“We have orders to reclaim the dust the ventor has confiscated.” The second faerie’s voice was a pitch higher, but still a man’s.
“Orders from whom?”
Both faeries spun. Catori had crept up behind them, as lithe as a feline. One of her palms was flush against the forearm adorned with the filigree tracks filled with captive dust. Dust she could manipulate. Hunters stored dust beneath their skin, but they couldn’t access it. Only Cat had that ability.
“Massina,” one of them exclaimed.
“Who gave you orders to retrieve dust from this hunter?”
The faeries looked at each other. A split second later, knowing their queen couldn’t fly, they sprang upward. Cat ripped the dust from her arm and then fashioned a burning arrow from the blazing ribbons, which she launched at the fleeing faeries. She missed—I suspected on purpose—and the arrow curved back toward her like a boomerang, landing in her fingers.
She watched them until their bodies vanished behind a blanket of clouds. “Did you recognize their voices, Lily?”
I’d been so consumed with rage and worry that I hadn’t even tried. I shook my head as I crouched beside Kajika and placed a hand on his back. A growl erupted from his mouth, and he whacked my hand away. I felt the blow deep in my chest.
I snatched my trembling hand back, and as I rose back to my feet, I stared at the muddy ground flecked by tufts of yellowing grass, then at the clumps of mud smudging the white soles of my sneakers.
Another pair of feet appeared beside mine, and then a hand touched my arm.
“He’s shaken up, Lily,” Cat whispered.
Her words did nothing to comfort me. Truth was, the hunter had never liked me because I was a faerie, and although he was fae too, he didn’t consider himself one of us. His loathing for me had grown the night I’d marked him. And for some reason, it had amplified recently. I suspected it was because he felt like I had kept him away from being with his family.
When they’d all left on the Caligo Dias, he’d had to stay behind to keep an eye on me. Not only was I a Seelie, but I lived with Catori’s father. I was a double threat.
Sometimes, I wished he’d just left.
2
The Assault
Shadows had crept over Cat’s brow as she crouched beside Kajika and touched his shoulder. He didn’t push her away. Even though Cat was now married to my brother, I didn’t think the hunter had ever stopped wanting her.
Kajika turned his feral gaze on me. He’d heard me. Ever since I’d marked him, he could hear my thoughts. Having me in his head had increased his loathing for me tenfold.
I didn’t step back. I didn’t move. I simply crossed my arms in front of my chest and kept my gaze leveled on his, daring him to contradict me.
“Did they get their dust out?” Cat asked him.
Without turning away from me, he said, “No.”
There was a disturbance in the air, and then two new bodies materialized beside us.
Cat’s brand must’ve flared to life, because my brother had come.
“Cat!” Ace worried about her first now.
I’d slid into second place months before.
Always second.
I couldn’t even fault my brother for it. He loved his wife. I loved his wife. I just wished someone would put me first. Was that so much to ask?
“Hey, Lily,” came a familiar voice.
I squinted at Ace’s dark companion. The shock of seeing Silas swept through me, blowing away the pity-party I was throwing myself.
Since the night of Cassidy’s birthday party on the beach, our paths hadn’t crossed. Ace had made Silas the new draca, which kept him busy.
His chest seemed to have expanded, and his arms—his arms were ropes of muscle beneath bronzed skin. Even his eyes had changed. Instead of gold like all lucionaga, they’d turned a luminous, almost phosphorescent green. The only thing that remained unchanged was his long hair swept back into his signature ponytail.
I’d had a crush on him once upon a time, but like all of Ace’s friends, he hadn’t taken notice of me. Silas smiled, and I grinned back. If it hadn’t been for the grunts emanating from the still-hunched hunter next to me, I might’ve asked the new draca a thousand questions about his life, but the moment didn’t feel favorable for catching up.
“The faeries said they had orders to attack,” Cat was telling Ace. She’d risen from her crouch and was now standing closer to him than to Kajika.
“Did you send them?” Kajika growled at my brother, amber eyes glinting like forged metal.
