Chapter 27
Bodies were unnaturally still. A high C rang in my skull, making me dizzy. I tried to blink it away, but my vision got fuzzier and fuzzier as I did. Because reality was fading. Dissipating like fog as new images took over my vision.
I vaguely recognized PCH, old cars and bicycles zoomed by, and the feeling of awe and wonder filled my gut with every person that passed.
Completely unaware of my, and my mother’s, presence.
Wait.
I turned to look into a shop, briefly adjusting my dark red hair under my hat that so many humans wore here. A beanie. I double-checked that my ears stayed rounded, just like the humans, and trotted after my mother. I recognized the face in the reflection, but it wasn’t my own.
It was Drustan’s
This was Drustan’s memory.
He looked younger. Much younger than how I knew him. He couldn’t have been more than a late teen. Maybe twenty years old at most.
“This way,” a woman with long red hair braided back, wearing faded jeans and a tank top with beads dangling at the end of the hem, called to him.
Drustan’s mother. Queen Astrid.
I could feel Drustan’s excitement about visiting the human realm. The realm he only learned about in school, through history classes and textbooks. The realm his father would never allow him to visit. But his mother was always more fun. More encouraging. More curious.
Ilia never valued curiosity. Only obedience.
Entering a quieter neighborhood, Drustan and his mother turned a corner and approached a stucco house—a house I immediately recognized even though Drustan didn’t.
Heather’s house.
It was early in the morning, and Drustan’s mother raised a finger to her lips and instructed Drustan to stay hidden. Obscured by the neighbor’s RV and overgrown shrubbery. The front door to Heather’s house opened, and Audrey, no more than fifteen years old, stepped out of it.
She held both straps of her backpack in her hands, yawning dramatically as she made it halfway down the lawn before frowning and turning to look behind her.
“Who is that?” Drustan asked with a whisper. His mother reached behind herself, grasping his hand in hers, and squeezed reassuringly.
“This is your sister,” she replied in a soft voice. Drustan’s surprise washed over his entire body, while also noting a hint of recognition. Audrey’s hair. The specks of gold freckling her eyes. His vision was so clear. He could see the finest details on Audrey yards away.
“…My sister? I thought she passed?” Drustan questioned. But he believed his mother just the same as he realized something and asked, “Does father know?”
His mother squeezed his hand as she replied, “He can never know.” Drustan frowned, feeling uneasy about keeping another secret from his father, but instinctively more loyal to his mother.
Audrey groaned, loud and annoyed, before calling toward the house, “Van! We’re going to be late!”
“Wait for me!” a feminine voice yelled from inside. My voice.
Chills of awareness ran down Drustan’s spine. Hairs on the back of his neck stood still. Muscles in his fingers loosened, and his shoulders dropped. Every cell in his body was focused on who was about to emerge from the house.
What was happening to him?
Stepping out of the house, was me. My wavy brown hair bounced as I trotted after Audrey.
He noticed the freckles across my nose and cheeks, my paler skin that was still a shade darker than Audrey’s from being in the sun more often.
My baggy grunge clothes. I wore earbuds of some kind that rested over my head, connecting to a device on my hip that, based on the sounds Drustan picked up from this distance, he assumed was human music.
“Sorry,” I murmured, pausing to adjust my Walkman. I pressed a few buttons, and it wasn’t until the music played again that Drustan realized I restarted the song I was listening to back to the beginning.
I raised my gaze as I shouldered my backpack, and my green eyes took his breath away. Something in Drustan’s gut tugged toward me. Longing to be near me.
Could she be…? He thought. No. No, she couldn’t. He and I were too young. Drustan wasn’t twenty-six yet. He couldn’t develop a mating bond yet. I was even younger than him, so his sudden focus and infatuation had to be a mistake.
But wait. “My sister is human?” Drustan asked his mother. She nodded, and suddenly the image went blurry.
Fading. Shifting to something else entirely.
Darkness, fear, suffering, and distant screams consumed my being. Pain stabbing my skull. Drustan’s cry of agony.
Kill me, Drustan begged. End me already. Be done with it.
