Chasing Midnight - A Cinderella Retelling (Once Upon a Curse Book 3) Page 12

  I have to keep going.

  I just have to keep going.

  “Salis ni mither dam lu da thaol,” I start, whispering the cloaking spell so softly the humans to either side of me won’t hear. These are faerie words, faerie secrets. They’re not for human ears. “On aoch in ithir fidi loam del bhfalich.”

  The prince leads us through the night, careful to keep out of the halos of light as we slip across pavement, around more cars, and over near the side of a building. There’s a large fence made of metal, but he has some sort of code and it slides open with a screech. I think all three of us wince at the same time, but we don’t speak, and press forward.

  I’m not sure what I expected a human flying contraption to look like, but it’s metal, which I didn’t anticipate, and so smooth the moonlight glistens off its curved edges. How does it work without feathers? There are wings, but they don’t look as though they can move. They’re rigid and quite thin. How do they flap?

  We stop beneath the strange thing and the prince moves my fingers to his shoulder so his hands are free. He uses a key to unlock a latch, then twists it and starts lowering the door to the ground. There’s a set of stairs on the reverse side, leading up. As I lift my foot to the first step, light floods our location, burning my eyes it’s so bright, and I freeze.

  “Stop where you are!”

  The prince pushes his palms into my back and yells, “Go. Go. Go!”

  I dash up the stairs and pull Ella with me. The prince clambers behind us, then yanks the door shut and seals the latch.

  “Ella, go sit down and buckle up. Nymia, you’re with me.”

  The prince takes my hand and leads me in the opposite direction, nudging me toward a chair. After I sit, he latches a thick strap across my chest and another around my waist, then jumps into the empty seat to my left. I stare wide-eyed as he puts the key in and turns. The invention rumbles to life, vibrating my seat. More switches and screens and lights than I’ve ever seen in my life blink on, beeping and swirling with colors I don’t understand, but the prince does. His fingers dance across the chaos. He's completely self-assured.

  “This is how humans fly?” I shout over the roar.

  The prince drops something over my ears. When he speaks, the sound is amplified and not quite natural. “I shouldn’t need much help, so don’t be alarmed. You’re just here in case of emergency. The engine needs a few minutes to warm up, but I’m going to keep us moving while I run a few systems checks.”

  He wraps his hands around two handles—it’s a wheel, I realize, just like in the car except this one isn’t a circle. When he moves it, the plane jerks into motion. My heart leaps into my chest. This machine can’t possibly fly. He’s gone mad.

  “Are you sure this will work?” I scream.

  “You’re talking into a microphone now.” He winces and lifts his fingers to nudge the cup around his ear. “You don’t have to scream. And yes, I’m sure. Why?” He pauses long enough to meet my eyes and lifts the right side of his lips in an amused grin. “Don’t you trust me?”

  No.

  But I don’t respond, because something catches my eye through the narrow windows. There’s a car moving toward us from the opposite end of the road at full speed.

  “Look out!”

  The prince jerks his head up, but when he spots the car, he just scoffs, then returns to what he was doing.

  “They’re coming straight toward us. Do you need me to do something?”

  “Yes—hold on.”

  “What?”

  Instead of answering, he pulls on a lever, and I’m thrown back into my seat as we jump into high speed. I squeeze the sides of my chair as my stomach leaps into my throat.

  “We’re going to crash!”

  “Stop screaming,” he mutters, half laughing through the words. “No we aren’t.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because if we do, we’ll all die—”

  “What?”

  “And,” he continues, nonchalant as we literally hurtle to our deaths, “none of them want to be responsible for murdering their prince. Now, no more talking. I need to concentrate.”

  I mash my lips together—half to keep from interrupting his focus, and half to prevent a scream from spilling out. The car zips toward us, flashing a blinding light in our eyes. We zoom toward it, moving faster and faster. When I glance at the prince, he’s got a smug look in his eyes, as though daring them to come closer, but there’s something almost reassuring about his confidence. Just as we’re about to slam into each other, the car veers to the side, but I don’t see where it goes because we arch up, the ground falls away, and just like that, we’re flying. We’re actually flying.