Skies only knew how my brother managed to contain himself. He pressed his lips tight before muttering, “Of course not.”
“They didn’t manage to get any dust out,” Cat added.
“Were they lucionaga?” Silas asked.
Cat shook her head. “They didn’t have golden eyes.”
“Whose dust do you carry, ventor?” Silas asked.
I hadn’t even thought of this… Not only was Silas strong, but he was also smart.
I turned toward Kajika, who was glaring at me. What had I done now?
He shifted his angry gaze off me, and then his mouth moved. “Liv Vargas, Frid Lief, Mallory Thoms”—he recited the names like a priest recited psalms from the Bible—“Sibyl Anders, Vivienne Moss, and Adison Wood.”
Cat’s black eyes widened at the mention of my mother’s name. She rose to her feet, then turned toward Ace. “Could your mother have done this?”
“My mother’s in mourning. She hasn’t seen anyone since Linus died.”
Linus.
Our father.
Since his death, Ace had referred to him solely by his first name, as though avoiding the word father could distance him further from the man he’d loathed. I didn’t have much love for the man either, but for some reason, I couldn’t refer to him by his first name. Not that I thought about him much anyway. When I’d been exiled from Neverra, he hadn’t shed a single tear.
I signed: Frid Lief. Frid had been Borgo’s cousin. Borgo, who took his life after revealing he’d had an affair with Kajika’s mate, Ishtu.
“Lily could be right. Frid has political pull and no love for the Unseelies,” Silas said.
Ace studied his draca. “Return to Neverra and convene a meeting of all the people whose dust Kajika confiscated.”
“Very well, massin.” He inclined his head toward Ace, then Cat, then me. Third best. Yippee. “Lily, I hope to see you soon. In Neverra, preferably.”
I smiled as he soared back upward.
“Did they hurt you?” Ace asked Cat, running his gaze over her exposed skin.
“No. They didn’t hurt me. Ace, I tried to shoot them out of the sky. Not to kill them but to immobilize them. I’m not sure it was a very dignified move, but—”
He pressed a finger to her lips, then tucked her hand in his and pulled her aside. They spoke in hushed tones. He was probably reassuring her that it was okay, that they’d deserved it. I doubted Ace would ever chastise Cat for protecting her friend, even though my brother wasn’t a fan of said friend.
Kajika finally pressed his blood-caked hands into the earth and heaved himself up to his feet. “You did not have to come, Lily,” he mumbled through gritted teeth. His tattered t-shirt flapped in the wind.
Your brand flickered.
“You no longer come when it ignites.”
I raised my eyes to his. One, it lights up all the freaking time. Two, you look so thrilled to see me when I show up that I’d rather stay away…or spend time with Faith. Even she’s friendlier than you. Which is saying a lot, considering how surly she is.
Faith’s mother, Stella Sakar, was a two-timing social climber who’d tried to kill Cat. In the end, Cat had offed her—a detail Faith was still not privy to. She didn’t even know her mother was dead. She assumed Stella was off on one of her endless, exotic trips. That was what Stella had claimed her extended absences had been, when in fact she’d been frolicking in Neverra with Faith’s biol
ogical father, Neverra’s wariff, Gregor Farrow. He was a cold, cold man with an agenda as thick as an encyclopedia.
Why Ace had kept him as wariff still staggered me. My brother claimed it was wiser to keep his enemies close, yet it didn’t reassure me. I despised Gregor.
“Did he…do something to you?” Kajika’s voice jolted me out of my thoughts.
I cocked an eyebrow. What?
“The gajeekwe, did he hurt you?”
Gregor? I blinked. He was overjoyed when I was kicked out of Neverra, but he never outright hurt me. I wasn’t much of a threat. In his eyes, in most people’s eyes, I was only ever a silly little princess.
Kajika’s jaw set so tightly I thought he might be in pain.
Want me to patch you up?
A lock of silky black hair slipped over his brow. “Patch me up?”
You know, close up your wounds? Our fire can injure, but it can also heal.
