Everlast (The Chronicles of Nerissette) (Entangled Teen) Read online

  “And if they refuse?”

  He raised his chin and glared at me. “I don’t intend to give them a choice.”

  “There’s always a choice.”

  The Fate Maker stood up and wiped the newest smears of blood off his face. “Do you know the first thing I’ll do when I go through the mirror, Allie? Do you want to know where I’ll go right away?”

  “I couldn’t care less,” I said, trying to figure out the best way to attack him. I eyed the window—I wasn’t sure if I had enough weight to push the two of us through it together. We were at least seven floors up, and the ground beneath was paved with thick, white stones. There was no way anyone could survive that fall, not even a wizard.

  “I’m going to go to Jesse’s and Heidi’s parents and take away the illusions. I’m going to let them feel the loss of those deaths. Then I’m going to tell them how you and your boyfriend killed their children. How you roasted them alive, screaming for blood the entire time and reveling in the battlefield.”

  “That’s not true.” I jerked my head toward him and felt my heart sink into my stomach at the cruel smile on his face. Was it? They couldn’t have been in the forest, could they? Had we killed them? Oh, God, had we murdered them?

  Revulsion filled me, and I had to push their faces from my mind.

  “It is,” he said, a note of triumph in his voice.

  “You’re lying.”

  “Am I? Or are you a murderer? Did you kill them like you killed that troll on the battlefield? Did he matter? Will you feel guilty that he’s dead, or is he someone you’ll forget?”

  “Shut up,” I said, my shame and revulsion growing like weeds in my stomach, as I remembered the look on the troll’s face as he died.

  “You’ll forget him. You know why? Because he didn’t matter. He wanted you dead, and you killed him, and it doesn’t matter.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Just like all of those people out there. None of them matter, and in the end, all of this will fade away to legend. A story lost in time. The dumb little queen who tried to defeat the wizards and destroyed the world instead.”

  I looked at him again and then at the window. It was too tiny to fit either of us. Which meant there was only one way to stop him. One way to make sure that he never used the relics to open a portal and steal someone else’s life. But I couldn’t end this without destroying all of our chances.

  “You might kill me, but you’ll never step foot in my mother’s world. No one else is ever getting trapped here again. And I don’t care if I have to destroy every piece of magic that exists to make sure of it. This ends here, today, just you and me.”

  “What are you going to do?” he asked. “Cry and hope I let you live?”

  “No.” I shook my head at him. I knew how I had to end this. I knew how to stop him and the first thing I had to do was get rid of Esmeralda. I had to release her from the curse that had trapped her inside the body of a cat and there was only one way to do that. “Esmeralda, wherever you are—I forgive you.”

  I grabbed the chair standing next to his table and swung as hard as I could. Shards of burning hot pain ricocheted up my arm as the chair connected to the glass of the mirror.

  The room exploded in golden light, and I felt myself flying backward. There was the dull, faraway thump from my body hitting the stone wall next to the fireplace. I saw it from the outside. My body was there, sprawled unconscious on the floor, bathed in the radiant light of the mirror, but I wasn’t in that body.

  I watched from near the ceiling as the Fate Maker collapsed to his knees, his whole body wavering like the last traces of an image on a television screen after you’ve turned it off. He dropped his head forward and howled in rage while the mirror glowed brighter, filling the room with a searing heat, an intensity that I’d never felt before. Even in my detached state it felt as if the entire world was crashing down on this single point, all the realities of all the worlds suddenly collapsing into this single instant of time and space.

  The light grew brighter, making the edges of my physical form tingle and burn. I watched the body below and tried not to think about the fact that it appeared not to be breathing.

  There was a high-pitched wail, like the sound of all the air being sucked out of a balloon, and the light receded back through the mirror, the magic of the mirror dragging the Fate Maker along with it. Everything went black. The room, the mirror, the place where I’d been floating. Everything was black, and the pain was unbearable. I wanted to scream, but the sound was eaten by the blackness, and I was left with nothing but silence.

