Barry. Jeremy went with them.”
Barry. Leena had almost forgotten. “They’ll be taking him up to the hospital. I need to go. Will Arianrhod be okay, Culhwch? You’ll take care of her?”
Dr. Berne looked up at her from where he was kneeling next to Annie’s chair and nodded. “Yes, my dear. I expect it’s just all this excitement we’ve been having this week, but I’ll stay will her, and monitor them both tonight to be certain.”
“Thank you, old friend.” She nodded and then turned and said, “Shanachie? Shanachie, I need my car.”
“Your car?” Mrs. Wallace gasped. “Leena, you don’t have a car. You don’t even have a driver’s license!”
Leena paused. That was right, of course. She had only just recently turned sixteen and hadn’t taken the driving test yet. But for one disorienting moment she had been certain she owned a car. The river of memories swelled up and threatened to engulf her again.
Mr. Shanachie was there, solid and reassuring. “Don’t fret, Your Highness. It’s always like this at first. You’ll get yourself straightened out soon enough. And you can take my truck. It’s parked around back. I’ll get the keys.” He limped off toward the bar.
“He’s going to let you take his truck?” Caitlin said, sounding impressed. “Can I come?”
“Leena, you can’t drive Mr. Shanachie’s truck!” their mother snapped.
Leena felt a momentary pang of sympathy for her mother. Aileen Wallace had spent sixteen years preparing her oldest daughter for a destiny she could not even begin to understand and now it had happened.
“Mother, I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll explain everything tomorrow,” Leena said. Then she reached out and gently touched her mother’s cheek.
Mrs. Wallace opened her mouth as though to speak, but no words came out. Her eyes widened briefly in surprise and then her mouth snapped shut and she folded gently onto the floor.
“What did you do?” asked Caitlin as she came to stand next to her sister. They both looked down at their mother, lying in a heap on the pub floor.
“She’s fine. Just sleeping. She’ll wake up in a couple of hours. Shanachie, will you see that she gets home?”
“Of course, Your Highness. And here are the keys to my truck,” he said as he came around from behind the bar. He held out a set of keys.
Leena took the keys and started toward the door. People scrambled to get out of the way. She ignored everyone until she came face to face with Kira Nichols.
The freshman girl was much shorter than Leena and looked up at her with an expression of wide-eyed astonishment.
As Leena returned the girl’s gaze, she felt herself growing angry again. But this time she remembered why she was angry. “You!” she snapped. “Why did you come back here? What were you thinking?”
Kira blinked in surprise and stuttered, “I...I don’t know what you mean!”
“Of course you don’t,” Leena snorted. “Just like Aidan. Always playing the fool. You even look like him, you know. Same eyes. Your cursed family is always stumbling in where they don’t belong. You just stay away from me and that door, do you hear? You’ve caused enough problems as it is.”
With that, Leena swept out of the door.
There was only one truck parked in the small lot behind the pub. Leena opened the doors and climbed in. Caitlin, who had followed her out, opened the passenger’s side door and then hesitated. “It’s a stick. You’ve never driven a stick shift before,” she said.
“Yes, I have,” Leena said firmly as she buckled her seatbelt.
Caitlin hesitated a moment longer, but then shrugged and got in. As Leena started the truck and pulled out onto the main road, Caitlin said, “So...it’s true, isn’t it? All those stories from The Annals of the Blessed. It really is fairyland on the other side of the door, isn’t it?”
Leena glanced over at her twin for a moment and then focused on the road. She had driven a stick shift before, although she couldn’t remember exactly when. “Yes, it’s true, although I’ve never liked the term fairyland. It sounds so...childish. Like a cartoon. It’s not a like a cartoon. It’s actually quite dangerous there. Especially now.” She sighed as she rounded a corner, her hand deftly shifting gears while her brain struggled to remember how she knew what to do. “It used to be lovely there. I miss it.”
There was silence in the cab as Caitlin digested this. When she did speak, Leena’s sister sounded strange. “One of the stories in the Annals talks about a queen who dies and is reborn over and over again. Reincarnation, I guess. That’s you, isn’t it? You’re the Fairy Queen.”
