The Kingdom of the Fae

Chapter 7: Queen of Hearts

She felt like Alice, tumbling through the rabit hole. She could see odds and ends floating past her in semi darkness. "Lost things" she remembered, but she didn't know how. Then, slowly, as though they were falling up, they tumbled through to the centre stage of the Verundin theatre. 

Drew felt her blood, hot and sticky, running through her hair from her scalp, her leg was also injured, and she limped to stand up. 

Everyone that she worked with was there. The seats in the audience were filled and the spectators looked at her from all directions. There were some people sitting in the higher seats looking through binoculars to see what was happening. They all had cold white irises, they were defenitely not an orthodox audience. Drew remembered Hannah's advice to not let anyone know that she had the sight, but it was too late to remember that now. 

The actors around her were in a tableau, because they were waiting for her to start the scene...

There were people, no animals, no they were not animals either...standing in different positions of mourning. Drew looked around her, she had landed on some kind of a long bed with a glass frame. Only the sound of the dripping tap in the back of the dressing room and the sound of the shutters shut-shutting in the old projection room upstairs reminded Drew that she was still in the real world. Slowly, she turned around and etched in solid grey stone was the name BRIGID, Our Beloved. Blood continued to drip from her hair and her stomach, staining the white satin bed, the sephulchre. 

Without moving a muscled, she calculated how long it would take for her to make it to the door. She could hear her heart pump faster in her ears and then...she laid one foot off the coffin and onto the floor and it seemed as though the floor fell away.....

A scream as she had never heard before filled the auditorium, blood curdling and fierce, piercing the very silence that was keeping her sane. With the rhythm of the shutters, shut shut, shut shut, Drew's heart kept beat. Her slippers had long fallen off and she gasped when they came in contact with snow, numbing her toes and her burning her nerves with the ice. The road would come soon enough, someone would realize she needed help, but nothing of the sort came. Instead, a castle, made of ice and stone appeared to her through the thicket of scratching pine forest and glittering ice crystals. 

Only the red blood of the mortal stained the snow as she collapsed, only a child, driven to madness. As her eyes fluttered closed and her hands groped the snow for something to hold onto so she would not fall again, she heard the fae and the shadows creep around her, and she tried to avoid them, but they were like licking flames, closer and closer, less person, more beast, their cold white irises and icy blonde hair. They were the Frost Fae. 

Wind whipped hair on her face and she felt it around her neck. It had grown so much longer now. There was the beep of a subway letting people off. She was sitting on a cold bench, wearing new clothes and a small jacket. How had she gotten to the subway? Her hand instinctively went to her head and she felt small white stitches, there were some on her arm and she felt a new pain in her stomach. 

She put her hands in her pocket and found something that felt like paper. She pulled it out and unfolded it, hoping that it would be an answer, some directions. For the first time in her life, Drew wanted to be told what to do, what to think. 

"Look in the other pocket my love"

She looked in the other one and pulled out a second note.

"You went through the portal when you landed at the Verundin. I don't know how you did it, but you got back through. Trust me when I say I would have died if you didn't. Unfortunately, the Battalion of the Frost and Fire Fae made it thorugh as well. Don't worry... not now anyway. I don't have much time to explain, not through a note. I had some business to take care of with a certain Red Cap Leader. I only made sure he wouldn't see daylight for a long time.

Get on the subway train that arrives at 12:13am exactly.

See you soon love,

Lucas"

Another train pulled in. It was 12:12 am. There were no questionas asked anymore. Drew folded up the note as small as she could and wrapped the star necklace around it. 

She had decided rationally and logically, that she could go anywhere, she just needed to get away from the Fae. Far away. She decided it would be sensible to try and escape. And yet when she saw his face, his smouldering eyes and his beautiful smile that appeared on his face when he saw her. She decided she couldn't. When he held out his hand to help her get on and folded her in his arms. She decided she was as safe as she would ever need to be. 

There was a war stirring. Ice and Fire would fight. This was not a plight for mortal hearts to meddle with.

And yet, there was something immortal in Drew that even she could not explain. And she couldn't help but wonder at the words, "looking like the dead princess does not make you the resurrected princess". She looked at Lucas and she saw in his eyes, complete and undeniable love. He was not dying, as Beads had told her, not in the least. Because the only way the Drew could break his heart now, was by breaking her own.