DREAM DATE

Umm, Reth?" I blinked, trying to find anything for my eyes to focus on, but there was nothing there. Unlike the Faerie Paths, I couldn't see Reth-not even the glow of his soul. I clutched his hand tighter, his skin against mine the only evidence I had that he was still here. "I think you made a mistake. This isn't the Faerie Realms."

"Wrong, as usual," he said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. "It's simply not finished yet."

"What are we doing here, then?"

Another voice, a voice like the light of the full moon, pure and white, enveloped me. "You are here to dream." The voice seemed to wrap me up; I could almost feel it on my skin, and I could definitely feel it in my soul. It tugged at me, much like the black hole gravity of the Dark Queen's voice, but rather than making me want to lose myself in it forever, it made me want to find myself through it.

I knew I couldn't see anything but I couldn't help twisting my head around, my eyes straining. I wanted to-needed to-see who was talking. "Who's there?"

"Close your eyes, child of impermanence and eternity. Sleep."

I snorted, fighting the soporific glamour of the voice. "Yeah, that's not going to happen. This isn't exactly my ideal sleeping situation. I usually like a bed, and a blanket, and the comfort of knowing where the bleep I am and that I won't be attacked or killed or lost forever at any given moment."

"You are as safe as ever you have been. Sleep, and dream, and understand."

I startled as lips brushed against my forehead, but my eyes closed against my will, sweet and sudden sleep slipping over me like a sheet of water.

I opened them to see the Dark Queen, in all her porcelain-skinned beauty, and next to her, hands clasped, was a faerie of equal power and grace, her skin black and warm as ebony, her hair a white cascade of rainbow light to contrast the Dark Queen's oil-slick black. Even though the Dark Queen looked different from when I'd seen her-her features even less human, the borders of her body almost blurring with light-I knew it was her just the same. They stood on an empty and brilliant plane, bright and beautiful and serene. In the distance I could see what looked like trees, but the two women were alone here.

The voice that had spoken to me in the darkness whispered in my ear. "Too wicked for heaven, too good for hell. We wanted more. We had eternity, and each other, and the faeries under us, and the multitudes that dwelt with us in the unchanging space between heaven and hell. But we saw what the other plane had, though they, too, were stuck between heaven and hell."

"They move," the Dark Queen said, ignoring my existence, her eyes seeing something impossibly far away. "They move forward. They create."

"I want to create," the other faerie answered, and I recognized the moonbeam voice from the darkness, aching with desire and longing. The Light Queen.

"What is the joy in eternity if we cannot change?"

"Dear sister," the Light Queen said, "if I cannot create, I want to perish instead."

"But we were not given dominion there. We were gifted our land; who can tell what will happen if we leave it?"

"I no longer care."

The Dark Queen narrowed her eyes. "Then I shall make a way for you to go there."

"It is too wicked." The Light Queen raised her head, crystal tears frozen on her cheeks. "We cannot."

The Dark Queen smiled her razor smile. "If I am too wicked for heaven, I am certainly wicked enough to do this."

The scene broke apart in scattered beams of light, re-forming over a shining pink body of water. The Dark Queen and the Light Queen stood together, one hand raised on either side, their contrasting hands clasped in between them. An entire congregation of faeries waited behind them, all standing tall but some with more confidence than others. I gasped as I recognized Reth, looking older and younger at the same time.

"You cannot do this thing," a voice like a waterfall said, and I saw Cresseda rise out of the water, far more solid and corporeal than she ever was on Earth. "You will destroy yourselves."

"We will not destroy," the Dark Queen said, and every faerie leaned almost imperceptibly toward the gravity of her voice. "We will create. We will be more."

"Leave then, and be done with it." Cresseda's voice poured down like a wave of judgment on them. "But we will have no part of this."

I saw then that the water was swirling with life, with souls, and my perspective shifted to encompass all of it-it was an ocean, a home to every water spirit. Behind the faeries was a forest of trees, each with leaves of flame. The trees nodded their agreement, bending away from the Dark Queen. Even the ground itself pushed back, forming a crater around the faeries.

