24. You’re Not Heavy, But You Are Annoying #2
There was a narrow pathway that looked to have been created almost by accident leading down from the top of the hill.
It was lined by the wear and tear of footsteps and the wheels of carts or carriages, following the slope as it rose up and then disappeared into a low-lying cloud of fog that had settled at the base of the Metal Mountains.
Dark, smoky shadows congregated in the mist, obscuring my vision of whatever lay ahead of us, but Lucais was staring directly at it. He had paled. His face was bone-white, like he was seeing a ghost.
I glanced down to find that his hands were trembling at his sides.
Wait here, Lucais said into my mind. His voice, at least, was steady.
Before I had a chance to react, the air in front of us began to ripple and distort, and I could see the two of us standing together in the reflection of what looked similar to the wall of glass from my dreams. Except it was not all-consuming like a gateway; it was smaller, like a full-body sized mirror.
Another portal?
I won’t be long.
Why—
I didn’t finish the thought because the ripples increased in severity, like larger stones were being dropped into a still lake, and Lucais took a step forward, and—
At the very last possible second, I snatched the High King’s hand and fell through the portal with him.
He twisted to push me back, but it was too late.
Entering felt like stepping through mud, whereas the gateway and the portal in the Court of Light had been more like a clear body of water, and I could have sworn part of it stuck to me even after we cleared the boundaries. Not like a physical layer of something—but a magical one.
Lucais moved to send me back to the other side, but it was to no avail. There was nothing there. Panic flashed across his beautiful face, and then he swallowed me with his arms.
The High King fit me tightly against his chest, holding me so close I felt like I could split in half, his heart beating like a wild racehorse fresh out of the gates.
I didn’t regret following him through it, but an irrefutable sense of dread reached out to caress me, coming directly from the shadows—a touch he tried to shield me from, but could not completely ward off.
He pressed his lips to the top of my head. “Fortune’s fool.”
“Lucais.”
The voice that spoke his name was not mine.
It was not familiar to me at all. He had pinned me to his body with such a tight grip that I couldn’t move to find the speaker, yet I wriggled against him in vain.
I was aching to see, to know. It was such a human voice, such a friendly voice. He’d said that it was Malum—
“Mama,” he answered quietly.
And then he very slowly turned around.
Lucais tried his best to keep me concealed, though I was determined to look. Craning my neck as far as it would stretch, I peered around his arm to see the speaker. Did I hear him correctly? Did he say the word mama ?
But then I saw her stepping out of the mist.
She was angelic in her beauty. Incredibly thin, like she was made of starlight strung together with papery skin and completely straight, white-blonde hair that stopped at her shoulders.
Pitch-black eyes were framed with extremely long lashes, and her mouth was heart-shaped and blood-red.
Her features were sharp and angular; everything was pointed or elongated from the tip of her nose down to her fingernails.
The resemblance she bore to her son was uncanny, though his complexion was far darker.
“How are you appearing like this?” he asked. “Are you an apparition?”
“Not an apparition, my Lucais.”
Her voice was so sweet and melodious, like a siren song. I found myself stepping out of Lucais’s grip to stand at his side and glean a better view of the woman who had created him. He let me, but kept me tightly in his reach with his hand around mine.
“As it turns out,” she continued, “we simply had not been consuming enough magic to maintain our true forms. And I have recently been fed.” Daintily, she tipped her head to one side and cast a brief look over her shoulder.
We both followed the direction she was indicating, and it took all of my willpower—and a firm squeeze from Lucais’s hand around mine—for me to remain motionless and quiet as the sight of dozens of dead faeries in a bloodied pile of broken bones and ink black veins came into focus a few yards behind her.
The colour on her lips…
It was like the body in the courtyard all over again, but magnified to be so much worse.
I was sick to my stomach thinking about how long they had suffered.
The deaths weren’t instantaneous. Not when the Malum were involved.
Enyd’s sentry had stumbled all the way from beyond the House’s wards into the dining room, trying to make his way back to his High Lady before he’d finally succumbed to his injuries.
