Chapter Eleven #2
I pin my lips between my teeth. That makes sense, considering how sore my body feels .
. . but how did it happen? All I can see when I force myself to remember are fuzzy gray patches.
My skull protests angrily, and I inhale a shallow breath and stop trying.
“Where are we?” I look toward the kindly older man, feeling he is more likely to answer me.
“Where do you think you are?” the silver-haired man snaps as if he’s nearing the end of his patience . . . or annoyed that I’m talking to the healer and not to him.
I stiffen and shoot him a derisive look I know won’t go over well. The sarcastic reply punches from my lips before I can stop it. “If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking, would I?”
His scowl grows teeth, thick brows slamming down. Despite my brain fog, I bristle and match his hostile expression, and we glare viciously at each other. The healer at my side lets out an aggrieved gasp and takes a step toward the menace in black before stopping himself short.
“Leave us,” the surly beast commands.
Much to my dismay, the healer departs—but only after a protracted moment as if worried for my safety. Shit, should I be worried?
Too late now.
“That was rude,” I remark, clearly with no sense of survival when he glowers at me. I must be delirious if I think provoking an unhinged stranger who believes I’m here to assassinate him is wise. Not that I even know where here is, for maker’s sake. Or how I got here.
Or anything relating to here.
I swallow past the sawdust in my mouth and catch a cloying, unfamiliar taste on my tongue. “Did you drug me?” I demand.
The man’s eyebrows jump up to his hairline, that imperious stare sparking with outrage. Those big, tattooed hands of his tighten on the footrail. I bet they’ll leave dents with the way his forearms and biceps are straining beneath his well-tailored tunic.
Stop ogling his arms, you ass. He’s probably imagining the bedrail is your neck.
He glares down the length of his elegant nose at me. “You were found unconscious just beyond the Barrin Mountains with an azdaha that vanished some time ago. You were both badly injured. There was no drugging.” His tone drips with contempt. “No one under my rule would do anything so vile.”
His words sound like they should make sense, but they don’t. None of that sounds in any way plausible. Everyone knows that the Barrin Mountains are impassable . . . and azdahas don’t fucking exist. They’re a mythical creature.
Sands on fire, what if . . . what if none of this is real?
Time slows to the consistency of honey.
I could be asleep and dreaming.
Or maybe this is a waking fever dream! I’ve had them before, the ones where I’m certain I am awake.
I’ve even dreamed of him before, I think?
It’s all coming back in snippets: that cruel blade of a jaw, the otherworldly gleam of pewter hair, and that looming shadowy presence.
I know exactly who he is . . . because he’s a figment of my overly febrile imagination.
“You’re not real,” I crow victoriously.
A noise of pure irritation leaves him. “I assure you, I’m very real.”
Forcing my weakened limbs to work, I push up on my hands and knees, and crawl gracelessly to the end of the bed.
Then I heave myself up so that my nose is parallel to the stranger’s armored chest. Even in my addled state, I appreciate somewhere in the back of my mind that the breastplate is of exceptional quality and has been crafted by a master blacksmith.
I poke him in the abdomen and let out a curse. “You’re hard.”
A deeply indrawn breath meets my ears, and I let out a deranged snort at my poorly chosen words. My fingers trail down the granite planes of his torso to his waistband and the laces tied tightly above a breath-stealing bulge. Smirking, I congratulate myself on a job well done.
“What are you doing?” my sexy hallucination snaps, his voice a rasp that sinks into my skin even as I snatch my marauding hand away.
I think back to the erotic dreams I’ve had over the past few years with my faceless shadow lover, the one Laleh always makes fun of me for.
The proportions of my broody warden are similar enough to make all my confusion and qualms vanish.
Because of course this is a dream . . . one of the ones where you think you’re awake but you’re not. And I know him.
“I should have made you more pleasant,” I muse as I pull myself to standing so that I am nose to nose with my creation. “Not so much grumpy, asshole energy.”
“How dare—”
I stop him with a finger smashed up against his mouth, watching his midnight gaze go wide in shock, and relish the feel of his surprisingly lush lips.
A spark of desire courses through me. Maybe I can get this wild fever dream to go in a more pleasant direction.
I seem to recall he’s excellent at following orders .
. . or giving them, depending on my fancy.
I trace my fingertip down and across a rigid jawline that could cut glass. “Less talking, more doing, Shadow Prince.”
“King. I am a king.”
I snicker at his boast. “Whatever you say.”
My dream-lover is so tall that even while I’m standing on the cot, he still looms an inch or two above me.
This close, I can see shards of refracted light in that pitch-dark stare.
His hair looks so silky that I want to thread my fingers through the shiny strands to see if they’re as soft as they seem.
But I’m sidetracked as my gaze snags on the cuffs adorning my wrists.
My nose wrinkles. What in the pits of Droon are they?
I’ve never been into bondage, but maybe Dream-Suraya is?
They’re delicately forged metal bands with engraved runes of some kind.
They’d be pretty—but something seems truly off about them.
