2. Little Beast
two
Little Beast
S omething brushed against my upper lip, tickling my nose. I shrugged it off because I was trying to get the sleep I so desperately needed. The world was finally dark again, and I was so, so tired—
Sniff .
There it was again. Scrunching my nose up, I turned my head away, making sure to keep my eyes tightly closed against any rebellious flares of light because I—
Sniff .
It came back with a vengeance, with the persistence only a sentient being could demonstrate.
Alright, I thought. That’s it .
My head thrashed from side to side as I tried to rouse myself from the depths of my dream-snared reprieve.
Heavy as iron balls, my eyelids felt tender and swollen when I attempted to pry them open using sheer will alone.
With my arms feeling like jelly, I couldn’t seem to call upon my own hands for help.
Loud roaring echoed in my ears like cars speeding down a newly paved highway, irritating me further. I have to find the window and close it so I can get some rest.
A bright particle of light sliced through my vision as my lids slowly pulled apart.
It hurt . My eyes watered, lashes fluttering with the intensity of broken butterfly wings while I fought to unravel the circling lines of shooting stars.
With some difficulty, I managed to force my sight to wade through the blurry whirlpool of shapes and emerge on the other side of the obnoxious luminescence beyond them.
A white thing with feathered edges bleeding into the murky background swiped across my vision, making my nose tingle, and I shouted at it even though I knew it was likely some sort of insect and would not care to hear my protests.
I bent my neck from left to right, rubbing the far corners of my eyes against my shoulders, and searched for my sense of balance.
When I found it, I shouted again—an incoherent gurgle of annoyance at discovering my new surroundings.
I was sitting in a carriage, slumped against the wall, and the roaring in my ears was the sound of the wind and earth falling away through an open window as we travelled over the countryside at an alarming speed.
A red velvet curtain was pulled halfway across it, guiding a beam of light with firm, rigid boundaries to pour into the space in front of me and land…
…all over Wren.
No. I frowned. That wasn’t right. Not Wren anymore. Lucais . The High King of fucking Faerie and my ill-fated fucking mate.
It had only been days since I learned that the High King of Faerie, my fated mate by order of the Oracle, was not the man I had been introduced to when I first arrived at the House.
Instead, it was his arrogant best friend, who had brought me there under false pretences, lied through his teeth to me for months, and forced everyone else to go along with his harebrained schemes.
And why? Because he was an asshole, inextricably linked to me by forces beyond even his own control, and yet he was repulsed by me in every possible way.
I was only a half -faerie. I was more human—in all of the worst ways—than I was anything else, with little to no control over the complicated powers making a hollow inside my soul, and he wanted to make me suffer for it.
Fortunately, I felt the same way about him and all of his flaws.
He grinned at me, and I groaned. I couldn’t remember the last thing that had happened, but his expression was evidence enough that it had all gone terribly wrong. I was about to pose the question when I spied what he was holding in one of his large, long-fingered hands.
“Where did you get a feather?” I mumbled accusingly. My words were slow and my voice was thick with the exhaustion of someone roused prematurely from their sleep.
In a flash of white and gold, Lucais flicked the feather out of the open carriage window. His eyes never left mine, and his smile only faltered for a singular moment, which was surely deliberate and done to add melodramatic effect.
He blinked at me innocently. “What feather?”
Throwing my head back into the wall, I closed my eyes and let out a soft whimper, silently begging the High Mother for it to be another one of my nightmares from the human world.
If my memory hadn’t been triggered by the resurgence during my first night in Faerie, I wouldn’t be able to recall a single thing about those awful dreams, and I found myself wishing for that again. Like I could wake up and forget it all.
I was groggy and nauseous, and the thought of wading through Lucais’s defences churned the acidic contents of my stomach. With effort, I opened my eyes, and I swore filthily under my breath when I didn’t wake up quite literally anywhere else in the world.
“Good morning to you, too, little beast,” crooned the real, blond-haired and golden-eyed, aggravating and cocky, High King of Faerie and Bane of My Existence, Lucais Starfire.
His voice was smooth as velvet and sweet as honey.
I wanted to take a vegetable peeler to his throat so it could never send warm shivers down my spine again.
