Tithe

by Chani Lynn Feener

  “You don’t have much time, little dark thing,” he chuckled, and reached for her.

  Before she could think to move away, Mavek was there, shoving the Erlking hard enough to send him sprawling half a dozen feet away.

  The disgusting water Unseelie were upon the Erlking in a blink. They ripped at him in a frenzy, moving so quickly that it was impossible to make anything out aside from the twist and twirl of their slick, eel-like bodies.

  Arden didn’t realize she was retreating, unable to pull her eyes off the attack taking place. A strong arm banded around her waist, lifting her and carrying her out of the water. She didn’t struggle against Mavek’s hold, but she kept trying to look over his shoulder.

  “They’re clearing out the iron,” Mavek growled in her ear, realizing what she was doing. “You’re lucky. The fact that they’re even bothering to remove the poison means that they’ve been tricked into thinking he’s the tithe.”

  “What did you do?” she whispered, or at least, she thought she did. She couldn’t be sure. Her head was still a little messed up from the vision the Erlking had shown her.

  Without responding, he deposited her on the edge of the water, though he didn’t let her go once her feet were back on the ground. Instead, his arm tightened, and he walked her weak body forward to a safe distance away from the shoreline.

  Not that it seemed to matter; the Underground faeries weren’t coming after them. Arden caught sight of them dragging the Erlking beneath the surface, saw the tip of his boot disappear and then the lake went still.

  Like the past ten minutes had never happened.

  “She’s murdered one of our own,” Titania hissed, and reality came crashing down on Arden.

  She peered out over the Unseelie, biting her tongue when she saw all the shocked and angry faces staring back. She’d never meant for the Erlking to be the tithe, but they all knew that she had meant for him to be dead. She wouldn’t have pulled an iron blade on him otherwise. It didn’t seem to matter that she hadn’t technically delivered a killing blow.

  “The tithe has been accepted,” Mavek called out, raising his voice so that everyone gathered could hear. “We’ve got our seven years, no matter how untraditionally it was collected.”

  “She murdered Herla!” Titania repeated, clearly amazed that Mavek seemed so eager to overlook this detail. “A Bloodheart killing one of us is grounds for revenge. We’re entitled blood for blood.”

  “He survived,” Mavek disagreed, “you all saw it. The selkies saved him.”

  “And dragged him to the Underground!”

  “Yes,” he agreed firmly, “as the tithe. Which, as you also witnessed firsthand, was not her doing.”

  Titania glared at him, but he only held her gaze for a moment before turning his attention back to the crowd. His voice was firm, leaving no room for argument when he addressed them next. The whole while, he wrapped his arm firmly around Arden, keeping her close enough that none of the onlookers dared move toward her, let alone attack.

  “Think about it,” he said, “what better sacrifice than one of our own? And one of our most powerful, at that! We all know a Blackheart is worth more than any Bloodheart could ever hope to be.”

  “We have no souls,” hissed one of the men who’d been holding Cole earlier. His fists were clenched tightly at his sides, and his chest kept rising and falling as he attempted to reign himself in. He wanted to kill Arden to avenge his regent. “We cannot be tithes because we have nothing to offer those in the Underground. That’s why they allow us to remain here in the first place!”

  “Give her to them!” someone cried out.

  “Call them back!” suggested another.

  The crowd began calling out their agreement of this plan, and Arden couldn’t blame them. Why risk the wrath of those in the Underground? The Erlking had been taken, sure, but she’d gathered by their reactions that the creepy selkies were merely a delivery service.

  The receiver could still deny the tithe.

  A few of the Unseelie surged forward, grabbing onto Tabitha who’d been hovering by Cole. She screamed and tried beating them off with her fists to no avail.

  Arden began struggling in Mavek’s hold as well, knowing logically that there was nothing she could do to stop them from harming her friend, but needing to try anyway. But all she accomplished was hurting herself with the attempts to break Mavek’s steely hold.