With a peculiar sense of doom, I twist my hands and peer at them, searching for some way to unlock them. “How in the realms do these unlatch?”
“Don’t bother,” Grumpy-Hole Prince of Darkness snaps. “We’ve already tried.”
“Did you put them on me?” I accuse.
He stares, lips flattening. “No. We found you like this.”
I shake my head, confusion flooding me anew.
This doesn’t feel right. None of this feels remotely right.
“These aren’t real,” I say, shaking my head.
“And you’re not real, either.” I tremble, a pervasive feeling of dread rising out of nowhere .
. . that I am terribly, horribly wrong about everything. My voice trembles: “Are you?”
I lift my hand toward him again, but this time, he grasps below my wrist, careful not to touch the cuffs. “Oh, I promise, little infiltrator, I am most definitely real.” A smirk curls those smooth lips. “And you are my prisoner, so stop testing my patience, if you value your life.”
His fingers squeeze mercilessly, and I gasp as pain shoots up my arm.
Now, I definitely don’t like this. I pinch my eyes shut.
Wake up, Suraya! Get up!
But when I peek through my lashes, he’s still there like an ominous, unsmiling mountain of wrath. A sinking feeling ensues that perhaps this isn’t a hallucination at all. “Let go of me,” I snap, and shove my free arm up to push him away.
But before my fingers make contact with his chest, I am propelled forcefully but efficiently on a gust of air, falling back onto the mattress, though the man hasn’t moved a muscle.
Because his tattoos did. They are no longer on his neck or his hands, which are back on the footrail of my bed.
The shadowy ribbons of darkness now tether my hands and legs, keeping them banded to the sheets beneath me.
I struggle but can’t move from my supine position. My eyes widen.
“What are those things? How are you doing that?”
Heavy footsteps bring him around to the side of the bed. “Magic.”
“That isn’t possible without a jādū crystal,” I say, the hairs on my nape standing straight up.
He opens his fist, and thick black tendrils melting into liquid smoke curl over his knuckles, and my eyes bulge. “It is here,” he says.
My mouth falls open in disbelief. I am utterly mesmerized by the shadow dance of the smoke that slithers up his forearm in coiling wisps.
It has to be a parlor trick or an optical illusion.
Even the runecasters in Oryndhr have to use crystals for any kind of magic.
No one has pure akasha running through their veins.
No one. At least no one . . . in Oryndhr.
A horrid sense of foreboding fills me. “Where is here?”
The smoky tendrils retreat, dissipating into nothing. “Everlea.”
My head spins at the implication. I’m in Everlea?
The realm ruled by a monster? The occasional traveling merchant comes through Coban claiming to have beast scales, luxurious pelts, and spelled jewelry from Everlea for sale, but the goods are almost always fake.
Not much of fact is known about the reclusive kingdom—only that it has been Oryndhr’s hostile neighbor since the hundred-year War of the Gods tore the realms of men apart.
And its monarch is as ruthless as they come.
If what this man says is true, then how in the name of rogue sandstorms did I get here?
Surely he has to be joking. But there’s no humor on his grim face, no lighthearted delight at my expense, only a stony, arrogant antipathy as though I’ve personally offended him somehow with my presence.
Maybe I have. He’s much too arrogant to be someone unimportant.
The way the healer had scurried away at his brusque command makes me balk and swallow hard. Leaps of logic are apparently too much for my poor brain. I glance up uncertainly at him. “And that makes you . . .”
“Darrius Nightsong,” he says.
“Nightso— the king of Everlea?” I whimper faintly and bite back my fright. Maker above, he hadn’t been boasting before. Because that is definitely information recorded in the history books. Nightsong, the nightmare fucking king. Gods, am I going to die?
“Gold star,” he says. “Now your turn. Why have you come to Everlea? Does your deceitful ruler know who you are to me? Did he send you?”
Who I am to him? What does he mean?
I don’t know this man; I’ve never seen him before, at least not outside my dreams, which are clearly, in fact, a laughable, hideous coincidence. And I’ve definitely never even met the king of Oryndhr.
“I already told . . .” I begin.
His voice deepens, waves of compulsion lancing from it. “Do not lie.”
The ferocious power emanating from him reverberates from a million directions at once, pressing down upon me and almost rattling my bones as he looms over me like a terrifying specter.
The tenebrous king of Everlea. I don’t have a single doubt in my mind that this man is more than capable of violence. Darkness seethes from his very pores.
Stars above, I want to obey, but my brain is still blank. “I swear, I . . . don’t know.”
Vengeful shadows bleed into his eyes like an ink-spill, and I stiffen at the obvious threat. Unbidden, a burst of something gathers in my center, like the wingbeats of some formidable creature, each powerful pulse crashing into my rib cage from inside.
I gasp aloud as those strange cuffs on my wrists ignite, runes lit crimson . . . and everything slams to a violent, oppressive halt.
Blood, breath, bones . . .
Sleep, something commands, and I can only obey.