Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
“Is everything in place?” Tarek asked a sentinel who was part of his retinue as they headed to the Core Tower.
“Yes, Prime Apparent, the sun is expiring, and the citizens are being prepped as we speak.”
“Good.” He could almost taste the energy that buzzed in the air. “Someone fetch Aela. I want her to see this. Proxima, too.”
An attendant trailing behind his guard of sentinels darted off to bring Tarek’s bonded to him.
Despite Aela’s many infractions, Tarek tried making her comfortable, but how long would she resist him?
It wasn’t due to attraction or his skills as a lover.
Even though Aela had declined his advances.
They had nothing but time to get to that aspect of their bond.
She would bend to him and become his bonded, then Tarek could Ascend.
Tala would function as she always had and with Aela secured to his House, Taurus would be safe while he was Set. He would not consider any other option.
Tarek’s mind was only slightly sluggish after the revelry of the ball the previous night. It wandered back to Aela and everything he had learned about her since she had arrived. Her secrets were coy—as if he didn’t know.
She doesn’t trust me.
The thought stopped Tarek in his tracks.
He didn’t want her to be difficult. Maybe he had been going about this the wrong way.
He barked a laugh; he was never wrong. Besides, she would have received his gift by now.
She’d come crawling to him soon enough. Lengthening his stride, he traversed the rounding hallways and sky bridges until he and his guards came to the Core Tower, where the first phase of his plan would begin.
Zosma came through the trailing vines hanging from the ceiling that Aela’s dreams had produced in the night. He found her in a mess of pillows and blankets in her sunken living room.
“Did you sleep at all after last night?”
When she didn’t reply, her guard moved deeper into the disordered space.
“I see you rearranged again,” he said.
All the furniture, aside from the bookshelves lining the walls and the dining table, had disappeared.
Precarious stacks of books, tomes, and scrolls monopolized the space as Tarek had finally made good on his promise of Aela’s odd request to study the Astral Archives of the Zodiac Houses.
Perhaps Tarek felt a shade of guilt after forcing a kiss on her last night.
A horde of attendants had come first thing following the ball, laden with the entire Astral Archive collection from the city’s library for her perusal.
She still didn’t have access to a particle screen—Tarek’s generosity only went so far—which would make her research immensely easier, but it was a start.
Aela hoped Fate would side with her and keep her obvious intention undiscovered for a while longer as she scoured the Line records of the realm for evidence of what became of her family.
“How do you explain it to your attendants?” Zosma asked as his eyes roamed her quarters.
Aela glanced up from the book in her lap, surveying the living room of her apartment before she resumed her reading.
When she slept without crystal bands, her dreams often shifted her waking world.
Her nightmares were dormant as The Darkness stole the spotlight of her dreams. Odd how the curse of the realm kept her nightmares at bay.
The stiff and gaudy furniture was the first to go.
It was replaced with thick tasseled cushions and rich fur blankets perfect for reading and nesting in.
The vines were a recent development that Aela rather liked.
It gave her rooms less of a formal feeling, transforming them into something a bit more raw and uncontrollable—just like her magic.
“Not that they speak to me much but that an earthen elemental has taken to me, and he indulges my penchant for interior decorating,” Aela replied without looking up from her book.
Zosma laughed.
“He laughs!”
“Funny.”
“It would appear so,” she snapped her book closed. “Now, would you please put me out of my misery, and tell me how things went?”
She had wanted to debrief with Tabitha and Arche after the heist last night, but part of the plan was to distance herself until the Asters discovered the missing crystals. It was partly why Aela had buried herself in research.
Zosma crossed his arms over his muscled chest. The crystalline spear he carried across his back angled over his head, shining from the starlight in the sconces along the walls.
“Something went wrong,” he admitted.
Aela jumped to her feet, stumbling over the book she had been reading. Zosma reached for her, gently taking her hand as he eased her away from the tangled mess of blankets and books. He handled her as if she might turn rabid, trying not to spook her. She narrowed her eyes.
