Reckless Cruel Heirs

by Olivia Wildenstein

  Scowling, he yanked his weapon out of the beast’s neck, the flesh squishing wetly around the whittled wood. Remo’s gaze was so full of anger and anguish and a hundred other murky emotions that I felt like I’d done something wrong even though my only wrong move had been displaying my magic.

  Hopefully, no one had been privy to the little show.

  “What the fuck was that?” Baldie asked, popping out from a yellow thicket with two spears and a machete.

  Remo’s lips were a thin line on his chiseled, blood-streaked face.

  I feigned innocence. “What was what?”

  “The fucking wire thingie. Where did you get it from?”

  “What wire?” I asked.

  “The thing that took down the cat!” Baldie’s tall forehead glowed with exertion and annoyance.

  I frowned. Although Nima could see right through my lies, this man didn’t know me from Adam or Eve. Maybe he’d fall for my subpar acting skills. “Remo took down the cat with his spear.”

  Remo’s biceps tightened as he readjusted his grip on his bloodied spear. “I’m not sure what you saw, Quinn. Besides my companion acting like a reckless child,” he bit out under his breath as he turned away from me. “How many tigers left?”

  “One. Next to the train site.”

  “Let’s go.” Without a backward glance at me, he stalked away, shoving past the leathery plants.

  Stunned by his attitude, I stayed planted in my spot almost a full minute.

  “I’m not crazy, little girl. I know I saw something,” Quinn growled before going after Remo.

  Grumbling, I took off after them, unhooking my sash before grappling with the edge of the tunic. That Quinn acted hateful was one thing; that Remo did . . . well that pissed me off.

  “Remo, wait!”

  He didn’t.

  I got in front of him, pulled off his sodden top, and slapped it into his arms. A muscle feathered his jaw as he flung it over his shoulder and brushed past me.

  “Are you mad because I chose to die?” I wasn’t one for letting things fester.

  He halted, then slowly, turned. “I could’ve protected you,” he gritted out.

  More shouting rang through the jungle. Muttering under his breath, Baldie hastened, vanishing behind the dense vegetation.

  Remo hinged around and took off again. Although his pace was hurried and he pointedly ignored me, he held up the tawny lianas longer than was necessary. Was it because he’d noticed the mark on my forehead and didn’t trust me not to get walloped upside the head a second time?

  At some point, I cinched his wrist, forcing him to stop again.

  “This isn’t the time, Trifecta. They need our help.” He still wouldn’t look at me, as though he’d looked his fill and could no longer stand the sight of me.

  “You might’ve been able to protect me, but injured as I was, I couldn’t protect you. So I apologize for leaving again, Remo, but I needed to heal.”

  His gaze finally slammed into mine, just as feral as the purple wildcat’s. “Protect me?” His lips curled as though he found a princess protecting a faerie guard ridiculous.

  Although I recoiled, I didn’t let go of his wrist.

  “What I need is for you to stop choosing death, Amara! What if the next time, you don’t come back?”

  “They said we always come back.”

  “Because you trust them?” he shouted.

  I held his wild gaze a long minute, sensing many layers to his anger. Now wasn’t the time to peel them apart, though.

  “You would’ve healed. I would’ve found a way to keep you alive. To keep you safe!”

  My hand slid down to his and squeezed his balled fingers. “In this world, it’s not your job to keep me safe.” And then I let go of his fist and headed in the direction of the tussle.

  After a few silent strides, his fingers slid through mine. “Don’t do that again, understood?”

  I glanced over at him. “Die, or use Karsyn’s gift in this cell?”

  His gaze ran over my face again, stuck to the hollow of my collarbone. Was my puncture wound still bleeding? “Both. Don’t do both. Either. Okay?” That tiny groove, which I was coming to understand was concern, marred the space between his brows.

  “Okay.”

  A spine-hardening roar fanned through the valley. Without letting go of my hand, he tugged me forward, carving a path through the sagging lianas and compact undergrowth. My gaze pinged from the gray trunks of the panem to the peeling trunks of the exotic palms, on the lookout for red beetles. I saw none.

