The Hedge
Beth slipped past the ballroom, only sparing a glance for her wedding reception where courtiers in their finery still danced. The guards were posted in the same places that they had been six years ago, and she found herself in familiar side passages to avoid them.
The gate to the Glen was in a sitting room off the main hall, but she headed to the stairs. As much as she longed to go to the Glen, hug Rose and throw back enough shots to make her cross-eyed, she knew that would only put Rose in a dangerous position. The Glen Rós came equipped with an enchanted ledger that kept track of all the Fae that used the bar to pass through the in-between. If Beth’s name appeared it would be Rose’s word against the ledger and Rose was biased. Beth wouldn’t do that to her beloved aunt.
She headed down to the servant quarters, betting that the kitchen door would be the least detectable way out. Due to some miracle, she was right. The kitchen was mostly deserted. She did have to duck behind a counter while two serving boys hauled a barrel of ale toward the stairs but then she was out and into the orchard.
The term orchard was applied loosely. Really it was rows and rows of barren, ice covered trees. On the other side of the orchard lay Maeve’s garden, which wasn’t much better in the liveliness department. The garden was a maze of thorny rose bushes with no buds and cobblestone pathways slicked over with ice. Beth slid her way through it, trying to ignore the cold.
Getting into the Hedge without a gate was supposedly very tricky. Tears in the realm wall were extremely rare and usually guarded fiercely when discovered, but Beth had stumbled upon one purely by accident. Her, Benji and Delphine had been playing hide and seek in the garden one bright morning. Benji had been finding the girls with absolutely no effort every time it was his turn to search. Beth had found her favorite statue and climbed behind it, and then she’d been somewhere else. Somewhere dark and wet and foul smelling.
Beth searched for that familiar statue now, the chill of the ground seeping through her slippers. Three lefts and then a right, round what she imagined would be a cherry blossom tree were it not covered in ice. Her feet remembered the way, it seemed, because soon she was looking up at the statue that she had adored so much as a child. It was a young man in a battle stance, sword draw, chin high, ready to face any danger. She had spent hours staring at this statue, daydreaming and wishing he would come alive and tell her stories.
Looking at him she realized abruptly, and with the sickening feeling of falling in her belly, that it was a statue of Ronan. The long hair was half pulled back and was unmistakable. The marble even scowled. Beth was flabbergasted. All this time she’d idolized and fantasized about this stone hero and then she’d gone and married him. Something was just so cosmically wrong about that, but she didn’t have time to contemplate it.
Beth scrambled around to the back of the figure, catching herself on angry thorns. This had been easier when she was smaller, she noted. Now to find the gate. She had sort of just fallen into it last time.
Panic sliced through her for a moment at the thought that it might be gone. Maybe the Queen had found it and had it sealed. Was it possible to seal a gate? Beth closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to will herself to calm down. What had the tear looked like? She tried to remember. There had been a shimmering strip of air that she saw first only out of the corner of her eye.
That had to be it! The rip couldn’t be viewed straight on.
Without turning her head, she glanced sideways toward the spot where she remembered it being, and nearly sobbed with relief when the air there shimmered. Without another thought she dove through. Though another thought might have been helpful because she came out head-first onto asphalt.
Fuck, that hurt. She sat up and touched her face, wincing at score marks. She wasn’t bleeding, just a little cut up. It would leave a bruise though. She pushed to her feet.
Katherine had told Beth, Benji and Delphine bedtime stories about the Hedge when they were children. It had once been a beautiful place, or so the legends said, full of lush greenery and sunshine. It had been, and still was, a mixture of the Fae and mortal realms. But only the best aspects of each, never the drama and pain of either, even though the Winter and Summer Queens had fought over the rights to own it, to imperialize it.
And while the war raged a stranger had stepped in a stolen it out from underneath them, claiming it as his own territory. The Hedge King. Beth had never heard him called anything else, but he was somewhat of a bogeyman for Fae children.
“Don’t sneak out of bed or the Hedge King will find you,” Katherine used to say. Beth had never been frightened by that threat until her and Benji’s journey into the in-between, and then she had understood.
The Hedge was just as she remembered it. The harmonious mix of Fae and mortal realms had been tainted and now the worst aspects of each world seemed to have taken hold. The ground was rough pavement, littered with broken glass and trash. There were still actual hedges, but they were made up of dark vine twined with sharp metal cables. They stretched up to at least twenty feet and were topped with barbed wire.
It was night time here, just as it had been in Faerie, but there were too many low hanging, storm bearing clouds to see the moon. If there even was a moon.
Lightning struck, hitting the barbed wire and charging the air with electricity and the smell of ozone.
