Dark Surrender (24 page)

But that was a good thing, for now he could follow a scent that was far more redolent, one that literally burned the smell of fae right out of this nose.

*****

Chapter 24

Andy was exhausted as she rounded a corner in downtown Augusta and found herself across the street from a small all-night diner. The place was the only light coming from the entire city block, and that illumination seemed to make the night warmer, softer. As if it weren’t the middle of winter.

Her mind had raced as her pace had gradually slowed, and her body shook from cold and weariness. The warm light seemed like a beacon. Watering some rather plentiful hanging baskets of mums and geraniums, a woman in a blue and pink waitress uniform looked over and smiled at Andy.

“
I just started a fresh pot of coffee. Would you like a cup?”

It was the woman’s job to serve people food and drink. But for some reason Andy couldn’t fathom, her words felt more like an invitation than a sales pitch.

Andy nodded and started walking toward the waitress and the warm light of the diner. “I’d love some.”

“
Good, good. It’s been one
hell
of a slow night.” The woman’s voice was lovely, with only the slightest of southern accents. She winked as she pushed through the door of the diner. “And I could use the company.”

Andy followed, and was comforted by the mingling scents of the diner: coffee and honey, bacon and pancakes, and powdered sugar. The waitress pointed out a booth that was half way back the length of the restaurant, and right at the entrance to the server station.

Andy slid into the Naugahyde covered seat and felt her body cry out in relief—to finally be off her feet. In a flash the woman was back with a cup and saucer in one hand, a pot of steaming, fresh coffee in the other. With practiced skill she turned the cup over on its saucer and filled it up. She placed a bowl of creamers beside the cup then asked if Andy wasn’t hungry?

The coffee smelled wonderful, but not only wasn’t Andy hungry, her stomach roiled just at the thought of drinking anything either. She gave the woman her best smile and shook her head. “Maybe later?”

“
We’re open all night.” The waitress said with a beautiful smile, walking back to the server station to start rolling silverware into paper napkins. She hummed a tune Andy had never heard before as her graceful hands made quick work of her side work. The song didn’t sound like something current
. Maybe an old folksong?

The diner felt warm enough, nearly too warm, but Andy still felt such a chill in her bones. As if they were wrought from nothing more than frigid solid pieces of water. Not to mention the arctic sensations that played in her stomach and clung around her heart. She ran a hand up under her eyes, rubbing away the threat of tears.

Andy sat, staring at the cup of coffee, holding it between her chilled hands, inhaling the aroma of the dark roast, but not taking even a sip. She just could not reconcile, couldn’t believe, that her mother and her sister had been lying to her for her entire life—well, for the last year, since that was in actuality her entire life span.

I’m not real.

Not real. What in the name of god did that even mean? Did it mean that she was only a magical construct? Something temporary, an illusion fashioned out of some sort of primordial mist? It made her chest hurt to even think it, but that was all she really had, wasn’t it? Her thoughts. For her family was not her family, and her life was a lie, and her memories…

She pushed that thought aside. Noting, nothing that had happened so far, not the spiders, or the wicked faerie queen—not even her mother’s news about her origins—felt quite as horrid as the realization that everything she remembered was a lie. Not even a lie. They had never existed, they had never happened!

An hour ago she had been just a woman standing in a park, waiting for the man she had a crush on to come out and talk to her. And now she was…

“
What the hell am I?” She said, closing her eyes and sniffling. The heat and burning of imminent tears started to form behind her eyes. She hated crying. It made her feel so ridiculous, so out of control.

“
You’re a star.” The waitress said in her sweet voiced accent. Andy laughed, and blotted her eyes on her napkin, looking up to the waitress. She stood there with a pot of steaming hot coffee in her hand and that beatific smile on her face. She leaned over and refilled Andy’s suddenly empty cup.

Andy blinked at the cup, and the fact that it was empty, and then she looked up again at the waitress.

But the woman was no longer a waitress. The woman before her was stunning, probably the most beautiful creature Andy had ever beheld. Tall and voluptuous, with long waves of fiery red hair that flowed down her back to her hips, skin so pale yet so radiant, it literally looked kissed with sunlight. Her lips were full and pouty, the color of strawberries, and her eyes shone the radiant green of the rainforest—lush and so very, very deep. Inhuman vertically slit pupils accented those eyes. She smelled like a mix between a farmer’s market and a forest.

She wore a diaphanous green silk gown that matched her eyes, and though it covered every inch of her, it did nearly nothing to conceal her.

The only thing remaining of the waitress was the compassion in her eyes, tempered by a cool eternal patience. She smiled more deeply, sliding into the booth seat opposite Andy. Andy looked around for anyone to call out to. But the diner is empty.

Something came to her out of the cacophony of terror that was her mind, something her mother had said. That one Queen had come to her, to press some great power into human form, and all just to keep it from the other Queen. The Queen of Winter, the beautiful, terrible creature she’d glimpsed in the frozen puddle. And though her coloring was all wrong, and this creature seemed to radiate heat not bitter cold, there was a striking similarity in the features of her face, and the features of what had glared back at her from in that frozen puddle of spidery craziness.

Andy gulped, that icy feeling spreading through her with renewed intensity. Seeing how bad things had gotten, and how quickly, this could only be the queen that was hunting her. Which seemed consistent with sort of day she was having.

Andy sighed, feeling her shoulders loosen. She didn’t have anywhere else to run, and no way of defending herself. “You must be the queen that wants to kill me. Well, good, I’m sick of waiting around for it. Go ahead. Get. It. Over. With.”

