Flame and Starlight by Dana Isaly

Chapter Two

Until you are tipsy in a bathroom with one of your best friends, you don’t really understand how much you can really love someone. Ashley was the friend who was always happy to see you, always happy for anything you accomplished. She had your back and was fierce for the people she loved.

She held my hand tightly as we squeezed down the skinny stairs, careful to not let me lose my balance. She continued to hold my hand as we snaked through the tables and people to get back to the front of the bar and around the corner to the big bathroom. As we passed the bar, I searched for Aoife but couldn’t find her. That’s weird,I thought to myself. Ash tugged me, opened the bathroom door, and ran her hand down the back of my hair to lead me in.

“You can go first,” she said as she locked the door and made her way over to the sink and mirror. Her hands ran through her chestnut hair, snagging on windswept tangles. She groaned and dug through her bag for a brush. “I just wish,” she started as she pulled it out, “that you two could just figure out whatever the hell it is you have going on.”

I rolled my eyes, not wanting to talk about this right now. I stood up and adjusted my dress. A gust of cold air fluttered across the floor from under the door. I shivered.

“Let’s not talk about it right now. I’ll keep these stupid hands to myself the rest of the night.” I looked up at her, and she was staring at herself in the mirror, lipstick hovering over the middle of her bottom lip. “Ash?” Gooseflesh rose up all over my body. She didn’t move. “Ashley,” I said a bit louder and took a step towards her. That feeling of unease tiptoed up over my shoulder and snaked its way through my hair. I slowly took a few more steps over to her until I was a hand’s width away from her. She wasn’t even blinking.

What the hell is wrong with her?

My mouth was suddenly dry; my tongue felt swollen and stuck.

I lifted my left hand slowly up to hers to try and get her attention and pull the lipstick away from her face. So quickly I could barely see her move, her other hand grabbed a fistful of my hair and slammed my head into the mirror. Blinding, white-hot pain seared through my scalp. As if in slow motion, stunned, my head bounced off the now cracked mirror and hit the side cast-iron sink as my legs gave out beneath me. Then I was on the floor, blackness filling the sides of my vision. I saw her feet turn towards the door, and the lock slicked open. The door opened just wide enough for a pair of boots to squeeze in, and then it was shut again.

“What a good girl you were, Ashley,” a deep voice purred. “You may leave now. Give a good excuse as to why your friend here won’t be joining you tonight.”

My heart was thrumming in my chest so violently I felt like I was going to be sick. There was a roaring in my ears, and my breaths came in and out through my nose too quickly, too shallow. I was hyperventilating. I blinked. The blackness on the sides of my vision slowly crept in further. Without a sound, Ashley left. I heard a pitiful noise escape my lips.

“Oh, little duck,” said the man as he squatted next to me. The English pet name rolled off his lips a little too easily. “I apologize for that, but I needed you subdued.” Cloudy black hair framed his out-of-focus face. He pushed some of my hair away from my eyes. “Let’s get you off this dirty floor, shall we?”

His face barely came into focus before he swung me up and over his shoulder. The swift motion sent my stomach rolling and my head spinning. I could feel warm blood trickle into my hair. The bathroom door opened, and he carried me out into the bar, towards the door. Everyone was staring, whispering about how drunk I must be.

Can they not see I’m bleeding?

And then Aoife’s fountain of hair was at the bar, her back towards me.

“Aoife,” I thought I whispered.

And then…black.

* * *

I remembered my mom always told me that my anxiety, no matter how hard it was to deal with, would actually keep me safe. It would keep my walls up, my senses sharp. Anytime I would get upset about how hard it was to go places on my own or meet new people or try new things, she would wrap me up in her arms and kiss my hair.

“It can be such a blessing in disguise, Alys. Every time you enter a room, you are aware. That keeps you safe. Think of it that way.” Her thumbs would gently wipe my tears away.

I got too comfortable. That was why this happened. I was in a very crowded public space with no anxiety. Alcohol had me unobservant. Tom had me distracted. I wasn’t aware of everyone in the room, and I didn’t think it was necessary to know my exits. I thought I was safe.

I kept slipping in and out of consciousness. At one point, he slid me off his shoulder and cradled me in his arms like a small child. I managed to open my eyes, and we were still walking, my head slightly bobbing against his shoulder. No one was paying any attention to us. I willed my body to move, my mouth to open, but my brain couldn’t communicate with it. My head lulled back into blackness again.

He wasn’t even out of breath when I jerked back awake and my body gave a little kick. He glanced down, and his grip on me tightened like he thought I might try to escape. But that movement was involuntary, and I couldn’t do more than that before my eyes met his blue ones and my brain slid back into darkness.

“Can you stand?” I heard him asking.

I realized as I groggily came back to Earth that my feet were on the ground, but my legs were definitely not holding me up. My entire body weight was like a limp noodle pressed into him, my head barely even reaching his shoulder, even though I had heels on. His left arm was wrapped around my back, his right hand not so gently slapping me awake.

I leaned away from him and grabbed onto a cement wall behind me. He still held me up as I tried to take in my surroundings. I blinked away the blackness threatening my vision again. Nothing in my life had ever prepared me for this. We were still in the city but just far enough out to where it was quiet enough to hear the current of the river below us. My heart dropped through my body.

I pushed off the cement wall, now realizing that it was actually just a very short barrier between myself and the river. The river that so many drunken university kids had fallen into and lost their lives. I pushed myself back into him unconsciously and whimpered.

“No, no, no,” I said under my breath. I immediately knew he planned to throw me over this bridge. I didn’t know if it was my thalassophobia or the concussion I surely had, but I clung to him like he was my only salvation. “Please don’t throw me in there,” I whimpered as I looked into his eyes.

