54. Chapter Fifty-Four
54
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
ELODIE
“ O k, I’ll start,” I began, deciding to give as much as they did, the weight of their attention now on me. “A nice and easy one; why am I here?”
Bastian’s mouth opened to speak before I cut him off. “And I want a real fucking answer.”
His eyes narrowed before he slipped a hand into his pocket, pulling something out and tossing it towards me. Flinching away, whatever he threw landed softly in my lap. I stared down at the dull stone, a large hole punched through the centre.
My head snapped up, looking between them. “A rock. I’m here because of a rock.” Frustration had my hold on the glass tightening, the divots of the cut crystal digging into my skin almost painful.
Was this some joke to them?
“Yes and no,” Kaius began, and I readied myself to fight for the answers I was owed.
“You’re here, Goldie, because we were told that whatever that rock found, would hold all our answers.” I frowned at him in confusion as he continued. “And that rock found you.”
“It found me?”
“Mhm. Believe me when I tell you, you weren’t what we were expecting to find.”
“I think that’s pretty obvious,” Bastian scoffed, and I ignored him, focusing my attention on the stone in my lap. Balancing my glass on the arm of the chair, I picked it up, turning it over in my fingers. As far as I could tell, it was literally just a rock.
“You found me with a rock. You understand how crazy that sounds, right?” Part of me wanted to rage at them for making up such nonsense, but the fact that Kaius had promised never to lie to me—a promise I knew in my heart he had kept—made me hold back.
“We weren’t looking for you ,” Bastian drawled in a way that made me want to punch him in the face again. His body was coiled with tension as his eyes locked onto the stone in my hands.
“Make a girl feel loved, why don’t you,” I snarked, earning a small laugh from Kaius.
“We were told that whatever we found would help us destroy The Darkness.”
My magik roiled at just the mention of the entity that had torn me open only hours ago, and my fingers clenched around the cool rock. The phantom burn of my wounds aching on my back.
“Imagine my disappointment when after all that time, we found you.”
“Bastian!” Kaius scolded his harsh words, but I didn’t care. Big Man could say what he liked as long as they kept talking.
“So, when you broke in, it wasn’t to kidnap me?” I frowned in an effort to remember the details of that night.
“Not exactly,” Kaius answered, swirling the amber liquid as he spoke. “We were expecting some kind of weapon, maybe a spell. Definitely not what appeared to be a human girl, half naked asleep in her bed. After so long searching we had no choice but to take you. If there was even the slightest chance you had what we needed, we had to take it. Though I can’t say I’m particularly sorry about it, considering the view we had when we arrived." He finished with a wink and heat flushed in my cheeks that had nothing to do with the roaring fire that crackled in the room.
“How long have you been looking?” I questioned, choosing to ignore the way my heart had skipped at that wink.
“Too long,” Bastian growled before he knocked back his drink and slammed the glass on the table next to him.
“Let me get this right. I’m supposed to know how to defeat The Darkness. Me ?”
“Apparently so.” Bastian’s voice was thick with derision as his green eyes swept over me. Assessing my worth.
“And who told you all this?”
Who had placed such a bounty on my head?
“Nova. She’s a seer. A powerful one,” Kaius answered.
“A seer?” I whispered, mind whirring with thoughts I couldn’t make sense of.
“Yes,” he said uncertainly, watching the turmoil playing across my face.
My eyes bounced between them as I debated on whether I could trust them, on what my truth may mean to them. I was here at their mercy—given a room and food. It was a comfortable imprisonment, I couldn’t deny that, but could what I say next change that?
“I think it’s my turn to spill some secrets.” With that, I grabbed the crystal glass, downing the rest of the drink and only slightly wincing as it burned. Still rubbing my finger over the cool stone, they leaned in slightly closer.
“Before I start, just know that I don’t even have half the information I would like. Let alone enough to satisfy you.” I arched a brow at Bastian, his eyes rolling in return.
