Midnight Enchantment Read Free Page A

and brother die; she wasn’t going to lose her mother, too.
    Her mother looked at her sadly. “It’s coming, and everyone knows it. Even living way out here in the Boundary Lands I know it. What must be, will be, my girl. It will be good for you, and I’m thankful for that. The rest of it…” She shrugged. “I simply have to accept.”
    Elizabeth steadied her gaze at her mother’s careworn face. The sprae dependent aged more like a human than the fae, and her mother was nearing sixty. “We’ll see about that.”
    Thankfully her mother dropped the subject, and the two of them finished their meal making harmless small talk that had nothing to do with death or the betrayal of her people. Those were two subjects Elizabeth wanted none of right now.
    After she’d helped her mother clean up, Elizabeth kissed Thea’s cheek and disappeared out the door, vanishing into the woods. As she walked, she shed her clothes. Then she ran, jumped onto a log and launched herself off it, diving through the air as though into a pool. In midair she became water self, splashing into the earth.
    All the tension and stress of her life vanished immediately, along with the bulk of her personality. Feeling free, she gathered herself, seeking the underground water source that flowed under her mother’s property and joined it. The only time Elizabeth ever surrendered was when she transformed into water, giving up her physical self to the slow, cool slide of moisture and the path of least resistance.
    She flowed through the earth, pushing through dirt and skirting rocks, her fae consciousness a bare echo at the very back of her water awareness. Finding the river that flowed near her mother’s cottage, she joined it and whooshed into the current, twirling and playing, dislodging the pebbles at the bottom and somersaulting along her way—reveling in
flow
.
    When she sensed she’d reached the general area of her destination,she found the now familiar underground stream and rode it as close as she could get to the clearing, then pushed to the surface. She was tired from traveling; it was hard to get through the earth and find a way to break through to the top.
    Re-forming near a tree, she lifted her head and shivered. It wasn’t from the cold, though it was really chilly at this time of the year—it was from her location. The place where she’d chosen to hide the pieces of the
bosca fadbh
was the same place all her nightmares had been forged.
    She pushed to her feet and stepped through the underbrush, into the clearing. Every time she came here, she relived it. The flash of metal, the laughter, the bellows of pain. The blood. The bodies.
    Finally, the burial.
    The sounds echoed through her mind and images flashed. It didn’t matter how hard she pushed them away, they always came anyway. It was not easy for her to come here, but this place served as a reminder of the reason she was betraying her people.
    The Black Tower had already taken too much from her.
    She needed that reminder because she was very much aware of the treachery she was committing against her people. The guilt was strong, but her fear was stronger. She couldn’t lose Thea—she
wouldn’t
lose her.
    She walked to the base of a tall, thin birch tree, moved a rock and dug into the earth. The ground was cold, but recently turned up, so the dirt gave easily under her fingers. This was where she kept the two pieces of the
bosca fabh
hidden. Taking the pieces from their hiding place, she unwrapped the fabric that enfolded them and touched their smooth surfaces by the muted, flickering light of the sprae that had gathered around her.
    They looked so unimportant, all dull gray metal and uneven edges. They looked like hunks of junk, something to be thrown away or tossed in a bin at an antique store. Instead they were imbued with powerful magick, the ancient magick of her fae ancestors. If she laid her hand on top of the pieces, she could feel it pulsing faintly. It