“You should not waste your fire, Lily. You do not have a limitless amount. Besides, I am a hunter. I heal fast.”
Not just a hunter, but an Unseelie. I tried to keep the distinction from my thoughts, but of course it seeped from my mind into Kajika’s. The moment my words hit him, he hiked his upper lip in a snarl. He hated to be reminded that his tribe’s Great Spirit was in fact an Unseelie spirit trapped in a human body.
When Gwenelda had explained it to him, he’d punched a hole in the drywall of Holly’s old cottage. I’d been there because Gwen had brought me in to discuss Cruz’s plan of awakening her buried tribespeople with her new clan of hunters.
“How are you feeling, lil’ sis?”
I turned to Ace and signed, Great. I added a smile so he wouldn’t worry.
He had enough to worry about, what with being king. He took my hand in his and closed his fingers around mine. Our bodies used to burn at the same temperature, but not anymore.
“Your skin is freezing.”
I pulled my hand out of his so I could sign: You’re just overheated.
My brother’s blue eyes churned, and he grunted. I took it he didn’t believe me.
“Have they made progress in locating the lock?” Kajika asked.
“That won’t help Lily.”
Changing the lock on the portals wouldn’t help me reenter Neverra—Kajika knew it…everyone knew it—but it would help hunters return to Rowan. Most of Kajika’s tribe was in the faerie world. From what Cat told me, they had settled in and didn’t particularly want to leave. Kajika refused to believe this. He was convinced the faeries were keeping his people hostage and mistreating them.
“It very well could counteract her skewed stamp.” The hunter was pretending to be concerned about me. I used to appreciate it when I thought it was genuine, but I’d come to realize that my life mattered as much to him as the life of the men he fought in the barn.
Catori bit her lower lip. Unlike Kajika, she was truly worried about me.
Kajika’s gaze flashed to me. “That is not true,” he said quietly.
I startled. What isn’t true? That Catori cares about me?
A nerve ticked in his jaw.
“The hunters are working day and night with the lucionaga to find the lock,” Ace continued.
Uncovering the lock to the portals was the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack, because the portal lock could be anything, from an adamans petal to a doorknob to an insect to a needle.
“If it can counteract her stamp, then it would be unhoped for, but I’m not relying on a hypothetical solution to save my sister.”
“What if we cut off her wrist?” Kajika suggested. “It would get rid of the stamp.”
It would also get rid of my wrist. I like having a hand. Not that a hand would be of much use to me if I were dead.
Cat hissed at the heinous idea.
“Are you fucking insane?” Ace all but shouted.
Cat closed her fingers over his forearm, as though she sensed he might take a swing at the hunter.
“No one’s lopping off anyone’s hand,” she reassured him, or maybe she was reassuring me. “I had an idea earlier.” She filled them in on the plasma injection.
It won her a derisive grunt from the hunter and a deep sigh from my brother. “Faerie fire isn’t human fire.”
Meaning it wouldn’t work.
The corners of Cat’s mouth turned down. I had to admit I was pretty crestfallen, too.
I traced the pale lines on my wrist that should’ve been a circle slashed by five irregular lines. Instead, it resembled a spherical maze.
Ace touched my shoulder. “Lily, I gave you my word…you’ll be coming home.” His expression was so determined it shrank some of my dread.
As long as Cruz doesn’t die, I signed.
Ace flinched, which made me angry, because it meant he was still entertaining the idea of letting his best friend take his own life. If Cruz died, it would annul all the ties he’d forged during his lifetime, thus erasing my awry stamp. I’d rather take my own life than allow him to take his.
Ace needed him.
Neverra needed him.
Who needed me?
“Lily—” Ace reached out for me, but I shook my head and stepped back, and then I shot up into the sky and used what little stock of fire remained beneath my skin to get away from the brother blinded by blood ties, and the hunter irritated by my very being.
3
The Research
“Lily!” Cat burst into my bedroom a half hour after I’d arrived.
What? I signed, my fingers moving lethargically through the air. I’d bathed, changed into my favorite nighty, and started a new book, but none of these things had done much to brighten my mood.