  “Did you meet the fourth prisoner?” I asked between pants of sticky air.

  His fingers stiffened around mine.

  Before he could answer, a whine followed by a growl echoed so close it raised the fine hairs on the back of my neck. Through the thick copse of trees, I spotted dabs of purple and gold.

  Even though I supposed I would find out soon enough, talking distracted me from the monstrous thing we were running towards. “So? Did you?”

  “Yes.” He snapped the word out, jaw as rigid as his fingers.

  “And is it someone we know?”

  He parted a yellow thicket with his spear, revealing a sight I truly wished I could forget. Sure, I detested Kingston, but seeing his body dangling from a tigri’s mouth like a ragdoll that had lost its stuffing made bile shoot up my throat. I spun away from Remo and evicted what little lay in my stomach.

  When I straightened, Kingston puffed into gray ash, his blood still dripping from the beast’s muzzle. The tigri roared its frustration, hopping over the debris of the train, closing in on Kiera and Quinn, who held spears up. The snap of a liana swinging over their heads had my gaze vaulting to the figure hugging the thick vine—a man with a head full of black curls and muscles that would put the proudest lucionaga to shame.

  The man bent at the waist and leaped onto the fiend’s back with the grit and confidence of someone used to hunting monsters. Hugging one arm around the animal’s thick, striped neck, he plunged a knife into its cheek and drew his arm back, carving a line from jaw to shoulder. With a final, thin whine, the tigri collapsed, and the hunter climbed off his dead prey. He pulled out his knife, then wiped the blood and gore that lacquered the blade against the mountain of purple fur.

  “Are they all slain?” His deep voice rang through the now-silent jungle.

  Quinn nodded. “Yeah. The new kids finished up their cat right before we came here.” He slanted a look my way that said he was going to demand answers about what he’d seen earlier.

  I turned my attention back to the corded arms and built shoulders of the fourth prisoner, the only parts of him I could see from my vantage point.

  “Look who’s already back . . .” Kiera tossed me a smile full of teeth.

  I’d heard stories of Neenee and Geemee’s imprisonment in the Daneelie camp run by the Locklear matriarch. Kiera had chained and mistreated my aunt while her friends and family had tortured Kajika. To this day, my uncle hadn’t forgiven them, even though Neenee, forever the kindhearted pacifist, had overcome her grudges. Which wasn’t to say she wasn’t still wary of Charlotte Locklear, but she could hold a conversation with her if need be.

  “I’d been expecting you to die at least a few more times before making it back down to us, princess.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was the hateful undercurrent in Kiera’s tone or my label, but the fourth prisoner seemed to freeze. And then, slowly, he started to turn. Remo stepped closer to me. Not closer per se. Directly in front of me. My nose bumped the hard knob of his shoulder. Frowning, I touched his arm to shift him a little to the side, but with his feet planted wide, he proved as supple as a calimbor.

  He was protective and possessive, but this was taking both to a whole new level.

  Who was this fourth prisoner?

  I stretched up on my tiptoes. When my gaze met the dark-haired prisoner’s, my hand, which was still on Remo’s bicep, popped off and smacked my parted lips.

  32


  The Revenant

  I didn’t think my heart had beat once since I’d laid eyes on the man standing beside the slaughtered tigri. I didn’t think I’d blinked or breathed once either. All of my senses were suspended by the sight of a man who was supposed to be dead.

  A ghost.

  A hero whose memory Neverrians celebrated each year.

  I inhaled so sharply my chest cramped. “How . . .?” My lids dragged up and down over my wide eyes as though to clear it of what was obviously an illusion. Every time my lashes whipped my brow bone, the man from the file back in Fake Rowan’s sheriff station was still there.

  Still staring straight back at me.

  “Is he real?” I murmured.

  Remo was so still he looked like he’d become one with the landscape. Only the fluttering at his temple gave away that he was still very much alive. “Yes.”

  “But how?” I thought of the mound of orange dandelion clovers that blanketed the gray rock atop one of the Five. “A plant grew from your ashes, Cruz Vega.”

