Uneasy Alliance Read online

  Part One

  Kira

  September 5, 2014

  “You! Why did you come back here? What were you thinking?”

  “I…I don’t know what you mean!”

  “Of course you don’t. Just like Aidan. Always playing the fool. You even look like him, you know. Same eyes. Your cursed family is always stumbling in where they don’t belong. You just stay away from me and that door, understand? You’ve caused enough problems as it is.”

  The angry girl pushes past me and out the door of the pub, letting it slam shut behind her.

  For a moment nothing happens. And I mean nothing. No one speaks, no one moves…I doubt anyone even dares to breathe. I know I don’t. What just happened is so insanely unbelievable that I’m not even sure I believe it. And I saw it with my own eyes.

  The wooden head on the back wall of the pub had come to life and spoken. The angry girl—Leena I think they were calling her—had…Well, I honestly don’t know what happened to her, but one moment she was having some kind of fit on the ground and the next she was bossing everyone around. And everyone, including the adults, did what she told them. The grumpy old guy who owned the pub had even just handed her his car keys.

  And then she had knocked out her own mother. I didn’t see how that happened, but one moment she was touching her mother and the next minute Mrs. Wallace—who is a very bossy woman herself—was lying on the floor.

  And Leena was so, so angry. Her anger filled the whole room. Even when she seemed to be talking calmly to people about what needed to happen, I could feel her anger the way that you can feel the heat radiating from a burning fire.

  Then it turned out that it was me she was angry at.

  I wish I knew why.

  Leena

  One week later (September 12, 2014)

  The problem with reincarnation was that it could be so hard to remember who she was right now. There were so many lives swirling around in the girl’s brain that it was hard even to remember her own name. Was she Riona? Or Leena? Or maybe Aillie? Each of those names fit, as if they belonged to her and probably at some point they had. There was also Sheena, Ealasaid, and Fionnghuala.

  She looked down at her clothes. She was dressed in a pair of jeans, a green tank top, and a pair of sparkly gold flip flops. Probably not Fionnghuala then. She didn’t sound much like someone who would even know what flip flops were.

  “Leena?”

  She became aware that someone was calling one of her names. Looking up she saw a woman standing in the doorway of her bedroom. She was tall, dressed in an elegant cream colored pant suit, and had short red hair. Aileen Wallace. Her mother. Memories clicked into place. Temporary identity crisis averted, Leena let out the breath she had been holding and stood to cross the room and give her mother a hug.

  “Thanks, Mom,” she said and meant it. Now that she knew which lifetime she was in, she was able to push aside most of the memories that belonged to her other selves.

  “Whatever for? And why didn’t you answer me? I’ve been calling you for five minutes.” Pulling away from the embrace, her mother frowned down at her. She began to “fix” Leena’s appearance. She did this without malice or even thought. It was an old habit. She tucked a strand of Leena’s long red hair behind her ear, tugged up the strap of her tank top which had started to slip down her shoulder, and twitched her necklace so that the little gold charm—a four leaf clover—fell into place.

  Leena endured this grooming as well as she could. It had bothered her when she had thought she was only a sixteen-year-old girl without much to distinguish herself except a head full of frizzy hair and a tendency to say awkward things. Now that she knew she was really a reincarnated fairy who had existed for longer than anyone, including herself, could remember and had wings and magical powers, she found it even more irksome to be treated like a doll.

  “Mother,” she began plaintively.

  “Stand up straight, Leena.”

  Sighing, Leena straightened her shoulders and tried to bring her mother to the point. “Did you need something, Mom?”

  “What? Oh, yes. I want you to come to the school board meeting with me.”

  “Mom, I’ve told you before that I’m not going to be your secretary anymore,” Leena said. It had been a week since her awakening—the day she discovered her true past and the myriad of selves that had been locked away inside her head. Oh, and it had also been the day she got her wings back.

  They fluttered behind her now, shimmering gossamer things that a poet had once described as spun sunshine. But that had been in another lifetime, back in her true home, the Otherworld. Long before Leena.

