The fall breeze caught my hat and tried to snatch it from my head. I plopped my hand atop it and continued onward, trying to ignore the dead, dry grass crumbling to dust beneath my steps. The filth caught the wind and fluttered away, utterly worthless.
Tall, tired sage bushes were putting up a better fight than the rest of the greenery. Of course, few things were green in the high plains of New Mexico. I'd known the state when it'd been part of its original nation, but the world was changing faster than ever. Everyone wanted to prove themselves in the brave, new land.
I'd walked through the Valley of the Damned, nearly drowned in a sea of sand, and roasted beneath the hot, red sun. And it was all worth it. This lousy shanty, this boarded up old shack; this was what awaited me at the end of a road that was too long.
A mere tap of my knuckle to one of the boarded windows was enough to ruin its resolve. I sneezed as the boards fell away and into the building. There was no door, but I bunched my skirt at the hip and hoped no one was around to see my boxers. One leg first, then the other. I slid in and gasped as agony burned through my back.
Translucent wing flesh caught on an old nail jutting out from the window shutter, I hissed as I grabbed the low edge of the roof outside and pulled myself up. There was a hole in my wing the size of a dime by the time I was done, but that would heal. Fairies aren't particularly vulnerable to disease, so I wasn't very concerned about the tear. Pain was a passing gesture and, had the nail been iron, I would have known it already.
It did stand to reason that it should have been. Weren't iron nails meant for the wilderness? Horseshoes and wagon wheels, blacksmiths clanging away at their anvil; those were the typical trappings, weren't they?
Perhaps someone with modern ideas had shown up and, at some point, bothered to replace the nails in the original wood with new nails made of aluminum. I couldn't imagine it had been recently, but the harsh desert climate often took its toll on untreated wood. I shrugged the matter away for later thought and sought to discover the interior.
There was but a single room with a pair of old shelves in one corner. A rusted woodstove lay on its side, the unfriendly maw of the iron catastrophe threatening to consume me. I skirted around it, intent on a stain in the center of the room. Brown with time, the dirt thick across it, I scuffed the sand away with my slipper. The blood stood out against the slate floor and I crouched to examine it, running my fingertips over the rough surface.
"The stone drank it in, allowed it to become part of itself," I murmured, lifting my hand to my lips. Dried long years past by the heat, baked into the rock, I frowned. I hadn't come prepared to excavate a block from the floor, but where there was a will, there was a way.
I lifted my hands to the sky, fingering the dirt between each set of my index finger and thumb. Spell work like this was difficult, but not beyond someone who had graduated first in her occult classes. I concentrated. The energy that lay beneath the ground, the pooling lava desperate to breach the surface, was more than willing to allow me to tap it. I did so and pulled with everything in me.
The fire rushed heat through my flesh. Like a laser, the lava ripped upward and made neat cuts in the floor. With a puff of hot air, I blew a fragment of the blood-imbued stone into my hand and examined it. Though I preferred to work with fresher materials, the spot would have to do. I allowed the lava to simmer back through the cracks in the earth, climbed back through the window, and started my journey back down the mountain.
Again, the sage swayed in the wind. The weeds danced across the trail in front of me. And the grass shattered beneath my slippers. The high desert was in the dry season, useless and worthless for anyone who needed it.
Just like my mother.
My grip tightened on the rock in my hand. She had spent years being ever so careful never to bleed in front of me, knowing that the vengeance I craved would work only with a drop of her blood. Yet, she hadn't considered that I would enter the mortal realm and find our place of becoming. She hadn't thought that I may find some way to do the impossible and extract the blood I needed from stone.
Because if she had, she would have gotten to it before I did.
I stepped through the portal at the bottom of the hill, head held high, and into my destiny.
The arrow bit into my chest, just to the left of my sternum. The rock tumbled from my hand and into the paper-white palm waiting for it. I stared up into the unforgiving emerald eyes as I fell to my knees, my heart laboring its last.
?I knew,? she said.
Mother and the archer abandoned me to die on the cold, hard tile.
Topic: Editor Draft: A Daughter's Affection (Read 1164 times)