  Cruz offered me a smile that made my heart lurch, because it was the same he wore in the picture Iba had of him. “They must not have been my ashes.” Tucking the knife into his belt, he made his way toward where I still stood in Remo’s shadow.

  “You look so much like your mother, Amara, and yet so much like Ace, too. It’s incredible.” His eyes, the same vivid green as Remo’s, shone with emotion. “How old are you?”

  Remo stiffened, which was impressive considering there wasn’t an ounce of softness anywhere on his body.

  “Almost eighteen.”

  Cruz’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his corded throat. “Almost the age your mother was when I knew her.” There was something heartbreakingly wistful in his tone.

  “Since we aren’t needed here,” Kiera said, “Quinn and I are going to head to the fall and scrub some of the cat gunk off.”

  I couldn’t believe I was standing in front of my father’s best friend, speaking to him. This was insane. Almost as insane as the fact that he was still the exact same age he’d been when he’d vanished from our worlds.

  Since Remo didn’t shift a foot, not even an inch, I stepped around him, coming to stand at his side instead of behind him. “How are you alive, Cruz?”

  “After Gregor . . .” His voice trailed off as he looked at Remo, shaking his head a little. “Sorry, but this is . . . it’s—you were a baby when I was shipped to the Scourge, Remo. Now you’re a man.” He shook his head again, a wavy black lock falling across his forehead and into his glistening eyes. He thrust one hand through his hair, then cleared his throat. “Gregor injected me with dile poison to get Lily back into Neverra. Next thing I knew, I was lying in mud below a portal. I thought I’d died and gone to Hell. Until I reached this cell, and found Kiera and Quinn and a few others.”

  “Others?” Remo narrowed his eyes.

  “Yes. They’ve all passed on, but there were others.”

  My pulse stuttered. “I thought . . . I thought we couldn’t die for good.”

  Cruz stared at his bloodied palms, then wiped both on his dark green cargo pants which bore a constellation of other stains. “You’ve encountered the apple, right? Each cell has one.”

  All of the blood drained from my body. “I almost ate it,” I blurted out, glancing up at Remo in horror.

  He slanted me an I-told-you-chomping-on-it-was-a-bad-idea look.

  “I owe you my life, Remo Farrow,” I breathed, and something poked my stomach. What the—

  Remo’s eyes, which had been pinched until now, snapped wide.

  Oh . . . no. Nononononono. I’d just struck a bargain with the faerie!

  I could’ve been dead, so all in all, a bargain wasn’t so bad. Besides, Remo was . . . nice. He wouldn’t use his gajoï to hurt me.

  “Amara . . .” Cruz rolled my name, completely oblivious to what had just happened between Remo and me. “Love. Who came up with your name? Your mother or father?”

  I wet my lips and turned back toward Cruz. “It was my father’s idea. So . . . so you landed here, and then what?”

  “Then I understood Gregor hadn’t killed me; he’d saved me. For the longest time, I believed he would come to get me out. But years passed, and no one came, and I realized he wasn’t planning on letting me out. My only prayer was that he’d left me here to punish me for having awoken the Hunters and helped Ace take the crown, and not because he’d stolen it from your father. It was only when Kingston arrived that I learned no one was aware of this dimension.” Anger stained his gaze, but it didn’t linger. Soon, his expression gentled. “I also learned that my dearest friends were all alive and well. That the Woods still ruled over Neverra, and even though I never gave up hope that Ace would find out about this place, I was content.”

  A tear curved down my cheek. And then another. I rubbed them away. I wasn’t even sure why I was crying since, inside, I was screaming. Screaming at how evil Gregor was to have locked an innocent man away. How could he do this? To Cruz? To Neenee? To Iba?

  “Don’t cry, Amara.” Cruz lifted his hand as though to touch my cheek, but something in Remo’s expression made his fingers return to his hip without making contact. “I could’ve been dead.”

  “It’s unforgivable, and so unfair,” I croaked. “Cruel.”

