Dimpled Terror
I shook my head at Jack, confused. "What do you mean? How are we going to stop the faeries? I won't drain them. Any of them. Besides which, even if I wanted to, I'd never be able to get them all."
"It's simpler than that. Simple, and obvious. They don't belong here; we're going to send them somewhere else."
"Wouldn't they come right back? They can make doors."
"We won't use a door. You're going to make a gate. They can only access the Faerie Realms and Earth with their doors. If you were to open a gate to somewhere else, they wouldn't be able to get back."
How did he know about the gates? I couldn't remember whether or not I'd told him. Maybe Raquel had. Whatever the case, he obviously didn't understand how they worked.
Well, of course he didn't. I had no idea how they worked, and I'd made one.
"I can't really do that, I don't think. Besides, isn't that what they wanted? Reth was always talking about me sending them back where they came from. I'm guessing that meant making a gate. I don't especially want to work with any faeries right now, or ever. And I'm not in the mood to make them happy by giving them a shiny new gate to wherever it is they want to go."
"There are other places to send them." Jack's smile was still firmly in place, but his tone was cold, menacing.
I shook my head. He wasn't getting it. "But how would we even get them to go through the gate? And where would I open it to? And how would I open it in the first place? I've only ever done one, and that just sort of happened." The night I'd released all the souls Vivian had taken, the gate in the stars called out to me. The souls of all the paranormals that Viv stole changed me, helped me see things I couldn't before and hadn't since. I doubted I could find that gate-or any others, if there were others-again.
"Relax, Ev. I've got everything figured out. There's only one door into the Faerie Realms from the Paths. Remember?"
I nodded, recalling how it had felt when Jack showed me.
"Very good. That door opens up to any area, but it's still the same door. So if you were to open a gate in that same spot . . ."
"The faeries would go through without meaning to." I stared, finally understanding. It would be like a trapdoor. Trap gate.
"Exactly! No need for confrontation. They'd slip through before they knew what was happening."
"I guess that could work." I frowned. "But even if I could figure out how to do it again, I don't have enough energy to open a gate. I had all those souls from Vivian before."
He raised his eyebrows. "And you're telling me you don't have any extra floating around in you?"
The vampire, the sylph, and the fossegrim: fragments of their souls coursed through me. Shrugging nervously, I shook my head. "Maybe a little, but not on purpose. Well, I mean, I had to. And it's not enough."
"How do you know if you haven't tried?"
"I guess I could give it a shot."
"There's a good girl! And if it isn't enough, we can get some more. Too bad about sending Fehl away, though. We could have used her."
"It's not like that." I narrowed my eyes, uncomfortable with how casually he treated stealing souls.
"Come on!" He grabbed my good hand and pulled me through the wall and into the Paths, practically skipping. I stumbled along, too tired, too overwhelmed to protest. "Here we are." He smiled at the blackness in front of us; I recognized the feeling of the door.
"So I'm gonna send them home?" I was torn. On the one hand, it was what they wanted. But on the other hand, they'd be gone. That couldn't be a bad thing. "How will I know what gate to use? I don't think I can find one."
Jack turned toward me, his eyes feverish. Something in his face reminded me of Fehl, and my stomach turned nervously.
"You're not sending them home. I've read everything there is on gates and portals, and there's a much better destination for them."
"Which is?"
"Hell, of course." I blanched, and he squeezed my hand. "Think about it, Evie. Why should they get what they want, after all they've done? They created vampires. They destroyed Vivian. They ruined your life, and they stole mine. 'Too bad for heaven and too good for hell' no longer applies-if any creatures alive deserve eternal torment, they do. They've earned it. They made you, forced you into this life, just so you could open a gate for them. So go ahead-open a gate!"
"I don't know." It was one thing to get rid of them, but to doom all of them to this hell Jack thought I could find?
