Elixir by Ruth Vincent Read Free Book Online

hours. It was a remarkable bit of craftsmanship, the kind of artifact you’d see in a museum.
    “My father gave this to me,” he said quietly.
    “It’s quite a piece,” I said, admiring it.
    “Yes, well, every gentleman had one back then.”
    Something in his words gave me pause.
    “My father is dead now. Everyone in my family is dead,” Obadiah continued.
    “I’m sorry,” I whispered. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to reach out to him, to put my hand on his shoulder in sympathy. But I didn’t know if he would want that. So instead I just stood there, awkwardly, with my hands in my pockets.
    “Do you know why everyone in my family is dead?” he asked. The volume of his voice was slowly rising.
    I shook my head. I felt afraid to know what he was about to say.
    “Because when I finally escaped my captors and came back to New York City, two hundred years had passed.”
    My mouth gaped open. It all made sense—his old-fashioned way of speaking, all the antiques in the club, the fireplace instead of modern heat . . .
    “Walking through Times Square, I might as well have been back in Fairyland,” he said, his voice full of bitterness. “It was certainly no longer home . . .”
    The gulf of the tragedy was too much to even comprehend. I reached my hands out towards him. It was all I knew to do. But his eyes were flashing warning signals that screamed “don’t touch me,” and I could only gaze at Obadiah, my heart aching for him. There was so much pain in his eyes as he looked at me—and yet, I was scared too, because I could tell he didn’t want comfort. He wanted revenge.
    “Time is so strange down there,” he said. There was a faraway quality to his voice, as if he were talking to himself, not to me. “When you’re inside their enchanted cocoons, you don’t know if you’ve been there an hour or a week, a year or a hundred years. And even though it’s been decades since I escaped, still, time never sits quite right with me.”
    “You were held captive in the Vale! But by who?”
    Obadiah’s jaw tightened. “I think you know the answer to that.”
    I shook my head. “No, I don’t. Really, I don’t.”
    “The fairies.”
    The expression in Obadiah’s eyes as he said it was terrifying. It wasn’t anger. It was hate. Every muscle in his body, from the sinews of his shoulders to the smooth lines of his face, was taut with contained rage as he spoke of them. His fists were tight beneath his immaculate cuffs, as if at any moment he could slug someone.
    But he didn’t. Instead, he proceeded to walk slowly and calmly through the aisles to the back of the room. There was another marble-topped bar back there, on the other side of the fireplace. It was of the same design as the bar on the dance floor, but this was bare and empty of bottles.
    He ran his fingers slowly over the marble, then gripped it; his knuckles white.
    “So now you know why there’s a trap in the floor, triggered by the green light that’ll kill any fairy that comes in here,” he said with icy quietness. “I will never fall for fairy tricks again.”
    I was silent. I knew something about fairy tricks—my anger still burned white-hot when I thought of the Queen and the life she’d stolen from me.
    “But you.” Obadiah turned to back to me. “You’re not quite a fairy, but you’re not quite human either. I don’t know what the hell you are. Believe me, I’ll find out. But I don’t think you’re one of us .”
    One of us? What was he talking about?
    “Oh my god, are you one of the Shadows?” I asked, breaking the heavy silence that had fallen between us. “Why did you come back? I’ve never heard of a Shadow child who wanted to return.”
    It was the only explanation for why a human like Obadiah would have spent so much time in the Vale. He must have been one of the human children we rescued and replaced with a Fetch. We’d take the ones they were hurting, the ones they didn’t want—and give them for