To Err Is Faerie: Chapter Two – This Is All You Get Until The Whole Book Is Published Tomorrow on Amazon

How far would you go to save a friend?

If you’re a crazy little pixie princess named Sabrina, apparently pretty darn far, risking your life and sanity with only a few mental hesitations.

Let’s face it, however: Most of us have no clue how to answer that question. If you’ve ever served in the military or had a baby, I imagine you’ve got a much better idea than the rest of us. But for a single civilian like me, I just genuinely don’t know.

There are definitely people I say I’d die for, such as my growing family and my very closest friends. And I truly want to believe that I would put my money where my mouth is if push came to shove.

Whether reality would follow along, however? Well, let’s just say I hope that, unlike Sabrina, I never have to find out.

CHAPTER 2

S

abrina turned the shiny doorknob with a whole lot of hesitation in her wrist. Yes, Kenneth was her brother, and she’d already bucked his authority a few times over in typical little-sister style. Not to mention that, according to certain sources she’d had throughout the years, older brothers were born to be badgered by their younger siblings. It was practically a law in and of itself, carved into nature at the beginning of time, or very nearly so. Sabrina didn’t doubt any of that, but it didn’t mean she felt comfortable playing her full part in that long-lasting tradition. She’d only known Kenneth for a very short amount of time, and he was still a king with a lot of power and even more stress.

With all that in mind, her pulse did perform a little faster than usual when she stepped into the main room.

It was a simple but expansive space. Done up in varying shades of cream and accented with the family green, everything was set up just-so from the wide and cluttered desk her brother sat at, to the circle of furniture created by two black leather sofas and two matching loveseats. Several bookshelves filled with various works lined the walls, but they were more for decorative and intellectual show than anything else. In the same way, the pieces of first-edition faerie art around the room were set in grandiose frames for subtle or not-so subtle purposes of intimidation.

Sabrina was very happy the arts’ particular effects had worn off on her a week ago. Back at her brother’s safe-house, she’d been outright mesmerized by the paintings she’d seen, to the point where she’d required physical assistance to stop ogling them. According to Lauren, faerie works had that influence on humans; and since Sabrina had still been in the process of morphing into her proper self, she’d reacted just as a human would with rapturous attention.

But things had changed. She was a full faerie now with a clean bill of health according to Aileen. Her wings were perfectly functional, she was able to size-change – an interesting experience all by itself – and she reacted to art normally. Now if her shrink would give the same diagnosis, she’d be in tiptop shape.

“Hey, big brother,” she started amiably.

It was more to butter him up than out of natural affection. She was still working on that and genuinely wanted to achieve it, but it hadn’t arrived quite yet when their relationship was still so very knew and fragile.

He smiled a tired smile that made her feel guilty for bothering him, and told her to take a seat across the desk. The king looked exhausted, with heavy bags under his green eyes that made him look more haggard than a healthy man in his forties should be. His wide shoulders were slightly slumped and his magnificent green wings fell down from his shoulders, drooping past the chair’s arms.

It wasn’t a relaxed position; it was one born out of depression.

She knew why, of course. Dallas’ kidnapping had hit Kenneth hard on multiple levels. There was the fact that the younger man was a Scottish faerie and therefore automatically under his protection. But she knew that Dallas was much more than that to her family. He and Alistair had been best friends since grade school, which meant that both had spent plenty of time at the other’s place. And apparently, while Dallas’ father was still alive, the man was not now, nor ever had been, the most affectionate sort of soul. A businessman, he had put his career ahead of his family, so Kenneth and Kyla had unofficially adopted Dallas as a second son.

For that matter, Sabrina still hadn’t met the man, which she found odd. If she had been in his position, she would have spent every waking moment roaming the palace halls and pestering people to find Dallas.

Rather like her brother was.

“Are you okay?” She regretted the question before she could complete it. It was an all-around inadequate string of syllables, but she didn’t know of any other way to express her concern.

“I’m holding up,” he assured, and it almost sounded like the truth.

She winced in both sympathy and empathy. “Are we any closer to finding him?”

“We have a few new possibilities,” he said in a voice that didn’t promise much. “But it’s been a while. The longer we can’t find him…”

He trailed off, unwilling to say the words they both knew to be accurate. It was like the process of saying it might give the fates permission to make it so.

Sabrina glanced down at his beautiful mahogany desk, mostly because it was painful to look at the raw emotion all over his face. She wondered if that was how she looked when she talked about Dallas. If she had to take a guess, she’d say his tight and exhausted expression was something very close to a mirror image of her own.

