My bed is stuffed with straw and the windows in my room are definitely not double paned or sound-proof. I hear every miserable howl, banshee cry, and portend of death from the time the moon goes down to when it comes back up again.
I’m undeterred.
“I’m going to look for my brother,” I announce once the moon has painted the outdoors with enough silvery light to make forward momentum possible.
Marco chuffs with amusement. “You can’t just look for people here. It doesn’t work like that.”
I hesitate. “What?”
“I mean, you can’t find lost people in the Evernight unless you already know where they are.”
My brain registers how stupid that is at the same time it remembers reading something almost exactly like that in a book of folklore. You can stumble across lost things, or be led to them, but if you look for something, you’ll never find it.
Shit. I was pretty sure that was either made up, embellished, or didn’t apply to humans. Shit.
If it’s true, I won’t find Leo without help. Help from someone who knows a lot more about this place than I do. Someone like the king.
Shit.
Victoria glares. “We’ll get our orders today. You need to be here for that.”
I emit a loud, unabashed groan. I’m finally here, in the land that swallowed up my brother, and I’m stuck in place.
Someone knocks on the door.
Our visitor is a small man with green skin, bright red hair, and glowing blue eyes. His primary color scheme is only slightly less disorienting than his feet, which are pointing in the wrong direction.
Seems like a weird quality for a messenger, but whatever.
Behind him, a saddled wild hog tied to a fence post paws impatiently at the ground.
The little man hands Marco a rolled-up piece of paper with a wax seal on it, inclines his head politely, and mounts his pig like John Wayne in a seriously unhinged alternate universe.
Marco unrolls the scroll. “We’re going to the Twilight Lands,” he announces. “Tomorrow. Sunday’s job is to destroy—”
“—The Dazbog,” I say. “I know. Any tips? How will I know it when I see it?”
“Just follow us,” Marco says. “We’ll protect you and get you where you need to be.”
“Perfect,” I grumble. “At least tell me what to expect. Fangs? Claws? Scales? Does it breathe fire?”
Marco’s mouth quirks up. “Nothing like that.”
“Size?” I ask.
He shrugs. “170 pounds?”
That doesn’t seem so bad. I’ve disarmed plenty of 170-pound men. I can fight a 170-pound monster.
I sleep restlessly. At moonrise, the shadow people give me food. A hunk of very brown bread and something that appears to be scrambled. I dig through my pack for a granola bar and eat that instead. I know all about faery food, thank you very much. As cool as it would be to be able to punch through furniture, I’d rather not be sucked into a fever dream just before I have to go slay a monster.
The shadow people march into the forest like it’s just another day at the faery office. Marco and Victoria lead the way, and Ryan, who slept through my arrival and big reveal, brings up the rear.
The moon—weirdly—is just as full as it was the day I entered the Evernight, but everything under it is menacing. The wind howls, and the trees seem to reach for us with long, knotted stick fingers. Unseen creatures shake the underbrush. Glowing eyes peer at us from treetops.
The shadow people don’t even seem to notice.
I trail behind Marco and Victoria, tugging at the uncomfortable collar of the scale leather vest Marco gave me. It has a dark brown stain on the left shoulder that I don’t want to ponder too much, but it beats going into battle dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.
The shadow people are carrying double-edged bastard swords with black blades. “Can I try it?” I ask Victoria, pointing.
“Sure.” She hands her sword over and watches me give it an experimental swing. It’s light, but otherwise it feels just like a regular sword.
Ryan is a freckled redhead who looks maybe nineteen. About fifteen minutes into our little trek I hear him busting with laughter and turn just in time to watch his fist pass entirely through my left shoulder.
“You didn’t even feel that?” he exclaims.
“No,” I say, rubbing my shoulder, not because I did feel it but because it’s weird as hell when someone who can talk to you and walk next to you puts his hand all the way through your body.
He swings his fist again. I dodge, scowling.
“I wouldn’t have really hit you,” he says.
I glare at him. “Please phase through someone else.”
“You’re not fun,” he grumbles.
“So …” I say, hoping to distract him from his irritating game. “What are the Twilight Lands like?”
“It’s light there. Well, lighter than here.”
“You mean it’s twilight.”
“Yeah,” he says like this has never occurred to him.
