8. Wrenlock Elumos
eight
Wrenlock Elumos
M y laughter eventually died inside dreams of the dead faerie.
His three eyes haunted me that night. I watched the light leaving them like fireworks all through the dark, flickering on and off as though I were bewitched by a looping reel that could not be paused or closed.
Unable to fall into a deep sleep and unable to wake up enough to dispel the images, I succumbed to a form of sleep paralysis that I truly thought I’d left behind in the human world.
At the very least, I was convinced I’d left it in the cottage on the road into the Court of Light. It made sense, since that was the last location in which I’d experienced a nightmare, unless—
Had the House… No, it couldn’t have. But what if it did?
An enchantment such as the one on the House might have held the power to ease the burdens locked inside someone’s mind.
To take the edge off the guilt and self-loathing.
In the Forest of Eyes and Ears—brought to life with a similar spell—I had felt a sense of peace unlike any other.
Maybe the House had attempted to provide me with something akin to that by scaring off my nightmares and quelling my daytime fears.
After all, I really hadn’t grieved for the loss of Jonah’s life in the bookstore.
Not like I grieved for the maroon-skinned faerie with three eyes, whose name I didn’t even know.
When I woke up, thoughts of Jonah, the House, and its attempts to soothe me in the forefront of my conscious mind, I felt wetness stuck to my lashes and cheeks.
Tears had started to flow once more, escaping from the corners of my eyes before they had even opened to the melancholy morning.
My heart hung heavy in my chest, a low-lying anchor in the sky of my regrets.
Guilt closed an iron fist around my soul and shook me senseless when I stumbled out of bed, a sudden cramping sensation roiling through my stomach. It was like someone was scraping out my insides with an apple corer.
Arm across my mouth, I rushed into the bathroom and dry heaved over the sink. There was nothing in my stomach for my emotions to forcibly eject, so the action only served to create a burn down the back of my throat from the acidity of my saliva.
After rinsing my mouth out, I slipped into the shower and tried to wash off the sadness that drenched me when I realised I had to do those tasks all by myself again.
It wasn’t because I had any type of aversion to the act of turning on taps and fetching my own towels; it was the loneliness that the previous night had drilled into my bones, leaving me hollow and wanting for companionship. For friendship .
The House never spoke to me, so it had never had the chance to lie to me, but in place of words of affirmation, it communicated with acts of service—a constant and unfailing false sense of security that I would have to learn to live without again.
Even when it was shunning me, or it had mysteriously gone quiet, the House had given me Delia in its place to make sure I always had someone to take care of me if I needed it.
And I shouldn’t have been so sad about leaving. I knew that.
But I hadn’t realised until it was too late that the House had shown me what most of my friends had grown up with when I was in school. What I had tried so hard to be for Brynn.
It had taken care of me. It ran my baths, it brought me fresh and clean linen, it cooked all of my meals, and it chased away my fears in the dark.
Yes, I had fought with it—in the only way one could fight with something like an enchanted House—and I cursed at it when it didn’t do what I wanted.
However, I started to figure out that was all because it cared. And I didn’t say thank you.
I hadn’t even said goodbye.
Wrapped in a towel, I walked into the middle of the bedroom, traipsing water all over the scuffed wooden floorboards as I surveyed my new surroundings. The room was nice if Halloween was the occupant’s favourite holiday.
Smaller than my room at the House, most of the space lay between the floor and the high coffered ceiling, which loomed above me like a dome.
There was a huge, unused candelabra pendant welded from obsidian fixed in the centre, dusted with cobwebs.
Fixtures of a similar design were fitted to the walls, furnished with candles that appeared to have had their wicks pulled out.
Two steep, arched windows made from stained glass were featured against the far wall.
They provided a restricted view over the palace’s primeval buttressing and tinged the dismal, fog-weakened light with colour as it slanted into the room between window panes.
An oversized bed sat against a blank wall, adorned with elaborate carvings on its ebony bedhead, the spires of which almost touched the ceiling.
I could tell that the blankets were dyed in deep golds and strong whites, but beneath the stained glass they appeared cerulean and turquoise.
