Legend 4 - Free Falling Read Free Page B

vacations with me there. So, you have the picture.
    I wish I could tell you that we went on and on and lived happily ever …
    I can’t tell you that, and I can’t help but feel that the reason for this awful dive into black waters is entirely my fault .
    If I hadn’t decided to go to university in Edinburgh, my parents wouldn’t have returned to Scotland to take up residence there to be near me.
    If they hadn’t returned to Scotland to live, my dad wouldn’t have been pulled into the conflict with the vicious Unseelies.
    As I have laid it out for you, the Unseelie Fae is a race of potently deadly, most definitely evil monsters. They were a mistake that couldn’t be flushed away.
    So the word ‘if’ made it into this equation. Words are powerful things.
    How can such a small word have such a huge meaning?
    If is a word that can break your heart— if I hadn’t, if they hadn’t … if my dad hadn’t … he wouldn’t have been killed by Gaiscioch!
    Now my mom is ‘free falling’.
    She isn’t looking to be saved. She isn’t trying to hold on— not even for me.
    I have always been so close to my mom. We are best friends—she has always been there for me, but now …
    Her arms don’t reach for me. Her hands don’t try to clutch at something and hold on. She has let go—she wants to stop existing and be with my dad. She is just plunging into an abyss of darkness .
    She is using illusion like a drug. She is trapped in the illusion that my beautiful dad is still there with her. She is all balled up within herself. She can’t think. She can’t see. She can’t feel anything but loss. At first she couldn’t stop crying. Now she huddles and hugs herself, and I can’t reach her. I can’t make her pain go away. How can I? I am suffocating with the same pain. In human terms, she is catatonic, and it is my fault.
    She has never experienced this level of grief. She had never expected it. Early in their marriage she had asked my mortal father to take the elixir only a princess may offer the human of her choice. It was an elixir of immortality. He did.
    Fae are born immortal, but not the Fae born of human—even ones who’ve taken the elixir. So, when I turned eighteen, she asked me to take the elixir. I hesitated. I mean, it was a pretty heavy thing to think about. Still, my mom wasn’t taking no for an answer, and I caved, just to put the subject to rest, you know.
    My mom had every expectation that we would always be together. After all, hadn’t she protected us with Fae immortality?
    My dad was immortal. How could he be killed?
    There are only two, perhaps three, ways to kill a Fae. A Danu death weapon is the most widely known method.
    He was killed with a weapon from the World of Danu from which the Fae had originated. My father had been drawn into this problem with the Fae traitor Gaiscioch when it first began, back in May. Dad wasn’t Fios (a seer who can see through Fae Glamour and magic). He couldn’t see the Fae if they were shielded in the Féth Fiada (cloak of invisibility), but over the years he had struck up a friendship with the chief of the Fae Trackers, Nuad, who had come to visit him during one of the rituals.
    Evidently, all Druid priests were being put on the alert for the traitor Gais, for he’d found a way to escape the Dark Realm for short periods and had also been successful in sending lower-caste Unseelie creatures into our world to wreak havoc. My dad found a spell he thought would keep the portals at the MacDaun Dolmens closed. August and Lughnassa were only a few weeks away, and Dad was certain Gais would try and use our dolmens during the Lughnassa ritual.
    Sure enough, Dad was right. Gaiscioch (who had been stuck in the Dark Realm, where he had taken refuge back in May) was able to access the portal at the MacDaun Standing Stones. His goal was to find a portal large enough and powerful enough to bring the worst of the Dark Fae through to our human world.
    At home, my father