Allie & Micah

They crossed the tree line and almost immediately could see the break up ahead where the trees met the shoulder of the road. Allie stayed in the small gap of trees, dividing her attention between hiking over the uneven rocks and roots and keeping a close eye on their surroundings.

Micah was silent for several minutes as he trailed behind her, his thoughts elsewhere. He watched her back as she walked, his eyes moving up to her face when she looked left or right to scan the environment.

This girl he had known for so many years, of whom he could distinctly recall memories at every age and stage, no longer seemed to be so cut and dried. Her appearance was intimately familiar to him, but when he thought about the things he had seen today and realized that Allie shared a world and identity that was completely unknown to him, the effect was jarring and unpleasant. It seemed that their close friendship couldn’t mask the fact that she was hiding secrets well beyond the fact that she was terrified of turning left into traffic, or that she could eat for three people if the food was readily available.

Her face when she turned back to glance at him suddenly seemed to be the visage of an utter stranger.

“Hey, uh…” she started, but was unsure how to continue.

Do I really know her? He thought.

“I know all this has to be really, um — really crazy to process.” She faltered, her pace slowing. “Look, I’m really, really sorry it had to come out this way. There’s a lot I need to tell you.”

“There’s more to confess?” he asked incredulously. His prior thoughts were easily read in his tone.

“All of my secrets are one secret, Micah. If you knew one, you’d have to know them all.”

“Would you have ever even told me, or was the only way to find out when the jig is up and dragons attack?”

She looked ashamed, her eyes averted to the ground as she walked.

“I’m on the run from some dangerous people. It was kind of something I had hoped to leave in the past and never have to revisit,” she responded finally.

“Well, cat’s out of the bag,” he said, taking a deep breath and attempting to sand down the coarsest edges of his upset feelings. “Can you enlighten me as to who I’ve spent twelve years thinking I knew?"

She licked the front of her upper teeth, considering how to address the question. Her pace had picked up again as they kept to the trees and out of sight of the road while still following it to Allie’s house.

“Okay, so Esmere and I are from somewhere...alternate to Earth. It’s not accessible to humans by any means known publicly — it’s not in space, or underground; it is not on land or in an ocean you know. Now, I’m not deGrasse Tyson, so I’m sorry if my explanation is bad,” she confessed. She held up her index fingers side by side for him to see as he took a few quick steps to be by her side. “My world, Sidhe—” she wiggled one finger, “—and your world, the Overworld—” she wiggled the other, “—are two planes that exist parallel to each other, as close as they can get without touching, though many times in our history our planes have touched, were even heavily linked together at some points. Things and beings from Sidhe crossed into the Overworld all the time, and sometimes, but less often, from your world into Sidhe. I’ve noticed since I’ve been here that it seems like almost everything the human race sees as myth and legend were actually from and about Sidhe. The evidence is everywhere in your history — alchemists, religions, ancient stories make reference to my world; there’s endless artistic fascination, and the roots of human language are steeped in ours. Your world is saturated with things from Sidhe."

“When you say myths, you mean things like giants and dragons and—?”

“So much stuff, Micah. I can’t even begin to describe all of it. Humans have mixed up a lot of details along the way, but ridiculous amounts of what your ancestors depicted and recorded really did exist, at least based in some modicum of fact.”

Micah shook his head, trying to organize it all mentally. It was a lot to process.

“So the things you and Jemma used to fight back there were dragons?”

“Yeah, or others call them drakes. For some reason she thought it was a good idea to bring her real drake here, but what I had was just an illusion, crafted to look like my companion I had as a kid, Alestair.”

“You’re gonna hold a straight face and tell me that an illusion tore both of them apart like that?”

“It was a guardian spell, made by an old friend of mine, which can still do damage to protect its ward. I didn’t have to make it because it was attached to me, but controlling it takes a huge amount of effort, which is why I got to taste my breakfast twice. The level of concentration needed to direct it is...draining."

Her lips pursed, and she revised, “Actually, that was a lie. Controlling one does not take that much effort. It’s draining for me because I’m weak. I’m pretty sure at this point a fay toddler could run magical circles around me.”

“You said your drake is called Alestair?”

Her expression was pained.

“Yeah. Drakes and fae can be bound together, like a marriage-companion of sorts, but I severed my bond with Alestair when I left. I couldn’t take him with me.”