Giving him a couple extra seconds to collect himself, she picked up a copy of The Faerie Times that he had lying on one corner of the desk. She shouldn’t have been surprised to see a picture of her kidnapped friend there, smiling his usual cocky grin, his dark blond hair falling across his right eyebrow in a way she was very familiar with. He would be just about ready to shove it out of his face, she knew.

The image brought on a new rush of heavy emotion that nearly forced tears out of her eyes. As it was, she had to swipe at them with her fists before flipping the newspaper over.

“Is there anything I can do?” It wasn’t the first time she’d asked the question.

“I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do other than what we already are.” He paused to close his eyes for something longer than a blink, and when he opened them again, it was to stare blankly at the ceiling. “We don’t know where he’s being held specifically or where the Committee is in general. They abandoned the last building, and it’s not like they left us a forwarding address.”

The words rolled out with a controlled amount of bitterness. “We’ve scoured their usual known haunts but found nothing. And even if we could get in contact with them, what could we offer? They definitely don’t need money.”

Sabrina knew that was true. All too well. The facility she’d been kept at had been flawlessly clean and well- maintained. If it wasn’t brand new, then they had put a lot of time, effort and British pounds into keeping it in mint condition. So no, they didn’t seem like they’d care about any financial incentives. At least as far as she had seen. She supposed her experiences had been limited to just a few areas, including her padded cell, the rooms where they conducted their studies, and Dr. Stewart’s personal office.

The evil therapist’s space had been particularly lavish, she recalled. After all the time she spent there, she rather thought she had its details memorized. And not just the physical impression. It also had an air to it: a disturbing, oppressive ambience she never wanted to experience again. Or perhaps it was just the sound of his voice that had given off such a negative impression.

Sabrina knew there was an intellectual debate over which was worse: psychological torture or its physical relation. But now that she had firsthand experience with both, she had a simple and complicated answer. It all depended on how well they were applied.

Stewart had helped her come to that conclusion.

Shaking those burdensome thoughts to the side, she tried again. “Kenneth, there’s got to be something I can do. Quite obviously, I’m not sleeping much at night, and I’ve got plenty of time on my hands during the day. It just feels wrong not to help when I know what he’s going through. So if it’s a matter of you feeling badly wasting my time, don’t.”

He shook his head again, his blond hair shifting a little with the movement. He needed to cut it, she could tell. Normally a good-looking guy, he’d rather neglected his appearance as of late. Several inches over six feet, he was ruggedly handsome and charismatic with the appeal of a well-mannered rugby player. If there was such a thing.

At least, he came across that charmingly on his good days. This wasn’t one of them.

Kenneth sighed, another indication that he was tired of it all. “I wish it were that simple. Believe me I do. And if I think of something, I’ll let you know. But for right now, there simply isn’t anything.”

“What about Alistair?” She found herself feeling quite desperate to be of some use. “He’s been helping you out, hasn’t he?”

“Yes,” Kenneth acknowledged. “Yes, he has. But he was born and bred to run an entire country.”

Sabrina felt the implications like a kick to the curb. Her nephew was useful; she wasn’t. Still, she protested anyway, leaning forward in her desperation to be of some use in this whole, sordid mess. Almost without thought, she wrapped her wingtips around the bottom of her chair.

“I get that, but what other faerie can you think of who’s spent as much time up close and personal with the enemy?”

“You’re already telling your psychiatrist everything you can,” he reminded her. “And Geoffrey has his men playing and replaying the interviews you’ve given them for any clues. Whether you realize it or not, you are helping.”

She gave up at that point, but only because her brother looked so battle-weary. She couldn’t continue badgering him anymore; it was just too pointless and cruel.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he told her with a small but sincere smile. “Believe it or not, I know how you feel.”

“No, I really am sorry to bother you,” she repeated, standing up this time. “It was thoughtless of me.”

“Sabrina,” he commandeered her attention, his brow furrowing slightly. “I’d love to say you can interrupt me anytime you’d like, but obviously with my job, that’s not true. However, when I’m not in a meeting, you’re more than welcome to stop by and visit. It isn’t a bother.” He sighed. “I’m not getting anywhere anyway.”

Unclear about whether she should stay or go, she hesitated.

“Would you like to play a game of Scrabble with me?”

Sabrina couldn’t help it: she looked at him like he’d gone crazy.

He gave a rueful laugh. “You think I’ve lost my mind, don’t you?”

She tempered her actual response to something less insulting. “It is pretty early. Anybody can feel a little loopy at this time of the morning.”

