16. Chapter 16
Chapter sixteen
Kaed matched my pace as we walked through the awakening streets. A few looks snagged on the bloody mess we were, but they dropped their eyes when Kaed flashed them his.
“What happened this morning wasn’t my fault.” I had stopped in the tree-lined streets.
He turned to collect me, his hand banding around my upper arm.
I tried to pull free. “Let go of me.” To my utter shock, he actually heeded me.
And then I looked around at the humans and fae alike that had gathered. As soon as Kaed lifted his head to them, they scattered.
“Why do they do that?” I allowed my eyes to dart back to the people who had now given us a wide berth.
Kaed shrugged with a grunt instead of offering anything intelligent. He had a scowl firmly placed on his brow.
“They’re afraid of you.” My summation whooshed out of me. Why wouldn’t they be afraid of him? He was tall, dark and terrifying in an obvious way. Even if you didn’t count that he had a menacing scar across his savage cheekbones.
“We’re not doing this now. Not here,” he said by way of answer.
“Why? Why not?”
His boots scuffed the dry flagstones underfoot as he halted. He raised his chin to the skies and then dipped it with solemnity. “Maybe they have good reason. Maybe they’re smarter than you appear to be right now. Maybe they know what is good for them. Maybe they know they should stay away from me.”
I shifted, my arms folding in front of me. I knew it was defensive and I didn’t care. “Is that what I should do? Stay away from you?” I stabbed my chin at him.
His eyes darkened until they were a tempest. “You.” He paused until I could feel the weight of his magic simmering just beneath the surface of his skin. “Don’t get that option.”
His hand stayed banded around my arm the entire way after that.
“Your prisoner again?” I said once he released me in the foyer.
“You were never not my prisoner.”
My arms barricaded over my chest again. Not even a whisper of pain, a tug of a scar from the injuries.
I hadn’t died, I finally realised.
I hadn’t died.
“So what happens now?” I pushed.
Kaed had been about to walk off, to leave me here. Maybe I should have said nothing.
“Now?” He turned his head to me, and it was darkness in his eyes, not blue. “Now, you find a way to stay out of trouble. Or I’ll find a cage and lock you in it.”
His words echoed in the silence around me. There was no humour in them, no misunderstanding them.
“Did you expect me to just sit around? I was just exploring the city!”
Kaed appeared right before me then. “You tried to take something from me today.” His chest was heaving up and down like he’d just run the length of the city walls.
“You can’t possess me! I’m a human being! You can’t protect me.” My frame felt tiny, fragile in the shadow of his enormity as I roared the affirmations at him. They were as much for my ears as his.
“Fae,” he said flatly.
“What?”
“You’re fae. Like me.”
I blinked. Why did that matter to him? “I’m nothing like you,” I said, my words crackled with sparks.
In response, a storm brewed as Kaed’s chest thundered, low and deep.
“Is this it? Is this it forever?” I threw my hands up.
Frustration moved me like a marionette. “You just push me around and put me where you want me? You just decide everything for me? You think I’m not a person, but you’ve changed my entire life.
You’ve taken me. Stripped me of my rights. Taken my freedom!”
Kaed’s nose was tip to tip with mine before I’d even finished taking a breath. “I saved you. You’d have bled out on the dock if I hadn’t.”
That black nothing waited in the back of my mind at the memory of just how close I’d come to being lost.
“I didn’t ask you to save me,” I snipped. I knew it was petulant.
I could feel his breath; we were so close.
“No. Not this time. Not the last time. Maybe you will someday.”
And I hated that he was keeping track of all the times I owed him my life.
I hated that he was right. Today would have been wholly different if he hadn’t found me. How had he found me? Actually, I didn’t want to know.
My lashes fell, and my eyes unfocused away from him.
This whole event had shaken the reasons I wanted to stay. Maybe this city was too dangerous, even if it had what I needed.
Disquiet settled into me.
“I don’t belong here, Kaed. Please just let me go.” My voice was a snowflake drifting helplessly; it would vanish before it had a chance to settle.
Maybe there was some part of him that could understand I wasn’t meant to be here. I didn’t belong to him. I couldn’t stay.
Something softened in his shoulders as he turned.
“You know I can’t do that.”
I did.
Whatever his motivations were, they were more important than what I needed. Whatever drove his decisions, it was more powerful than his compassion for me. Perhaps he was in trouble, and the faebane was his only bargaining strategy. I supposed that made two of us.
Maybe there was a way I could get out of this without selling out the people of Shadowfall, even if they didn’t quite deserve my protection or thoughts, and without ending up cornered by men—or Kaed.
“Give me what I want, Imogen.” Kaed had stepped back from me, and when he spoke my name, it sounded pained. The humour, the play, the dark charisma vanished for a moment.
