Chapter 23
Aurelia
“Where’s the real Jade Brown?” I hiss into Ghoul’s dark mind.
“Dead, funnily enough. Smile.”
That poor innocent girl. I barely remember her from primary school.
The type of girl who didn’t stand out amongst the rest of the hatchlings.
Average grades, her ponytail always in a scrunchie.
There are plenty of Eastern Brown snakes on this side of the coast, and while they are dangerously venomous, the ability to sell their venom to research has made a lot of them quite wealthy with a high rank in the serpent community.
It made sense that Ghoul would choose one as his mate.
I bare my fangs as suggested, and the shadows part just enough for everyone to see my red lips and the sharp white tips.
Everyone, that is, including my goddess-forsaken father, who is at the head of the crowd, tall and foreboding.
My vision through the lace is fragmented, but I would know my sire on his power alone.
It coats the air like oil, hanging above it and yet contaminating everything around it.
It gives everything around him a subtle feeling of being choked.
I suddenly wonder how my mother ever tolerated it.
How I, as a child, had ever tolerated it.
But it had been all I’d ever known, and he had loved me at the beginning.
Or perhaps it wasn’t love, but possession and greed that made his touch doting.
It’s shocking and uncomfortable to feel betrayed in retrospect.
The other high-ranking serpents hang back, letting their king greet his general.
To my utter and brilliant shock, my father embraces Ghoul, clapping him on the back just once before stepping back.
He doesn’t even look at me. “Congratulations, General,” Mace Naga says. “Finally, you bring me good news.”
Interesting; that feels like a jab. More interesting still is the fact that it sounds like they’ve been trying to get Ghoul married.
Aunt Charlotte saunters forward, her stilettos clicking, in a long black dress with a dramatic fur trim. Her blonde pin curls look a bit dry at the ends, and her red-lipped smile is strained as she glances me over, then turns to her only living mate, Uncle Ronald.
“Well done, General,” Uncle Ron says. His smile doesn’t reach his eyes.
“Thanks, Ronny.”
Ghoul being chummy with my family makes my stomach turn, but it’s not until Aunt Charlotte tries to usher me towards one of the black velvet couches off to the side that I break out into a sweat. “You must sit down, dear,” she says, reaching out as if to sweep me away.
Ghoul’s shadows make me scoot backwards into his body. “My bride will sit with no one but me.”
A nearby anima that I recognise as one of Charlotte’s besties laughs nervously. “Ah yes, the possessiveness of basilisks is said to be akin to a rabid dragon, is that not right, General?”
“If the rabid dragon had its eggs taken from him, yes,” Ghoul says smoothly.
“We were all beginning to think you were impotent,” a stout man with a thick moustache chuckles. “Are you sure it’s yours?”
Light flashes and sizzling sounds. There’s a scream before it’s abruptly cut off. Everybody flinches, then immediately turn away and continue on like nothing happened. There is no trace of the man who stood there. Only a pile of smoking ashes and a joke that lingers in the air.
Wait. Wait.
“I’ll be in touch with you about your pregnancy requirements, Jade,” Aunt Charlotte says formally before turning on her heel and clacking away.
Now I’m shouting furiously into Ghoul’s head, “You can lay your own eggs, Ghoul! What the hell.”
He only chuckles, pulling me to sit on his lap. “Don’t you want my hatchlings, regina?” I go still. Suddenly, this dress feels tight around my diaphragm, and more sweat trickles down my spine. “Easy, snakelet. I know the princess is in there somewhere. All of this could have been yours, remember?”
I do remember, that’s half the problem. I imagine if I had been my father’s daughter, princess of Naga House. I had always been kept away from the generals, but as an adult, I would have had to interact with them. “You would have had to answer to me,” I tell him.
“It would have been perfect.”
I frown at him, but the basilisk general is looking threateningly out at the crowd. They might not be able to see his eyes, but his posture in the seat, the set of his shoulders and thighs, and the slight cock of his head scream pure, lethal challenge.
Now I get to look out at the rest of the people in the room. A string quartet is working its way through the Four Seasons in the corner, and overlooking them is the Naga family crest in gold and silver, shiny because it’s brand spanking new. I guess they couldn’t save the original one.
My eyes scan to the right of them, where on a dais before a little crowd sit three people, gagged and chained with obsidian to three chairs.
