CHAPTER 198

The queen vanished, gobbled up by the dream. Lily slammed the door and summoned a large key to lock it shut.

"Can't she just break out of there?" Mike asked while stepping out of the fountain. His body solidified, and the others vanished from sight, except for Lily.

"Oh, she's having a very bad time right now." Lily smirked. "Wanna see?"

"I'm not going in there," he told her. His sudden reversal of fortune was too good to pass up.

"You don't have to go in there. This is all inside your head, remember? You just have to want to see it. Here, I'll show you." Lily extended her hand and Mike took it.

The home and the beach vanished, and he found himself back in the court of the faerie queen. Convinced he had woken up, his first clue that he was still asleep was that the court was in black and white. As he looked around, he saw that there were two thrones now instead of one.

"The humans need to be made to understand," said an elegant man with six wings and a scepter. "We can no longer allow our people to suffer, my Queen."

The queen looked younger, somehow. Maybe it was the smile that reached her eyes, or the way she looked at the man, but Mike felt a sudden kinship with them.

"We must let the mortals work out their own problems, Oberon. Our kind are not meant to persist in their world." The queen moved close and laid her head on his chest when he embraced her. "Besides, I will miss you."

Oberon chuckled. "You will hardly know I'm gone. The time cycle is in our favor, a few days for you will be years for me in the real world. I just need time and the world's attention. I found a human I believe I could possess, the human world already refers to him as a king."

"You can't go about possessing the monarchy. They aren't like us."

Oberon laughed. "Ah, but this one is! He sings and dances like one of our own, and I have made arrangements to meet him soon. Well, he doesn't know that we'll be meeting, but you catch my drift."

"You promise you'll come back to me? I couldn't bear the rest of eternity without you."

Their words were lost in a wail of grief, and Mike flinched when he realized that the faerie queen was on her knees next to him. Her extra arms were gone, and she was back to her normal height.

"No, please, don't make me watch," she cried, and covered her eyes with her hands. The skin of her hands became translucent, forcing her to watch as the sky filled with random images of a man known as the King. Crowds of adoring fans shrieked his name and cried out for him, and the scene changed to a dressing room.

"Holy shit," whispered Mike as he watched Oberon argue with his wife in his human form. The two of them were shrieking at each other in fast forward, and the conversation finally slowed down enough that he could hear it.

"You need to come back," she begged. "The human world has poisoned you. This form has poisoned you."

"I'm so close," Oberon hissed, then picked up his guitar. "I just need a little more fame, a little more time, please."

"Look at you. You're starting to fall apart." She took his hands in hers. "You've even built yourself a kingdom here. Do you plan to stay in the human world?"

Oberon simply winked at her, and now they were standing in a cemetery. The real queen was a blubbering mess, but her past self stood next to Oberon on the edge of a packed gathering. The mourners moved in slow motion, and her face was puckered in anger.

"But you failed," she said. "Your human host couldn't contain you any longer, and you nearly died with him."

"It was an abject lesson in humility," Oberon confessed. "A lesson which I will not need to learn a second time. I simply need a younger host."

"Don't you dare," she warned him. "Oberon, you need to come home, our people need you."

Oberon shook his head. "Our people need you to lead them while I try to save them from this side. For my next host, I will work on bringing the world together, and getting them to part with their parasitic ways."

"That hardly worked this time. You were so caught up in fame that you never once worked to better our people, my king." Her voice was harsh, and her cheeks had turned green. "You squandered your time here, and for what? For them?" She gestured at the mourners.

"I'm simply not used to human time versus our own. A human decade isn't that long as a fey, and I admit that time got the better of me." When Oberon turned to face her, Mike could see the deep lines in the brow of his forehead. He looked sickly, with heavy shadows beneath his eyes. "But I am the king of the fey, and I will do right by our people. You have my promise."

"Your promise is meaningless if you fail to deliver."

Oberon scowled at his queen, but said nothing. They watched the mourners in silence, and the scene rippled once more. It was the queen, and she was sitting on her throne, and a fey with wings behind his ears knelt before her.

"What did he say?" she asked, her eyes fierce, but her lower lip trembling.

"Your Majesty." The messenger looked nervous. "He said that the human world deserves his gifts, and that he does not intend to return anytime soon."

"And has he addressed the plight of our people? Has he taught them to take care of the planet, to stop poisoning our streams and our air?"

The messenger licked his lips, then shook his head. "He said he will get around to it after his next world tour. He doesn't think his host's fame is big enough to make any changes, yet."