“Why did Jemma want to attack you in the first place?”

“That’s slightly complicated. My father was alberich — like a monarch — of Atlantis. Another alberich had my father assassinated, and since I was too young to assume the throne, there was a power vacuum that was taken advantage of. A few members of the royal household that were still loyal to my family smuggled me and Esmere out when it became clear that the other fae intended to permanently prevent me from ever taking over. So Esmere and I fled — not just from Atlantis, but from Sidhe.”

They had reached a smaller road that turned off of the highway, where Allie hooked a right to follow it. Micah saw a corner street sign through the trees that indicated that it was Addersley Lane, which was a scant half mile from Allie’s home.

He jumped a roadside ditch filled with wet, green weeds and followed his friend.

“What will you do now then?”

“Move, I guess. I have to go home, let Essie know, pack up, and leave Colorado. Jemma’s death won’t be the end of this.”

“Why not go back and try to claim the throne? You’re not a child anymore -- why continue as a fugitive?”

“Were you there for the part where I said my magic is shot? Controlling an independent magicept isn’t an insanely complicated task, but what trickle of magical power I had barely covered it.” She stepped over a root carefully, and then paused to appraise their distance from the house before continuing. “—and that was just against some dockalfar nobody. I’ve been in the human world now longer than I was in my own, cut off from everything magic, and never using mine. I couldn’t light a sparkler now, let alone fight again.”

“You can’t regain it somehow? Is it just gone forever?”

Her pace quickened over the soft earth.

“That’s not the point.”

“I mean, it’s your excuse to use,” he pressed. “It just seems like it would be better to go back and fight to the end rather than making your life goal to just keep running.”

She stopped completely, and twisted to look at him. There was a flash in her eyes like emerald lightning, and her cheeks were red with anger.

“I didn’t ask you to judge my course of action.”

“If you can’t take a step back to at least evaluate what I’m saying, I don’t think that’s the real reason you won’t go back. I know you; you’re holding on to something.”

“Fine, yes, good god. You’re right; I don’t want to go to Sidhe because I chose to save my own skin and abandoned my people. I can’t go back and face the consequences of that.”

Her fists clenched and unclenched as she tried to put a lid on the boiling pot of her emotion, but Micah could see the self-loathing that was written on her face, making the scar on her neck white with tension.

“Let’s just go,” she said after several seconds of silence, and she strode toward a break in the trees ahead, through which the grounds around her house were visible.

It was quiet between them, each lost in their own train of thought, until the pair drew close enough to see the house and Allie said, “I hate confrontation. Why do you push like that?” She slowed her stride considerably to look at him.

Micah raised his palms to her in an attempt to demonstrate his peaceful intentions.

“Sometimes you have to face stuff, even if you just want to hide from it forever.” A small but suffusive idea that seemed poignant appeared in his thoughts, and he voiced it. “Hiding from it will never ease that restless itch in your spirit.”

Her eyes dipped to stare at the ground for a second, and she shook her head.

“Yeah,” was her reluctant reply. “You’re right, but I’m not going to unpack that bag right now. First I need to warn Essie and prepare to leave.”

She didn’t move just yet though, and when she looked at him again, he could tell she was genuine when she said, “I’m sorry for how I was acting. I’m scared, and I can’t stomach the thought of facing those fears right now, too.”

“It’s okay; don’t worry about it.” His tone was of casual dismissal, to show that he hadn’t taken her words to heart.

Allie nodded and turned her focus back to the house. They passed near the front of Esmere’s vehicle parked in the driveway.

Micah asked, “So you’re definitely not going back to Sidhe?” Then he immediately cursed himself for the tiny bit of hopeful yearning obvious in his voice, despite his best attempts to hide it.

Allie heard it, too. She whipped toward him.

“Don’t do that. I hear you wanting to go. You’re curious, damn it.”

“How could I not be?” he asked.

The look on her face told him she found the idea ludicrous.

“Look, I think that somehow, despite the dragons and gory deathsplosion, you are still somehow not convinced that this is real. This isn’t a dream, or a movie, or a fantasy novel. If you get mixed up further into this, you will almost definitely die. We are going to need to go our separate ways, and you will need to try to convince Rex to move the hell on out of here.”

