34. Don’t Ask Such Infuriating Questions
thirty-four
Don’t Ask Such Infuriating Questions
I always knew I would die before my time.
I had a midlife crisis when I was ten—or at least, it had felt like a midlife crisis. It was definitely some kind of crisis, and if I hadn’t made it to my twentieth birthday, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.
My father made us a statistic, increasing our chances of early and unexpected death according to the studies I’d read, and my anger towards him made me reckless and volatile.
Belgrave was a quiet, uneventful town filled with nosy people, but we got a lot of tourists.
It was always at the back of my mind that a random driver passing through on their way into the city might see me sitting down at the docks alone, willing myself to stow away on the next boat, and kidnap me.
It was just a thought.
But even then, sometimes, I wondered if it could qualify as a desire. The deep, dark kind.
Maybe that was why I kept going back despite the fact that I was never going to get on a boat.
Even at the age of ten, I knew that was fucked up—knew I was fucked up.But the darkness inside of me had never felt like power. It was not a call so much as it was a warning—the persistent echo of an enigmatic impending doom.
Something bad is going to happen. Maybe it already has.
It left me riddled with paranoia, weakening me like I had been ingesting poison since birth.
Deep down in the cobweb-covered recesses of my mind, I kept a truth under lock and key—the unshakeable feeling that all of it was my birthright. I’d always assumed it was my father because that would make perfect sense to anyone who had the displeasure of knowing him well.
The fact that both nature and nurture were set against me from the very beginning made me sick to my stomach.
I’d known that, too, though. My shadow on the ground didn’t follow me everywhere I went in the light of day because it had to, but because it wanted to know where I was going.
Subconsciously, I’d always felt it there—larger than life and darker than night, stalking me through my childhood and growing alongside me like a toxic vine that had its roots buried underneath my skin. Feeding off me. Intertwining with me. Becoming me.
If Faerie was telling me the truth, I had been born with it.
The dark magic was a seed when I was a toddler—something mild that occasionally made me kick my legs and wriggle in an unknowing effort to dislodge it from my body—but the magic fed off every bad thing that had ever happened to me, so it burst into full-bloom and consumed me when I turned eleven.
The Court of Darkness was my punishment.
I was set to inherit a damned Faerie Court, barely functional and populated by dark faeries who had either been traumatised beyond the point of salvation or condemned for their sins inside of it since the moment I’d shown up in Lucais’s life.
The irony was nauseating—that I was the reason he had shunned them, and yet, they were supposed to be my responsibility.
“If I go back there, will I ever be allowed out?” I wondered aloud as Lucais stomped through the palace, his hand tightly wound around mine like a vise.
“Can I still visit Brynn, or will it be too dangerous?” I paused, gnawing on my lower lip.
The next question I needed to ask started hurting before I’d even gotten it out. “Will I be too dangerous?”
The High King shoved at a heavy oak side door with his free hand and sent it flying off its hinges with a loud crash.
Splinters of wood ricocheted off the ground as it bounced across the cobblestone outside like a rock skipping across a lake, each subsequent bang dropping in volume until the door skidded across the ground, only stopping when it hit the other side of the palace’s exterior.
There was a damp chill in the air outside, perpetuated by the lack of light in the sky beneath the city’s thick layers of fog.
Over the courtyard, it hovered well above the ground, somewhat reminiscent of a ceiling.
It allowed me to glimpse parts of the palace that hadn’t been destroyed, though the gloom coated it like an accelerant for the sparks of Lucais’s moods and made me feel very unstable.
As he dragged me across the open space by my hand, I gazed up at the palace’s untouched exterior towering over us, the mist wafting between the turrets akin to the water in a river skirting large rocks as it flowed downstream.
“You’re not fucking going back there,” he growled, yanking me across the bailey. “Don’t ask such infuriating questions.”
I dropped my gaze back to the ground and sneered. “You’d rather I die. Got it.”
In the middle of the courtyard, Lucais came to a screeching halt and whirled on me with an expression that had me almost stumbling over my own two feet. His face was contorted with negative emotion—pain, rage, or hatred, I wasn’t sure. But then he spoke, and it became perfectly clear.
