I Do Believe in Faeries (The Cotton Candy Quintet Book 3) (5 page)

He glanced back at me. “Really, you didn’t learn your lesson the first time? A wish requires a sacrifice and getting that baby back will require a bigger sacrifice than before. Plus, I’m not the one you should talk to about making wishes. I don’t do that stuff, and I can’t grant you that wish anyways, so don’t even try.”

“What about other faeries?”

“Seriously?”

I groaned in frustration.

He shook his head and turned away to go further into the glade ahead of me. No, he was
not
going to walk away like that.

I grabbed his arm and whirled him around to face me. “Listen,” I demanded. I raised a fist and extended my finger at him. “I have magick now. And I don’t know how to use it properly. So you’d better tell me what I can do, or else I’m going to see just how magickal I can be.”

Amusedly, he smiled down at me. “You’re really threatening me with your finger?” He flicked his eyes to my index finger.

I bristled. “I don’t know what I can do with it.”

“Nothing to me, Tinkerbell. I am one of the oldest faeries around, so trust me when I say I can take away your magick. And it wouldn’t do any good even if I told you where they were.”

With something between a grunt and a scream, I released him. “Please just tell me. I…I have to fix this. I have to save that baby.”

He watched me for a few long, agonizing seconds. Finally, he sighed and scratched at his head. “You’d have to get the baby in Tir na nÓg.”

“Tir na nÓg?”

I didn’t even know what the heck that meant. Was it a place? Or a town? Or something else entirely?

“See, I told you it wouldn’t do any good if you knew. You probably don’t even know what it is.” He leaned towards me. “It’s a
realm
that mortals can’t find by themselves. You wouldn’t last two minutes by yourself.”

I licked my lips. “Then take me there.”

He blinked at my reaction. “What?” At least I surprised him.

My heart thudded in my chest. “Take me there. This is kind of your fault anyways.” I wasn’t so sure about that, but maybe I could guilt him into taking me there. I certainly had enough guilt to spread around.

“You’re crazy.”

“I’m desperate.”

“Desperate, eh?” He stroked his chin as he looked slyly at me. “Does that mean you are asking me for a favor?”

A favor?
Warning bells went off in my mind, something I’d read or heard a long time ago. That asking favors of faeries was never a good thing. Like he might come back and ask for my firstborn child. Or my house. Or any number of things that I cherished.

But none of that mattered at the moment. What mattered was getting Alaina’s baby back.

“Yeah, I’m asking for a favor.” My throat was dry as I said it.

Our gazes met again, and he watched me curiously. My insides squirmed under his keen, green-eyed scrutiny.

He clapped his hands once and rubbed them together
.
“Excellent.”

He then grabbed my hand and the world around me went dark.

I didn’t even have time to text Jordyn that I’d be back as soon as I could.

Chapter 5

“Oh, yeah, I forgot that mortals don’t travel very well. Sorry, Tinkerbell.”

For the second time in just a few hours. I emptied everything in my stomach. Which wasn’t much, considering that Mom’s pork casserole was somewhere by the side of the highway.

I sat back on my haunches and wiped the last of the spittle from my lips. I still felt sick and gross, like I’d been on a fishing boat too long, but that was the least of my worries as I looked around.

My blood ran cold and I couldn’t process what my brain was seeing.

“Where are we?” I whispered.

Robin crossed his arms and nodded his head towards the scene that lay before me. “Tir na nÓg. Remember?”

Oh I remembered. I knew that I was Abigail Murphy, seventeen years old, and I lived in Centerburg, Florida. And I knew that we weren’t on Earth anymore.

We were at the edge of a large cliff, and one quick glance told me that I didn’t want to wander any further towards the edge. Nothingness and clouds lay below.

Impossibly green grass stretched out before us. The color was so brilliant, as if too much blue and teal got mixed up in the color palette when this scenery was painted in. Streams and rivers with blue, almost purple, glittering water spiderwebbed their way through the landscape, ending in waterfalls that cascaded off the side of the cliffs. Dense trees lay about a hundred yards before us, and beyond that, cliffs rose above the forest, dotted with buildings. Above everything was a bluish night sky. Only it wasn’t nighttime. We were in an ethereal, even light.

