I no longer believed I’d died. Now, I was just hoping I hadn’t cracked my skull and was in a padded cell somewhere, locked in this hazy fairy-tale-esque limbo. As I ran, I thought about my brother, who I loved to pieces and teased just because it was a sister’s right to do so. I thought about my nephew, who meant the absolute world to me and who I hoped was okay and not worried about me.
What must they be thinking right now? One second I’d been there with them, defending a perfect stranger. The next, I was gone to God only knows where with said stranger as my only ally. And it sucked the big one.
I’d seen Beauty and the Beast. The honest to God Beauty and the Beast. I’d known it the second I’d spotted them. I was as sure of that as I was of the sun rising tomorrow morning or the wind whispering through the trees.
Gerard hadn’t had to confirm it for me, either, because the second I’d seen them, that deep, dark place inside of me exploded with hazy images of seeing them before, just as miserable and catty as they’d been today.
But in my weird memory, Gerard and I had laughed about it, bonded by the truth so very few on Earth knew.
Blinking, I slowed my pace until finally I stopped running altogether. I held on to the thick trunk of a tree as I stared unseeing at what was before me, recalling with near perfect clarity another memory.
Fairy tales were real and nothing at all like the stories of Earth.
“Kingdom!”
Click.
He’d told me that. Back at the pond. But it had meant nothing to me then, I’d thought Gerard had been teasing me. Poking fun at the stupid American, he hadn’t though. Kingdom was real and I was in it.
I screamed and then gasped as a flock of birds were startled from their hiding places in the tall grass. I looked around, feeling as though someone had just knocked the wind right out of my sails. My heart thundered like the hooves of wild horses, and my mouth tasted like cotton.
I stood beside a dirt road. When had I run out of the hamlet? I’d been lost to the thoughts in my head and hadn’t paid attention to anything, it seemed.
I was in the woods, surrounded by pine trees of unusual shape and size. Some were squat and fat, others were big and boxy, and some even looked tall and triangular. A dirt trail led to the only building in the entire area, a tiny thatch-roofed hut with a curl of smoke winding like a snake out the chimneystack on top.
I bit my bottom lip and frowned. Where the hell was I? I swallowed hard. Why had I run?
“God, you’re an idiot, Betty,” I growled because, darn it, I was so not a Mary Sue. I did not just run into trouble because I’d been an idiot and too stupid to live. Men did not rattle me. I was an independent, thinking woman with guts and a heart and a one hundred and thirty-two IQ. I was too smart to be so stupid.
I looked around. I didn’t see the hamlet at all. I had no idea which direction I’d stumbled in from. I was a fast runner, but geez... if I didn’t know better, I’d swear I’d stumbled into a completely different realm. Now that I was remembering Kingdom the world of fairy tales was returning to me. Kingdom was comprised of hundreds, maybe even thousands of realms where all of the fairy tales I’d ever read or heard about breathed and lived.
“Oy! You lost, git?”
Twirling at the welcome scratchy tenor of an elderly woman, I nearly wilted with relief when I saw her walking toward me.
She had the type of arthritic shuffle my own grandmother had had near the end. Her skin was a soft, almost glimmering shade of ivory that was very delicate and pretty. Her hair was salt-and-pepper gray, and she moved half bent over with a brown shawl wrapped around her scrawny shoulders.
I debated whether to stay put or leave, but didn’t move an inch as I watched her walk painfully toward me. There was something about her face... something... familiar.
I shook my head. Not again.
I was transfixed, like a meerkat watching a hawk zoom down on me. But her smile was welcoming and friendly, putting me instantly at ease.
When she got to within a few hundred yards of me, I made my decision and sprinted over to her, grasping her by the elbow.
Zap.
Grabbing her arm was like touching a live wire, the same thing that had happened with Gerard.
A tiny cry of shock spilled off my tongue. But the old woman just chuckled.
“Betty Caron, you don’t remember me yet. But you will. You will.”
