Dark Prince's Desire

by Slade, Jessa

  “Our Queen will want more than those pretty gold eyeballs strung on a chain.” Echoing EveStar’s aggrieved hiss, a gust of black sand kicked up from the erstwhile ocean bed to bite at their ankles. The pterodactyl gave a mournful cry.

  Yelena held back a shudder, memories of other sands eroding her poise.

  For another heartbeat, EveStar seemed to continue to expand, until the revelation of what existed beneath the illusion seemed inevitable. Yelena stiffened, prepared to take a hit—and this time to dole one out; there were no innocents here—but Raze grabbed her wrist.

  The heat of his burned hand distracted her. Though he’d said otherwise, the grasp must have been painful, and yet the lock of his fingers said he would not let her go.

  Unlike the rough touch of his scarred and now blistered skin, his words to EveStar were gentle. “Have I not always fought for our people and safeguarded the phaedrealii?”

  “Protected us even from ourselves. Not what one would have expected from a saturni such as you, but this is true.” The other woman—or whatever she was—shrank back into her slight size, leaving a faint scent of something burned. “I remember this too is true; we scarcely survived the Iron Wars.” Her voice thinned and cracked, like rust coming off an old weapon. “We won’t survive again, Prince of Flutes. Not again...” She sidled away from the door, clearing the path.

  Raze led the way, and Yelena followed. She cast a glance at EveStar as they passed, but the phae kept her face averted.

  Yelena stepped up behind him. “What’s a saturni?”

  “A breed of phae better known for singing and dancing and chasing nymphs than leading an army.” His mouth twisted. “Perhaps that’s why we lost.”

  Though the bitterness in his voice should have warned her off, she couldn’t help but try to imagine what he’d been like. “And the flute? I suppose that got you a lot of nymph lovin’.”

  He shot her a glance. “Do you know what the first flutes were made of?”

  “Not iron,” she guessed.

  “Bone. Dry, hollow, dead bones. That is what I am now: Prince of Bones.”

  Well, his cheery attitude certainly wouldn’t have won him any nymph ass. And yet her brain still conjured up a vision of him without the scars, lips pursed coyly over a pan flute.... Except she’d jumped him without even the excuse of fairy piping. “Whatever EveStar said, I don’t want to destroy you, you know.”

  “I’ll take some comfort in that,” he replied, dry as the sands outside.

  She wanted to snark back, but then they crossed over the shadows under the lintel and into the palace of the phae Queen.

  Chapter Seven

  The court palace was never the same when he visited. Raze knew that, of course, since he’d been the one to anchor the magic that siphoned the worst of the phae’s devastating passions. The emotions hadn’t simply vanished, though. Instead, the seething energy fed the palace’s never-ending metamorphosis.

  Though the beauty or terror of its exterior were never entirely indicative of what might be found within, he’d learned to be cautious of the place when it was at its most heartbreakingly lovely. Because while the phae had renounced the true emotion that had once been their Undoing, they had kept their keen appreciation for irony.

  He stepped just far enough within the doorway to let Yelena enter behind him without fully exposing her to any lurking dangers, then paused to let his perception adjust to whatever the palace might present.

  His stomach twisted when she edged out around him and gasped.

  He had seen wonders before, but this... The Queen had quite outdone herself.

  Probably because she was teetering on the edge of becoming Undone.

  His sacrifice could not come soon enough if his other option was being trapped in this lushly overblown boudoir. The palace had become literally—if not actually—the center of a dusky-red rose, with curving velvety walls that arched overhead to reveal only glimpses of something like sky. The bright flutter of butterflies passing above sent sparkles of prismatic light cascading down between the multi-story petals.

  He started walking, listening for the soft patter of Yelena’s bare feet behind him.

  “It’s stunning,” she said.

  “It feels like a labyrinth, and more than a few have died making their way to the heart of any labyrinth.”

  “Should I knot a thread of my dress to the front door and unravel it as we go so we can find our way out again?”