  No light. No dark. No pain. No sound. Nothing—and all I could think was that no one had warned me death was going to be so boring.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  There was an intense heat, and then the nothingness fell away into jagged spikes of pain.

  “She’s breathing,” someone familiar yelled. I struggled to open my eyes. “Stay back. She’s breathing. Give her some air.”

  Gran Mosely. It had to be Gran. Something had happened. Some sort of accident, and I had been hurt, and we had all been here in Bethel Park the whole time.

  There was no Nerissette. No Fate Maker. No war or dead trolls or dragons or any other fairy-tale creatures that lived inside my mind. Heidi and Jesse were alive. We had been in an accident, and everything had been some sort of hallucination brought on while I was unconscious.

  “If you don’t move back, Iron Lover, I will tie you in vines and leave you in the corner.”

  Darinda.

  I felt my heart crumble. It wasn’t a dream. We were still here. Nerissette was real, and I had killed the Fate Maker. I had murdered someone. Two people, if you wanted to count the troll. I tried to open my eyes and winced at the bright light.

  “Come now, Your Majesty,” Darinda said. “It’s nothing more than a bump on the head, and you have an army to congratulate.”

  “Wha?” I moaned and my eyes fluttered open. Something warm filled my hand, and I found Winston’s dark fingers tangled with my pale ones. “What happened?”

  “We were hoping you could tell us,” Rhys said. I shifted so that I was looking at him.

  “Let’s get you sitting first,” Darinda said.

  Instead of waiting for her to help, Rhys scooped me up and set me on the bench beside the worktable.

  I glanced around and saw that my friends all looked battered and bruised. Rhys was covered in smoke and grime, the arms of his coat torn, while Mercedes was dirt-streaked with her hair in a messy halo around her face. Kitsuna had a shallow gash above her eyebrow, leaking blood, and I tried not to vomit at the sight of it, remembering the way the Fate Maker had bled when I hit him with the orb.

  I turned to look at Winston, and he smiled, his face a mask of exhaustion. He had an ugly bruise forming on his cheek, and his left shoulder and arm were bandaged tightly against his side. I looked down and noticed that he had bandages wrapped around his chest and stomach as well.

  They were all here. I gasped for breath as a sob racked my chest. We were all here. We were alive. None of us had been badly hurt.

  I stopped and shame filled me again. Not everyone had made it through. We’d still lost Heidi and Jesse and it had been my fault.

  “Oh my God.” I rested my head against his shoulder and let out another sob. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

  “Just a dislocated shoulder and a couple of cracked ribs,” he said before I could ask what happened. “The other guy looks much worse.”

  “Does he?” I sobbed again and then looked at him.

  “I’d let you see.” Winston swallowed and looked away from me, lifting his chin to stare at a blank spot on the wall above my head. “But the aurae have already begun burning the bodies.”

  I nodded, still too numb to really understand what he was saying. “So…did we win?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Rhys chuckled softly. “We won. When you and the Fate Maker disappeared from the field, his army panicked. It was ov
er within minutes.”

  “What happened here, though?” Mercedes asked. “We saw the explosion from the window, but by the time we got here the Fate Maker was gone, and you were lying in the corner, not breathing.”

  “I destroyed the Mirror of Nerissette,” I said.

  “What?” Mercedes asked as everyone else fell silent.

  “He told me that when the war was over he would kill us all and find the relics to go back through the mirror and find another girl to take my place. So I stopped him.” I swallowed. “There was this explosion and this light and he was sucked in.”

  “We should go.” Darinda grabbed Mercedes’s hand, pulling her from the room and motioning to Rhys and Kitsuna to follow her.

  When the door slammed shut I turned to Winston. “How much do you hate me?”

  “Why would I hate you?” He stared into the fire, not meeting my eyes.

  “I destroyed our only chance of going home. How can you not hate me?”