  “You did it!”

  The prince’s gaze slides toward me, burning in a way that makes my abs clench. “Of course I did.”

  A smile tugs at my lips.

  I look away before he sees and lean closer to the window for a better view. We rise higher and higher, until the lights that seemed so bright only a few moments before are now little more than a dull halo, then farther still, until the whole city is splayed out before me like a twinkling carpet. It’s as though the Father let all his burning faerie souls drop out of the sky, no longer stars, but petals that glimmer in the night. I’ve never seen anything human-made look so beautiful.

  “Wow—ahh!” The invention shakes roughly and my view goes dark. I squeeze my chair and spin to the prince, but he’s got a wild grin on his lips. For some reason, I think he’s enjoying this. “What’s happening? Are we falling?”

  “No.” He laughs and shakes his head a little, but keeps his focus on the screens before him as he holds his hands steady. “It’s just a cloud. We’re almost through the worst of it, then it should be smooth sailing from here.”

  A cloud.

  My eyes go wide with understanding. The charcoal fog outside, it’s just the light from the invention catching the icy particles hovering in the air. I press my palm to the window, shivering from the cold seeping through, but it’s the most miraculous freeze I’ve ever felt. Then we burst through, and suddenly, it feels as though we’re in another realm—no longer on earth, no longer in this world, or even my old one, but somewhere else entirely. The moon is a perfect circle, a shimmering opal in the sky, surrounded by the sparkle of diamonds. Clouds stretch like a downy ocean, so soft and fluffy I almost wish I could jump out and dive in. It feels as though we’re soaring into the afterlife, straight to Father’s kingdom, where time and space cease to exist. The interplay of light and dark stretches into eternity.

  “It’s beautiful up here, isn’t it?” the prince whispers.

  I turn to him, but I can’t find the right words. My silence seems to amuse him. With an airy laugh, the prince reaches his hand across the space between us and gently presses his finger against the bottom of my chin. I didn’t realize my mouth had fallen open until he closes it. He holds his hand there for a second longer, staring into my eyes, then drops it away. “That expression on your face? I think it’s the same one I had the first time I saw magic.”

  “Magic?” I glance at the blinking lights and the mechanisms I’ll never understand, then back out the window, then finally toward him. “This is magic.”

  “No,” he says with a shake of his head. A sad sort of smile passes over his lips, out of place on his face. “I understand why you’d think that, but it’s not. It’s just science. It’s facts, and mathematics, and engineering, and aerodynamics. Magic is…” A wistful expression clouds his gaze. “Magic is everything this isn’t. It’s a mystery no one will ever be able to explain. I was in a plane the first time I saw magic, did you know that?”

  How could I?

  But I don’t say that, because I think it was implied. I just listen as he blinks and clears the fog from his eyes, then glances back out to the stars.

  “I was twelve. It’d been four years since the earthquake, but magic was still a total mystery to me. I’d seen a few blurry shots from
cameras, images recorded in the seconds before everything close to the power went dark. We mostly knew about magic from firsthand accounts. No one could get a camera to work close enough to catch anything on film, and most of the people who tried disappeared. Then this one afternoon, my father let me join him on a scouting flight. They were normally safe, relatively routine. But while we were flying over the North Sea, a few kilometers off the coast, a signal beeped on the radar.”

  He points to the screen in front of me with flashing rings, and I recognize it—it’s just like the magic-tracking device he used earlier.

  “We dove beneath the cloud coverage, closer to the water—oh, I should say, we were in a military plane, so it was a lot easier to maneuver. Anyway, my father and I were staring at this endless stretch of blue, trying to figure out where the radar signal was coming from, when a creature burst through the waves, shimmering like a liquid rainbow. I blinked and it was gone. Then another broke through, and this time I made out a horse’s head, but it was different—covered in scales that gleamed like oil on water, with a mane made of fins instead of hair, and two or three times as large. When it dove back under, a fish’s tail splashed up behind.”