They’re not getting stronger. Lucais spoke directly into my mind again, correcting a previous assumption he’d made about the Malum and their diabolical plans. They’re getting smarter.
I didn’t know if he was really speaking to me or just thinking loud enough for me to hear it, but I found myself poised to reply nonetheless. My lips parted, and then his mother turned towards me, as if the motion had caught her attention.
The movement was not humanlike. It wasn’t even faerielike.
The way that she moved her head reminded me of the laughing clowns at the Belgrave Carnival I used to take Brynn to visit once a year.
Her gaze was positively serpentine—dead, yet still occupied.
I could feel the danger in it, as if direct eye contact broke whatever spell made her appear so angelic and holy from afar.
“Aura,” she said.
Lucais used the fist he had closed around my hand to pull me firmer against his body. The chaos emanating from him was enough to send a building collapsing onto its side. I sensed fury and devastation growing inside of him like a wave poised to drown an entire civilisation.
“I always wanted someone like you for him,” his mother admitted in a low voice.
My eyes widened. She knows.
She dropped her gaze for a moment, and the illusion that she was friend rather than foe returned.
She looked so much younger than I had imagined, and I briefly wondered if her appearance was true to the woman who had died and turned Malum, or if the way she presented herself to us after feeding on innocent faeries was simply a preference.
Not that it mattered, in the grand scheme of things.
“If only I had the power required to change things around for you now,” she went on softly, raising her scrutinising gaze from the ground beneath my feet.
“What…” My voice faltered. I cleared my throat as delicately as I could manage with all of the fear his mother provoked slipping down it. “What do you mean?”
She gave me a sympathetic look that was somehow extremely condescending at the same time. “He has to be with Margot.”
Margot. Wrenlock’s sister.
“I will never marry her,” Lucais cut in, his voice firm. He was vehemently shaking his head. “No.”
The lady made from moonlight and murder simply shrugged. “Fine. I like Aura,” she said sweetly. Extending one long, bony arm towards me, she beckoned me with her hand. “Give her to me, and I will send her back to you once her transition is complete, my child.”
My stomach flipped, and though I tried to stop them, my eyes flew back to the pile of dead faeries behind her. That wasn’t a queue of High Fae waiting to transition into Malum. It was plain old murder—borderline cannibalism, surely—and she was a certifiable lunatic if she thought I’d fall for it.
“Transition? How many human girls did you have killed before you found me, exactly?”
She pursed her lips, levelling a thoughtful stare on me.
“You know things.” Glancing at Lucais, she sighed deeply.
“Fine. We were going to kill you,” she agreed, a haughty look in her eyes.
“But it does not matter which woman the High King takes as his bride as long as she is Malum. If his choice is you, then I shall make you Malum, and you shall be the new High Queen.” She lifted a shoulder in a delicate shrug.
“If the transition is successful, nobody will mind. Not even Margot.”
My forehead creased, and I opened my mouth to reply, but no words came out. She had rendered me utterly speechless.
Lucais inched forward. “You will touch her over my dead body, and then you will fight my ghost to take her.”
His mother gave him a withering look before rolling her eyes. “ Mating bonds. ”
Lucais made a strangled noise in the back of his throat and gestured between us with the hand that was not holding mine a prisoner. “ Mother-in-laws, ” he retaliated bitterly.
Her head reared back, a look of disbelief passing over her eyes. “What on Faerie is that supposed to mean?”
Lucais sneered, but I felt the effort in his facade through the bond. “The first time you meet Aura, mother, you threaten to kill her.”
“I did no such thing.”
“You want to turn her into Malum.”
His mother lifted her chin. “That’s not the same thing.” She had the audacity—I might have even dared to call it humanity —to look genuinely offended. “I am not dead , you know.”
“You may as well be!”
Hurt flashed across her eyes—the first true sign of life I’d witnessed in her since she’d stepped out of the mist.
“Where’s father?” Lucais enquired, his voice suddenly thick and unsteady. Hatred trembled beneath the surface, a burn in his throat so strong I could almost hear it crackling.