Wait for me! My voice from years prior rang in his mind, causing the shadows and demons of the Gravhune to lessen their attack.
Wait for me! The memory of my voice was getting clearer the more he focused on it. Years had passed, but Drustan could still remember my face. My freckles. My green eyes. My hair. The holes in the knees of my jeans. The way I bit my bottom lip as I adjusted my Walkman to restart my music.
Wait for me! He focused on the memory of my voice as pain threatened to tear him apart. As demons and misery clawed at his mind, taunting him to end it all. The agony of the torture still registered in his body, but he disassociated from it. Focusing on me.
He’d never get to know if that human was his mate or not.
Revisiting the human realm to search for me would put his sister at risk, and after that one single visit to the human realm, he’d made a promise to his mother to keep his half-sister safe.
But it wasn’t as if Drustan was ever going to see the light of day again anyway.
What was I doing in the human realm? Was I happy there? Did I have a family of my own now? Children? A human mate?
Wait for me!
My face solidified in his memory, moments before another prison mate growled and charged Drustan, ready to attack. Fully consumed by the madness of the Gravhune.
Wait for me! With my voice clear in his mind, grounding him, Drustan ripped apart the deranged prison mate with his bare claws.
The image shifted again. The torture of the Gravhune still haunted Drustan on occasion. Drinking helped numb him to it. Keeping the public at arm’s length helped more.
What didn’t help? His sister was being pulled into Hyvenmere by a lustful fae, too selfish to be near, what Drustan assumed was, his mate, to truly care about her safety.
All the effort Drustan’s mother put into protecting Audrey from this realm was officially wasted.
Because of Liam’s na?ve narrative, Caelena and Drustan were ordered by Ilia to visit the human realm.
To learn Audrey’s weaknesses. Find a way to take her down.
“I found something earlier today that you might be interested in,” Caelena told Drustan after scouting the human realm on her own that morning. She didn’t share with Drustan what she found, ensuring that he would follow her back to the human realm that evening.
While disguised as humans, Caelena and Drustan entered a small but noisy dwelling with the words Sun Bean on the front. My coffee shop.
Following the scent of Audrey, they decided to take a break from their spying, sit down, and enjoy the music. Caelena was always excited to experience new things, as sheltered as she was. She hummed along with the music, smiling at all the energy and joy filling the space.
That’s when Drustan heard my voice. It had been fifteen years since he heard it, but he recognized my voice as if a single day hadn’t passed. The voice that Caelena could surely recognize after flitting around in Drustan’s mind for years.
Drustan’s body tightened on high alert. The noise of all the other humans and musicians faded into nothing.
My voice, singing backup for the performer that night as I played the drums, made his chest tighten, and his ears relax.
Every cell in his body wanted to jump out of his chair and run toward me.
It’s her. He thought. Focusing on the stage, after humans moved out of his way, he saw me. Ripping the drums with a soft smile as I leaned over into the microphone to accompany the singer.
Everything he suspected as an adolescent was true. He and the human female he stumbled upon years ago were bonded in a sacred way.
In a blink, the image changed again.
“Bring her to me.” Drustan was drinking heavily again. This is dangerous, he thought. He couldn’t have a mate. A human mate. Not in this political climate. His father would surely kill me if he found out.
But Audrey would put me in danger anyway.
“Is—is that the best option?” Caelena asked with crossed arms, frowning at the empty whiskey bottle Drustan set on the table. If I knew you were going to act this recklessly, I would not have led you to your long-lost human mate, Caelena scolded him in his mind.
“I can’t—” Drustan couldn’t stop picturing my face.
All grown up. More beautiful than he remembered.
My voice. He felt so spoiled, having practically an hour of new words I’d sung to commit to his memory.
Memory he could call upon to help him whenever he felt the lingering darkness of the Gravhune start to creep into his consciousness.
“I can’t focus on anything else.” He pinched his brow as he pointed to where Sergei stood at attention near the doors of his chamber.
“Just—bring her to me—unharmed. I’ll frighten her right now if I go myself. ”
“Dru, she won’t be safe here,” Caelena tried to argue.
