66
Once Upon a Dream
Melody
“Yes, I can.”
Holy fucking hell.
My ears start to ring. I can hear my blood rushing through my veins as loud as a brook in a forest.
He can lie.
My mind grapples with the full extent of what that means. This changes pretty much… everything , I guess. Everything this world hinges on. That scrambles all fae rules. Fae believe him when he speaks to them because they think he can’t lie.
“But why can you?” I ask. I can lie, because I was born in the human world. Because I am half-human. But he shouldn’t be able to.
He watches me through his lowered, dark lashes, almost so long they touch his cheeks. “I suppose that’s a second question.”
“What do you want in return?” I ask quickly, my heart pounding recklessly.
His cruel smile widens, his eyes glittering with malice. “Another bargain then? One might assume you’d tire of those.”
“No—no bargain. A game.”
His eyes glimmer in otherworldly silvery lilac, scrutinizing me as if I’m something to unravel.
“Come on—what do you have to lose? Time doesn’t count for you. You’ve got an endless amount of it,” I push, the words tumbling out like a dare.
“My nerves,” he offers—and damn me, was that another actual attempt at a joke? Has Caryan really just tried to be funny? Again? In his own dark way of being intimidating at the same time? Or is he serious?
“Yeah,” I murmur, teasing despite myself, “with me, I guess they’re always on the line, so…” I tip my chin up, glancing up through my lashes.
He snorts, derisive, at my goading—but he rises to it anyway. “Very well then—what are you ready to give, little princess?”
He steps in close, too close, and catches my chin, fingers firm, compressing my jaw as though he’s reminding my body who it belongs to.
“Depends on what you want,” I force out, breathless around his grip.
“You know what I want.”
Gods. My stomach somersaults at his tone—at that dark baritone undulating along my bones, slipping under my skin, seeping deep into my core, laced with an even darker promise.
“Cheap,” I breathe back, “to offer something you could just take, isn’t it?”
His eyes darken. Why did I say that? Gods, what’s wrong with me? Do I want him to just take me? To finally do it—to do whatever the bond demands that I’m too damn afraid to do?
His gaze dips to my lips. My heart pounds, and as close as he is, he can feel it—drumming through my chest against his, betraying me.
My mind is swamped by his closeness, his heat, his scent—wild from all that just happened, wild from him.
I can’t think—not with the wildness clinging to him like blood and smoke.
I’m suddenly desperate. Furious too. Feverish. A toxic mixture that only ever makes me reckless and rebellious.
His eyes look like starlight caught in deep water—silver and shadow—and I drown in them, as though our magic flickers there, alive beneath his skin.
Gods, he is so beautiful I’d never manage to capture him fully.
I painted him once—his face, his golden eyes looming over the room from the wall of my chamber in Niavara.
I came close with the striking cut of his features, but I will never be able to capture Caryan’s wildness.
His otherworldliness. The sleek, predatory elegance of his movements—or the quiet, unnerving stillness when he doesn’t move at all.
Most of all, I could never reproduce the way he’s looking at me right now.
Intimate. Complicated.
As if he wants to slip beneath my skin.
And then, once there, to flay it from my bones just to peer into my mind.
His gaze trails lower, slowly, drifting from my lips down over my neck, to the exposed curve of my cleavage in the dress he chose for me. My breath hitches. Abyss, it takes all my willpower to force my thoughts to function when I feel his desire as acutely as my own.
Caryan wants me.
From the way he’s looking at me, I know he wants to shred my clothes and have me against that tree. Hard. Again and again and again. Just as he said.
And Abyss, I want him to.
Because gods, if that isn’t a heady feeling all of its own. Being desired by Caryan might be the purest rush I’ve ever known.
I want him to ruin me. Eat me. Ravage me. Destroy me. Consume me.
Carefully, I slide my hands into the narrow space between us and press my palms to his chest, feeling the hard planes of muscle beneath my touch. His heat. The slow, intoxicating rhythm of his heart.
Then I let my hands slide upward, closing them behind his neck.
I know I’ve surprised him again by the way his pupils narrow slightly.
“So what might it be?” I purr.