  It wasn’t Remo’s fault, yet he flinched as though his grandfather’s crimes were his own.

  Cruz expelled a deep breath. “So now, can I hear how the two of you landed in here?”

  “I owed Kiera’s brother a gajoï. He told me about a portal that led into a supernatural prison, told me where to find it. I thought he’d lost his mind, but then I got sucked through.” I laid one palm over my stomach as though expecting it to cramp again. “I damned him for sending me in here, but now that I’ve found you . . . now I’m glad he claimed his bargain.”

  Cruz smiled.

  My hand finally slipped off my abdomen, coming to rest on my necklace of torn sleeves. “I still can’t believe you’re real.”

  Remo grunted, which made Cruz’s thick black brows lift a little. I was tempted to elbow my moody companion so he’d act more civil with the man his grandfather had sent away for life. Why was he behaving like this, anyway? Did he think we were ganging up on him?

  It wasn’t his fault Cruz was in here. He hadn’t created this place.

  “And you, Remo? How did you happen upon this place?”

  “Amara’s my fiancée.” His voice was as taut as the rest of his body. “Couldn’t exactly let her go through a ghost portal on her own.”

  My cheeks warmed at the way he flung this label over me. “It’s an arranged engagement.”

  Remo sent me a chilling glower.

  “What? It is . . .” I said.

  “Why did you call it a ghost portal, Remo?”

  “Because it’s a portal that doesn’t exist. A lot like you, Vega,” he added under his breath.

  Cruz gazed at him a long minute. Instead of commenting on Remo’s tangible antipathy, he asked, “Your grandfather never told you about it?”

  “Never.”

  Silence stretched between the three of us.

  I wanted to reach out to Remo, tell him he didn’t need to be on the defensive, but Cruz said, “Kingston mentioned you and Gregor were close.”

  A wall fell around Remo. “Were.” His voice was ice.

  Sensing how hard this was for him, I touched his arm. He moved it away from me.

  Not again . . . We’d made up mere minutes ago and now we were back to being . . . what were we back to being? Embittered children with zero communication skills? “Remo—”

  He backed away. “I’m going to the waterfall.”

  And then he turned and stalked through the brush, leaving me behind with the ghost from my parents’ past.

  33

  Forgiveness

  Even though the jungle had swallowed Remo, the yellow underbrush still shivered from his brisk retreat.

  “He was very cl
ose to his grandfather, which has made our . . . trip especially hard on him.” I sighed. “Before seeing this place, living in this place, he still held Gregor on an exceedingly high pedestal.”

  I turned back toward Cruz, found him examining me.

  “I can’t believe Catori and Ace had a daughter, and I’m speaking with her.”

  “And I can’t believe you’ve been in here for two Neverrian decades.”

  An Earthly century . . .

  He scraped back his dark curls. “Does anyone know you’re here, Amara?”

  “Just Joshua Locklear. I’m hoping he’ll have told Iba and Nima by now.” Then again, if he had, wouldn’t they have made Gregor fish us out?

  “Iba and Nima?”

  “It means Mom and—”

  “I know what it means.” He smiled. “I studied Gottwa. I’m surely a little rusty since I haven’t had anyone to practice it with for a long time.” After a second, he said, “I’m surprised Ace answers to anything said in Gottwa.”

  My lips quirked into a smile. “Only when it comes from my mouth, or Nima’s. He pretends not to understand our extended family’s language otherwise.”

  “Skies, even your smile is the same as your mother’s. But your eyes . . .”

  “I had to take something from my father.”

  He chuckled.

  “I also got his superior sense of humor, in case you were wondering. Made surviving this damn place a little easier.” My gaze chased the bushes that no longer shivered from Remo’s hasty departure.

  My sense of humor had helped, but it was Remo who’d kept me sane.

  And safe.

  And smiling.

  And alive.

  “You should go wash up,” Cruz said, as though realizing where my mind had ventured. Or rather, after whom. “I need to take care of the cat. Get some meat and fur out of our hunt. We’ll meet back at the caves.”