38. A Mind-Reading Spell #3
His silhouette was dark against a halo of bright light, bleached through the fog, and two enormous wings had appeared on either side of his body.
They were tucked in close to his shoulders, barely spanning past the sides of the window though the apex of each wing surpassed the top of the arch, and I realised that it was because he couldn’t stretch them out any further.
Built like an angel in their outline, they were translucent as a dragonfly and delicate as the winged faelings I’d watched flitting up and down the main city streets when I arrived.
I found myself crawling off the edge of the bed and wandering over to him, entranced by the seamless way they’d appeared, the way they melded with his flesh as easily as his arms. He was silent and patient as I approached, marvelling.
Up close, I could see the damage. The light flooding in through the window made it difficult to tell from afar, but the membrane had been torn to shreds until hardly any of it was left between the thin veins and digits that crossed over the entire surface area.
Only the outer margins survived intact, though barely.
Every second or third digit had sustained what looked like fractures or breaks—very small cracks and abnormalities to their structure, resulting in a deformation of the overall wing that hadn’t been obvious at first.
“Can I touch them?”
In the thick, heavy silence, I heard him swallow. “You can try.”
With a featherlight touch, I traced the sturdy outline of Lucais’s outer wing—
They disappeared.
As easily as they’d appeared, they vanished. I blinked a few times to adjust to the change as he slowly turned back around, pulling a plain white cotton shirt over his head. The action ruffled his hair, and he swept it back from his forehead before speaking again.
“It’s not you,” he promised, reaching for another glass of wine.
“It was a reflex. They’re never exposed to the open air these days, let alone a woman’s touch.
I have a permanent glamour over them to help reduce some of the pain and put an end to all the pitiful fucking looks.
” He swallowed the entire contents of the glass in one gulp again, looked at the perplexity written all over my face, and then let out a resigned sigh.
“You don’t have to—”
“In High Fae culture, I am considered disabled,” he interrupted quickly.
“Amongst my people, our wings are a point of pride, and the ability to fly has always been as standard as walking is for yours. To have lost that is devastating. Some people who hold onto the old ways too tightly still think it’s shameful, weak, disgraced.
Nobody dares to fly around me anymore, not even Wrenlock and Morgoya.
They think it’s respect, but I think it’s pity.
I can still rule and live a perfectly normal life with some alterations, such as evanescing, which didn’t become popular until my wings were butchered by the fucking humans and I decided to make it look like fun. ”
A sharp pain stabbed me right in the heart.
I knew he wasn’t talking about me. It wasn’t about me at all. Still, I wanted to cry for him.
“Alright.” Lucais placed his glass back down with a loud clang and smiled, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “We’ve officially shot the mood to the pits. Do you want to share your deepest, darkest, most shameful secret with me now, and then we can move on?”
I tried to smile back at him, but I thought about it. I seriously considered it.
Could I tell him about the worst thing that had ever happened to me?
Could I admit to it, knowing that it hadn’t even happened to me ?
Because that was the truth of the matter—my greatest shame was hidden inside the fact that the worst thing that had ever happened to me, the horror that kept me up at night and completely altered my brain chemistry, had not even happened to me.
I’d only witnessed it. I’d only been there for it. I’d only contributed to the reason it had happened in the first place.
I didn’t even own my own fucking trauma.
“I can’t.”
Sighing morosely, Lucais took both of my hands in one of his.
“Aura, I hate to bring this up right now, but I really need you to think about this. The mating bond is not a fix-all solution. We are still going to enact it, so you don’t need to look at me like a jilted bride, but it’s not going to protect you from the Malum.
” He pointed to the fog beyond the windowpane.
“It’s not going to shield you from the caenim and the locusts.
It may not even completely solve your pending issues with the Court of Darkness, if I’m completely honest. You’re going to need to rely on yourself more than you have in the past, which means dismantling the block in your head preventing you from using your magic. ”
I shook my head. “No.”
Dismantling patriarchal belief systems that had been ingrained into me since birth? Yes.
Dismantling magic blocks designed to suppress catastrophic powers for my own protection? No.
“Aura,” he said again firmly. “I lost my wings because I was distracted for a split second in the middle of a war. What happens if this escalates to that point again? What if, next time, there are soldiers as well as caenim and locusts? What if my father has been breeding an army of Malum this whole time, and I am too busy looking at you to see them coming?”
Pulling my hands out of his, I turned around, snatching the first pair of pants I could see lying on the floor.
They weren’t mine, so I pulled the drawstring extra tight around my waist and then fixed it in a double knot so that they would stay up.
The length would be an issue if I didn’t walk carefully, so I walked over to the chest of drawers and rifled through them until I found a pair of socks.
Bending over, I pulled them on until they were almost up at my knees, and then I tucked the excess length of the pants into them.