The fae’s head snapped back and the most beautiful peel of silvery laughter came out of her mouth, like tiny bells. Sensations washed over Andy, as if someone was stroking feathers over her every nerve. Then the faerie queen held her belly, the nonexistent thing that it was, and bore her startling green eyes into Andy once more. “I put a lot of effort into shaping you into this lovely form, I hardly think I want to destroy it.”

Andy’s eyes felt like they were about to pop right out of her skull. “
You
made me?”

“
Yes my dear. Let me introduce myself. I am Arianna, Queen of Summer, of Light and Water. And I molded you into what you are.”

Andy jerked forward, the words tumbling out of her mouth before she could catch them. “What am I?”

“
You’re human…well at least, on the most part. But I already told you what you were before your mother and I interceded.”

Andy just stared at her without comprehension.

“
A star my dear. Well, a piece of one.” The fae woman glanced out the window of the diner and smiled secretly to herself. “I believe you came from Andromeda. That is why you are so named…Andy.” Just the way she said her name made an invisible string pull at her heart.

Andy sat back in the booth and clutched the napkin that was by her right hand. “No…that’s—”

“
Impossible?” The Summer Queen waved her hand dismissively. “As if humans know anything about what is possible. They know not even the limits of their own world, yet they seek to find other worlds to be ignorant of as well.”

Andy felt her stomach lurch. “So I’m some sort of meteor? A big piece of space rock?”

“
Heavens no,” The faerie chuckled, “you landed on this earth, but not in this world. You came to rest in Faerie, and once there you became what you were meant to be: living energy, pure radiant light.”

A sphere of some sort of energy.
Her mother had said.

“
So I did the only thing I could do,” Arianna continued, “I transformed you into this form, and gave you guardians, a family to love and protect you.”

“
But why? And why is the other queen after me?”

“
Both questions have the same answer. My cousin, Sliva, Queen of Winter, of air and darkness, well…she’s gone quite mad you see. Happens sometimes to the very old. But not usually one of our station. She’s family, and I love her…and I hate her. We’ve been battling for thousands of years, so it’s hard to keep a concise track, but it seems like forever. And every year we both win, and we both lose, and that keeps the balance of power between the two courts. But as I said, she’s been driven insane, and she’s seething for more power.”

Arianna looked out the window of the diner again and sighed. “Why she’d ever want more power is beyond me. Our powers are so great already, one nearly has not enough things to put it into. But for the last few millennia she has been very active in trying to gain more power. Her dream is to someday plunge the world into one endless winter. As I said, crazy.

“
Our powers were created equal, to make sure they canceled each other out. That is our purpose, that is our reason to exist. I am the beginning of things, and she is the end. She is the queen of winter, of darkness and air, and of the end of things. She does not create anything, only destroys and kills. I on the other hand, am the queen of beginnings, of creation.”

She fell silent, staring out the window, her warm green eyes haunted.

“
So, she’s looking for me, to…” Andy’s stomach churned and she felt nauseous.

“
To devour you, yes.” Arianna said cheerfully. “She will take you into herself, to finally make herself more powerful than I, to upset forever the power of the courts.

“
That’s why you hid me with my…”

“
With your family, yes.” Her green eyes bore into Andy. “They are your family, I made you from them, molded you into their lives. Do they not feel like they belong to you, and you to them?”

Andy had to admit, they did feel like they were her family. And she felt as if she belonged with them. Even with the lies, they loved her, and she them. Actually, she wanted nothing more for them to show up right then and there.

“
Alas, I think my dalliance in subterfuge has not been good enough, for my cousin searches this very moment to find you.” Arianna sounded almost bored, certainly not as if she were nervous about the winter queen finding her.

“
Yeah, she found me in the park across the street from my apartment building.”

“
It’s not your fault. I imagine I could have hidden you better. Maybe I could’ve made you into a blade of grass in a forest in the Ozarks, or one of the roses in that quaint little garden at your White House. My cousin may have never found you. But she has, and that’s…well,” Arianna eyes radiated with satisfaction, “that’s just marvelous.”

Andy blinked. Then she sat forward and looked upon the fae queen with bewilderment. “What?”

The Summer Queen gave a silent chuckle as she waved away the scorn in Andy’s voice.

“
What I mean is I had to make the crazed old girl want you in the worst way. How else could I get her to ignore the fact that you are a star, a being of light.” She leaned forward and touched a single finger to the hand Andy still clutched the napkin in. That one touch was like being struck by lightning, like having every molecule in her body catch on fire at once, her mind turned on as if the rest of her life had just been some kind of fuzzy dream. Perfect clarity, and the roar of the most terrible, blinding power—and she liked it.

The Queen broke the contact, pulling back her hand, and the instant she did Andy felt as if a part of her—no, not part of her, that she and the creature sitting across from her were one and the same.

Andy trembled, pulling her hand back and cradling it against her chest, her breathing suddenly rapid, her mind spinning, though her thoughts nowhere near as clear or as brilliant as they were a moment ago.

Arianna sat back, and she too was breathing hard, her eyes glowing and wild. And she looked as if she were as disturbed as Andy had been.

She glanced at the hand she’d touched Andy with, and then clenched it into a shaking fist, drawing it under the table top of the booth. She took a few more ragged breaths, and then turned her gaze back upon Andy. They no longer glowed, but there was still that wild intensity.

“
My cousin only sees that you are a thing of power, and that I am hiding you from her. That makes you absolutely irresistible to her.”

Andy had fallen back against the padded back of the booth, still clutching her hand to her. “So you
want
her to find me?”

“
Of course,” Arianna said as if it were obvious.

“
But why the hell would you want that?”
Andy’s words practically exploded from her lips.