Chapter 6
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Ah, what a lovely cliff.
Zahra knows I’m here.
Castor really knows Zahra.
Staring at the sky beyond the glass ceiling and the bars of the golden bird cage, I lie on my suspended bed and try to gather my thoughts. After Castor told me his passcode, I checked his Discord app.
It was Zahra’s username. Her profile picture. Everything I remember from before I had to leave my phone with her contact information behind.
Zahra talks to Castor.
Zahra actually talks to Castor.
He sends her pouting emojis when LARP day is canceled.
She tells him to shut up and get over it. Like they’re close. Like they’re friends.
A star shoots across the sky. I follow the trail until it disappears into the darkness.
Without any light pollution, the stars of this world fill the abyss, endless, suggesting that universes upon universes exist.
It’s beautiful.
Calming.
A reminder about how insignificant I and my problems are.
Alas.
These bars really do spoil the view.
Why would Zahra want a man who locks me in a cage to take care of me? Does she know I’m in a cage? The or else seemed like a threat. But if Castor is a man she needs to threaten, why would she tell him to take care of me at all instead of bring me to her?
Maybe she’s also helpless. Maybe she’s just more vocal about her irritations than I am. Maybe we’re both trapped.
If that’s the case, though, what can I do?
How do I save us both?
“My feather?” Castor’s voice drifts from his large bed, and I tell myself not to tense.
“Yes?” I whisper.
His voice is nearer the next time he speaks. “Are you having trouble sleeping, my love?”
Love. Feather. My, my, my.
He’s already quite completely decided I belong to him.
Sitting up, I focus on every facet of my body, telling everything inside me to calm. He is not Rodrick. He has not—with zero social expectations or witnesses—attempted a single thing in the past twenty-four hours.
I am fine.
I am safe.
If I’m ever going to figure out the rules here, I need to play with a little fire and see what burns.
Carefully, I step off the swaying bed and follow Castor’s dark shadow to the bars of the bird cage door.
My heart attempts fear. I remind it how we have always responded to our mother’s touch—leaning in, trying to soak up the heat, desperate for an illusion of care—and brace my hand against the gold trapping me.
As expected, Castor lifts his arm, long sleeve slipping down to his wrist. Moonlight illuminates his pale skin, limning his fingers as they reach past bars to cup my cheek.
I close my eyes, remember my mother, and embrace the caress. There is no illusion of heat in it, no bodily warmth that suggests life, but it is something far closer to gentle than my mother ever managed to present.
His hand trembles.
“It’s hard to sleep in the same room as you,” I murmur, soft, cryptic. “I didn’t sleep much last night either.”
He reaches his touch a little farther, hooking his hand behind my head and forcing me closer to the bars.
“It will take some time to adjust. Change is often unwelcome in our blood. It comes with discomfort.” His breath hits me—spearmint and cool—as he presses himself into the metal between us. “What can I do to make it easier?”
“How strong are you?” I ask, lifting my hand to his wrist. Cool and dry. All of his skin is cool and dry. What a relief.
“I am the second eldest of five local ancients, though one is a cat and hardly counts in my mind. Still, in over a millenia, nothing has toppled us.” His tongue flicks to wet his lips. “Before you, however…I have never felt so weak.”
That bodes quite well, I think.
“Let me out?” I ask.
He does so. Immediately.
In doing so, he had to pull his touch away, and once bars no longer separate us, he does not close the distance again.
With the darkness shrouding, I scan whatever details of him I can make out. The sharp angles of his face. The dark strip slicing the white between his cheeks and forehead in half. His long, pale ears.
Otherworldly.
He is regal and ethereal.
Beautiful in ways I’ve never known before in all my life. He is stunning, like the endless sky with its limitless unspoken possibilities. He is graceful, gentle, more than anything I have ever grazed.
There are worse fates, worse wardens, worse masters to submit to.
Right now, this moment almost feels like a dream. One where I get to be in control, stop pretending I’m something I’m not, say no and be heard.
I have no idea whether or not he’ll listen, but that is something I need to learn.
“Is it very dangerous outside at night?” I ask. “The entire day, the sky was clouded and dark, but now it’s clear, and I wonder how far from the dawn we are. If we can’t sleep anyway, maybe we can wait for the sun to rise? I could watch it crest the horizon and you could feel the warmth.”
His hand finds mine, closing gently around my fingers. “My apologies, my darling. The sun never shines fully in unseelie lands. Far too many here are nightcrawlers, accustomed to the darkness. Such is the way the shadowed domains in Faerie are.”
With that knowledge, my chest squeezes.