“When are you going to drop the fucking act, bookworm?”
Rage. His golden eyes were glowing with the power of a thousand suns across a thousand different galaxies. But there wasn’t even a glimmer of hatred in a single one, and the emotion was so strong it left no room for pain to share space in that moment.
For once, I didn’t debase him by asking what he meant.
I sucked in a deep breath through my mouth, letting his hand fall out of mine as I lifted my arms and wrapped them both around my torso in a feeble act of self-comfort. “I can’t.”
“You can’t?”
My shoulders rose and fell with enough force to send a twinge shooting down my spine.
Heart pounding steadily in my chest, I met Lucais’s eyes and resisted the urge to fall into them and burn myself alive.
“It won’t matter either way now. I can’t be both the High Lady of the Court of Darkness and the High Queen of Faerie, can I? ”
I knew the answer was no. He knew that, too. Morgoya was in charge of the Court of Light, which meant that even Lucais himself couldn’t claim both roles. The High Mother wouldn’t allow it. Regardless, I needed to say it out loud, and he needed to acknowledge that he heard it.
Lucais hesitated, resisting something, and then seemed to decide it was inevitable, so he shook his head grimly. “No. No, you cannot.”
Mouth pressed into a hard line, I shrugged expectantly. “Then there really isn’t any point in hurting both of us by pretending we could even have a future together.”
The High King’s eyes were conflicted. After a moment, he said, “You could just be the High Queen.” I must have looked as confused as I felt because he added, “The crown supersedes everything else. If you accepted the mating bond and the throne beside mine, the Court of Darkness would—or at least it should, under normal circumstances—be forced to leave you alone and look for your replacement amongst the other dark faeries.”
The crown supersedes everything else.
“Lucais…” My brows twitched, head swimming with a sudden heat that intensified my puzzlement and that tiny little bit of hope I felt pulsing inside of my chest. I squashed it beneath my mental boot, because if the Court of Darkness didn’t kill me, that emotion certainly would.
Blinking through my disorientation, I said, “But this means that Blythe is dead, doesn’t it?
Whatever is in the lapsus killed her and consumed the rest of the Court. ”
And then showed me what it wanted me to let loose upon the rest of the unsuspecting world.
“Yes,” Lucais said slowly. He didn’t have to literally read my mind to understand where it was headed. “The second most powerful dark faerie is a gamble, but it’s worth taking if it means that you stay here.”
“I don’t think you understand.” I bit my lip, feeling very much like the pot calling the kettle black. “There is no way a sane individual is walking out of that Court. You’ll have a wildcard on your hands, and there’s no guarantee you’ll win favour with the Unseelie Court.”
The High King made a very handsome portrait of denial personified.
“It’s a maze, Lucais. A literal maze filled with nightmares at every turn.
I’ve been on horror trains and haunted houses at theme parks that seem like a baby animal petting zoo compared to what’s happening in there.
You said that the thing in the lapsus is reliving the same moment in time over and over again.
Like it’s being repeatedly shocked by electricity.
I felt like that when I was inside it, but it pulled me beyond the lapsus.
I was inside the Court, and it’s filled with…
” I trailed off, my skin prickling as it turned ice-cold.
The visions and memories from the time I spent as a prisoner of the shadows were still murky, but they’d left me with an empty, hollow feeling and the remnants of fear so profuse it was leaching into my bones.
“Caenim,” he finished for me gently. A severe, kindred warmth blazed in his eyes as they bore into mine.
“And monsters that do terrible things. I know, my love.” Lucais took a step towards me and softly cupped my face in his hands.
The expression on his own face ran through me, piercing my soul.
“I heard you screaming. I think some of the splinters of those screams are still lodged in my heart.” His throat bobbed.
“One day, I am going to butcher every single one of the abominations inside of that Court who dared to reveal their ghastly selves to you. But you don’t have to go back for that. ”
My chest pulled against a flare of desperation. “What if I don’t even want you to go back for that?”
He shrugged, a smile ghosting his lips. “No matter. I’ll drag them from your nightmares and execute them here in the bailey for you instead.”