28. Extraordinarily Long and Unorthodox Foreplay #3
I saw him reach a hand out, felt him coast it down along my back. The motion made me stiffen, every muscle in my body straining to pull taut. A flicker of electricity sparked out across the muscles in my shoulders and lower back at his near touch, but there was something else in there, too.
Something dimming it.
“Hmm,” he murmured. “That’s rather fascinating indeed. It doesn’t separate from her body, but my hand slips straight through it.”
“But that is Aura,” Wrenlock contended. He drew a swirly line in the air with his pointer finger, one eye squeezed shut as he scrutinised me. “Look at it. The same height, the same curves of her figure, the same posture—even down to the curls in her hair.”
“It’s hanging off her.” Batre’s voice was a ghostly undertone. “Like—”
“A shadow,” Morgoya finished, squaring her shoulders. “By the Elements, she looks like Blythe.”
The High King straightened. “Indeed.”
I opened my mouth to ask them how in the hell I could possibly look like Blythe, but as soon as I did, my teeth started to chatter violently.
The trembles swept all the way down to my fingertips, and suddenly, all of my energy was sucked into the endeavour of maintaining self-possession. My teeth and the hinges of my jaw ached with the effort.
I felt hysteria brewing a pot of uncontrollable sobs at the bottom of my throat, sprinkling in a dash of blood-curdling screams and a pinch of sudden onset nyctophobia.
“Wasn’t this your theory?” Wrenlock questioned, putting a hand on the High King’s shoulder. “You said that you believed Aura to be the heir to the Court of Darkness, did you not?”
“I did,” Lucais admitted, stroking the light sprinkling of stubble on his chin with one hand.
At long last, he looked at me properly—held me with his eyes.
The trembles subsided, but barely. “I tasted dark magic in your blood, Aura. I stand by that theory, and I’m honestly inclined to take this as confirmation.
” Arching his brows, he pointed to my feet.
“This is the third time the darkness has reacted to you in strange ways, and right now, it’s treating you like a familiar. ”
“The third time?” somebody asked. I thought it was Batre, but I was too deep inside my consternation vortex to hear it properly, and I didn’t dare break away from Lucais’s eyes lest it swallow me completely.
He nodded, gaze still locked with mine as he lifted a fist and raised one finger. “The dark magic in her blood”—a second finger—“the shadows on the Map of Faerie”—a third—“and now this.”
“Are you sug-suggesting that my father lied to m-my mother?” I stammered. God, it’s hard to hold still. Pull yourself together. “Because sh-she was sure he was from the Court of Li-Light.”
The High King held his palm up to me, exchanging the steady presence of his gaze for his hand so he could break eye contact and watch the shadows at my back while he approached me.
He treated the darkness like a snake, poised ready to strike, and I trembled so violently I thought I’d be sick.
Still, I accepted the gesture gratefully. I focussed on his palm, tracing the lines on his skin, counting the silver rings on his fingers. When Lucais was close enough to touch me, he gave me that hand.
“Here’s the thing about faeries, bookworm,” he drawled, threading his fingers through mine.
A shot of warmth trickled over me, starting from where our knuckles touched and palms rested against each other.
“We can get away with murder if we say the right things. He may have told your mother he was from the Court of Light, but that doesn’t mean he was born there. Maybe he travelled into your world through the Court of Light’s portal.”
“But the ma-magic—”
“Light manipulates the darkness, darkness manipulates the light.” His warmth reached my shoulder blades, and they slumped forward ever so slightly.
The tightness in my chest relinquished an inch.
“Rumour has it there were once just three Courts in Faerie, back in the very beginning of time. The dark and light faeries were the first, the wind and fire faeries were the second, and the earth and water faeries the third. People who believe this lean heavily into the idea that those elements cannot exist without each other, which is partly true, but there’s no substantial evidence to back up the claim.
Even so, if he was clever—and I’d wager he is, having met his daughter—he could have pulled a few parlour tricks out of his sleeve to make it look like he was using the light.
An untrained eye most likely wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. ”
Great. As if I need another reason to hate him.
I shuddered as Lucais’s warmth brought full motion and feeling back to my legs. He was undoing the fear paralysis meticulously, using both his words and his magic to achieve a seamless result.
