by Slade, Jessa
But her stripped splendor and the scent of night clinging to her hair wasn’t what he needed. He needed answers.
“I am Raze,” he said. “Prince of the phae and vizier to the Queen. What shall I call you?”
She barred her teeth in an insincere smile. “A taxi?”
He tilted his head. “This is a joke from the sunlit realm, I think.” He’d had little to do with the world since the Iron Wars.
Her smile upended. “Not joking. I want out. But first I want to know how you forced the verita luna on me. Tell me.”
Despite the demand in her words, the furious gold had faded from her eyes, leaving a darker amber flecked with green. Raze relaxed a bit since she seemed less likely to rip him apart.
“This court is a place of enchantment,” he reminded her. “Perhaps the magic here inspired you.”
“The Second Truth isn’t a two-penny magic charm I rub between my fingers,” she snapped. “It’s what I am.”
He hummed in the back of his throat and traced his gaze over her nude silhouette. “Your wild side is quite charming, although I admit, I find this shape even more so.”
A rosy flush brightened her cheeks, and she angled one arm across her body. The move only served to plump the curves she sought to hide. Beads of water glistened on the upper swell of her breasts and across her flared hips. He was a beast himself to tease her, but he had not been named the Ruiner for his kindnesses.
“No wonder Mom said to stay away from phae,” she muttered.
“Your name,” he reminded her. “Your name in exchange for my cloak.”
When she narrowed her eyes, a glint of gold shone beneath her dark lashes, but she said grudgingly, “Yelena,” and held out her hand. “Morozova, of the Amur tribe.”
He shrugged out of the gray cloak, keeping the loose trousers and sleeveless tunic for himself. But instead of passing over the robe, he took her hand—though he should not have done so without his gloves—and raised it to his lips. “Yelena,” he breathed across her skin before his mouth grazed the soft ridges of her knuckles.
From the way she clenched her fist, he guessed the courtly gesture had expired sometime since he last walked the sunlit realm. A pity, for the touch told him much. Under the pads of his fingers, he felt calluses with a reserved strength behind them. This was no pampered house cat.
Also, the simple touch was a pleasure.
She, however, did not seem particularly pleased as she plucked the cloak from his slackened grip and slid it over her shoulders, wrapping it tightly around her waist. Scaled for his breadth, the folds went nearly twice around her until she secured the belt. The gray cloth looked rough and dowdy against her creamy skin. With a whisper of magic, he could match the cloak to the amber glow of her eyes, reweave it as a silken gown to skim her curves....
With a ruthlessness to befit his name, he crushed the fantasy. He wore the crude homespun because every twitch of his power sustained the geasa. He needed all his magic to find the flaw in the wards.
And she was the key.
“There was a phae portal in that lake,” he confirmed. “But it should have been closed. I am uncertain how you got through. Or how to send you back. What were you doing when it opened?”
“Nothing.” She wrinkled her nose. If she’d had whiskers, they would have twitched. “I was looking at the moon, and it turned red.”
Bloodied water. Raze glanced at the cell door. The slow weep from the iron had halted, and the metal seemed to quiver with silent intensity. The silence of attentive listening.
“Come.” He reached for her arm, but she avoided his touch, as lithe as a tabby arching away from an unwanted petting. “If you want out, I need to be in the center of my power.”
She stared at him through narrowed eyes. “Do I have another option?”
Inclining his head, he considered briefly. “No.”
She swept one hand ahead of her. “Then after you.”
He stepped ahead of her, making his way down the corridor.
Leading had never been his intent. Despite the legacy that made him a prince, in the desperate days of the Iron Wars he had become a soldier. He’d served as vizier only because so few survived, but now, with the barrier between the phaedrealii and the sunlit realm fading, he knew he had to finish what they’d been so loathe to do: seal the court forever.
If he didn’t, no one—not the phae, not the werelings, not the humans—would escape the bloodbath.
Chapter Three
Yelena followed the hulking phae, making note of the twists and turns of the corridors in case she needed to find her way back. She didn’t trust him—no one should trust any of the phae—but something about that black iron door made her hackles prickle and she was relieved to step away.
Plus, she needed to keep this Prince Raze in sight. Somehow he had triggered the verita luna. Was it a phae trick? But maybe the trick would help her sisters with the change.
She reached down inside herself again, feeling for the glorious power of the tigress, but found only fleeting wisps, all that remained after her nightmare in the desert—
No, she’d sulked enough. This was her last chance to find her way back to what she was. Though the brief change had relieved some of the pressure inside her, she couldn’t be without the verita luna for much longer or she’d go crazy.
How had he done it? Her skin still tingled with the aftermath of the change, but more, she remembered the feeling of him pinned between her legs when she’d straddled him in both her forms. He was big and solid, formidable in a way she had not expected. She’d had no real dealings with the phae, not when they’d kept to themselves for so long, but she’d always thought they were wispy, languid, sort of metrosexual-y.
Not this one.
