Unfortunately, we Fae weren’t any better. While stories of the round-eared Witches and Warlocks were passed down as cautionary tales, we had failed to heed those lessons, which was how we had found ourselves in a centuries-long war with the product of our own failures. I just hoped that whatever these Unity Trials contained, it didn’t doom us further than we already were.
Chapter 1
Juniper
Friday nights were my favourite. Not because I didn’t have to go to class or teach rowdy middle schoolers for an entire weekend, but because these were the nights I got to sneak out to Ozzie’s for our weekly sleepover.
That was why I was currently peeking out from behind a mess of tiny leaves and sharp twigs, trying unsuccessfully to avoid getting scratched as I hid behind the foliage. All the other students at Aurora Academy’s university campus headed in droves towards the student village, and I couldnotget caught. The grad students were notorious for nightlife on Fridays, which was one of the reasons Oz and I picked that day to do this. We couldn’t let anyone discover us.
Once I was sure the coast was finally clear, I darted from the bush and dashed into the dorm building that housed his room. I didn’t wait around, bolting up the grand staircase that split in the middle. Girls on the left, boys on the right. I glanced around me and cast my magic out to perform a quick scan to ensure that we truly were alone before knocking on the familiar green door.
Knock.
Knock-knock… knock.
The door swung open, and a large hand grabbed hold of the front of my shirt, dragging me inside before slamming the door shut behind me.
‘You weren’t followed?’ Oz asked, his voice pitched carefully low.
‘Nope,’ I grinned brightly, smoothing out the wrinkles on my shirt that he’d made with his fist and wincing when I brushedagainst a shallow cut. It didn’t escape his notice, and he immediately waved a hand in my direction. The warmth of his magic ran over me as it sought any injuries, and soon enough, the cuts were completely healed over like they’d never even been there.
I was about to send him a grateful smile, but I was engulfed in an all-consuming bear hug before I got the chance. My arms latched around his neck as we squeezed each other as hard as we could, the peaceful sense of coming home warming me from the inside out.
He released a sigh of relief. ‘Fuck, I missed you, Junie.’
‘I missed you, too, Ozzie. This is torture,’ I admitted. It was the same thing we said to one another every Friday, but it was no less true each time.
He pulled away to look me in the eye. Those brilliant blue eyes, an exact match to mine, glinted with excitement that filled me with tentative hope.
‘You found something?’ I asked, barely daring to put the question out into the universe for fear of being crushed by the answer. Again.
But I didn’t need to worry. This time, his answer had me beaming from ear to ear.
‘I found something,’ he confirmed with an equally wide grin, then led me over to his bed where a stash of old tomes was spread out across his sheets. A few were open to reveal worn pages with writing in a language long since forgotten by our kind. Said to be spoken by the Fae, a race of mythological creatures rumoured to have walked the earth long before Humans, Old Fae was a dead language that was still largely indecipherable for most. The others were closed, their worn, faded brown and grey leather covers simple and plain with no decoration beyond the engraved, Old Fae symbols that held the titles of each book. They were dusty when we’d first discoveredthem deep in the recesses of Aurora Academy’s library. We didn’t have a restricted section, necessarily, but these were stashed away in a forgotten room hidden away inside the library’s walls. We’d cleaned them up enough to crack them open without coughing a long time ago, taking great care to ensure they remained in better condition than we’d found them.
We had been decoding the symbols to read through them for years, but without much luck. While we had been partially successful, the words didn’t make much sense. It was like trying to put together a puzzle, only to discover we were missing most of the pieces.
‘What is it? What did you find?’ I bounced on my toes, eager for answers. If he truly had found something that could help us, then we could finally be free. We wouldn’t need to hide anymore. I held myself back from pouncing on the books, though I wanted nothing more than to tear through them to discover Oz’s breakthrough for myself. He wasn’t moving fast enough for my whirring, overexcited brain.
He flipped each tome open to a specific page and arranged them on his bed, though the reason why was lost to me. When he saw me staring at him in confusion, he gestured to the pages with a smug smile that tugged up the corner of his mouth, highlighting the dimple there that we both shared. He was awfully pleased with himself, but I couldn’t see why. Clearly, I was missing something.
I frowned down at the displayed pages. ‘I don’t understand. What am I looking for?’
‘Look,’ he said, pointing at the pages, so I tried again. I scanned the swirling symbols inked onto the pages and attempted to read the ones I recognised, but if there was anything to say about Old Fae, it was powerful and difficult to translate even with the ability to read a few symbols here and there.
Ancient, forgotten words dotted the pages in a seemingly random fashion that I failed to make sense of. I caught certain scribbles I recognised from our personal studies:Black. Sickness. Womb. Trials.But still, despite those few words jumping out at me, I couldn’t see what Oz was trying to show me. I looked up at him and shrugged, eyes wide as I waited for him to actually show me what he’d found.
His gaze darted from me back down to the tomes, then his tongue poked out the corner of his mouth as he studied them, his lips pursing in concentration. After a moment of deliberation, he snorted and adjusted the way they were spread. ‘Oops. I did it backwards.’
He sent me a crooked grin when I giggled, and I stuck out my tongue and wrinkled my nose in response. The action was warm and familiar, not that anyone but us really knew that. It was essentially our way of sayingI love youwithout voicing the words out loud. Our sneaky little way around the magical gag order preventing us from speaking to one another in public. Sometimes, though, it felt good to do it when it was just the two of us, a reminder that we could still interact despite the contingency of spells that attempted to keep us apart.
Smile stuck firmly in place, I studied the pages once more. Now that everything was the right way up, it was easy to see what he’d found. With the tomes arranged in just the right positioning, the magic slowly revealed itself. It started as a shimmer, like the reflection of gentle waves cast against a rocky cave wall, then the words rearranged on the pages until they connected to form… a picture?
The image slowly revealed itself to me as a woman and a man, their hands connected between them. It was like the puzzle pieces were finally slotting together, the randomness from before merging into an image with astonishing detail. Their faces were clear, but that wasn’t the most shocking part. Iaudibly gasped and whipped my gaze up to meet Oz’s, because they looked just like us.
His eyes flickered back to the tomes, urging me to do the same. There seemed to be more to the image that we couldn’t see. The edges were faded and frayed as if it had been torn from the centre of a bigger image, the magic fading into fractured smoke. Were there more tomes needed to piece together the full picture? Perhaps. Or maybe it was something else. Regardless of what it was, it was clear that somethingwasmissing. But what?
‘What is this?’ I asked, awed by the detail of the design and the effort that must have gone into creating such a masterpiece. Magic emanated from it in waves so subtle I had to really focus to feel it, yet it was powerful enough to raise goosebumps on my skin and vibrate my own magic inside my veins. It was like they recognised one another and were responding to the proximity, almost as if they were trying to reach out to touch the other.
