Garnet 5 - Silver Feathers Have Fallen

We were walking home from the bus stop—okay, I'll admit it, I was practically skipping after my amazebeans performance at lunch earlier—when Jack leaned down and whispered, "What are we going to do with Lily?"

I bit back a sigh. Why did we keep having to have this conversation? "We're not doing anything with her," I replied.

"What about when your parents come home? If your parents find out Lily's here without parental consent, they'll just ship her right back to the Whitmoor house."

I bit back a Homer Simpson "d'oh!" and tried not to grind my teeth. I hadn’t even thought of that. I didn’t know how I was supposed to handle the secret about my parentage. I was apparently a Boajuun, a demon from Fayre. Jack had triple-checked by making a tasty snack out of my neck (with my permission) and tasting the starlit demon magic in my blood. Apparently this also made me incredibly tasty. Yay for him, I guess. But the fact that I was a demon meant one of two things: either my parents had lied to me for eighteen years and I was adopted, or my parents had lied to me for eighteen years and they weren’t human, either. At the moment, I wasn’t sure which one I was hoping for.

If my parents were human and I was adopted, they had no clue about the world of faeries and witches I'd stumbled into by punching Lilith Whitmoor in the face on the first day of school. Since they didn’t know about that, they wouldn’t understand why I had to keep Lily at our house. I couldn’t lie and say her dad was molesting her or something, because then the cops would get involved. And who knew? Mr. Whitmoor might try to kill them to get Lily back.

Not that he loved her. I knew that. He wanted her back because someone had taken his property. I still couldn’t believe the creep thought of his own daughter that way. Liars or not, I was so glad my parents were homicidal, über-possessive warlocks like Lily's dad.

Don't even get me started on her mom. I still wanted to take a tire-iron to Gia Whitmoor's supermodel face for all the things she'd done and said to Jack and Lily. The ho-bag needed to die. Like, pronto.

"Well?" Jack demanded, nudging me with his elbow.

Part of me did a happy dance because I loved it whenever he touched me, for a thousand reasons—the two biggest being, he was the hottest thing since the sun had exploded into existence, and because it meant he wasn’t afraid to touch me—but at the same time, I had no idea what to do when my parents arrived.

So I just shrugged. Go, the eloquence of me.

"You'll have to think of something soon," my King reminded me. I bit back the expected retort of no kidding, Sherlock. He added, "When are your parents coming home?"

"No idea," I muttered. "They're still at my grandfather's. They know I've got some friends staying over for pretty much every weekend, but they think you're all girls. I didn’t know how to tell them we had dudes involved without my dad freaking out and telling me to chase after you with his claymore."

Come to think of it, maybe I should've said something to my dad. I'd commit metaphorical murder to get permission to put my hands on the claymore he kept hung up on the wall of his office. I wasn’t allowed to touch it until after I'd had at least a year of sword-fighting lessons, which were not the same thing as fencing. So my fencing lessons apparently didn’t count. Boo.

"They're scheduled to call me again tonight," I added. "I'll ask them when they're coming back then." I scratched the back of my neck and looked around. "This is so weird," I mumbled, eyeing my quiet neighborhood. The only noise came from my Black Court's inner circle trudging and talking behind us.

"What?" Jack asked.

"It's quiet," I complained.

Jack shot me a look and raised a single golden eyebrow. "The proverbial 'too quiet?'"

I nodded. I didn’t like it. Until I'd defeated Lily, I'd pretty much gotten into a fight or had some sort of altercation with someone pretty much every day I'd gone to school. I hadn’t been attacked since Homecoming. It made me itchy, waiting for some assault. Maybe we had a temporary ceasefire with the Red Court, and White Court currently called me Queen of the Universe, but Gavin's psychotic little groupies were still out there, and Gavin wanted me dead. Maybe raped and dead. I wasn’t sure about that.

Why hadn’t Gavin attacked yet? Was he trying to get Lily away from me first? Because he couldn’t possibly be afraid that she would help me if he attacked. Everyone and their dog knew Lily would've rather played a very violent game of cat's cradle with my intestines than help me out. Her one show of support—throwing me her bondline so I could hook into her nexus (the magical hook-up in her chest that controlled her psychic connections to everyone in her Court and Coven)—had been an act of self-preservation. It was either she let me hook into her nexus with my dominant bondline, or I shatter every connection she's ever had with anyone. I'd still broken her connection to her dad, the High Priest of the Coven of White, but somehow I didn’t think Lily minded that so much. She hated her dad almost as much as Jack and I did.

