For the Love of a Goblin Warrior (Shadowlands) (6 page)

By the time she got off the train and was walking the last couple of blocks home, she’d almost convinced herself the cross was at home, tangled in her bed sheets. The loop had never been quite right since it had been pulled off at school by a child who’d decided to make her suffer for being different. She’d pushed him off the jungle gym and broken his arm in retaliation.

In hindsight, she could’ve killed him. Maybe murder ran in her blood.

The two kids at the bus stop across the road waved. Their mother would have gone to work already and left them to get themselves to school. At least she’d never had to do that. She’d always had breakfast made for her and someone to send her off each day. Nadine waved back as always. They knew that if there were ever any problems after school, they could knock on her door. So far there’d only been a couple of Band-Aid emergencies.

When she got inside, the house was silent. Gina was having an extra-long weekend away with her just-returned army boyfriend. For today the place was hers. The stillness echoed around her and she breathed it in, searching for peace and trying to rein in the hope that lingered in her belly—her cross was here, it had to be. She dropped her bag by the door and went to her bedroom. The bed was unmade, as she’d left it.

She rummaged through the sheets, then stripped the bed, shook the sheets, and searched the floor. Then she went into the bathroom. The cross wasn’t there either and it was too big to go down the drain. She worried her lip between her teeth.

It had been two decades since she’d slept without it and before then her mother had been alive and had read to her every night. If her father was home, and not driving a cab, he sat on the end of the bed and listened too. She couldn’t remember an argument between her parents.

Nadine closed her eyes and put her hand on the empty chain. It wasn’t all lost. She still had the original broken chain. She swallowed and tried not to choke on the lump in her throat. That would have to do. But before she could sleep she’d have to remake the bed, shower, and eat.

Dressed in striped panties and a hot pink tank top with her short, wet hair sticking up in all directions, she ate a bowl of cereal. She really couldn’t be bothered with cooking, and this had dried fruit in it. It was almost a real meal.

As she ate, she sifted through the mail on the kitchen table. Most of it was junk. Real estate agents cruising for a house to sell. A letter for Gina. And one for her. She stared at the familiar handwriting.

Nadine put her spoon down. She’d already received her birthday letter from her father. What did he want from her now? Part of her hated him for what he’d done; the rest of her couldn’t be bothered dedicating the time to hate him properly. She’d never argued that he remain in jail until he died, even though she was given the option every time he came up for parole—it had always been denied because he’d never shown remorse or told police where the body was. However, according to the letters she’d received from the Department of Corrections, he’d been a model prisoner. He’d gotten an education and worked on the prison farm. Good for him. She was still paying off her college debt and would be for years.

She toyed with the envelope for a little longer, as if she could convince herself to read the first letter he’d written to her as a free man.

Usually it was just her birthday and Christmas. When she was little, her first foster mother had read them to her. Later, when Nadine could read, she’d just put them in a box unread. She didn’t want to know how much he loved her. If he loved her, why had he ruined her life?

Why had he destroyed the happy family they had by killing her mother?

Her earliest memories were of laughter and singing. Of speaking Nuer with her father and her mother reading fairy tales in French. Not one of her memories involved anger or tears. She didn’t trust the only memories she had of her family. How could she?

How could she trust anything her father said?

If he’d pleaded guilty, pleaded insanity—anything—she would’ve at least had a father. Instead, she was the little girl no one wanted. Too difficult, too traumatized, too anything but loveable.

Her appetite vanished and she threw the rest of her cereal in the garbage. But like every other letter from her father, she couldn’t throw it away, so she added it to the collection that lived in a box at the bottom of her wardrobe. Next to the box of letters was the book of fairy tales. Taped inside were the broken chain and a picture of her family.

Her mother on one side of her and her father on the other. Both of them were smiling and in the middle was a tiny version of herself with pink ribbons in her pigtails. She didn’t remember the photo being taken. But there was no doubt she was their child. She looked too much like them both. She’d inherited his eyes, a murky mix of green and brown, and her mother’s wide cheeks and narrow chin; even her skin was the shade between her pale mother and dark-skinned father, as if she were the perfect blend of both of them.

On the next page, handwritten in French, was the fairy tale her mother had told her the most
—Le roi des gobelins,
The Goblin King
.

Once
upon
a
time, there was a king. He was fierce and brave and handsome, but also just and kind. When his lands were attacked by invaders from over the sea and his brother captured as a slave, he rose up full of fury. But the invaders were sneaky. They didn’t want to face the king who was uniting the people against them. So they laid a trap and tricked him and his loyal men with magic. The king was turned into a hideous goblin with a heart of solid gold and banished to the Shadowlands, the place where nightmares are created.

Her gaze skimmed over the familiar script; she knew the words by heart. When she was young, she used to close her eyes and imagine she could hear her mother reading to her like she’d used to. The words blurred, but it didn’t matter. Her lips moved as she read to the end, the last line resonated in the air around her.

Love
is
the
most
powerful
magic
of
all. Never forget that. If you can love, you can do anything.