“How do you—”
Her soft hand framed my face, and my lashes fluttered as an overwhelming feeling of safety and warmth flooded me, again bringing tears to my eyes, but this time they weren’t tears of fear and heartache, but of relief and the joy of finding a long lost friend you hadn’t known you’d lost until just now.
“Who are you?” I asked in a hushed tone.
She smiled broadly, revealing two missing front teeth. “A friend, dear. The very truest kind there is. I come to you in the guise you first knew me as...long ago. I cannot make you come with me, but I promise if you do, I’ll show you wonders you could hardly fathom.”
My heart beat in my throat, I tasted my pulse on the back of my tongue, and I nodded. She knew. She knew it all.
“Show me. Show me everything.”
Chapter 13
Danika
“Look into my eyes, lass. Look into my eyes, and just breathe. Breathe, forget about everything, and let be.”
I had my hands on her face, framing her cheeks gently as my thumbs brushed along her petal-soft cheekbones. Tactile magic was some of the strongest magic in my arsenal. It created a tether of sorts, making me better able to pierce through her conscious mind into her subconscious where all the memories of her past life were stored.
She looked confused and my heart lurched to see her in this manner. I remembered the Betty of before—expressive and smiling and so bloody brilliant of mind that she’d left me marveling in wonder.
This Betty was far more guarded, a little spitfire of claws and teeth, but beneath the prickly exterior was that same beautiful soul, the one that saw beauty and magic in everything. The one who’d believed in a land the polar opposite of her own far quicker than any other of the Bad Five’s mates.
That woman was still in there. I could see her, the shadowy, yet brilliant image of her burning through molten brown eyes. Betty wanted to believe. She sensed something not right, sensed all wasn’t as it should be. It was why she’d come with me in the first place. She was able to hear the still, small voice deep within that so few dared to heed without believing themselves mad.
“Good, girl,” I said when I felt the tension begin to ebb out of her like a slow rolling tide.
We stood in the center of an abandoned hut, sheltered from the outside world, alone, where she could relax, quiet her mind, and pierce through the veil of dark magic that’d caused her to forget a life in which she’d once known the very deepest and truest kind of magic there was.
True love.
When I felt her riotous thoughts begin to slow and quiet, I gently probed at her mind. I’d done this very thing with Hatter. I’d been able to open his mind to Alice’s true meaning to him.
But as I began to sift through the many layers of Betty’s mind, I encountered mental road blocks, tough impenetrable walls of fortified steel that hindered my forward progress. Beads of sweat popped out along my brow line as I waged an internal battle to rip through her shields.
What was this magic? Any incremental bit of progress I made felt like scaling a mountain, leaving me dizzy, cold, and growing ever more mentally drained. It was like trying to run through quicksand to reach the root of who she was.
After what felt like hours, I’d barely made any headway. I wasn’t even halfway through the barrier when I felt my magic begin to wane. I needed to rest, but Betty needed her memories back more. I stared at the metaphysical blockade, the hope of overcoming it dwindling.
“This is hopeless,” she whispered, echoing my thoughts, eyes screwed tightly shut as she, too, sweated and trembled before
me.
I had one of two choices—push on, quite possibly destroying parts of her consciousness in the process and maybe even erasing memories from this timeline, or stop.
I must have hesitated long enough that she grasped my intent without my having to say a word because she suddenly wrapped her fingers around my wrist. “Please don’t stop. Whatever this is, whoever you are, please don’t stop. I don’t care what it does or how much it will hurt.”
My lips twitched, but my heart hurt. It was good to hear Betty’s passion again. This was the woman I knew, the one with a heart like a lion’s, who would wage war against a fairy council if need be to save the man she loved. But it hurt me to know just how lost she was.
“Betty, I could kill you. I’ve never encountered a mental defense as strong as yours.”
A sound somewhere between a growl and an exasperated laugh spilled off her tongue. “Kelly always did call me stubborn.”
“Your brother is right, as he usually is. Good man.”
She went absolutely still, eyes opening and staring at me with something wild and haunted. “You know my brother? You know Kelly?”
