18. Special Enough for Dragons
18. SPECIAL ENOUGH FOR DRAGONS
Hours later, once the faint echoes of music from the festivities had died down, something stuck its sharp claws in and dragged me from sleep. Like the serpents from the Hall of Mirrors, stark unease undulated around my insides while I pushed away the alluring grogginess trying to entice me back under.
I was nestled in Rush’s arms in a dim room, quiet but for his deep, steady breathing against my hair. Without moving, I surveyed the dark recesses I could make out from where I rested my head against his arm, the other wrapped across my waist as he curled around me. His skin was hot and smooth against mine.
Within my bedchamber, nothing moved, nothing appeared out of place or at odds from before.
It was only me who was different.
If there’d been any doubt what Rush and I’d done in the bathtub earlier had been enough to whisk away my virginity, Rush had worshipped and consumed my body in a way that definitely cemented it now. I was no longer the maiden Zako had demanded so persistently I remain without real reason. He’d touted the importance of “purity” for my training, that it’d make me stronger. But whenever I’d pressed, he’d never had a better explanation for his insistence.
I was relaxed in ways I’d never experienced before. Living among a tribe of openly sexual shifters, whose passions bordered on beastly, I’d learned to pleasure myself, to love my own body. Those experiences were nothing compared to sharing myself with Rush. My muscles were at ease even as anticipation of more sex zinged just beneath my flesh. I’d never shared a bed with a man before, never allowed myself to fall into the trusting ease of sleep with someone else there. I was both spent and energized, content and regretful that it couldn’t last, open to him and protectively closed off at the same time.
And throughout all that, the niggling unease remained. What was it? What of all the many things that disturbed me about life at the palace had woken me when my rest was imperative? In mere hours, I’d be fighting for my life against the man who held me in a lover’s embrace.
“Are you all right?” Rush asked against my hair. I hadn’t realized he was awake.
The deep rumble of his voice stirred a smile, and I snuggled farther into his hold. It was risky, I knew, perhaps even dangerous—he’d been labeled my enemy in so many ways. But my heart, happy and full for the time being, didn’t care—didn’t want to care.
“I’m fine,” I said, hearing the smile in my voice.
Beneath the covers, he ran fingers up and down my side, over my hip, and across my thigh. A shiver mirrored his touch, trailing a mere moment behind it.
Already allowing his warmth and the deliciousness of his caresses to tug me back toward ease, I murmured, “Something woke me up. Not sure what. Must’ve been nothing.” Truly, those vipers of trepidation were dispersing, the hazy darkness of the room swallowing them up.
But Rush had already tensed behind me and craned his head up to examine the room himself. “What did you feel? Tell me exactly.”
“It was nothing, really.”
“El, I’ve seen you fight.” His words rustled my loose hair. “Both as yourself and in a glamor that changed the proportions of your body, which couldn’t have been easy. Even if Embermere tells you that as a female you shouldn’t, you have the instincts of a warrior.”
He pushed up to an elbow, and I instantly missed being cocooned in him. “You should never ignore your instincts. Tell me precisely what woke you.”
I sighed. Zako had warned me to listen closely to my instincts and intuition perhaps a thousand times over the years.
Rush sat up in bed, the covers falling until they barely covered his hips and that sacred bejeweled wand that had lived up to its nickname. I wanted to run my hands along his muscled chest, those firm arms, to touch him in all the ways I hadn’t gotten to. After the Gladius Probatio, I might never have the chance to trace the lines of his artful tattoos that glowed softly in the night.
But the drake who’d been such an eager lover had been replaced by the man tasked with my protection. He scanned the room, eyeing his blade atop the bedside table.
“There’s nothing in the room,” I said, “or you and I would’ve felt it by now.”
“What did you feel? What woke you up?”
“Nothing. Can’t a lady wake up from sleep without an important reason?”
I’d hoped to see Rush’s brows arch, perhaps his lush lips to quirk up in playfulness…
“Not when that lady’s a fine warrior and when I gave her sufficient ethercrests to erase every worry.” His features were tight, serious.
“Ethercrests?”
“You don’t have that word in Nightguard either?”
“No. Tell me.”
“You’re supposed to be the one telling me.”
“I will, I promise.” This close to him, my head against his chest, my misgiving had slithered far from my thoughts. “After you explain.”
He held my gaze as I looked up at him; his silver eyes were brightening along with his tattoos. “When that sexual energy builds inside you, and you climax, reaching the elation of the Etherlands while still in this life … you crest into the ether .”
“Ah. Makes perfect sense.”
He tapped my shoulder, his finger remaining there, swirling small, tickling circles across my exposed skin.