Apparently, no one else cares to add anything, because we walk on in relative silence, except for the crunching of the leaves Ryan is deliberately stomping on and the snapping of the twigs he’s deliberately pulling off trees. I guess this means we don’t really care about stealth.
I consider asking someone what the Evernight has against the Twilight Lands, but I’m not sure I want to know. I’m just clinging to the hope that this whole debacle will somehow end with me finding out where Leo is.
That just makes me think of the Moth King and the whole pain of death thing and now I’m pissed off again.
“Do any of you know the Moth King?” I ask, partly to make conversation and partly because I hate that fucker and I want to seethe about him out loud.
“Not really,” Victoria says. “We have to swear fealty. And we go to court sometimes.”
“Impressions?” I prompt, hoping she has something nasty to say about him.
She shrugs. “He’s tall.”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah. He’s tall. But what about the …” I’m not even sure what to call them. Shadows? Phantoms? “ … things … that are crawling all over him and those insanely black eyes?”
“I’ve seen weirder,” says Marco. “Have you ever seen sluagh? They break into pieces and travel in flocks.”
“The king does that too,” I inform them.
“Yeah.” Victoria kicks a pine cone and watches disinterestedly as it shatters against the trunk of a nearby tree.
“He explodes, too,” I prompt, hoping at least one of them will react.
“Yeah,” Marco says. He sounds bored.
“The Moth King used to be a man,” Victoria tells me. “At least that’s what people say.” She uses a hushed voice, like it’s a bit of choice gossip people like to slobber over when they think the Moth King isn’t listening.
“Really?” The word comes out a bit shrill and now I’m kind of irritated because I’m the one reacting.
“He was dying in the forest. Magic saved his life, but it also turned him into what he is now.”
I can’t imagine the Moth King as a man. “I bet that’s not true.” What if it is true, though? Does that mean he’s still got human empathy and human feelings somewhere inside that grotesque body?
Doubtful.
“I think it is,” Marco puts in. “I’ve never seen anything else like him. If he was made naturally, there would be more of him.”
The conversation is leaning a bit too heavily into the sort of biology I don’t really want to be pondering, so I try steering it in a more chaste direction. “Why is he called the Moth King?”
Ryan looks at me like I’ve just asked why water is wet. “He’s covered with moths.”
“Not really, though. They don’t all look like moths. And I don’t think they’re alive.” Something horrible occurs to me. “Are they?”
“They might be,” says Victoria.
“Maybe they’re ghosts,” Ryan says. “Insect ghosts.”
“Phantomlings,” says Victoria.
“They’re too big for insects,” Marco says. “They’re more like rodents or snakes.”
“Ratwraiths,” says Victoria. Everyone laughs.
This is becoming more and more horrible in a very unintended way. I don’t think I’m going to get them to gossip about the king, at least not in the pejorative way I’d like them to, so I change the subject.
“You said most humans are brought here as children. Who brought you?”
“Jahnari,” they say in unison.
“Jahnari? Short old woman Jahnari?” Wait, why am I surprised?
“Oh, you know her?” Victoria says. There’s no malice in the expression on her face. In fact, I think I might even see some … affection?
I crinkle my nose. “I mean, not really, but she was the first person I met here.”
“Most of us were brought here by Jahnari,” says Marco. “It’s kind of her thing. She’s one of the only Evernight people who can go through the rift. She takes human kids and cares for them until they’re old enough to move into a mortal house.”
“I knew it,” I mutter. He was lost, my ass. Still, this is the most useful piece of information I’ve heard since I got here. Maybe the mist demon sold Leo to Jahnari. Maybe she raised him like she raised all the other shadow people. But even if that’s true, he’s an adult now, which means he probably is in one of the other mortal houses.
It also means he can’t handle human stuff and he can phase through furniture, but I don’t even want to begin parsing that out.
Victoria is still talking about Jahnari. “She’s actually very kind, and we get a choice about where we go after we leave her house. We don’t have to be soldiers if we don’t want to.”
Now I’m annoyed at Victoria, who’s obviously been Stockholm-syndromed into thinking that what she went through as a child was perfectly fine. The Evernight is terrifying enough for me, a twenty-three-year-old woman. What must it be like for a kid as young as Jahnari’s little pajamaed companion?