My gasp is involuntary. It’s the tall figure of Ablo Obon; the wolf queen, Lunissa Darkfang, and Irma Goldwing, the avian queen.
All three have glazed, unseeing eyes, but their breathing and heartbeats are rapid as if they’re in pain.
He’s done it. My father has actually done what he’d planned all those years ago. Mace Naga is preparing to take over the state.
I want to jump out of this seat and run. I need to warn Minnie and the academy. I need to find my mates. I need to get them back now.
“Settle,” Ghoul warns into my head. His shadows slide down my arms as if to soothe me, and perhaps because he’s one of my mates, it works.
The regina in me succumbs to his hold. The serpents in the room mingle and laugh.
They point at their captives and shake hands with each other.
Suddenly, I’m all too aware that every male in the room is wearing a formal military evening uniform. It looks official. Intentional.
It reminds me of images I’ve seen of another time and place where such things had happened, in another fragile decade.
My vision sharpens, and with that, my mind.
Though I keep my gaze turned away from them, I allow my mind to stray to the wolf queen.
What manner of serpent magic is this? That the avian queen with her refined healing powers could not fight off?
That Ablo Obon, with his powerful telekinesis, could be helpless against.
The wolf queen does not respond when my power touches her mind and asks permission to speak. It’s as if her mind is cast in darkness. In shadow. My head swivels towards the face of my fifth mate. Both of us, with our eyes covered from the world. Both of us covered in shadows. “You did that?”
“Did what?” he drawls. “Cast a spell upon The Collector to make her skin fall off?”
“We are not the same.”
“We’re exactly the same. That was a stroke of genius by the way. Very well done.”
I won’t get any type of answer from him, and I know it. “Is this it?” I ask. “You want me to be your bride? Bear your seed?”
“Is that too much to ask of my regina?”
“You’ve never been loyal to me.”
He bares his fangs. “Are you ready for what’s to come, snakelet?”
My stare is hard on the points that glint crimson. He’s caught me off guard with his words for the second time tonight. “Get me out of here,” I say with disgust. “I’ve played my part.”
When he rises, holding me close as if I am only made of shadow, my gaze finds my father sitting in a winged-back chair, his eyes fixed on me.
My heart jumps like it’s been shot but he can’t know that it’s me.
A band of shadow wraps around my arm in a guiding fashion, and Ghoul leads me right over to his king. He bows, and I do a hasty curtsy.
As we turn to leave, a woman’s voice rings across the room. “Jade? Oh Jade, how happy we are!”
A plump woman and an older man are hurrying towards me, their faces panicked, their arms reaching out. Maybe it’s their panic, maybe it’s my panic, but I too reach towards the flustered mother.
There is a strange and awful hiss, and a column of shadow bursts around me like a tornado. My world is a whorl of black and power. Wild Mother, all I can see now is the tornado of turning shadows around me. I stand in its eye, hidden from the entire room.
“Do not touch my bride.” Ghoul’s voice has taken terror to a whole new level. Within my tornado, he sounds like he’s very far away, but even then, his wrath sends me reeling. “She is no longer yours. She is mine. As are the hatchlings. As is her soul. Do you understand me?”
There are other muffled voices from outside the storm of shadows, and before I know it, I’m being whisked away by dominant, possessive hands and being lifted into Ghoul’s SUV. We’re tearing down the street fast enough for the streetlights to be a blur.
There are too many things wrong with all of this.
My father wants Ghoul to breed. Jade’s mother doesn’t know she’s dead.
The world doesn’t know that the council is being held captive.
There is a warrant on my head, and none of my mates can help me right any of these wrongs.
Ghoul is an enemy. But why is it that he doesn’t touch me like one?
No words are exchanged between me and the basilisk lord, but he undresses me with the same efficiency as he dressed me, then proceeds to lead the way back to the academy.
The flight is strained, but not physically.
I’m troubled as to why he hasn’t chosen the real Jade Brown to be his wife.
Nothing stopped Xander from taking Francesca as his for a while.
But I’m not going to ask him any questions at all. There’s no point.
When I’m finally back in my bedroom, feeling like I need to scrub this night off my skin, I turn around to address the silent giant. “How are you going to keep up this ruse?”
“You’ll be coming back as needed, of course.”
“Arrogant bastard,” I mutter. “I don’t want to go back there.”
“Hush now, wife.”
I round on him, but he’s already gone, and in his place are six glass vials glinting like jewels on the open windowsill.