  Her mother clicked her tongue—a sure sign that she was annoyed—and reached out to touch Leena’s hair again.

  Deftly sidestepping, Leena said, “We’ve been through this, Mom. I have too much to do now. In fact...” She pulled a cellphone out of her pocket and glanced at the screen. “I’m supposed to meet the Five over at the pub in about ten minutes. Can I take the car?”

  “Not until you pass your driver’s test,” her mother replied stiffly. “And I only thought you might want to come to this meeting because they intend to discuss that door of yours.”

  Leena looked up from her phone, which she had been using to check her Twitter feed. “The door? Why are they talking about the door?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m going and why I thought you might want to join me. But of course, if you’re too busy…”

  “No, I’ll come,” Leena said quickly.

  Kira

  Same day

  Oh great. Another meeting. Because the last one had gone so well.

  “Do I have to go?” I am whining and I know it, but sometimes a girl just has to whine a bit. After all, it wasn’t my fault that someone left a portal to another world in the middle of the high school campus. Or that some crazy seer had pestered me into opening it.

  Okay, so maybe that’s a little mean. Aislin isn’t crazy. At least I don’t think she is, although she does say some very strange things sometimes. And I suppose it isn’t her fault that prophecy runs in her family. She can’t help it any more than I can help being the descendent of the Lost One—that’s a whole other story and I still don’t understand most of it myself.

  Anyway, it wasn’t Aislin’s fault and it wasn’t mine, but we seem to be getting all of the blame for it. I wish someone would just explain exactly what was going on.

  “Yes, honey. You have to go,” my mom says. She’s been pretty good about everything, but I can tell that she’s starting to get a little frazzled.

  “Why? Why are we even still in this crazy town? Why don’t we just pack up and move?”

  “You sound like your father,” Mom snaps.

  Neither of us say anything for a while after that. Her words sting, but I remind myself that this has been hard on her as well. She’s a stranger in this town, just like I am. An outsider to begin with, but even more so since I opened that stupid door. And what makes it worse is that it is all my father’s fault. Or at least, his ancestor’s. More than a century ago, Aidan Mulloy did something to offend a fairy queen and so she banished him. He and his descendants were supposed to stay away from New Elphame forever.

  But we didn’t. I didn’t.

  So here we are. Right in the middle of a fairy tale gone wrong. And even though it is my dad’s genes that are to blame, he’s all the way across the country in Portland, Oregon. I told him what had happened, of course, but I don’t think he believed me. Or my mom when she tried to tell him.

  Which makes her even madder at him than she already was.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Mom says eventually. She comes over and gives me a hug. She holds me really tight for a few moments and then pulls away, but keeps her hands on my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s just that your dad…Well, he has spent his entire life running away and not even knowing from what.”

  “From this
place,” I say and she nods.

  “Yes, I suppose so. And I spent my whole marriage and your whole life running with him until it just got to be too much. So I stopped and by some trick of fate we ended up here. We can’t start running away again. It’s time that the Nichols family stood still and faced their problems.” Her expression narrows into that trying-to-beam-her-thoughts-directly-into-my-brain look she gets sometimes. “Do you understand, Kira?”

  I sigh. “I guess so.”

  “Good. Then let’s get in the car and see what the school board has to say.”

  Leena

  Same day

  The meeting was already in full swing by the time Leena and her mother arrived. The folding chairs that had been set up to allow people from the community to sit in on the meeting were completely full. Leena knew from past experience—her mother had dragged her to a lot of this sort of thing—that this was unusual. Apparently they weren’t the only people who wanted to know what the school board had to say about the door.

  The board members themselves were seated at long, semi-circular table at the front of the room and there was a podium set up in case anyone from the audience wanted to get up and say something. She had a feeling that she would be making use of the podium herself before the meeting was over.

  “We’ll have to stand,” her mother whispered loudly, not bothering to hide her irritation.

  Some people sitting nearby looked around, but most turned back after seeing who had come in. Of course, a few continued to stare at