“What’s in it for her?” It can’t just be a fun hobby. Taking care of kids is work. Taking care of kids who have been kidnapped and miss their parents, well … I hope her little victims don’t make it easy on her.
“She gets a fee from the king or whatever trade we join,” Victoria says.
“So the Moth King paid her for you.” Yep, he’s as despicable as he is ghoulish.
She shrugs. “My life is not terrible. What would I be doing back in Oregon? Waitressing? Scraping together gas money? Screwing some guy in exchange for a bed to sleep in?”
Wow, that’s a pretty bleak picture of life in the human world. I second-guess myself. “I bet your parents still miss you,” I venture.
She laughs bitterly. “I ran away when I was eleven. My mom was a drunk and my dad was … abusive. They probably don’t even think about me anymore.”
What the fuck.
I turn to Marco and Ryan. Marco shrugs. “I was in a lot of foster homes. My last foster mom was okay, but I was just a paycheck to her. I don’t actually remember my parents.”
“Jahnari makes good soup,” Ryan puts in. “And when I first met her, she gave me a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. It tasted like straw, though.”
That’s slightly off-topic and maybe a little fiendish, but mediocre cheeseburgers are hardly evil.
A whole new picture of Jahnari unfolds in my head. What if she’s like the Dexter of forest hags, only taking kids from people who don’t deserve to have them? Saving them from a shitty fate in the mortal world? I turn this idea over and come up doubtful. There’s no way Jahnari is wandering the shopping malls and Walmarts of Humboldt County in search of abused children. She’d stand out. I’m sure she snatches first and asks questions later.
Anyway, Leo was not a runaway, and my parents weren’t drunks or abusers. They took us on road trips, played board games with us, and helped us with our homework. We ate whole grains. My mom never drank. My dad drank wine, but only on holidays.
Maybe the whole grains were kind of abusive. Not lose your parental rights abusive, though.
Jahnari did seem pretty insistent she’d never seen Leo before. On the other hand, the fae and their ilk aren’t exactly noted for their straight-talking devotion to truth and honesty.
I consider this as we trudge on, but it doesn’t get my mind off the part where I’m about to fight a monster. My stomach is starting to feel like I just drank a vinegar cocktail and then went on a roller coaster.
The sky fills with something I haven’t seen since before I arrived in the land of the dark and gloomy, and the shadow people adopt serious expressions.
I stop walking. “Is that …?”
“It looks like the sun is coming up,” says Marco. “But it never does.”
I blink at the orange streak above the treetops and bite back a sudden wave of homesickness, as if getting up in time to see the sunrise is something I ever do. Meanwhile, my heart picks up a steady drumbeat of sickening anticipation.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“We fight the enemy.” Victoria unsheathes her sword.
We slow our pace. As our footsteps quiet, a low hum fills the sound void, so low it’s more in my bones than in my ears.
I shudder, and Marco gives me a sideways look. “That’s the aegis,” he whispers. “It’s the wall between the Evernight and the Twilight Lands.”
“How do we cross it?”
“We walk through it.”
Um.
“Humans can walk through the aegis,” Marco says. “That’s why we’re valuable to the king. Magic doesn’t always work on us the way it does on everyone else.”
His logic has some obvious holes. “Wait. I’m not the same kind of human you are. How do you know I can go through it? Or come back the other way?”
Victoria looks thoughtful. “Good question.”
Marco winks. “I guess we’ll find out.”
Great. Maybe I will walk through it. Maybe I’ll smack my face on it. Maybe it will disintegrate me or eviscerate me or magically turn me inside out.
The humming intensifies, and I start noticing some weird shit. Through the trees, the forest ripples like a picture on a flag. As we get closer, the ripples flatten, and the scene morphs into a two-dimensional image of a desert.
Approaching the aegis is kind of like walking into a movie theater, if the screen were 100 feet long and the movie was a generic western stuck on a wide shot of Death Valley just before the sun comes up. The shimmering quality of the image is the only thing convincing me this is not some bizarre and expensive piece of technology, mostly because it’s similar to the rift I summoned in the redwood forest.
Victoria walks right up to the picture and sticks her hand through it. Her arm vanishes as if the desert landscape might not be representative of whatever we’ll find on the other side.
