Compel (Rae Wilder #2)

Chapter One

The path to contentment should be clear to one with a purpose, yet I diminished into the realm of the lost.

Grief smothered me until I gasped for air.

I hummed with passion. Hate. I wanted the High Lord’s head on a pike. I wanted to dance manically around his corpse, and give in to the dark whispers in the corners of my heart. Nothing less would appease the burring ache in my chest, the carnivorous sense of loss that threatened to consume me.

The dew from the dawn soaked the understory, and smoke from the bonfire faded. I can barely remember what I had seen as I had stumbled through Orchard, fairy Wyld, and place of my birth.

Coming to a halt at base of three large tree trunks the colour of ash, I had gotten a vague sense of being surrounded, and a low intense hum of feelings pressed on me from above, like whisperings of the gods calling from the heavens. I had looked up, dazed, and gasped at the fallen stars scattered across the forest canopy. The twinkling I had glimpsed among the rich green leaves was fairies and their auras. An immediate kinship bloomed in my heart and it petrified me. I had looked into their shinning faces and seen exactly what my arrival meant to them.

The fairies stood on the porches and outer steps of tree houses seemingly growing from the thick bark that coated the broad tree boughs. The males and females wore long tunics and dark trousers beneath, similar to what I had seen in the Grove, but these people seemed softer somehow. These were not warriors, but families with young children and elderly folk who peeked down at me with expressions of awe. The elderly fairies, faces wrinkled, and hair shades of pure white and gray boggled my mind. How many centuries could have to pass for a fairy’s skin to wrinkle and back to become curved with age? Two thousand? Three? Not that I had forgotten, but it brought my own age into question. I had eighteen years of memories as a human. I was … had been a Sect Disciple found on a Priest’s doorsteps, and was given to the Clerics to become a protector of humanity.

Yet Breandan, the fairy-boy who had found me, claimed I was born before him. Two hundred years before him. That was when my mother had split the key to the grimoire - a powerful book of spells - into three amulets and hidden them with magical guardians. One, the amulet of protection, had been given to my older brother Conall. The second, the amulet of wisdom, had been given to me. The last, the amulet of power, had been given to her nephew, and the heir to the fairy Wylds, Devlin.

Had the protection of the key been my whole purpose maybe I would not feel the need to run away. Perhaps I could have adjusted into my new life as a demon, a kind of being I had been raised to hunt down and kill if it threatened the safety of my human home. But what came with the amulets I’d nearly died for was a responsibility to use their power to protect and guide the fairy people, the cornerstone of demonkind.

Stricken with grief, stumbling across the Wyld, I found myself in the midst of the people I was destined to protect they intuitively looked to me for reassurance. Shaken and frightened after the sensational and violent departure of their High Lord they turned their faces down toward me, and I felt the weight of every gaze – a thick swelling of anxious consciousnesses pleading for me to soothe them. But I had nothing to give. Nothing. I was a girl, angry, and full of anguish. What did they expect from me? I watched their Lord abuse and murder my best friend. I was forced to watch her suffer, unable to help her as iron chains drained my power. Alex had been chosen for being nothing more than a source of purity, and as a twisted way for Devlin to get back at me. How could they have expected anything from me? I saw nothing but monsters. Pointy eared and fanged monsters in a myriad of colors and creeds reaching out their talon tipped fingers to trap and torture me.

Shivering, I came back to myself and glanced around. I sat by a pool of cool water, and the most beautiful lush flowers I had ever seen bloomed in the morning sunrays. The air was fresh, and scented with a zesty bouquet. I breathed in deeply, letting the cool air chill my lungs even as my mind fought for clarity. The air tasted sweet and earthy, and every noise no matter how low or loud washed over me like raindrops, like music. Colour was intense and everything seemed to shimmer and glow. As the dawn passed and the sun climbed higher in the sky the soft radiance emitted by the flora intensified. Never had I experienced a dawn like it. When I was at Temple the sun always retreated behind low and dark clouds, covering the land in a perpetual twilight. Here everything was made of light and shone brightly.