Chapter 18
ISLA
Isla woke to an empty bed, though she didn’t remember falling asleep in it.
Her shaking fingers raked over silken sheets, heady with Kai’s scent but absent his warmth as the fog of her recurring nightmare cleared.
She wrenched up, a gasp caught in her throat, and her body covered in a cold sweat as her hand dove under her pillow for the knife she kept there.
The iron tang of blood stung her nose, but—
Not real.
With her heart thundering, she blinked, and steadily the raucousness of a battlefield, of that woman’s voice, faded to the faint chirping of songbirds, and the metallic tinge of blood turned… floral? The vision of strewn corpses was replaced by their empty bedroom.
Empty.
Kai.
His side of the bed was bare, and even their duvet had somehow ended up on the floor. Adrien’s voice, his warning of Cassius’s plans, crowed in her head along with her nightmare’s taunting.
He’d gone out on morning runs before, but today was her coronation.
Where the hell was he?
The bond felt wrong. Lately, it always felt wrong. But right now… right now…
Isla moved, ice flooding her veins as she gripped her dagger so tight the hilt indented her palms. She had to find him, even if he was just downstairs. She needed to see that he was okay. Needed to get death out of her head. She had to—
Flowers.
There were flowers on her bedside table next to a framed photo crowned by an amethyst ribbon.
Grayscale and grainy, the image of her mate grinned, those dimples on display as he wrapped an arm around her as she cupped his face in her hands, her lips smooshed against his cheek in a loving, playful kiss.
The ice melted, and Isla’s shoulders dropped.
The photo was from their date night a couple of weeks ago—their first ever, unless their time spent researching, spying, or fighting counted—taken by a local photographer who’d snapped them while they were on a walk.
Rather than asking him to trash the film as Marin likely would’ve advised them, so they wouldn’t be seen as so “commonly,” they had asked if he’d take another.
Kai must’ve gotten a copy after it was developed.
Isla lifted the silver, woven branch frame, a smile tugging her lips as her gaze shifted to the stunning bouquet of autumn blooms, in hues of burgundy and orange, browns and golds.
She grabbed the folded note near the book she recalled reading last night when she’d been in the library.
After talking with Adrien, she’d wanted to begin learning all she could about this dark moon, not wasting a moment to pick up a tome about charting the stars to gauge celestial events. Kai must’ve carried her back.
FOR THE MOST BEAUTIFUL
QUEEN IN THE FOUR REALMS.
BE BACK SOON.
I LOVE YOU.
Isla ran her hands over the ink and brought it closer to her nose to catch his scent. Real. Alive. She let out a heavy breath, unsure whether she was about to cry in relief or over how much she loved him.
He had to be safe, then. Wherever he’d gone. But the bond, something inside her, still felt… wrong.
But she couldn’t linger on it for long, not with the blush pink that crept over the floor as dawn peeked over the mountaintops.
The countdown had begun. At dusk, as the sun faded and the goddesses rose with the moon to witness, the coronation ceremony would begin.
And she would be crowned the Luna of Deimos.
Late afternoon hit, and Kai was still missing.
Marin hadn’t known that he’d left at all, let alone where he’d gone, and neither had Sol or any of the staff or guards.
Isla couldn’t make a huge fuss about it when she’d asked them, having to frame her question as something easy in passing, but she should’ve known that someone would see right through it.
Isla had dealt with Ameera’s scrutinizing stare for ten minutes too long before she dismissed Marin’s arsenal of doting handmaidens so the two of them could talk.
The general carefully sat on the lip of the bath within the ornate bathing room, specifically situated in the Northern Hall to prepare the luna for events. “How long’s he been gone?”
Isla’s heavy sigh rippled the lukewarm water. She ran a sponge over her arm, dousing herself in the smells of spearmint and jasmine. Not as calming as she would’ve hoped. “Since this morning. He left me a note saying he’d be back soon, but didn’t say where he was going.”
Ameera pursed her lips. “All meetings today were canceled for the coronation.”
“I’m aware.”
Her voice softened even further, wary of any listening ears. “You can’t feel him?”
Isla kept hers equally so. “Barely.”
It had been with sheer grit and determination that she took the fragments of the bond, of herself, and hurtled each across the bridge between them, trying to re-forge the tether with whatever fire she possessed.
But he was only a whisper of a tug, if anything.
