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I can’t take any chance that she’ll follow me into Everwilde.
While Chatty busies himself chasing the dust devils across my wooden floor, I slide into the red wooden chair at my desk and flip open my laptop. It’s nearly ten years old and takes forever to load our crappy internet, but I wait.
I need to know more about the place I’m going. I nearly looked it up earlier when I checked out the neverapples, but then I lost my nerve.
What if I discover the Fae torture us for kicks, or find human flesh a tasty snack? It’s not like I can choose not to go.
My homepage finally loads. Before I can stop myself, I scan the first article at the top. The headline reads: “She Lost Her Daughter Because of the Fae, Now She’s Forced to Live Next to One.”
I don’t bother reading the article; my stress level is high enough, and the last thing I need is to be reminded that the Fae destroyed half our world, trapped me here in this cesspool, then somehow talked our government into giving them temporary visas to stay in the Untouched Zone.
How is that even remotely fair? Especially when we’re stuck here, slowly starving to death.
Grimacing, I focus on the task and type in Evermore Academy. Then I hold my breath as the cursor makes the rainbow swirly disc . . . only to be disappointed with one result.
I stare in disbelief at the old Wikipedia page. Which I’ve already visited like a million times.
How can I find literally ten pages of information on a piece of magical fruit, but almost nothing on an infamous academy?
The first paragraph tells me nothing new. The noble sons and daughters of all ten Seelie and Unseelie Courts go through its hallowed grounds, blah blah. The next paragraph is more interesting, but still too brief.
Sources say every year children from the most esteemed families travel to Evermore Academy to serve the Fae students and further the diplomacy between humans and Fae.
Huh. Something tells me diplomacy has nothing to do with it, but what do I know?
The rest of the summary describes how the mortal students at the academy are trained to protect their Fae keepers from the darklings. Upon graduation, most usually go into service as shadow guardians who protect high-ranking Evermore Fae from darklings. After retirement, a shadow can ask any favor of their Fae; many go on to be incredibly powerful influencers on the other side.
Just for kicks, I click on the link over the word darkling and am rewarded by a terrifying photo. All-black eyes stare wildly at me above bared incisors. Once human ears rise sharply into points.
The darkling in the photo, taken God knows where, still wears her human clothes: an orange-and-blue flannel and ripped jeans.
Bad fashion sense aside, the wild, hungry look in the darkling’s twisted expression scares me more than the way her back has hunched and her bones have malformed so that she runs on all fours. The way her body has grown larger even as her muscles and flesh have withered.
I skim the words below. Infested with the residual dark magic that seeps daily into the tainted borderland, this used to be a happy, seventeen-year-old girl named Samantha Stevens.
More pictures of turned darklings fill the page, and I quickly close the tab.
The Wiki for the Fae themselves is much more thorough, with everything from their appearance (super good looking,) lifespan (immortal, duh,) and weaknesses (iron, ash, rowan berries, salt,) to conspiracies on why they came.
Annoyed at the lack of any real information, I push my laptop away. I need to focus on my letters, anyway.
I feel especially guilty for not telling Aunt Zinnia. Ever since she rescued me from a human trafficking ring in Dallas, she’s been nothing but amazing. Treating me like the daughter she lost.
When the Fae arrived and took over the west, the Shimmer was erected almost immediately.
Anyone on the other side was just gone. The Fae sent a few of their leaders to talk to our side, and they quickly confirmed that not a single mortal survived what they called a terrible accident of magic.
It wasn’t until later that we were told the truth: The twisted magic from the explosion turned the humans who didn’t die into darklings. And the residue from that same polluted darkness was present everywhere in the borderlands.
The attacks began shortly afterward. Some of the darklings came from breaches in the Shimmer. Some spontaneously transformed in public places. A girl even changed in my high school. I didn’t see it, but they said horns sprouted from her head and her bones twisted and bent, her body growing into some grotesque monster not quite Fae, and not quite human.
She escaped out a window. Most darklings only attack humans if they’re cornered, injured, or starving. They prefer Fae flesh.
Still, the human government erected borders between the borderlands and the outside world as they worked to contain the spread of tainted magic.
Both Aunts were home during the Lightmare, waiting for their families to come back from an auction near Denton. When Aunt Zinnia rescued me in Dallas, she was there looking for her daughter, Grace. Someone had called to say they spotted Grace, but it ended up being a false lead.
Instead, she found me. Not that I could ever replace her daughter. That was obvious. But somewhere in mending my wounds, physical and mental, she’d helped heal her own.
