Decent finds. But neither held the magic he had hoped for.
His shoulders sank. “No Lava Flow charm, then.”
“Sorry. Both still powerful, though. Rosamund really did have a talent for locking her charms into place.” She turned the stick to admire each side, then handed it to Merrick. “The lawful thing to do would be to turn it over to the Researchers Guild. Other option? Put it back in that box and pretend you don’t know it’s there.” She twitched one ear, her equivalence of a wink.
He folded his fingers around the summoning stick, drawing it up against his chest. “Would it work on a faery?”
CHAPTER 2
AT TEN O’CLOCK THAT NIGHT, AFTER DROPPING Sal off at her second-cousin’s place, Merrick drove up a wooded hillside a few miles from Highvalley House, where the road curved close to the verge. The stars shone between feathery black treetops. The nearest houses were a mile downhill, and the road was quiet. He pulled over, got out, and tiptoed into the woods.
He knew when he had reached the verge, for the air crackled and sparked, stinging him with tiny electric jolts—a warning installed by the fae. The sparks flashed upon the sign on a nearby post, set up by the Eidolonian government:
WARNING!
Crossing the verge poses grave dangers to humans. Emergency assistance cannot reliably be reached past this line. Respect the truce: do not enter!
Merrick drew back a step, enough to stop the sparking, and stared into the forbidden land.
He had chosen a spot between two guard posts, which were stationed every mile throughout Eidolonia, a perimeter loop of over six hundred miles circling the center of the island. Signs like this one were posted all along it. It would have been easy enough to tell the line of demarcation regardless, for in fae territory many of the trees were immense, over a hundred feet tall and three times wider than the span of Merrick’s arms. The smell of earth, moss, berry, and leaf rolled out from the forest, thick and alive. Little glowing forms moved about in the forest’s looming darkness, at every height from the treetops down to the ground—either luminescent fae or floating lights created by them.
“Summoning stick probably won’t work if you use it from the human side of the verge,” Sal had said. “But I can’t recommend you cross over, of course. Maybe, if you stand right up next to it … well, it’s worth a try. Just be careful.”
Unlike his father, he had never crossed the verge, though he longed to. Being half fae, he felt he ought to have some right to go in there, should be able to expect some safety. But it didn’t work like that. He was counted as human: mortal and thus vulnerable.
He took out the summoning stick from his sweatshirt pocket. At Sal’s suggestion, he had wrapped a few of his own black hairs around it and had tied on a blue feather dropped by a kiryo bird.
He held up the stick to the starry night sky. “I summon Haluli, air faery, my mother. I ask her to come to me.”
Her name means “blue feather” in their language, his father had told him. Or “feather blue,” is how she put it. The feather of the kiryo bird.
Merrick had tried before, of course, standing at the verge and calling her name. She had never come. But he’d never had a summoning stick before, let alone one made by Rosamund Highvalley.
Lightning illuminated the tips of the trees. Thunder rolled against the mountainside. Something whipped past his ear, then chittered from a nearby branch, sounding like an angry finch. Merrick squinted into the dark, trying to see. The wind picked up, blowing his hair into his eyes. He held the carved stick higher and channeled his magic into it, pulling it from the air.
Clouds spread across the stars. Thunder crackled closer.
“Hey, stop! What are you doing?”
A wallop of magic hit him in the spine. His limbs went rigid and he fell onto his back. Someone seized his arm. Lying on the damp leaves, he found himself squinting up into the flashlights of two guards.
One was an exo-witch—someone who could manipulate other living things, but not her own body. Merrick knew it from the magic paralyzing him, as well as from the yellow sash across her uniform coat. Endo-witches, people like Merrick who could only use magic to alter themselves, wore a red sash when working officially. That said, when it came to magic, working officially was not something Merrick often did.
The other guard, a thickset man in his fifties, wore a green sash—a matter-witch. He tucked his flashlight under his arm and reached out. The carved stick flew out of Merrick’s grasp and into the man’s hand.
“What were you doing at the verge this late?” the woman asked. “Trying to get fae-struck?”
“Trying to meet my mother. She’s a faery.” The fae half of him made it difficult to lie outright. He often wished his absentee mother had been one of the deceptive types of fae so he could indulge more easily in the human habit of dishonesty.
“This is a summoning stick.” The man held it up. “Got a license for it?”
“No. I found it. Just keep it and let me go, okay? I won’t try anything else.”
The exo-witch still had Merrick’s limbs frozen. “Afraid we’ve got to write this up. What’s your name? Can we see some identification, please?”
Merrick sighed. “In my back pocket.”
They found his wallet, read his driver’s license, and ran a check on a phone screen.
“Merrick Highvalley,” the man said. “Age twenty-nine. Perfumer, co-owner, Mirage Isle Perfumes. Endo-witch, registered with rare witch abilities—only human in Eidolonia with the power of flight. Huh.”
“I’ll just go home. I swear,” Merrick said, still immobilized on the ground.
“Sorry, friend.” The woman released her magic hold and replaced it with a hand around his arm. She pulled him to his feet. “Looks like this is your second offense. We have to give you a citation, and we’ll be escorting you home ourselves.”
They marched him toward the road.
“No—listen. I’m trying to help my father,” Merrick said. “He’s aging too fast, all because my mother took him into the fae realm a couple of times. No one’s been able to help him. She might. I just need her to come talk to me.”
“That’s not how to go about it.” The woman got out a small printing computer from the patrol car and began tapping buttons. “Use and possession of an unauthorized summoning charm is against the law.”
Merrick looked away, his jaw clenched. The woman printed out the citation and handed it to him. He ignored it a few seconds before snatching it.
Lightning flashed again, dancing across the curdled undersides of the clouds.
CHAPTER 3
WHAT DID YOU THINK WOULD HAPPEN?” CASSIDY sounded long-suffering rather than angry. Although a bit angry too.
Merrick had come home late last night, his car tailed by the police, who luckily had their lights and sirens off and thus hadn’t woken Cassidy. But he’d told his sibling everything this morning, since there was no hiding the fact that he had a court appearance in a couple of weeks.
“It was worth a try,” he muttered.
Cassidy leaned on the parapet next to him, on the rooftop deck of Highvalley House. A March mist lay on the forest. The air was still cool enough that they both wore jackets, though Eidolonia rarely got much colder than this. Snow usually only fell on the highest peaks, and all of those were in fae territory.