Traitor (3 page)

“In the pantry,” Issac said, laughing. “They can stare at all the food but have none of it. The perfect welcoming gift back to the human realm, if you ask me. And Desmond, at least put up a fight to keep your food. What are you going to do when you have a Changeling trying to attack you, just look down and hope it disappears?”

I sighed as everyone else in the room gave into raucous laughter. Desmond was a brilliant shade of red. “Hey, I did well against the one today!”

“Only because I was there with the iron-laden ropes, mind you!” Liam chimed in lazily. His eyes were bright with excitement as he looked to me for approval, even though he’d obviously tried to play off the event like no big deal. I nodded and winked at him, and his smile broadened.

As I watched the guys scarf down their food, my thoughts strayed to the Changeling in the pantry. Identified by their insatiable appetites, Changelings were constantly eating. That was one of the markers that Jamie had noticed in my habits when Ankou sent her to Fairborn High School in search of me. Memaw said it was luck that had kept me alive through everything, including the incidents this past year involving Jamie. I had to admit that I was starting to agree with her, although having the faerie committee assassin as your grandmother couldn’t hurt the odds, either.

Memaw was a Glaistig like Reuben, which made me half faerie, half mutated human of sorts. I had somehow overpowered the Changeling that inhabited my body when I was an infant, taking back my body and holding the Changeling hostage. Because of this, I was now a Bridger, one of only two in existence. The other one was currently reading today’s newspaper intently with a worried look on her face. She wrapped the waterlogged edges of the paper in on themselves and made the paper half the size it should have been. Her hands clutched the soggy paper tight and I could see tiny droplets of ink-stained water pooling between her fingers. It rained the whole day before I returned, and I was impressed Tess could read anything on the paper at all.

“Another remote farm in Ballyglass was ravaged by what the reporters are saying was a tornado,” Tess said from behind the water wilted pages. “We haven’t had a tornado in ages, especially not this time of year.”

Issac looked up from his plate and punched Desmond. “See brother, what did I tell you? It ain’t no coincidence, three tornadoes in three weeks,” he said, still trying to swallow the large mouthful of mashed potatoes he had shoveled into his mouth. “We’ve got a Pooka on our hands.”

Desmond snorted into the green beans that remained on his plate. His fork clattered to the ground as he laughed, tossing a bean across the room and smacking Liam in the side of the head. It connected with a wet
thwap
and landed in Liam’s lap. Desmond almost choked from laughter before responding to Issac, who looked like he was momentarily distracted by the flying green bean as well. “A Pooka? Here this close to Cork? There’s no way. There’s been no sightings of black horses, and you know that’s what the Pooka looks like.”

As he rubbed the wet spot where the butter-laden green bean had hit, Liam was solemn. “The Pooka can take on many shapes. The older it is, the better it is at shifting. It can be as good as a Changeling after centuries of practice.” He sounded as though he was reciting a textbook, which could be likely. He’d spent an absurd amount of time poring over anything faerie related this summer to make sure he knew as much as possible in order to Protect me.

I looked around, confused. Why was everyone so up in arms about this Pooka? I’d never even heard them speak of it before. “What’s a Pooka?”

It was Memaw who answered, of course. Memaw and Tess both knew more about Irish folklore than anyone I’d ever met, although Liam was coming up close on their heels. To be fair, they were part of the folklore themselves. “Pookas are the most feared type of faeries in Ireland. They always come out after nightfall, causing all kinds of harm and mischief to anyone who has the misfortune of crossing paths with them. They’ll take different forms, but usually they’re black stags. Over time, they gain the ability to shift to whatever they want. They also have the power of human speech and can hypnotize someone if they have the chance to look into your eyes. If you don’t do whatever they tell you, they end up tearing up your home and anything else of yours they can find,” Memaw finished, heading into the kitchen to find whatever was left of the food that the guys hadn’t ravaged.

“Real sweet, Pookas,” chirped Desmond. “Make you want to get all snuggly and cuddle up to one of them.”

