Page 108 of Faerie Fate
Poppy wasn’t hard to find. She stood in the middle of the fighting, her arms lifted and her spellwork glowing faint silver in the face of so much gold. Her witch powers slammed into several of the approaching faes going after the pixies.
If her power wasn’t a dead giveaway, her laughter was.
“Poppy!”
Cutting a path to the witch wasn’t easy. I struggled to get to her, punching one of the fae in the face hard enough to send his helmet skittering off his face.
“The war is shifting. The pixies are losing, and that isn’t supposed to happen,” I yelled. “We have to do something.”
Poppy grabbed my hand. “We have to unlock your powers. Now.”
I nodded, my heartbeat taking a rapid dive into slowness, my head going light. “Glad we understand each other.” It felt like whatever vision of hers I’d sunk into, whatever bond we’d created, made it easier to sense these things and each other.
The pixies continued their retreat and Poppy and I left the foyer, dodging through more fighting. She led the way like she knew the intricacies of the palace without a map.
The sounds of the battle slowly filtered away the farther we walked. A second staircase curved down from the first floor into the basement, deeper underneath the stony foundations.
Soon, the stench of burning flowers lessened. All those acres of beauty now lost. It broke something inside of me even as Poppy kept us moving down.
“We should be undisturbed here,” she said. “If the place is still intact. Why shouldn’t it be? The fae wouldn’t know to point a blast here.”
I wanted to go home. I wanted all of this to be behind me, to the point where even the thought of unlocking my witch powers wasn’t as terrifying as it used to be. Numbness took up space inside me where reservation used to be.
If I didn’t do this, Mike would be gone.
Then Poppy dragged me around a corner and the light disappeared. We went down another flight of stairs. But she seemed to have a destination in mind and I didn’t push or press. My tongue knotted itself and I let it stay that way. If we were doing this, then I had to trust Poppy.
Finally we came out at the bottom of the stairs and into a hallway. She marched at my side with her grip firm, refusing to let go of me even when the hallway ended in a set of double doors. A massive lock kept them firmly together.
“Watch for shrapnel, girl, in case this goes south.”
She said the warning seconds before holding her hands up and sending a blast of magic at the doors. The hinges rocked, then the lock fell away. It clanked against stone before stilling.
The doors swung open to the shadows behind and the hush turned reverent with each step we took over the threshold.
“What is this?” My voice didn’t reverberate back to me even though the ceiling was high enough for me to lose sight of the beams.
“A ritual room,” Poppy said briskly.
“How did you know it was here?”
“I’m a slave. It’s my job to know everything political. My master makes sure I do. I know the riches of every ritual room in the kingdom.”
Until that moment, I’d never considered her aslaveslave. But it was true. She did have a master who controlled her movements and told her where to go, what to do. Who to kill.
Poppy strode confidently toward the far wall and tossed open the glossy panes of a storage cabinet. The offer to help died on my tongue and I watched her, caught in now-familiar helplessness.
Finally, unable to stop the frantic pace of my heart, I joined Poppy at the storage cabinets and marked her frantic supply run. She turned to me with her arms filled with bottles then hustled to unload them at the center of the sacred space.
“We don’t have the journal. I don’t remember the spell.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she snapped. “I know what we need.”
She stopped suddenly, her fingers brushing against the side of a glass jar with floating bits of black suspended in liquid. Her eyes narrowed.
“You seem unsure.” My voice trembled.
“The details of my memory are a bit blurry. Ugh.” Poppy shook her head to dismiss those hesitations. “I’m not sure.”
