Chapter 23
twenty-three
He continued to play with my hair for a while in silence as he thought through everything I had told him.
Then Rune took my right hand in his and held my forearm in front of his face, and the bird that had been sleeping at the table suddenly rose in the air and flew closer to give him more light to see my skin.
He searched for the scars of Maera’s scratch, but my skin looked untouched, not a hint of redness left behind.
“It was about this big, four vertical lines, like this ,” I explained to Rune. “It’s all gone now.”
“Fascinating,” he said, and he planted a kiss on my wrist before he put my arm down again and wrapped his around me. The bird stayed in the air, flying from one end of the room to the other, slowly. “They took you all the way to Raja.”
“They did,” I said, the memory bringing goose bumps all over my skin that he chased away with his touch. “They even threatened her with their howls, apparently—Raja was pissed about that.” I closed my eyes, breathed deeply. “I honestly didn’t think that she’d betray me like that. ”
“She didn’t,” Rune said, almost in wonder. “I asked her to cooperate with the soldiers when they came.”
Now that was a shock to me.
I leaned farther back to look at his face. “Are you serious right now?”
“It was for the best. By the time you made it to Raja I knew Lyall was alive, and I knew he wasn’t going to hurt you. You would be safer traveling with his guards and coming back to the court. So, I sent them there and told Raja to make sure you went with them.”
“That’s…that’s…what the fuck, Rune?!” I sat up, suddenly feeling like I was lying on needles.
“I’m sorry, Wildcat, but it was the safest way. I couldn’t have gotten to you fast enough, not with the tunnel ruined. Trust me—if there was any way for me to get to you unnoticed before they did, I would have. Trust me.”
His hands were on my face. He’d sat up, too, and his wide eyes didn’t blink. They were as honest as the first time I’d noticed them, really noticed them.
All that sudden panic was already fading away.
Fucking hell, of course I trusted him. I trusted him more than I trusted myself.
Closing my eyes, I held onto his hands and sighed. Rune touched his forehead to mine. “There was no safer way to get you to me than that, I promise you. As much as it killed me, I alone wouldn’t have been enough.”
Because of the tattoo on his neck that extended to his back, his side, his ribs. The traitor’s mark that his fucking father had put on him when he was six years old, sealing more than half his magic with it.
It was because of that that Rune didn’t think he’d be enough to keep me safe.
And if he thought it, I believed it .
“I know,” I said, absorbing every kiss he planted all over my face. “I know, Rune. I know. I just wish Raja had told me.”
“I told her to warn you.” Rune sighed. “Must have slipped her mind.”
I laughed—how could I not? Something slipping Raja’s mind? “Yes, yes. I’m sure that was exactly why she said nothing.”
Rune wrapped his hands around me and pulled me to his lap. We were both naked still and the cover fell off us, but I wasn’t cold. Not even close.
“I don’t know what happened with the werewolf alpha, Wildcat, but I’m going to try to find out,” he told me, resting his chin on my shoulder as he looked up at me with those wide puppy eyes.
“What’s there to find out? I’m fine, Rune,” I promised him.
Silence for a beat.
“She said you glowed with moon magic.”
My stomach fell all the way to my heels. “Maybe she was just seeing things,” I muttered. Though Raja seeing things was just as impossible as something slipping her mind.
Never mind that I had seen that glow, too. Or at least I thought I did.
“She wasn’t. I feel it in you. It has changed you, altered your energy signature.
Your very scent.” With his eyes closed, he leaned closer and sniffed my neck, right below my earlobe.
“That’s why the seer couldn’t track you, even with Lyall’s blood.
That’s why whatever connection I seem to have created with you suddenly stopped working.
” A kiss on the side of my neck. “That’s why I thought I’d lost you, Wildcat. ”
He leaned back and looked at me, and in his eyes, I saw the wound in his soul, still bleeding.
I touched his cheek, leaned closer and kissed him on the lips. “I have no idea how any of this works or what any of it means, Rune, but I wasn’t going to die without seeing your face again. I’m stubborn like that.”
Rune chuckled. My own lips pulled up in a smile automatically and I was glad to get that look of pure desperation out of his eyes—but I felt it, too. I’d thought my life was over for real so many times, and all of that trauma didn’t just go away. It remained. It stuck around like an invisible scar.
“We will figure it out,” Rune finally said. “I’ll ask questions. I’ll read. There must be an explanation as to why you didn’t die—or shift.”