“Sounds like it,” I said dryly as he waggled his fingers in front of him like a monster. He completed the look with green beans stuck in his upper lip that hung down like great green teeth. “Real cute, Desmond.”

“That’s what I was striving for: a cute, yet homicidal beastie,” he said as he spit the green beans out and laughed.

What a dork.

“That’s probably what happened to these poor souls,” added Tess, still poring over the newspaper for any other tidbits. She was completely oblivious to the spectacle Desmond was putting on, as well as the fact she was losing her audience because of it. “Just seems odd one’s around this area. Keep an eye out at night, will you boys?”

The guys all murmured their consent, continuing to eat. Desmond was still going on with his monster kick until Memaw snuck up behind him, whacked him upside the head and sent his green beans flying from his mouth. Liam managed to duck this time as they whizzed past his head. I glanced at Liam, who was staring daggers at Desmond. He must have felt me looking at him, because he turned back to me with a curious look on his face that erupted into a full on grin. Liam’s long black eyelashes shielded his bright blue eyes as he looked to the ground, a blush betraying his usual stoic disposition. It was all I could do not to laugh. He never ceased to give me butterflies.

His eyes crinkled and nearly disappeared when he looked back up and grinned at me. I saw the stitches above his left eye that were partially obscured by his mop of thick black hair. They were identical to those above mine. I sighed. If only there had been a way to stop him from swearing to be my Protector. My misfortunes were going to end up killing us both. I smiled back at him as though nothing in the world could be wrong in this moment filled with trampled homes, hateful Changelings locked away in our pantry, and each of us having half a dozen stitches in our heads. Somehow I was going to get him out of the death sentence that being my protector was. I just didn’t know how.

T
HE ALARM CLOCK
screamed across the room relentlessly. The incessant, obnoxious beeping ripped through what could have been a much longer sleep. Stupid thing.

Lying across the room in my bed, I rolled over onto my stomach and put the pillow over my head. The idea was to drown out the sound. The continuing muffled barrage on my ears made it clear this wouldn’t work. Time for the next plan of attack. I grunted with frustration as I grabbed the extra feather pillow lying in the bed and chucked it sidearm in the direction of the offensive alarm. There was no break in the sound. It connected with something, but not with what I had intended it to.

A wave of cold morning air hit my legs, which a moment before had been warm beneath a thick patchwork quilt that Tess had made herself. I picked it off her shelf last night because of the greens and blues and yellows it consisted of. The red stitching set everything off, and it made me feel like I was home, curling myself up under it. I complained at the loss of it using a language all my own, which contained mainly groans of protest.

“Ashlyn, are you planning on destroying everything breakable in this room in an attempt to not have to get up? You almost knocked over my elf-blown vase. Those are nearly impossible to find now, you know,” Tess said, throwing the pillow back to me. It landed in my lap. I extended my hands hopefully for the blanket, but she refused to give up the covers she’d hijacked. She held the quilt to her chest before folding it quickly and efficiently. As she walked to the shelf to put it back, she talked to me over her shoulder. Her voice was filled with stern motherly affection, and it made me smile. “You need to get up. We’ve got things to do today.” With that, she walked out of the room and shut the door again.

I loved the giant woman with all of my heart; she was my second mother. Right now though, she was delivering a form of slow torture. She was a slave driver when she wanted to get moving in the morning. I got up, my bare feet hitting the cold wooden floor, causing me to cringe. There was a bathroom attached to the bedroom, and I padded over to assess the damage left from Desmond and the Changelings.

The bathroom was long, slender and decorated in a beach motif. Shells lay scattered around a dry starfish on a shelf on the wall across from the sink. A picture of Liam and Tess at the beach when he was younger was framed on the wall to the left of the shelf, with one of a sun sinking low in the sky over the same beach on the right. The walls were a calm, pale pink, like the inside of an oyster and matched the pearlescent tile that covered the floor. I looked at it all in mirror image as my gaze searched for anything to look at besides my mangled face.