She let her gaze trace the expanse of his wide shoulders narrowing to lean hips. The sleeveless gray tunic revealed what she’d thought were Byzantine tattoos down both heavily muscled arms, but the ambient light coming from nowhere caught a faint pale gleam within his darker skin, and she realized the marks were scars.
Yelena knew scars. These must have hurt like hell. For a heartbeat, the detachment she’d cultivated since coming home wavered, her careful facade splitting as intricately as his skin. If he looked, he’d be able to see the ugly truths that had brought her to this place.... Well, not to this place in particular—where the hallway had widened into an intimidating expanse of soaring columns and flying buttresses, like the hallucinations of a first-year architecture student with a better understanding of grandiosity than gravity—but to this place in her life
Then she remembered where they were—the phaedrealii—where nothing was real, where every shifting surface was an illusion.
“Dreams,” she said suddenly.
Raze glanced back then shortened his stride to fall into step beside her. Despite his size, he moved with an almost animal elegance that reminded her of her own people as well as the more instinctual human warriors she had worked alongside. “What about them?”
“When I walked down to the lake, I said, ‘Perchance to dream.’”
His look sharpened. “You sought to drown yourself, to die?”
She scowled at him. “You know Shakespeare.”
“Along with the drunken wanderers, some poets have found their way to phaedrealii.” His hand dropped to the long knife tucked against his side. “Dreams and death are common paths to the court. Although only one leads out again.”
They had come to an arched doorway where a stairwell spiraled down. The mellow glow of the corridor did not reach past the first curve of the stair. Tiny will-o’-the-wisps drifted in the darkness, their firefly lights twinkling.
Yelena balked. “I’m not going any farther.”
The phae tilted his head. His dark hair was too short to fall into his eyes, but it had just
enough length to start to curl, a quirky contrast to the unyielding slash of his high cheekbones and tight jaw. “Into death? Or dreams?”
“Neither.” She glowered; she wasn’t going to forgive him for that “drunken wanderer” crack. “Not until you tell me how you inspired the verita luna.”
When he crossed his arms, the open neck of his tunic gaped, revealing more scars descending over his collarbones to what she could see of his broad, smooth chest.
She swallowed, suddenly certain the scars were no glamour. How far down did the wounds go? The phae were known for their perilous beauty, but she sensed these marks were not meant to be alluring; quite the opposite, they were the sign of something very, very dangerous.
Still, against her better judgment, her fingers twitched to confirm the marks were real. That he was real.
He stared at her, his gray eyes hooded. “What did you dream?”
She snapped her gaze up from the taut line of his chest. “Excuse me?”
“At the portal, which should have been locked, you spoke of dreams. Dreams of what?”
She shifted, her bare feet making no sound, but uncomfortably aware of the rest of her bareness under his borrowed cloak. “What does it matter? Dreams don’t come true.”
“Here they may.” He paused, then his gaze sharpened. “The verita luna. You’ve lost the way. That’s why you wanted to know how I triggered it.”
“No, I—” The lie was bitter in her mouth, and she choked on it. Of all the places where a lie should have been easy. “It’s none of your business.”
“It is now.” He took a step toward her. “That is what brought you here. You are trapped, unable to change, just as we—” He cut himself off as he prowled behind her.
She whirled to face him again. The threatening heat of his big body made her already sensitized skin tingle. As a cat, she would have rubbed against him to release the static charge. A longing for her tigress arrowed through her, as piercing as the knife at his side. She could not admit he was right; to say it made it too true. She hedged, saying, “You think my answer is here.”
“The phaedrealii is rarely a place of answers.” When she opened her mouth to press him, he set one fingertip to her lips, silencing her. “Not that the sunlit realm is any better. But if ever you might find what you seek, it will be with me. Now come.”
His touch burned on her lower lip, and she found herself tilting toward him as if gravity had shifted. His scent—like a storm brewing in the boreal forests she called home, mist and mountain struck by lightning, wild and evergreen—lingered in her flared nostrils. The unintentional change she’d just gone through must have unsettled her more than she’d thought.
But when he turned, she followed. What other choice did she have?
* * *
Which was more dangerous: a tigress by the tail, or a tigress on his tail?
Raze’s spine tingled with awareness of the force of nature prowling behind him as they descended to his lair. She might be smaller than him at the moment, but the wild heat of her was the same in either of her forms. He didn’t doubt holding her would be risky whether her claws were feline or verbal.
But she’d tacitly confessed she’d lost the verita luna. Curiosity prickled more than the sense of danger, both sensations an irresistible lure. Just as well he was no cat or this curiosity might get him into trouble.
He glanced back, and the prickle in his spine shot out along every nerve as he found her golden-green gaze fixed on his backside. She instantly glanced away, but her pupils were blown wide and dark, not just from the low lighting in the stairwell but from something else, something more edgy.
The steep pitch of the stairs left his head level with her belly, and though his gray robe covered her now, his mind’s eye had no trouble seeing right through the rough weave to the memory of her bare curves. His previously loose trousers suddenly felt very constricting.