  He’d get to see her naked again. His pulse surged at the thought, and agreement hovered on the tip of his tongue. And other tips of his anatomy. But just as the Minotaur had eaten both Athenian youths and maidens, the Queen’s hungers were equally...democratic. Teasing her would be foolish.

  “Such simple tricks won’t save us,” he told Yelena.

  Her long stride brought her to his shoulder and let the musky warmth of her fill his senses. “Are we going to need saving?”

  “Someone will, mostly likely.” He had ceded rule of the phaedrealii to the Queen, though his own claim had been stronger, because he’d had more pressing concerns, but some things he would not share.

  The tigress was his.

  The depths of his selfishness should have disquieted him, especially when he’d already made note of the court’s fracturing and forfeited so much to stop it. But part of obsession’s power was its willingness to succumb utterly and eagerly to entrapment. To the phae with their ruses, such commitment was almost impossible to believe.

  And apparently even more impossible to resist.

  The curves of the petal walls tightened as they went, forcing Yelena closer to him. “We must be getting near the center,” she said. “We’re almost going in circles.”

  When the back of her hand brushed his, the skin-to-skin contact jolted a word out of him. “Stay.”

  He halted abruptly, mortified at his lack of control despite the most glancing of connections. Why did that word emerge with such entreaty? Did he believe she would listen?

  She glanced back at him. “Stay? I’m a cat, not a dog.”

  “I meant...” Since she had walked a step ahead before looking back, they were no longer in direct contact and so he did not have to continue.

  Indeed, he was not entirely sure what he’d intended to say. If it was a truth she’d forced from him, then it was buried too deeply for him to unearth.

  Unless he touched her again.

  He folded his arms over his chest, tucking his hands away. “You should wait here while I take the edge off her mood.”

  “No.” Yelena matched his pose. “I’m done with waiting. Where has waiting gotten me?”

  “You think confronting that warlord or your council would have gotten you further?”

  “Maybe not, but holding back has left me...” She let out a slow breath. “A tigress shouldn’t try to change her stripes.”

  And keeping her here in his den of illusions was as contrary to her nature as restraining her beast. He shouldn’t forget that.

  Yelena lifted her chin. “Whatever your Queen does, it can be no worse than what I’ve done to myself.”

  The certainty in her tone—and his painfully personal knowledge that she was oh-so-wrong—paralyzed him long enough that she slipped around the last tightly furled petal-wall, out of sight before he could muster another argument. He hastened after her into the center of the court.

  The red velvety walls flared outward into an expansive space so wide he stumbled over his own feet with momentary vertigo. He cursed his awkwardness; he of all beings should know the phaedrealii’s tricks, not to mention the Queen who played them.

  Yelena had not paused. She strode across the faintly pulsing floor—when had the petals become a bloody, beating heart?—toward the shining gray throne rising like a sword thrust through the heart of the ros
e.

  The purification of iron into the Steel Throne had been the doom of too many phae smiths, but what remained was a testament to the phaedrealii’s tenacious survival...and its fatal flaw. For all the ensanguined glory of the glamoured throne room, Raze wondered if the Queen who lounged there now with her chin propped in one hand could ever appreciate the sacrifices that had put her there.

  She looked young, with tousled red curls framing a smooth, rounded face spattered with freckles. The bulk of the throne and her red robe nearly swallowed her. He reminded himself she was still young compared to the phae who had walked under the sun before the Iron Wars. But coming of age along with steel had given her a different sort of edge, and her eyes—as crimson as the beating petal walls—were feral in a way even Yelena might not appreciate.

  The Queen did not lift her head, though her free hand crept out to grip the armrest of the throne, poising herself like an arrow to be launched.

  Yelena must have noticed for she stopped just out of range and gave an awkward bow. “Queen of the phae.”

  “Wereling.” A careless acknowledgment. “So few of your kind have ever stepped into the court. Had I thought a moment about it, I might have been offended. What brings you before me now?”