“That’s ok, Goldie, just tell us what you know,” Kaius reassured, reaching across to sweep my hair over my shoulder.
Taking in a shaky breath, I started. “After my parents died, I grew up with my Nanna. I don’t remember much about them. For as long as I can remember, we both had magik. Not a lot, and nothing like I can feel since being here, but enough. She taught me how to use it, how to make wards, help the plants grow, things like that. It was just part of my life, and I never questioned why we had magik and no one else did. Nanna’s friend Briar would visit us. She also had magik, and she would teach me things.”
“But humans can’t use magik,” Big Man stated, face creased in confusion as he listened.
“Apparently so. But that doesn’t matter, because I’m not human.” I watched the slow embers that burned in his eyes and pressed on. “According to Arden, I’m Fae. And I’m also an Anomaly.”
“No fucking way,” Bastian spat as his eyebrow flew wide.
“Continue, Goldie.”
Squeezing the rock in my hand, I carried on with my story. “He tested me, and unless you dispute that, then yes fucking way . I don’t know how I ended up back home, whether someone sent me there or I found my way there somehow. I don’t even know if Nanna is really my family.” My voice broke slightly, heart cracking at the thought. I ached to see her again despite the anger I felt at the lie that was my life.
“What else has Arden so helpfully found out during your short time together?”
Ignoring his most holy dickhead, I turned to Kaius, focusing on his stormy eyes as they silently encouraged me to continue.
“I would have these dreams. I would see things play out in front of me minutes before they happened. Every reading I did would spill secrets I had no right knowing. Nanna told me there was nothing to them, just dreams. But Briar… Briar would ask. Always pushed me to explore it. And I did when I was younger. But as I grew, I got more and more disinterested, convinced myself that everything was a coincidence, or forced myself to forget what I had seen. As I got older, those things just kind of faded out.” I swallowed down the embarrassment at my complete refusal to acknowledge what was right under my eyes.
Maybe there was more to it than a conscious decision to ignore all the signs.
“Oraculum,” Kaius murmured. At my small nod of agreement, something I didn’t understand flashed in his eyes before they darted towards Bastian.
I held my breath waiting for their reaction.
“You’re a seer.”
“Yes.” My voice was barely more than a whisper as my magik raced to soothe me, caressing my nerves as I sat tense in their presence. The vulnerability I was showing them hard to process. Heat bloomed behind me for a moment before it fell away, leaving an unexpected chill at its loss, but I kept my focus ahead.
This could be it, the moment it all changes. The moment they decide I don’t belong, even here.
“A seer.” Bastian’s voice was hard as granite, the words forced from his lips. “Well, what can you do then?”
“What can I do? What are you expecting, some sort of magik trick? To pull a rabbit out of a fucking hat?”
“I was expecting more.” His eyes dragged over me with barely concealed resentment, and it took everything in me not to shrink from his gaze.
More. Of course they wanted more. Of course I wouldn’t be enough.
“I don’t know what I can do,” I bit back while knowing I had to tell them what I did know.
“There’s something else,” I started before I lost the nerve to keep talking. “Someone put a block on my mind. Arden thinks that’s why I never questioned all the things that now don’t make sense to me.”
Curses dropped from both their mouths, and Kaius’ eyes flew wide, one hand reaching to claw back the waves of dark hair that fell into his face.
“That’s big, Goldie. That’s fucking huge.” I watched the shock play across his face before he, too, downed the remainder of his drink.
“How are you even alive?” I twisted towards Bastian, blinking at him blankly, unsure of what he was going on about now.
“Fae cannot live for large periods of time in the mortal realm before their magik becomes poisoned. You must have crossed back over for you to even be sitting here now, let alone with a hold on your power. And you had to have been born here, too.”
“I don’t know. I’m starting to think there are many things I’ve been forced to forget.”
“Arden has confirmed this. This block?”
