Chapter Two
Jet
The fucking redcaps were following me everywhere.
“Fuck off,” I snarled, grabbing a rock and hurling it at the closest one.
There was a crack as the rock collided with the man’s cheek. It probably said a lot about me that the sound was satisfying, as was his yowl of pain, and the blood that crept down his cheek.
But watching his comrades step forward to catch the blood in their hands and rub the fluid on top of their heads—how they got their name—reminded me that these creatures were more beast-born than fae.
Turning away, I continued my walk into the woods, listening to the crunch of their blasted footsteps a few yards behind me the whole way.
For the record, I was entirely too old for babysitters.
But my father (rightly) believed I would do just about anything to get out of the spectacle commencing in just an hour’s time.
I’d already gagged and bound the officiant and stuck him in a storage closet and accidentally set part of the kitchens on fire.
Fate had been on my side the past three times my father found me the ‘perfect bride.’
One of them conveniently ran away. With an enslaved dragon shifter, of all things.
The second one had poisoned herself into a coma. Bit of a kick to the ego, that one. But, fuck, I could understand the sentiment.
And the third, well, she disappeared. Though the word I heard while eavesdropping on the servants was that she’d had a lover in her father’s employ and he’d helped her escape out of her bed on the eve of our wedding.
There were no runaway, missing, or unconscious brides this time, it would seem.
There was no way out of this.
I was finally going to be married. As a pawn. In a political move by my father. To prepare for a completely fucking useless, but seemingly inevitable war.
I made my way toward the ruins of an old torture shed, jumping up to the half-collapsed roof, knowing it was the one place the damn redcaps couldn’t follow me. They had endless stamina, but absolutely no agility.
As a surly child sick of being followed around, I once used a rope to sail across a cavern with roaring rapids beneath.
The dumbasses just walked off the cliff, fell, and drowned.
They’d been replaced by the end of the day.
They were like fucking cockroaches. Didn’t matter how many of them got stomped on, there were always another thousand to take their place. Walking around with their heads full of blood, smelling like rot and sour skin.
I’d barely known a moment of solitude my entire life.
And as my father’s sanity slipped further and further away—bringing in more mass violence that scared people into falling in line no matter how twisted and unpopular his plans were—he only got more and more paranoid and obsessed with controlling me.
Forcing me into a marriage I didn’t want—and we didn’t need—was just another way for him to keep me on a leash.
If you heard him talk about it, he would claim my marriage was strategic and political, a way to shore up alliances. In reality, no one wanted this damned war.
The Dark and Light would never be friends, but we’d managed to mostly avoid outright conflict for a long time. They stuck to their world. We stuck to ours. It was tense but tolerable. We could have easily continued on that way.
If not for my father.
I found myself rooting for whatever it was eating away at his mind, begging it to work harder and faster. If he wasn’t able to form a sentence or walk a straight line anymore, maybe even his allies would stop following him.
Right now, it didn’t matter that the people didn’t support him when he had all the rich and powerful families in the Dark realm on his side. But if he lost their confidence, things would change quickly.
Would that likely mean unrest? Sure. Other families vying for the crown that would, genetically, fall to me? Yep. But I had my plans. My own allegiances. I would be fine. Once my father was no longer in charge.
Below me, the redcaps started circling the shed I was standing on, making demonic humming sounds that grew into an almost buzzing.
What a useless fucking existence they had. All blood and death and not a single thought to share among them.
As a whole, the Dark realm got a bad rep because of creatures like the redcaps. The problem with that was, the majority of the Dark were just… normal fae. Normal fae with a higher tolerance for violence, gore, and backstabbing? Sure. But fae like me. Not nightmare fuel.
That said, we were home to the redcaps and their bloody heads.
We were also where giant horse-like kelpies and each-uisge—the shape-shifting water sprites—leapt out of the water and dragged people—and fae—to their watery deaths.
And, sure, the sluagh soared through the skies in flocks to invade homes to taunt and terrorize anyone foolish enough to leave their western windows open.
Of course, we were also quite famous for our seducers.
The gancanagh, who seduce women only to leave them emotionally ruined.
The sirens, succubi, harpies. The leanan sidhe, beautiful female sprites who inspired artists, granted them incredible talent, then slowly allowed those talents to consume their lives until they went mad and died.
But those were the minority.
Most mortals didn’t judge entire countries based on a handful of murderers or rapists.
This didn’t feel all that different. If anything, it was less dark than humans torturing and maiming and killing one another.