Staring down at his cluttered desk for a few seconds, he looked back up at her and shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “Sometimes stepping away from the problem gives me a fresh perspective.”

“And Scrabble will do that for you?” She asked, still a little doubtful.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But it would be time spent with you, which I know I’ve been very lax about so far. And I think both of us could probably use a few moments of distraction. Unless you’d like to go back to bed, of course.”

He made the last statement with the smallest upward turn of the left side of his lips, like he didn’t have a clue that bed was the last place she wanted to be when sleep wasn’t sure to follow.

It was sibling manipulation at its best, and Sabrina found herself taking some comfort from it. She felt little qualm in caving after that, moving with him over to the sofas and the coffee table in between.

There, they played and talked. In the beginning, the conversation was nothing more than polite chitchat, but it morphed into something more comfortable before she knew it.

Playing words like “quark,” her brother took the lead after only a few moves. She frowned at the folders he’d moved aside to make room for their word battle, board and all. How he could get the necessary letters to play so many points so quickly was beyond her comprehension.

Kenneth gave a genuine bark of laughter when he saw her expression, and assured her that he wasn’t hiding any extra letters around him.

From there on in, Sabrina had to rack her brain for ways to keep up with him, which was a relief from her normal thoughts. Concentrating on triple-letter bonuses and intersecting parts of speech meant thinking about Dallas just a little less than normal. His plight was still there, just not quite as unbearably heavy as before. She’d feel guilty about taking the mental and emotional break later. For the time being, however, she was determined to semi-enjoy herself.

That was the plan anyway. But since her plans so seldom seemed to go the way she intended them to, she messed it up while tallying her score for the simplistic and barely adequate play of “leader.” It fell on a triple-word tile, but it still felt pathetic.

“So have you gotten anything else out of Alex?” She used her pointer finger to wobble one of the tiles she hadn’t played yet.

“No.” Her brother returned his attention to his own letters after a quick, questioning look her way. “At this point, I’m actually quite inclined to believe he’s telling the truth though.”

She didn’t know why she had broached the topic when sleeping dogs really were best left to lie. That was particularly true when those canines had caused too much trouble already the last time they were woken up.

Considering how she did the complete opposite of changing the subject, it seemed that she hadn’t gotten the adage through her thick skull just yet.

“What are you going to do with him then?” She pressed with all the casual poise she could muster, concentrating a little too much on placing the letters D, E, T, O, U, R and S on the board, locking in a few additional points from the word “loves” she’d managed to also make with the S.

Kenneth shook his head over his row of tiles, which were spaced neatly on their gold-edged holder. “I don’t know yet. I want to be as sure as possible before I let him back out.”

If he expected a fight out of her on that one, he was very mistaken. She wasn’t going to come down on him for trying to protect his country. There were too many reasons to keep her cool, including how he was once again breaking the no-human-prisoners rule faeries had long since held. Back in darker days, faeries had often just killed humans who got in their way. And while she was pretty sure those practices were legally obsolete now, the no-prisoner statute lived on.

Housing them in Faeriedom was flat-out impossible, and keeping them elsewhere was just dangerous. For the vast majority of the past decade, the HPAC had failed miserably in obtaining any faerie information. But for whatever reason, the group was getting lucky as of late, compromising wingless agents, locating faerie-owned property and, of course, kidnapping high-profile targets. All it would take was one more accident, and the HPAC could discover the holding areas, letting even more faerie secrets slip into their hands.

For Dallas’ sake, her brother seemed willing to break the rules, just as he’d done before for her good. Though as far as she’d been told, Alex was still being held miles and miles away.

Then again, none of those precautions or allowances might matter when it came down to it. There was no way to tell when, under torture, Dallas could be spilling damaging information right then. He was strong and stubborn, but everyone had a breaking point.

Sabrina’s fingers danced nervously over the tops of her letters. “Would I be allowed to visit Alex?”

Her brother shook his head in such a way that his answer was obvious and inflexible. Yet she waited for his verbal response anyway.

“You know Faeriedom is on lockdown until Kyla and I give further notice. Nobody comes in and definitely nobody leaves other than necessary personnel.” He grimaced, his features a study in resolve and regret. “It’s just too dangerous right now.”

Sabrina knew it was true, mostly because of how swiftly the king and queen had set the new rules in place after Dallas’ kidnapping. Sending out a broadcast on the faerie-specified wavelengths, he had invited citizens and residents alike in the surrounding aboveground areas to take shelter downstairs.