“Cass just called. Faith went into labor.” Cat’s cheeks were flushed and her black eyes bright.
I sat up so fast the book propped on my stomach toppled onto the bedsheets.
“I’m going to go to the hospital. Want to come?”
I nodded, then yanked on a long cashmere cardigan that hit mid-thigh, rolled on thick socks, and grabbed my bag.
Faith was prissy and critical, an armor she donned to keep people away. Beneath it, she was a sensitive girl. Well, more faerie than human girl. Cat was toying with the idea of telling Faith about her heritage, but it meant broaching the subject of her missing mother. Announcing you’ve murdered someone’s mother—even in self-defense—isn’t a simple thing.
I unplugged my phone from its charger, and then we left the house just as Derek drove in with the hearse. Cat lowered her SUV’s window to tell her father we were going to the hospital.
“How sweet of you girls. Is Stella back?”
Cat became as still as the gray headstones surrounding us.
“I don’t know,” she said, and I could only imagine how much it hurt her to lie to her father.
Derek was the kindest man in the world, and the absolute greatest father. How I wished my father could’ve been even a teeny bit like him.
“Cass probably called her,” Cat added.
Derek had been present the day Stella died. Technically, he was the reason she’d died. Stella had taken him hostage to recoup her kidnapped dust, but instead of recuperating it in her palms, she’d recuperated it in her mouth. Her own dust had asphyxiated her, and she’d crumbled into ashes in the Prices’ kitchen. Sometimes I caught Cat staring at the grout between the tiles and shuddering, as though she could still see traces of Stella. Sometimes, Derek would absentmindedly rub his throat as though he too remembered the blade that had bitten into his skin and killed him. He had no memory of his death, thanks to Kajika who’d influenced him to forget.
Cat powered her window up and rolled past the hearse and out of the gate. For a long moment, we were both lost to our thoughts. But then, I took out my phone and typed, Are you sure Faith will want us there?
Cat’s eyes flashed to my lit screen. “She’ll probably gripe about it the whole way through, but deep down, I think she’ll be glad for some company. I can’t imagine having a
baby all on my own.”
I typed, Like Ace would let that happen. You’ll be lucky if you get a second alone once you’re carrying his child. And if it isn’t him, it’ll be Veroli. Or your dad.
A flush streaked her face. “Really not in a hurry to have any kids.” But then she glanced my way and added, “Because you’re not going to be stuck to me once I’m carrying your nephew or niece?”
My lips twitched into a smile. I rested my elbow on the door and pressed my cheek into my open palm, staring at the autumn-burnished trees and moonlit asphalt. I would love to be an aunt, but for that I’d need to exist.
“I can hear your negativity all the way to here,” Cat said after some time.
I sighed.
She closed her hand over mine. “You’re going to live.”
I lowered my elbow. But not at the expense of Cruz.
She concentrated so hard on her windshield that a small groove appeared between her thin, black eyebrows.
“There has to be a loophole, and we’ll find it.” She released my hand, but not before saying, “You really are cold.”
A full body shiver raked through me as she said it, because I was cold and scared of what it meant to be this cold. Did I have another two months in me, or less?
“I want you to promise me something, Lily. I want you to promise me that you’re not going to fly anymore. Flying uses up too much fire.”
I gnawed on my bottom lip, resenting how pathetic this body of mine had become. An empty, useless shell.
“Promise me.”
The urgency in Cat’s voice made me nod.
I’d try.
Minutes later we drove into Mullegon, and then we parked in Mercy Hospital’s lot. Cat texted Cassidy to tell her we were in the waiting room. We grabbed two coffees and sat on the plastic chairs underneath buzzing strips of too-bright neon.
Cat kept looking around, lips pinched so tight that I signed, You OK?
“This is where Stella attacked me,” Cat explained quietly. “In this hospital. On the day Astra died.” Goosebumps pebbled her exposed forearms.
I touched the top of her hand, then moved my hands through the air, She’s gone.
Raging Rival Hearts Page 2