The Shadow Reader

by Sandy Williams

  “We need to move you inside,” she says.

  Maybe my head isn’t completely clear yet, because it makes no sense for tor’um to be in my world. Fae aren’t supposed to come to Earth unless they have permission from the Court. I realize that doesn’t stop all of them. Every false-blood I’ve hunted has come looking for shadow-readers and humans who have the Sight. Merchants fissure here as well, either to avoid the gate taxes or to take back Earth-made goods to sell. But the tor’um can’t do that. They can’t fissure.

  “Here,” she says, holding out a bottle of water. “Drink.”

  I’m afraid to swallow, but my lips and throat are parched. I reach for the water. My arm is heavy and my hand shakes so badly I accidentally brush hers.

  I jerk back, dropping the bottle, as a chaos luster leaps into my skin. Instead of a hot, tingling sensation, the lightning is cold, almost numbing. My gaze shifts between my hand and her face, which has turned stony. She picks up the bottle and thrusts it at my chest. “Tor’um aren’t contagious.”

  That’s not why I recoiled. I’m human—it’s not like she can damage my magic—but I haven’t met many tor’um. I certainly haven’t touched one before. They tend to keep to themselves. Whether that’s by choice or because they’re outcasts, I don’t know. The ability to fissure is deeply embedded into their culture. Taking that away is a huge handicap no fae wants. It doesn’t matter that some of the tor’um are able to work small magics; they’re not able to instantaneously travel from one point to another on their own, so fae society has left them behind.

  “You have half an hour,” she says, standing. “Be ready to move by then.”

  An apology is on my lips, but my voice refuses to work. I take a sip of water. It doesn’t give me more energy, though, and the back door to the house seems so far away. I don’t know why she wants me inside. The other fae have been healed, but they don’t look like they’re going anywhere soon. They’re sitting farther away from me than before, far enough that I can’t hear their conversations, and someone’s brought them food and water. Someone’s taken care of them.

  I rest my head back against the fence, letting my eyes droop shut again. I swear it’s only seconds later when I feel someone watching me. Aren. I wonder how long he’s been there, sitting with his arms propped up on his knees. His posture makes it seem like a while, and that makes me uncomfortable. So does his silence. I close my eyes again, hoping he’ll go away.

  He doesn’t.

  “May I heal you now?” he asks quietly.

  “You’re the one who cut me.” My voice is weak, hoarse, and the wound across my neck stretches with each word, but at least I can speak.

  Aren doesn’t respond for a long time. I stare at the dew-covered grass. I should feel afraid or angry right now, but I don’t. I don’t feel much of anything until Aren says softly, “I’m sorry.”

  I pull my lower lip between my teeth. I don’t want to believe him, but there’s so much regret in his voice, in his gaze, even in the air around him.

  “I didn’t like hurting you,” he says.

  “You could have healed me hours ago.” I want my words to come out angry, but I’m too tired, too hurt, to hate.

  He tilts his head slightly. “I tried.”

  At first, I think he means he tried and didn’t have enough magic. After all, he healed a dozen fae during the night. Then a memory surfaces. It’s fuzzy but I remember Aren kneeling at my side and reaching out to me, and me, kicking and screaming and demanding he stay the hell away.

  I shrug in response.

  A minute passes in silence before Aren says, “The tor’um want you inside before their neighbors wake up.”

  Next door, the upper story of a house rises over the fence. Above it, the stars are fading from the sky. It’s almost morning. Is that why the tor’um wanted me inside? Someone might look out and see me here, covered in blood? If I screamed, would someone hear me? Help me?

  My throat won’t handle a scream, though, so I ask, “Why are they here?”

  “They choose to be,” Aren answers. “To survive in the Realm, they have to rely on other fae, and they’re considered . . . enthess.” He pauses, searching my eyes to see if I understand.

  “Second-class citizens?”

  He nods. “Most fae don’t want anything to do with them, but they can blend in here. The tech doesn’t affect them much. They don’t have to hire a fae to freeze their food basements. They can use refrigerators. They don’t have to find someone to fissure them from one city to the next. They can use cars. They can find jobs that don’t require the use of magic, and humans don’t shun them. Here, they can be normal.”