Beth started forward, her thin slippers not much help against the broken glass. She tried to step carefully but the only light came from the periodic strikes of lightning. And then it started raining. Cold, slashing rain that stung her skin. She came up against a wall and went left, following the maze as best she could in the blackness.
The strobe light effect of the lightning was making her jumpy and blind. Beth hugged herself tightly and kept walking on, always going left when confronted with a fork in the road.
It wasn’t long before low growls reached her ears. Her heart rate picked up and she stumbled. It occurred to her that they’d managed to escape last time because of Benji’s fire, but he’d been a servant and a young one at that. He’d never been taught to use his innate abilities, much less control it. Servants were never supposed to show their powers, so he’d had no clue what to do as the fire erupted from him.
Beth remembered the sheer terror on his face. It hadn’t deterred the revenants, but the beasts had stayed away. Oh, how she wished Benji were here beside her. She sought to ready herself, looking around for anything she might use as a weapon. A large shard of glass caught her eye and she grabbed for it.
The growling was getting closer. The flashing light revealed ominous shadows creeping toward her and she started to run.
Shit. This could be bad.
In general, Beth wasn’t helpless. She had taken a few classes in the mortal realm on various fighting styles and regularly sparred with her friends, but these were Hedge beasts. She remembered them as viciousness incarnated. Large, blurry forms of death that stunk of coppery blood and decaying flesh.
Beth gripped the glass shard, her heart pounding as she turned left and then left again, glancing over her shoulder.
There were so many shadows behind her. She pictured them smiling, blood and drool dripping from pointed teeth. The hyenas from the Lion King came to mind, only bigger. They began to bark as she turned another corner and came face to face with a dead end.
Shit. Shit shit shit.
This was it. She turned, her back against the wire wall. She could hear their paws on the pavement now, unheeded by the broken glass that had her slippers and feet in ribbons.
Belatedly, she realized that she was gripping the glass so hard she’d cut her hand, something she would have to deal with later if she survived.
When they finally rounded the corner she counted at least a dozen of them. Apparently Hedge beasts ran in packs. Just as she’d imagined, they were smiling, anticipating ripping her to chunks. Their eyes were an unhealthy yellow that glowed in the dark. They stalked closer, taking their time, like they were playing with her. She felt like they’d be circling her if she wasn’t flat against a wall.
One stalked forward. A leader, judging by his larger stature and extreme amount of scarring. He sniffed at her, stopping maybe five feet away. Her heart fluttered in her chest like a trapped hummingbird, desperately trying to escape. He growled deep in his throat, but it sounded oddly appreciative, like he enjoyed her scent. Behind him, the pack moved forward a foot. But before they could move any closer she heard a sickening crunch, like she imagined a car being compacted might sound, and something came from behind and wrapped around her middle, tugging her roughly backward through an opening in the Hedge that definitely had not been there before.
She lost her grip on the makeshift knife. A jagged piece of metal caught at her leg and dragged a trench in her skin and the dress. She looked up and the beasts looked just as startled as she was. They were backing away slowly as their alarmed growls filled the air. Then, suddenly, the hedge knitted itself back together seamlessly and she couldn’t hear them anymore.
Her leg stung something awful, but she was more worried about what was pulling her along. She looked down at a mottled, grey arm and immediately started struggling. A growl answered her, different from the beasts, and a sound like teeth snapping came from somewhere above her head. Suddenly, she wished could go back and take her chances with the beasts.
Benji’s fire had never deterred the revenants. Terror skittered up and down her spine as she struggled harder. It wasn’t that the fire hadn’t damaged them, because it had. They’d even screamed as their skin had melted from their bones. But they’d just kept coming. It was as if they wanted what they wanted badly enough that the pain was worth it.
Beth hadn’t really understood then, but now, having taken that poor servant’s soul, she got it. They wanted life. They wanted a person’s essence, because they had lost their own. She remembered what it had felt like when one had caught her, what it was like when they tried to feed from her life-energy. The memory alone made her gag. A cold thought collided with her mind and reverberated through every inch of her body. Was that what it felt like when she took someone’s soul?
Beth didn’t have time to dwell on that horrific thought now, however. The revenant was dragging her somewhere at a surprisingly fast pace. Where was he taking her? Did revenants run in packs too? She and Benji had never faced more than two at a time but what if they had been the exceptions?
The rain had stopped but the temperature had dropped also, and she could feel her soggy dress starting to freeze. The wound in her leg hurt more than ever, as did the scratches on her face, hands, and feet. She felt like she’d accidentally fallen into a wood chipper, and then a pond, and then a freezer. In a last-ditch effort, she lurched forward, but the revenant tugged her back against him hard enough that she heard something inside her crack.