"Whoa," Chantal chimed from behind us. "What's wrong with Bianca?"

I'd been staring at my shoes, a bad habit when I was busy thinking too hard about something I couldn’t figure out. Now my head snapped up in time to see Bianca Rairah, Fiver's fourteen-year-old sister, tripping over her black Vans and the straps on her pink-trimmed bondage pants as she came running down the sidewalk, platinum braids streaming out behind her. Her ice-blue eyes were wide with panic.

Fiver shouldered past us and moved to intercept. Bianca threw herself into his arms, gasping and crying. The crying galvanized me; I was running before my brain had processed the word tears. I snagged Fiver's shirt and swung myself around so I didn't trip and skin my palms on the pavement trying to stop on a dime.

"…don't know where it came from, but it's pulling at me, Hrair, it's horrible, make it go away, I can't make it stop, it shouldn't be here…" Bianca sobbed into her brother's shirt. Chantal got to Bianca and put her arms around the kid, hugging her while Fiver stroked her hair. I noticed a bruise darkening her cheek.

"David," I said sharply, catching my Knave's eyes. I'd learned over the past three months that a Knave's job was to protect his Queen—and anyone else she told him to watch out for. Protecting Lily had been Jack's job until I'd broken his soulbond with her and he'd hooked up with me instead.

David Jacobson wasn’t just my Knave. He was almost seven feet of solid muscle. The phrase "play dodge ball with your head?" David could totally do that to someone. He had a two-inch fro going on, eyes that were normally the color of melting chocolate, and a smile that always promised a good time. Lily had used magic to force Jack to kill David's little brother Larry a couple months ago, but David didn’t blame Jack for it. David had also been the protector and Knave of Julie Frost, the Queen of Spades. My best friend. David had been with Julie all their lives. He probably would've still been with her if Doreen hadn’t killed Julie by shoving her down a flight of stairs. Magic had done the rest.

Now David moved into position on the sidewalk, effectively blocking an attack from the street with his body. Aoife Dodarino and Wilhelmina McGill, two former Red Court girls who'd teamed up with me after I'd had my throat ripped out by the Knave of Diamonds, flanked him. Tacit backup.

Eddie Wong, the guy who'd ripped my throat out, moved to protect our other flank. Eddie didn’t look intimidating unless you got close enough to see his teeth. A therian who should've been able to transform into a giant Moray eel, Eddie spent his days as a scrawny Asian kid with glasses, with perpetual but invisible neon sign overhead blinking the words, Please steal my lunch money. He moonlighted as my second Knave and one of my Chessboard Knights. On the Twilight Chessboard, he scared the jeepers out of people.

Harriet took her place with Eddie, tugging on the hem of her black Happy Bunny shirt so everyone could see the words I have fun when I break stuff written in gold above a corpse-blue rabbit smiling like an axe-murderer. But that pretty much described Harriet. She was quiet most of the time, but when things got crazy, she went right along for the ride.

And of course Darren stayed behind us. Sadie and Mouse stayed with him.

I wasn’t sure if Darren was actually watching our backs or just didn’t feel like dealing with a crying freshman. But since we were pretty much covered, I decided to let it go and focused on Bianca again.

"Hey," I said gently. "Rabbit Ears. Snap out of it, I need you to take a breath." Bianca shoved her face into Fiver's shirt. "Bianca. Rabbit Ears. Hey. I'm right here with you, okay? Whatever just happened, whatever tried to grab you, it's okay. No one is going to hurt you, okay? They have to go through me and everyone else first. It's okay."

Bianca loosened her death-grip on Fiver's Ghostbusters t-shirt. Her shoulders hitched and she gulped loudly, which was kind of icky, but then she swiped at her face with the back of her arm and forced herself to breathe evenly. My overwhelming, panic-induced urge to track down random bad guys and punt their faces with my knee slowly faded. I laid a hand on her shoulder.

"Okay, you okay?" I asked. She nodded. Fiver kept his hand on her head and Chantal kept her arms around the younger girl. "Okay. Can you tell me what happened?"

"There's an ayza hole in your front yard," Bianca whispered.

Fiver stiffened. Chantal gasped and her hair did this weird rustle like it had tried to stand on end but was too heavy. Jack managed to choke on his own spit from sheer surprise.