"We have all spoken," voices said in unison, voices that sounded like the rumbling of stones, the rustling of leaves, the crackle of flame, the rushing of water. "We accept what we have been given and reject you."

The Dark Queen raised her chin in defiance, a smile twisting her violet lips. "Not all have spoken."

A breeze started, and part of the souls in me recognized it. The sylph, in its true form as shapeless air. It spun, faster and faster, until it was howling, surrounding everything. "We want to fly," it said in a voice almost unhearable through the violence of wind. "We want to be free. We want to see new places, taste new things, fly unbound and boundless."

Cresseda shouted something but the noise was swallowed by the wind, now a hurricane force with the faerie-filled crater at the very center. I watched in fascination and horror as the glowing souls of the trees, fire, water, and earth were torn from their places and caught up in the screaming wind until the faeries were surrounded by a swirling vortex of light.

"We will be reborn," the Light Queen said, her voice reverent.

"We will give birth," the Dark Queen said, and together they raised their arms, hands out, all the faeries around them doing the same thing. The lights of the souls spun faster and faster until they were a solid wall and then a soundless, horrible rip shuddered through the land, like the very air was being sucked from my lungs, so wrong and so unnatural I wanted to scream, but I couldn't do anything except see.

The Light Queen's face fell. "What have we done?" she whispered.

"What we must."

"We cannot do this."

The Dark Queen's eyes flashed in anger. "I do this for you. And there is only one way for you to stop me. Will you break our bond? Will you utter my true name and betray me, the other half of your heart?"

"I will never," the Light Queen whispered. The Dark Queen took her hand, and as one the faeries ran forward, breaking through the wall of light and disappearing.

I thought it was over, that it was the end, but the lights didn't stop, the souls of the other paranormals weren't flung free of the sylph's wind. The faeries had left a gaping wound in their wake, a tremendous black void that the lights were pulled toward; and now under the howl of the hurricane I could hear the voices of all the other creatures, screaming as one in terror and agony as they were dragged away-the water, the earth, everything that had made up this world. When the last light, that of the wind itself, was sucked through and disappeared, the darkness collapsed inward and left the landscape so empty and devoid of spark and wrong I wanted to scream, I wanted to die, I couldn't be there anymore, I had to-

"Wake up, child."

I opened my eyes, my heart pounding, and sat up. "Where are we?" I couldn't get my heart to stop racing, my body still in panic mode, as I looked around. Reth stood next to me; we were no longer in the pitch-black. Now we were in a cave, brilliant light reflected and refracted by the thousands of stalagmites and stalactites that looked like they were made of pale pink spun sugar. The entire thing seemed impossibly fragile, like a shout would bring it shattering down around us, but that only made it more beautiful.

I looked to my right, and there was the Light Queen, exactly as I'd seen her in my dream. Only...somehow less. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, because she was just as beautiful and perfect, but it felt like she was shorter, or thinner-diminished in a way I couldn't describe. The lines of her body, instead of blurring to take part in everything around her, trapped her, contained her soul, cut her off.

"The sylph," I said, understanding. "It harnessed all the souls, and then you two used their power to rip a gate through to our world. But you didn't close it, and everyone else got pulled through, too." Just how Donna and Kari had explained it; now I'd seen it for myself. I shook my head in disbelief, then asked, "Where did you take me?"

"We have not moved," the Light Queen answered.

"Where did this all come from, then?"

"You."

"Last time I checked, my powers don't extend to making shiny pink rock formations." And, in the catalog of powers to have, that one was frankly useless. Although it would make a good party trick.

"This was the great tragedy, the great failure of our grand plans. Because unlike humans, who create with every thought, with every dream, with your very bodies, even here we were powerless on our own to create so much as a new thought. We assumed that by coming to your world we would be given the gift of creation, but it was never ours to have."

"Sucks to be you?"

