DarkLight by Lesley Livingston

Author:Lesley Livingston
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-01-12T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter XIII

Home. She was home.

Fennrys had done it. Gwynn had sent her home.

Back to New York City. Sort of . . .

Kelley stood in the middle of a wide road—Park Avenue, maybe, although it was hard to tell—and gazed around the city streets at buildings with outlines softened and blurred, details obscured by greenery. Thick, lush vegetation covered the skyscrapers, climbing trellises of glass and steel. They reminded Kelley of pictures she’d seen of those jungle-covered cliffs in places like Hawaii, towers of rock thrusting hundreds of feet into the air like grasping, leafy fingers. To her left a crystalline waterfall tumbled down what had once been an office tower.

Overhead the skies rang with symphonies of birdsong, but down at street level, everything seemed deserted. Almost. Kelley had walked for about a half a block before she encountered the first of many “statues”—a couple holding hands, frozen in time. They looked like sculptures in a garden; ivy and moss had begun to creep over them, obscuring their features, trapping their feet forever, rooted to the crumbling pavement.

There were others—petrified, motionless as if they were chiseled from marble. A man in a suit on a bus bench. A newspaper seller. A young mother pushing a baby carriage that—Kelley noted with numb, detached horror—was lacking an occupant.

In its place grew a profusion of wildflowers.

A flash of movement out of the corner of her eye made Kelley turn in time to see a red fox darting into an overgrown bush, heavy with some kind of berry. Kelley heard a high-pitched giggle and saw, hiding behind the screen of bushes, the Faerie girl from Gwynn’s Court, Jenii, smiling widely at her. Kelley saw that there was blood staining the jagged points of her sharp teeth. Sharp, bright green teeth.

The four-leaf-clover charm at Kelley’s throat grew warm, and as she looked down, she saw that it had begun to sprout leaves. And more. Leaves and shoots, flowers and vines of all kinds flowed up her neck and across her shoulder. Winding down her arms, covering her torso and legs like a shimmering emerald gown. Until she stood there, a living topiary. The curling fronds of new ferns—crooked like beckoning fingers—unfurled from her shoulder blades, fanning out, filling the space behind her in place of Faerie wings. Her hair became corkscrewed, twisting in tendrils like the growth of new ivy, and the flesh of her hands and wrists shone pale and glistening like the translucent, curling skin of a white birch sapling. . . .

Suddenly, a shadow-black, old-fashioned carriage drawn by a monstrous dark horse came racing toward her. The air grew cold on Kelley’s leaf-clad limbs, and her feet were rooted to the ground. She could not move out of the way. She would be crushed.

She heard the Faerie girl Jenii laughing wildly.

Then she heard the bellowing of a king stag. From somewhere behind her, a white-green brilliant light washed through the street, and a white King Stag—the same magnificent creature that had once saved

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