Instead of answering my question, he demanded, “Get out of the car, Larken. We have to run.”
I turned the engine off and opened my door, my feet hitting the pavement and grinding the small gravels atop the surface.
Kes was beside me in an instant. “We have to hurry! There’s no time.” A pause, then, “This might hurt.”
“Hurt?” I barely had time to utter the word before he clamped his hand around my forearm.
It hurt.
He wasn’t kidding. It felt like some sadistic form of acupuncture, like tiny needles had been shoved into every available sliver of skin.
I was still screaming and swiping at my skin when we reappeared in the middle of the cemetery. Seemingly unaffected, Kes strode away toward the old mausoleum nearest the woods.
The stone was old, covered with strange etchings, with a roof arched like a miniature cathedral. Green, leafy vines crept up the sides, slowly swallowing it as it crept closer to the edge of the woods. Though I’d seen it a hundred times at night and in the daylight, I never dreamed Kes thought this place was safer than all others. I mean, off the top of my head I could think of a thousand other places that felt safer than this. Maybe five thousand.
“Why are we here, Kes?” I screamed after him, patting my arms and legs, running hands down my chest and stomach to make sure all of me was still there. I didn’t know how he transported me. I mean, in my mind he wasn’t a faery. Or a changeling. Kes wasn’t one of the fair folk. The fair folk weren’t real.
Kes was.
And I’d seen him appear and disappear more times than I could count, but he’d never – never – taken me with him. I never thought it was possible.
“Where better to hide the living, than among the dead?” he fired back.
Kes didn’t bother with a key but kicked the mausoleum doors in and strode inside while I gaped, dumbstruck on the lawn. We are so going to hell for this. This had to qualify as tomb desecration. I was too young to go to jail. Not to mention I looked awful in orange.
“Kes, this is insane!” I hissed. “You are insane. And where are Mom and Dad? Did they disappear, too? Where did that girl go?”
Kes yelled from inside, “Stop messing around and get in here, Larken!”
His tone wasn’t just ‘irritated brother’. His tone was dire. I hauled butt inside.
I’d followed Kes here before when we were younger and he snuck out after Mom and Dad went to sleep. While I’d hovered outside these walls plenty of times over the years, I never had the courage to push the door open and peek inside.
The dust was thick in the stale air. Motes flew in every direction as Kes cut through them like a speedboat through still water. A marble vault lay at the far end of the room and I was glad the lid was closed. My shoes left a fresh set of footprints on the dusty floorboards, overlapping the trail Kes had just blazed. Layers of older prints, all Vans, all Kes’s, lay beneath the fresh ones.
Kes gripped the edge of the giant stone slab positioned over the vault and began to push. The sound of stone grating against stone filled the room.
“What are you doing? Stop! You cannot seriously open up a grave.”
“It’s… not a grave,” he gritted, pushing the stone harder. It slid farther and farther to the side and then fell to the floor with a violent thud. Kes waved me over impatiently. “It’s a staircase.”
“A staircase to what?”
He closed his eyes and took a frustrated breath. When they snapped open again, he cryptically replied, “Not to what, to whom.”
“I swear to God, Kes, if this is some weird, devil-worshipping-cult shit, I want no part of it.” I raked my hands through my hair and tried to soothe the incessant pounding in my head. Just then the world began to tip, and before I knew he was near, my head was cradled in his hands. Kes let out a soft curse as his palms gripped my jaw and his fingers lay against my temples. The vice felt good. The pressure eased my pain.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?” he said quietly.
“I haven’t exactly had time.”
Within seconds, my migraine was gone. Not even a flicker of pain pulsed.
Kes had many powers. Some I knew. Some I was sure I didn’t. But he could heal my headaches and broken ankles like nobody’s business, and I loved him for that.
He picked me up, damsel-in-distress-style, and headed for the vault. “I can walk! I’m fine now.”
“I know, but you’re short and can’t climb.”
My mouth popped open. “I am not short. We are almost the same height, thank you very much.” Kes smiled but didn’t argue as he placed me on the edge of the vault. I raised my feet up, just in case something nefarious was going to grab me from below, but like he said, there was just a dark, foreboding staircase. “I am not going down there.”
“Yes, you are.”
“You’re going first.”
He rolled his eyes. “Fine.”
I made room for him as he swung his legs over the edge of the crypt and started down the steps. “Is there any light?”
Kes whispered a few words and a peculiar blue light flooded the staircase from below. He disappeared when he reached the bottom and his footsteps echoed across the floor. He growled my name, so I took a step down. Then another. When I reached the bottom, I peered around the cavernous room that had absolutely no business being beneath the ground of the Ashburn Cemetery. Tree roots had wormed their way between a few of the smooth, precisely cut stones, but the room was otherwise immaculate. Kes must have been keeping it this way. Unlike upstairs, there were no dust motes. The floor was black marble, as reflective as a polished mirror, the blue glow spilling over it like an ocean of light.
Matching marble columns braced the ceiling. Scattered along the walls were planters containing a perfumed, blooming plant with star-shaped purple flowers. My fingers drifted over their pointed tips as I crept around the perimeter of the circular room. The roof wasn’t domed but was painted to look like it was. However, that wasn’t the most amazing part. The entire thing was painted to look like the night sky, one constellation shining brighter than the rest… the stars of which glowed, somehow lit from behind.
Aries.
Kes hovered over a marble slab but turned as I approached, blocking my view and moving in front of me when I tried to peer around him. He gripped my upper arms with the same intensity he’d used to clench the steering wheel this morning. “What you are about to witness, you can never breathe a word of.” I nodded. “And for goodness sake, keep your mouth shut. He’ll be disoriented and… never mind. Just don’t say a word. Don’t move. Don’t even breathe.”