Holy shit. Was that her ribs? Had he just cracked her ribs? The pain that then sliced at her from the inside out answered her question. This guy wasn’t playing around, so why hadn’t he started with the soul-munching yet?
They turned a corner and she found out why. Four more revenants waited in yet another dead end. When the lightning flashed Beth saw all of them look up at once, and Beth could swear in that moment that her heart ceased to beat. He was easy to recognize, despite the total whiteness of his eyes, because his face was so fresh in her mind. It was the servant whose soul she had sucked out for Maeve.
How long had it been? A few hours, that was all. This was ridiculous. Maeve just threw him in here like unwanted trash? Why didn’t she just kill him? Could revenants be killed? She and Benji hadn’t managed it their last go-round in the Hedge, they’d outrun them. She wished she could run now.
The figure holding her shoved her forward and she stumbled, falling to her knees. She glanced back up at him and again nearly died right then and there. This was a face she had thought she would never see again, not since he had tried to molest Benji six years ago.
Like the servant and the rest of the revenants, he didn’t have any color to his eyes, but still, she knew his face. This was Redmond, the first soul she’d ever eaten. Were all revenants just soulless Fae? It kind of made sense, except that she had only ever ingested two and there were dozens, maybe hundreds in the Hedge. If there was another soul-eater in Faerie, she’d never heard of them.
They were moaning now, all of them ambling toward her. She was surprised Redmond had decided to share. Perhaps their plights had given them a sense of camaraderie. Sebastian had a penchant for zombie flicks and she’d seen enough to know that sometimes they became allies, when a common goal was in mind. Or food source, she supposed.
She tried to scramble away but the blood from her hand had formed enough of a pool on the asphalt that she slipped in it, falling and scraping her elbow against the ground. There really wasn’t anywhere to go, and no time to go there.
Fuck. She would have rather died at the teeth of the beasts than have her soul devoured. She supposed it was karma though, for what she had done to them. Well, two of them.
Beth closed her eyes, readying herself for the familiar agony, like having your skin torn from your body and your muscles flayed. Suddenly, the same sound from earlier filled the air, like a car being compacted, and without any thought but self-preservation she crab-walked backwards. The opening was smaller this time and her dress caught on multiple pieces of wire and metal, but she somehow made it through.
Beth collapsed as soon as the hedge closed up in front of her, curling into herself on her side. From her vantage point she could see no revenants or beasts or anything else in the immediate vicinity, which was good because her vision was tunneling.
It was hard to tell how much time had passed when Beth woke. There was no change in the darkness, though the lightning seemed to be less frequent. She wasn’t sure if that was a help or a hindrance. She pushed into a sitting position and tried not to wince as her bloodied hands ground against the asphalt. She glanced warily back at the hedge. This was twice now it had opened and spared her from a horrible death.
“Thank you,” Beth murmured gruffly, wondering if it was sentient enough to hear her.
Her dress was in tatters and she only made it worse when she started tearing off strips of it to bind the gashes on her hand and thigh. Her side ached where Redmond had crushed her. The soles of her shoes were almost completely gone so she kicked them off. She sat for a moment, trying to calm her racing heart before pushing to her feet. There had to be another tear somewhere and she wouldn’t find it by staying still.
So she walked on, limping because the gash in her leg hurt like hell. She had lost a lot of blood and was fighting disorientation, but the last thing she needed was to pass out again. It felt like she had been here for days, but that wasn’t possible, right?
Beth missed Benji. She wouldn’t wish this experience on him again in a million years, especially with Redmond walking around, but a selfish part of her really wished he was here with her. He could keep her warm with his fire, help her to stop shaking.
She was afraid the clatter of her teeth would draw attention. And then, of course, right after the thought had crossed her mind, a shriek resonated through the sky and the unmistakable sound of flapping wings came too close to her head for any semblance of comfort.
The wings sounded leathery, like it was a pterodactyl or something. She searched for a tear, checking her periphery as best she could while moving. Her pace increased to as much of a run as she could manage, and she wished fervently for home. The house, the beach, the crisp autumn air of the Atlantic northeast.
Beth thought about how nice it would be not to die here amongst the metal and glass and wire. She’d take bleeding out on the sand under the moonlight over this any day.
She turned a corner flashed again the wings got closer. Another shriek broke the air and then she saw it. Innocently shimmering at a fork in the path, tear. Oh, thank god.
She full out ran for it, probably looking like a handicapped pony with the way she had to half-gallop. Another shriek and a sharp pain as something swooped at her head and then she gathered all of her strength and jumped.