Red colored Drustan’s vision. Caelena was trying to keep his mate from him.
Instincts he had only read about flooded the surface of his skin.
Making the monster in him desperate to claw out.
He put all his energy into ensuring his claws stayed retracted.
Caelena wasn’t the enemy here, but this primal impulse didn’t care.
Logic was threadbare at this point.
“Go.” Drustan waved to Sergei. “Bring her to me. Unharmed.”
That was the night that Sergei and Leon attacked me on my boat.
Ilia never wanted me. It was Drustan. It was always Drustan.
Suddenly, Drustan was stalking the corridors of Fergus’s family estate, following the sound of my hum as I studied the vases and drapes of the hallway. Practically hypnotized. He had no qualms about ditching his cousin while she obtained the recipes his father asked them for.
Because here I was. Dressed as if I belonged in Hyvenmere, with him. When he startled me, and I gasped, impaling him with my cake knife, he couldn’t find it in himself to focus too much on the pain. Instead, all he kept thinking was, my mate is stunning.
My voice echoed in his head; I just stabbed someone.
I just stabbed someone. But as far as first meetings went, he figured things could have gone worse.
What was I doing there? In the realm? He thought Audrey had fought Sergei and Leon well enough and would go out of her way to keep me far from Hyvenmere.
Why on earth would Audrey dare to bring me here? So close to him?
Did Audrey want Drustan to find me?
I was terrified, but bubbling under the surface, he could smell other emotions coming from me. Curiosity. Recognition. Attraction. His mate was so close to realizing it.
Got it, should we go? Caelena’s voice entered his mind.
Not yet, Drustan responded to Caelena as he inhaled my scent. She is breathtaking.
Then we were back in the human realm.
Drustan was watching me flirt with my handsome stranger for the first time, in a random human disguise as I fluttered my lashes and gave him teasing touches.
No. Wrong. Mine. Drustan’s mind kept repeating.
The flirtations were cut short, and as Drustan watched me run outside the coffee shop, searching for something, he noticed how the man looked more uninterested in me than before.
Then, an idea formed in Drustan’s mind. He turned a corner, needing privacy as he found a window to an empty shop to observe himself in. Staring at his reflection, Drustan shifted. Presenting himself exactly as the human male I was flirting with.
Perfect.
Then we were at Bandthral, and Drustan’s hackles rose when he saw that his deranged father had made me sit next to him. It took every muscle in his body to casually place himself between his father and me.
Then we were in my room.
Drustan was determined to visit me while I was awake this time. To perhaps attempt explaining why he put his hands on me so thoroughly at Bandthral. That he couldn’t sit with the knowledge that my back was in so much pain. He simply couldn’t focus on anything else.
But a complicated discussion couldn’t be had, because I was hallucinating in my bed. The faint smell of blood mixed with the smell of the tea Audrey gave me made Drustan’s heart twist as he stared down at me.
I was smiling up at him. I hadn’t done that before.
Not when he looked like himself, that is.
Of course, I wouldn’t be of sound mind the first time I did that.
When he tried to ward off my advances, and I started thrashing and crying, he gave in and ordered me to touch myself.
The smell of my arousal perfumed around both of us, drugging him with need.
“You know I want you,” Drustan cooed at me.
Then we were in the courtyard in Enhavenn.
The night Caelena stole the former Fae Queen’s journal.
Gods, she’s mouthwatering like this, Drustan thought as he stalked me in the shadows.
He bit back a groan of arousal as he stepped in front of me, letting me crash into him, and pinned my body against his.
How could the simple act of holding me against his body feel this good? This right? As if our bodies should never be separated again.
Who knew that mating bonds could be so cruel? Surely, Tynara was punishing him for all the lives he’d taken.
Another change.
Drustan was chained in the cell, his father standing in front of him. His father’s voice commanded every muscle in his body.
“Stop,” Ilia’s sharp command ghosted over Drustan’s entire body, forcing him to halt his movements, but leaving the agony that filled his mind. “You will never disobey me again, son.”
Then reality started to blur again.