I scowled at him, feeling a knot forming somewhere deep inside my heart, tightening around a vital artery. “Little beast?” I repeated with distaste. “Since when is that my pet name?”
Lucais’s smile only grew wider, but his eyes darkened until the gold blended into amber.
It carried a serious, silent threat. “Since the last time I quite affectionately referred to you as bookworm , you stole the light from my sky and tried to bolt,” he told me.
His tone was pleasant and conversational, but his eyes were smouldering.
I suddenly felt hot and uncomfortable—almost ashamed.
“So, no. From now on, you shall be referred to as what you truly are. A little beast .”
I forced myself to hold his stare as I crinkled my nose. “I don’t like it,” I said.
“Demon?” he offered, arching one golden eyebrow on his beautiful and hateful face.
“No.”
He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees, and flashed his sharp teeth at me. “ Wretch ,” he continued, pursing his lips around the word. A mischievous light danced in Lucais’s eyes, his brows flicking up towards his ruffled hairline.
I scoffed. “ No. ”
The High King did not miss a beat. “Monster.”
My pupils flared. “No!”
He rolled his eyes, feigning exasperation—I was certain that he had an entire thesaurus of derogatory names to call me, and he quite enjoyed reciting them—and sat back in his seat with a dull thump. “Villain?”
“Ugh—” I broke off, distracted. I’d moved to smack the palm of my hand against my forehead, and that was when I realised I was in chains.
High Mother help him in a minute or two.
He had put me in chains. Again.
But this time, they were not tethered to him.
A set of thick, convict-style iron manacles encircled my wrists, fixed to chains that were bolted into the floor on either side of my feet.
Anxiety curdled in my stomach. I straightened up, looked down at my confines, and pulled against them instinctively.
Nothing happened.
Blood flooded my cheeks until my face felt swollen.
I knew nothing would happen, but the panic overtook every other sense and logical thought in my mind. With a racing heart, I waited for the cool iron to warm and scorch my skin, but—
“It was a necessary precaution,” Lucais began quietly. His voice was an echo down a very long, dark tunnel. “After the stunt you pulled in the Court of Light, and in front of Enyd’s Court, no less—”
“It doesn’t hurt,” I cut in, looking up at him with fear bleeding from my eyes. Why doesn’t it hurt? I scanned the cuffs around my wrists, on the brink of hysteria, and shot a panicked glance at the High King when I found nothing. “The iron doesn’t hurt me.”
Lucais gave me a bewildered look. “You think I’m trying to punish you? To… torture you?”
Confounded, all I could do was shake my head.
“No, I-I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.” I heaved an enormous, shaky sigh.
“Shouldn’t the iron hurt me?” I yanked, grinding my teeth together until my jaw ached, and pulled against the chains so hard that the cuffs scraped the first layer off my skin.
Another wave of tears pricked at my eyes.
Please, please, please. “I have magic,” I hissed at the floor, at the chains, at the iron.
At the cold and empty universe. “There was magic.”
The High King’s expression had softened by the time my eyes found their way back to his face. He opened his mouth, then sighed, and said, “Little beast, you’re a human. There is already iron in your blood .”
Abandoning my endeavours with the chains, I blinked away my tears.
They rolled down my cheeks like fat, useless drops of acid.
The iron didn’t need to tell me what I already knew; the magic stalking me through Faerie had ghosted me as soon as I gave in to it—which was what I’d been afraid of the whole fucking time—and to wish for any further, physical proof was borderline masochistic.
The truth was staring me in the face, cold as death and firm as iron .
My powers had disappeared again, exactly as they had done in the human world when I’d needed them most at the hopeless age of eleven. They stalked me, haunted me, tempted me, and then bailed.
Fuck them. I turned my attention back to Lucais, focussing on his words instead, searching for a loophole.
“Being part-faerie, you have less than there is in a full-blooded human woman, but trace amounts nonetheless,” he concluded.
My eyebrows drew together, and I cocked my head to the side. “Are you saying I have low iron?”
Lucais’s upper lip curled. “I’m not a doctor.”
“You’re not a lot of things, you know.” I contained a laugh because none of it was actually funny, and he was looking at me the way he did when he wanted me to feel stupid. “Besides, I already know I have low iron,” I complained.