Chapter Three
O kay, so what are we working with here?” I asked, trying not to get distracted by the room we were in.
That was hard, as it was part of the suite that Pritkin had been allotted in the royal palace. According to him, it was garbage-tier compared to what the other heirs had received. But if this was garbage. . .
I thought back to my court in Vegas, situated in a casino designed to look like hell, and winced. I hoped I didn’t get a light fey delegation anytime soon. Because this place was stunning.
For one thing, it was underwater, or at least this part was. Which was why fish were swimming past the windows, and light shadows from the sun somewhere above were streaming in to dance on the floor, walls, and ceiling. An occasional jellyfish-like blob hit the ward keeping all that water out and stayed there, blorping gently for a while before floating off.
They were easy to see as the huge windows were floor-to-ceiling, although they didn’t look like windows. The room had an oblong shape with rounded walls, like a half-squashed balloon, and was made up of the same dark stone as the cavern where we’d come in. Now that I could see it better, I realized that the rock was striated with veins of what looked like pointy black glitter, which Pritkin said were crystalline formations within the stone.
Wards covered the fissures in the walls, leaving them looking less like windows and more like what they were: gaps in an undersea cave. The floor had a slightly uneven feel that lent credence to that view, like one giant, black river rock that a stream over untold eons had smoothed out. It glittered, too, but with pieces that looked more like the flecks within terrazzo than the pointy inside of a geode.
And that was just the bones!
It didn’t consider the furnishings, which were opulent to the extreme, including braided ropes of tiny pearls used to keep back the filmy white curtains on the platform serving as a bed. Or the massive pieces of coral that made up scattered tables and sconces, the latter holding balls of spell light instead of candles because Nimue’s court had magic literally to burn. Or the carpets scattered carelessly about in dark jewel tones that matched the rest of the room—reds for the coral, black for the rock, white for the pearls, and blue for the water—and with a nap that looked like silk but was something even finer.
Pritkin had said that the fey wove it from the secretions of certain ocean mollusks that used it to adhere themselves to rocks. Mussel spit, in other words, but it didn’t feel that way when the weavers finished with it. It caressed my abused toes in almost obscene luxury, making me feel more inadequate than I already did in my drenched rat state, with a half-burnt gown from my last adventure because dragonscale doesn’t hold up so well to real dragons.
I was also vaguely dizzy as the whole, dimly lit room subtly glittered. Between that and the constantly moving light shadows from outside, it felt like the waves were in here, too. Or, when I briefly lay on the bed, heaped with fluffy mattresses and silky furs and enough velvety pillows for ten people, that I was drifting on a raft under a star-strewn sky, to the point that I started to disassociate.
Looking at it through half-lowered lashes was not recommended.
I got up in self-defense and started pacing around the room, trying to find something to ground me. Pritkin stayed on the bed, exhausted from an ordeal that had lasted far longer than my brief participation. It had been the first in a series of challenges that had been the Alorestri’s way of choosing their next monarch until Nimue had shown up and rendered it all moot.
But she was gone now, and the locals had dug out the old scrolls recording how chieftains were selected in ancient times, and it was as bloody as you’d expect from Faerie. That would have been true even if the contest was fair, but it definitely wasn’t. Pritkin was part demon, and it seemed that everyone was ganging up on him to make sure that whoever won, at least they wouldn’t be ruled by hellspawn.
And the easiest way to do that was to kill him.
He’d been ambushed three times during the Challenge today, and the only thing that had saved him was oozing over by the walls.
Or I should say things, as they were both there, our demonic guardians, looking as abashed as something like that could. I shot the one with a slightly pink tint an evil eye, as it had been my ride before abandoning me to save its smelly hide, and watched it sink even more into itself. Any further, and I was going to see what it looked like on the inside—
Oh, wait.
It made an unhappy sound and tried to hide behind its . . . brother? Friend? Partner in crime?
I still wasn’t sure, but I was giving it a pass since it had helped Pritkin when a couple hundred fey ambushed him during the Challenge. Its amorphous skin didn’t mind arrows getting shot into it, as it just glorped them back out again, allowing it to pick up Pritkin and run off with him heedless of how many times they were hit. And they’d been hit a lot.
“Did you hear me?” I verbally poked Pritkin a little because he was ignoring me.
“Yes, and let it rest for a moment,” he said, with an arm flung over his eyes. Only his tone made it into “Let me rest.”