  He flinched and then glanced over at the empty frame where the mirror had been. His hand trembled as he stared at what remained of what had been our only way back to normalcy.

  “You did what you had to so that you could protect your people.” He wrapped his non-bandaged arm around me, his eyes still fixed on the mirror’s remains. “How could I hate you for that?”

  I leaned my head against his shoulder, and we stared at the shattered glass as the last of the fading twilight gave way to the darkness of night.

  What could have been moments or hours later, he shook his head and shifted, looking at me for the first time since he’d seen the destruction I caused. He stood up, taking my hand, and helped me to my feet.

  “Come on,” he said. We walked down the stairs, hand-in-hand, and made our way to the passage that led to the roof. I opened the hatch since he couldn’t lift it with only one arm, and he helped me climb up the ladder so that we could stand on the roof, staring out at our kingdom.

  He wrapped his arm back around my shoulders, and I turned to the west, watching the smoke rise from near the river. I looked down and saw some of the men of the Leavenwald carrying a board between them, with Gunter resting upon it.

  Winston squeezed my shoulders tighter, and I let my head lean against his shoulder. Whatever happened, at least we’d be facing it together.

  Epilogue

  I was back in Kiirastuli, the Place of Waiting. The floors were cold against my bare feet, and I brought my hands up to rub my arms so that they wouldn’t get cold. What was I doing here? The last thing I remembered was being in the library, reading about the Great Goblin Wars.

  “Your Majesty,” a low voice purred from the shadows, and I froze. “How wonderful it is to see you again.”

  “Kuolema,” I said as the giant dragon slunk into the light. “Why am I here?”

  “I thought that would have been easy to see.” His face came closer, and I could feel his tongue flicking the air near my ear. “The goddess Fate wants her due.”

  “She’s gotten it,” I said, trying not to shiver as his tongue flickered next to my ear again. “I’m here, ruling Nerissette. I’m doing as it was decreed. Besides, Fate isn’t real. She’s just a made-up thing that Esmeralda created to keep people in line.”

  “Is that so?” the dragon hissed.

  “Yes.”

  “And now you think you rule by what? The might of a sword? The love of the people?”

  “I’m queen because there’s no one else. Not because of prophecies or fate or anything else.”

  “You’re queen because that is who you are meant to be.”

  “Fine. Then as queen I demand to know why I’m here and not back in the library.”

  “Because you haven’t fulfilled your end of the bargain,” Kuolema hissed. “You haven’t paid back your share. You are a pretender to the throne.”

  “I am—”

  “A murderer.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No, I’m not. We didn’t know they were there. It was a mistake. Heidi and Jesse were a mistake.”

  “War is coming, Queen Alicia. A war like one that no one on any world has ever seen before. War is coming, and if you are not careful it will swallow every reality whole. The world of nightmares will be made real, and then no one will escape. No one will be free. Not even your mother will be free from the monsters that will be unleashed from inside her head.”

  “You leave her alone.”

  “War is coming, Queen Alicia,” he said again and began to slither away from me, back into the shadows. “I suggest that you prepare.”

  Acknowledgments

  No one writes a book alone. Especially not someone as scatterbrained as me. So here we go in no particular order.

  Thank you to my daughter Ainsley for not only giving me the challenge of writing something that I was willing to let her read but also for reading every version of this story and not telling me that it sucked.

  Thank you to Libby Murphy and Liz Pelletier at Entangled Publishing for taking the chance to let me write not one, but three books about this world and cheering me on the entire way.

  A huge thanks to Libby and Danielle Rose Poiesz, and everyone else at Entangled who have put so much time into this project and into keeping me sane, as well as my amazing publicity team: Jaime Arnold, Danielle Barclay, Heather Riccio, and Debbie Suzuki. I’d be a lost stammering mess during interviews without you.