“I really don’t know what woke me,” I said, “but whatever it was pulled me out of a deep sleep.” I grinned up at him. “And yes, you’re right, you gave me enough ethercrests to make sure I slept through the night and was crisp as a freshly blooming rose for our fight tomorrow.”
His eyes dimmed at the reminder. “No one can know about this—us.”
Without logical reason, my heart squeezed uncomfortably. From the first moment I’d learned his role in my continued imprisonment, I’d known he and I would never be. Nothing had changed.
Liar .
“Yeah, of course,” I breathed through the squeeze, avoiding his eyes.
He tipped my chin up until I met them again. “Courtiers gossip too much as it is. They’re hateful, vicious fae. I don’t want their attention on you any more than it already is. The less any of them think about you, the better.”
“They do seem pretty vicious…”
“You have no idea how bad it really is. Everyone’s out for themselves. They’ll sooner stab you in the back while calling you their friend than sacrifice a single step of their positioning on the board. You should never trust any of them, no matter what they say.”
“What about Hiroshi, West, Ryder, and Roan?”
“I trust them with my life.”
“And can I?”
“I hope so.”
Again I diverted my stare. “And you? Can I trust you?”
“No, beautiful, fierce, surprising Elowyn…” The spark of passion I’d felt from him as we’d had sex had fled, leaving his voice hollow. “You shouldn’t. I’m … made to do things … I don’t want to do. You can never trust me.”
“What kind of things?”
His jaw clenched and his tattoos flared for an instant. “What made you startle awake?”
“I didn’t think I’d startled.”
“You did.”
“Unease. I just felt uneasy. Like … like something was wrong. But I don’t know what it could be … beyond all the obvious stuff, anyway.”
I turned away from him, pressing my back to his thigh, curling in on myself instead of him around me. But he didn’t speak for so long that I ended up facing him again. “What? It was nothing, really.”
“‘Nothing’ is never really nothing. Not when it concerns you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? ”
“You have your intuition. I have mine.”
“Again, what’s that mean?”
“It means whatever uneasiness you felt, I feel it too. I don’t know what it means, and I should.”
“Why should you?”
“’Cause when it comes to you, I’m supposed to be the one who protects you from everything, whatever comes.”
“But I’m not supposed to trust you…”
“No, ’cause that’s not all I am. I’ve been made into someone I never wished to be. But my wishes haven’t mattered for a very long time.”
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t have anything better to offer him when he wouldn’t let me in on his secrets.
“Not as sorry as I am. From what you’ve told me, your life hasn’t been about your wishes either.”
I allowed that sentiment to settle for a few breaths. “No, my life’s never been about what I wanted,” I admitted slowly, softly, regretfully. “I was all but a servant to the dragon shifters and dragons, until I was taken and brought here. I tried to make the best of it in Nightguard, I really did, but now that I know it was all a farce, that Zako wasn’t even my father, but that he’d lied to me my whole life, I dunno. It all seems worse somehow.”
He hummed in understanding even though I hadn’t told him every one of those details before. He was the queen’s spy, and I suspected that meant he knew so much more about me than I did about him.
“Our conversation is still private, right?” he asked, now knowing I could see the ears and eyes that watched us all over the palace and across its grounds.
As if the bloody appendages believed we were still at the party with everyone else, they granted us an unintentional reprieve. He waited until I nodded to continue.
“You’re special, El.”
Suddenly feeling like too much of me was on display beyond my nudity, timidly, I glanced up at him again.
“Not just to me,” he continued. “The king wouldn’t have hidden you away with dragons if there weren’t more to you than he’s letting on.”
“Well, he was unfaithful to the queen, which I definitely don’t totally blame him for—she’s psycho. I was the evidence he needed to hide away so she’d never find it—me.” I shrugged as if it were no big deal to be a pawn of royal indiscretions and power plays.
“There’s more to it than that. There has to be. The royals have kept mistresses and lovers long before King Spiro cast out Borromeo.” Unlike how Pru pronounced the prince’s name when she first told me the story of the mirror world’s creation, Borromeo rolled off Rush’s tongue like silk. “We fae are long-lived, and love doesn’t always last as long as we do.”
“Did the king and queen marry for love?”
He chortled. “No, most definitely not. The king was supposed to marry the queen’s sister at first. I wasn’t around then, but from what I’ve heard, the king loved her. But like so many of us, he put aside love to marry out of duty.”
“Like what you’re going to do?” I asked, the question sticking in my throat like sand before finally tumbling out.
“Yes.” Again, his tattoos brightened intensely before dimming, a tell, I was learning, that his emotions ran high.