She shook her head at him gently, and a tiny shard of broken-off maternal love hovered in the atmosphere between them. I recognised the glint to it, the way its edges were shaped, even without proper light.
“Where is he, mama?” the High King pressed. “Why did he not come to see me with you?”
“Lucais, your father knows you do not wish to see him,” she proclaimed in hushed tones.
Tears welled up in my eyes as I watched the exchange. I’d heard it a million times before—the excuses, the softening of a voice to try to compensate for the physical and emotional blows, the bitterness and disappointment.
The fucking blame .
He knows you were angry with him, Aura. That’s why he left the last time. I don’t think your father believes you want him to come back yet, so he’s taken a job away from us for a while.
Five years or five hundred years old—it did not matter. The lashings of parental blame were equally painful.
“Wrong!” Lucais laughed bitterly, casting his eyes around the hillside behind her as if there was an audience I couldn’t see.
“He’s scared, mama. He is absolutely petrified that I might change my mind about letting his crimes go unpunished.
And rightly so!” he added, shouting the last part into the distance with a hand cupped around his mouth.
Oblivion surrounded us in the portal, but Lucais glared into the darkness as if the darkness might glare back.
The sound of his dejection boomed for miles.
“For what he did—to the Witches, to Margot, to you… ” Breathing heavily, the High King stared at his mother with hard eyes, though moisture lined his lower lids. “And for what he plans to do to the woman I love.”
Letting out a weary sigh, his mother raised her hands, palms turned up towards the sky. “It is not so bad now that we understand how to maintain our true selves—”
“You’re murderers !” he bellowed, and his voice broke halfway through the accusation.
With his free hand, he pointed to the pile of corpses behind his mother; and suddenly, I was holding on to him with a protective death grip, hellbent on keeping him in place at my side.
“Look what you’ve done to my people. They are my people, mama.
My subjects! I took a solemn oath to protect them! ”
“It is a necessary unpleasantness,” she bartered, “and we are your family —”
“Not anymore, you aren’t,” he snapped.
Anger flashed in her black eyes. “Who will take our place?” she challenged.
“I have no place for you anymore.”
“A boy needs a family, Lucais, even once he grows to be High King. Don’t you recall when you needed us?
Don’t you remember what we had to do? Who will replace us— Aura ?
” she jeered, nodding her head to me with sudden disdain.
“She won’t accept the mating bond. She doesn’t even know if she’s genuinely in love with you or if her feelings have been falsified by the Oracle, not to mention the fact that she positively reeks of another man. ”
I blanched, but Lucais was unmoved.
“Trust me,” she implored. “She won’t stand at your side and fight your enemies—not your true enemies, of which you have many , my child.
You need someone who loves the ones you love, and who hates the ones who would bring your downfall.
Not the other way around.” His mother’s cool, calculating gaze landed on me.
I felt like she was stripping my skin from my bones with nothing but the jealousy in her eyes. “Give her to me, or Faerie will burn.”
Lucais was already shaking his head. “You will have to kill me, I fucking swear it to the High Mother. You. Will. Have. To. Kill. Me.”
“You’re wrong.”
But he was already turning us back towards the portal, which had reappeared, rippling behind us with an ethereal cerulean glow around the edges.
“Wait—” she started.
“No,” he interrupted firmly.
The portal shimmered like the surface of a lake as we approached, much clearer from the Malum’s side than it had been when we had entered earlier. We stepped—
“I love you, Lucais,” she called out softly. Her voice was suddenly worlds away, like we were underwater and she was above the surface, but the words were as clear as if she’d whispered them in his ear.
The High King of Faerie paused a single step away from whisking me back through the portal. I felt its pull like a magnetic force battling his restraint as he hesitated for a split second, holding us there. Filled with suspense, my heart was shattering against my sternum.
Lucais lifted his head and turned it to the side, but didn’t quite look back over his shoulder as he spoke, his voice breaking on a whisper. “I love you, too, mama.”