I walked back over to the huge bed and sat down. It was atop a three-step dais like the one I had back at my court in Vegas. Giving me a sudden pang of longing for my tacky penthouse, my pretty blue and sand-colored bedroom, and people who didn’t look at me with suspicion and hate. But the job was here, and the job wouldn’t wait.
I compromised with duty and lay down beside the exhausted man. The stench had mostly been washed off us by the plunge and what was left . . . well, I was getting used to it. Pritkin huffed out a laugh as if he knew what I’d been thinking and turned to face me.
His hand lifted to play with a limp curl by my cheek, making it hard to concentrate as a warm knuckle kept just brushing the skin. It was unpredictable—brush, brush . . . brush—and the anticipation in between moments of contact had me holding my breath. And then letting it out again in a soft “ahh” whenever that tiny touch came once more.
It was one of the things about dating a prince of the incubi that nobody else would understand. Pritkin usually put on this fierce, war mage persona—gruff, hard-edged, and fairly profane. Okay, make that really profane, especially when something set off that famous temper. And that was one side of him.
But then there was this.
Brush . . .
Brush . . .
Wait for it . . .
Annnnnd freaking nothing, except for green eyes sparkling at me through pale lashes, because yeah. He knew exactly what he was doing. And it was working.
My body was tingling, my insides were liquifying, and goosebumps were flooding over my skin, and yet—
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Auggghhhh!
More nothing, except for the feel of his breath on my face because he was close, close, so very close, and yet nowhere were our bodies actually touching. But close enough for me to feel his heat radiating on my skin and banishing the room’s chill. Banishing Faerie, for a moment, because this was home, this was what I longed for, this was why I dreamed of Vegas.
Because he was usually in it.
Brush.
I jumped him, heard him laugh, felt him roll me in the soft silks of an alien world, and looked up into a face full of evil intent if I’d ever seen one. Yeah, I thought enthusiastically. Be mean to me, Daddy—
Just as somebody started pounding on the door.
Pritkin’s head dropped to my chest in defeat. “I hate this place,” he whispered, and I laughed.
Then they were coming in, a bunch of people I didn’t know, to invite us somewhere I didn’t want to go. And didn’t have the clothes for, as my once pretty tissue of silver dress, which had reemerged from the armor once the danger was past, was looking a bit ratty. And smelling worse.
I took a discreet sniff while Pritkin dealt with the flunky brigade, all of whom were staring: at him, at me, at the two horrors squelching by the wall, and speaking of which—
“We need some food,” I said abruptly, with the tinny translation spell echoing my words in whatever tongue this particular brand of fey spoke.
Or maybe not, because the chief flunky paused the flowery speech he had launched into to blink at me in confusion.
He was a typical fey, with high cheekbones, a tall, deceptively thin body considering that he could probably heft a tank, and—thankfully—dark brown hair. It was the silver-haired bastards that made my butt clench, although, after today, I was starting to wonder if these were any better. Frankly, it was doubtful.
But this one, dressed in some mighty fancy robes for a flunky, was at least listening, although I appeared to have confused him. “But your . . . Pythianess,” he said, frowning and stumbling a bit over the word he’d just made up. “Did you not hear? The victory banquet is in less than an hour—”
“To catch us off guard and exhausted,” Pritkin explained in English, which the flunky didn’t appear to understand because he continued blithely in his language.
“—and I can assure you, any delicacy that you could possibly—”
“Are they invited?” I asked, not bothering to be polite, considering that his people had just tried to kill me.
Luckily, my translation spell didn’t manage sarcasm well, and he failed to notice.
“They?” his eyes went around the room, carefully avoiding the repugnance along the wall. “You brought others with you?”
Pritkin was trying, not very successfully, to hide a smile.
“They,” I said impatiently. “Them. Those.” I pointed at Horror #1 and #2 and realized I hadn’t thought to ask their names.
“You think they deserve to eat?” Pritkin asked. “After the stunt they pulled?”
“Only one of them noped out,” I reminded him. “And both of them did help. I take it that getting help is not illegal?” I assumed not, as he’d have been disqualified otherwise.
“No, I’m allowed a team,” Pritkin said, grinning openly now.
“I don’t know what’s so damned funny,” I said. “We won, didn’t we?”
That won me an actual laugh.
Pritkin’s amusement seemed to take a couple of the fey back almost as much as it did me, as it was not a regular occurrence from a man known to scowl for centuries. But nothing about this day was normal! And if Gross and Nasty over there were our team, we needed them strong.
But the flunky, who had appeared as unruffled as they came on arrival, was starting to have a problem keeping up that fa?ade. His eyes didn’t seem to want to light on the horror twins, yet his duty required them to, so it was a lot of blink, slide, blink, slide as he continually readjusted his view. And then Pritkin decided to help him out.
