chapter seven
So far, each time I’d woken up in Avalon, something majorly sucked. This time was no exception.
A piercing scream brought me from dead asleep to wide-awake panic in one second flat. A couple more voices joined in, the screams bouncing and pinging off the stone walls and ceiling. Some of the torches had gone out, leaving parts of the cave hidden by shadows.
Ethan sprang to his feet in front of me, and to my shock, a long, thin knife appeared in his hand. “To me!” he bellowed, loud enough to be heard over the sounds of terror, and soon a handful of the students came charging out from between the stalagmites toward him.
Two human boys were supporting a third, whose shirt was shredded, his chest bleeding from what looked like claw marks. Behind them, Kimber and the Fae boy she’d been so chummy with were backing toward us instead of running, each menacing the surrounding darkness with knives that looked just like Ethan’s.
I clutched the afghan tightly under my chin, totally mystified as to what was going on, knowing only that it was bad. Really bad, judging by the wide-eyed terror on the human boys’ faces.
“Don’t move!” Ethan ordered me without turning to look, and he stepped forward to put himself between us humans and … whatever was out there.
Realizing the wounded boy was about to collapse, I sprang off the love seat. His friends gave me appreciative nods as they laid him down. The wounds on his chest looked nasty, and there was enough blood to make me feel light-headed. I had the sensation that I’d stepped into the middle of a nightmare. This just couldn’t be happening. My life was aggravating in the extreme, but it wasn’t dangerous. There had to be some perfectly reasonable explanation for the screaming, the bleeding, and the weapons.
The sense of unreality kept me from being as scared as I should have been. One of the boys tore his sweatshirt off over his head and stuck it over the wound, applying pressure. The wounded boy groaned in pain.
To my shock, the other boy had drawn a gun, though he pointed it at the floor as his eyes darted back and forth, searching for a target.
What kind of students were these?
I stopped worrying about the gun when an awful shrieking sound, like fingernails on a blackboard, only ten times worse, split the air. With all the echoes, I couldn’t tell where it came from, but the three Fae seemed to have a good idea. They stood side by side, knives at the ready as they faced one particularly dark pool of shadow.
Then the shadow moved, stepping into the glow of the torchlight. I clapped my hand over my mouth to keep from screaming, because whatever it was, it wasn’t human. Not even close.
It looked like it was made of sticks and straw, with a vaguely humanoid shape and huge black eyes. The sticks that made up its fingers were sharpened at the end, and several of them glistened with blood. My stomach almost revolted when I noticed another sharpened appendage, this one jutting out from between the creature’s legs. There was blood on that, too.
It opened its mouth, and another of those awful screeches made me cover my ears. Two more creatures just like it emerged from behind a couple of stalagmites.
The Fae put some space between one another, each facing off against one of the creatures. The human boy was trying to line up a shot, but the Fae were in the way.
“Will bullets hurt them?” he asked suddenly.
Ethan, slowly and carefully advancing on the creature he’d targeted, shouted a quick no over his shoulder.
“Shit!” the human boy said, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him. He put the gun away, then chivalrously pushed me behind him.
The creatures shrieked again, then all three of them sprang in unison. I swallowed a scream of my own.
“Jason!” a voice behind me cried in terror.
The gunman—Jason, apparently—whirled around, and I did the same. Another one of the creatures had snuck up behind us and was perched on the back of the couch. Those eyes were as expressionless as ink blots, and yet I still felt its gaze almost like a physical touch as it stared at me. The boy on the couch froze in terror, and if the creature had wanted him, he’d have been history. But it had eyes only for me. It shrieked again, then leapt off the back of the couch toward me.
Instinctively, I ducked and dove forward, sending myself under the creature’s leap. Unfortunately, Jason was right behind me, so when I ducked, the creature slammed into his chest. He went down hard.
I did scream then. I couldn’t help it.
Jason’s friend surged forward and grabbed the creature, pulling it away. Already, a set of claw marks marred Jason’s face. The creature whirled on Jason’s friend, twiggy arm striking out in a backhanded blow that sent him flying. The creature crowed in triumph and seemed to grow bigger as I watched. Fixing its gaze on Jason, it started forward. I scrambled to my feet, looking around frantically for something I could do to help.
What I did next was pure instinct. I was unarmed, and even if I’d had one of those Fae knives, I’d be more likely to hurt myself than hurt these creatures. But I couldn’t just stand there uselessly, hoping some big strapping man would come save the day, not when the creature was advancing on the obviously wounded Jason.
I was more terrified than I’d ever been in my life. I grabbed the afghan that was still wrapped around my shoulders and flipped it like it was a sheet I was trying to drape over a bed just right. It came to rest directly over the creature’s head, and I let go.
My hope had been that blocking its vision would slow the creature down at least a little, but my plan worked better than expected. The creature tried to pull the afghan off its head, but the yarn kept getting caught on all the little sticks and twigs that jutted out of its body. Shrieking in outrage, the creature began shredding the afghan with its claws.