Leena laughed. She couldn’t help it. After everything that had happened that night, all the strangeness and all the changes in herself that she was still grappling to understand, that sounded so ridiculous.
Caitlin laughed too. They laughed until Leena pulled into the hospital parking lot and the truck’s engine rumbled into silence. Leena pulled out the key and turned to face her sister. “I was never the Queen. That’s someone else. She’s not very nice. I was just...there, I guess. One lifetime after another, I was there to watch over my home and protect my people. They used to call me the Lady. Here I’m just...me.”
“Are we really sisters?” Caitlin asked.
“Yes. It’s all very hard to explain, but we are sisters. When I...die, my body really does die. Then everything else—my thoughts, my memories, my soul I guess you could say—is born again in a new body. You and I are biologically identical twins. If you looked at our DNA, it would look the same. I just happen to remember being a whole lot of other people as well,” Leena said. “Look, can we talk about this later? It’s hard to explain and I have something I have to do right now.”
“Barry,” Caitlin said. “Will he be all right?”
Leena hesitated and for a moment she looked smaller somehow, more like herself than she had done since the Giant first spoke to her. “I hope so. Like I said, the Otherworld, which is what you would call fairyland, isn’t a very nice place right now. There was a war. The Queen that I mentioned...She’s not very nice. She was making everything like a nightmare for my people. I knew that she wouldn’t stop unless she thought that she had won, so I left. There wasn’t anything else I could do. I left and I came here. I hid all the doors into this world. I did everything I could to make sure that none of them was ever opened again. I put so many protection spells on the one up at the school that I don’t know what exactly happened to Barry when he tried to go through. I’ll do what I can, but I’m just not sure. There’s not much magic in this world and I used up most of what I brought with me when I hid the doors.”
Leena and Caitlin stood on either side of the hospital bed, looking down at Barry’s sleeping form. He was breathing on his own, but was hooked up to several monitors and an IV. His mother had told them that the doctors were saying he was in a coma. Leena knew that wasn’t it exactly, but she didn’t know what to do about it. She had told Caitlin the truth when she said she didn’t have much magic in this world. She remembered, in a vague kind of way, having a great deal of magic, of being able to heal with the touch of her hand. But now the tiny spell she had used to put her mother to sleep was about all she could manage and she didn’t even know how she had done that.
She sat on the edge of the bed and held Barry’s hand.
“He really doesn’t have any fairy blood in him at all. Mom was right about that. He’s not from one of the old fae families,” she said.
“Does that matter?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not to me, but it’s why he couldn’t go through the door. I put extra spells up to prevent any humans from accidentally going through. The Queen doesn’t treat visitors very well. If any of the doors were ever opened, I wanted to make sure that no one from this world would be in danger. That’s why he sort of bounced back when he tried to go through.”
“Was the magic supposed to put him to sleep like this?” Caitlin asked.
“Well, it’s always tricky when more than one spell
is working at the same time. It’s hard to know exactly what will happen. And there were a lot of spells on that door. I don’t remember ever putting in a sleeping spell, although I suppose I might have...”
“Can’t you just...undo the magic?”
“It’s not that easy. Like I said, I don’t even know exactly why he’s asleep and I don’t have much power here. If I start messing around with things, I could just make it worse.”
They were silent for several minutes and then Caitlin suggested, “You could try kissing him.”
“What?” Leena looked up at her sister in surprise.
Grinning, Caitlin shrugged. “Well, you’re a fairy, right? He’s in some kind of magic sleep, like in a fairytale. Maybe a kiss can wake him up.”
“Those are just stories,” Leena said, but she laughed a little. “Kisses don’t really break spells.”
But when Caitlin tactfully left a few minutes later to give her some time alone with Barry, Leena tried it. She remembered how she had so carefully put on lip gloss in the pub earlier that night, how she had looked at her split reflection in the broken mirror and thought about being someone different. She remembered blushing as she had thought about kissing Barry. Well, this wasn’t exactly how she had imagined it, but it was worth a try. After making sure that the door was closed, Leena leaned over and pressed her lips against Barry’s for a moment.
As first kisses