The werelings had wanted no part of the Iron Wars, and he’d had few dealings with them back when the phae walked the sunlit realm. He knew they were sensual creatures, prone to grand passions of the sort that had been the Undoing of the phaedrealii. Phae magic was destabilized by unruly emotion, and that unpredictable animal fever couldn’t be allowed to wreak havoc on his painfully wrought geasa. Not now, not when he was so close.
She was too close, which was why his pulse was racing as if the fever had already infected him.
“I suspect...” His voice sounded harsh, even to himself, so he cleared his throat and started again. “I suspect the depth of your longing for the verita luna brought you through the lake gate, even though it is locked.” The Queen had crafted the portal with a volatile new compound, which had no doubt exacerbated the already erratic qualities of a doorway woven from algae spores.
Yelena pursed her lips—her wide mouth was the same dusky-rose-red as the tips of her breasts had been; would her tender, inner flesh be as lush?—and he almost fumbled on the last stair.
“You started to say the phaedrealii couldn’t change either,” she mused. “Why not?”
Unbalanced by his misstep—and by his distraction at a simple pout—he spoke without thinking. “Because it would mean the end of us.”
To his relief, she was sidetracked when, triggered by his presence, light bloomed in his lair. Swirls of ammolite phosphorescence spiraled up the fluted columns of flowstone that supported the rough cavern rock far overhead. The glowing traceries branched out across the ceiling like spreading limbs and leaves, a tree of light.
Yelena’s dark pupils constricted in the sudden shine, revealing the wide pools of tigress-gold that shimmered with the iridescence around her. She turned in a slow circle, and in her wondering gaze, he saw anew the beauty of the quartz-studded walls only barely softened by the long falls of silky curtains. The lacy edges drifted on an imperceptible breeze that carried the faint mineral scent of wet stone.
A sudden wish to show her more—to point out the tiny spiderling phae constantly spinning the silk or to guide her deeper into the caverns to reveal the hot springs where he soaked away the agony of his scars—welled in him, a desire even more corrosive to his discipline than the blatant delights of her naked body.
He slammed a halt to the thought, as hard and jagged as the quartz. What in the deepest hells was he thinking? Sharing their magic had almost destroyed the phae. He couldn’t forget that, not even for one, impossible moment with a woman who reminded him of the world he’d lost.
He would have pulled his cloak more tightly around himself, but she was wearing it. He’d coax the spiderlings into weaving him another. Otherwise the tigress’s earthy perfume would haunt him forever.
“Come,” he said again. And this time he did not try to keep the harshness from his voice.
Her upper lip—ah, those lips would not be so easily purged from his memory either—curled at his brusque tone, but she followed him toward a small alcove carved with many sills and ledges holding boxes, bowls, bottles and bric-a-brac.
“A pack rat,” she muttered. “But a tidy one. You’d love my sisters’ matryoshki nesting dolls.”
That was the second time she’d mentioned her relatives. “You are close to your family?”
She watched while he chose a shallow obsidian bowl and various other items from the wall. “Very. Will that make it easier for me to get home?”
He shook his head as he mixed ingredients into a thin paste. “It doesn’t matter either way.” He scraped some of the ammolite from the wall. The dust shimmered like dragon scales as it fluttered into the black glass basin.
Her jaw thrust forward so furiously he could almost see her tigress whiskers bristling. “It matters to me.”
“I meant such connections won’t save you.”
“Oh.” Her face blanked like a mask. “I know that.”
Her bleak tone—a fa
miliar echo to the emptiness inside him—made him pause as he studied her. She might try, but she could not rival him in detachment.
After all, he intended to sever the phaedrealii from the emotional enticements of the sunlit realm forever.
“Give me your hand,” he said.
She eyed him warily. “Are you going to kiss me again?”
He wanted to object that he hadn’t truly kissed her. But the surge of interest in his groin to correct that oversight told him more clearly than the court’s growing agitation that it was past time to lock down the geasa. “I will not kiss you.” He emphasized the words with the strength of a promise.
Even as he spoke, though, he knew all phae promises were lies.
Chapter Four
Slowly, Yelena raised her hand to his outstretched palm. Her hand looked small enclosed in his calloused fingers as he rotated her arm to slide back her sleeve and expose her inner wrist. He brushed the pad of his thumb over the paler skin, making her pulse leap. The rough cloak chafed at her sensitized skin—she imagined his big hands skimming over her—making her nipples peak.
His eyes narrowed and he withdrew his knife.
She stiffened, the sensual lull severed by the glint of steel, but his grip was too strong. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to mark you with a geas. The symbol will power a spell to reveal what traps you.”
She strained away, unease ramping up her heartbeat another notch at the thought of what the spell might reveal. Phae weren’t the only ones with secrets. “Werelings don’t do magic.”
“You are magic.”
“No, we just are.” She balled her hand into a fist.
His gray gaze turned harder than the stone around them as he reeled her closer, so close the scorching heat of his body surrounded her. “If you want to flee, then change. Right here in my arms. Slash me to ribbons and go.”
She froze again, though his nearness threatened to melt her. “You know I can’t.” She couldn’t find the verita luna and couldn’t leave until she found how he had uncovered it.