She was breathing too fast. “Mom told the cottage to take me home. She touched it and she told it to take me to her realm if I got away from her because she does that. She’s a trickster. She’s terrible and she can make anyone and anything do whatever she wants!” She stomped her foot. “The cottage doesn’t have a choice. It has to play out the spell, but it doesn’t want to. It wants to stay here. We landed in this land, and it touched you, and suddenly it’s thinking. It’s alive. It’s afraid that if we leave, it’ll lose its new awareness. It needs you, Frank, as much as it needs me. So it stopped siphoning.” She looked down at her hands. “It’s only been a few minutes. I… I hid the bridle and the cottage asked what to do and we agreed.”
I pulled her against my chest. Her power screamed through me like I’d just hooked jumper cables to my hands and it took significant concentration not to twitch or yell or push away.
Flames blipped through my mind again, along with another flash of an even deeper trauma—a cold slab, blinding lightning, thunder as pulsing as the electricity through my dead nerves.
My mind knew this particular flashback. It also knew what it was about to dredge up.
“I’m here,” I said, through the haze of glare reflecting off my own charged-up, dithering, foaming life of rejection. Off the byproducts of the scars and the scariness, and the ugly and the lumbering. Every bit of the fear generated by the sucking away of my mate magic.
Understanding my traumas didn’t stop them from surfacing. All it ever did was give me words to describe the episodes after the fact.
A sob burst from deep in Ellie’s chest. “Frank!”
“If the cottage restarts its siphoning, it’ll move, won’t it?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said into my chest. “I want to burn things,” she whispered.
My axe had been talking to the cottage. “Salvation! A little help here, please.”
She wanted us to know that the cottage had a thick accent and they weren’t communicating well but they were trying.
I pressed my cheek against Ellie’s head and a new electrical jolt spread a thick coat of metallic-tasting buzz across my tongue. I fought back the need to spit. “It’ll be okay,” I said.
“No, it won’t.” She buried her face in my neck. “We wanted to stay. We wanted to say good-bye.” She hiccupped. “I thought… I thought if you knew for sure that she’d taken us to her realm the elves might be able to help you find me.”
“You’re not going anywhere.” She was not going back to Titania’s realm. Not alone. I hoisted her up and curled her legs around my waist. The jolts increased in frequency and strength, but I held on anyway. “Can the cottage move Sal and me?” I wasn’t going to lose Ellie, too.
You, perhaps, Salvation said. Me, no. We don’t have enough time to do the necessary magical translations.
“Salvation, if I put you on Bloodyhoof, can you guide him to the cabin?” She’d be safe with the elves.
I will not be defeated, she yelled in my head.
“Sal…” My fears also radiated off my axe—the fear of rejection from the one I loved. The fear that I was not worthy of the life I had built in the community in which I’d built it. The fear that I wasn’t nearly as alive as I thought I was. All the emotions my knotted flashbacks had tied up in their unwanted blips and bursts.
All those things that gave others reasons to reject a semi-dead thing.
Damn it, I thought.
Go, Blodughofi! Salvation yelled. Go to Maura Dagsdottir.
The stallion reared up. Then he galloped through the gate and into the trees beyond.
Frustration rode in on the back of my shocked and terrified nerves. Frustration with my own brain, with Sal’s mirroring of my pain, with the very real possibility of losing Ellie because I wasn’t smart enough to figure this out.
But also frustration because this punishment had descended onto Ellie because she’d tried to stay with me.
My mate magic might be gone, but we still had what we’d built despite the concealments keeping us apart. She trusted me. I needed to trust that I could trust her.
And all of a sudden, my body rolled up all the events of the past month and honed them into a sharp, terrible animosity toward all things royal and fae.
Was it misdirected? Yes. But it also cut through the buzzing, distracting haze in my brain. No one stole my faith.
Salvation yanked up my anger and added it to her own. We will not be defeated, she said again.
“We will not,” I looked around. “There has to be some way to anchor the cottage.” Nothing in the yard stood out. “Should we go inside?” Maybe something inside would let us anchor.
The magic swirling around Ellie brightened to near blinding. “I’ve tried to build an anchor. I tried in Tokyo and when it moved, it hurt Chihiro. She was inside with me. We can’t go in.”
“Okay. Okay,” I said. We’d stay outside. “If only I still had my tracer spells, huh?” I said. I’d be able to find her easily no matter what her mother did.
Ellie hiccupped again. “I’m glad they’re gone. Those damned things hurt.”
They interacted with her concealments. The vampires stole all of them anyway when they used me to…
Dracula used me as a siphon to concentrate his spells and stabilize Vampland.
I could do it again. I could drain off her extra energy.
“Salvation! Will it work?”
You will not, she said.
“You want to better Titania, don’t you?” We both wanted to beat Titania at her own game. We will not be defeated, I thought at my axe. So it would work. It had to work. “What—”
“Blood magic,” Ellie