“Is he in there right now?”
The High King’s gaze strayed to the shadow maze contemplatively.
“Maybe. He could be anywhere in Faerie, but if he lived in the Court of Darkness, he’d be there now.
I know all of the dark faeries who were away from home when the wards were sealed shut, and none of them fit the description of your biological father. ”
“Then let’s leave him,” I muttered, letting go of Lucais’s hand. I wrapped my arms tightly around my shoulders and ducked my head to warm my nose in the crook of one elbow. “I’ve already been damaged and disappointed by one father. I really don’t need to go through that again with a new one.”
Lucais’s expression softened. He started to shrug, but his High Lady interrupted him.
“It’s inconceivable,” she averred. “It can’t be, can it? There’s never been a human heir to any of the Courts.”
“There’s never been a human heir to the throne, either,” Batre offered neutrally.
“That’s true,” Lucais mused. “She’s already broken many of our standards—the High King’s soulmate, a human with no prior history of wielding magic doing it well enough to kill a Banshee—but so have I, and she was designed to be my equal.”
“You said the whole Banshee thing was light magic,” I reminded him. “So how can I have used light magic and still be the heir to the Court of Darkness? You said yourself that you’d have to be clever to manipulate it like that, and I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“Okay,” he allowed. “That’s fair. But how else do you explain this? If you were a light faerie, the shadows would shy away from you, not hitch a ride on your back.”
There was silence for long moments.
Finally, Morgoya broke it. “I never would have guessed that Aura would be your soulmate, but I don’t doubt it now.
I’m just not convinced that she’s Blythe’s heir because—I mean—” She huffed, looking at me with a desperate gleam in her eye.
The dark-haired beauty was reaching for something—all of us were, and we were becoming increasingly frustrated when we didn’t grasp onto anything with enough substance to stick.
“How old were you when Blythe disappeared?”
“Uh…” I pulled a face at Lucais. “What, like, fourteen?”
He grimaced. “Yeah.”
Age gap.
Shut up.
“See?” Morgoya persisted. “I just cannot accept the idea that a human girl who never even knew she had magic was that powerful at the age of fourteen. No offence, Aura.”
“None taken.”
“But that’s assuming that Blythe did disappear seven years ago,” Wrenlock added. “What if it was later than that?”
“My point would still stand,” Morgoya replied, shaking her head.
“A teenage human girl who doesn’t even know she has a claim to magic being strong enough to force out an existing High Lady who is four hundred years her senior?
It just doesn’t seem like the right explanation.
” She scrutinised me, her red-painted mouth twisting. “Does it?”
“Yeah, if we were in a book,” I muttered. Lucais snorted obnoxiously, and I pulled a face at him before turning back to the High Lady. Sighing, I pinched my brows together. “When was the Oracle’s prophecy?”
“Five, maybe six months ago?”
My spine relaxed, and I shook my head dejectedly. That was not related, then.
Lucais waved both hands like he could clear the clouds of confusion away.
“Look. I am sorry we don’t have anything more concrete to go on yet, but you didn’t see the way the shadows on the Map reacted to her presence.
They’ve been clouding Blythe’s Court for so many years, resistant to even my light, and yet one touch from Aura’s hand made them scatter into the aether.
Unless she put them there herself and then forgot about them, what other explanation could there be? ”
Everyone stared into the void lingering between us.
“Because I’m human?” I suggested dubiously. It was all I had to offer to the conversation. I switched my gaze to Wrenlock’s calm, handsome face. “Because when you reject magic, magic starts to reject you, right?”
The tall, dark man smiled at me, but it didn’t reach those beautiful brown eyes.
With his entire hand, Lucais gestured regally to the shadows still wafting around my feet. “Then explain that,” he said with a sigh.
I grunted, annoyed, and let my head fall back.
When I opened my eyes, the storm was still swirling above us, reminding me of our original purpose in coming to the Ruins and the Court of Darkness.
Lucais must have been on the same train of thought because he instructed us to bench the topic for another day in a less creepy location, and then led the group onwards.
A cold chill seeped through to the bone as the shadows danced around my feet.
