Chapter 14
I love you. Even when you’re not here and I have to imagine your hands in my hair, massaging hot mustard oil into my scalp. Even when I can’t remember your voice anymore. I love you, I love you, I love you.
—Excerpt from a letter from Mahira Nazir to Zimran Nazir, contained in the journal of Mahira Nazir
Yaseema
I could still feel his hand pressed to my skin, so tight it had likely left an imprint on my stomach.
He’d held me in a vise, his body like a solid wall behind me, his voice so low it was almost a growl.
When he released me, I half expected him to be another beast, ready to tear my head off when I looked at him.
Instead, it was a young man about my age, maybe slightly older.
A very tall, very shirtless man.
He was easily the most handsome man I’d ever seen, even with the cruel smile on his face.
His torso was muscular but stamped with the strangest scars over it—the outline of scorpions over his stomach and side, crisscrossing each other like a macabre web.
It was as if he’d had the same image branded on his skin over and over and over.
His strange silver hair was loose at his shoulders, and he had a deep scar from his cheekbone to his chin that belayed his handsomeness into something more dangerous.
As my gaze traced up the man’s jaw, I jerked when I saw pointed ears.
Not a man.
Fae.
Peri.
I was in Peristan. A fae world., I couldn’t assume that anything I knew was the same as it would be in Astola.
“What are you doing near the River at this time, human? You don’t know what things lurk in the dark, waiting for those like you to get lost.”
His voice was soft, but felt no less a threat than the growl of the wolf behind me.
“I . . . er, got lost. Then I saw—” I gestured vaguely behind me, realizing I didn’t know the names of anything here. “A beast.”
The fae male glanced behind me, and it was alarming how beautiful he was. His shoulder-length silvery hair seemed to glow, and his eyes were dark and piercing.
“The halmasti.” He nodded. “I’ve been hunting it. It’s got your scent though, it’ll find you eventually. They’ll cross multiple Courts if they’re locked in on something.” He angled his head, his eyes sliding from the beast—the halmasti—and back to me.
As if he were the one who was locked in on me.
“Who are you?” I asked again and with less ire.
Though I nearly regretted it when his gaze sharpened on me, roving up and down my body, as if trying to take my measure.
He smiled faintly, just a quirk of lips so that I couldn’t tell if his mouth moved or not.
“I’m not someone you want to know, girl. ”
“And yet you’re going to save my fucking life?” I arched a brow, despite my heart beating wildly at the beasts both behind and in front of me.
He blinked, then angled his head. “It’s not often a halmasti is out wandering the wood. And I’m fairly certain you haven’t the means to defend yourself from it.”
His eyes swept over me, and I had a feeling he was amused at what he saw. Short, disheveled, human, with tangled hair and wet clothes, my spectacles askew, my satchel swinging haphazardly beside me and my skirt torn from running through the woods.
I debated my next question to him: “Why do you keep calling me girl when we are the same age?” or “Where did your shirt go?” when my eyes alighted on something glimmering in the dusk.
He held a long dagger. My gasp echoed through the trees as I recognized some of the early fae blade work from the swords I had unearthed for the Citadel.
“What is that?” I whispered.
He followed my gaze to his weapon. “Did you think I was going to kill the halmasti with my bare hands?”
My gaze jerked up. “You’re going to kill it?”
“No, I’m going to feed it forest sprites.”
Another growl thundered through the forest, the halmasti snapping at the branches of the mango tree I’d climbed.
Fear still flooded my blood, but the scholar part of my brain pushed it aside.
I took a step closer to the fae, and he raised an answering brow.
I gestured to his curved blade, the handle a magnificent filigreed gold, set with such vibrant jewels they glimmered in the moonlight.
The pommel looked like the curved head of a naga, the cobra ready to sink its fangs into skin.
It was a breathtaking fae dagger right here in front of me.
And it was a reminder of where I was—a place that only usually existed for me in a hidden vault beneath my feet.
“I just wanted a closer look at your sword.”
“My sword?” He raised a brow. I ignored the mocking tone in his words as my scholarly curiosity won out over my fear and I took another step toward him, examining the knife.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathed.
“The dagger was made in the River Court,” he murmured, begrudgingly, as if he didn’t want to have this conversation at all. “The Salt guards don’t use these to protect the River Palace, so you might not have seen them.”
River Palace. Salt guards.
Each bit of our conversation gave me a clue to where I was and what world I had stepped into.
I didn’t understand half of what he was saying, or what palace he was talking about, but I wanted to know as much as I could. “Why do you use one, then?”
He gave a light quirk of lips. “Because I’m from here. They are not.”
I struggled to make sense of his words. “But you are hunting it . . . the halmasti. Are you protecting the palace too?”
His mouth tightened. “I’m not a guard. Just here to hunt the beast.”
The beast in question growled low, and we both swung our heads toward it. It had finally left the tree and had almost made it around the boulder. The fae turned to say something to me, but his gaze snagged on Queen Azari’s haath phool gleaming on my wrist.