  “Chance magic,” Yelena offered. “An accident I hope to set right.”

  “There are no accidents with magic.” The Queen’s gaze flicked to Raze, accusation a dark veil over her red eyes.

  Yelena glanced between them. “Perhaps I should say involuntary.”

  Raze matched her even tone as he addressed the Queen. “She should not be here. Such incursions—” and excursions the other direction, although he did not add that “—imperil the phaedrealii.”

  The Queen’s eyes glittered more darkly yet as she studied him, making his exposed skin prickle. “I see the geasa you’ve marked to confine us are essentially complete.”

  He stiffened. “Not confine. Preserve. As I promised you—”

  “If your scars and your promises mean anything, how did the wereling get here?”

  Raze ignored Yelena who had sucked in a harsh breath. “The intensity of her...desire breached the locks. To avoid undoing the geasa, I’ll need a regalis spread to send her back through.” Slavic folklore told how spores from Osmunda regalis—the royal fern—could unlock secrets and fulfill wishes, and the folklore was right, as far as it went; the phaedrealii sprang from secrets and wishes. But only phae of pure royal blood could sow the delicate spores into portals. With his magic funneled into the geasa, he didn’t have the power to spare.

  The Queen flicked one casual finger. “Simpler for you to just kill her.” She yawned, revealing sharpened teeth that glistened with the red of the walls as if she’d been drinking blood. “Or give her to me and I’ll do it.”

  Yelena didn’t even twitch, and Raze wondered if she was frozen with fear. She couldn’t know the Queen wouldn’t eat her. She also couldn’t know the Queen would do much, much worse. But when he glanced over, Yelena’s amber gaze was steady on the other female.

  “I was drawn here because I lost something,” she said, “as I think maybe you have lost something.”

  The Queen tilted her head against her palm. “And this lost thing, you very much...desire to find it again?”

  Her mocking pause echoed Raze’s earlier hesitation, and he silently cursed the word he’d chosen. The phaedrealii shunned wanton emotion now, but the phae still knew hunger. And while the Queen wasn’t one of the breeds who lived off mortal remains, there were rumors she had rendered down more than one human lover, pursuing the enchantments contained within flesh and bone.

  He forced himself not to look at Yelena, but for once he could empathize with the Queen’s relentless craving.

  Because what would he not do to have the tigress again?

  Despite his best efforts to pretend she was safely elsewhere, Yelena stepped ahead of him, the golden shimmers in her spiderling silk flickering like sunlight. “I want all beings to have the chance to walk freely in the world.”

  “Yelena.” A chill swept down his spine. It was one thing to speak such absurdity to him. To say it to the phae Queen was an invitation to mayhem.

  He was even more perturbed when the Queen finally raised her head from her hand and silenced him with a cutting gesture. “Freedom for all? Do you know what happened when last the phae walked the earth?” She rose from the throne, and the red robe unfurled around her into giant butterfly wings.

  Yelena stood her ground. “I heard you fought a war,” she said. “And lost. I’d think you wouldn’t make that mistake again.”

  The Queen’s eyes brightened to scarlet. “The mistake of losing?”

  “Of fighting,” Yelena corrected, making Raze choke with her temerity. “The world has come a long way since then.”

  Sharpened teeth flashed in a smile. “You must think I know nothing of what goes on in your realm.” The Queen shook her head in mock dismay. “Such naivety from a creature born with fangs and claws.”

  Yelena shrugged, her hands lifted to display empty palms. “My claws are not out now.”

  “That makes this easier.” The Queen raised one hand as if she would reach out in return.

  A glacial cold swept into the throne room. The rose-petal walls blackened as power drained from the sustaining illusion.

  Without wasting a shout of warning, Raze leapt.