“Did you get that idea from a spy movie?” he replied, scowling at her. She looked uncomfortable. “You’re not just gonna witness protection program me and then go out to get killed, yourself.”

“I have to leave, Micah. If I stay, fae will find us and kill us. If you go with me, you’ll die when Esmere and I are eventually found and overpowered. If you are found by them anyway, you have to pretend we never met, or they’ll torture you for my whereabouts, whether you know them or not.”

He looked skeptical.

“I can guarantee you that if I hadn’t been able to get rid of Jemma, after killing or capturing me she would have slaughtered you, too, to tie up loose ends, or maybe even for fun, I don’t know.”

She paused before the front door.

“My point is, I can’t let you come. You have Rex, and a life ahead of you, and I won’t let you share the target on my back.”

“I don’t think you can just make that decision for me, Allie. But… you’re right. I couldn’t leave Rex.”

She didn’t answer, and Micah didn’t mention that the inevitable result of her conclusion was her death. He wondered if she realized that she had mentally resigned herself to it, had already given it up as hopeless.

She had already closed the conversation in her mind, instead focused on patting her jean pockets down for her keys.

“Damn,” she muttered, looking at a loss. “I left my keys back in the jeep. We need to go around the back.”

The walk around the impressive old house was a long one and required a climb and a jump over the elderly, sturdy wooden fence that ran the perimeter of the two-acre property. She hoisted herself up onto its slats.

Vines caught on Allie’s foot as she swung her leg over, and Micah helped her untangle from them and followed her up the wooden wall. Despite being only six or seven feet tall, the jump down was unnerving, and with the light darkening to evening, Micah felt a twinge of unease at the height.

Allie landed on the ground and crossed the walkway leading to the back door, then stooped to lift a flat rock from where it lay snug among its brothers in the winding path. Underneath there was a single small key. Micah jumped as she picked it up, shook off the dirt that clung to it, and walked to the door, unlocked it and slid the little silver key into her pocket as she slipped inside.

“Where’s Esmere?” Micah asked, noting the empty downstairs rooms as he followed her in.

“She might have gone for a run,” Allie replied, glancing around the kitchen and into the attached breakfast nook. She exited the kitchen. “Her car is here, so she’s not out. She’s probably in the area, and she’ll be back soon,” she continued, pulling a large canvas travel-sack from a coat closet in the hall.

She returned to the kitchen with it, and began opening cabinets one after another, muttering yes and no at various things inside, deciding what should be taken. She threw in bottles of water and protein bars, passed over a few items she deemed unsuitable, until she reached one particular cabinet, and Micah saw her fingers quickly clench, hesitating, before she snatched an entire tin of ground coffee from the shelf.

“Coffee? We’re looking for survival items, and you want coffee?” he asked, incredulous, and she shrugged.

“It’s a survival item for me.” She stuffed the tin, and another, into the sack, and might have tried for a third if Micah hadn’t sighed and she gave up, moving from the kitchen to the adjoining living room, which was neat as a pin but equally empty of Esmere.

Allie took a light jacket that had been lying over the back of the impractically-shaped couch and nestled it in the bag.

She proceeded to the wide, carpeted staircase.

Micah followed Allie up the stairs, keeping up with her as she moved through the house quickly. She kicked aside the heavy, ornamental hall rug to reveal a nearly seamless hardwood floor. With her foot she nudged a small ridge in the molding trim along the floor, and a square door in the wood swung up neatly on its hinge to reveal a safe. She knelt and entered a pin code into the keypad on the front.

“I always suspected your family had old money,” Micah admitted, as she pulled open the heavy metal door to reveal boxes of money and jewelry that looked old and expensive.

“How do you think I could afford to get Esmere that ridiculous car for Christmas, or why she never had to get a job?” she replied, palming handfuls of jewelry, pearls, silver, and gold, and stuffing them into a pocket in the travel sack. “Most of this came with us from Sidhe.”

One careless movement caused several rubies the size of grapes to scatter onto the floor, clattering over the wood and rolling away.

She took a breath and said softly, “Alright, slow it down. Haste makes mistakes.” Then she dumped a small box of unfamiliar coins into a pocket in the rucksack; they tumbled into each other with heavy clinks.

Leaving what Micah guessed to still be a small fortune in the safe, she stood and bumped it closed with her shoe, leaving the rug still askew.