  “What if someone sees their edarratae?”

  “They’ll let us know,” he says. He moves toward me now, raises a hand toward my neck. “May I, nalkin-shom? I don’t want to move you before you’re healed.”

  I focus on the house. The Sight, like shadow-reading, is an inborn trait, but I made it through the first sixteen years of my life without running into a fae. Kyol and the rest of Atroth’s soldiers don’t stay longer than necessary, so the idea that any fae would choose to live on Earth confounds me.

  “McKenzie?” Aren’s hand is still raised.

  “Okay,” I say, brushing my hair away from my neck. He inches closer and lays his hand against the wound.

  It burns, not as much as when he healed my broken arm, but enough that I grab a handful of his shirt and twist it in my fist.

  “It’s not deep,” he says.

  “It feels deep.”

  He shakes his head. “Your life-blood runs through here.” His thumb presses against the heartbeat to the right of my windpipe. “If I’d severed that, you’d have bled out. I was careful.”

  “Careful, my ass,” I say through gritted teeth. It doesn’t hurt anymore. Now it feels good. That’s almost worse than the pain. “I blacked out from blood loss.”

  “That was from your stomach wound, I think.” He removes his hand and inspects my throat. “You’ve scarred.”

  “Great.”

  “If you’d let me heal you when I first offered, you wouldn’t have.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Do you really want to discuss who’s at fault for all of this?”

  When he traces my scar with his fingertips, it takes all my effort not to shiver.

  “Lift your shirt, nalkin-shom.”

  I hesitate, but he didn’t have a chance to completely heal the two gashes across my stomach. They were much deeper than the comparative scratch on my neck so I pull up the bloodstained cotton. Looking down at the ugly, almost parallel lines now, I figure I’m lucky to be alive.

  “I suppose those are going to scar, too,” I say.

  He nods. “But these definitely aren’t my fault.”

  I lose my battle with my smile. Aren sees it, and I swear his mood lightens. All sorts of funny feelings shoot through me when I realize I’ve relieved a little of his stress, lessened a little of his burden. I wish . . . Yes, I wish he wasn’t part of this rebellion. I wish we could be friends.

  I swallow back my smile. “Could you do this quickly, please?”

  “I could heal you with a kiss.” Mischief sparks in his silver eyes, and a thousand chaos lusters ricochet through my stomach. Heat flows into me. It’s more intense between my legs. Shit. Shit. What the hell is wrong with me?

  “Just do it.”

  His chuckle tells me my reaction to him doesn’t go unnoticed. Thankfully, he places his hands, not his lips, on my stomach. I grit my teeth when he flares his magic. Pain strikes across my middle, and I lurch into him.

  “Shh,” he soothes. “Almost got it. It’s deep on your side.”

  My fingers dig into his biceps. His muscles tremble. He’s exhausted. He hides it well, but he needs rest. I need rest. My stomach hurts worse than when I received the cuts.

  “Aren,” I hiss out.

  “Done,” he says quickly. He runs a gentle hand across my stomach, back and forth as if he can ru
b away the memory of the pain. Sweat beads on his forehead.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  He tilts his head a little to the side, and I regret voicing my concern. The way he’s looking at me, it makes me feel like he wants me. I’m stubborn, but I’m not a complete idiot. I know I want him, too. How could I not when his touch triggers lightning under my skin? With his devilish grin and mussed-up hair, he’s incredibly sexy, but I need a hell of a lot more than a good-looking face to fall for a guy. I need someone like Kyol, someone who knows me, really knows me. Kyol’s concerned not just with my physical well-being, but my emotional one as well. He protects me as much as he can from the violence of his world, and he worries about my other life. When my parents cut me off, when they refused to speak to me until I got “help” in a mental institute, he was there for me. I can depend on him. And Aren? Well, he’s proven I’m disposable if the situation is right.

  I push away the hand he left resting on my stomach. “We’re going inside?”

  “Yes,” he says, rising. He helps me to my feet, holds me steady while the world settles. “We’ll talk, then you can clean up.”

