I wasn't sure if she was being serious, until the door behind us swung wide open and she waved her other hand, sending a force of magic against everyone else in the room to expunge us from the place by tossing us all out the door before it shut and locked loudly.

"Great... now what?" Ettie groaned as most of us stood up from the ground.

I yanked my long-handled axe from my belt and threw my shoulder in to a chop against the door, shattering the door down the middle with the strength I still had in my arms. I glanced back to Ettie with my eyebrows raised. "Like you really thought a door was going to stop me?"

She laughed gently while I stepped through the door, splinters falling to my feet. I could hear Nera incanting something at the other end of the room. The portal near her flashed with life before images of cities like our own came in view at the center of the sphere.

"Finally!" Nera bellowed with excitement coursing through her. "A new world filled with so many people possessing magic trapped inside them, and it will be all for me!"

"If you want people with magic trapped inside them, why don't I just start with you?" I yelled while choking up on the grip of my axe as I ran toward her. Everyone else filtered in behind me.

Nera's face grew grim and angry as she turned to me. "You are always such an annoyance. Everything I threw at you, somehow you managed to get through it."

"You could have saved yourself the trouble and not tried to kill me or take my cloak." I explained and she looked at me funny.

"You still haven't realized that your cloak comes from the rainbow road that used to connect this world with another, have you?" Nera began but the explosion of a gunshot sounded which forced a bullet close enough for me to feel the breeze against my hair.

Bonny stepped up near me holding her smoking pistol, "Enough. Let's just finish this. She might be powerful but she can't handle the seven of us."

I glanced over the rest of my party, all looking like they were trying to hide how tired they were. I wanted answers and talking to give us time to rest was better, right? Why was Bonny jumping in to things?

My eyes drew back to Nera, who was holding the side of her head while blood ran between her fingers. She roared and ripped her hand from her hair, flinging blood drops in the already blood-drenched room.

Her fingers widened as the magic trickled out and Bonny, next to me, went flying against the wall. She was forced against the wall like she had been glued to it. She struggled but couldn't get free.

Nera then waved her other hand through the air and I felt the pull of energy trying to force me toward the wall. I dug my axe head in the blood-crusted floor and pushed energy in it to stick me to the ground. Everyone else slammed against the wall with a few loud cracking noises.

"Yes, I certainly can't deal with a bunch of n.o.bodies who have nothing special to warrant a risk." The blue faerie laughed, amused clearly.

I ground my teeth. "You really don't know anything about them."

My hand closest to everyone against the wall reached out before making a few hand gestures. Immediately Ashe, Reynard and Ettie dropped from the wall, soon followed by Han, Bonny, Roberts and Goldie. All of them stood with an aura of energy glowing around their bodies.

"You couldn't have countered that!" She yelled as I turned to look back at her with a weak smile.

"You forget I still have some of your magic, Nera. I did more than counter you." I let go of my axe and felt her spell take hold as I shot across the room and stuck to the wall.

Ashe ran to me with Reynard in her chest pocket. She pulled at my hand but it wouldn't budge from the wall. I grinned down at her and whispered, "Bring me the hand. I think it has one more use in it."

"But..." The animal whisperer started, her eyes showing worry about me.

"I'm fine. I can't counter the spell on myself. But that doesn't mean I'm useless." She still stood there before I yelled, "Go!"

My roommate pulled away from me quickly, as much as I didn't want her to leave my side, she had something to do. She started to spread the word to the others.

"You still haven't answered me about why you need my hood." I started; hopefully to buy time for word to spread and some of them to set in motion.

"You can't see?" Nera waved her hand to look back at the ma.s.s of various energies and made a tsk-tsk sound. "I expected better of you, former faerie. You did have a magical artifact all this time and didn't know?"

"I see a portal. And my cloak just has an enchantment to protect itself." My eyes briefly followed Ashe as she dashed around to include everyone. I wondered what she was thinking. Did she come up with a plan so fast?

"Yes, and?" Her cat eyes didn't falter from me. She probably still found the others as no threat, when really I was the least of her problems. I was weak and the only bit of magic power I had left was some of hers I had taken and the vast power of the sleeping curse in me, which I wasn't going to touch even if my life really did depend on it.

"That's it." I said while Ettie and Bonny pulled their guns to their hips.

She shook her head. "This is exactly why you aren't a real faerie anymore. You can never see beyond what is right in front of you."

"No, I'm not a faerie anymore because I chose to not be one." I laughed while my eyes fell to Goldie, taking up a position to leap in with a strike.

