Free Keys and Curses (Shadow Book 2) by Nina Smith Page B

She sighed, put the stick over her shoulder and left the room. The doorway in the air closed as though nothing had ever been there.
    Flower looked back at the notebook again, still hardly able to believe the one word her charge had managed to write.
    Ishtar.
    She woke in the cave with a suddenness that left her head spinning. It was dark except for the few glowing coals in the fireplace. Nikifor slept fitfully under the guard of two fairies, themselves dozing. Bats rustled softly in the roof. Frogs chirped far away in the night.
    Only Ishtar was awake, sitting hunched over the fire, her eyes a mere gleam in the darkness.
    “Ishtar?” Flower made her way to the fire and sat across from her.
    “What, Muse?”
    The urgency of her question made Flower clench her fists in her lap. “Who is the girl with the pink hair? Do you know her?”
    Ishtar snorted. “What are you babbling about?”
    “There’s a human in Dream. At least I think she’s a human. She’s one of my charges, but she won’t write. Not a word until tonight, and then she wrote your name.”
    Ishtar picked up a short dagger and used the tip to clean dirt from under her nails. “My name?”
    “She wrote Ishtar.”
    “That’s the clan name of everyone you see here and a good many more besides.”
    Flower thought about this. “Could she be a Bloody Fairy? Have any of your clan ever gone to Dream?”
    Ishtar’s voice hardened. “My sister Hippy was the only one of us ever to go to Dream, and she came back and was murdered for her efforts. No self-respecting Bloody Fairy would live in that place. Or have pink hair.”
    Flower sighed, deflated. “I suppose.”
    “Got you rattled, this human.” Ishtar shoved at a log on the fire with her dagger, sending red sparks sputtering toward the roof.
    Flower shrugged. She wasn’t about to confide in Ishtar that the girl had almost opened a door into Shadow. Only the king could advise her on this, which made the search for him all the more desperate.
    “What were you doing near that mine?” Ishtar asked. “That place is crawling with Moon Troopers and fetches.”
    “Eight hundred Freakin Fairies are missing from the village.”
    Ishtar nodded. Apparently, that was not news to her.
    “I believe they’re being held in the mine. Maybe the Moon Troopers are forcing them to work it.”
    “So?” The word was so casual as to be callous. “Serves the Freakin Fairies right for being so obsessed with quicksilver.”
    “So what’s the Guild thinking?” Flower wished she could slap even a shred of sympathy into the woman, show her what was at stake, but it was no good getting angry at a fairy unless you wanted to be driven to a nervous breakdown. “What do they need that much quicksilver for, and who ordered the fairies to be enslaved?”
    “My money’s on your king,” Ishtar said. “He set up the Guild, he’s calling the shots.”
    “No!” Flower slashed her hand across the flames, a movement that caused Ishtar to half-rise, then slowly sit down again.
    “You’re very certain.” Ishtar slowly resumed cleaning her nails.
    “There has not been a direct order from the king in months. Maybe years. Somebody else has taken over. He may be imprisoned or even hurt.”
    “Let’s be positive about this,” Ishtar said. “He could be dead.”
    “If he was dead we wouldn’t be here. Nothing would be.” Flower pushed tendrils of hair from her face. She had to convince the fairy. She had to convince someone, so that she wasn’t the only person in Shadow who knew what was going on. “Ishtar, those Freakin Fairies are being held against their will. Nikifor and I are going to get them out of there, and if you and your warriors were to help-”
    “You’d be less likely to die trying?” Ishtar turned her attention to sharpening the dagger on a stone. “True. But I’m not wasting any Bloody Fairy lives on a pointless mission like that. Our objective is to kill your king, nothing more, nothing less.”
    “Why