Look in his eyes. Make him realize you are a real person.

“So dramatic, sweetheart. I will not be throwing you in the river.” Relief washed over my entire body. “We will be jumping in together.” It was his turn to stare into my eyes. “I am going to sit up onto this little wall here, and then I will lift you up and we will go in together.”

He must be out of his fucking mind.

“You must be out of your fucking mind.”

I started to cry out of sheer panic. He sat on the wall and tugged hard on my arm to bring me to him. His fingertips dug into my flesh, and it was the only thing keeping me from fainting. “Alyssandra, you will not die. We are not technically going in the river.” I blinked at my full name. Not many people knew it was anything other than Alys.

What did he mean we weren’t technically going into the river? My eyes darted from him to the river. My breaths were fast and shallow, and I could see stars forming in my vision when I blinked away the constant flow of tears. “Please,” I said and tried to take a step away, but his hand only grasped harder.

“Little duck,” he said with his other hand suddenly grabbing my jaw and forcing me to look at him. “Shut. Up.” He lifted me with inhuman speed, and then we were falling. A scream caught in my throat as I felt the ice-cold water envelop my body and flood into my open mouth. I coughed and gripped him around his neck so hard I thought I might choke him to death if the river didn’t kill us first. The water in my mouth tasted of dirt and debris. I sucked in water through my nose and involuntarily coughed. I started to kick violently to get us back to the surface while my lungs screamed that they needed air.

“Ow! Dammit, Alyssandra, stop!” I opened my eyes at his voice, and we weren’t in the river. I gasped so deeply that a strange groan escaped my throat. We were standing. Well, he was standing. I was clinging to his neck and hanging from him while kicking like a toddler throwing a tantrum. He reached up and peeled my arms off his neck. I dropped to the ground, my legs refusing to hold me upright. He swore and bent over to rub his shins.

“Was the kicking absolutely necessary?”

I looked around, and my brain couldn’t—wouldn’t—process what had happened. We had fallen into a river, but where were we now? I pushed up on all fours, still looking around. All I could see were trees. A scream was bubbling up in my throat; I could feel it.

Oh wait. No. That’s vomit.

I grabbed my hair as best I could with one hand, noticing it was somehow dry, and emptied my stomach onto the green forest floor. I heard him sigh as he stood over me and grabbed all my hair in his fist. I tried to take a breath, but the taste of alcohol and river water had me retching again. I spat and crawled away as he released my hair.

“Where are we?” My throat was raw from being sick, so it came out as more of a whisper. I took in my surroundings. Just miles and miles of evergreens. What had happened? My mind was racing through all the books I had read since I was a kid and all the stories my mom had told me. Fantasies filled with magick portals and hidden other-realms teeming with magickal beings. Was that what had happened here? My mind was adamant that that could most definitely not be the case. But at the same time, it couldn’t come up with another reason, another excuse as to how not even five minutes ago I was sitting on a bridge falling into a river, and now I was in the middle of a forest.

The stranger squatted down in front of me, and it was the first time I got a really good look at him. His hair was so black in this moonlight it almost looked blue, and it grazed his thick eyebrows. His eyes were a pale blue, nearly grey, and sat atop strong cheekbones and full lips. His jaw was strong and sharp, and a nerve twitched there as he looked me over as well.

He had tattoos that ran down the thick column of his neck and disappeared below the collar of his shirt only to poke out again on his defined arms. And then it dawned on me. This was the same man I had run into, literally, earlier in the coffee shop. But now he was almost glowing. He had a very light dusting of pale blues and silvers over every inch of skin I could see. So faint that I had to squint to see it, but it was there.

“Who are you? What do you want with me?”

“My name is Asher. And you are in Esteria. Welcome home, Alyssandra.” I swallowed a very large lump of fear and disbelief. Home? “What I want with you—” He paused and pushed his hair back away from his face as he took a moment to think. And there were his ears, coming to a slight point at the tips. “What I want with you we can discuss at a later time when we are not so near a pool of your vomit.”

A strangled laugh bubbled up out of my mouth, and one of his eyebrows raised and disappeared under his hair. If the guy hadn’t just kidnapped me, I might have thought he was very, very handsome.

“That’s insane. This is insane. You are insane.” I stuck my finger in his face, and he shrank back from it with a look of disgust. “This kind of stuff does not exist in real life.”

He rolled his eyes and stood up, dragging me with him by the arm. “Did your mother really never tell you any stories of us? Of your home?”

I cried out in protest as his fingers dug into the same spots as before. My mind was racing through all the stories my mother had told me about Faeries. At the time, I would always laugh at her when she would act like they were real, as if they had happened to her.

My entire body was tender and bruised. I used my free hand to reach up and delicately touch the cut on my head where it had collided with the mirror and sink. I hissed a sharp intake of breath when my fingers came into contact with the lump forming there and came away slick with blood. I swore and fought back the tears threatening to fall. “Please take me home.” I sounded much stronger than I felt.

“Okay, enough chitchat.” He fisted my hair again, less gently this time, I noted, and forced my head to crane back so that he could see me. I reached up and gripped his forearm, hoping it would cause him to loosen his grip. Instead, he gripped tighter, and I stood on my tiptoes to try and take the pressure off my head. I winced, and a tear rolled down my cheek from the tightness in my scalp.

“You are very weak considering,” he said matter-of-factly. He leaned closer, and shadows began to pool over his shoulders and around his face. My breath caught in my throat, and my eyes widened. I tried to push away from his chest and escape the vise grip tangled in my hair, but I couldn’t move. Those shadows stretched out to me like snakes coiling to bite. As they drifted closer, I could smell jasmine and a hint of cedar. One touched my cheek, cold as ice and darker than night. I screamed and, for the fourth time that night, blacked out.