When he finally stopped coughing, he growled, "What?"

My super awesome spidey-senses told me "ayza holes" were another thing that, as the Black Queen, I should've known about, but somehow had fallen into the Abyss of Stuff Everyone Forgot to Mention Because It Would Never Come Up in Conversation. Except it just had. I was pretty sure everyone needed to rethink this approach.

"What's an ayza hole?" I asked, wondering if I was actually going to get a viable answer. I knew the Ayza were the royal family of Fayre, and they were all demons (apparently, according to Darren, marrying into the royal family involved a transfer of power that turned non-demons into demons somehow).

Jack bit out, "Something that shouldn’t be at your house."

Well, that was a no on viable answers, then.

My King continued, "Did anyone see it?" Bianca shook her head. "Did anything come out?" This time she nodded. Jack's hand flashed out and he gripped her shoulder. "What was it? What came out of the hole?"

"A silver feather," she whispered. Reaching into the massive pocket of her bondage pants, she pulled out a shiny, silvery thing and held it up. It was a huge feather of hammered silver, perfect in every detail. As big as it was, it probably belonged to a harpy eagle. When I looked at it, I smelled rotting honey. Demon magic.

Jack reached for it, then snatched his hand back before he could touch the sharpened silver. Bianca was careful to hold it by the two-inch quill. I had a feeling anyone who touched the feather-part was going to lose a lot of blood. Maybe a finger.

"Is that a Jubei feather?" I asked, possibilities crashing around in my brain. Jack and Fiver both nodded. Chantal and Bianca just stared at it. "Is it Janee's?"

Janee Avix was a Jubei demon who'd come to Tucson just in time for Homecoming. She'd shown up on the Homecoming ballot somehow, and won a slot in the Homecoming Court because for the first time ever, Pillar Prep had been hit with a three-way tie, and Principal Burton was such an idiot that he didn’t know how to break said tie. And any tie for the Homecoming crown should have been between me, Geneva, and Lily. Instead, it was between me, Geneva, and Janee. We'd all been crowned Homecoming queen, and Janee's king had been Gavin Whitmoor. I was pretty sure, after all that, that Janee was out to get me, too.

Pretty much, after the three months I'd had, it was just better to assume everyone was out to get me. I kept an open mind in case they proved me wrong, but except for my inner circle, I didn’t trust anybody.

"I don't know," Fiver mumbled.

Jack stared at it for a long moment. Then he plucked it delicately from Bianca's fingers and brought it to his nose. He sniffed once, gently. Sniffed again, a deep suck of air. He closed his eyes and lines wrinkled his forehead as he seemed to taste the scent of the feather.

He opened his eyes again. They looked gray, black irises and pupils half-bleached by dearg power. He shook his head. "It's not hers. It's someone else's."

I wanted to face-palm. "Are you serious? Someone else trying to kill me?"

"We don't know Janee's after you, Alyssa," Jack reminded me. I gave him my best duh look and didn’t bother arguing. He knew my policy. "And we don't know this Jubei is after you, either."

"Opening an ayza hole in her front yard doesn’t really speak to friendly motives," Fiver muttered.

Jack shot him a savage look. He was doing the protecting-me thing again. It was cute, really, and I understood why he wanted to protect me. I'd nearly died during my fight with Lily at Homecoming. Jack had thought I had died for a minute. That was the closest I'd ever seen him come to crying in the real world. So I got it. And I knew that even though so far I'd survived this little war of the witches, I wasn’t invulnerable if any big bad faeries wanted to bring some smackdown.

But I was the Queen. I needed to protect my people. Bianca wasn’t officially part of our Court yet, but I liked her, and she was Fiver's sister. She counted. So if this ayza hole was so bad, I needed to know why.

"An ayza hole is supposed to be a secret form of travel," Fiver said, literally reading my mind. Jack opened his mouth to protest, got one look at my face, and shut it like a steel trap. Smart guy. The albino dearg continued, "It's supposed to be used only by the Council of Wings or their people. No civilian just throws open an ayza hole willy-nilly. Most of us don't even know how."

"That's why I couldn’t use it to bring you to the Chessboard," Jack added. "It's the easiest and safest way, and you actually go to the Chessboard physically instead of just psychically, but it's almost impossible to do if you haven't been taught by the Wings."