“See?” she says, as if I should now just throw all caution to the wind and dive in like a Chuck-E-Cheese ball pool awaits me on the other side.
“Just try it,” Marco says. “Make sure your arm goes through before stepping through.”
“Or what? What happens if my arm doesn’t go through?”
Marco shrugs as if he doesn’t give a shit one way or another. Guess this place makes everyone hard.
“Marco could carry you,” Victoria suggests. “Other creatures can go back and forth if we carry them or pull them through. Hurts a bit though.”
I don’t especially like the sound of that either.
I grit my teeth and approach the aegis. It looks kind of like the rift, but that doesn’t mean it is like the rift.
I consider which body part I would least mind losing and extend my left pinky finger through the image. Behind me, Ryan snorts with laughter. I ignore him. I don’t think I much like Ryan.
My finger disappears. I exhale and stick it in a bit further, then follow with my entire fist. I feel no pain, and I’m at least ninety percent sure my hand is still attached to my wrist.
Everyone is looking at me, eyebrows up.
“It’s fine,” I mumble.
“Great,” Victoria says. “Swords drawn.” She turns to me. “Don’t worry too much about the foot soldiers. That’s our job. You just worry about getting to the castle and killing the Dawn Lord.”
Okay, wait.
“The Dawn Lord?” I say without trying to keep the panic out of my voice. “No, no, no, that’s not right. I’m supposed to destroy the Dazbog.”
“Yeah,” she says. “That means Dawn Lord.”
What the fuck. “Why didn’t the king just say Dawn Lord? He didn’t even tell me that was a person!”
“Well to be fair,” Marco says, “the Dawn Lord is not exactly a person.” He takes a step towards the wall as if what he’s just said is not alarming at all, everything is all fine and settled, and it’s time to get this over with.
“Wait. I’ve never killed anyone before.” All three of them turn to stare at me, but I get the feeling they don’t really care that I’ve never killed anyone before, they’re just pissed I keep stalling.
“First time for everything,” says Ryan. Fuck him.
“You know how to use a sword, though,” says Marco.
“Um, yes?” I mean, do I? I can spar. I can disarm my opponent. I think I might have missed the eviscerating and/or beheading human opponents lesson.
Marco shrugs and steps through the aegis. Victoria spares me a glance before following him, and Ryan jumps through like there really is a ball pit on the other side.
For a moment I consider turning around and marching back through and out of the Evernight, getting in my car and driving back to my apartment.
Grumbling, I follow the shadow people into the Twilight Lands.
Crossing the aegis is kind of like walking into a nightclub that overuses its fog machine, except the other side is not full of drunken co-eds. For a moment, everything goes misty, then I find myself standing in a desert landscape.
I’m relieved to not see any of the aforementioned foot soldiers or whoever this Dawn Lord person is. This gives me some extra time to hate on the Moth King. I imagine punching him in his smug graveyard face.
Dazbog. What an asshole.
We march over parched, red ground lined with a mosaic of ankle-width cracks. A building in the distance looks a bit like a castle. Like the Disneyland castle after a nuclear bomb takes out Anaheim.
If our supposed enemies survive here, maybe there’s a reason they’re aggressive. What if they’re fighting the Evernight not because they want to but because they have to?
I don’t like this thought so I push it away. This is how I find Leo. Maybe it’s not the best way, but I’m stuck with it. I made a faery bargain. I swore myself to the monster king of the Evernight.
Maybe the Dawn Lord is a right bastard and deserves to die.
As I’m coming up with new ways to either feel sorry for myself or justify murder, the ground moves.
Victoria, Marco, and Ryan stop walking, swords raised.
People are rising out of the cracks in the earth. Ethereally beautiful people. They’re dressed in simple, belted tunics made from strange luminescent fabric. Their skin glows the way water does under the last rays of afternoon sunlight.
They approach us, swords poised, and only then do I realize that they’re not people. They’re androgynous. Their faces are like porcelain. Their features don’t move. Their eyes are too large and shot through with colors that don’t belong in human eyes.
My companions surge forward, swinging their swords.
Victoria lands the first hit, striking her opponent in the shoulder. It doesn’t seem like a killing blow, but she doesn’t withdraw her weapon. Instead, she holds it there while the soldier’s body vibrates and darkens.