Humans chose to be violent. The truly Dark fae creatures had no choice. It was their nature.
Did many humans who accidentally wandered through the Veil meet gory and terrifying ends? Sure. Did it also happen to Light fae who decided to get brave and come over to the Dark side? Also, yes.
It would be like humans who got killed by bears or sharks… you were in their home. You couldn’t blame them for attacking you.
The majority of us, though, weren’t driving people mad or rubbing blood on our damn heads. We were just… living. Or trying to.
There was no reason to go to war over a few violent creatures and one mad king.
For thousands to die for… what?
That was the question. What did my father hope to gain by overtaking the Light court? More wealth? Sure. But he had more than anyone needed. More death and terror and subjugation? He had plenty of people in his own realm to torment.
I knew the real answer, though.
It had nothing to do with material things he wanted.
It was his pride.
He simply wanted to win.
He wanted to rule.
He wanted the Light royal family to suffer.
Which, unfortunately, included his daughter. My half-sister. Who had spent her entire life in the human realm, oblivious to the existence of fae until her roommate went missing and she followed her brother through the Veil.
My hand went to my throat, as it always did when I thought of the last time I’d seen her, of how she’d harnessed her pyro skills to burn my neck—at my request.
The pain had been instant and overwhelming and had lasted weeks as I recovered, my burns resistant to every cure from every herbal practitioner my father could find.
Eventually, it had subsided, but I’d been left with raised, pink, angry skin. Evidence of my betrayal to our father in helping her escape his clutches.
As far as I knew, she was now safely nestled in the Light Court, getting to know the family she’d never met, and preparing for war against us. War that they didn’t want either.
I sighed, hearing the horns at the gate.
Guests were arriving.
Someone would be sent to fetch me soon. Someone with knives and swords and shackles, in case I got spicy.
But I wasn’t going to fight it.
I would stand at the altar.
I would agree to the vows.
I would get this charade over with so I could get back to my real mission.
Dragging this out was accomplishing nothing.
I jumped off the roof.
And if I kicked some roof tiles on the heads of some redcaps, so what?
“Your father has been asking for you,” Vishen, my guard, greeted me when I snuck back in through the servant entrance.
Vishen had been with me since he’d first left the military. We’d been roughly the same age at the time but had led very different lives.
Vishen had been found screaming and emaciated in the woods as a baby by a passing military regiment, who took unexpected mercy on him and brought him back to the keep where he was fed and changed by various servants but never loved nor particularly cared for.
As soon as he was in his adolescence, he was thrown into the military academy, then right into active service.
Until my father was looking for a guard around my same age who I wouldn’t resent and try to shake the way I did with the older guards.
Enter a sixteen-year-old Vishen.
Tall, muscular, tattooed, and scarred, with long, unusually blond—for our realm—hair and bright green eyes.
He’d been just as frustrating as my older guards at first. Until I hatched up the plan to sneak out after getting him wasted on dreamroot liquor, which causes horribly vivid waking dreams. Unfortunately for my rebellious plans, I hadn’t anticipated that Vishen’s dreams would be horrific enough for me to take pity on him and stay with him through them.
Which, inevitably, created a bond between two broken—in very different ways—kids.
It was something we hid from my father, both of us knowing that if the king saw any kind of friendship between us, he would likely not only get rid of Vishen, but have him given the true death in front of me just to remind me that the royal family didn’t have friends.
“And you said?”
“You got drunk on ashroot tea and had your head buried in the privy.”
“Better a drunkard than a rebel, I suppose,” I said, following him down the hall toward my quarters where my formalwear had been hung for me before I even got out of bed that morning. “Have you seen anything of my bride yet?”
I’d tasked him with finding details. Frustratingly for both of us, he’d only been able to learn it was the daughter of one of my father’s oldest allies. Which could have been anyone with deep enough pockets and a dark enough soul.
“Her carriage has arrived.”
I turned back as I shucked off my shirt.
“And?”
“And she was dressed as a bride with her face covered.”
“I don’t care what she looks like,” I reminded him.
This wedding was a sham, a farce. I had no intentions of having any sort of association with the woman outside of whatever formal events my father required.
“Who is the family?” I asked, pulling on the midnight-colored tunic with the royal crest emblazoned on the back in silver thread.
Vishen took a breath so deep it shook his whole chest.
Vishen, abandoned baby, unloved child, lifelong warrior, did not look concerned often. He certainly looked it then.
“It appears to be the daughter of one Kilson Grimwood.”
My head whipped up.
“Fuck.”