Page 4 of The Unseelie War
Closing her eyes, she tried very hard not to think about anything at all. But she could feel it anyway—the power inside her, vast and uncontrolled, reshaping reality with every stray thought, every unconscious desire.
She'd wanted to force Serrik and Valroy to face each other directly. Well, that was still probably going to happen.
She'd wanted to take control of her own fate. Mission accomplished.
She'd wanted answers, truth, an end to the manipulation and lies that had defined her existence since entering the Web.
What she'd gotten was a world where truth and fiction, dream and reality, had become indistinguishable.
Where every thought had weight, every emotion had consequence, and every choice could literally reshape the fabric of existence.
Opening her eyes, she looked at Serrik and Puck—one ancient and patient, the other chaotic and gleeful—both of them looking to her for answers she didn't have.
“Right.” She threw up her hands. What else was there to do? “Anyone have any bright ideas about how to save three worlds that are now one extremely screwed-up world?”
Neither of them said anything.
She gestured toward the New-Boston-York skyline. “Well. I guess we might as well start walking.”
“Oooh! We’re on aquest!”Puck cackled. “I lovequests.”
Ava figured it was time to place bets on how long it would take before Serrik murdered Puck. But she couldn’t really spend much time focusing on that. Because there she was, walking through a meadow full of living origami paper cranes and razor-petaled flowers, and trying to figure out how to un-fuck the universe.
It was going to be a very long day.
CHAPTER TWO
The walk toward the merged city took them through landscapes that shifted like fever dreams. What had been a simple meadow became a path lined with trees whose bark shimmered with the silver threads of the Web, their leaves whispering secrets in languages that had never been spoken on Earth. The ground beneath their feet alternated between familiar New England soil and the moonlit pathways of Tir n'Aill, sometimes within the span of a single step.
Ava tried to keep her thoughts carefully neutral, but every stray emotion seemed to manifest around them. When she felt overwhelmed, storm clouds gathered overhead. When she worried about the people they might find, phantom voices echoed from the trees—cries for help that made her heart race and summoned more shadows from her fears.
“You must learn to control this,” Serrik said after a particularly vivid manifestation of her anxiety took the form of a pack of wolves that dissolved into mist when she focused on them. “Your emotional state will quickly become a liability.”
Gritting her teeth, she tried very hard not to lose her temper. Shedidn’t want to know what that’d do. “I’m trying,asshole.It's not exactly like anything I've ever had to deal with before.”
“No.” His golden eyes scanned the shifting landscape ahead. “It is not.”
Puck had been unusually quiet since they'd begun walking, his tablet tucked under his arm as he navigated the unstable terrain with inhuman grace. But as they crested a hill and the full scope of the merged city came into view, even he stopped and stared.
Boston—or what had once been Boston—sprawled before them like a wound in reality itself.
The familiar skyline was there, but it had been grotesquely twisted and expanded. Skyscrapers burst up from the ground like they had punctured up from the crust of the earth, buckling the ground around them, their surfaces reflecting not the sky above but glimpses of other worlds, other realities. The Charles River ran through it all, but its waters had turned silver and seemed to flow upward in places, defying gravity as it wound between buildings that existed in multiple dimensions simultaneously.
Streets that should have been paved with asphalt were now covered in what looked like living moss that pulsed with bioluminescent patterns. Some of the buildings appeared to be growing branches, merging with the tree-like structures of Tir n’Aill. In the distance, she could see what had once been the Public Garden, now transformed into a maze of towering hedge walls that moved and shifted when no one was looking directly at them.
“It's beautiful.” There was something sad in Puck’s voice. “And absolutely terrifying.”
Ava felt sick looking at it. This was her doing. Every impossible angle, every reality-defying structure, every person who might be trapped or dying in that nightmare landscape—it was all because of her.
It was all her fault.
They descended toward the city limits, and the first sign of human habitation they encountered was a small group of peoplehuddled near what had once been a bus stop. The stop itself had been transformed into something that looked like it belonged in a fairy tale—ornate metalwork covered in flowering vines, with a small thatched roof that seemed to have grown rather than been built.
But the people gathered there looked anything but enchanted. They were clearly terrified, pressing themselves against the transformed structure as if it might offer some protection from the chaos around them. There were five of them—a middle-aged man in a business suit, a woman with two young children, and an elderly man leaning heavily on a cane.
And surrounding them, like predators circling prey, were three fae.
Ava recognized them immediately, though she had never seen their kind before. They were Unseelie fae, their appearances shifting subtly as she watched—sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible, always otherworldly. One appeared to be made of living shadow, its form constantly shifting and reforming. Another looked almost human except for the fact that where its eyes should be, there were only points of cold blue light. The third was the most disturbing—it looked like a child, but its smile was too wide and contained too many teeth.
