Page 4 of Prince of the Sun

I don’t stop running until I reach Quincy House, then curve left, entering the courtyard, and press my back up against the brick wall cordoning off the courtyard from the street beyond. Inhale. Exhale.You’re safe, now.Safe.

I don’t know why I insist on telling myself this lie. I know it isn’t true. I’m not safe inside Quincy Courtyard. I’m not even safe inside my dorm room.

I’m not safe anywhere.

I was twelve when I watched elves murder my father and take my brother.

It was a Saturday night. Dad took us grocery shopping at the Italian delicatessen in Edina, our favorite weekend activity. To Michael and me, the store wasn’t a supermarket; it was a sculpture garden. Fruit baskets stacked one atop the other, crowned with perfectly pointed pyramids of their contents. Crates that looked as if they had just been hauled from the back of a farmer’s pickup truck overflowed with vegetables, eggplant and summer squash and bunches of broccoli. Tin pails of dried beans, rice, and chickpeas, which we scooped with a miniature trowel. We felt as if we were wandering the aisles of a market in ancient Rome.

Dad allowed us only a half-hour inside, then it was time to check out and load up the car. That Saturday, as Michael and I heaved paper bags into the trunk with trembling little arms, I realized I’d forgotten something: my weekly fizzy drink, the Italian soda we could only buy at Lomeli’s. I pleaded with Dad togive me two dollars, then raced back into the store, calling over my shoulder that I would only be a second.

Drink secured, I checked out and strolled outside through the sighing automatic doors.

That’s when I saw them.

Two elves, tall as trees and dressed in full regalia, talking to my father. They were backlit by the moon and the lampposts of the Lomeli’s parking lot.

I froze.

Growing up, I worshipped elves. Spent hours scrolling the internet and leafing through magazines, gobbling up every picture I could find. I joined human-run forums devoted to Elvish culture. Read translations of Lukkarin and Maevish. Followed the lives of the prominent elf families with feverish addiction. Ran my fingers down the pixelated versions of their corn silk hair, wondering what it would feel like to touch in person.

To me, they were aching beauty. Reverent perfection.

So when I saw them that day—elves? in Edina?—I could barely move. I could barely think. The blood orange soda bottle slipped right through my tiny fingers and shattered on the asphalt.

I was so starstruck, in fact, that I barely registered the long, deadly spears clutched in their hands. Barely registered the way my father inched in front of my little brother, his body a human shield. A useless shield, actually, because moments later, I watched and did absolutely nothing, didn’t even scream, as one of the elves raised his spear and drove it through my father’s heart. In the front and out the back, cocked at a downward angle so the spear would plunge through my little brother’s shoulder too.

Time stopped. No one moved. Not the elves. Not the other customers. Not even me. Dad and Michael wavered, bodiesskewered together like a human kebab. Then Dad keeled over, blood gushing from his mouth and the hole in his chest, and Michael fell with him, and time resumed, and I was screaming, and everyone was screaming, and I sank to my knees, and shards of glass tore open my legs, and it was as if I wanted it, as if I wanted to be dead, to be dying, to be in the same agony as my brother and father. And the screaming got louder, all around me, cars revving and sirens blaring, and all I could do, all I could think to do, was to stare at their speared bodies. Dad and Michael. As connected in death as they were in life.

But Michael wasn’t dead. Only injured. Only bleeding out onto the pavement. And I watched, frozen, as the elves bent down, business-like, and slid the spear out of my brother’s shoulder, tucked his limp body into their arms, and vanished behind a row of cars.

Just like that, he was gone. They both were.

Seconds or minutes or hours or days later, a paramedic scooped me up, draping me in a blanket I couldn’t feel. He carried me to the open back door of an ambulance, asked questions I couldn’t hear.

The attack was not widely publicized. In fact, it barely made the local news. Witness accounts of the attack are varied and provide little in the way of answers. We don’t know whether it was provoked or unprovoked. We don’t know the identities of the elves. No one but me seems to even remember what they looked like. Most witnesses refused to testify, for fear the elves would find out and come for them next.

And besides, our laws do not govern the elves. They cannot be tried for murder or sentenced to life in prison. They would simply walk right through the bars and carry on.

If that night in the parking lot did one good thing for me, it was to rip back the veil of obsession. I finally saw the elves for what they really were. For the violence of which they werecapable, the unspoken tyranny they wield over the humans. Everything changed.

We mean you no harm, said King Varith when they first arrived.

I listened to those words over and over again, once I finally dragged myself out of the haze into which I fell after Dad’s murder and Michael’s disappearance. I found recordings of the original radio broadcast on YouTube, staticky and crackling with age, playing over photographs of the king and his family. I stared at his perfect face. Counted his perfect teeth, his perfect eyes, his perfect pointy ears. Hatred for him and everyone like him grew, thickened, curdled the inside of my stomach.

We mean you no harm.

Well, I began to think,I can’t say the same for you.

“Quinn?”

The small, tinkling voice shakes me from the memory. Just to the left, my roommate Cara stands, iced coffee in hand. The sun glints off her familiar brown pixie cut and the dove tattooed on her wrist. Her eyes are nervous. I realize I’m still pressed up against the wall, shoulders hunched to my ears. Like a criminal on the run.

“Oh.” I peel myself away from the wall and dust off my legs pointlessly. “Hi. Sorry. Just, um… planning out my day.”

Cara tilts her head. “Against the courtyard wall?”

“Yes?”