I Do Believe in Faeries (The Cotton Candy Quintet Book 3) (4 page)

I glanced at my phone’s clock. 1:07am. Oh my god, I really had been here for that long.

“Time slipped away from me,” I told Mom honestly. After all, I wasn’t lying. I started packing up my things. I wanted to get out of here as soon as possible.

“That’s no excuse, and you know that.”

Oh, Mom, if you only knew what had happened to me.

For a second, I thought about telling her. She was a witch, she understood magick and everything that came with it. Then I struck that thought from my mind—after all, I’d been talking with faeries. And talking about faeries was crazy.

No, this was something that I should keep to myself. I could just imagine Aunt Margaret’s expression as I relayed that story to them. Aunt Margaret made some great unimpressed facial expressions. Almost as good as Robin’s unimpressed look, and the very memory of that made my insides squirm.

So I didn’t tell her.

Instead, she launched into a long lecture about how she trusted me, and if I was going to stay out past my curfew, she was going to put me on a tighter leash. After all, when her other daughter was my age, she had brought her boyfriend back from the dead.

In fact, her lecture lasted my entire walk back to my car, ending when I unlocked the door.

“I’ll be home in fifteen minutes,” I told her.

“Where are you where it would take fifteen minutes?” Mom demanded, her voice raising an octave.

“IHOP,” I lied. It was the first thing that popped into my head, and I didn’t know of any other place that was open this late.

Thankfully, Mom bought it.

“You come home. Right. Now.” She hung up without saying good-bye.

I tossed my phone into my passenger seat and drummed my hands on the steering wheel for a second, calming my adrenaline after everything that had happened.

I didn’t
feel
any different, which made me question if I had really encountered Robin Goodfellow and a bunch of pixies. Maybe they didn’t grant my wish. Or maybe, which was the more likely explanation, I had dreamed the whole thing. Maybe I was hallucinating. After all, I could have accidentally ingested one of the mushrooms while trying out my spells. Unlikely, though.

I hoped it was real.

It would certainly be a shame if Robin wasn’t real. Because I think I kinda liked him.

Chapter 4

Lo and behold, I couldn’t sleep.

It was sometime after three in the morning, and I kept tossing and turning. I don’t think it was from the hard talk that Mom gave me when I got home—even though I did get an earful and more. Every time I closed my eyes, I kept thinking of green-eyed faerie men and pixies crawling all over my skin.

One mental image was hot. And the other totally was not.

I itched all over, like I had pins and needles stabbing me. I wanted to crawl out of my shell of a human body and be something else. What, I didn’t know. It was sure uncomfortable, though.

I harrumphed as I flipped to my back and looked up at the ceiling. I still had these little glow-in-the-dark stars that I’d put up there when I was six years old. Jordyn had helped me, and we tried putting each five-pointed star into constellations. So many nights, I had looked up at this ceiling and memorized every little detail.

I was a teenager with chronic insomnia. Tonight, though, it was really bad, much worse than usual. Questions swirled in my brain, and I tried connecting the dots like they were far-flung parts of a constellation. Nothing made sense. And everything seemed like a far off dream.

Did I have magick? Did those pixies really grant me a wish? I was itching to try it out but there was no way I was going to be able to get out of the house tonight, not after mom already busted me on curfew.

What sacrifice might they have taken in return? The last thing I remembered was seeing Alaina before they accepted it.

I rolled onto my side, facing the doorway. The night light had burned out a long time ago but I could see the outline of it. It was in the shape of a crescent moon, purposefully picked out to match my ceiling-sky.

It suddenly irritated me that it had died. My room was dark and even the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling had winked out due to there not being any light in my room.

I focused on the nightlight, concentrating on each and every detail. I could almost imagine my consciousness running up and down the filament in the bulb, imbuing it with a piece of myself to breathe some life back into it.

But that was crazy, because I had no magick within me.

Then…
then…

It started as a small glow, so small that I thought it was a trick of my eyes. Then it grew stronger, a bluish light that threw shadows across my room. I blinked in confusion. Was I doing that? Or was it just suddenly coming back to life in a wacky, strange coincidence?