“Yes. He said he would help me to try remove it, but that he might not be strong enough.” Something ever so slightly resembling concern flickered across Bastian’s face before Kaius’ deep voice spoke.
“If he can’t, then I will find someone who will.” The sincerity in his voice made my skin prickle with goosebumps. A dark edge to the air around me crept in. I was itching to reach across and touch him, but kept my hands fisted around the rock that apparently caused all my most recent problems.
Strange how something so small can make such a huge impact in my life. Maybe that blame lies on the one who sent them my way in the first place.
“Thank you,” I said, voice rough as I swallowed hard, the darkness fading with each second. Again, my thoughts raced with more information than I could process. To go from being so ridiculously in the dark— to this —was more than overwhelming. And yet there were still questions that needed answers.
I wanted to sleep.
I wanted to rest.
I wanted to give myself the time I had been denied to come to terms with all I had learnt, but I knew this may be the last chance I had to get a better picture of the situation. Especially when it came to Bastian. Though most of what came out of his mouth was just more thinly veiled accusations; I would take it if it found me my truth.
“If you had been searching for so long, how did you end up finding me when you did?” They hadn’t given me a time frame for how long they had been waiting for me to show up in their magikal rock. For all I knew, “too long” could have been mere months, and Big Man didn’t strike me as particularly patient.
“Because you finally showed up. For years we had been feeding magik into the stone in the hope it would show us where to go. We had had a few small sparks in the past, but nothing that gave us a clear location. Then all of a sudden, it found you. There was nothing different that we hadn’t done a hundred times before, not on our side at least.”
Years.
“Maybe the block had something to do with it?” Bastian’s emerald eyes gleamed as he offered a reasonable response for once. I could almost picture the churning of his mind, the thoughts I had no intention of learning.
“How did you get through my wards?” I asked, remembering how I had woken from my nightmare and found them in the dark corner of my room. It shouldn’t have happened, Fae or not, magik or not; they shouldn’t of been able to get through.
“There were none. Only that beast guarding the place.” Bastian’s gaze flicked to the arm I knew Titan had injured, and satisfaction broke through the anxiety that had coiled so tightly within me since I had started talking.
“Did you knock them out when you found me?” There definitely had been wards in place.
“No, Goldie, there were none. Honestly, we thought it was some sort of booby trap at first, like surely what we had been searching for wasn’t going to be that easy to get a hold of. Then Titan ambushed us, and we just took it as one of the things that would be in our way. Although, we weren’t expecting to end up in front of a cute little cottage with a purple front door.”
“Lilac,” I grumbled. “That shouldn’t of been possible, I only crossed through them a few hours before you woke me.”
“We could feel that there was magik around us, just nothing in place to keep us out.” Kaius added.
“That makes no sense.”
“Your wards were probably just too weak, considering all that time you were in the mortal realm.” Bastian decided to comment, proving once again I could expect nothing helpful from him.
“They were definitely not weak, Big Man.” I sighed in exasperation, leaning back into the chair and closing my eyes.
“Well, reality says otherwise,” he countered, and I decided not to look at his stupid face, instead trying to commit every word spoken here to memory.
That’s if I even have enough space left in here.
Finally getting the answer to why I was here wasn’t as rewarding as I had expected it to be. There were so many threads, and they were all getting ridiculously tangled the more I found out.
“Are you sure you were pointed in the right direction? Because I hate to tell you, but I don’t know how to help.” Bastian scoffed before the crackle of flames became the only noise in the room.
“I imagine the nature of a block means that you have no idea why it was put on you, let alone what it is you might know for the need to block you anyway.” Kaius’ tattooed hand scraped across his beard, and I could sense the hesitation in his words.
“And?” I pressed.
“What if that’s why Nova sent us to find you because you do know something? You just don’t know it.”
It was possible, more than possible. Without removing the block, I had no idea what was missing from my mind. It could well be nothing, but then why would someone go to the trouble of keeping it from me?
