“That bad?”
“It’s a good thing you don’t have mirrors on the warcruiser, huh?”
I winced. “It’s been a long few days.”
We drank and ate, making polite conversation. Janet was an engineer, Miquel a farmer who spent much of the year isolated on the vast expanses of wheat fields. I gleaned from the conversation that Hulia had known them a long time. Longer than she had known me. They served bite-sized parcels of spicy meats and apologized for it not being enough. Nobody had invited me into their home before. Nobody had offered me a seat at their table and spoken to me as though I were… like them. Not saru. Not the Wraithmaker. Just another friend. The fae had taken me too young from the saru for me to have known. Aeon was the closest thing to family I had. This light and laughter around a feasting table was such a simple thing, but oh so precious. What would it be like to laugh and love with my friends, Kellee, Talen, and Arran. Would we ever have a moment like this, not fraught with tension? I wanted this for us. It was a dream, but I hadn’t given up on all my dreams, not yet.
“Your drone is powered by lumines?” Janet asked as she cleared the table.
I’d almost forgotten Sota was with us. He had settled on a shelf, doing a fine job of blending in like a large, beaten-up, red-eyed metal soccer ball. He’d been watching the scene like I had.
“Lumines?” I asked, unfamiliar with the word.
“It’s what they call magic,” Hulia explained, her smile cracking around its edges.
“Oh, er… yes. He has some.” They could tell Sota had life magic in him? “I’m surprised you noticed. Tek and magic aren’t supposed to mix.”
Janet laughed softly. “When you’ve lived on Hapters a while, lumines get into your bones.”
They were talking about Faerie magic and were more right than they realized. It infected most everything it touched over a long period. If these people knew about magic, what else did they know? “Hapters does have some unusual characteristics,” I said, steering the conversation toward the tunnels.
Janet beamed. “It’s the secret to our yields. Hapters keeps on giving year after year.”
Did they know it was fae magic boosting their crops? A glance at Hulia’s straight face indicated not.
“We learned a long time ago how to combine lumines and tek.”
“Combine them?” I tried not to appear too interested, but Hulia’s narrowed eyes flicked my way in warning, or was that fear in her gaze? Why would she fear this conversation?
Janet continued to clear the dishes away, smiling like her world was perfect and she hadn’t spent the last few days trapped inside a fae vessel. Maybe she hadn’t been too concerned, but the people here were already familiar with the magic that powered the ship, the magic the fae wielded.
“The Giver came and showed us the way,” Janet said. “We are forever grateful for his generosity.”
“I’m sorry, I haven’t heard of them… Who is the Giver?”
Janet’s crinkled eyes shone with pride and something akin to love. “He died and was resurrected to show us the light.”
A religious leader?
Miguel filled my glass with water. I thanked him and took a sip, noticing how Hulia stared into hers. I was missing something here… “The Giver taught you how to combine tek and magic?”
“Oh no, he showed us the lumines and we saved him.” She reached inside her shirt and plucked out a brooch, just like the one in my pocket. “He made our future real,” Janet explained, “and made us see a world of possibilities. We built that world for him here. He has promised to return one day and see all we have done, see that his dreams are real.”
The water lodged in my suddenly dry throat. I coughed. “Dreams?”
Miguel rushed to refill my glass. I waved him off and threw a look at Hulia. She continued to stare into her cup, studiously avoiding me.
They didn’t mean Dreams. They couldn’t. I looked at the brooch in Janet’s hand. The tek encircled a red gem—a dormant, cold, hard thing wrapped in metal vines. But if I tilted my head, if I turned those vines loose and twisted them into a cage-like shape. Oh no.
The brooch was a symbol to these people. A talisman in times of need, used for protection. That’s why the mother had reached for it. She had been praying to her god in her final moments. But I’d seen it before in another form.
A tek and magic heart.
My thoughts raced to everything I knew of Eledan. For a thousand years, it was believed he had been slain in the first war. An angry mob had torn out his heart. But he had survived, his fae heart replaced with tek. Here, on Hapters?