  Another fae stepped forward, shoving the Unseelie off Tabby. He flicked them away as if they were bugs, taking Tabby in his arms and pulling her closer to Mavek. He reached down and grabbed Cole’s arm as he passed, helping him stand. Though his dark brown hair and bulky build were unfamiliar, the shadow at his feet was easily recognizable.

  Brix.

  Arden let out a sigh of relief and immediately deflated in Mavek’s hold. Even though she’d just sacrificed his regent, she knew there was no love lost between Brix and the Erlking. While the number of Unseelie she trusted had dwindled immensely, she found she had faith in Brix. He’d been more honest with her than pretty much anyone else, after all, including both Mavek and Eskel.

  “Quiet!” Mavek ordered, and his voice was so commanding that even her heart stopped for a beat in fear. A gust of wind swept forward, almost like he’d called it, and once it’d passed everyone grew still and quiet, even Titania.

  “These humans are mine,” the Midnight Prince growled, “if anyone so much as scratches one of them, that Unseelie will be met with worse than death.” Titania took a step forward and his heated gaze shot to hers. “Do not test me, Ania. Even you will not be safe from my wrath should harm come to them.”

  “Threatening me, Midnight?” Her eyes narrowed. “I’m far older than you.”

  She kept moving until she was standing only a couple of feet away. She was about to add a threat of her own but she paused to glance almost absently at Arden. When she did, her eyes widened and all the fight drained from her.

  “Oh.” She blinked a few times, as if unsure if what she was seeing was real. Then she looked at Mavek, and his expression was enough to confirm her suspicions. “This changes things.”

  “I’m aware of that,” he stated.

  “Is sh—”

  “No.”

  Arden frowned, confused over why Titania seemed to be having a change of heart. A second ago, the queen had been ready to take Arden’s head off, and now…?

  The corner of Titania’s mouth turned up mockingly and she let out a little giggle.

  Mavek tensed.

  “No one touches the girl,” Titania called over her shoulder to the rest of their people. “Or her friends.”

  “But the law—” a willowy faerie girl began, only to clamp her mouth shut when the queen glared at her.

  “No law was broken.” Titania waited a beat, silently urging someone else to argue with her. “And the tithe was accepted, we saw it ourselves. While it is true that we have no souls of our own, I know from past personal experience with the Underground that Herla will be an acceptable sacrifice. They’ve been wanting him back for ages now.” She glanced at Mavek, sharing a pointed look with him. “Any more doubts?” she asked the crowd.

  When it was clear that no one had the guts to speak up again, the queen ran her palms down the front of her dress as if easing out the wrinkles, then waved at Cole and Tabitha vaguely. “See that these humans are taken care of, Brix.”

  “Of course.” Brix bowed his head and kept it there.

  “This is going to be fun,” she said to Mavek next, lifting a hand to cup his cheek. She ignored Arden as she did so. “You’ve made such a mess for yourself. I look forward to watching you attempt to talk your way out of this one. That silver tongue of yours can only get you so much. Even you have limits, darling.”

  Titania turned and sauntered through the crowd, which parted and then swarmed around her. They all began to turn, some sending last looks over their shoulders at Arden, before heading off into the woods back toward the manor.

  “
Why do I have a terrible feeling right now?” she whispered, unable to get her voice any higher and knowing that he’d hear her anyway.

  The three of them had just been spared by both remaining faerie regents, meaning that none of the others would dare come after her or Cole or Tabitha… and yet she didn’t feel comforted. Instead, Arden kept replaying the Erlking’s last words—she wasn’t yet ready to focus on what he’d shown her—and Titania’s comments. They’d both looked at her right before something in them had changed.

  Why?

  “Mavek?” she urged, falling back into old patterns, needing him to comfort her despite everything she’d discovered about him.

  He lowered his head and pressed his firm lips against the curve of her left ear. It would have been tender, sweet even, if not for the fact that his arm was still holding her up.