Even some of the farmers – who had one of the more dangerous jobs considering the spiders and birds that would gobble them up if they got the chance – had come down. Not too many, admittedly, since those men and women were used to adverse conditions, much like Wild West cowboys.

The faeries that had come down now lived in various public and private buildings around the city, living off of government rations until their monarchs gave the all-clear. Already, some of them were complaining that they wanted to go back, but the king and queen had so far refused to lift the ban. They had made the conditions for coming down very clear in their original message, so subjects were essentially stuck where they were for the time being. It wasn’t like they could sneak out on their own either. There were just a few legal, natural openings nowadays, and those were heavily guarded. All the others had been filled up during the sixties, she’d found out.

Sabrina had learned a lot about faeries, their way of life and their history since coming down. She had also learned a lot about herself while she walked a fine line between outward serenity and inward agitation, doing her very best to cultivate the appearance of calm concern.

She’d gone to her psychiatric evaluations and spilled all the details she could think of in hopes that it might help. She hadn’t cried or balked like she wanted to, numbing herself instead to everything but practically emotionless memory. She’d shut herself off as she dredged up every sordid aspect and angle possible. Not to mention going above and beyond the call of duty by doing research on both faerie and available HPAC accounts in order to glean any useful information she could, and keep herself from being a nuisance.

It just wasn’t doing any good.

She stared down at her last five letters, a P, A, E, R and T, rearranging them one way and then the other until she formed “trap.” It served to flicker a dangerous little light bulb on inside her head.

Sabrina bit her lower lip in contemplation while she processed the idea. Thanks to various sources, including Deanda, she was aware of some of the methods Kenneth and Kyla were employing in their search for Dallas. And while she doubted she’d heard every single one of their plans, Sabrina was pretty certain they hadn’t considered the one she was now musing.

A trap. But not just any trap. One that the organization couldn’t refuse: something that was just too tempting for them to pass up.

The HPAC might have Dallas in its clutches, but he could only be passed around for so long and to so many doctors at a time. It was the classic problem of supply and demand, particularly with rare products. If her family offered them up another pretty piece of wing, she couldn’t see them refusing.

Especially if she was the offered bait. Too many of them had shown too personal an interest in her for Sabrina to think they wouldn’t go far out of their way to get her back.

That included her nemesis, Mr. Smiley. She didn’t understand his particular obsession with her, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. But that didn’t mean she could ignore the certainty that he was trying to find her every waking moment he had at his disposal. And when she thought about it a little more closely, Dr. Stewart was probably pining after his psychological study just as much. He’d lived every scientist’s dream while she was in his clutches, experimenting on her psyche without any ethical boundaries or the possibility of professional lawsuits.

Then there was the short, balding Dr. Morrison, who’d been so smug while he pushed her to perform more and more difficult tasks until she was in literal agony. And when she couldn’t take it anymore, he’d tried to push her further with his warped sense of motivation: electric shocks applied directly to her skin.

Or Dr. Anderton with his needles and vials. He never had gotten to use much of his tools of the trade on her.

As she’d considered before, there was the chance that they had replaced her with Dallas. For all she knew, they might have forgotten about her altogether. Then again, maybe they hadn’t, and maybe it was a theory worth looking into, which meant that talking to Alex could be a smart place to start. The HPAC might have confided in him, or at the very least let something slip about where they liked to hang out when their normal haunts weren’t an option.

It was her turn, but Sabrina didn’t put down “trap” after all, choosing to play “part” instead. The way she was working everything out in her head, she was fairly sure she would have to first get her ex’s full-fledged consent. So there was no reason to broach it to her brother just yet.

Instead, what she did was ask one more time about Alex. “What if I was really, really careful?”

Kenneth couldn’t have had any idea about the larger plot she was piecing together, yet he seemed to address it anyway. His expression remained weary, but there was an uncompromising resolve about him nonetheless.

“Sabrina, this isn’t open for discussion. I’m not letting you put yourself in harm’s way by going up there. End of story.”

She let the subject drop, but not because she was ready to give up. After all, she could contact Alex by email just as easily. It might not be as effective as sitting down and talking to him, but she could work with what she had.

“I’m sorry,” she offered. “I’ll let it go.”

His expression softened somewhat, though he still looked solemn. “I’m only thinking about your safety. You know that, right?”

She agreed. Yet even while she did, she was busy sorting through details to solidify her scheme. In the end, she meant to have her way. She had to have her way when Dallas’ life seemed so thoroughly dependent on it.