I still had the brooch in my pocket. A talisman to the Dreamweaver. Hapters’s messiah. I wanted to rip the piece of jewelry from my pocket and smash it under my boot.
“Thank you.” I stood. “For the meal. But I really must be leaving.”
“Kesh…?” Hulia began.
The Dreamweaver had been here. He had beguiled these people and made them worship him. They loved him. But he wasn’t a benevolent god. He was fae. A Prince of Faerie. Oberon’s brother. And as capable of darkness as he was of light. He had used these people. Why or what for, I didn’t know. But the fact he had been here was enough. It was all a lie. It always was with Eledan. Illusion. I needed to see inside Hapters’s tunnels. I needed to go back to that slab of stone and its iron-poured writing.
“You’re too kind,” I mumbled. “And I wish you all the best for the future…” Sota hummed into the air and buzzed out the door after me. “Find Kellee,” I told the drone. He shot off, zipping between homes, leaving me standing outside in the dark alone.
“Kesh, wait,” Hulia called.
“He was here.”
“I know.” Hulia stopped beside me. Patches of light from nearby houses and their tiny windows peppered the pathways and Hulia. “I was going to tell you but then it seemed like it didn’t matter. He’s not here now. And so what if these people think he’s their god? It’s harmless.”
“Harmless?” I could hear his laughter, hear it so far away but it might as well have been in my ear. “You don’t know him…”
She lifted her hands to placate me. “I understand. He had me in his thrall for a few hours. With you… I know it was a long time. I know it was hard.”
He’d had me for nine months. And forever. Turning my mind over and over and over. “He’s not kind,” I snapped. “He’s not a hero. He’s certainly not a god. Eledan is fae. He’s fae, Hulia. He’s not even here and these people are his puppets. That should tell you enough.”
“Don’t lecture me about the fae!” Her eyes flashed. “We all have wounds to bear. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. You were only staying for the party, but then the fae came and… It’s over now, and these people can—”
“It’s not over. There’s something left over here, something unseelie.” Beware the nightshade. And now Eledan’s past was all mixed up here too.
Her eyes widened.
“There are tunnels. Do you know anything about that?”
“Tunnels, what? No. What do you mean, unseelie?”
“I mean, dark fae supposedly gone but not so much.” I pulled in a breath, tasting hot dust and night. “You need to ask these people what they know about the unseelie. Try to find out if there’s anything dark in Hapters’s past. I don’t believe for one second that Eledan was here and he’s not in some way connected. Find out what you can and make sure they stay inside. I killed an unseelie creature, but there could be more.”
Her double eyelids flickered. “You killed an unseelie? For real?”
“On the plains, we found a family, all killed. The mother was reaching for this.” I plucked the heart talisman from my pocket, fighting the urge to toss it away. “Eledan has one just like it that’s keeping him alive.”
She looked at the talisman seeing its true meaning. “They think he’s coming back.”
“Of course he is, because he knows there’s power on Hapters, just like there’s power on Calic
to. I will find out what’s going on. I will stop this, and then I’m going to do more.” I heard the Kellee from my past offering me a chance to make it right, heard Talen say I was everything, heard a boy once tell me a hero would come and save us, and I heard my king’s voice whispering that I was his secret to keep. All of it had brought me here to a township on a faraway planet where its people worshipped the Dreamweaver as a god and the unseelie lurked beneath our feet. None of this was an accident.
I squeezed the talisman in my hand. “I can make a difference. I can stop Faerie from conquering Halow. I will stop this war.” As I said the words, it felt as though something larger than me clicked into place. Something cosmic, something more than my deep-seated fear of the Dreamweaver, more than Hapters and its rogue unseelie. With all the magic here and the tek-heart in my hand, I wondered if my pledge had carried far between the stars to Faerie and Her king.
Chapter 13
We trudged back to the warcruiser in near silence. Arran attempted to make conversation with me, but I was lost in thought. Kellee was a silent brooding storm. Sota happily chatted with Arran, his man-crush on the gladiator gleefully on display.