The Council of Wings wanted me dead. They didn’t know it was me, but I was the Alice, the girl from Lewis Carroll's prophecies who was apparently destined to break the famous Treaty of Jubei. According to Jack, the Council of Wings would do anything to stop that from happening because once the treaty broke, the magic that had gone into forging it would be let loose on the world. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the Council didn’t want that to happen. Once it did happen, all the faeries in the human world would get the full complement of their powers back. Even more important, humans everywhere would be able to see the Fayre. They would remember faeries actually existed.

That would be chaos. I knew that. But during all the crazy shenanigans, people screaming about Justin Bieber being the spawn of Satan, and everyone cringing from any sign of the impending apocalypse, one very important thing would happen.

The warlocks and their corrupt, pet witches would go down. So even though trying to break the Treaty—which was an actual magical force—would probably result in me dying, I was totally okay with that. At least I'd bring people like Lewis Whitmoor down with me.

Unfortunately, Jack was not okay with that. He would do anything to protect me. And if I died, he'd probably off himself because he thought I was the only person who really loved him. I knew his parents didn’t care about him, but I wasn’t sure about Lily.

I didn’t get Lily. Everything in me screamed that she loved Jack…but she also loved cutting him open when he made her mad. I just didn’t get it.

"So what's it doing on my front lawn?" I demanded, dropping the thought of Lily for the moment. I worried about the White Queen a lot. I wasn’t sure if that was because I was afraid she'd snap one day and try to kill us all, or if I wanted to fix her.

I jumped a mile high when Darren chimed in from behind me, "There's only one way to find out." I whirled on him.

"Aren't you supposed to be guarding the rear?"

"I left two very competent people in charge," he said, voice dripping acidic sarcasm. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at Mouse and Sadie.

Pulling a Spock, my eyebrow popped up. "You left the humans without offensive powers to guard our backs?"

"Gotta let them off your apron strings at some point, Alyssa."

"Shut up." But I agreed with Darren about one thing—I needed to go look at this thing. Agreeing with Darren was probably a harbinger of Armageddon, but whatever. "Let's go."

I marched past Jack before he could do more than say, "Wait—" The others moved into formation around me. Oh, it was nice to have friends. To have backup. To not have to worry that anything might come slamming into me at any second and I'd have to unleash my fantabulous ninja skills because no matter how amazing I was with Alyssa-fu, I still ended up getting hurt. A lot. Backup meant I got hurt a lot less.

When we came to my house, I had to stop. The thing was impossible. It just didn’t make any sense to me. I knew what I was looking at—a hole in my yard—but that thing wasn’t just a hole. It was…I didn’t even know what it was.

Someone nightmare giant had reached down and scooped a huge divot out of my front yard. Darkness swirled inside. The rocks in the front yard closest to the hole sparkled with flecks of gold like someone had dumped glitter all over them. The few green weeds that had sprung up since my parents had been gone—yard-work was another of my enemies, like school dances and those killer I'm-gonna-stab-out-your-eye-when-I-kick-your-face heels—had turned blue. Not been tinged blue. They were neon blue.

The same color as the butterflies that always flocked to me when I went to the Twilight Chessboard; the blue butterflies that were the symbol of the Council of Wings.

Another silver feather, longer than the one Bianca held, jutted up from the dirt between the rocks right at the edge of the hole. A piece of blue paper with familiar, looping scrawl written in glittering, yellow gel-ink fluttered on the wind.

I moved toward it, but Jack grabbed my arm. "Wait, Lyssa-love. It might be a trap." Subtext of that statement: it might be them. They might've found us already. Crud.

"I'll get it, Lady Alyssa," Mouse cried, leaping forward. The kid was human, one of us should've been able to catch him, but he slipped through our collective fingers and frolicked over to the hole like it wasn’t the freakiest thing he'd ever seen.

Then again, his stepmother was an exiled demon from Fayre. Maybe it wasn’t the freakiest thing he'd ever seen.

Mouse knelt next to the paper. Carefully pulling the feather out of the dirt by the quill, he lifted the note and scanned it, a frowning pulling at his freckled face. Then he looked over at us. I could read confusion easily on his face.

"It just says, 'Remember what the doorknob said. The Smoke has been blown away.'" He frowned harder. "What does that even me—"

An arm, pale as ivory, shot out of the hole, grabbed Mouse's sleeve, and yanked him into the hole. With a sharp cry of fear that might've actually been Darren's name, he disappeared into the darkness.