  Aren’s tone is sober. Too sober. He said he was sorry, that he didn’t like hurting me, but where does that leave us? When I thought he was going to kill me, I didn’t read the shadows for him. He knows I’ll never help him.

  When he starts to walk toward the house, I stay where I am. He doesn’t pull me along. He turns to face me.

  “You win, McKenzie,” he says. “We’re sending you back to the Court. We’re trading you for Lena.”

  “Lena?” I can’t possibly have heard him right. Naito’s the one who’s been captured.

  “She was taken in Lyechaban,” Aren says. He tenses with his words, as if he needs to guard himself against my reaction. Does he expect me to celebrate? To rub it in? I should—this is a victory for the Court—but I recognize Aren’s mood now. I’ve heard this tone, seen this weight on a fae’s shoulders before. He feels responsible for what happened to Lena.

  “It’s not—” I stop myself just short of telling him it’s not his fault. I might not be willing to gloat, but I won’t offer sympathy either. This is good for me. I finally get to go home.

  I get to see Kyol.

  My stomach flip-flops. Most of what I’m feeling is anticipation, but there’s some nervousness twisting through me as well. I need to see Kyol. I need him to reassure me I’m working for the good guys, Atroth is the rightful king, and the rebels’ claims about the number of provinces, the gate taxes, and the Court’s transgressions are all lies.

  “When?” I ask Aren.

  “Tomorrow.” He must notice my surprise because he raises an eyebrow and adds, “Too soon?”

  “No. Not soon enough,” I say, not wanting him to know how uncomfortable I am with . . . Well, with everything.

  He looks away briefly, then says, “Your friend Paige. Her wedding is tomorrow night.”

  I feel my eyebrows go up, surprised he remembers that part of our conversation in the forest. He was hurt and bleeding at the time, and I was just talking to fill the silence. “It’s her sister’s wedding, yes. Why?”

  “Taltrayn and I will meet there unarmed and visible. It’s a public place. People will know you.”

  “There will be tech there,” I warn. “Electricity. Lights. Music.”

  “It’ll handicap Taltrayn the same as it handicaps me.” He places his hand at the small of my back, guiding me forward. “Come inside. I won’t give you back to Taltrayn looking like this. You can clean up and rest.”

  My first steps are wobbly. I cling to Aren, waiting for my fingertips and lips to stop tingling.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  As soon as the dizziness passes, I focus on him. “You do realize you’re going to have to wear a suit, right?”

  He tilts his head to the side. “What’s a suit?”

  SIXTEEN

  IT’S MAY IN Texas. The night isn’t cold, but it’s not quite warm enough to chase away the lingering chill of the In-Between. I’m not sure that’s why I have goose bumps, though. Maybe they’ve sprouted across my arms because of the lightning-covered fae sitting on a tombstone to my left. I told Lorn it was rude to sit there, but he didn’t believe me when I said humans bury the dead under the ground.

  I guess this cemetery is as good a place as any to wait for Aren. A thick hedge separates it from the road behind us and from the palatial building lit up by landscaping lights at the top of the hill ahead. There’s a twenty-acre garden between the cemetery and the mansion’s side entrance. That’s where we’re supposed to meet Kyol and Lena. I just wish Aren would hurry up and get here already.

  “Eager to return to your little scandal?”

  I don’t give any indication I hear Lorn’s words.

  He chuckles. “Don’t worry, McKenzie. I’m a master at keeping secrets. Why, you could give me the location of the Sidhe Tol and I wouldn’t tell a soul.”

  I give a short laugh and finally turn his way. “I was wondering why you were here.”

  He puts a hand to his chest and looks wounded. “What? I just wanted to contribute to the cause.”

  “Forget it,” I say. “You lost your chance in Lyechaban. I don’t need anything from you anymore.”

  “Everybody needs something from me. You just have to decide—”

  A new set of goose bumps spreads across my skin. Lorn mutters something under his breath about timing as the cemetery is lit by a flash of light. Aren steps out of a fissure, and my stomach does a little flip. He looks good. More than good, actually. He’s wearing an expensive suit, probably stolen from Neiman Marcus or some other high-end store. The pants hug his butt and his jacket all but begs for hands to slide underneath it, over his firm chest and up to his muscled shoulders.