When we rode the pod into the warcruiser, Talen stood in front of the doors, looking every part the perfectly in control fae. Nothing of his wounds remained. He was back in his fae leathers, his hair elaborately twined in braid upon braid. Nothing had changed besides the storm in his eyes. That was new, and he looked ready to take one of us to the wall—probably me, probably because of the pilot I’d killed. I held his gaze, waiting for the words.
Instead of speaking his mind, he said, “Sirius is in the meeting room.” He kept the storm from his voice.
“Alone?” Kellee asked.
Talen slid his glare to the marshal. An eyebrow quirked at Kellee’s fae leathers and no doubt the fact the marshal—with his errant curls, scuffs, and general disheveled prettiness—looked as though he’d stolen those leathers from someone worthier. My smile ticked at one corner. I liked how Kellee fucked up all the fae prettiness whenever he encountered it. “The ship will not permit him to be incarcerated.”
“You are the ship,” Kellee grumbled, shoving by his sometimes friend, sometimes enemy.
Arran looked between me and Talen, uncomfortably. I gave him a nod that sent him on his way. “Go with him, Sota.”
The drone bobbed in the air behind Arran, asking about the rules for a game of rock-paper-scissors. On the walk back, they had been figuring out a way for Sota to play.
Talen waited until the voices had faded before lifting his gaze to me. The emotional storm churned in his violet eyes, crackling with lightning. “You’re safer with me than either of those males.”
He was probably right. Kellee either wanted to fuck or fight me, probably both at the same time, and Arran had a habit of rushing into things before thinking. But for Talen to voice the possessive thought was unlike him. Something had him wound so tightly he was about to break. Sirius, probably.
I pulled the talisman from my pocket and held it out on my palm. “What does this look like to you?”
He didn’t look down, didn’t reach for it, didn’t even blink. His gaze drilled deeper into mine, accompanied by careful, measured breaths that rhythmically lifted his chest. I’d seen him enraged, seen him sorrowful, but this was something else. Maybe I shouldn’t have sent Arran away with Sota.
“Talen?”
“What you did—”
This was about the pilot. I lifted my chin and stared back at the fae. “What I did was necessary. I freed the people. The flight escaped, and while they’re scattered, they’re not a threat, but we’ll need to deal with them. The pilot…” His eyes flared and the storm surrounded me—his magic, so real, so present, that it pushed in from all around like invisible, intangible water. I’d drown in it if he let it all go. “He asked to die,” I whispered. “I’m not apologizing for that.”
“I know.” He started forward, the storm breaking its barriers, and before I could think to protect myself, he was in front of me, his hands wrapped around my upper arms, his head bowed, forehead touching mine. Old saru instincts tried to drop me to my knees, but he wasn’t hurting me. “You saved the pilot.” Talen breathed the words. “I saw it all. I know it cost you. Kesh… I… I would take you away from all this. Take you far away to the corner of Halow where Faerie cannot reach you.”
I looked up into his eyes and fell into Talen all over again. He never wasted a single word, so when he spoke, everything held weight and reverence. And he had offered to save me in such a foolish, unrealistic, almost romantic way that I would have laughed if he hadn’t looked ready to snap. Nobody did intense like him. “I don’t need saving,” I said. “But there are hundreds of thousands of people who do.”
“I know. I know that too.” He spoke as though the words pained him. “I know more than you can imagine.”
“So how about you tell me some of it?”
His eyes flicked between mine, his gaze so damn intense it might burn me to dust in the next second. “I want to. I want to tell you everything, Kesh. All of it. I wish I could.”
But he wouldn’t, and we were right back at the beginning, a wall of secrets and lies between us. I closed my eyes. “Let go, Talen.”
He did and stepped back, shutting down. The storm had passed and he was just Talen again—ice and fire, stardust and shadow in one perfect faerie specimen, but back under control.
“Any time you feel like revealing all these secrets, you know where I am…” I left him standing in the corridor and didn’t look back.