She breezed past several rooms to go to her own. Micah passed Esmere’s room more slowly than she had, and a figure inside caught his eye.

The room was lit by the light of the hallway and the light left from the sinking sun was muted into shades of navy by the heavy drapes over the floor-to-ceiling windows. Micah paused and stood in the doorway, trying to figure out what he was looking at.Esmere, identifiable by her tall silhouette, stood completely still in the center of the dark room.

“Allie,” Micah said softly to get her attention, and she turned back out of her doorway to look at him. His tone put her on high alert; she came quickly to his side, but stopped at the threshold, seeing her nanny. Micah felt a chill run through his body and had no desire whatsoever to leave the light of the hallway and enter the abyss of Esmere’s sleeping quarters.

Allie took a step forward, the bag in her hand loose at her side.

“Essie?” she whispered. There was no response or movement, and the following silence caused gooseflesh to break out on Micah’s arms. He felt a powerful impulse to flee.

But Allie took another step forward, going for her nanny’s motionless body and reaching out to touch her shoulder. It was in those few seconds, slowed as realization registered in his brain, that Micah saw the second silhouette by the drapes, nearly undetectable in the shadows. He didn’t call out, didn’t think, only surged forward toward the figure as it lunged at Allie.

She sensed the quick movement and whirled, not fast enough to avoid the dark figure catching her by the shoulder and knocking her to the ground.

Then everything became blurred by adrenaline, happening too quickly for Micah to fully process until afterward.

He was almost knocked off balance by an immense wave of heat, coupled with a blinding light that left him reeling.

Esmere had burst into flames.

Micah stumbled forward and felt heat on his skin as his eyes adjusted to the light. Esmere stood completely still without screaming or struggling, but in the new light, Micah could see her flesh beginning to blacken and peel away to reveal new pink flesh underneath, which blackened in turn, and the air crackled with fire and the sickening smell of seared flesh and hair.

Micah regained his balance and hurtled toward the figure that had pinned Allie. Her attacker was unarmed, but she was having trouble fighting him, put at a substantial disadvantage by their size difference. He had both of her hands trapped in one of his as he reached for her face, as if trying to open her eyes, which she had clamped shut as she struggled underneath him.

Micah tackled and rolled with the stranger, and, finding himself on top, he began to struggle with him, trying to lock down his limbs but quickly realizing that he was far stronger than his thin frame would have implied.

Micah got his first good look at him, illumined by the light of burning nanny: he was sickly pale; his greasy, shaggy hair was matted with sweat; his sharp features were scrunched in desperate effort, and his eyes were covered by a blindfold.

Allie picked up a fire-iron from the empty fireplace and was there just as the attacker threw Micah to the side, who rolled to his feet and away as Allie swung with all the force her upper body could generate, and the poker smashed into the stranger’s face with a crunch like breaking an egg under a quilt. His cheekbone folded in and the hook on the end of the fire iron snagged his nose, tearing it open in a splatter of blood.He fell back and was still for only a few seconds, long enough that Micah heard the choked, wet whistle of air as he tried to breathe through his broken, bloody ruin of a nose. Then he lunged again for Allie, moving so quickly that she was caught off guard and only had time to lift the iron to her chest.

There was a schlick as the stranger impaled himself upon it.

It punched through the front of his chest and almost completely through the back, causing the skin and shirt to tent instead of puncture. He died gasping upon the end and Allie pulled the fireiron from his chest, her face frozen in horror and disgust. There was a wet, slick sound as his body slid off the end of the iron and dropped.

“Oh…” Allie murmured, letting her arms fall to her side and grip loosening on her poker. It dropped to the carpet with a muffled thud, and Allie lifted a hand to her mouth.

Micah took a deep breath and felt his heart beat against his ribs, the details of the world coming back into focus as his body caught up, realizing the threat was gone.

It was growing darker in the room. He turned his eyes to Esmere, and wished he hadn’t.

She was a heap of smoldering, blackened limbs whose embers were quickly dying.

As Micah began dry-heaving, Allie cried out wordlessly, her lips trembling.

She dropped to her knees next to the ash pile and ran her hands through the ashes that were no longer burning, as if she could shape them back into her nanny. Tears welled up in her eyes and fell, mixing with the black soot, so that her hands and arms were soon smeared with a grey paste.