Whatever caused it, there was definitely a light emanating from that light bulb, shuddering in its socket. The light danced off the wall with the movement.

“Abby!”

Jordyn threw open the door to my bedroom. That very action disoriented me enough that I stopped concentrating on the nightlight, throwing my room back into instant darkness.

My first thought was a panicked,
Oh, crap, she saw what I was doing!
The second thought was,
I guess she stayed here tonight.”

And then I saw her tears.

I sat bolt upright in bed. The elation from possibly doing any sort of magick came crashing down, concern for my sister surging to the surface.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Jordyn wrung her hands as she came over to my bed. She plopped down next to me and put her head in her hands, sobs wracking her body.

“What happened?” I asked.

Did her ex-boyfriend Zach come back from the dead a second time? Or did something else…?

“It’s Alaina…” Jordyn managed between her tears. “…her—her baby…”

My body went rigid as I remembered the last image that came through my mind before the pixies claimed that their “sacrifice” had been made.

“What about her baby?” I asked.

Jordyn blinked at me. “She’s at the hospital. Her baby…It’s…
missing
.”

***

“How the hell does an unborn baby go missing?” Luke asked as he drove both of us to the Jacksonville hospital. Thank god for good boyfriends. Jordyn was in no condition to drive and I was too freaked out to attempt it. She immediately wanted to go to the hospital and console her friend. I never had as much respect for her as I did in that moment.

“I—I don’t know what happened!” Jordyn sobbed.

She sat in the passenger seat, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue. I didn’t realize until this moment how close my sister was to all of her mermaid friends. They were like their own little family. They’d do anything for each other. I wondered if I would ever experience that kind of sisterly love from any of my friends.

“Tell him what happened,” I prompted from my seat in the back of Luke’s Prius. She had already told me, but I needed to hear it again. Maybe it would make more sense and keep me from freaking out if I heard it a second time.

“Alaina woke up with bad stomach pains. She thought she was having early contractions, so she went to the emergency room. And when the doctor checked her out…there wasn’t a baby. Like she never was pregnant in the first place.”

“How?” Luke asked again.

“I don’t know. The baby is just…
gone
…apparently.” Jordyn chewed at her bottom lip. “She fainted when she heard the news. Her boyfriend is there right now. Oh god, I don’t know what to do.”

She combed her hands through her pink hair. I wished there was something that I could do, anything that would help. If I truly had magick…

Alaina’s baby was the sacrifice so that you could wish for magick.

The ugly thought reared its head in my mind, and I blinked furiously to stop the tears from falling.

I was responsible for this.

I’d just traded Alaina’s baby for magick.

“Stop the car!” I demanded.

“What?” Luke asked.

“Stop the car, now!”

I didn’t even wait for Luke to come to a full stop before opening the door. I bent over the side and threw up the remains of the pork casserole that Mom had made for dinner onto the side of the road.

***

As we headed down the hallway of the hospital, a tired-looking man around Luke’s age came out of a room to meet us.

“James!” Jordyn said, rushing to give him a hug.

“Oh, thank god you’re here,” the guy murmured. He looked like he was barely keeping it together as he wrapped his arms around my older sister. I figured he was Alaina’s boyfriend.

What do you say in this situation?

“Where is she?” Jordyn asked.

James looked stricken for a moment before sighing. “She’s…here…” As he spoke, he opened the door to the room he just came out of. I looked around and saw Alaina laying in a hospital bed. Contrary to the bubbly, pretty girl that I had seen at lunch yesterday, she looked small and frail, her skin a ghastly shade of gray.

I swallowed back more bile as it formed in my throat.

“I don’t want to disturb her,” James whispered. “She’s been having nightmares and they had to sedate her because she was thrashing around so badly. I just…” His face crumpled as he collapsed back into a chair. Jordyn took a seat next to him and rubbed his back, murmuring some things that I couldn’t hear.

Why did I come? I couldn’t do anything; I would just get in the way. Like usual.