“I mean, maybe?”
“So, you’re telling me that she could hold the information I need, but it’s behind this block.” Bastian gestured towards me, and my stomach churned as his words took on an edge that I didn’t feel good about.
“Information we need, Bastian. And I’m saying it’s a possibility, along with other things.” Kaius’ voice was careful, measured, and I knew he could feel the way the room had changed.
“Then what are we waiting for?” Bastian rose from his chair in one fluid motion, flame-filled eyes searing with a determination that set the magik residing in my streaming across my skin.
“Let’s break the block and find out what Princess here is hiding.” His hand reached for me, and I felt a probing heat press against my skin. Pushing to my feet quickly, I stepped away from him. My pulse raced, and energy pressed into my fingertips as invisible flames began to lick across my face.
Instinctively, I raised my hands to shield myself, and the air in front of me wavered for a moment, the heat on my skin stopping abruptly before a tall figure stepped in front of me. One hand reaching back to hold my arm, the other out in front of him, physically pushing his best friend away from me.
“You don’t just go battering into someone’s mind, you lunatic!” Kaius yelled at him, his power crackling around us. A dark charge was surging over the skin he held in his grip, my own magik reaching towards it, eager for its touch.
“What the fuck has gotten into you?” he demanded as Bastian was forced backwards, his legs hitting the chair he had just been sat in. His gaze tore into me with such a viciousness, I unconsciously took a step back, breaking my connection with Kaius.
“She fucking knows something Kaius, she must!” He roared, and the heat in the room enveloped me, a suffocating blanket of magik that stole the breath from my body. Rising panic had my heart fluttering as his heat stole the air from around me, before I managed to send my own power flooding out, allowing my lungs to expand.
“Fuck you,” I spat, stepping around to Kaius’ side. “I’m not hiding anything. I didn’t do this to myself, you absolute asshole.”
“And how do we know that for sure? How do we know that you’re not keeping information from us!”
“Like what?” I shouted, furious that nothing was enough for this man. “I didn’t even know any of this existed before you brought me here.”
“So you claim,” he seethed.
“You are unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable.” I was exhausted, I had given enough. I needed to get away from him, this Prince .
“I’m done,” I said, the finality ringing clearly through the room.
“You’re not done until I say so.” Menace laced every word with a danger that coiled around us, but I didn’t care as I turned from him. The crystal glass balanced on the chair toppled, the solid glass thudding against the patterned rug, but it didn’t break. With the rock, now warm from my body heat, gripped tightly in my hand, I marched to the door, magik easing just a little with each step out of his range.
Four steps away.
“What the actual fuck is wrong with you?” I heard Kaius hiss.
Three steps and shadows bloomed beneath my feet.
Two more left, and I would be out of this stifling room. The mix of our magik a cocktail of energy that pounded against my skull, a relentless drum beat I was desperate to outpace.
One... I reached my hand out, not caring what was happening behind me. The taste of ash coating my tongue.
I was out. Slamming the door with a pulse of magik, the guards stationed outside flinched slightly at my unexpected exit. A quick scan of the corridor confirmed that Alouette hadn’t stuck around to wait.
I sucked in clear, fresh breaths as I took off in the direction I was sure I’d arrived in, despite knowing I was clueless to the layout of the palace. I had faith that someone would point me in the right direction, whether that was because they had taken pity on me, or because I had stumbled somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be. The guards kept to their stations, and I wondered just how far my anger would take me before I began to regret the decision to storm off.
Before long, I heard footsteps thudding on the carpet behind me, and the swell of a familiar magik brushed against me tenderly, evoking memories of a warm, hard body pressing against mine. This time, the heat it sent to my core was welcome.
“Am I even going the right way?” I asked quietly as he reached my side, finding me as he had before, the two of us together walking through the palace in a comfortable rhythm.
“Not in the slightest.”