My left eye was blossoming into a magnificent bruise; blues and blacks and a hint of green swirled together underneath my eye and slightly over the bridge of my nose. I pressed two fingers against the edges of the bruise and watched it turn red as pressure was put on, then fade back into the dark colors when I released. It stung to touch. The butterfly stitches above it were still intact, now browning at the edges from dried blood. The guys were still impersonating Desmond’s attack. For some reason, the humor in it that everyone else saw evaded me. Maybe after my eye healed I would be able to see it.

Stepping into the tiny shower, it was impossible not to see how drastically life had changed since this time last year.

This spring had been amazing, despite the many near death experiences and constant threat of being kidnapped. I had grown close to my grandmother who turned out to be a Glaistig, an immortal faerie who was once a human. I became best friends with Mary and Roslin. Even more amazing than the other two, I fell in love with my boyfriend, Liam. That wasn’t even mentioning the fact that I learned hand to hand combat from the Glaistig’s personal assassin, my grandmother, and began learning how to wield magic from Roslin, one of the other committee members. Being one-of-a-kind certainly had its perks.

The downside to the spring, however, was that my brother, Chris, was still missing along with Memaw’s daughter, MaKenna, and Tess’s son, Aiden. After nearly being killed three times from minor missions into Neamar, Ankou had grown wise to our plans. Not to mention the fact that I had to turn down the leader of the faeries in Adaire when she offered immortality, and one could say this year had been a bit busy so far.

Liam would die if I accepted immortality. He had sworn himself to be my Protector and so his life was tied to mine. Upon becoming immortal, in a sense I would die. That effectively ended his purpose here on earth. I could not - would not - be responsible for killing him. Instead of flat out turning Rebecca down though, I hedged and asked for time. Rebecca obliged, but begrudgingly. She gave me six months to make a decision. That meant there were four months left before I was forced to make an impossible decision. For some reason, I had a nagging suspicion that six months would not be long enough to decide. We needed more time to figure out how to save Liam from his decision.

Hot water cascaded down my back in rivulets as I leaned against the shower and breathed in deeply. The warm mist tickled my nose. The high showerhead made it feel like I was standing in a warm summer rain. It was nice; it was normal.

I hadn’t realized how long I had been in the shower, reliving things from the past six months, until my teeth began to chatter. Fingers pruned, the hot shower was now cold from being in there so long. I turned the water off, grabbed the towel draped over the rack right outside the sliding shower door, and wrapped myself tight. It was impossible not to shiver as I stepped onto the now slick tile floor.

A muffled voice crept through the small window above the toilet. “You know, it would be a lot more fun being a peeping Tom if I could see through this foggy window.”

I jumped from the shock of hearing Liam’s voice on the other side of the fogged glass, causing my feet to slide out from under me. I grabbed the sink and the rack on either side of me to keep from going down, my towel slipping a bit in the process. Thankfully, I managed to gain enough control of myself to keep the towel from revealing any taboo body parts in time.

Hiking my towel back into place, I used my elbow to clear out a small circle of the window. The water beaded up and made zigzags as the droplets made their way toward the sill, gravity having its way with them. Liam smiled through the clearing, his eyes crinkling in the process. “Hi there,” he said simply.

“You know your mom would kill you if she knew you were spying on me.”

“She probably would,” he said casually, pulling the side of his lips into a coy smile. “But you won’t tell her, because you don’t want me to die, do you?” He pretended to pout.

If only he knew what it had cost me to keep him alive already. I forced my smile to look genuine, but inside I felt a little more of my heart break because of the situation we were in. My voice was even, maybe even a little playful if I was convincing enough. It impressed me. “No, I don’t want you to die, Liam. That’s the point of me trying to stay out of as much trouble as possible.”

I pushed the window open a bit to trace the outline of a puckering, pink scar that was emerging above his left eye, identical to mine. He had taken off his butterfly stitches the moment Tess left him alone. Stubborn tough guy. Every injury I sustained no matter how great or how small, was inflicted upon him in real time. His punishment for not keeping me safe, Memaw explained to me when I asked her why. It was part of swearing to be a Protector.

I pushed his cheek gently and laughed. “Now will you go and find Desmond and the rest of the guys before they get themselves into something in town that will land them in jail? I need to get dressed!”