Two sides of me warred in my mind. Was staying for the potential of finding something in the library, this city, worth it?
How long would it take? I wanted to be able to leave.
But I couldn’t. Not yet. I couldn’t sell my sister out, or the people of Shadowfall, no matter if they had never treated me with respect.
I was more than what they believed I was.
“I will find you faebane. I don’t know how, but I will. If that’s all you care about. I will find it.” The books yet unopened in the unexplored library beckoned me. Books held secrets, stories, legends, histories and truths. There was something in that library.
I was sure of it.
“It’s not all I care about. But I don’t have the choices you might believe I do.” His eyes were unreadable, like a tome bound in secret that needed a cypher to decode its truths.
Kaed gestured to the bathing chambers. I was still covered in my own blood.
“Don’t worry. I’m not joining you this time,” he said, eyes pinning me with their intensity.
I thought he’d joke. Smirk. Grin. Something. But he just waited for me to take my leave. I hesitated on the threshold of the steamy chambers where the bathtub summoned me like a siren. His hands were a deep claret red as my blood dried on them.
“Thank you …” I breathed. It felt paltry in the silence between us.
Kaed seemed to struggle with the words as much as I had. “You’re welcome,” he managed.
And both our words fell flat.
He’d saved me from my own mess.
And there was no cage in sight. No bars on the windows.
Just a bathing chamber to wash away the stains of the morning.
“Who was that?” I asked before I closed the door to the chambers. “The male in Celeste’s house. Her son? You seemed to dislike him?”
For a moment, Kaed hesitated. His tongue worked its way over his teeth, and his hand raked through his hair once. “That rat is Huxley. He spends her money and loses more of it on gambling and females. I’ve resisted the urge to kill him thus far. For Celeste’s sake.”
“You’d be that petty? Kill a male for bad lifestyle choices?”
“Celeste is the best person I know. And she deserves better than a barnacle of a son who drains her every way he knows possible. She is good. She deserves good.”
Celeste was goodness personified. Her warm heart shone in her hands as she had worked her magic, and you could feel the veracity and compassion in her. But for Kaed to see that and feel that was strange.
“You care for her.” It wasn’t a question, but I wondered at the root of its truth.
His eyes were hard as they flashed to me. “I’ve known her for a long time. She is more than I deserve in my life. And I owe her more than I care to admit.”
The rawness of his words hit me like cold water, and I didn’t have the heart to push for more from him.
I had been prepared to level a slew of insults at him for threatening to kill her son. But Kaed seemed unnerved today. Like the pieces of his hard exterior had been rearranged and he was itching to fix the facade he normally held.
“Huxley is less her son and more her beneficiary. He’s grown accustomed to living off the lifestyle his mother has cultivated as a vital part of this city.”
I looked at him, actually bewildered that he was talking openly to me.
“In a past life, many, many years ago, Celeste was a healer before she was a council member. She has given a lot of herself to others. To me.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
Kaed sighed. “I don’t know,” he finally settled on. “Maybe I thought that if you knew what she gave you, you might understand that I am trying to protect you. But you’re making it very difficult.”
“Gave me?” I said, confusion knitting my brow.
Kaed cocked his head at me. “You’ve no idea, have you?”
I waited for him to elaborate. Only marginally led astray by the hair that had fallen across his scar. The scars that were not so easily sewn into fae. And yet there it was. Radiant and blazing across his bone structure. Had Celeste tried and failed to heal it?
“Magic. Her magic. Any of us. It takes something from us to use it.” He paused as if checking I was truly as clueless as I felt right now. “It takes vitality from us every time we use it. It might take decades, but magic use ages fae.”
My eyes widened at that, but no words came.
“Magic is why we aren’t truly immortal. And as we use it, we let go of a piece of us. And Celeste has given so much of herself to others. To me …” His voice trailed off.
A sob worked its way to my throat. “And she healed me. With her magic.” She didn’t even know me.
“Yes.”
“Why?” I stammered.
Kaed looked through me. His eyes were like depthless oceans, deep wells of darkness and swirling waters.
“She did it because I needed her to.” His words were heavy as they settled into the cold marble.
Of course. His investment.
Before I could say more, he left.
I bathed and washed until every drop of blood was gone.
My fingers traced the smooth skin of my wounds.
Celeste had left no mark on me. She’d taken every part of my injuries and made them so they were never there.
Save for my scar. I traced the shape of it on my wrist and scrubbed the cool skin down as though it might one day just vanish if I tried hard enough.
But the knowledge of what Celeste had given me lingered worse than any bloodstain or scar. What she’d given up. What Kaed had asked of her. For me. It all felt like a knife in my gut.
My actions had cost Celeste. And I had to live with that.