  “Sleep, Arden,” he ordered, with that same note of sway in his tone that she’d heard coaxing her inside her head during the challenge.

  As her eyes began to droop, she realized that she still didn’t understand how Mavek was able to do that. She’d trained enough that his sway shouldn’t affect her like this, especially not this quickly. She opened her mouth to ask, but the darkness swept her away before she could get a syllable past her lips.

  The last thing she heard was Tabby and Cole’s outrage before oblivion took her.

  “Arden,” the voice was soft. Persistent. “Arden. Arden.”

  “What?” She grumbled, swiping her hand in the air in the direction of whoever was speaking. She rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position to slip back into sleep, and came up against the hard wicker backing of a bench.

  Blinking, Arden pried open her eyes and stared in confusion at the white material, then spared a glance down at the soft blood-red padding cushioning her weight. She’d seen this particular bench over a dozen times in the past, but had never sat on it. Usually, her trips to the greenhouse were spent wandering around, taking in the flowers.

  She seemed doomed to suffer the same fate over and over again, falling asleep only to awaken dazed and confused, blissfully unaware of past events.

  Until she wasn’t. She recalled everything that had transpired then, all of it.

  Slowly, she forced herself to sit up, gripping the back of the bench to steady herself. She didn’t know how long she’d been unconscious, but she still felt the lingering pulls of tiredness. The outfit she’d worn for the Halloween party was torn in places, and the material of her pants were stiff at the bottom from where the lake water had dried. Both of her daggers were gone.

  “Arden,” Tabby repeated, from where she was kneeling next to the bench. She was shaking, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, hair a twisted mess around her slim shoulders. Tear marks stained her reddened cheeks, and her full bottom lip was dried and cracked.

  Swallowing to wet her own parched throat, Arden turned toward her friend. She didn’t reach out however, part of her afraid to do so. Because maybe if she did, she’d find out that this was a dream—that she hadn’t actually been able to stop the Erlking from sacrificing her best friend.

  “What’s going on?” Tabby asked, interrupting Arden’s litany of fears.

  They were in the greenhouse, tucked into the far back corner, surrounded by thick red roses on all sides. Many of the rose bushes were grown in table-height planter boxes. Although the bushes weren’t as large as those in the garden outside, they were still big enough that someone could easily hide within them.

  Arden opened her mouth to tell her friend that she didn’t know, when she caught sight of Cole sitting a few feet away with his head down.

  “He’s been like that since we got here,” Tabby said once she’d followed Arden’s gaze to her cousin. “I tried to reach him, but he won’t snap out of it. They didn’t… You don’t think they did something to him, do you? Something,” she licked her cracked lips, “faerie?”

  If this had been yesterday, Arden would have said no. They’d been trained against that sort of thing, against persuasion and sway. But now… Mavek had penetrated her mind so easily, not just once, but twice.

  Tabby cleared her throat and rested a hand over Arden’s. “What you did for me—coming back, risking yourself like that—I’ll never forget it.”

  She flinched. “It’s my fault you were involved in the first place.”

  “No,” Tabby shook her head vehemently. “It’s not. None of this is.”

  Arden sighed and pulled away. This was not how this night was supposed to go. She’d always imagined that by this point she’d be happy, ecstatic even, because she’d won and that meant freedom for her and her family.

  She snorted. Freedom. From a curse that wasn’t even real to begin with. A curse that had been fabricated by the very person she’d believed all this time she could trust. The one person, in fact, she’d counted on. She felt like a pathetic fool for buying into Mavek’s crap. For allowing herself to fall so deep that she’d considered herself in love with him.

  A fresh wave of anxiety hit her at that, and the nagging sensation at the back of her mind told her that part had been true—and maybe, those feelings weren’t all gone just yet. But how could she still feel that way for him after everything? What kind of a monster would that make her?

  Despite what Tabby said, they all knew the truth. This was, in fact, Arden’s fault. She was the one who got involved with the Unseelie, despite knowing what they were capable of. She was the one who’d become attached. If she’d been strong enough to face the supposed family curse from the get-go, then none of this would have happened.