“I’m the prince’s Lifebound,” I said reluctantly. “We both know he transferred his magic to me somehow when he bound us. That’s why I didn’t die or shift.” At least to my very human mind, that’s the only thing that made any sense.
“No, Wildcat. Fae cannot transfer magic into anyone. That’s not how it works.”
My gut twisted. “Maybe it does, and people just don’t know it.”
Rune closed his eyes, kissed my shoulder. “Maybe,” he said, but he didn’t mean it. He didn’t believe my explanation for a second—this had nothing to do with me being a Lifebound.
Suddenly the face of that old man chained to the altar came in front of my mind’s eyes, and I closed my own eyes. Breathed.
I thought I was very subtle about it, but… “What? What is it?” Rune asked .
Fuck, I didn’t want to talk about that at all, would rather try to convince myself that that hadn’t happened, even though Maera had been there, too, had seen the whole thing. That’s why I hadn’t even thought to tell Rune about it until now.
But I knew that it was wrong.
“There’s something else I forgot to tell you.” Forgot because I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it at all.
But now I remembered. I remembered it in detail.
“What is it? Talk to me, Wildcat,” Rune urged me, and I did.
I told him about the altar, and about the man with the glyphs on his chest, and the chains around his wrists. How he’d looked at me with those dark eyes. How he’d coughed blood.
How he’d called me his queen.
As I spoke, chills ran down my back, and even the warmth of Rune’s body couldn’t stop them. The memory was too fresh. Too vivid still.
“A sorcerer,” said Rune in barely a whisper. “They build their altars and make sacrifices all the time—that’s how they gain more power. Some have gods, too, and some believe in thin air.” He looked up at me. “Some in fae. Especially in fae royalty.”
I shook my head. “Maera said that frostfire is a thing of the Ice fae, like the final level of magic or something. So, what the hell does that have to do with me?”
Rune thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know, but historically, sorcerers were always more tied to the Frozen court, and Ice fae royalty had better relations with them than with the other courts.
It’s why they gifted them Mysthaven, which borders the Frozen court beginning to end.
But as far as we knew, there haven’t been any sacrifices made to the Ice fae since the death of the Ice queen. ”
My stomach fell and fell.
“Right—the woman you were framed for killing when you were six years old and got banished because of it.” He smiled and kissed the tip of my chin.
“But seriously, Rune, he was surely just fucked up in the head. He’s probably dead by now—you should see what he looked like.
A fucking corpse even when he was breathing.
” I shook my head to rid myself of the memory.
“Possible,” he said. “But you still smell different, Wildcat. And I’m going to find out exactly what that scratch did to you, and why you seem to have moon magic in you now. And why you can hear me through my shadows, even though you’re not Midnight—or fae.”
Well, fuck. When he put it like that…
I closed my eyes, took in a deep breath as if I knew exactly what he was going to say next.
“You don’t… feel different, do you?”
Yeah, that might have been another thing I’d forgotten to tell him because I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it at all. I hadn’t even allowed myself to think about it.
“Wildcat?”
Oh, he knew. Just the tone of his voice said so as he pushed my head up by nudging me with his nose.
“It’s just…” I shook my head. “It’s just cold. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“ Cold, ” he repeated, as if he wanted to make sure that he’d heard right.
“Yes, cold. The gold light that you saw in the cavern? That feels warm. It gets really hot before it comes out of me, but very recently, since the soldiers brought me here, I’ve also felt this cold sensation that’s sort of rivaling it.
” Fuck, it was more difficult to explain than I thought.
“It doesn’t do anything, though. I just… feel it.”
The whispers in my head returned, and within the second, I regretted saying anything. I regretted not lying, just telling him that nothing at all had changed about me—because what always happened when I told people truths? I got mocked and laughed at and looked at like a fucking weirdo.
Except this was Rune, and that was the reason why my instincts hadn’t been so quick to warn me.
It was Rune, and Rune believed me, no proof required.
He thought about it in silence for a second, and he never once questioned that maybe I was mistaken or something. All he said was, “We’ll figure it out.”
“What does that mean, though?”
“Nothing, really. Seelie and Unseelie magic feels warm, and Midnight and Ice magic feels cold—but so does a bunch of other kinds of magic, too, from what I’ve heard and read. It could be anything.” Another kiss on my shoulder.