His eyes darkened, his mouth going white with the press of his lips. I processed the shock, then anger, coming over him.
“Where did you get that?” His voice was low and urgent as he sheathed his blade an took a step toward me, his hand outstretched.
“It’s mine,” I answered, tucking my hand into the pocket of my skirt so that the haath phool disappeared from view.
“It isn’t yours,” he said with a growl. “It doesn’t belong to you in the slightest.” He reached for my arm, but at that moment the halmasti roared, the sound deafening in the forest.
The silver-haired fae didn’t even look its way, his gaze focused solely on me. His bright hair and dark eyes and skin contrasted with one another in a way that made him seem otherworldly, like a god, or demon, or something unnatural.
My breath caught in my chest, my heart hammering so loudly it nearly drowned out the sound of the beast roaring.
He was otherworldly, and I kept forgetting that.
I was not in my world, I was in the land of the fae. The peris, as they were once called.
And this man was not human.
“Give it to me.” His voice was as dangerous as the beast.
“No.” I wasn’t about to give up the one relic that had brought me across the River, not if I wanted a way to get back home.
He lunged for me, but at that moment the halmasti chose to do the same. We were so wrapped up in one another that we hadn’t seen how close it had gotten.
It leapt on us, barreling into our bodies and taking us to the ground. The fae landed on top of me and all the air left my lungs. He had one hand in the grass by my head, and the other pressed against the halmasti’s jaw, preventing it from coming closer.
It gnashed against his hand, and it seemed like sheer force of will alone kept the wolf from ripping his throat out.
“My blade,” he bit out, his eyes finding mine while he pushed the halmasti back. I was crushed beneath his weight and the halmasti’s and I could barely listen to what he was saying while the beast’s giant teeth were minutes away from sinking into me.
“What?” I shook my head. “What do you mean?”
“Pull out my knife. Give it to me and then slide out of my arms.” The words ground out of him, the beast pushing him further on top of me. His hand was now at the beast’s throat, his hips pressed to mine as he grunted with the force of holding it back.
I wasn’t sure how I could possibly slide out from underneath him, as pressed into the earth as I was, but as soon as I thought it, ropey green vines curled around me, sprouting from the ground, supporting his weight and easing him off me.
I stared at the vines, which two seconds ago hadn’t been there at all.
He grunted as the wolf lunged at us again, and the muscles in his shoulder strained.
“Hurry, I don’t have much more in me,” he said, his dark eyes finding mine.
I blinked and moved my hands as fast as I could, sliding the naga-headed dagger from the leather sheath at his waist and pulling the blade between our bodies, unsure of how to give it to him.
“Put it in my mouth,” he muttered, voice filled with strain.
“Your mouth. Right.”
I lifted the blade to his lips, watching them part as his teeth bit down on the blade.
Then I followed his instructions and slid out from underneath him.
It seemed like he was using all his strength to prop himself up, even with the curled vines that had mysteriously sprung up out of the ground underneath us, because the moment I slid out from under his body his arm gave way, and he collapsed to the ground.
I thought I was about to witness his throat being torn out, but instead he rolled the halmasti over, as if he were wrestling a bear, his knife in his teeth, holding the beast’s gnashing jaws at bay.
He must have been holding the giant wolf back solely to avoid crushing me.
I pulled myself back to my feet, looking around blindly for a weapon, wishing again that I had my cousin’s rifle.
Not that I knew how to properly fire one, no matter how much my father had tried to teach me.
What would I even do with a weapon? The only thing I could effectively stab someone with was a quill.
But still, I saw a sturdy tree branch and lifted it up from the forest floor, attempting to wield it like I’d held a sword all my life.
The giant wolf was still snapping its jaws, its large canines inches from the fae’s face.
With my best impression of my cousin Safiyya, I lifted the tree branch and slammed it down on the halmasti’s jaw.
It snapped at the bark, but that bought the fae time to snatch his dagger from his mouth and with an underhanded swing, gut the wolf with a vicious stab.
It yelped, the growling replaced by a low whimper.
Then, the beast swung its gaze to me, the violent red eyes blinking and focusing on me furiously before finally fluttering shut.
The fae male stood, soaked in thick black ichor, blood like I’d never seen before dripping from his chest. After everything I’d experienced here already, it was this that caused real fear to rise in my chest.
I’d been shot at, hunted, crossed a magical fae wall, rescued from the River, and thrown into a new world. And it was finally catching up to me.
How did I think I would survive here alone? Not to mention find an ancient treasure and bring down a magical wall that had been erected for a thousand years?
What had I done?
I must have made a sound because fae looked at me, face splattered in black blood, and his eyes as cold and hard as the dead halmasti he’d just killed.
I wanted to burst into tears.
Instead, I turned and ran blindly, threading through the forest and away from the two terrifying creatures I’d found in the dark.