I couldn’t feel the shadow behind me, but I could see darkness collecting at my back in my peripheral vision.
I considered asking Lucais or Morgoya to send it packing with a blast of their light magic, but the closer we got to the lapsus, the less the shadows bothered me.
They didn’t feel foreboding or dangerous anymore. I had a weird sense of the slate being wiped clean with back and forth strokes that matched the pace of my footsteps as our group drew closer to the storm.
Lightning flashed above us, and rumbles of thunder broke out into a brawl on top of our heads, steadily increasing in volume.
Nobody said anything, and I wasn’t quite sure what else to look for aside from signs of environmental disruptions, so it took me by surprise when a thread of the shadows in the Court reached out to greet me like a hand.
The sound of my sharp intake of breath was swallowed by a boom of thunder.
The shadow hand poked me with a long, jagged finger.
It wasn’t like the mindless dark swirling around my feet; it presented itself to me with purpose and intent at eye level.
I froze, my muscles tensing and joints locking into place as I waited for a sensation to follow. A tickle or a searing pain. Something.
I felt nothing, and it poked me again.
What the fuck.
A shiver zigzagged down my body as a second hand reached out to join. And then a third. And a fourth.
This is getting ridiculous.
“Hello,” I hissed, skirting the outstretched hands to continue following my friends. “Now, go away.”
The damn things were undeterred. Shrugging off their attempts to prod me with shadowy fingers and dodging as new upper limbs formed out of the darkness ultimately gained me nothing—they wouldn’t let me through.
They encircled me, backing me up against the border of the Court of Darkness.
It was at that moment I realised how dangerous something could be even when it couldn’t be tangibly felt.
I tried to swipe the hands away. My flesh and bones fell straight through the wrists made from shadows, but they took a moment to reform.
Wildly, I started swinging at them, flapping my arms around in disjointed movements as I attempted to bat away the hands that extended towards me long enough to slip out of their reach.
It was like mopping up a spill in the ocean.
I made a noise in the back of my throat, and saw Lucais turn back for me right before the unholy mother of all shadow hands rose up from the dark maze like a wave, rolling straight towards my face. Without thinking, I jumped backwards—
And fell straight into the darkness at my back.
A guttural scream ripped from my lungs as the shadows sank their teeth into me.
In a torrent of wind, I was ripped in half and stitched back together in the dark.
Wrenlock had been right. It fit me perfectly.
Every curve along my body and every strand of my hair was swiftly and seamlessly engulfed in darkness, but it was like falling into a pool of jelly. I couldn’t swim away. I couldn’t run and hide.
The more I struggled, the more disturbed the shadows became, the more it hurt, the louder I shrieked, and the deeper into their grasp I fell.
I held my breath to starve my lungs of the fuel they needed to scream, and met the High King’s shell-shocked gaze with my own.
A gale raged around me, whipping at my clothes, but the shadows were static. Pain built and built with the momentum of boulders rolling down a hill inside my chest, but I bit down on it, clamping my teeth together to foil the screams.
With one look, I could see the panic in the High King’s eyes as he assessed the situation—that he couldn’t tell where my body ended and the shadows began as the Court of Darkness devoured me.
Lucais lifted a hand, his golden eyes blazing with power, and shot a steady stream of searching light towards the shadows.
But the darkness anticipated his move and yanked me backwards, forcing me deeper into the abyss.
Sparks flew as the shadows rose up to form a shield, blocking his light from reaching me.
The High King’s power hit the darkness like molten lava crashing down the side of a volcano during an eruption, and the shadows only pulled me tighter into their ranks.
A veil of black and white fell between us, ripping colour from my vision.
Straining my eyes before they could adjust, I searched for any of the High Fae standing along the cusp of the Ruins.
Relief crashed into me when I found them again, but it was a momentary glimpse through a murky film—and only long enough to see the end.
I smelled them coming.
The shadows tightened their grip on me, pinching another shout of pain out of my mouth that quickly snowballed into a cry of warning as an enormous caenim flew past me from the clouds of darkness at my back.
The beast lunged out of the gaping hole the shadows had made to hold me as their prisoner of the dark, and it went straight for the High King of Faerie.