I even saw a rainbow.

“Oh my god,” I whispered, as I looked over the edge of the horizon.

Earth peeked over the edge, like it was the moon or the sun. It was huge, like some sort of overlord watching us here.

I got to my feet, my legs feeling weak underneath me. “We’re not on Earth anymore?”

“We’re in Tir na nÓg,” Robin repeated. “The Land of the Young. Like you wanted.”

Like that made sense. Because
none
of this was making any sense.

I looked around us, spinning around on my heel. I had to make an effort to stop myself, or else I’d keep spinning. This whole new world was dizzying.

“Are we on an island?” I asked stupidly. It felt like the ground wobbled slightly as I moved. “A floating island?”

“Yeah.”

“You act like I should have already known all this.”

“You were the one who wanted to come here. I even warned you.
Again
.” He quirked a smile at me and cocked his head. “Still want to be here, Tinkerbell?”

I gulped, trying to calm the panic that threatened to explode. Apparently I hadn’t thought this all the way through. I was in a strange land. With a strange, gorgeous faerie boy. Trying to get back Alaina’s baby.

I was in over my head, way over my head, and I was powerless to take care of myself.

Stop it. You’re not powerless.

I had magick now, even if I didn’t know the full extent of it or how to safely use it. I knew that the pixies had gotten their sacrifice, and I knew that I had been powering my nightlight. Not that nightlight powers did a whole lot of good here, but maybe…
maybe…

I held up my hand and willed the magick to my open palm. It was hard, and it felt like I drained myself, trying to focus on that one point in my entire body. At first, nothing happened.

Then finally, a spark erupted and a small, glowing flame appeared, hovering above my hand. I yelped in surprise and lost my concentration. The little fire immediately extinguished.

“Well, I’ll be,” Robin said, appreciatively, breaking into my thoughts. “Tinkerbell is not as helpless as she seems.”

“I have fire magick,” I said, stunned.

“Apparently,” Robin said.

“Fire magick.”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head. “My family has always used earth-based magick. My mom, my sister, my aunt, my grandma…”

“Uh-huh?”

“No one’s ever had fire magick!” I gulped. “This isn’t natural.”

To my surprise, Robin put an arm around my shoulders. “Listen, Tinkerbell. You’re dealing with faeries now. Nothing about this is natural. This is all faerie magick now.”

I held my breath, so I didn’t have to breathe in his sweet, earthy scent. It was tempting. I’d never been this close to such a good-looking guy in my entire life, and here he was helping me and –

Wait a second, this isn’t insta-love is it?

Oh my god, I was turning into one of those mopey teenagers in books, the kind of girl that falls in love with the wrong guy the first time she sees him.

No, you’re not,
I told myself firmly. Just because he was handsome in a sinfully gorgeous way, that didn’t mean I was head over heels in love with him. That would just be stupid on my part. He was here only because he expected something out of me later.

Just thinking about it made me shudder. I twisted away from him.

“Yeah, I know nothing about this is natural,” I said, my voice slightly hoarse. Robin quirked an eyebrow at my change of demeanor, but waited for me to continue. “But that’s why I have you here,” I said, giving him a firm nod.

He gave me a devilish smile that totally did
not
make my heart flutter. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “That’s exactly why you have me here.”

He pushed past me before I could say anything else. I was still in such deep thought that he turned around and looked back at me.

“Coming, Tinkerbell?”

That nickname was really starting to get old.

***

“Where are we going?” I grumbled.

I’d only been following Robin for a half hour and I’d learned one thing already: faerie boy never shuts up. He kept running his mouth, and while the terrain in Tir na nÓg wasn’t especially treacherous, I had to watch my step in order not to step on anything that could have been a faerie.

You’d think it would have been easy to walk through a faerie wood. Everything here was magickal, from the air to the trees to the grass, too much for me to really digest. But I quickly realized that at any given point, a flower could really be a faerie or a rock was actually the shell of a turtle-faerie. I had the scratches on my calves from one such faerie that I had stepped on earlier.

Robin had thought that was hilarious.

It wasn’t.