Micah turned away from her wordless pain and closed his eyes.

He waited until her sobs had subsided, and he approached her, not touching her or saying anything.

Her shoulders were still shaking gently, but she wasn’t crying any longer and her hands had stopped moving in the ash; instead they were upturned, motionless, in her lap. There were blisters forming on her hands where the embers had still been hot enough to burn flesh. She took a deep breath and slumped, staring down at her fingers.

“She was all I had left,” she whispered, almost too soft for him to hear, and she looked up at him then, her face streaked with tear trails that reflected the light from the hallway, like snow trails lit by moonlight.

She looked down again at the ashes and her hands clenched.

“Allie,” Micah said, as firmly as he could while still sounding gentle, “We have to get out of here.” He didn’t mention the twinge of hurt that had flickered through him at her words.

He swallowed heavily, trying to clear his head.

Not the time to whine.

She nodded after a few seconds.

“I know.”

It was another minute before she rose, however, and when she did, there were no more tears in her eyes. They were filled with grief, but were also as hard as her clenched jaw. She raised her head and turned her eyes on the body of the pale attacker. Crossing to him, she knelt and began searching his ragged clothing for information.

She determined that he was not dockalfar, but there was little else that appeared unique to her.

Finding nothing in his rags, Allie gritted her teeth and went for his broken face. She pulled the blindfold from his eyes, and then both she and Micah stared down at him. His eyes were pale blue and brighter than a tv screen at night, giving off their own light.

Allie sucked in a sharp breath and put one hand over his eyes, covering them. She muttered something in a foreign language that sounded like a prayer.

“What is it?” Micah asked, going to her side.

“He’s an infrar,” she hissed, closing his eyelids with her fingers.

“What?”

“A Sidhean, like one of the fae, but also not. This one… he was using his vision. That’s why...Esmere. Damn it,” she cursed, her hands balling into fists. “He commanded her to light herself on fire.”

Micah didn’t understand, but she didn’t explain further, rising and walking out of the room, leaving him with the two bodies. She returned a couple minutes later with a pair of flat-nose pliers in hand, turning on the light overhead as she passed it. She sat by the body of the fay once more, and took its head roughly in one hand.

“Do you still want to come with me?”

He didn’t understand, and at his look of confusion, her eyebrows raised.

“To Sidhe,” she clarified, “Do you want to come?”

“I…I hadn’t really let myself settle on it. I still have Rex.” He said as she opened the corpse’s mouth, revealing a set of blackened teeth. “Are you going back?” he asked, slightly surprised.

“I have to now, for Essie. Then I will need help from an old friend to help me disappear again.”

Allie took the pliers and positioned them over one of the fay’s teeth, pinching the handles and giving a twisting yank on the tooth. It left its bloody red nest without much resistance, and Allie flicked the ebony incisor to the carpet.

“Why in the hell are you mutilating the corpse?” Micah said, his stomach turning.

“To take his teeth back to Sidhe. Evidence,” she answered simply, and then with a grunt she proceeded to pull the rest of the dead fay’s teeth. “Plus, I don’t want these teeth to raise questions if forensics attempts to investigate dental records after the fire.”

“The what now?” he said, cringing as he tried to ignore the click of metal pliers against tooth enamel. Four teeth were out now.

“I’m going to burn this house down. I don’t want these bodies to be remotely recognizable. Also, if there’s any trace of you here — possessions, smell, anything — I don’t want it to lead other Sidheans back to your apartment and Rex.”

Neither of them spoke the obvious: Unless they already have that information.

Finally, Allie stood, scooping all the teeth into her ashy hands. The infrar looked almost comical, his mouth open in an obscene, toothless grin.

Allie went to the small half-bath in the hall and flicked on the light with her elbow, throwing the teeth in the sink with a clatter and washing both them and her hands in the water.

She took a small bag from the underside cabinet of the sink and put the teeth in it, and slid that into her pocket to join the house key.

She left the porcelain sink streaked with grey from the ashes on her hands.

She went downstairs while Micah re-gathered the items into the emergency bag that she had dropped. He took it downstairs to her as she grabbed a plain-cover, maroon book from one of the living room endtables. She accepted the bag and stowed the book.