  “A hippokampoi!” I gasp. I thought they were gone, like so many other creatures I used to know, but it makes sense that they’re still alive. They live so deep in the ocean humans couldn’t get close enough to steal their magic away. “How many did you see?”

  “Maybe twelve?” he answers eagerly. “They were only there for a minute, rising to the surface one after another after another, before they vanished. If I’d been alone I wouldn’t have believed it. They’re magical, yes? They must be.”

  I nod. “The Mother made them to help control the tides. They have elemental magic. Humans used to hunt them for their scales, because ship captains thought it helped them control the weather conditions on a long voyage.”

  “Sounds about right,” he mutters with a sneer, then pauses. “The Mother? Who’s that?”

  I look away, back out the window, keeping my lips shut.

  “Is she like a god?”

  I don’t respond.

  “Nymia—” He sighs. “I know you have secrets. And I know you have no reason to reveal them to me, especially since the way you talk about humans makes me think you don’t like us very much, but I’m not your enemy. In fact, if you let me, I’d like to be your ally.”

  “Why? Fascination?”

  “Partly.” The honesty in his response makes my spine straighten. The hesitancy makes me turn to face him. “But mostly because I don’t want to be on the side of history that destroys what little bit of wonder we have left in this life.” He pauses and flicks his gaze toward me. “How much do you know about my world?”

  “Very little. I was under a spell when the earthquake struck and only woke up about ten days ago. This is all very new to me.”

  “That’s what I thought. You don’t understand that human technology can be used for incredible things, like this plane we’re flying right now. But it can be used for terrible things as well.”

  His tone sends a chill through me—it’s so desolate, like a lone wolf howling to the moon, leaving nothing but an eerie silence in its wake. I’m not sure I want to know more, but I have to. “Things like what?”

  “Like bombs that could level entire cities the size of London to the ground. And they almost used them, in the days and weeks and months following the earthquake, but people had just enough hope that their loved ones might still be alive within those cities shrouded in magic that they didn’t. But I’m honestly not sure how long that hesitation will last, how long until their patience runs out.”

  “And they’d use these bombs”—I stumble over the word—“on people like me?”

  As I say it, I know it’s true.

  “Some people would, yes,” the prince confirms. He stretches his hand across the space between us, then rests his palm over mine and squeezes my fingers tight, warm and solid and comforting. “But if you let people in, if you let them see you and understand you and understand magic, there might be more people who’d fight to stop them.”

  “How do you know that?” I ask, taking in his calm assuredness, puzzled by what he sees when he looks in my eyes. If not a monster, then what? “How do you know my magic isn’t the evil, scary thing you humans seem to think it is?”

  “Because I can feel it,” he murmurs and drops his gaze to our entwined hands. I follow the path of his eyes, surprised to find my magic glowing brightly in the spots where his skin brushes mine. It’s never done that before tonight, responded to another person’s touch the way it does to his. I don’t understand what it means. “Ella’s magic was different—it was a force, threatening and frightful. But yours is softer—peaceful, yet somehow thrilling. It’s like those creatures I saw in the water that day, jumping through the waves, minding their own business, unaware of their own majesty. Your magic doesn’t attack the way Ella’s did at the ball—it just is. And there’s a beauty in that I think the rest of the world should understand.”

  He runs his thumb over my wrist.

  I jerk my arm away.

  “Nymia—”

  “Ella should see this,” I interrupt and take the cups off my ears before he has time to protest. I unclip the straps across my chest and stand, feeling his gaze on my back as I walk away, but I don’t turn around.

  Ella jolts when she sees me, practically bouncing in her chair.

  “Do you want a turn?”

