The Faerie War Read Online Free PDF Page B

did I?”
    “No, no, she was telling the truth about needing to get home.” Jamon sits down on the swing beside me. “Natesa is one of the few people who isn’t scared of you, actually. She’s been telling me for weeks to get over myself and stop treating you like someone who’s about to attack us all.”
    I scoot backward with my feet, then let myself swing forward. “I like Natesa.”
    “Yeah, everyone does. She’s pretty awesome.”
    I swing back and forth, watching the dreamy look on his face each time I pass him. I want to tease him about her—I mean, it’s so obvious he likes her—but I’m not sure we’re at the point yet where I can do that. He might lose his temper and threaten to lock me up.
    I bring the swing to a stop, then turn in the seat to face him. I want to know where we stand with each other, and there’s only one way to find out. “Do you still hate me?” I ask.
    He’s silent for a moment, then shakes his head.
    “So it’s really that easy for you to change your mind about me? All I had to do was shoot our common enemy?”
    He shrugs. “I suppose so. In my head, I’ve separated you from the rest of your kind. To me, you’re not really one of them.”
    “So you still hate guardians in general?”
    “Yes.”
    I wrap my hand around the swing’s linked chain. “Why? I don’t get it. Farah told me that guardians fight evil in order to protect people. Isn’t that a good thing?”
    He shakes his head slowly, but I can’t tell if he means no or if he just means that I don’t understand. “They protect humans. They protect themselves. Occasionally they protect other fae. Mostly, though, they seem to wind up killing or capturing fae creatures for crimes that I would hardly call evil. They dish out so-called justice to everyone else, but who judges them? Who do they have to answer to?” He raises his eyes to look at me. “I wonder how many you’ve killed.”
    His words startle me. Killed? There’s a possibility I’ve killed someone? My hand slips down the chain, and I watch it, trying not to imagine it covered in blood. I have faint memories of fighting various creatures. Memories that dance at the edges of my mind, flitting away when I try to grasp at them. I suppose it’s only logical that I ended up killing some of those creatures. “I don’t know,” I admit. “But I’m sure I wouldn’t kill anyone unless they deserved it and they gave me no other choice.”
    “You’re sure, huh?”
    “Yes,” I say with more certainty than I feel.
    “Well, anyway, I have to get going.” He stands up. “We’re making preparations to move our entire community. It’s going to be a major mission.”
    “Oh, I wanted to ask you about that,” I say. “Your dad was saying you don’t know how to get everyone to the new hiding place. Why can’t you all just do your vanishing thing and end up there?”
    “The children haven’t learned how to do that yet. And what about all our belongings?” He looks at me like I’m stupid. “We may know some magic, Violet, but we can’t do the things faeries do. We can’t recreate everything from scratch with a snap of our fingers when we get there.”
    Right, like it’s really that easy for faeries. “Am I missing something here?” I ask. “Why can’t you take your stuff with you when you vanish?”
    Now he’s looking at me as though I have the intelligence level of a troll. “We can’t take things with us when we vanish. We take ourselves and that’s it. That’s the way it works.”
    “Oh. So . . . you’ve obviously tested that out?”
    He rolls his eyes. “Obviously. Reptiscillas have known about this limitation for centuries, Violet. Anything bigger than, I don’t know, a loaf of bread gets left behind when you vanish with it.”
    I stand up quickly, leaving the swing’s chains rattling against each other. “You know what? I think I can help you.”

 
     
     
     

     
     
     
    Two days later, more than two thousand