The distraction gave Ethan just enough time to come running. His knife flashed again and again as he plunged it through the afghan and into the creature below. Black icky stuff dripped from the blade, and the creature’s shrieks turned to sounds of pain. But Ethan didn’t stop stabbing it until the shrieks subsided and the creature collapsed to the floor and stopped moving. I blinked, and suddenly the creature’s body lost its shape and became nothing more than a pile of sticks and straw and gross black sludge.
The sudden absence of screaming and shrieking made me feel like I’d lost my hearing—except I could hear my frantic breaths as my mind tried to absorb everything that had just happened.
Ignoring me for the moment, Ethan bent to check on Jason while Kimber and her friend tended to the other two boys. Jason’s eyes were squinched shut in pain, and he clutched what looked like a handkerchief to his bloody face. Ethan had torn his shirt open and was now probing gently at his ribs.
“Broken,” I heard him mutter under his breath when Jason flinched under his light touch. “It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” he warned, then put both his hands on Jason’s chest.
I saw the flash of fear in Jason’s eyes. I didn’t know him, wouldn’t even have known his name if the other boy hadn’t called to him, but I guess taking care of my mother for all those years had given me a nursemaid instinct. I knelt on Jason’s other side and took hold of his hand. He squeezed gratefully.
Ethan was mumbling again, and I felt the little hairs on my arms stand at attention. Ethan was obviously doing some sort of magic, and though that wasn’t unusual in Avalon, it still felt surreal to me. Then Jason screamed, his back arching as his hand nearly crushed mine.
It lasted only a few seconds, and then Jason’s whole body sagged and he breathed a huge sigh of relief. He closed his eyes, and I figured he’d just passed out.
“What were those things?” I asked Ethan as I began shaking in delayed reaction.
I could see the muscles clenching in his jaw as he ground his teeth. “Spriggans,” he said, then spit as if the word tasted bad.
That didn’t exactly clear things up for me. “What’s a Spriggan?”
He sat back on his heels and pushed his hair away from his face. “Creatures from Faerie. Creatures that are not allowed to set foot in Avalon.”
“Unseelie creatures,” Jason said, and I saw that he hadn’t passed out after all. He was also eyeing Ethan strangely.
We’ve already established that I was woefully ignorant of the workings of Avalon and Faerie, but I did know at least a little something about the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. All of Faerie was divided between the two Courts, which were sometimes at war, and sometimes at an uneasy peace. The Seelie Fae were the “good” Fae, although when speaking of Fae, “good” is a relative term. The Unseelie Court was home to all the bad guys—goblins and monsters and things that go bump in the night. And, apparently, Spriggans.
Ethan frowned down at Jason. “They are no kin to me, so stop looking at me like that.” He helped Jason sit up.
“Sorry,” Jason said, avoiding Ethan’s eyes.
Ethan patted his shoulder. “No harm done, and I can’t blame you after what just happened. It’s creatures like Spriggans that give the Unseelie Court a bad name.”
It took me a moment to make sense of this exchange, but when I did, my eyes widened to what I felt sure were comic proportions.
“You’re Unseelie?” It was somewhere between a question and a gasp of horror.
“I am,” Ethan confirmed. “As are approximately half the Fae who reside in Avalon. And no, we are no more uniformly evil than humans are uniformly good.”
Jason looked only halfway convinced. But then, he was still in obvious pain. I frowned at Ethan, not at all sure how to take this little bit of news. He’d seemed perfectly at home wielding that knife and stabbing the life out of those nasty creatures, and it was hard not to wonder—yet again—if he was one of the good guys or one of the bad guys.
“I thought since Avalon seceded from Faerie, the Fae here weren’t supposed to be affiliated with the Courts,” I said. “They’re only supposed to matter in Faerie.”
Ethan laughed dryly. “That’s true in theory. Reality is somewhat different. You’ll notice many houses and businesses in Avalon displaying either white or red roses. White roses mean the house or business is Seelie; red roses mean it’s Unseelie.” His eyes fixed on my chest. I looked down and noticed that the cameo lay outside my shirt. The cameo with the white rose on it.
Had Dad’s thoughtful gift had some invisible strings attached? He’d never mentioned that wearing the white rose declared me to be a Seelie girl. It seemed to me he should have told me, and I couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t.
Ethan met my eyes, and I suspected he knew what I was thinking. “Neither Kimber nor I wear the red rose,” he said. “As far as we’re concerned, it’s an outdated custom that desperately needs to be abandoned. I’ve never even set foot in Faerie, so why should I declare allegiance to the Unseelie Court?”
I wasn’t too sure how I felt about the cameo anymore. I couldn’t quite bear to take it off—right now, it was the only link I had to my dad. But I did tuck it back under the neck of my shirt where it didn’t show.