Free The Faery Keepers by Melinda Hellert

here?
                  “I know,” he mutters lowly. “I can’t explain right now, they’ll hear. But I promise I’ll be back later.”
                  He reaches across the gap between us and rubs a thumb under my eye, catching a lingering tear. I flinch back from the touch.
                  “Right, right,” he nods, brown eyes distant. “I’ll be back.”
                  And he leaves through the door.
                  I let out a huff of a sigh, collapsing sideways on the bed. I curl into a tight ball, trying to hold myself together with my arms. The images I’d just witnessed replay across my mind in an endless loop. I squeeze my eyes shut in hopes of eradicating the memory. But no matter how hard I try I can’t chase it away. I keep seeing his face in the last seconds of his brutally shortened life. It feels like my body is being torn to pieces and the only thing that’s keeping me whole is the pressure of my own arms constricting my torso.
                  Eventually I fall asleep through silent tears. Don’t ask me how because it seems impossible even to me but I do. I try to wait for Derek to distract myself, but apparently it doesn’t work. Whatever, I am asleep. That is until I wake up to the sound of the door opening quietly. I think I have sensory overload because I never wake up at such a light noise.
                  A Faery walks in bearing a tray of strange looking food. It’s a woman this time. She’s pretty, as Faeries go. A plain brown dress goes to her knees and grass green wings jut from her back.
                  “Supper,” she says, setting the tray on the bed. Her jade green eyes never quite meet my face; they flit around the room, anywhere but on me. She probably thinks I’m a grade-A criminal.
                  “I’m not hungry,” I shove the food away. It’s probably chock-full of poison anyways. The fruit looks unnatural, not like anything I would find in our local grocery store. At first it looks like ordinary grapes by the size and shape. But where grapes are usually red or green these are a candy corn orange. Definitely not normal. It also had a hunk of grainy bread and a cup (that was wood of course) of some sort of liquid. It sloshes over the rim as she sets it down, yellowish fluid puddling on the flat, wooden tray.
                  “Starve then.”
                  She leaves with an agitated twitch of her wings.
                  I scowl after her, propping myself up on an elbow.
                  Part of me wants to eat something, the rumbling stomach part. The other, more careful half of me is screaming at me that if I touch the food something incredibly bad will happen.
                  How harmful can it really be?
                  I pick up the hunk of bread—the least dangerous looking thing on the plate—and take a bite. Its course on my tongue, riddled through with a kind of nut unfamiliar to me. It tastes alright, so I take another bite. Then another.
                  Pretty soon it’s gone, sitting happily in my stomach.
                  I’m thirsty but don’t trust the cup and its questionable contents, so I deal with it as best as I can.
                  I lie back down and stare at the ceiling. They’d re-lit the candles while I was being interrogated but there was a dried puddle of wax where they had fallen before.
                  Vertigo overtakes me. I clap a hand over my eyes to stop the room from spinning.
                  I knew I shouldn’t have touched that food! I scold myself as my vision is plagued by faces. My father, mother, Maggie, Derek, Parker. . . All of them disembodied, floating, opaque above my head. I turn to face away from their piercing eyes but they follow in my line of