Another soldier approaches Victoria, swinging its weapon. She knocks it to the ground with her foot. As the first collapses into a heap, she turns to the fallen one and runs it through. It thrashes at the end of her sword and crumples into a motionless, darkened husk.
Why didn’t they give me one of those swords?
Marco uses his elbow to shove the blackened remains of a soldier off his blade.
The violence is completely bloodless. The dead foot soldiers are nothing but piles of cloth and papery matter.
Ryan dodges a strike and then flinches as another one passes right through him. Oh, of course. They can phase. Now I really do understand why the king pays Jahnari for her shadow people.
“Stay close!” Marco shouts.
I scurry to catch up. A soldier charges me, blade out. Years of swordplay lessons take over and I get an unexpected surge of confidence. This is just a pretty, three-dimensional paper model. Even better, its fighting skills are ass. Fighting it is like fighting a second- or third-year fencing student.
I parry, riposte, and strike my opponent in the gut.
The soldier doesn’t crumple into a benign pile of cloth and paper like my companions’ opponents do. Blood sprays my armor.
I choke in surprise and horror.
My stomach plummets. The soldier is grasping its wound in a very human way. It looks up at me, and blood drains from its strange, unmoving porcelain mouth. It slides off my blade and collapses onto the ground.
This is awful.
It’s almost a mercy when another soldier advances and swings at me, distracting me from the one I just murdered. Its sword grazes my left arm. I spin away and stab backward, striking my attacker in the pelvis. It goes down with a howl.
I don’t have time to wonder if I landed a killing blow. Instead, I cage what’s left of my humanity in a small place in the back of my mind and plunge my sword into where the soldier’s heart would be if it was a living human.
It gets easier after that. As it turns out, adrenaline and the desire to survive are a winning combo when you need to summon a little inhuman viciousness.
My field of vision narrows to the six foot bubble around my body, and for an impossible-to-quantify moment in time it’s just me, my sword, and the things I’m killing. My breath is amplified in my ears, muffling everything else, including the sloppy, wet sound of steel penetrating flesh and the gargling groans of dying soldiers.
Ryan leaps in front of me and decapitates two soldiers with one swing. There’s blood on his left sleeve and a visible gash on his forearm—which must mean phasing has limitations—but he’s powering through it like Uma Thurman circa 2003, Kill Bill: Volume 1. “There!” he shouts as a hole in the wall of hostility opens up where the two formerly upright and fully-in-possession-of- their-heads soldiers used to be.
Oh, right. I’m supposed to kill the guy in the castle. I duck through the gap and run.
The space between me and my destination elongates. The sensation is so overwhelmingly real I actually have to look at my feet to make sure the cracked earth didn’t just morph into a treadmill.
As I run in slow motion, a few soldiers rise from cracks in the earth to challenge me, but my battle fugue holds steady and I take them out before I’ve even consciously acknowledged them. When I finally arrive in the castle’s shadow, I’m breathing hard but unscathed.
I should feel relieved to have come this far. Instead, I feel the heavy press of my conscience and the strangling, adrenaline fueled surge of blood through my circulatory system.
Up close, the castle has Nosferatu vibes if Nosferatu preferred warm, dry climates. The reddish-brown walls are as dry and cracked as a witch’s fingernails, and piles of crumbled mortar lie despairingly along its perimeter. A wooden gate large enough to drive a train through is half-buried in sand. The windows don’t have glass. Some have shutters; one creaks as it twists at the end of a rusty hinge. A tattered curtain flaps beside it.
Someone lives here, really?
I look over my shoulder. The horde of foot soldiers is still behind me, a mass of white against a backdrop of desolate, Arizona-red. I can’t see the shadow people, but I hear shouts and clashing metal. I take that as a positive sign they’re still upright and still kicking foot soldier ass.
Someone clears their throat.
I startle like a horse that just crossed paths with an airborne plastic shopping bag and spin, waving my bloody blade in a random, uncontrolled way that would deeply embarrass every swordplay instructor I’ve ever had.
A man stands on a turret about fifteen feet above me. A gloriously beautiful man with auburn hair that looks almost purple in the pale light. He has luminous skin, like the soldiers’, but his face is very, very, human. He has high cheekbones and eyes that do not resemble wells of despair, which seems worth noting. As I gaze up at him, he meets my eyes and smiles. It’s not a smirk or a menacing grin, it’s a smile.