I nodded. “I know them all, lass. Even Briley. You belong here, Betty, in Kingdom. And so do they. I want so badly to show you your life before with Gerard, the love you once shared. You saved him then. But I can’t hurt you, lass. Not even if you beg me to.”
“You could tell me the stories.”
I snorted, my grip on her face easing up a little. “Of course I could. But I know you and the way your mind thinks. You’d wonder if I’d told you the whole truth. You’d wonder if there was more. You’d always wonder and question, and eventually, that kind of wondering can poison a mind, make one wary and unsure. That is not how things are supposed to be between you and Gerard.”
Her nostrils flared. “I knew I wasn’t crazy. I’ve felt a connection to him from the second he saved me at the pond.”
A corner of my mouth lifted in a half grin. “Aye, and no doubt he feels it for you, too, lass. But you have found Gerard at the very worst moment of his life. There is a woman, Belle. In this life and in the other, she wounded him deeply.”
She swallowed hard. “As in ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Belle?”
I nodded. “The one and only. You see, girl, this world is where all your fairy tales come from, but your stories are never entirely accurate. The authors of the books have taken... well”—I shrugged—“let us call it liberties, now and then. Gerard is who you would have known as—”
She sucked in a sharp breath. “Gaston! I’m crushing on that awful, boorish—”
I tsked, gripped her hands, and gave them a firm shake to get her to quiet down. “As I said, Betty, what you think you know of our world is nothing at all like the truth. Gerard was a good man, a very, very good one, with a kind heart and the looks of an angel. He loved Belle with his whole heart, but she is not the Belle of your stories. Her heart is... complicated.” I sighed.
She bit her bottom lip. “What happened to him? I need to see it. I need to know.”
Nodding, I decided to step back and give Betty some of the details she was missing. “My name is Danika. I am your fairy godmother and his.” I rolled my wrist with a sad sort of smile.
She blinked. “My what? Like the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio kind of fairy godmother?”
She sounded a wee bit in shock. Not that I could blame her. I nodded.
“Something like her, though nowhere near as vanilla. Look, Kingdom is suffering from a curse that has thrown us into a different timeline, one where many happily ever afters never happened. I’m trying to help you and Gerard find yours again, but the truth is that Gerard hasn’t much time. In the other timeline, you found him after his misdeeds. He’d been cursed by the Blue and given a death sentence unless he learned to truly love. And he did, Betty. He loved you dearly. But you have been thrust into this timeline right at the crossroads of Gerard’s downfall. And I’m scared for him, scared that if he doesn’t remember soon, not only will history repeat itself, but this time, you will not be there to save him.”
“What do I do?”
“Make him remember you. Somehow.”
Her eyes went wide, and an irritated look flashed across her face. “But how? I can’t even remember. I get snatches of things that feel an awful lot like a memory, but it’s not enough. Why can’t you just give him the memories like you tried to give me?”
“I already did. I’ve visited all the Bad Five, and the only one I could help was the Mad Hatter.”
She blinked and mouthed “mad hatter” like she couldn’t even begin to fathom his being a reality. I almost chuckled at that.
“Everyone else has been a roadblock of walls and mental obstacles to me, just like you. I fear it’s the curse continuing to wreak havoc. I only wish I knew why.”
“Danika, how far did you get into my mind? Is it farther than you did with Gerard?”
“Much.” I nodded. “But even then, it wasn’t a lot.”
She inhaled. “If you tried to show me Gerard’s story anyway, even though you’re not far into my mind, might I remember something? Anything? Even if it’s only fragments?”
I pursed my lips, thinking. It could work. She wouldn’t have everything, but possibly she could get just enough to develop a framework of the past. “It would be like peering through Swiss cheese, but yes, you might remember snatches. Would you like to try?”
She nodded. “Yes. Give me whatever you’ve got, and then when we’re done, you’re going to tell me everything about this curse.”