Now, Robin pointed at a spot ahead of us that I could just barely see peeking through the trees. There was a castle of sorts towards the center of the island, although I couldn’t get a good look at it.

“We’re going to the Spring Court first to see if they’ve seen or heard anything about an unborn human baby in Tir na nÓg. And if they haven’t heard anything, then we go to the Summer Court, and hope that the baby is there.”

“And if the baby isn’t?” I asked breathlessly, fearing the answer. He had somehow gotten so far ahead of me in our walk. I didn’t know how that happened. Time seemed to move at a weird clip here.

Robin stopped and waited for me to catch up at the top of a large rock. The light silhouetted him as he looked down at me, casting him in a soft hazy light that lit up his red hair like fire. I gulped back the lump in my throat as I started scrambling up the rock.

“You’d better hope the baby is in the Spring or Summer Courts,” he told me. He extended a hand. I hesitated for just one moment before grabbing it, and then he hefted me up to the top of the rock, like I weighed nothing.

Our eyes met for the briefest moment before he turned away. I hoped he couldn’t hear my heart pounding.

“Because if the baby isn’t in the Spring or Summer Courts,” he continued, “then it’s in the Autumn or Winter Courts. And we do
not
want to be dealing with their denizens.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re the more…mischievous of the faeries. They dislike humans.”

Well, that was a problem.

“So they’re the bad guys?”

He shrugged. “Not necessarily the bad guys, but they’re dark faeries who live in dark lands. You see, in the Spring and Summer Courts, it’s always beautiful and bright. Autumn is perpetually stuck in early evening, while the Winter Court is stuck in at that point of night when it’s the darkest.” He shuddered.

“So the sun never shines there?” That sounded like a horrible place.

“No. You can imagine how that impacts a faerie’s psyche. They follow different rules. It’s not just good or evil. They just do their own thing. And lots of times, that’s not good for mortals.”

So I crossed my metaphorical fingers that Alaina’s baby was in the Spring or Summer Courts.

“Which court do you belong to?” I asked.

“Pardon?” Now he looked back at me curiously.

“Are you a part of the Spring or Summer Courts?” I hoped he wasn’t in the other ones. He wouldn’t be helping me if he was in the Autumn or Winter ones, right?

Then again, he was only here so I would owe him a favor.

A wicked smile came to his lips. “What do you think, Tinkerbell?”

“I…I have no idea.”

He snickered and kept moving. “The pixies that took your friend’s baby are solitary faeries,” he continued without answering my question.

“Solitary faeries?” I asked, tripping over a root.

“Do you mind?” the face in the tree attached to the root growled at me.

“Sorry,” I mumbled as I cowered away from it. I hurried to catch up with my guide, who didn’t miss a beat.

“Solitary faeries live in the mortal world,” he explained. “In your woods, in your households, in your backyards, pretty much everywhere humans are. But I think they took the baby to win favor with one of the Faerie Courts and rejoin the Faerie world.”

“You mean Tir na nÓg?”

“Yes, Tir na nÓg. I think you just say it because you like those words.” He pushed a branch out of the way for me, a courtesy he hadn’t done up until now.

“Why would that win favor in the Faerie Courts?”

Robin let out a breath. “Because,” he said finally, “some ruling monarchs like to adopt human babies. Take them under their wing. Raise them as a squire or to be treated like a doll. Or even for…
other
reasons. It’s happened before.”

I mentally gagged, because I didn’t want to think of the other reasons. “So the court that wants the baby will accept them into the Court?”

He nodded.

“What’s wrong with being solitary fae? Why do they want to go back to Tir na nÓg?”

He pointed to the Earth hovering on the horizon. It hadn’t moved since we started walking. “Because your world is being corrupted with human pollution, and it is making it harder for fae to live there.”

Though I wasn’t cold, I found myself shivering. I rubbed my arms to try to dispel my unease.

I forgot to recycle every bottle, every sheet of paper. I littered sometimes. I remembered Aunt Margaret lamenting that earth magick was a bit off lately due to climate change.

I just hadn’t thought more into it. And now…

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. Even though it was a far bigger problem than just me, I was at fault for it too. I furiously wiped at my eyes, trying to keep tears from leaking. I was crying a lot tonight, apparently.