Sirius waited in the meeting room. Lucky for him, Kellee had stayed by the door, though he shot the guardian his stoic, unshakable lawman stare.
“There isn’t time for this,” the guardian hissed, looking even more pissed off because he had chopped off chunks of his long red hair, leaving it in a haphazard mop around his angular, stubborn face. My tek-razors had taken some removing. I felt a pang of loss over his missing locks. He had looked lordly before, and now he looked like those wild sidhe lords who shunned the royal courts in favor of Faerie’s hills.
“Said by an immortal who has all the time in the worlds.” I had my whip back, its weight clipped reassuringly to my belt. Sirius’s gaze dropped to it as I approached the table. Apparently, he and Talen must have come to an agreement, because he wasn’t broken or kneeling—as Talen had promised—but he did look forlorn, as though someone had taken his favorite toys away.
“Send the vakaru away,” Sirius snapped.
Kellee snorted. “This vakaru does what he wants.”
Sirius’s smile wasn’t pleasant. “A vicious, mindless race. Oberon should have killed you with the rest instead of sparing you.”
Oberon had spared Kellee?
A whisper in the air was all the warning I had. Kellee was suddenly standing over the guardian, his right arm raised, claws poised to tear the guardian’s throat out. “Kellee! Don’t!”
Kellee’s lips rippled, curved fangs bared. “If it were up to me, your immortal life would have just been severed at the root.”
Sirius’s mouth twisted. If he laughed, Kellee would cut out his throat and gut him.
I barely had control of Kellee at the best of times. If he killed Sirius here, we could lose a valuable contact. “Kellee, leave us.”
The marshal snarled, making sure he had the last word, and flung Sirius away. Sirius’s gaze tracked the marshal all the way out the door. It wasn’t until he had left that I realized Sirius had gotten exactly what he wanted: me, alone. I dropped my hand to my whip and kept the table between us.
The guardian’s face was the picture of fae arrogance. He was in my ship, surrounded by his enemies, and he still looked at me as though I were just another one of his household’s saru playthings. That glare might have held more weight, but his messy hair diluted the effect.
“Your retinue is impressive,” he said tartly. “For a saru.”
“What did you mean when you sa
id Oberon should have killed Kellee?”
“Didn’t he tell you?” Sirius’s green eyes flashed with malice. “Did you not wonder how a single vakaru survived? It is only by our king’s leniency that your vakaru lives.” Sirius sat himself at the table, draping all his guardian self into a chair like a feline sprawling in the sun. “Kellee stood by and watched the fae snuff out his people. One by one.”
The glee Sirius took in retelling the tale made me want to spring across the table and choke the life out of him. Kellee would never have stood by and let his people be killed. Never. Sirius was twisting the truth and I couldn’t afford for him to drive a wedge between us. We did enough of that without help from outsiders.
“You came here for me?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Oberon ordered you to retrieve me?” I reworded the question, remembering I was speaking with a fae.
“He did.”
“And to kill my friends?”
Sirius bowed his head. “Indeed.”
“But Talen is alive and the two of you appear to be fine. He bargained with you?”
Sirius wet his lips, his mind crafting the right answer. He reached up and ruffled his hair, and then frowned when his fingers combed through it too quickly. “There are few of Faerie’s creations I fear. I do not fear the king, though many do. I do not fear the Hunt, though perhaps I should. Your Talen, I fear. We bargained. We forged a truce. I will speak no more of it.”
Interesting. “You won’t kill my friends?”
“No.”
“Any of them?”
He sighed. “I cannot give you my word if I do not know who your friends are. And what is your definition of friend?”
“You don’t need to kill anyone. You’re here to take me back to Faerie. Can we agree on that?”
“Yes. And we should be leaving. Time is not our ally. Our king needs you.”
Old longing reared its ugly head. The need to be seen, the need to be loved. A king’s promises whispered into my ear. I shook my head. “He’s been doing just fine without me for a few thousand years. He has Faerie. He doesn’t need me.”
The Nightshade's Touch: A Paranormal Space Fantasy (Messenger Chronicles Book 3) Page 13