  And last but certainly not least to my family—Ben, Ainsley, Max, Mom, and my friends who have read, critiqued, consoled, and occasionally provided a shoulder to cry on as I worked to bring Allie and her adventures to life. And to all the young people who have read this book in its various forms and given me their opinions. Each and every one of you have made my life richer for having known you, and I can’t wait to see what sort of adventures your own lives will have in them.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek at the next book in the Chronicles of Nerissette trilogy

  EVANESCENT

  by

  Andria Buchanan

  Chapter One

  I stood in front of the Fort of Neris as the sun came up—alone. The square was never empty. There was always someone around, even if it was just a guard standing watch, waiting for the giants and trolls that could attack our home at any moment. My first sign that this was a dream.

  The sun peeked over the horizon, and I watched the red-gold light fill the sky, heralding the dawn. Something slithered against my ankle and I glanced down. The square was flooded, and blood-tinged water lapped at my ankles.

  Definitely a dream.

  I lifted the heavy, impractical skirts that Dream Me had apparently decided to wear and sighed. Whatever it took to get out of this dream, I wasn’t going to find it standing here in a crappy dress, getting waterlogged. I turned toward the main gates, prepared to start the long hike uphill to the Crystal Palace. I really didn’t feel like hiking five miles—even if it was a dream—in a floor-length gown, of all things.

  “They’re coming.”

  I jumped at the sound of Esmeralda’s voice and saw her sitting on top of the water. I stared at the sorceress-turned-black-and-white cat. She had gone missing three months before, during the first days of the war against the Fate Maker for control of my kingdom, and no one had heard from her since. “Es? What are you doing here? Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been forgiven,” Esmeralda said. “I have been released, but I still choose to protect you because you are the greatest thing—the only good thing—I have ever done for my people.”

  “That’s not—”

  “They are coming,” she repeated. “No one is safe. You are not safe.”

  “Who’s coming?” I asked.

  She looked over her shoulder, and I followed her gaze. On the horizon a huge black dragon circled in front of the sun. Kuolema. The Soul Eater. One of the four guardians of the Bleak, an eater of the dead, a dragon who called the darkness between worlds his home. The dragon that always haunted my nightmares. But this time
there were two figures sitting atop his back. There had never been anyone with him in my dreams before.

  A man, raven-haired, hunched his long, thin body over the dragon’s shoulders, his black and silver robes flapping around him. The Fate Maker. I tried to stay calm as I moved my attention to the person behind him. All I could tell from this distance was that it was a woman, her crimson skirts draped delicately over the dragon’s flank and her red hair gleaming like fresh blood in the sunlight as she clung to the Fate Maker’s waist. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and all I wanted to do was run. Run as far and as fast as I could away from her. If she was on the back of a dragon with the Fate Maker, no matter who she was or what she wanted here in Nerissette, it was bad. Very, very bad.

  “No.” I shook my head and stepped back, lifting my skirts even higher so that I could make a dash for it if need be.

  “The world they bring with them is too evil to contemplate.”

  “But he’s dead.” I swallowed. “All of you are dead. You. The Fate Maker. Heidi’s and Jesse. We have their bodies.”

  “Are you certain?” Esmeralda asked.

  “There were bodies. Skeletons.”

  “Are you sure they’re the right bodies?”

  “No, but dragon fire is hot and we did our best to identify them.”

  “When you looked at them, what did you think?”

  “I didn’t actually see them myself, but we buried bodies.”

  “And me? Did you bury me? The Fate Maker—did you bury him?”

  “You and the Fate Maker just disappeared into thin air! Like you spontaneously combusted or something. So you’re dead—you have to be. Aren’t you? What are you if you aren’t dead?”

  “I am at rest,” Esmeralda said. “Or as much at rest as I can allow myself to be now that you’re in danger.”

  “And the Fate Maker?”

  “He is coming and bringing an army of monsters with him like this world has never seen. If you are not prepared to stand up in front of the gates of Nerissette and face him, he will drench this world in a river of blood and tears that will wash Nerissette back into the Sea of Nevermore. Then he’ll march into The World That Is and burn every world between here and the stars.”