Unlike the other stories in the book of fairy tales,
The
Goblin
King
didn’t have a happy ending. The story seemed incomplete. More of a cautionary tale. As a child it hadn’t bothered her; she’d believed the Goblin King would get a happily ever after because that was what happened, and she’d go to bed imagining a princess who could break the spell.

Nadine closed the book with a heavy thump. Revisiting her mother’s stories was always bittersweet. With the curtains left open so sunlight would spill onto her and wake her if she slept too long into the afternoon, Nadine lay down on the bed, taking the book with her.

At
first
her
dreams
cradled
her, the way dreams should. Her mother was sitting in the garden; behind her was a fountain and a castle. As a child Nadine had spent a lot of time imaging this place until it was so real she knew each flower, each brick, and every turn of the path. It was her sanctuary. Here she had lived her perfect life with her mother and father, but she’d banished him when she was old enough to understand what he’d done. Sometimes she was an adult walking the palace corridors, looking for something or someone; today Nadine was little again. She skipped along the path and then jumped onto her mother’s lap.

Together
they
read
Beauty and the Beast
and
then
Sleeping Beauty.
Then
her
mother
flicked
back
to
the
first
page
of
the
book
and
read
The Goblin King
. Her silky smooth accent made the story flow, so Nadine could almost see the King who’d been banished to the Shadowlands, a place so gray and bleak only goblins could survive. Even though she knew the story word for word, she shivered as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. She glanced up. It hadn’t. There were no clouds for it to hide behind. The sun had vanished, yet it wasn’t night. The sky was empty and weird and gray. That wasn’t right. There was always blue sky and sunlight here; it was never dark. Everything was always as it should be. The gray bled into the landscape around her, stealing the color from the flowers. She watched them wilt and die.

Fear
gripped
her. This was her place; she was in control. She would not let nightmares encroach. Nadine stood and she was an adult again.

“No!” Her voice echoed oddly. She spun to face her mother, but she was gone. Where her mother had sat on the bench the book lay open, the pages fluttering in an unfelt breeze.

If you can love, you can do anything.

The
words
spun
off
the
page
and
danced
in
the
air
like
black
butterfly
skeletons. They twirled around her and tangled in her hair. Where they touched her skin, they cut with razor sharp wings. Nadine slammed the book closed before more words could escape. Around her the world shattered as if it were made of glass. The sky began to fall in like shards of lethal rain and the ground cracked like she was standing on thin ice. She screamed as if she was going to fall off the world and cease to exist.

Nadine sat up. Her breath came in short, sharp pants. Terror lodged in the back of her throat, jagged and rusted with age. It had been a long time between nightmares, yet her ears still rang with the sound of breaking glass.

She knew that whatever lay on the other side of the glass in her dreams would hurt her, but she always woke up before she saw what it was. The child psychiatrist had said it was her brain’s way of protecting her from what she’d seen the night her mother was killed. Part of her wanted to know the truth; the rest of her was too scared to remember. It was one thing to know her father killed her mother, but another to have seen it. She took a deep breath and flopped back onto the bed and tried to go back to sleep.

But Nadine couldn’t close her eyes; the fear was too fresh. Instead, she stared out the window at the blue sky, wishing she could see the sun, as if she needed reassuring it was still there. The blank gray sky of her nightmare had been alien and oppressive. She knew it was the Shadowlands of her mother’s story. She shook her head and closed her eyes. When she went back to her dream castle, she’d fix whatever was damaged and everything would be fine.

***

Light and noise filled the room. Meryn opened his eyes in time to see someone being wheeled out. The man lay motionless on the bed. Was he dead? Where were they taking the man…and would he be next? When the door closed, Meryn eased up and looked around. One sleeping area had the curtain pulled around. The other two were now empty.

For a moment he sat not sure what to do, only that he had to do something. He wasn’t used to sitting still. He slid out of the bed and his feet touched the cold floor. It was smooth, unlike the dust of the Shadowlands. He flexed his toes. He was still in the Fixed Realm.

The door swung open and a woman pushed in a cart. She spoke a greeting.

Meryn copied. “Good morning.”

She put a tray of food on his table and swung it around so it was over the bed, as if she expected him to eat in bed like an invalid. He was about to argue, then realized it would be a waste of breath.

He mouthed the words again and committed them to memory.
Good
morning
. Not Decangli or Latin. Then what language? And what did the greeting mean? He shook his head. He would learn better with food in his stomach—even if he didn’t know what that food was.

On his tray was bread and stuff in a box. There was writing on it, that he couldn’t read, and a picture. So he followed the picture and poured the contents into the bowl and added milk. Then he picked up the bowl and began drinking and crunching through the contents.

He smiled as he ate food he hadn’t had to hunt and kill. The skinny deer of the Shadowlands that rotted almost as soon as he killed them were barely a decent feed. The food in his mouth changed taste and texture. He glanced down at his bowl. The milk had curdled, as if he were still in the Shadowlands and being punished for not eating fast enough. He dropped the bowl and everything spilled on the tray.