  Before I even finish speaking, she’s pushing past me to sit with the prince, which is just as well. I’m tired from all the talking and the running, but mostly I’m tired from the fighting. The prince was right in his assessment. Faerie magic was never supposed to be used this way. It’s a power made for peace. All magic is. But sometimes, there isn’t a choice.

  I collapse into a seat and turn my face to stare out the window, but I’m not looking at the stars or the clouds. I’m staring into my past, at a memory the prince’s words resurfaced.

  Aerewyn and I were ten. We’d snuck out in the middle of the night because she couldn’t sleep—she wanted to explore. She always wanted to explore. There was nothing my sister found so interesting as the places we weren’t supposed to be, and I couldn’t let her go alone. So we slipped into the forest, to run and dance and play beneath the moonlight. Then we saw a silvery glow in the distance, like a star brought down to earth. It was a unicorn—a real, live unicorn. We’d never seen one before, so we followed it, trying to get close. When it stopped by a river to drink, Aerewyn and I finally caught up.

  Magic recognizes magic.

  The unicorn didn’t run or hide, but instead watched as we approached. He knew we came in peace, that we were blessed by the Mother, same as him. Aerewyn got there first. He neighed softly when she pressed her hand to his nose, and his horn brightened as she rubbed her palm over his hide. I stretched out my hand to do the same, but before my fingers made contact, an arrow struck his cheek, planting deep.

  Blood splattered over my hand.

  Another arrow thunked.

  The unicorn reared onto its hind legs and we stumbled back, falling into the grass as another arrow sailed overhead. The priestesses had always warned us not to venture off alone, that there were humans who would try to kill us and creatures like us for a taste of the magic in our souls, but I’d never seen it before now. In the dark, our skin glowed like a breathing target. The next arrow skimmed my calf.

  When I screamed, Aerewyn yanked on my arm. We rolled into the river and let the current carry us away until the silvery glow disappeared. Then and only then did we crawl up the riverbank and back into the trees. My leg was on fire. We were lost. So we grew vines and climbed high into a pine, curving the branches into a nest where we could hide for the rest of the night. The priestesses found us in the morning, but I’ll never forget the hours I spent huddled in the dark, wondering what happened to that unicorn, and what would’ve happened to us if we’d been caught.


  I close my eyes and lean my head back, relaxing into the seat, trying to let the exhaustion of the night overwhelm me. I want to sink away. I want to leave these memories behind, but just like on that long-ago night, one thought lingers, keeping me awake.

  The prince says he wants to be my ally.

  Is it even in his nature to understand how?

  A loud beeping jolts me awake. The walls shake violently and a scream cuts through the chaos, high-pitched with fear. I jump to my feet, but we drop and I’m weightless for a moment as my heels lift into the air. Then the direction shifts and I slam into the floor, clutching the back of a chair to keep from falling. Grabbing the walls as I go, I make my way to the front of the invention, where alarms ring and lights flash. The prince moves his hands rapidly across the display.

  “What’s going on?”

  The prince holds up his hand to signal he can’t respond, but Ella turns toward me, eyes wide and somewhat bloodshot. We jerk sideways and I grip both of their chairs to keep from slamming into the wall.

  “We’re falling!” Ella screams.

  “We’re not falling,” the prince interjects, casting a quick glance over his shoulder. I catch his eyes just long enough to see legitimate panic in them, and then he turns his attention back to the switches. “We’re landing against our will.”

  “Nymia, we’re dropping out of the sky! What do we do?”

  How should I know? I’m not the one who suggested flying in the first place—it always seemed like a ridiculous idea to me. Though I don’t say that, because, well, what good would it do?

  The prince answers for me. “Ella, everything is going to be fine. I promise. Now, get in the back and buckle up.” His voice never wavers—it’s firm and commanding, but not mean. It’s just strong enough to force Ella to listen. “Nymia, I could use a hand.”

  “Which one?” I ask, holding out my palms.

  He shakes his head, fighting a smile, and points to the spot Ella vacated. “Just sit down.”