"Of course you know! You have to know! Do you have any idea what it was like, growing up with them? Desperate for love, for attention, for anything? Adored, then discarded on a whim? The things they did to me . . . the things I was willing to do for them. And still I was nothing-not even a pet. You can't tell me they don't deserve this! You saw the Dark Queen, what she does! Do you think those humans deserve the hell they're living in? And you won't help me fix this?"
The looks on those people's faces flashed in front of my eyes, haunting me, eating at me. They'd been stripped of everything-even their free will-by the faeries. And wasn't that what faeries always did? Took away choices, forced us to play their sick little games?
"And what about Reth?" Jack's voice was softer now, insistent. "After everything he did to you, the way he tried to make you his? Can you really see your scar and not want him gone forever?"
I nodded slowly, looking down at my wrist. Faeries were evil. The nauseating pain in my broken arm was further testament to that. I was done thinking of them as amoral. They might not have the same ideas about life as humans, but they were in the human world. We weren't the ones screwing with their laws, their lives, their rights. And if they were gone, I'd finally be safe. No more worrying about what they had planned, what they were trying to do, how they would attack me next. Jack was right.
Come to think of it, though, I couldn't remember telling Jack about my scar. Or any details about Reth. Or that faeries had made vampires. And I was sure now that I'd never mentioned gates.
"How do you know about all this?" I asked.
"I already told you-I've spent a lot of time studying. IPCA records, faerie lore."
"Wait, you were studying me?"
"It's like the Paths. I learned how to use them because it meant freedom. And I learned about you because you meant-mean-the same thing. Freedom from faeries, forever."
His hand on mine was tight, desperate. How long had he been leading me here? He might be right, I didn't know, I couldn't know anymore, but I couldn't do this right now. "I need-I need to think." I was in too much pain to figure this out on the spot.
"No. We need to do this now. Don't let the faeries hurt anyone else. Look for the gate. Feel for it. It'll come to you, I know it will."
A growing sense of the possibilities around me had been nagging since Jack suggested opening a portal. I knew that with a little nudging I could find a gate.
Gates.
Hundreds and thousands, infinite possibilities, and they were all around me. It felt like the Dark Queen's pull, inevitable, heavy, drowning. I could open any of these gates and lose myself forever.
Or lose an entire race forever.
Whereas that night with Vivian only the right gate had called to me, now it seemed that the wrong gates were clamoring, pulling at my senses, begging to be opened. Maybe the gates I found were a reflection of the turmoil in me. Maybe the flux of the Paths, their very nature, supported gates to . . . darkness.
"Think about Arianna," Jack whispered. "Think about Vivian. Think about your mother. What that faerie did to her, using her, abandoning her, then forgetting about you. She's lost forever because of them, and you never even knew her."
I closed my eyes. How did Jack know about that? Did it matter? The faeries deserved this; they needed to be stopped. And I'd be helping, protecting so many innocent people. The chaos tugging at my fingertips scared me, though. What if I didn't have the energy to close what I opened? I might not know anything about gates, but I knew I was messing with forces much bigger and stronger than me. I didn't want to leave something like that open.
"I don't know if I can do it."
Jack sighed, annoyed. "Fine, you need more power? How about that crazy vampire? He should do it, right?"
"What, we're going to use him like some sort of living battery?"
"Doesn't he deserve it?"
I rubbed my forehead, trying to think. Sure, the vampire had killed poor, defenseless troll children and tried to kill me, but . . . Well, but what? Why shouldn't I? It wasn't like I hadn't already taken some. And besides, all my life I'd been used-by IPCA, by the faeries. Surely the vampire's life would be better put to use in ridding the world of the faerie menace. He certainly hadn't earned his immortal soul. He'd done nothing with it, no good at all. Like the faeries, he was a monster. What had his words been? "I will kill them all." He was mindlessly bent on destroying other immortal paranormals just for being what they were.