"You only think so, child. Being a faerie is about so much more than just magic and having the wings and t.i.tle. You do well as a witch but not a faerie. You don't take reality for anything other than what it is. You fail to see the potential, because you don't want to, former faerie."

I really wished Goldie had chosen five seconds earlier than that moment to leap with her dagger in an attempt to stab the faerie woman. At the same time, Han dashed from his spot to where the hand was lying on the b.l.o.o.d.y floor.

"Fool!" Nera roared and turned on Goldie while she made her sneak attack. The faerie woman's hand blasted a stream of blue energy, but it just flashed over Goldie before her dagger sunk in the blue faerie's stomach. She pulled out and rushed a step back as Nera gasped in pain.

Magical bullets and real bullets exploded from Ettie and Bonny once Goldie was clear, but Nera chose a safer route this time and formed a wall of energy to catch the bullets.

"You warded them!" She bellowed in pain when the gunfire died.

"You bet I did." I grinned and her eyes fell to Han picking up her severed hand in his mouth.

"You will dare not use my own hand against me!" She screamed and shot a blast out of seething acid but Roberts jumped in front of it. The acid sizzled against him without so much as a burn as he stepped forward to slice his sword across her hip, and then lunge to stab her in the chest.

Unfortunately, Nera released a wave of energy across the room that pushed Roberts and Goldie away, now that their wards had fallen to such strong spells previously.

Han tossed the hand from his mouth, and Ashe caught it before turning to me, not two feet away. She laid the severed body part in my hand and curled my fingers over it for me. I smiled softly to her before she turned away and s.n.a.t.c.hed up my long-handled hatchet from where it remained dug in the ground.

Every last one of my friends; warded or not, had a determined expression on their face as they stood between the Blue Faerie and me. I knew I could trust them to do their best, so I focused on the ritual I had to perform while stuck to the wall.

The most ridiculous ritual I had ever concocted. Or probably ever will.

"Gnidori?" My concentration s.h.i.+fted as I looked down to see Reynard at my feet.

"Not now Kit." I growled.

"But I can help with the ritual and Reynard wants to help."

"How?"

"How else?" The fox sat and wagged his bushy tail, like a puppy ready for a ball to be thrown.

I smiled. "You clever little fox."

His tail just wagged faster while my attention fell back to coiling the pathways in my mind, running my fingers over the leathery flesh of the hand I held to trace the hundreds of designs required to displace the curse inside of me.

By the time I could even draw my senses back to the fight going on around me, the only one who still had the glow of their ward against Nera's magic was Bonny.

Han was limping, but tried to hide it, probably from some spell Nera used like a lightning bolt.

Ashe was holding her shoulder, but there was no blood which led me to think she had dislocated it somehow, probably from dodging something.

Roberts and Goldie both had blood dripping to the floor from their hands, and a few more slashes of blood in various areas across their body. They had probably gotten torn up by one of Nera's wind barrier spells.

"You little pests! I'm done with you!" Nera cried before her hands drew in a spiraling blue energy. This wasn't good if she was going to start throwing around sleeping spells.

She released a shot of it toward Ashe, but Bonny stepped in to it and her ward evaporated from her body, leaving no one with a ward from Nera's magic.

It was in that moment, that everything seemed to change, with The Pirate King staring so severely toward the faerie woman.

"It's more like I am tired of you." Bonny let out her dragon roar that shook the b.l.o.o.d.y room. "I will not let you continue."

The pirate woman then dropped her pistol in to her holster and lifted a hand up to peel the purple eye patch from her hidden eye. She dropped the patch to the floor and turned her head to glance at me.

My heart sunk to the b.l.o.o.d.y ground. One of Bonny's eyes were crackling purple in the iris but the other hidden one was entirely purple and bleeding off magical power with such intensity that lightning literally sparked from her eye.

She smiled to me and I could barely manage a breath with the magical energy stifling me. Ettie dropped to the floor completely like she was suffocating. How could Bonny hide such power? Had it been the eye patch?

"Why don't we speed everyone up?" She said so simply before the energy poured over me and the simple movements Nera made suddenly slowed to a turtle crawl.

I finished off the final design in the hand I held just as Bonny peeled her sword from her side and turned to look over the Blue Faerie.

"I should have just done this before..." The pirate sighed as she stepped in front of the slow-moving Nera, trying to cast a spell, and pulled her hand back in a ready stance to slice her sword.

It was then that Reynard leapt up her back and jumped from her shoulder, catching the shriveled hand I threw and touching the fingers to Nera's forehead. I clasped my fingers together, releasing the seals I drew in the hand and forcing the activation of Nera's falling star spell.