We walked in silence. At some point, Kaius had twined his fingers with mine, and I had held on tight. Both of us lost to our own thoughts but grounded by each other.
I barely noticed when the coloured light danced across the floor, when Kaius pushed open the solid black door to lead me forward, across the circular chamber and down the corridor flanked by the burning women. When the sound of our feet changed from the sharp tap of marble to the muffled thuds of carpet. Nor when we stopped outside my newly appointed room, and without thought, I reached for the handle.
“Looks like I got my answers,” I said, letting go of his hand as we stood in the lavish room. The free space unnerving. The fire already high.
“Not all of them,” he said, reaching out to knot his fingers back with mine.
The same hand that had glowed when he promised to help me, clasped around the one that wasn’t clutching the rock that had changed everything.
“I’m not sure any of that matters anymore.”
“It all matters, Elodie.”
“Does it?” A small frown crinkled his brow above his steely gaze. As the heaviness of the day weighed down on me, my shoulders sagged. Yesterday’s rest wasn’t enough, not nearly enough. Kaius pulled me closer, our bodies close but not quite touching.
“Bastian, he’s...” He trailed off, searching for a word that I found easily available.
“A dick?” I offered.
After a moment, he conceded, a small smile on his lips that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Yeah, a dick.”
“I didn’t ask for any of this.”
“I know.” Kaius brushed a strand of white hair from my face, tucking it behind my ear, fingertips tracing along the row of gold bands stacked through my lobe, before his hand cupped the side of my face.
“But neither did you,” I sighed, closing my eyes at the truth.
Because it was the truth; they had pinned all their hope on something to help them. A weapon to save the kingdom. And got me.
He bowed his head, forehead pressing against mine, and I breathed in a lungful of his earthy scent, the hint of sharpness that drifted along the edges, and that tight edge that had gripped me since before I slammed the door on that dark room eased.
Gently he pressed a kiss to my lips, his thumb trailing a line of heat as it traced my jaw. It wasn’t the heated passion from the cave; this was raw in its tenderness, and my stomach tightened as his tongue teased at mine, a gentle caress that set me burning. Stealing the air from my lungs as I matched his torturously slow movements. Magik built beneath my fingers, desperate to find his as that pull in my chest ached just a little. Behind my closed eyes, the room darkened. Then all too soon, it was over.
“Stay,” I murmured breathlessly. Stupidly.
“I can’t.” Just the whisper of words against my lips, and my heart stumbled. Pulling back, I blinked up at the eyes that burned like liquid silver, saw the regret in them. “I have somewhere I have to be.”
“Right,” I said, turning away, taking a step to put space between us. The sting of his rejection hit me hard before his fingers grabbed my chin and turned me back to face him.
“Stop pulling away from me, Goldie.” The plea was clear on his face.
“I don’t know how not to,” I replied honestly, taking that final step back, our hands falling away.
A knock boomed through the room, and I slipped A Hundred Tales of the Fae of Old under the sofa cushion. Considering it was now the only thing I had, I wanted to keep it safe. Crossing the room reluctantly, the blanket I had been cocooned in draped over my shoulders like a cape as it brushed across the floor. There was little chance it would be Kaius changing his mind, and I sent a silent plea to whatever gods were playing witness to my life that it wasn’t Bastian back to try and crack open my mind.
I opened the door an inch, and I couldn’t help but smile as I found Alouette. I opened it wider, finding her leaning against the frame, red hair curling over her shoulder and a bag held up in her hand.
“You up for going out for some fun? I think you deserve it,” she asked.
“I can leave?” Excitement bubbled inside me at the thought.
Without waiting for an invitation, she stepped into the room. Tossing the bag onto the table, she twisted around to see me still standing with my hand on the door.
“Who’s going to stop you if you’re with me?”
I got the message loud and clear that on my own, no, I would definitely not be stepping outside the palace. But I found I didn’t much care, because going out with Alouette seemed like the best thing that had happened in a very long time.