She smiled. "It does indeed. But we found ways around that, as you have demonstrated. It is not creation to take what humans make and form it how we want, but it is as close as we get. And my sister will leave me forever before she will give up the power that human dreams give her."

I frowned. "Wait, so all this-everything in the Faerie Realms-you make from dreams? Any dreams, or the dreams of the humans you steal?"

"Those are most powerful, dwelling already in the land of dreams, but we can pull from your realm. Thoughts, hopes, desires, dreams. Here we take the material you give us and make it into imitations and repetitions of reality."

So faeries used human dreams to make the Faerie Realms and everything in them. Maybe that's why being here for a long time changed you, like it did Jack, made you less able to live in the human world.

Thinking of Jack in the Faerie Realms made me think of all the other people I'd seen there, which, when connected with the Dark Queen's determination to get back to where they came from without losing their ability to create...

"She wants to open a gate and take humans back with her, doesn't she?" I asked.

The Light Queen nodded solemnly. "Even this mockery of creation is more than we had there. She would have it all-eternity and the ability to shape it. My Seelie faeries refuse to once again bring unwilling creatures somewhere they do not belong. Thus the great chasm that has grown between us. She would sooner trap us all here than go back to our home without human dreams to feed off."

So pretty much all those poor saps I'd seen were nothing more than cattle to feed the Dark Queen's need to "create." "Why didn't you go back? After you got here, I mean. And why are the rest of the paranormals on Earth and not in this realm, with you?"

"We were scattered coming through the gate. Without the energy of all the souls together and a way to focus it, we could not open a gate again. Coming to Earth changed our forms-gave bodies to things that had been mere spirit, trapping them and shifting them and changing many beyond recognition. Some adapted better than others. For the faeries, our threads to eternity were shortened, thinned, until we feared they would snap entirely. It took us many generations to carve out this space between, where we were able to form a buffer between ourselves and time, living outside it. We would have protected our spirit cousins here as well, but since it was our folly that ripped them through the gate with us, they have never forgiven us."

"So that's how-" I paused, not wanting to refer to Melinthros as my father. "That's how faeries can make Empty Ones? You force them to live on Earth for long enough and it breaks down what makes them a faerie?"

"Yes," she said sadly. "I have never returned to the mortal realms. Those who make frequent trips do so at great personal sacrifice." I looked at Reth, who still stood next to me, had been standing next to me this entire time, silent and watching. Reth who never needed to come back to Earth after I freed him from IPCA. Reth who was looking dimmer by the hour after taking the midnight faerie's attack in my place.

The Light Queen followed my gaze. "My golden son has given much because of his love for you and his devotion to me. He may yet give up all."

Well, bleep. It was so much simpler to hate him.

"I know you hold depths of anger and bitterness toward the fey, child, but please understand our desperation. And please know my deep respect for humans and human life. Such beautiful, fragile animals, so fleeting and easily broken and yet powerful beyond anything faeries can ever hope to be. We cannot create but live forever, unchanging. You change with every breath, dying even as you live, but your thread to eternity and immortality is reborn with every new generation."

I was busy avoiding Reth's eyes, not wanting to think of him like that, as someone who was nobly sacrificing to be around me and protect me. Not wanting to accept that he really loved me the way he was always saying he did. My head was already the oddest combination of fuzzy and buzzy from being around the Light Queen.

I sighed, knowing what I had to do and hating that it was what these scheming faeries had been trying to make me do all along. But at least this way it was my choice, just like Lend and Arianna had said. And I wasn't doing it for the idiot faeries, anyway. I was doing it for the others, the ones that had no choice in all this, the ones that had never asked to come here in the first place. I could understand that.

And I found, to my surprise, that once I made the decision, really made it, I wanted to do it. I needed to do it. I wouldn't leave those paranormal souls to whatever fate they'd face here, not the way I'd been abandoned. I flexed my fingers, trying to calm down my wildly beating heart. There was no going back now.

"Okay," I said. "I'll do it."