Page 48 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
That made her sixteen years old. Alice would be eighteen.I’ve lost almost a full decade with her—
“Now,” the High King said firmly, helping me to stand with an ironclad grip on my arm. “Thank you so much for the tea and biscuits.” He graciously dipped his head to my mother, who was smiling up at us like she couldn’t hear the pounding on the ceiling getting louder as it moved from over the top of our heads, down inside the walls, and towards the front of the house. “We can see ourselves out.”
“I’ll call you over the weekend, honey,” she sang out to me, turning to engage Alice in conversation as if it wasn’t the first time she’d seen me in eight years. As if we talked on the phone all the time. As if I wasn’t about to walk out of her house and slip back through a portal into an entirely different world.
Nearly tripping over my own two feet as I stumbled behind the High King to the doorway, I called out to them over my shoulder, “I love you! I’m sorry—sorry I have to rush off—”
Lucais yanked me out of the kitchen right as the hideous sound of nails on a chalkboard began to scrape down the front window. I knew it was the caenim, but I didn’t understand why they hadn’t just broken down the door if they were aware I was inside. The last time it had happened, I’d thought the horrific foreplay was simply to frighten my family.
“They’re trying to pierce the shield,” the High King groaned. Instead of going back out the way we’d come in, he took a sharp turn down the hallway and dragged me up the staircase, tears racing down my cheeks like my eyes were leaky faucets. “I’m sorry. I thought we’d have a little more time, but the whole lot of them have come straight here, which is extremely irksome. I don’t understand why they decided to bypass the trail we left through the main part of town.”
As he pulled me past my old bedroom, I stole a brief glance inside. It had been turned into a storage room inclusive of a guest bed and furnished with plain items that had probably been purchased from an opportunity store in my mother’s spare time. It didn’t seem to have even a single trace of me left behind in it. I had really gone—I had really been gone for eight years.
“I’m not in the mood to unravel this mystery right now,” Lucais went on, more to himself than to me. He grunted as he tried to open the window in Brynn’s bedroom without shattering the entire window frame. The lock required a key, and it was missing.
Standing back as he forced it to yield, I surveyed the updated interior design. Her bedroom looked so different from the way I remembered. It was natural for a girl growing up through her teenage years, but disturbing for me on such a deep level.
Where soft toys and pretty dolls had once decorated her bed and the shelves on her wall, Brynn instead had a collection of preservation jars filled with strange types of insects and reptiles. The posters of furry native animals, unicorns, and fairies had been replaced by collections of butterflies pinned up behind glass and posters of boy bands I’d never heard about. An array of non-fiction books, covering all different subjects from Greek Mythology to Scottish Folklore, replaced the spots on her bookshelf once reserved for fairytales and look-and-find books. I remembered that pink was her favourite colour once upon atime, but Brynn decorated using different shades of purple and offset the colour against black instead of white.
The only relic of the little girl I had once loved and protected so fiercely before I abandoned her was a stuffed bear sitting in the very corner of the room.
On the old, mirrored dressing table that had been handed down across generations of girls on my mother’s side of the family sat a bear I’d had since I was a baby. It had no clothes, and the ribbon around its neck was stained with age and frayed at the ends. But it was preserved on top of a stack of rogue fiction books, and around its torso—
A handmade crown.
Lucais pulled me through the window, the cold air slicing at the tears on my face like razors as we tumbled from the second floor down towards the ground.
sixteen
My Least Favourite Person in the World
We hit the ground running to the sound of the caenim knocking against the human realm as if Lucais’s pliable shield were a wooden front door.
Giving me goosebumps, their razor-sharp nails tapped along the edges of the world with dull, resounding echoes.
Once we were out of the townhouse, the sinister touches rattled against the sky and the grass instead of the walls. I felt like I was trapped inside a snow globe they were about to smash through at any given moment. The threat moved with us, eerily shifting from the clouds to the trees, constantly changing.
“Why can’t they just”—I clutched my bone-dry throat and sucked a sharp, ragged gasp of air into my lungs as Lucais pulled me across the land, half-running, half-evanescing—“pick a spot andstickto it?”
“They’re searching for weak spots,” the High King replied grimly. A moment later, he tucked my head under his chin and spun us through the air a few hundred metres ahead. He glanced up as another strike of a monstrous fist hit the sky and added, much louder than necessary, “But they won’tfindany!”
When we reached the new industrial estate, my stomach gurgled in disgust for two reasons.
First was the reminder that I’d lost close to a decade of my life—and the lives of my mother and sister—in a matter of months, if not weeks.
Second was the way the caenim scraped their iron-tipped nails along the steel walls of different buildings, causing them to shudder beneath the phantom touches. The monsters suddenly felt much closer to sinking their claws into us with a thin veil of magic trembling between realms as our only shield—a shield that would become utterly useless as soon as we stepped through the gateway back into Faerie.
Lucais seemed to realise that, too, because he hesitated in the middle of an abandoned lot. Towering around us on all sides were chain-link fences with spirals of barbed wire atop them and hollow, cream-coloured warehouses. All of the workmen seemed to have gone home for the day.
“They’re too fast,” I said, as Lucais hovered behind me with his back resting lightly against mine, scanning the abandoned lot with clenched fists.
“No, Aura, they’re slow.” His tone cast suspicion onto everything that encased us, including the very ground beneath our feet. “They’re trained on scent. Which means they should have started trying to break through the wards here, when we crossed through the gateway and the first hint of our trail began. But instead, they started at your family’s home and followed us back.”
An ice-cold itch tickled the hollow of my throat. “What are you trying to say?”
“We’ve been here less than half an hour,” he estimated, scanning the synthetic landscape beyond the fenceline. “At the pace they move, we should’ve had another thirty minutes before they tracked us to your mother’s house.” He tipped his head backto slice his golden eyes across the skyline. “It’s like they knew exactly where to find us.”
“Maybe you’re just bad at math,” I deadpanned.