Am I to be subjected to an absence of sunlight for the rest of my life?
Castor cups my chin in his free hand. “What troubled you just now, my feather?”
“I…like the sun. I’ll miss it.”
His grip tightens on me, then he turns on his heel. When I stumble at the suddenness, he does not pause; he merely whirls and pulls me into his arms. The door to his bedroom opens without his having to touch it, and a tingling sensation pricks my flesh.
His long strides carry us outside, past the pool, to Zahra’s faerie path.
He steps through the trod—which splits like a gate, tearing a hole in this world as it opens up another—and I witness a splash of road before he’s stepping us into yet a third world.
This time, the bustle of voices makes my heart race.
Beautiful buildings made of crystal rise up on either side of us, and beyond the alley we’re in, people fill a town square.
Cautiously, Castor waits between the buildings.
“Wher—”
“Shh.” He kisses my forehead, angling my face toward his robes.
When an opening comes, he slips us through the traffic, unnoticed, and glides across a field. Electric blue moths dance among the waves of tall grass, and I follow their twirls toward a cherry tree melded with an ivory palace in the distance.
It’s gorgeous. Rippling with color. So unlike the one where Castor lives.
“No,” he growls in my ear.
I startle, swallowing hard.
He pauses his frantic pace to drop his forehead against mine and smile too tightly. With forced serenity, he murmurs, “No, no, love. Don’t make me jealous. The moth prince does not deserve your awe.”
Perhaps stupidly, I say, “The moth prince?”
“Cael,” Castor hisses, tossing his chin toward the electric blue moths. “Those are some of his spies. Say hello, why don’t you? Tell them your name.” His grip flexes into me. “Go on.”
“Um…” I look at the moths. “Hello, Cael. My name is…” Danielle. Storm. Feather. I…don’t know.
“Quickly now, love. We haven’t much time.”
“What name do I tell him?” I ask.
In lieu of answering, Castor sucks his teeth and curses.
Behind us, moths gather, spilling a figure into the field. Dark hair thread with gold. White robes to contrast Castor’s black. Fury. Fury consuming amber eyes. “Castor,” the moth prince sneers, raising black-and-gold wings.
I clutch Castor as he whirls to face Cael. Snide, he greets the royal fae, “Fancy meeting you here. Au revoir.” When he steps back, the world changes again. Bright city lights blind me. A car nearly hits us. But then it’s gone. And craggy woods fill my vision.
My head is spinning by the time Castor slows to a stop at an overlook.
He sets me on a rock off a cliffside, and my heart lurches as I grip him.
His chuckle skates over my skin. “Worry not, dear heart. I won’t let you fall.” His arms frame my body, secure, as he nods toward the vast rolls of majestic mountains in the distance, at the sky cresting with warm shades above the peaks. “Sun,” he murmurs, letting his head rest against me.
A breeze teases the long strands of our hair together, making his glisten like white water against the amber in mine.
“You… Is this the human world?”
“It is.”
“You brought me to the other side of the world?”
“Yes. Russia, specifically. An…acquaintance of mine has family out this way…family I prefer to keep tabs on.”
Russia.
I’m in Russia? On the side of a cliff?
Choked, I say, “You brought me to Russia so I could see the sun?”
His arms squeeze me. “Yes.”
What Frelsi said about making him my slave is not at all seeming difficult, all of a sudden.
Dog people are absolutely, completely bonkers.
Clearly his anger earlier when I didn’t obey swiftly enough means I’m not in any kind of secure control, but…I can probably work with this. I can probably wrap him around my finger. Forge a new safety. Discover his boundaries and rules. Learn the words that get me out of trouble.
It won’t be easy.
But it is far easier than having let my mother force me to marry Rodrick.
Anything with this man seems easier than what I’ve already experienced with that one.
After all, I have now seen his anger, and I have not been harmed by it.
“Castor…” I hedge. His fingers dig into me, and I bite my tongue. Heart lunging, I stammer, “I’m so sorry. What should I call you?”
Breath taut, he buries his face against my side. “Anything. Any word from your lips to refer to me is a blessing.”
Dog. People. Need. To. Chill.
For reasons unknown, I find myself running my fingers through his hair, feeling him shudder and nuzzle closer. I begin again, slowly, “Castor…” He squeezes me. “…about earlier.”
“Earlier?” he whispers. “When was earlier? Has there not only ever been now?”
Oh-kay, sir drama…
“Earlier…with that moth prince.”
Castor growls, and his grip loosens, leaving me to grasp his hair by mistake as my precarious position sends a jolt of anxiety through me.