Another loud shriek, and then we dove.
Chapter 37
The water tore at me at me from every angle, cold and rough, violently trying to steal my oxygen. I tried to hold onto Alex, but the water was making my hands slip loose. Alex was kicking, trying to break us free from the undertow. But we just kept getting pulled in all different directions.
Eventually, the water started to settle, and our bodies became less tangled. He swam us upward, and finally we broke through. I gasped for air, and so did Alex. He opened his mouth to say something, but I was tugged downward by a set of bony fingers that had snatched hold of my ankle. My hands slipped from around Alex’s neck, and I was submerged by the dark water again. I tried to kick the Water Faerie off of me, but all it did was tighten it’s grip.
And then Alex had my arm. I knew it was him because of the buzzing. He was pulling on me, but the Water Faerie was too. My body felt like it was going to tear apart. Then, Alex was beside me, underneath the water. Our bodies tangled together, along with the Water Faeries. There was a lot of tugging and spinning, and then suddenly I was no longer being pulled down, but whooshing upward and bursting out of the water.
Alex swam faster than I ever thought was humanly possible. Especially while hauling me along with him. And before I knew it, we were lying on the shore, out of breath and panting loudly.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked, out of breath.
I coughed up some of the water I swallowed. “Yeah, I…Wait. Where’s my mom?”
In the snap-of-a-finger, we were both on our feet and searching. But I couldn’t see her anywhere; the only thing in sight was the grey stone castle, the tall-treed forest, and the haunting…Water Faerie filled lake.
“Oh my word,” I breathed.
Alex followed my gaze and his jaw nearly hit the ground.
Across the dark water, the Water Faeries floated. The sight would have been alluring—they looked like ballerinas dancing. But knowing what they really were, and what they could do, the sight only made a chill slither down my back.
“They can’t come up here?” I asked. “Right?”
He nodded, but his bright green eyes were still locked on the water. “I’ve never seen so many of them up here before, especially when no one has summoned them.”
As I watched the Water Faeries swim around, a thought abruptly smacked me in the head. “Wait. What if my mom’s still in there?” And then I was running toward the lake, my brain too irrational to process the consequences if I stepped in.
Luckily Alex grabbed me, and pulled me back.
“Are you freaking crazy!” he exclaimed, shaking me by the shoulders, with a look of what could only be described as terrified. “You can’t go in there.”
It took my brain a second to grasp the severity of the situation I had just about gotten myself into. “I’m sorry, but what if she’s in there?”
His harsh expression slipped to a semi-sympathetic one. “If she is, then there’s nothing we can do about it.”
“We can go back,” I said, my tone razor sharp. “We have to save her.”
He shook his head. “There’s no way we’re going back there after what happened. Now that they know something’s different about you, they’re going to be all over you if you even step foot in their world again.”
“So what.” I was trying with all my might to wiggle my arm free from his grasp. “I don’t care. How do expect me to just let her stay down there after I saw how horrible of a place it is.” I could feel the tears stinging at my eyes. “Let me go!”
“No,” he told me, just standing there, holding on to my arm, my yanking not even fazing him the slightest bit.
“Let me go,” I growled.
He shook his head, tightening his grip. “You’re not thinking clearly right now.”
I stared him down with a determined look. “You have to let me go. You don’t need to protect me anymore now that the star’s power is probably not going to save the world.”
He stared at me with this strangest look. “I think you—”
Then we heard it. An earsplitting bang that rocketed through air.
“What the heck was that?” I asked, glancing around at the trees.
Alex looked over at the castle, and then at the ground. I followed his gaze and saw what he was looking at. Footprints, printed across the mud, leading toward the castle.
We took off, tromping through the muddy grass, and running up the hill, until we reached the door to the castle. Alex seemed a little uneasy as he turned the doorknob and creaked the door open. The stale air immediately surrounded us.
“Does anyone live here?” I whispered as we stepped inside.
He shook his head and dropped his hand from the doorknob.
It looked as if no one had been inside the castle for ages. The banister that guided the stairs had a thick layer of dust on it and cobwebs ornamented the ceiling like a haunted house on Halloween.