Allie went briefly outside to bring in several canisters of lighter fluid and a gallon of gasoline.

“They’ll probably be able to tell that an accelerant was used, and chalk this up to arson,” she explained as Micah appeared at the top of the stairs, and she opened one of the canisters, “But I have to make sure this whole place burns. If you stay, you’ll want a good alibi.”

She poured a line of fluid from the kitchen counter all the way into the living room, leading to the alcohol cabinet. Micah watched as she doused the cabinet, and then began throwing the lighter fluid on the furniture, using it selectively but ensuring that when lit the entire room would catch. She began moving up the stairs, one hand holding the second canister of lighter fluid, the other clutching the banister tightly.

She came back down when she had finished the majority of the upstairs, then said to Micah, “Can you do me a favor?”

Her eyes pleaded with him, and he consented, knowing full well that he probably wasn’t going to like it.

He was right.

“Please do her room. I can’t look at her again,” she pleaded, handing him the last of the fire accelerant. He sighed with resignation and took it, and made his way back up the stairs and into the bedroom.

He tried not to look at the pile of ashes in the middle of the carpet, nor at the body of the attacker near the fireplace, but in the light of the hallway, the discarded iron poker shone with dark blood, and it caught his eye as he tried to be sparing with the gasoline on the canopied bed.

The fireiron held for him a grim fascination, a reminder of all the things he had already seen that day.

This is a really long dream, if it is, he thought. He wondered briefly if he really had been concussed, or if maybe he had never woken from last night’s car crash.

He gritted his teeth and turned away from the bloody poker and concentrated on his task, skirting the corpse, whose mouth was still open and grinning. Micah shuddered and left the room.

At the bottom of the stairs, he found Allie had finished packing and was instead kneeling in front of the pack, her gaze fixed on a fray in the rug with an expression that matched Micah’s own feelings.

Her eyes met his and then panned around the living room, at the house she and Esmere had shared.

“Okay, this is really happening,” he heard her say softly to herself, and then she steeled herself and stood, bag in hand. She looked as though she wanted to cry. She swung the pack over her shoulders and took a deep breath. She went to the kitchen and began turning on all the gas burners on the old-fashioned stove without letting them light, and then opened the water heater closet.

“You might want to go outside,” she suggested, but Micah stayed to watch her turn the gas on and leave it.

“C’mon.”

They exited through the front door, and she handed him the bag as she turned back to the open doorway, a small book of matches in her hand.

Before removing one from the box, she ducked at the edge of the garden bed, where she picked a few purplish flowers from among many and then delicately placed them in a front pocket of the pack.

“I always hated these, but Essie loved them. Calypso orchids — fairy slippers, they’re called — and she thought it was so cute.”

She stood and hesitated just a moment, then broke a match out and skimmed it across the cover. The tiny, dancing flame reflected in her eyes held huge significance — the potential destruction of her house, of her home, the end of her familiar life. She gazed at it a fraction of a second longer before she flicked it into the living room.

It landed on carpet that had no accelerant, but it quickly spread along the old, dry fibers to a section that did, and the flames flared up in snakey rivers along the whole room. He thought of how they had spent many afternoons and evenings in this house as kids, their feet wearing away the carpet that was now going up in flames.

Micah saw it begin traveling up the stairs, while another trail made its way to the kitchen, and another to the alcohol cabinet. It seemed surreal to him that the memories of Allie’s house were soon to be the only remainders of its undamaged physical form.

Allie pulled him away from the door and began a little half-jog toward the edge of the lawn, not turning to look until they were on top of a hill a safe distance from the house.

She flinched a little when the fire finally reached the kitchen and the gas cloud that had been building there, and the back of the house exploded, shattering the kitchen windows. Micah saw flames beginning to lick the upstairs windows, and Allie’s shoulders slumped as she turned away from what would soon be a pillar of flame.

“I was wrong when I said Essie was all I had, you know,” she said quietly, and Micah had to lean closer to pick up what she said. “You’re still here, god knows why, after all this. But I’m glad you are.”

She didn’t seem to be able to look at him.

Micah didn’t know what to say. His emotions were still tumultuous and unresolved, a mire of confusion and bitter ire.

“Okay, the fairy ring is in the shed in the back of the grounds,” were her next words, and the pressure to respond was gone.