Before I know what I’ve agreed to, his lips are on mine hard, his tongue in my mouth, my head tilted backward. It’s rough kissing. It’s brutal. All teeth and heat and fury. Every ounce of his rage poured into it.
He lifts me and slams me against a tree, the bark biting into my spine, his lips never leaving mine. My fingers catch in his armor, to pull him closer or shove him away, I don’t even know.
He breaks away at last—breath ragged against my bruised mouth. “No,” he breathes. “There is a chasm between taking and being taken…and I would have you choose the fall.”
My mind reels. I force it to steady, drag myself back to the question that started all this—back to something resembling sense.
Because after that—
Gods.
“What happens,” I ask, my voice unsteady, “if you win the war?”
He laughs darkly, but the sound is hollow, his expression suddenly lifeless. “That depends on many things. I die, for one, if the prophecy proves to be true.”
And still he stays. So close our lips almost brush.
My hands rest against his chest, his heat still seeping into me through my palms. His scent is everywhere—intoxicating, heady, dizzying.
“Not good enough an answer.” I try to push him away, but fail.
He only asks, “What do you think will happen?”
“That’s a question from your side. One truth for a truth.”
“Fine,” he relents. “If the answer is good enough.”
“You’ll have total power. You’re going to be the strongest fae in existence. The balance will tip even further. What about the demons coming through the rips? There will be more. Everyone will be blood-sworn to you. But what then?”
He looks at me blankly, but his eyes glitter dangerously. “That’s a rather grim thread to spin for what lies ahead.”
“Isn’t this how it’s going to be?”
He straightens but keeps me pinned against the tree. “So you either think I won’t gain total control, or you’re planning not to help me,” he says.
Suddenly, fear prickles down my spine.
What am I doing?
Baiting death?
“I never said that,” I retort, trying to straighten too.
He scoffs, but his sharp eyes catalogue every detail of my face. And my whole body shivers under the weight of his scrutiny.
“Demons can be controlled. And people, well…freedom is an illusion. A construct. An idea.” His silvery eyes flicker with dark calculation. “If you create it, they’re happy. And no one ever has to die.”
I want to whirl away, but there’s nowhere to go. “This is insane.”
He looks at me as if I’m nothing more than a mouse and he a wolf—as if he could swallow me whole simply because I ran straight into his jaws.
Then he turns abruptly, and his wings brush over my shaking fingers.
I touch my lips where he kissed me, and when I pull my hand away, my fingertips are stained red.
“You are young, Melody. You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. You haven’t seen the atrocities people commit because they believe they’re acting in the name of peace. You haven’t seen the suffering.”
He turns his head, and I catch his profile—the strong line of his jaw, the sharp point of his ears. But his gaze goes nowhere, unfocused, distant.
For a moment, he doesn’t seem to be here.
He’s somewhere else. Somewhere darker.
When I gently run a hand along the wall between our bond, I can sense the darkness in his mood. The somberness. The pain. Carefully locked away—but still there.
A sea of darkness. The endless ocean I once waded through when I fell into his mind. So much blackness you could only drown in it.
It makes breathing hard, makes me feel as if I’m suffocating.
I walk up to him, suddenly needing to touch him.
But I’m too afraid.
Instead, I lift a hand and gently run it through the feathers of his wing.
His eyelids flutter closed for a moment before he slowly turns back to me, his eyes an irate silver.
I draw in a sharp breath. “Do you believe in the prophecy?”
“No. I think it’s a bunch of old, sinister women spinning the threads of fate. But you can cut it in the right places, and they have to start anew.”
He leans down and, before I can react, his tongue slides over my raw, bleeding lips. The wound seals instantly beneath his saliva.
“I’ve been too rough with you,” he says darkly. “Again.”
He looks away.
“What happens if you lose the war?”
“Nothing. The world will go on.” He says it so naturally, as if it’s obvious—but of course he must have lived through that a thousand times.
I frown at the impossibility of truly grasping that. For him, it must be like a game of chess. “So—you don’t care?”
His head whips toward me with supernatural speed. “I do care not to be captured again. Not to be abused for other people’s hunger for power, Melody.”
Again, I sense all the pain behind that wall—a churning flood, waves crashing against my own inner barriers.
Before I know what I’m doing, I step forward and hug him, my arms closing around his hard body.