Zosma watched her warily. “Before you start panicking, all Tabitha said was that she and Arche were discovered and that we needed to regroup. That’s why I left you alone at the ball. I’m sorry.”
Aela waved his apology away and paced. “What does that mean? Were they captured? Where are they? Did anyone get out? Who discovered them?”
“Breathe, Aela. We will figure everything out.” His lips compressed.
“There’s more?”
“Yes, Tarek requested your presence in the Core Tower.”
Aela’s feet stilled and she shifted her gaze away, her mind a whirlwind of information and questions. Her insides iced over as a former conversation snapped back to her about the unstable sun on Prente.
“Prente?” Aela breathed, fearing the truth.
“I’m afraid so.”
She remembered all too well the feverish heat of the desert planet. Heat from two suns. She hadn’t understood when Tarek admitted the purpose the planet would serve.
Her mind raced.
First the rebellion was at risk, and now a planet full of innocent humans was too. Taurus had the resources to house the humans, and though Aela wasn’t a fool to believe they’d welcome lesser beings into their city, she had to try.
Aela burst from her room garbed in the comfortable clothing she had changed into after the ball, feet and wrists bare. Zosma called after her, and when she didn’t stop, he ran to catch up as she tore through the Avarice palace.
“Ah, Aela, there you are,” Tarek said, moving close to her as she emerged from the curling stairwell, slightly out of breath. Zosma hovered behind.
“No hard feelings about today. Right, Lion?” Tarek asked over Aela’s head as he trailed his hands along her upper arms.
“None, Prime Apparent.”
“Not for much longer,” Tarek crooned as he looked down at Aela.
She couldn’t help the tear that spilled down her cheek. “Please don’t do this. I know it’s not my place, but please. There has to be another way. They are innocent, Tarek. They don’t deserve this fate. We can help them.”
“Help them? Help the ungrateful traitors of my own Line?”
Aela took a step back. “What? Traitors? No, Tarek, the humans on Prente…”
Tarek shifted his head toward the curved window behind the particle screen displays.
Aela followed his line of sight and wandered to the window, peering down onto the streets of Avarice.
There, at the foot of the Core Tower in the middle of the main avenue that divided the city, was a cluster of stars being corralled like beasts by sentinels.
“What is this?” she asked.
“Penalty for treason,” Tarek replied.
Aela went as white as the silenced stars in the heavens.
He continued. “A loyal Aster brought it to my attention that a small group of common class stars were involved in a smuggling ring and tried to leave the city while we celebrated our bond.”
Aela couldn’t tear her eyes away from the common class Taureons. She had come prepared to make a case for human lives, not to validate the common class’ treason. If she appealed on their behalf, what else would she put at risk?
She spun away from the window, making eye contact with Zosma, who stood so still he could have been mistaken for a pillar carved of quartz.
“What of the humans on Prente? Bring them to Avarice and relocate them,” Aela nearly begged.
“Foster the mortals? I’m sure you think you feel a strange sort of kinship with the…
humans… but they have no place here. The Gods made them stewards of our energy supply.
That’s all. They gave us dominion over them.
It’s the natural order of things. It can’t be helped if nature has come to take its course. ”
“They don’t deserve this Tarek. I know your aunt said the planet was barren, but I was there. I know there are more crystals in the mines. Maybe if I—”
Tarek’s bark of laughter cut her off.
“Aela, you need a better outlet for that bleeding heart of yours. I need the energy from that sun to fuel the jump into Sagittarius. It’s done.”
With her crystal bands forgotten in her apartment, a pull behind her navel was the only warning Aela got before she disappeared. Flicker.
Aela fell to her knees on the familiar fissures along the desert floor.
The glaring sunlight overhead was hotter than she remembered as she peered up at the dual suns.
The larger of the two was shimmering with a feverish heat, its expiration underway as flares of fire whipped from the unsteady mass.
She had shifted from Avarice to Prente, just like she did in her dreams, yet fully awake. Aela set aside her alarm and focused on the blinding need within her.