“And you’ll do it because of this … Ramana and Larissa?”
His stare simmered as it held mine, but whoever the women were—or had been, based on West’s comments about Ramana—he still wasn’t telling.
Finally, he said, “I’ll do it because I must. For faekind and for my family. To save whatever’s left to save of the mirror world. To have a chance to return Embermere to the glory of the Golden Forest.”
“Well, you’re on your way. Tomorrow the queen will name you winner of the Gladius Probatio.”
“That’s not what concerns me.”
“What is, then?”
“What she might try to do to you to make me winner.”
I snorted nervously. “Surely you won’t follow through when she asks you to behead me?”
“No, of course not,” he assured instantly. “But the queen’s more dangerous than she looks.”
“That’s hard to believe.”
He waited until I was once more holding his stare. “ Trust me on this, whatever horrors you’ve seen her do and command, she does worse, so much worse.”
I swallowed thickly.
“After Odelia died—” An unspoken question arched my brows. “Odelia Catalina Corisande was the queen’s eldest sister. King Erasmus had five daughters when all he’d wanted was a son, a fact he didn’t hide from anybody. Though Erasmus wasn’t happy his heir would be a female, he groomed Odelia for the role, and man, did she step into it.
“I was only a young child when this all happened, but the crowned princess Odelia grew so fierce and strong that Erasmus decided she’d do well when she inherited his throne. At that time, see, Prince Borromeo’s bloodline ran through him, not his wife, the consort queen.
“The king, your father, was a drake of the Leantos clan, and he was selected to wed Odelia. They quickly fell in love, which is a rare gift in arranged marriages.”
“But they never married,” I whispered, the tragedy of my father’s story hanging in the air around us like the cloying incense that was wafted around the dead.
“No,” Rush said. “Odelia fell ill, eventually losing her mind, and died a slow and agonizing death. Our current queen Talisa was the next in line. Erasmus married her and Oren soon after, and when Talisa became more powerful than him, she was crowned queen and the king retired until his death.”
“How sad.”
“Not Erasmus retiring. He’d grown dark, too dark. He’s the one who changed everything for Embermere, and his decisions rippled out across the entire mirror world.
“But that’s not why I was telling you this. King Oren grieved Odelia for a long time, and a part of that grieving was him making his way through a long string of lovers, most women, some men even, anything to distract him from the loss of Odelia and the new marriage he suddenly found himself in.”
“You sound sympathetic.”
“I am—to an extent. In recent years he’s stood by and done nothing as the queen destroys our world.”
“He seems very weak.”
“But he wasn’t always. He was chosen as Odelia’s match because of his strength. Of all the eight drakes of the clans, he was the best choice.”
“Hmm,” I said, unwilling to distract Rush. I no longer minded the interruption to our sleep and snuggling, not when I was learning so much.
“I have no doubt the king has other offspring sprinkled about here and there. He was reckless then, didn’t care about anything anymore. But you … he thinks there’s something special about you or he wouldn’t be standing up to the queen for the first time in decades to keep you alive.”
“Decades?”
He nodded.
All at once I realized I had no idea how old Rush was. “So … you were around then?”
“Not at court as I am now, but yes. ”
“So…”
He smiled softly, almost sadly. “I’m nearly eighty years old.”
“Oh,” I squeaked, though I’d known fae lived for centuries. Zako had been two-hundred-and-two when he’d died.
Rush rubbed a hand along my back and I couldn’t help but think, No wonder he’s such a skilled lover , and question how many people had been on the receiving end of those skills.
“It might not look like he’s doing all that much,” Rush said, “but the king’s fighting for you.”
I snickered. “You’d be right about that. It doesn’t look like he’s doing much at all. He tried to tell me who my mother was that one time, and since then, no matter what I do, he won’t be alone with me.”
“Probably because he knows it’s dangerous.”
I snorted another time. “The queen’s already trying to kill me at every turn. Not sure it can get much worse than that.”
“It can. Much worse.”
“Oh,” I said lamely.
The pad of a single finger blazed up and down my spine, and I struggled not to shiver; I didn’t want him to stop.
“The land doesn’t save just anybody from death,” he added. “Whatever power it sent into you was enough to do away with Braque’s spell and glamor. Not just anything can do that. There’s a reason he and Ivar are always with the queen. They’re more powerful than pretty much anyone else at court.” He pulled back to look at me. “Other than maybe you.”
“Me?” I chuckled nervously. “I didn’t tell you, but when I was in the dungeon last, when I thought I was going to die there, I tried to call on the magic of the land. Nothing happened.”
“Hmmm, interesting.”
“No, not interesting. Not there. No magic. Nothing.”