“Or we could just take them with us.”
“Take them . . . with you?” the head flunky whispered as if he didn’t understand.
“To the banquet,” Pritkin said helpfully, which caused one of the flunkies-in-training to gasp and the other literally to clutch his pearls.
He had a lot of them. They all had a lot of them, from the seed variety sewn onto their filmy robes to create patterns in the weave, to normal-sized ones that they wore in long ropes around their necks and threaded through their elaborate hairstyles, to one the size of a robin’s egg on the hand that the chief flunky had brought up to his throat. It was black and matched his expression, which had just about worn through the thin veneer of proper manners he had left.
He clearly didn’t think that we deserved proper manners. He thought that we smelled. And what he thought about our companions was probably best left unsaid.
So Pritkin helped him out again. “Or you could have some raw meat sent in. Venison will do.”
“Venison,” the flunky repeated as if he had never heard the term. And then he seemed to snap out of it. “Yes. Yes, we can—venison. Venison. Of course.”
“A lot of it,” Pritkin clarified, and the three of them nodded together as if their heads were on a string.
Then they fled. Probably to get a bath and change clothes, lest any of our funk persisted. I grinned for some reason.
And looked down to see that I had made a friend.
“You have a name?” I asked Horror #1, who had sidled up beside me.
It opened up a hole in the rippled skin that I guessed was supposed to be a mouth and screeched something. I winced. “I don’t think I can pronounce that.”
“Perhaps you should just give them names since we’re all in this together,” Pritkin said dryly from over by the door. He’d followed the flunkies, closed the door after them, and was doing something to it. Probably making sure that they hadn’t added a listening spell because he continued to move about afterward, checking other parts of the suite.
“And the rest of the team?” I asked, terribly afraid that I already knew the answer.
“Nobody wished to throw their hats in the bull ring with the certain loser,” I was told.
“But you didn’t lose.”
“No.” He frowned, his good humor evaporating as quickly as it had come. “Which just makes this more dangerous. My attackers were clumsy today, assuming that numbers would be enough to overwhelm me. They’ll be more strategic next time.”
“Next time?” I repeated. “How many of these damned events are there?”
“Five all together. And they get progressively harder.” He looked at me seriously, and his head tilted. “Feel like doing that sort of thing four more times?”
“No.” I lay back on the bed, and the horror I had decided to name Pinkie curled up next to me. I absently petted it. It wasn’t like I could smell any worse.
“Then I take it you’ll be leaving?” Pritkin asked, appearing hopeful.
I frowned at him, a fact that did not go over well.
“Don’t be stupid, Cassie! You have to see what’s going on here!”
“Yes, I do, and don’t call me names.”
He blinked slightly at that. “I wasn’t. I was pointing out that you are, in fact, acting remarkably—”
“I am acting like a Pythia who wants this war over and all of us back home!” I said and shifted to get in his face since I could currently do that. But he recovered quickly; no one had ever said he wasn’t resilient.
Which was why I found my wrist captured in an iron grip and a suddenly dangerous-looking man in my face. He had just been chased through a forest by no fewer than three different hunting parties, had gotten into a fistfight with a prehistoric nightmare, and had almost drowned while sharing his limited oxygen supply with me. He should have looked like a twin to my drowned rat.
He didn’t.
The tan he’d been working on in Vegas had deepened, probably due to roaming all over the fey countryside, trying to get here. I imagined that that hadn’t been easy, as assassinating him before he arrived would have been simpler than this. But they’d missed him, and now they’d missed him again, yet all he could think about was my safety.
I wanted to kiss him, so I did. And it was nice—for half a second. Which was all I had to enjoy the hard lips, the faint scrape of stubble, and the body that felt like it had dropped some weight and put on some muscle since I’d seen him last, not that he’d needed it. But it had left him looking even more stripped down and deadly than usual, with the cheekbones more clearly defined and the jawline sharp enough to cut myself on.
Pair that with blond hair that was no longer dripping but molded to his skull as it never did usually, hard green eyes, and a grip like iron, and I was . . .
I was trying to kiss him again.
But he pulled back, clearly not in the mood, which was not normal for an incubus. But Pritkin was a war mage first and Rosier’s son second—or maybe third or fourth as he and the old man were less antagonistic these days but hardly friends. And business took precedence.
“What?” I asked.
And then wished I hadn’t as a silence spell clicked shut over our heads.
Damn it.