Alex went to the bottom of the stairs and glanced up. Another bang shattered the air and his gaze darted down the hall, where the noise had come from.
“What if it’s not my mom?” I whispered.
He held up a finger and then crept down the hall. I stayed behind him, keeping my footsteps light. There was another loud noise that sounding like glass being shattered, and then I saw her.
She was in the room where my soul had been detached; the room with the stone fireplace and tiled floor. She was standing in the midst of a pile of broken glass, her bare feet, I’m sure, getting cut by the sharp edges.
“Mom,” I said softly as I stepped cautiously into the room.
She’d been staring at the broken glass, but blinked up at me when I said her name. Any acknowledgment she had of me was gone, and I could see it in her bright blue eyes that she, again, did not know who I was. She grabbed a vase from off a nearby desk and threw it at the floor.
“Jocelyn,” Alex said, and she looked at him, tears dripping down her cheeks. Alex took a slow step toward her, but froze when she screamed.
Then her eyes slipped shut and she collapsed to the floor.
Chapter 38
This was not how I pictured my reunion with my mom. Maybe I had been delusional, but I always pictured it as much more welcoming and filled with hugs, despite the fact that Alex had warned me that the Jocelyn everyone knew might be no more.
Instead of giving me hugs, she’d lost it and had passed out on the floor in the middle of the broken glass.
“Is she going to be okay?” I asked Alex, who was leaning over my mother, checking her wrist for a pulse.
“She’s alive…” he said, setting her arm down gently. “I don’t know what’s wrong with her, though.”
“She didn’t just pass out.”
“I don’t know, she could have, but…”
“But what?” I hated it when he trailed off like that, leaving his sentences hanging in the air.
“But with where she’s been, and how long she’s been there, I can’t say for sure what’s wrong. She could be in shock or something.”
I felt so frustrated I could have screamed. I kicked at some broken glass. “So what do we do now?”
He shrugged. “I guess we go back to Maryland—to Laylen and Aislin and wait until your mom wakes up.”
“And, what if she doesn’t?”
He didn’t answer.
Thank goodness my Foreseer gift was working again. Otherwise we would have had a very long drive back to Maryland. I managed to get us back to the beach house without any problems. My mom was still out when we arrived, and Alex carried her back to an empty room, leaving me to explain what had happened to Aislin and Laylen.
All three of us sat in the living room, and they listened to me ramble on and on about our journey to The Underworld. By the time I finished giving them the details, Alex had returned. He looked tired. There were bags under his eyes, his hair was messy, and the lake’s water had crinkled his clothes. It had crinkled mine as well and the fabric felt dry and rough against my skin.
“So, all the Water Faeries just passed out?” Aislin asked, her bright green eyes wide.
I nodded. "Yeah, one moment they were trying to do some kind of torture thing on my soul with that diamond we took down there, and the next moment they were on the ground.”
“Was it because they were trying to do something to your…soul?” Aislin asked worriedly.
“I don’t know what happened exactly.” But I wouldn’t be surprised if my soul had done it, seeing as how it was broken.
“I don’t think it was your soul that did it,” Alex interrupted, sitting down beside me. “I think it was because of the overload of fear you shot at them.”
“What overload of fear?” I looked at him funny. “All I did was scream.”
He looked as though he was choosing his next words very carefully. “I think because your emotions are so new to you that sometimes they come off a little….strong. And with the excessive amount of fear you shot at the Water Faeries, I think it sent them into shock.”
“Strong,” I said, insulted.
He pressed his lips together, doing that thing that he hadn’t done in awhile. You know the one where he is trying to hide the fact that he finds my irritation amusing.
The look—which used to make me angry—was having a different effect on me. It was making my skin tingle, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t from the electricity. But I refused to let him know this, or he would probably do it to me all the time, which honestly, wasn’t sounding that bad to me at the moment.
“So how are we going to get my mom to wake up?” I asked, changing the subject.
The looked Alex was giving me was quickly erased. “Gemma…I don’t know for sure that she will.”
“But you don’t know for sure that she won’t,” I pointed out.
Everyone looked at me, and I could see it on their faces. They felt sorry for me. Even Laylen looked at me this way. But why? Because they all thought my mom wasn’t going to ever wake up.