“I need some air,” I rasped to Luke. My throat burned from where I had heaved up the contents of my stomach.

He nodded, not really listening to me. His eyes kept flicking between his girlfriend and the still form of Alaina in her room.

I took that moment to back away. I turned tail and ran. I had no idea where I was going, I just needed to get out and breathe in something that wasn’t their despair.

Possibly caused by me. Probably.

I wound through corridor after corridor. Every hallway looked the same. White glossy floors and locked doors. Somehow, I ended up on the ground floor of the hospital and I pushed open the doors to the outside. I found myself in some sort of nature preserve. Like a small park in the middle of the hospital complex, it must have been a place where the administration thought they could make patients forget that they were sick.

It didn’t make me feel any better.

I took a seat on a wooden bench. I tried inhaling big, deep breaths, but my lungs didn’t seem to want to fill with air.

I’d caused their pain.

And for what? So I could turn on the night light in my room? I didn’t care what other magick I had—if I had any more magick to show.

I would have given anything to have Alaina’s baby back.

“I tried to warn you,” a familiar voice said, breaking through my thoughts.

I shrieked and jumped, seeing that the red-haired faerie boy had appeared on the bench next to me. Anger quickly overtook surprise, and I sprang to my feet.

“You!” I roared. “You caused this!”

Robin blinked at me. He quirked a smile, although it seemed sad. Not that his being sad helped anything. In fact, it fueled the anger inside me.

“No, I didn’t,” he said. “I tried to stop you, if you remember.”

I wracked my brain, trying to do exactly that. He’d appeared out of nowhere, saying that I shouldn’t make wishes in a Faerie Ring. But then he’d kept talking to me, keeping me in that Ring… And me, stupid me…

Argh, I just wanted to punch him in his pretty face.

“You tricked me!” I decided.

He raised an eyebrow at that. “Really?” he asked. “You think I tricked you?”

“You kept talking to me. I mean, you could have just warned me and I would have left. Trust me, you freaked me out enough for me to run all the way back to my car.”

“If I wanted you to make the wish, I could have just let you finish it the first time,” he said. “Or did you forget that too?”

Was that the way it happened? It all felt fuzzy to me. The end result was the same, and he was the closest thing I had to laying the blame on someone else. Someone who wasn’t me.

“I didn’t forget that,” I snarled. Then, the outburst made tears prick up in my eyes again. “It’s just…it’s all my fault. Alaina’s baby is missing and—and…”

“Mortals and their placing blame,” Robin sighed. He patted the spot next to him on the bench. “Come sit back down. I think you’re going to melt or set the world on fire if you don’t calm down.”

I looked at him through my watery mess of tears and then I sat down.

“Oh
now
you listen to me,” he sighed. He combed a hand through his unruly ginger hair.

“How do I fix this?” I asked.

“Fix what?”

“How do I get Alaina’s baby back?”

Robin considered my question for a beat before shaking his head. “There’s no way. The pixies took the baby, and there’s no way.”

“So the baby is alive?”

“We’re not killers. Well, most of us.” He considered that for moment. “Okay, maybe all of us are killers, but I’m fairly sure that the baby is alive. Pixies are tricky, but they don’t kill the innocent.”

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“Well, yeah.”

“I need to get the baby back from them. Where are they?”

He scoffed. “You? Get the baby from them?” Then he went silent, making me look up at him. I thought he was trying to trick me again, but this time, he didn’t look mischievous at all.

In fact, he looked slightly terrified.

“How do I rescue the baby?” I asked.

“No,” Robin said firmly, shaking his head. “Absolutely not.” He stood up and started walking away.

Anger propelled me to my feet and I followed him. I wasn’t going to let him get away with just half-answers. Oh no, he was going to speak all right.

“How?” I demanded.

“Nunya.”

“’Nunya’?” I repeated incredulously. “As in ‘none of your business’? Did you really just say that?”

“Yep. Because it is nunya.”

Ugh, infuriating.

“No, this is all my…nunya,” I exclaimed. “Wait, I can just wish for the baby back, right?”