And there was Ethan, standing about ten feet behind us, trapping us between himself and his father. Now I understood why Alistair had “just happened” to be waiting for us. Ethan must have either seen Aunt Grace enter the hotel, or had at least seen her leave with me, and he’d called in reinforcements. But neither he nor Alistair could do anything to help my mother.
“I’m very sorry,” Alistair said to me. “I would not lightly put your mother at risk. But I cannot allow Grace to take you into Faerie.”
“Why not?” Grace asked. “Why should you care? You have never called Faerie home. You owe no allegiance to anyone there, not even your Queen. Why sacrifice this girl’s mother to stop me when what happens in Faerie is no concern of yours?”
The cameo warmed in a way that was becoming sickeningly familiar. For reasons I didn’t understand, I felt sure that magical electricity, or whatever it was, was coming from Grace, not Ethan or Alistair. Maybe just because she was so much closer to me. I saw her lips begin to curl in a smile, and I knew it meant no good.
“She’s going to cast something!” I screamed, sure whatever spell she was casting would not be pleasant.
I felt, rather than saw, the magic swelling around us then bursting forward, rushing toward Alistair. But I think my shout warned Alistair just in time, because he dove to the side.
My ears popped, and Alistair’s car, directly behind him in the line of fire … imploded. That’s the only way I can describe what happened. It looked like semi trucks had smashed into it from all sides at once. I didn’t even want to think about what Alistair would have looked like if the spell had hit him.
Grace looked down at me in such a fury I thought the force of her anger should strike me dead. I was sure she was about to hit me again. Instead, she did something much, much worse.
“Kill her!” she yelled into her cell phone.
“No!” I screamed, but Grace shut the phone with a snarl and hurled it over the side of the railing into the waters of the moat below.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Alistair get up, shaking off the effects of the near miss, but all I could think about was Grace giving the fatal order. I didn’t even try to stop the tears this time.
“That was not the wisest move,” I heard Alistair say, his voice calm and unruffled. I wanted to kill him for that calm when my mother had just been murdered because he wouldn’t let us go. “Even you can’t withstand a murder charge,” he continued. “Not with three witnesses.”
“You have always underestimated me, Alistair. Just like my brother has.”
At that point, I was so overwhelmed with grief and horror that I honestly didn’t care what else Grace had up her sleeve. Until I found out what it was, of course.
The Fae, even slender, willowy females like Aunt Grace, are way stronger than mortals. Which is why Grace had no trouble grabbing me, lifting me off my feet, and flinging me over the side of the railing to follow the path of her phone.
I was too shocked to scream, though both Alistair and Ethan cried out. I flailed around in the air, trying to control my entry into the water, but when I hit, I was flat on my back. I tried to dissipate some of the force by slapping my arms down, just as Keane had showed me, but it didn’t help much.
It wasn’t a horribly long fall from the bridge into the moat—not the kind of fall you’d expect to die from, at least—but it wasn’t just a little hop, either. The water slammed into my back like a slab of concrete, forcing all the air from my lungs and momentarily stunning me.
That moment was long enough for the murky, muddy water to close over my head and begin to suck me down.
chapter twenty-six
I’m not the world’s best swimmer, but I can generally dog-paddle with the best of them. When I recovered from that initial stunned, breathless moment, I started kicking and flailing, trying to get to the surface. I was scared, but not exactly in a panic. Not yet. It was just water, after all.
But for all my flailing, I didn’t seem to be finding the surface. My heavy wool sweater seemed to weigh about ten tons, and my feet couldn’t seem to move much water in my good walking sneakers. Lungs burning, I pried the shoes off with my feet and was able to kick more effectively.
With another couple of kicks, I probably would have made the surface and been fine. Except one of those kicks connected with something. Something soft and yielding, like flesh. Something that wrapped around my foot and held me.
I broke the hold easily enough, but the terror of being grabbed by something under the water, combined with my increasingly critical lack of oxygen, caused me to try to gasp. I sucked some water into my lungs. And that was when I started to panic.
I had to cough the water out of my lungs, but you can’t cough if you don’t have any air. I clapped a hand over my mouth and pinched my nose shut to keep myself from taking another reflexive breath of water, but the need to cough was overwhelming. I couldn’t fight it, even though a small corner of my mind knew that if I tried to breathe, I would die.
The reflex became too much, and I let go of my nose and mouth to gasp in another breath of water.
I was dimly aware of the sensation of hands grabbing my arms, but I was far too panicked to feel any relief or to try to cooperate with my would-be rescuer. I was half-convinced it was a near-death hallucination anyway.
But those hands had a firm hold, and a moment later, I burst through the surface of the water into the beautiful, wonderful, life-sustaining air. Unfortunately, I’d sucked so much water into my lungs that even with the air so tantalizingly near, I couldn’t breathe.