And it’s the strangest thing:
I remember the shape of him. His smell. And as dangerous as he is, I feel oddly safe.
He goes rigid at first before relenting, his hand gently stroking my hair as he holds me back.
“How did you learn to fly?” I mumble against his chest, breathing him in deeply.
What?” He laughs incredulously. Actually laughs. The sound rolls through me like distant thunder.
“You had to learn to fly, right? How did it feel? How did you learn?”
He leans back to look at my face. “You are full of surprises,” he drawls, but his irises are blue again. Blue and silver, like an ocean under the midday sun.
“So how?” I ask with a shy smile, digging my nails into his shirt. “How does it feel?”
“Very well. Hold on.”
I squeal as he whirls me up and shoots away from the forest floor, flying faster than he ever has, probably using his magic to spin us through the world so everything rushes past in a blur.
I cling to him harder than ever. “Don’t you dare drop me,” I mumble against his ear.
He chuckles darkly. “Not yet.”
We pause when I smell salt in the air, and I scream again when he suddenly lets go of me.
I fall straight into the ocean, coming up sputtering and spitting water, glowering at him as he lands smoothly on a rock, crouched low, his black wings flaring wide behind him while I tread water in the waves.
“You wanted to know how it feels. Like that. Like a wave when the water lifts you up and turns you weightless,” he explains. “You spread your wings and let the wind catch you.”
“That easy?” I ask incredulously.
I spread my arms and let the next wave sweep me upward before it lowers me again, until my feet almost brush the sand below.
“The hard part was never the flying,” he says, “but the landing.”
He smiles as he watches me and, for a moment, I’m so stricken by it that I can only stare.
“What?” he asks.
But I just shake my head.
I stay in the warm sea for a while longer before finally letting the waves wash me onto the white-sand beach, the night still bathed in that surreal blue light.
He lands beside me when I drag myself out—a little inelegantly for a fae, the dress hanging heavy and soaked around my legs.
I gasp when his shadows swirl around me and, a moment later, I’m dry again.
“How did you do that with your magic?” I ask, eyeing his shadows as if I might somehow figure out how they work.
He chuckles, a low, sultry sound, and again I find myself staring at him.
He seems in a strange mood suddenly. A loose mood.
Even his face looks softer. Younger. No longer so ageless.
“I know more about magic than anyone, save for maybe my brother.”
My throat constricts at the thought of that stone, and what he said earlier—that he’d abandoned the search for his brother in favor of the search for me.
I’d put the stone back in my drawer when I left tonight. Miraculously, it hasn’t reappeared in my pocket yet, and I wonder why. But maybe it’s because this dress has no pockets.
Who knows how that strange stone works.
I glance down at my hands, briefly terrified it might suddenly appear in my palm, and wring my fingers together.
I should tell Caryan. Maybe. Maybe I should call his brother.
But I can’t. Not until I know more about him. The warning of that creepy acolyte still lingers fresh in my mind.
Besides, if I tell him now that I had the stone all along, he’d be at my throat, and everything tonight would shatter.
Yeah. He would probably kill me.
And never trust me again.
And for good reason.
I lock all those dark thoughts away, just for tonight, and lie down in the sand.
I gasp.
“What’s wrong?” For a second, Caryan looks almost worried as he glances down at me.
“Nothing, it’s just—” I pause. “I’ve never felt sand before,” I admit, lying back and digging my fingers deep into the soft grains, only to let them pour back between them. “I’ve never been to a beach in my life. I’ve never swum in the sea. But I always wanted to.”
He stands next to me, watching with hooded eyes as I wriggle into the sand, laughing at the strange, wonderful feel of it beneath me—the way it shifts around my body and molds to my skin, almost like a touch.
He crouches beside me.
“I imagine this could only be better if the sun were shining.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t alter its course yet,” he says slowly.
But just then, the moon sinks, and the first rays of sunlight brush across his features.
Before I know what I’m doing, I reach out and touch his face. He freezes, then briefly closes his eyes, his cheek resting in my palm.
When he opens them again, he suddenly turns his head away, his brow creasing as if he hears something.
He gently takes my hand and lowers it with his.
“We must go back,” he announces, suddenly stern.
“What is it?”
“The queen is dead.”