“Let me spell this out for you,” he said grimly. “You asked what we’re working with? Them,” he hiked a thumb at the horror twins. “That’s it. And your power is wonky and dependent on portals that can be shut down, should anyone figure out that that is the way to stop you. And whilst I absorbed a good deal of power from recent events,” I stiffened, but he didn’t go into detail, thank God, “it is limited, and I expended a good deal of it getting this far. And for some reason, I can no longer feel my connection to Mircea.”
I bit my lip. “Yeah. About that.”
“Cassie . . .” Pritkin could make a single word into a whole paragraph, maybe an entire page, I thought.
“I was going to tell you later—”
“Tell me now.” It wasn’t a request.
Which was fair, as Mircea formed the third part of our triumvirate, and without him, the spell binding us together didn’t work. Not that that mattered since Pritkin had taken it off when he and Mircea went on different errands in Faerie, not wanting to risk me. But it was easy enough to reengage in emergencies, which was what had happened because Mircea had had a crisis involving a pissed-off Athena.
Yes, that Athena. Luckily, he’d had a witch with him, who I guessed had cast Lover’s Knot at his request. Because seconds before his daughter Dorina, who had been fighting an ancient goddess on her own, was about to meet a predictable end, Mircea had absorbed some of the goddesses’ power through a smear of her blood.
And used our bond to borrow one of Pritkin’s abilities.
The next thing I knew, a giant-sized Mircea was meeting the towering Athena on her level. Because one of Pritkin’s abilities as the son of the Prince of the Incubi was to steal talents from the souls he ingested. Not that he went around ingesting souls, as he hated his demon half, but Mircea had no such qualms.
Like most vamps, Mircea loved power, especially a new one that appeared when he most needed it. Which was why Athena’s intended butchering of Dorina did not go as planned. A furious father, every bit as big and strong as she was, had jumped her, huge vamp fangs glistening under the cold skies of an alien world, and shortly after that, RIP Athena.
That would have been great if, shortly afterward, he hadn’t ended up stranded in said world when the portal linking it to Faerie was blown up by a vengeful pixie.
It’s a long story.
But the point was that the Lover’s Knot spell binding the three of us was now well and truly dead, with one of its parts not only out of town but out of this universe. Because Jotunheim wasn’t like Faerie, which was within a stone’s throw from Earth, metaphysically speaking. No, Jontunheim was well into the universe that Faerie had initially come from, and that was a problem.
That was a big problem, as the spell was acting like Mircea had died. I didn’t think that was the case, as his vampire family hadn’t run amuck, and Pritkin and I hadn’t keeled over, which a dead triumvir would have definitely caused. But as far as our link went, it didn’t matter.
Lover’s Knot was kaput since a partial spell was an inoperative spell. I didn’t need to tell Pritkin that, who had forgotten more magic than I was ever likely to know. I just needed to tell him why.
And there was no way to make it any easier.
“He went through a portal into Jotunheim,” I said, fessing up. “Which was destroyed soon after—”
“What?”
“—so he’s stranded there for the moment. His daughter is planning to go through a similar gateway in my court’s library—”
“Gateway? What gateway?”
“—which has been inactive since the gods left but which her family lineage may allow her to open. But even if she gets through—”
“Wait. Go back.”
“—and somehow links up with him and manages to rescue him, it won’t be for weeks, as she was pretty banged up the last time I saw her—”
But Pritkin wasn’t listening. Pritkin was talking. “What the hell? The portals to other worlds are barred, save for Earth and Faerie! That’s what this whole damned war is about, to keep them that way and the gods out!”
He had flung out a hand as he spoke, I guessed at the collective crap fest the universe insisted on handing us, so I knew he was seriously pissed. Pritkin was usually tightly controlled, especially regarding physical actions, since war mages were essentially magical nukes. They could take out a building by a stray spell, especially those who had learned silent casting.
I’d often wondered if that was where all the swearing came from; it was literally his only safe outlet. But it hadn’t been enough this time, and he didn’t even know the half of it yet. This was going to be fun.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, wondering where to even start. “But Dory has a pass through the barrier from her family background, which is even more messed up than, uh. . .” The green eyes flashed, and I wondered if there was any way to postpone this to a time when I wasn’t tired and hungry and could think straight.
But I guessed not. Because, before I could come up with a good excuse, he came out with it: the question I’d been dreading. “And how the hell do you know all this?”
There was no point beating around the bush, as Pritkin was like a bloodhound on a scent. He’d have it out of me sooner or later. I sighed and womaned up.
“Because I was there when it happened.”