A red bubble of energy formed around the Sidhe which launched Reynard through the air, to be caught by Ashe as she dived for him despite her shoulder. Bonny's slash was repelled by the bubble and pushed her back a few steps.

Then the second part of the ritual stepped in to place.

I gasped as the sleeping curse, I newly modified back to its original design, coiled out of me and straight in the Blue Faerie through the shriveled hand that was now grasping on to her face.

My body writhed and convulsed and the pain was so consuming as that curse left me, that I was seeing triples of everyone and everything in the room.

Once I couldn't feel a trace of the curse's wicked sensation s.h.i.+vering through my body I gathered my senses together and shook my head, trying to get rid of that pukey feeling.

It wouldn't go away.

So I pressed on.

I tapped my fingers against the wall to let the bubble spell complete by darting in the air and right out the door of the blood red room, taking the Blue Faerie far away from this tower.

Bonny turned on me. "Why would you do that?"

I swallowed hard and tried to focus on the Pirate King. I had even more questions for her now.

"Give her a curse and send her to the one place it will actually be useful? I have no idea, why would I do that?" I grinned as the spell keeping me to the wall died out with Nera all the way to the Faerie Academy by now.

My body hit the ground and I lifted to one knee as everyone around me stared at Bonny.

"The real question is..." My face rose to look at the pirate woman as the bandage around my head uncoiled and floated from my hair to the floor next to me. "...What are you, Bonny?"

Thirty-Two.

Time is a Relative Bonny smiled as she took a step back and looked around at the stern expressions matching mine.

"How much of it had been you? The time-spell obviously..." I growled as I stood up fully.

"Just that... well..." She paused.

"Tell the truth Pirate King!" I bellowed and stepped forward.

"If you must know..." She began again. "I only did a few direct things. A few time spells and creating life on the Pixie Path. And I sent Gabbi off when she came to attack you during the sylph attack, because the ward you put on her ran out at midnight."

"G-gabbi?" My voice got caught in my throat. "She was there?"

"If I hadn't done all those things you would have died in some way. Gabbi's was particularly gruesome. She'll likely still be after you now."

"She'll always be after me. And I'll always be after her." I sighed and lowered my head.

"You were one of the most difficult people to keep alive. You are like the red string of fate connecting so many together. It becomes frustrating to see what impact you'll have; if you survive." Bonny continued while I tried to shake away what she was saying. She was trying to distract me.

"What do you mean, life on the Pixie Path?" My eyebrows furrowed as I looked up again and she pointed at Ashe. That only made me even more confused, at least until I saw Reynard as well. She had been the one to produce that brimstone smelling magic that let a kitsune come in to existence?

"Why?" I hissed and Reynard looked almost hurt as he poked his head up from around Ashe's hair.

"You never would have taken the legend keeper from the mirror if you didn't have him."

Legend Keeper... that was familiar. "You mean Kit? He's the legend keeper the dragon was looking for? I thought he was just a..."

"Mirror spirit, yes, I know. That was cute, even after the dragon showed up to tell you about the legend keeper. Somehow it still didn't register with you. You probably haven't even thought that I had made the unraveling spell to make sure you took the spirit with you." She smiled, amused at me, before her eyes s.h.i.+fted to look at the portal. She whispered, "I just hope they managed to catch the dragon while it was out."

"You used me all this time to lure out a dragon so someone could try and catch it?" If anyone could do it though, someone with the magical power Bonny was producing could have found a way. After all, she had managed to even make life.

"If you want to see it that way." She shrugged and stepped toward the portal, but everyone around, despite wounds, descended on her. Roberts had his sword at her throat, Han had his jaws around a leg, Goldie had a sword across her chest, Ashe had my long-handled axe poised between the woman's legs, and even Reynard was yanking at her pant leg.

"Oh please..." Bonny rolled her eyes. "You are really going to attack me after all that I helped you with? If you look at it, this one trip portal is my payment for all I did for you. The fox? The time trip? We both know you and Goldie would be dead if you didn't have your magic back then or in how many other faerie incidents you encountered?"

She sighed as I just took another step toward her, still glaring. "There are numerous time lines where you should have died. We almost thought you were going to when you stupidly jumped after the Cinderella girl, like a complete faerie folly."

"We. You keep saying we. You must mean the others with eyes like you. The ones that were in the hoods." I finally said as I stopped moving.

"The legend keeper must have told you that..." She started, her neck twisted to glance back at me. "We all have eyes like that though, yes."