explosion or an asteroid or whatever could kill me tomorrow. n.o.body knows when they"re going to die."
"Well, some of us have a better idea than others."
He sighed. "Yeah."
We sat together, silent and melancholy on the edge of an impossible forest in an impossible place with nothing but impossible decisions to keep us company.
"So." Jack skipped over. "Everyone"s settled and only one person pa.s.sed out from hyperventilating. Most of them were IPCA employees-surprise, surprise-and almost everyone remembers exactly who they were and want to go home immediately, which means we"re going to have to figure out logistics of feeding them soon. Plus we need to figure out what to do with all the weird pregnant girls. And you"re opening the gate really soon, right?" He waited for me to say something, then poked me with his foot when I didn"t move. "What"s the plan?"
If I never had to make another plan for the rest of my life, it"d be too soon.
A LOT STRANGE.
Carlee was with Lend, who was entertaining the kids by changing into their favorite characters from television shows. It was more than a little creepy for me to watch the boy I enjoyed making out with become some perky girl known for singing the alphabet, so I avoided that part of the meadow. Now, if he were to start acting out Easton Heights by being various characters, well, then I might tune in.
Carlee, as with everything else, had taken to Lend"s rather unusual ability with remarkable grace.
"Are you okay?" I"d asked her when he first shifted into someone else.
She"d shrugged, eyes wide with wonder. "Not any weirder than the rest of this, right? I always knew there was, like, something a little strange about you two."
"More than a little."
She"d laughed and picked up a small girl who was hiccupping with tears, whispering in her ear until the girl stopped, a smile spreading over her face.
I made my way past the group of IPCA employees, who were all glowering and talking in low tones about what they would do when they got back to Earth. Most of the people were recent acquisitions of the Dark Court, but all of them were forever tied to the Faerie Realms because of the food. That sucked. I went over to where Jack was with some guy who, had he been in a suit instead of a soft, flowing peasant shirt and trousers, would have been the archetypal uptight businessman.
"This is unacceptable! Do you have any idea how many people depend on me? How much money I"m losing every minute I"m here?"