  He’s staring at me. At first, I think he’s watching my reaction to him. Then his silver gaze lowers to my chest, to my silk-wrapped stomach and hips, then finally to my bare legs and peep-toed heels. I shift. I rarely ever wear dresses—I never know when Court fae will pop into my life and ask me to read the shadows—and I feel vulnerable and exposed.

  Aren’s eyes snap back to mine. He blinks once, clears his throat, then holds up a shimmery blue tie. It doesn’t quite match the color of the chaos lusters striking across his hands and face, but it comes close. “What do I do with this?”

  “I believe it goes around your neck.”

  Aren whips around to face Lorn. “What are you doing here?”

  He rises from the tombstone. “Just keeping the nalkinshom company.”

  Aren turns back to me. His gaze travels over me again. This time, it’s almost as if he expects to find an open wound. “You’re okay?”

  “Yeah,” I answer, frowning. Lorn met me at a gate a few miles north of the tor’um’s home. A rebel named Kian escorted me there, then handed me an anchor-stone. He left me with Lorn. I assumed that was because he was supposed to fissure me here. Maybe I was wrong?

  “He didn’t hurt you?” Aren asks.

  A snippet of conversation comes back to me, Aren saying it would hurt if Lorn had to pull the location of the Sidhe Tol from my mind. Lorn’s reaction was strange back in Lyechaban. I assumed that was because he hadn’t touched a human before, but his touch also felt odd. It felt odd again, penetrating, when he took my hand at the gate.

  I twist around to face him. “You invaded my—”

  “It didn’t work,” he says with a sigh. “Apparently, humans are immune to my magic.”

  Aren gently squeezes my arm. “You’re sure you didn’t feel any pain?”

  A chaos luster, hot and enticing, travels to my shoulder, so I pull free of his grip. “No. It didn’t hurt.”

  “Don’t overstress yourself, Jorreb,” Lorn says. “If it worked, I would have had the Sidhe Tol from her in Lyechaban. I came only to make sure it wasn’t a flute.”

  “Fluke,” I mutter. I don’t know if I believe him.

  “We’ll talk later,�
� Aren says, his tone firm. Lorn shrugs in response.

  “This goes around my neck?” Aren asks me, holding up the tie. “Like a noose?”

  “Yeah, well.” I turn my back on Lorn and take the tie. I’ve never in my life put one on a man. “It’s suppose to go around like this”—God, he smells delicious—“and hang like this. But I’m not sure what to do with the knot. And these need to be fastened.”

  The top two buttons of his shirt are undone. My fingers brush his skin when I button the bottom one. I start on the top.

  Aren’s hands cover mine. “Is it important?”

  If this was anyone but Paige’s sister’s wedding, I’d say it doesn’t matter, but Amy’s marrying a lawyer who comes from a family of lawyers. He’s paying for this shindig tonight, and Paige swears he doesn’t know how to tell her sister no. Thus the formal dress and the booking of the Marbarrage Mansion.

  “You’ll draw attention without it.” I pass the tie behind his neck. A shudder runs through him when the silk sweeps across his nape. I manage to ignore it and the heat of an edarratae as it tingles up my fingertips.

  While I’m working on the tie, I use the added height my heels provide to peek at the tag on his jacket. Armani. Figures.

  “You fae have expensive tastes.”

  “Kelia has expensive tastes,” Aren says.

  “She went shopping?” Stealing is the more appropriate term, but I’ve never been one to worry much about semantics.

  “She needed a distraction.”

  Lorn steps up and frowns at my work. “You’re doing it wrong. That goes under, I think.”

  I slap his hand away. “When did you become an expert?”

  “Even a fae can tell that’s a mess.”

  I glare at him. Then I whip the tie off and start again.

  Aren lets out a frustrated breath. He’s having trouble standing still and his muscles are knotting up like he’s prepping for a fight, and maybe he is. Kyol might already be here somewhere, waiting for us. For me.