And there was this pulse, and I thought maybe I cracked, just a little, the pieces jagged and sharp. There was green and gold, the colors of the forest around me. It was almost effortless, really, more so than magic had ever been before. It started in my heart; I knew that for a fact. I felt lightning-struck, the beat erratic and heavy.
The colors whirled around me, a spinning corona of light that pooled between my cupped hands, so bright I almost had to look away. It began to cascade downward, like a waterfall, the drops of light spreading along the ground, pulsating slowly. The forest faded around me. The sky above darkened. Everything else melted away.
I thought, It isn’t fair.
And then something hooked itself into my head and heart and pulled.
The air sizzled around me.
The lights grew brighter, and I had to—
There was a flutter of wings against my palm, the barest of touches.
I took in a great, gasping breath.
The magic around me began to fade, the light and sounds of the Dark Woods returning as if they’d never been silenced at all.
And from my closed hands came the smallest of chirps.
I looked down as I lifted my fingers away.
The bird blinked slowly up at me.
Its feet opened and closed.
The crooked wing moved back into place even as I watched, the feathers scraping against my fingers.
It took a moment, maybe two, before it righted itself, the talons digging lightly into my skin. There was a little smear of blood across my palm. The bird hopped around, looked up and down, to the left and the right. As it turned its head, I saw the ruffled feathers on its neck, but the skin looked intact. It chirped again.
And then it flew away into the trees, lost amongst the branches and leaves.
I sat there for a long time, in those Dark Woods.
Eventually I decided to head for home. My heart was still heavy, but it no longer felt shattered in my chest. I could do this. I could be who everyone wanted me to be. I didn’t need the knight. He had the Prince, and I… well. One day I’d find someone made for me. And I would show them why I was made for them. It was going to be okay.
I put my hands in the grass to push myself up and— I stopped, because the grass crunched under my fingers.
I looked down.
It was blackened. Burnt.
All around me. In a large circle. And everything in that circle was charred. The ground. The shrubbery. The trees. Everything. It was as if I’d burned the life out of it. To… to give— I stood, my legs shaking, breath hitching in my chest. I took a step back. And another. And another. And then I turned and ran toward home.
I was seventeen years old when I brought a bird back to life.
I had taken life from the earth to do it.
And I never breathed a word of it to anyone.
I: City of Lockes
Chapter 1: Best Friends 5Eva
“DO I even want to know what we’re doing?” Prince Justin asked me as we walked down a side street in the City of Lockes, trying to avoid detection.
“Absolutely,” I said. Probably not. “I have the best ideas.” There was plenty of evidence to the contrary, but it was usually spouted by excessively negative people, and I hated excessively negative people. “You can trust me.” This was going to end in tears and death, most likely my own, but he didn’t need to know that. At least not yet. I grinned my most trustworthy grin as I led him into an alley.
He stared at me.
I widened my smile so he’d understand.
“Are you… are you about to be ill? Because you look like you’re about to be ill. Like you just ate a plate of bad beef and are entirely unsure of what end it’s going to come out of. I suppose that’s how you normally look, though, so I don’t really think there’s much of a difference.”
“I’m smiling at you. To show my trustworthiness.”
He grimaced. “Funny how that works. I still don’t trust you at all.”
“Lie. You trust me a little bit. Otherwise you wouldn’t have snuck out of the castle with me without asking me why.”
“I didn’t do anything with you. You put your hand over my mouth and told me I had to come with you if I wanted to live. And I repeatedly demanded you tell me the reasons for—”
“We’re the best of friends,” I told a rather large alley rat as it scurried along down the cobblestones. “He hugged me once in the forest while a naked man with wings tried to get us to touch each other inappropriately.” I frowned. “Huh. What does it say about my life that that sentence makes complete and total sense to me?”
“We’re not anything of the sort,” Justin snapped. “In fact, my first act as King will probably be to behead you. Fair warning. And the hug was against my will, like most of the things you do to me. And it was made worse by the fact that the King of Fairies kept telling you to lick my—”
“You can’t kill me,” I reminded him as I stopped us at the entrance of the alley. “You would miss me too much and would probably feel really bad.” And I would also be dead, which would suck for me.
“I highly doubt I would feel anything at all but immense relief.”
Okay, I could work with that. “The people would revolt.”
“Or there would be celebrations in the streets as they would no longer need to hear your inane prattling.”
My trump card! “Gary would come after you.”
Justin sighed. “Now that I believe. He still looks at me like I wasn’t the one left standing at the altar on my wedding day while my fiancé stared lovingly into the eyes of another man and spouted disgusting platitudes of jerking off your heart or whatever the hell else was said.”
I glanced out the alley to make sure we hadn’t been noticed. “I don’t know if that’s quite what happened.”
His glare was rather ferocious. “Care for me to refresh your memory?”
Nope, not at all. “You’re distracting yourself from what’s important.”
He gaped at me. “Your level of self-awareness would be remarkable if it wasn’t so terrifying.”
“Thank you.”
“That wasn’t—”
“Don’t you want to know why we’re here?” I asked.
“No.”
“You did just a second ago.”
“I’ve since changed my mind.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to know? Not even a little bit?”
“Sam, if you don’t take me back to the castle this instant, I’m going to make sure you’re miserable for the rest of our lives.”
My heart swelled. It was inevitable.
He took a step back. “What. Why are you looking at me like that? Like you’re having feelings?”
I needed to hug him very badly. “Because,” I said, taking a step toward him. “You just said you wanted me to be miserable for the rest of our lives. Like we’re going to live long and miserably together. Forever. As best friends.”
He blanched as he held up his hands, back hitting the brick wall of the building behind him. “That’s not what I meant. You stay back! You hear me? Godsdammit, Sam, you stay back—”
“We’re going to hug,” I demanded, taking another step.
“No, no we’re not.”
“You can’t stop it,” I said, holding my arms out wide. “It’s gonna happen.”