I’d never told Betty this in the other life, but I’d always enjoyed the way her brilliant mind worked. There was an intangible, calming presence to Betty. I couldn’t explain it, but her belief in me had always helped me to perform wonders and miracles for her I’d never been able to for another person.
Maybe she had a magic all her own. I was sure I’d never know. All I knew was, if Betty thought I could do this, then I could do this. Slipping off the shawl, I nodded at her, gripped her chin, and said, “This may hurt, love.”
“I don’t care. Give it to me.”
And I did. I gave her all I could.
Chapter 14
Gerard
I sat on the edge of the hayloft, staring at the glowing lights of my tiny hamlet. I’d lost Betty hours ago, and though I knew I should feel a sense of relief for it, I didn’t. At all.
The truth was that I felt empty, dark, and alone.
I’d gone to the tavern, trying to drink the demons away, trying to lose myself in the intoxication of brew. I hoped Brigitte might be there and give me some pearls of wisdom to cling to. But she’d not been.
So I drank and drank some more. After my fourth or fifth tankard of ale—I completely lost count at that point—I began to feel halfway rationale again, began to forget about Belle’s duplicity and Betty’s large, tragic eyes that had hypnotized me from the very second I’d spotted her tootling about the pier.
And then Belle and Adam entered the tavern, and that festering pit in my stomach that’d started to shrink the more I thought of Betty suddenly flared to desperate life, making me feel reckless and stupid and incensed at the injustice of love.
I’d given Belle my whole heart, had put up with the taunts and jeers of my troops who called me weak and addlepated for refusing to indulge in the caresses of others because I was loyal to Belle from the very first second we met. What a fool she made of me. And what an arse I was, refusing to see the truth that was so damned evident if I hadn’t been willfully blinded by my own faith and trust in a woman who did not actually exist.
Before I’d thought about what I was going to do, I was up and walking toward them.
Belle had spotted me, and my chest had heaved when I saw her wearing the damned wolf pendant I’d given her what now felt like a lifetime ago.
“Gerard!” she squealed in surprise, clasping her hands together in front of her chest and smiling warily, as though she suspected what I was g
oing to do before I even knew myself.
I ignored her completely. Instead, I marched past her, whirled Adam around, and rearing back, slammed my fist so hard into his nose that I not only heard his bones break, but I felt something shatter in mine.
Anger kept me from screaming. I barely even felt the pain, at first. Adam, being a large oaf of a man himself, fought like the devil once he got over his shock.
I spit, still tasting the zing of metal on my tongue from the blood he’d drawn when his fist had forced my back teeth deep into the soft flesh of my cheek.
The lights of the hamlet winked and twinkled with the soft golden glow of firelight, but also the zip and glide of fairy godmothers granting wishes, as they so often did during the night.
The knuckles of my right hand were a mangled, bloody mess. My left eye was starting to swell, and it hurt to smile. But it was my heart that felt worst of all. Hurting Adam hadn’t stopped the pain. It’d only made it stronger, fiercer. Like a ravening lion, it was consuming me.
I squeezed my one good eye shut, feeling lost, hopeless, and so very alone. Brigitte would stay with me if I asked her to. But she had her own life, and besides, it was not her company I wished, but rather that of a vexing pigêon with hair like the plumage of an exotic bird’s and the wit of a catty shrew.
“Penny for your thoughts.”
I heard the voice, but I was sure I’d imagined it. That was Betty, no doubt in mind. There was a trace of an accent unique to her world and not found in my own, something husky and naturally lilting, intoxicating to my ears. It made my troubled heart twist and turn upon itself with anticipation, and if I was honest, a touch of fear.
I did not turn around, too afraid that her voice was just a cruel trick of my own mind that desperately needed to see a friendly face right now.
“Gerard, look at me.”
Heat zipped up my throat. My good eye—bloody traitor that it was—began to shimmer with wetness, and just as before, I was moving before my brain had time to rationalize how Betty, a woman of Earth, who’d never known a day in Kingdom, could have found my childhood hiding spot or how she could have known I’d be here. I’d told no one where I was going.