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"The sylph," I said, understanding. "It harnessed all the souls, and then you two used their power to rip a gate through to our world. But you didn't close it, and everyone else got pulled through, too. " Just how Donna and Kari had explained it; now I'd seen it for myself. I shook my head in disbelief, then asked, "Where did you take me?"
"We have not moved," the Light Queen answered.
"Where did this all come from, then?"
"You. "
"Last time I checked, my powers don't extend to making shiny pink rock formations. " And, in the catalog of powers to have, that one was frankly useless. Although it would make a good party trick.
"This was the great tragedy, the great failure of our grand plans. Because unlike humans, who create with every thought, with every dream, with your very bodies, even here we were powerless on our own to create so much as a new thought. We assumed that by coming to your world we would be given the gift of creation, but it was never ours to have. "
"Sucks to be you?"
She smiled. "It does indeed. But we found ways around that, as you have demonstrated. It is not creation to take what humans make and form it how we want, but it is as close as we get. And my sister will leave me forever before she will give up the power that human dreams give her. "
I frowned. "Wait, so all this-everything in the Faerie Realms-you make from dreams? Any dreams, or the dreams of the humans you steal?"
"Those are most powerful, dwelling already in the land of dreams, but we can pull from your realm. Thoughts, hopes, desires, dreams. Here we take the material you give us and make it into imitations and repetitions of reality. "
So faeries used human dreams to make the Faerie Realms and everything in them. Maybe that's why being here for a long time changed you, like it did Jack, made you less able to live in the human world.
Thinking of Jack in the Faerie Realms made me think of all the other people I'd seen there, which, when connected with the Dark Queen's determination to get back to where they came from without losing their ability to create. . .
"She wants to open a gate and take humans back with her, doesn't she?" I asked.
The Light Queen nodded solemnly. "Even this mockery of creation is more than we had there. She would have it all-eternity and the ability to shape it. My Seelie faeries refuse to once again bring unwilling creatures somewhere they do not belong. Thus the great chasm that has grown between us. She would sooner trap us all here than go back to our home without human dreams to feed off. "
So pretty much all those poor saps I'd seen were nothing more than cattle to feed the Dark Queen's need to "create. " "Why didn't you go back? After you got here, I mean. And why are the rest of the paranormals on Earth and not in this realm, with you?"
"We were scattered coming through the gate. Without the energy of all the souls together and a way to focus it, we could not open a gate again. Coming to Earth changed our forms-gave bodies to things that had been mere spirit, trapping them and shifting them and changing many beyond recognition. Some adapted better than others. For the faeries, our threads to eternity were shortened, thinned, until we feared they would snap entirely. It took us many generations to carve out this space between, where we were able to form a buffer between ourselves and time, living outside it. We would have protected our spirit cousins here as well, but since it was our folly that ripped them through the gate with us, they have never forgiven us. "
"So that's how-" I paused, not wanting to refer to Melinthros as my father. "That's how faeries can make Empty Ones? You force them to live on Earth for long enough and it breaks down what makes them a faerie?"
"Yes," she said sadly. "I have never returned to the mortal realms. Those who make frequent trips do so at great personal sacrifice. " I looked at Reth, who still stood next to me, had been standing next to me this entire time, silent and watching. Reth who never needed to come back to Earth after I freed him from IPCA. Reth who was looking dimmer by the hour after taking the midnight faerie's attack in my place.
The Light Queen followed my gaze. "My golden son has given much because of his love for you and his devotion to me. He may yet give up all. "
Well, bleep. It was so much simpler to hate him.
"I know you hold depths of anger and bitterness toward the fey, child, but please understand our desperation. And please know my deep respect for humans and human life. Such beautiful, fragile animals, so fleeting and easily broken and yet powerful beyond anything faeries can ever hope to be. We cannot create but live forever, unchanging. You change with every breath, dying even as you live, but your thread to eternity and immortality is reborn with every new generation. "
I was busy avoiding Reth's eyes, not wanting to think of him like that, as someone who was nobly sacrificing to be around me and protect me. Not wanting to accept that he really loved me the way he was always saying he did. My head was already the oddest combination of fuzzy and buzzy from being around the Light Queen.
I sighed, knowing what I had to do and hating that it was what these scheming faeries had been trying to make me do all along. But at least this way it was my choice, just like Lend and Arianna had said. And I wasn't doing it for the idiot faeries, anyway. I was doing it for the others, the ones that had no choice in all this, the ones that had never asked to come here in the first place. I could understand that.
And I found, to my surprise, that once I made the decision, really made it, I wanted to do it. I needed to do it. I wouldn't leave those paranormal souls to whatever fate they'd face here, not the way I'd been abandoned. I flexed my fingers, trying to calm down my wildly beating heart. There was no going back now.
"Okay," I said. "I'll do it. "
Chapter Thirty
YOU CAN'T CHANGE ME
I stood straighter and looked her in the eyes, a luminous brown like life itself, containing all the other colors at the same time. "I'll try to open this gate for you, on a few conditions. "
She smiled. "We faeries do love a good condition. "
I rolled my eyes. Didn't I know it. "First, I will not kill myself to open the gate. If I can't do it, I can't do it, and I'm not going to drain any more innocent paranormals to get more energy. What I've already got is all you're getting. Second, you absolutely must take all the faeries-every last one, including the Dark Queen and all her minions-with you. I don't want any of you staying behind where you can keep messing around with my world. Third, we have to save all those humans the Dark Queen has kidnapped and figure out a way for them to be able to go back to their lives. None of them are going through with you. And fourth, you break this bleeping curse the Dark Queen put on my boyfriend. "