They were ruffled, an unchecked ocean ready to swallow me whole.
I had no clue what the time was, but there was no way I would willingly place my body back at the mercy of that mattress.
There was a large, antique wooden trunk at the foot of the bed.
I ransacked it for a change of clothes and found that not only did the enchanted Houses fail to offer underwear, but the creepy palaces in Faerie did, too.
To my surprise, however, I found some normal clothes—normal by faerie standards, at least.
Once I was dried, I dressed in a pair of plain, well-fitting black slacks and a long-sleeved shirt with buttons and a neatly pressed collar.
The fabric was cool against my skin, so I put a long coat over the top and pulled on a pair of pile-lined boots.
If it was not safe for me to wear dresses in the House, it was certainly not safe in a city where I could not see past the end of my arm if I stepped outside into the fog.
Hunger had started to stab me below my ribs, clenching and unclenching my sides.
The nausea still gurgled, emotions warring with basic need.
I took a deep breath and blew it out in a huff of air that clouded in front of my face.
As much as I didn’t want to stay in the bedroom, I didn’t want to leave it, either.
That would mean facing up to the things that hunted me across time and portals, leering at me when they thought I wasn’t looking.
But I was on my own again.
The palace was not the House.
There was no magic there. No enchantment. Its cruel hardwood and vicious stonework did not care about me. Still, I decided to give it a chance. If my magic was lost, maybe it had taken my ability to properly sense other kinds of magic along with it.
I sucked in a breath through my teeth, the sound too sharp and loud in my own ears. My eyes wandered over the palace’s interior, looking for a friendly surface and finding none.
“Hello?” I asked into the quiet vacancy. “Are you here?”
“Hello,” a smooth voice replied.
Whirling at the unfamiliar sound, I stumbled and nearly fell over from the shock of finding Wrenlock standing in my open doorway.
I had not heard his footsteps or the door opening.
He was a vision of shadows in the low lighting; black clothing, messy dark hair, unblemished skin cooled by the melancholy lighting.
“Was that you?” I asked, cocking my head to the side.
“Was what me?” he returned, pushing off the doorframe and striding towards me.
“I said something, and you…”
Wrenlock raised an eyebrow. “You did?” He stopped in front of me, taking in my outfit, and then reached up to tuck my hair behind my ears. I eyed the skin on the palms of his hands, noting the burn marks had been healed. “Are you talking to yourself, babe?”
If looks could set people on fire, he would be ash.
“ No. ” I shrugged his hand off from where it had come to rest on my shoulder and folded my arms over my chest. “Forget it.”
He sighed deeply. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have teased you.
I just came to see if you were hungry because you don’t know your way around this place yet.
” As if it heard him, my stomach let out a feral growl, which caused one side of his mouth to quirk to the side.
“I see,” he stated, and then he offered me his arm.
“Look, Aura, I’ll take you to breakfast. No strings attached.
In fact, when you stab your fork into your food, you can pretend that it’s my heart. ”
Groaning, I hooked my elbow around his arm and told myself it was because I was weak with hunger pains. Though relief chilled the fire in my veins slightly as we exited the macabre bedroom and stepped onto a thin navy-and-gold rug in the hall, it was momentary.
We were on a level of the palace that was basically an entire wing of bedrooms. There were closed doors separated by colourful portraits within copper frames placed in a square formation around an open, gaping drop leading down to the lower levels, walled by a solid ebony railing of modest height in the middle of the floor.
High windows ushered in murky, silvery daylight that beamed down in a tight formation and exposed clouds of dust leisurely floating across the space.
The urge to throw myself over the bannister came and went in the blink of an eye.
“I do not want to stab you,” I snapped, glancing up at Wrenlock.
Everything felt so hot and cold around him, and all of it was out of my control.
“You broke my heart. You broke my trust . You were the nice one who took me under your wing—and then took advantage of me. I don’t want to stab you, Wrenlock. I want to look at you without hurting.”
“Hmm.” He placed his free hand over my forearm and squeezed it gently as we moved through the shadows. “But you want to stab Lucais?”