“It was there enough to reveal you as a royal to Azariah, and he can sense those kinds of things even when the rest of us can’t. I’d bet the queen punished him for revealing what the crowd might not have noticed otherwise.”
Twisting so that I lay flat on my stomach, I pushed up onto my elbows, my breasts hanging heavily to the bed below. Rush’s stare sped toward them and he licked his lips—without realizing it, I guessed.
But this information was too important. I insisted, “I thought everyone knew I was a royal of some kind because Braque’s glamor fell.”
Rush spoke to my breasts. “No, most knew you weren’t Zinnia anymore, but it takes a very specific kind of magic to distinguish a royal. Azariah probably only said it ’cause he was so shocked. Most spells don’t fool him. He’s too powerful. But Braque’s did.”
His brow furrowed as he finally looked away from my chest. “I’ve been trying to talk to Azariah, but every time I’ve gone looking for him he’s been elsewhere, and the queen doesn’t usually let him go anywhere but where she tells him.”
“Wow, that’s awful. He’s a unisus! The queen should be bowing down to him.”
Rush smiled. “We call them pegicorns, but yeah.”
“Why are you looking for him?”
“To try to figure out why he thinks you’re a royal. The royal bloodline runs through the queen, not the king. So you have to be related to her somehow.”
“Aren’t you all related to each other? If you left the Golden Forest three thousand some years ago, you’d all be related at least a bit, right?”
“Right … to an extent. Three thousand years is a long time for people to breed, even for fae lifespans. You can’t be too far removed from Prince Borromeo’s bloodline for Azariah to think you’re a royal.”
“And I can’t be this Odelia’s daughter…”
“Because she died long before you were born.”
“Right. What about the other three sisters? Where are they?”
“I don’t know. Probably hiding from the queen, if they’re smart. But it doesn’t have to be that close to the original elven bloodline. It could be a cousin, maybe even a second cousin, that kind of thing. But I’m not sure. It’s why I need Azariah.”
I clenched my teeth. “Or for the king to tell me who my mother is already.”
“Or that.” Rush once more looked at me, his gaze dropping to my breasts .
“See something you like?” I asked to lighten the somber tone of our conversation.
Instantly he grinned, reminding me of a dragonling anticipating mischief. “I see something incredibly delicious. Two somethings actually…”
“We can be done talking,” I offered, long before I thought I’d be finished getting answers to my endless questions. But if Rush was one thing, he was tempting.
He dragged his teeth across his plump bottom lip and my core pulsed. Now that I knew exactly what he could do for me—to me—all that he could make me feel, I was greedy for more—so much more.
“By a dragon’s veins, I’d love that so fucking much.” With effort, he dragged his stare up to my face. “But I’m going to go check on things.”
“What? Now?”
“Now. I take unease seriously.”
“Why?” I was whining, I realized, and hastened to adjust my tone; I didn’t want to appear as desperate as I suddenly felt at losing something I’d never truly had in the first place. “I’m uneasy all the time . I’m living in a palace as a prisoner of a queen who wants to murder me and everyone I care about.” I laughed nervously. “Of course I’m uneasy.”
“It feels like more to me.”
“Why?”
“Because I feel it too.”
“How?”
“I’m not sure, but I’m feeling … so mehow … different. And what I can’t understand, I don’t like, not at court.”
He pulled back the sheets, revealing that gloriously bejeweled wand.
I could feel myself pouting, and reined in my disappointment while my gaze raked across his manhood, semi-erect despite his plans to go elsewhere.
“What if tonight’s really all we get?” I asked.
“I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that’s not the case.”
“How?” I asked yet again.
“I don’t know. But that won’t stop me from trying.” He leaned down and kissed me as if he were staying, as if the night were still long and all ours.
His tongue tangled with mine, and he clasped onto my lip with his teeth and tugged.
I groaned and looked at his wand—fully erect now.
“Stay,” I breathed.
“First and foremost, I have to keep you safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He kissed me again, this time just on the lips, and rose. I watched him dress while holding back the obvious retort: You won’t be able to keep me safe in the ring .
When he strapped on his sword, he stared at me long and intently enough that something stirred deep inside me, something beyond my obvious arousal. But then he was gone, rustling around in his antechamber room—probably strapping on more weapons—before stepping beyond the sanctity of the private chambers and speaking with someone on the other side of the door—the king’s royal guards, no doubt, or Rush wouldn’t leave me alone.
I waited for his return until the sky beyond my windows began lightening, but when Pru arrived to wake me the bed beside me was cold and empty, and whatever unrest had sent Rush prowling through the palace bloomed into full panic even though I still didn’t comprehend it.