  The flash of formless magic was strong enough to strip flesh from bone as the disrupted energy that had moments before sustained the rosy illusion arced across the space. As he aimed himself at Yelena, Raze noted dispassionately that the spread of the blast was wide enough to have clipped him where he stood; the Queen had not minded if he was caught in the backlash.

  Indeed, perhaps she would have found him a convenient casualty.

  He slammed into his wereling in a plume of breath that froze on the icy air despite the plasmatic wrath—neither flame nor fluid—that unfurled from the Queen’s fingertips. He rolled Yelena to the floor, wrapping around her to take the worst of the salvo.

  The magic flayed the tunic from his back, and his shoulders burned but he stayed hunched around her. The Queen let out a howl that stung the glowing whirlwind into a twisting, wrenching rage.

  His own magic was too far away, left behind with his blood in the carved wards locking the portals. Regret burned worse than the skin on his back.

  Suddenly, saving the phaedrealii seemed less vital than saving this one wereling.

  He stared down at her, curled so close he could count the striations of gold in her eyes. “Bite me.”

  Those eyes widened. “What?”

  “I need you.” He kissed her, hard and fast enough to startle the tigress.

  She nipped him, just a tiny sting, but he felt the verita luna rise at the threat. Changing shape couldn’t help her though, not this close to the Queen’s fury.

  He swiped his finger across his bloody lip, winding his phae trickery with her natural body magic. He didn’t have much, but he scattered the shreds of his tunic in a veil around them. The unwoven spiderling threads, reinforced by his enchantment, caught and deflected the Queen’s blast, the filaments flaming incandescent before withering to ash.

  They had only moments before the frail barrier was incinerated.

  He rose, yanking Yelena to her feet. “Run. Change and run.”

  “Not without you.”

  “I can’t—”

  The petal wall behind them, already shriveled from the withdrawn magic, crumbled dryly around a multi-jointed fist. “Come,” EveStar said calmly, as if the throne room wasn’t a cyclone of fire.

  Yelena was already in motion, twisting her arm in Raze’s grip to grab his hand and pull him along. He resisted just long enough to let the ash fall into the shape of bones—a pathetic sleight of hand, b
ut maybe enough to give the Queen pause—then threw himself behind his wereling.

  Chapter Eight

  Yelena doubted EveStar was any more a friend to her than the Queen, but the other phae wasn’t actively trying to fry them, and that difference seemed worth acknowledging. They fled the crumbling labyrinth of the in-retrospect-not-so-beautiful rose, plunging blindly through the dried paper walls, that strange fire licking at their heels.

  They burst out through the final wall of the palace, and the thousands of butterflies forming the facade took wing. Yelena batted at the fluttering mass, suddenly not so enamored with butterflies, either.

  Raze stumbled into her. Avoiding the bugs, she thought, until he abruptly sank to his knees, breaking her grasp.

  She gasped his name and crouched beside him. Her stomach churned at the sight of him, back burned smooth of the geasa that had been carved there.

  “Go,” he snarled.

  “Not likely.” She wedged her shoulder under his arm. “EveStar, help me.”

  The phae turned back, her long fingers writhing with agitation. “I can’t touch him. We mustn’t...”

  Yelena snarled too, feeling the tigress in her throat. But she couldn’t change and still carry him. If only she could summon the tigress’s strength without the shape.

  A fighting spirit would have to be enough.

  Gritting her teeth, she hauled him upright. “Come on, Prince of Flutes. Ugh, why couldn’t you have hollow bones?”

  “I think they had turned to stone,” he said. “That’s why I felt nothing. Nothing until you...”

  The confession was forced by the skin-to-skin contact, she knew, yet she couldn’t help but flush with pleasure at his words. Or maybe it was the heat of his burns. “What you’re feeling is shock. We have to get out of here.”

  EveStar was gesturing urgently toward the boat, still canted adrift on the black sands. “This way. You need to take him back to his cavern. The Queen is afraid to reach that deep.”

  Yelena wondered what was there to frighten a phae. Besides the scarred phae in her arms.