Perhaps, sometimes, she felt her heartbeat in phantom rhythm with his, but that could’ve just been in her mind as a comfort. Telling herself that he was alive.
“Could he be getting you a gift?”
Isla sank lower into the water, letting its warmth envelop her, just above her shoulders.
“He already did.” There was a steady pressing on her skull, right between her brows.
A tap, tap, tap on her mind, but not from the bond.
Not from Kai. Stress, anxiety, she didn’t know what it was from, but with each ticking second since she’d woken up this morning, it was relentless. “What I do feel… is something’s wrong.”
“With him?” Ameera’s body had become rigid, muscles in her arms flexing as if the word had triggered something deep within her, and for a moment, Isla saw a flash of wild emotions on the general’s usual flawless, fierce exterior.
“No, not him,” Isla answered quickly, but then reeled back. “I think he’s fine. It’s just… something.”
It wasn’t nearly as placating as she’d hoped, for Ameera or herself. The general was already rising. “I’ll gather my band of fools, and we’ll look for him.” Rhydian and Jonah, Isla assumed. “It’s not the first time he’s disappeared on us.”
Isla offered a soft smile in thanks. “Where was he the last time?”
Ameera’s jaw tensed, and a bitter rage lingered under her words. “In Callisto, because he’d entered the Hunt and never thought to mention it to us.”
Isla opened her mouth to defend him, to say he hadn’t been thinking straight in the early months that followed his family’s deaths, but it seemed Ameera had already figured that for herself.
The mention of the Hunt snagged in her mind. She recalled all they’d learned from Adrien the previous day, including about the spreading rot. If Kai had gone to investigate without her…
“Check along the Wall, the wasteland,” she told Ameera, who didn’t question why. Only nodded and left the room.
Two hours and forty-two minutes passed.
Two hours and forty-two fucking minutes, Isla was left with the silence of her paranoid thoughts as a team of stylists and artists scrubbed and plucked and preened her, rubbed her skin raw, and then soothed it to smoothness before lathering her in lotions and subtle perfumes.
Two hours and forty-two minutes that she endured the pounding in her head.
And still no Kai.
In the small moments of reprieve from being prepared like a fine holiday meal, she tried to distract herself by reading, returning to her book on charting the stars and celestial events.
Frankly, that only led to more frustrations because there was nothing about this supposed “dark moon” that Cassius had told Adrien about.
Nothing about losing their ability to shift, the loss of magic, or bloodlust-ridden creatures.
The only interesting thing she found was how, on the equinoxes, the stars could be used to map the other realms. With the veil at its thinnest, constellations took the form of the eternally sealed doorways between their worlds, and the darkness of their sky—the reason it could be so unique and beautiful on nights like tonight—was because it was bleeding with the darkness of others.
The realm of the fae, demons, deities, or all of them at once.
Isla shook away the chilling feeling of being watched.
Only hours remained until moonrise.
“Hey, careful, careful!”
From where Isla had been reaching for her glass of sparkling wine, she snapped her gaze up at Davina, who’d been with her for most of the afternoon. She looked beautiful in a rust-colored dress that, coupled with her dark makeup and coppery hair, made her appear as autumn incarnate.
Every one of their friends had a role to play today. While Rhydian, Jonah, and Ameera went looking for Kai, Davina kept her sane, and Sebastian and Adrien, little did they know, were Isla’s eyes on her father’s movements.
“I’ve got it.” Isla drained the bubbling contents in an impressively graceful swig, careful not to disturb the pale blush that painted her lips.
“Marin will kill me if I let you ruin your makeup or dress,” Maeve said from the small raised platform behind her. Isla’s handmaiden had become more like a friend over these past weeks. “Or your dress.”
Her coronation dress was layers of silk and velvet, of sparkling jewels and embroidery, that had been worked on over the past weeks by Deimos’s most skilled seamstresses.
Artisans she’d already showered in gifts and thanked a million times over.
Heavy yet movable, so dark that it gobbled up the light in the room, the gown’s embellishments glimmered like a sea of stars.
The silver twining and diamond whorls over the bodice, tapering her waist and lining the trim that skimmed the marble floor of the dressing room, told a tale of the heavens.
Even tiny gems trailed up her arms along her fitted sleeves and were carefully placed over the cape she’d don this evening.
She looked like she truly had been Goddess-blessed. If only she hadn’t felt like a wreck.