  What kind of monster was she already?

  When Mavek entered the greenhouse, she felt him. It was a strange feeling, like a tingling up her spine and a slight shift to the pressure of the air. It was unlike anything she’d ever felt before, and it caught her off guard.

  He rounded the corner and came into view less than a minute later, two Unseelie close on his heels. He was still wearing the same clothes as earlier, only he’d added a pea coat in the same deep crimson shade as his favorite roses over his still-open vest. The coat covered all of his tattoos, aside from the three that swept over his chest.

  Brix was back in his preferred form. The familiarity of the red hair, even though she’d only known him as that for a grand total of about ten minutes, was comforting.

  Arden recognized the other faerie, but had never actually conversed with him. His arms and legs seemed slightly too long for his body. It wasn’t overtly unnatural: he could easily pass for human without a glamour, with his short chestnut hair and light brown eyes.

  “They’re going to take them into the house,” Mavek told her once they were close enough for his words to reach her. He stopped his small entourage a good ten feet away, knowing her well enough to understand that she’d need space right now.

  Which she hated. She hated that he knew her at all, let alone that he did so intimately. All the private things she’d told him came flooding back and her hand twitched. It was probably a good thing her weapons had been taken away, because she might have actually used them against him in this moment.

  Or, at the very least, might have tried. As pissed off as she was, she wasn’t one hundred percent delusional. She was very aware what had happened with the Erlking was pure luck; she’d never be able to take on Mavek.

  His words registered and she got to her feet.

  “I’m thinking not,” she told him. “The last time I left them, you almost sacrificed them to hell.”

  His lips thinned but aside from that, he masked any ire he might have been feeling. “Only Tabitha would have gone to the Underground. Cole would have been free to go on his way after.”

  “With a dislocated shoulder,” she pointed out, “and the knowledge that he’d basically gotten his own cousin murdered? Yeah, sounds great. You’re right. Don’t know why I’m so upset about this. Let’s kiss and make up.”

  “That isn’t funny, Arden.”

  “It wasn’t me
ant to be, Mavek.”

  “We aren’t here to debate. This isn’t like all those other times you’ve disobeyed me. Right now, I am the Midnight Prince, and you are the Heartless who almost cost my people the Tithe. We all would have been dragged back to the Underground with no way of ever returning.”

  “Good,” she spat, ignoring the painful stab at the center of her chest at the thought of never seeing him again. “It’s what you all deserve.”

  “Careful, heart,” he warned, “you’re getting dangerously close to the edge. You won’t like the drop.”

  “Are you threatening me now?” Maybe she’d been programmed during their time together to do these dances of theirs, to argue with him even when the situation called for self-preservation. Or, maybe she’d gone insane after all.

  Either way, Arden wasn’t in the mood to bow down, especially not to someone who’d all but ruined her life. Someone she still couldn’t fully shake out of her system, despite everything he’d done. Everything she’d just discovered about him. There was a chance that she was in shock because of it all, every dark thing, every trick, and every lie. Who knew, tomorrow she could wake up with a clear head and a heart devoid of any feelings for him aside from hatred.

  A girl could hope, anyway.

  “I hate you,” she said, but the words weren’t just for him, and by the glint in his hazel eyes, he knew what was going through her mind.

  “Take them and go,” he ordered the two fae at his back, who immediately stepped forward to execute his command.

  Tabby got to her feet and stepped back into Arden, the move almost sending them both toppling back down onto the bench.

  Cole didn’t so much as twitch.

  “I’m sorry,” Brix said, stopping in front of them. He held out a hand, palm up, and met Arden’s gaze. “Please, I swear I won’t let anything else happen to her. The manor has been cleared, and it is now safe for them. No one will lay a finger on them.”

  “Aside from you, you mean,” she corrected, and couldn’t bring herself to regret the accusation, even after all that Brix had done for her. Or tried to do, really.