I hadn’t worn shoes to his bedroom the previous night, so I resolved to leave without them.
“I get it,” I said, running my hands through my hair as I straightened up. “This was a bad idea. You said it from the start—it’s dangerous. We are dangerous and a very bad idea, so let’s just thank Lady Luck we didn’t get quite that far, and then we’ll call it a day.”
I moved to open his bedroom door.
“Bookworm, stop. That’s not what I’m saying, and you know it.”
“No, Lucais, I don’t.” My voice trembled, so I pushed my feet to move faster.
One after the other . The voices in my head told me to keep running.
Always, always running. “I think that’s exactly what you’re saying.
I think that’s what you’ve been saying this whole time, and you’re just too afraid to admit it. ”
I heard his footsteps padding along the stone floor and felt his brooding presence following me as I found a staircase and began to descend it, though I didn’t know where I was going—only that I had to leave.
I had to keep moving, keep walking, because I couldn’t do what he was asking me to do.
What he kept asking me to do. Even thinking about it was messy and painful.
Attempting it was even worse. If I succeeded at unleashing the magic again, it would only cause more destruction.
“Have you forgotten what happened last time?” I muttered, loud enough for him to hear it.
My voice rose in pitch and volume as I plowed onwards, picking up the pace until I was nearly jogging down the stairs.
“I took the light out of your sky. You hexed a whole Forest to turn against you. My father was a dark faerie, and I’m being summoned to lord over a realm that wants to watch the world die in deafening silence.
What if I do something like that next time? ”
“So we’ll be prepared for it,” Lucais returned, still trailing me. His voice was annoyingly even and calm. “You can’t do much damage in a place like this anyway.”
“You have no idea what I’m capable of,” I seethed. Heat was accumulating in my chest, making my pulse feel weak and thready.
“ You have no idea what you’re capable of,” he shot back.
At the bottom of the staircase, I found a side door and shoved it open, secretly hoping that it would slam closed on his face as I stalked out into the freezing morning air. The stonework was so cold that it sliced through the socks and bit into the soles of my feet, icy and resolute.
The door fell closed with a resounding slam, but the High King was right on my heels. “You already know you could be the answer to all of this!”
Halfway across the courtyard, I whirled so fast I almost slipped over and fell onto my ass. “Yes,” I shouted, “and I don’t care!”
“What the fuck, Aura?” Lucais’s brow creased as he threw his hands out to the sides. “Why the fuck not?”
I was burning up from the inside out, despite the glacial temperature of the ground beneath my feet and the air in my lungs. Breathing took more effort than it should have. My heart was running so fast that it was no longer even beating; it felt like one long, constant pressure in my chest.
He’d finally done it.
He’d pushed me too far.
The confession was poison on the tip of my tongue, and it was self-preservation to spit it out.
“Because when I care, Lucais, people die .”
“What?”
“Lucais!” I shouted his name into the bitter atmosphere mindlessly, stamping my freezing foot into the cobblestone.
“I am not right. I am not right in my head”—with both hands, I pointed to my brain—“or in my heart”—I mimicked the motion of stabbing myself in the chest—“or in any part of me. I mean, look at me!” I waved both of my hands up and down my body as if he wasn’t looking properly and required directions.
“I can’t control magic, but I can’t absorb iron.
What the fuck is that about? I am anathema, and you’re honestly lucky that you’re finding out now before you’re mated to me for the rest of your—”
“Will you stop ?” Lucais had a wild look in his eyes, and a strong breeze picked up in the courtyard that probably had something to do with it. “There is literally nothing about you that doesn’t look or feel right to me, you infernal fucking woman!”
“You don’t even know me!” I shrieked.
“What more do I need to know?” he shouted back, the deep tone echoing against the stonework. “For fuck’s sake, Aura, I’ve already seen the worst parts of you. I think we’re going to be just fine!”
I tipped my head back and glared up into the fog, swirling like storm clouds against the wind stirred by Lucais’s upheaval of emotion.
When I finally said the words into the mist—when I screamed the words with all the might of my lungs—they were as much for me as they were for him, because I’d never uttered them out loud before. Ever.
“ I had a brother! ”
Silence accompanied the stilling of the clouds.
Silence that had once been my closest friend.
Silence that was going to devour me whole and spit out my bones if someone didn’t break it.
“What happened to him?” Lucais asked once the mist had finally settled around us again.
It solidified until we were encased in a protective cage of grey fog, so opaque and firm I might have been convinced it was soundproof, too. Like it was determined to shelter my secrets alongside my body.
But I’d kept it for far too long.
It demanded to be known.
So I confessed my sins to the High King of Faerie and prepared to face his judgement.
“I think I killed him before he was born.”