I guess this is the dude I’m supposed to kill. Fan-fucking-tastic.
I suck in a shaky breath as my battle fugue flees, leaving me with rubbery knees and a wobbly sword. Thanks, battle fugue. That’s excellent timing you have there.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this. I’ve lost the element of surprise.
My new problem solves itself as my lovely nemesis jumps—jumps—from the turret and lands easily on the ground in front of me.
Well, I guess fifteen feet isn’t that high.
Up close, he’s even more beautiful. His eyes are purple, like a sunset in a cloud-dappled sky. His skin is so flawless it’s practically golden. He’s wearing a white tunic sort of thing with gold trim and a belt, like what Julius Caesar would have worn if he was hot and on the cover of GQ. His lips are sculpted, slightly parted, and kissable.
I remember I’m supposed to kill him and I raise my sword.
“You’re a human,” he says, smiling. His smile is genuine. Fond, even. “And that is a sword you brought here from the mortal world.”
“All true,” I say, trying to sound defiant. “I’m sorry you don’t get a prize for guessing correctly.”
“Oh, but you do.” His smile widens. I hear a familiar metal-on-metal sound as he unsheathes a sword I didn’t even realize he was carrying because I was so busy losing myself in his beautiful purple eyes.
Wow, I am truly an idiot.
He raises the sword thoughtfully, as if he wants me to appreciate its craftsmanship before he goes about the dull business of eviscerating me with it. I don’t take my eyes off his face, but the way his sword sparkles in my peripheral vision makes it clear he spent a lot more than 300 bucks on it.
He advances like someone swinging at a child he doesn’t think will put up a real fight. I block him easily and lunge. He knocks my sword aside and advances again.
I parry three more thrusts. I’m already breathing hard, and I’m just trying to keep up with him. Fighting him isn’t like fighting the humans in my swordplay classes and it isn’t anything like fighting those foot soldiers. He’s closed off. I can’t guess his moves or predict his feints.
He’s going to kill me.
I advance, letting furious determination take over. I block a couple of energetic swings. I lunge and my blade slides across the fabric of his tunic. I’m hit with a surge of almost heady confidence, and then I notice the smile on his face.
He’s toying with me.
He knocks the sword out of my hand and grabs me by the shirt collar. His blade is at my throat. He leans in. His breath smells like a dewy spring morning.
He presses his perfect lips to my ear. “I’ll make a deal with you.” His voice is like a caress. If I wasn’t terrified, I might feel a little gooey.
He doesn’t wait for me to respond. “Go back to the human world and find a blue star moonstone. Bring it to me. I will give you whatever you ask in return.”
I jerk away, and the flat side of his blade slides along my neck. “Anything?”
He smiles a perfect smile and spreads his arms wide. It’s a little Jesusy for me but he’s definitely got my interest. “My brother. Leo Hale. Do you know where he is?”
His face remains unreadable. Like, Moth King unreadable but even more disconcerting because I’m usually pretty good at seeing through even the most pokery of poker faces. Looking at the Dawn Lord, though, I can’t tell if Leo’s name rings a bell or if he has no idea who I’m talking about.
But then it doesn’t matter what his face tells me because his mouth says exactly what I want to hear.
“I know Leo Hale. And I know where he is.”
Holy shit, that definitely beats “I will tell you what I know of him.”
He backs up and adopts that same, charming smile, the one that says, “I want to take you out for coffee,” not the one that says, “I have a sword that I’m thinking about decapitating you with.”
I’m about to relax when I remember that Victoria, Marco, and Ryan are expecting me to kill this dude who I definitely can’t kill now and I’m not sure how I will explain why I let him walk back into his shitty little castle.
Then the Dawn Lord fixes the problem for me. He raises his hands, and dozens of soldiers rise from the cracks in the earth and descend on me like ants to a little pile of breadcrumbs. He turns around, apparently unconcerned that I’m still standing there with my sword at my feet.
I snatch my sword from the ground and look up just in time to see him leap fifteen feet back onto the turret. “Until next time,” he calls over his shoulder.
Porcelain-faced soldiers are pouring out of the castle gates and closing in on me from all sides. There’s nothing left to do now but run.