"Oh," I said, softly. Monster indeed, for hating other creatures based on their existence. The clamor of gates unseen swirled around me, buzzing behind my eyes and making my fingers tingle, but instead of alluring, it made me feel sick. How could I consider this? Who was I to decide what fate faeries should have? I couldn't condemn an entire race of creatures to hell for being what they were.
I had a choice, and I wouldn't turn myself into a monster in the name of protecting the innocent. I'd lost so much of myself these last few weeks, chipped away slowly but surely. I'd lost my past, my future, my home, but this last little bit-this sense of right and wrong-that was human. Human, and no one could take it away from me.
I thought of Lend and what we talked about so many times, arguing over his dad's methods versus IPCA's. There were no absolutes. You couldn't put things into neat little categories of "good" or "bad." Uber-vamp was bad. Arianna was good. But they were both vampires. Regardless of what some faeries were doing (and I couldn't argue that the Dark Queen didn't deserve hell), that didn't mean they were all irredeemable.
I looked at Jack, his cherub face twisted with eagerness and rage. He was letting his hatred of the faeries destroy him, the same way Vivian had let her bitterness at the world destroy her. I wouldn't give the faeries that victory. Whatever else happened in my life, it was still my life, and no one-not Reth, not Jack-was going to force me to become someone I didn't recognize.
"I can't," I said softly, wanting to let Jack down easy. "It's wrong. Faeries are awful, but I'm not their judge. Maybe if I knew how to send them home, but I'm not going to banish them to hell for being what they are."
"What are you saying?" Jack's voice was low, trembling. There was no trace of his disarming smile now.
"I can't do this. Those places-I can feel them, and I can't do it, can't send anything there."
I jumped, startled as Jack burst into a sharp laugh. "You can't? You can't? I've been living in hell for the last thirteen years, and you're balking over sending these demons where they belong?" He squeezed my hand so hard it hurt. "I'm afraid that's not acceptable. Not after all the work I put into getting you here."
I'd never thought to be afraid of Jack, silly, cartwheeling Jack, but staring into his eyes, I knew that paranormals weren't the only monsters in the world. "Can we go somewhere and talk about this?"
"No, we can't go somewhere and talk about this." He imitated my voice, sneering. "Do you know how long it took me to figure this out? To steal the faeries' lore books, ingratiate myself at IPCA, convince Raquel to pull you back in? How many missions I had to screw up, how many problems I had to create until she was desperate enough to call you? And do you have any idea, any idea at all, how hard it is to track down a sylph?"
"You were-that was you?" Things started clicking into place-terrifying things. That night at the Center, the faerie hadn't been after me. She had been after Jack for stealing her books. Reth really hadn't been behind any of the attacks.
"Finding the fossegrim was a little easier, but I nearly drowned explaining what I wanted him to do. And still you barely took anything! Then we lucked into finding the vampire. You had more than enough time to drain him in Sweden, but no, you tell him to run away, so I had to drag him unconscious through the Paths on Halloween. Don't even get me started on Fehl. I wait my whole bloody life for a faerie name, then use my only named command to have her hurt you without killing you, and what do you do? Banish her! Heaven and hell, Evie, you're worthless!"
I stared at him, shocked. "This whole time. You've been manipulating me, trying to make me-How could you?"
"For all the good it did me!" His face burned with hatred. "Open the gate. Now."
"I won't!"
He lightened his grip on my hand and I felt a fresh surge of panic. "Jack, I-"
"What was that you told me about your personal hell? Lost in the Paths forever?"
Tears spilled out of my eyes. "Please."
"Open the gate."
"Please take me home. Please."
His dimpled smile, evil in its innocence, snapped back into place. "You don't have a home. But fair is fair. You won't send the faeries to hell, I'll leave you in yours."
"No!" I screamed, trying to grab his hand with both of mine, gasping from the pain in my broken arm. He slipped from my grasp effortlessly and flashed me one final grin before stepping backward into the darkness away from me.
And then I was alone.