She was already in the basket, giggling over something Dawson had told her.
“Hey, Lily,” he said, before his gaze climbed up the length of the hunter’s hulking figure. Terror scrunched up his features. “You’re…” He tugged at his gray tunic collar. “Did you grow?”
When Veroli and Dawson had traveled to Earth, Kajika had met them, but briefly.
“His biceps certainly did,” Magena said.
“That must be it.” Dawson pushed his mop of blond hair off his freckled forehead.
“You are huge. I’m not sure you’ll even fit through the opening of the wigwams,” she added.
“Wigwams? You built wigwams?” Kajika asked.
“They’re different than the ones we used to live in. Way neater.” She patted the space on the bench next to her.
Kajika gave the faerie-made contraption another lengthy once-over.
“Will you ride too, Lily?” Dawson asked me, strapping himself back in.
I will fly next to you, I signed. I gave Kajika a little shove. It’s safe. I promise. Besides, I’ll hold your hand if you’re scared.
“Scared? Me?” He shook his head. “You have me mistaken for a Seelie, Lily.”
I pinched the taut skin at his waist in retaliation for earlier.
He finally climbed in, inspecting each inch of the basket. When Dawson lifted off the ground and the basket teetered, the hunter turned a little green.
I hopped off the ground and flew beside them. As we traveled across the sky, Magena talked and talked, mostly in Gottwa. Here and there, she slid in an English word. I drifted away from them, flying closer to Dawson.
Where is Ace? I signed.
“In the Valley with Negongwa and Gregor. They’re updating the portal stamps. The old one is taking to Unseelie skin now that he has the lock.”
Below us, the Pink Sea glimmered wildly. A shadow flickered beneath the waves.
He dipped his chin toward the shadow. “That must be Catori. She’s been trying to teach me to hold my breath underwater, but I really suck at it.”
I stared at her a moment, and then I unzipped shoes and tossed my bag and boots inside the runa. Like a pelican, I dive-bombed toward the shadow that recoiled so fast that by the time I opened my eyes, it had vanished. I kicked back toward the surface that had shifted from mirror-calm to agitated, probably to match Cat’s mood. I scanned the wavelets for her, but she must’ve receded into the depths because no one had come up. I heard Kajika yelling for Dawson to get lower, but then I didn’t hear anything anymore as I was swept under.
My heart rose into my throat. Instead of kicking, I turned to stone and sank. And then I stopped sinking, and a glimmering form rounded on me. I pressed my hand over my pounding chest, which caused Cat to break into a grin.
Even though the water slowed my hand movements, I signed, You scared me.
She shook her head, then signed the very same thing.
We kicked back to the surface. The second our faces broke over the surf, she pulled me into a quick hug. “Way to announce yourself, Lily.”
The anxiety that sinking had caused me—propelling me to a time when it hadn’t been playful—gradually retreated.
“Lily!” Kajika roared.
Cat looked up at the same time I did. “If it isn’t the hunter who swore he would never step foot in Neverra,” she said playfully.
Kajika was too busy glowering to respond. I knew what he was thinking because I was thinking the exact same thing. I wasn’t even sure what had gotten into me to dive into the water.
“You were not thinking,” he muttered.
“I feel there’s a story there,” Magena chirped.
Cat’s smile was gone. “Did you just get here?”
I nodded.
“We’re going to the Valley. Want to come, Cat?” Magena asked.
“I’ll go get changed and meet you there.”
I rose above the water, steam curling off my body.
“Unlike some of us, I don’t dry instantly,” she said.
I smirked, and then I didn’t, because I was thinking about my made-up engagement.
Kajika put my thoughts into words. “Catori, were you aware of the lie your mate fed me?”
Her forehead, which looked more like hammered copper than tiny scales, furrowed.
“Ace told me Lily had gotten engaged to Silas.”
“He said what?” Her voice was as sharp as her shine.
I sighed, relieved she wasn’t in on the lie.
“Why would he do that?” she said.
“I am guessing it was to keep me away,” Kajika said.
Magena piped up. “This is the most entertainment I’ve had since the day Catori vanquished the mist.”
We all looked at Magena. At least one person thought this was fun.
Cat must’ve decided she didn’t need to dry off, because she caught ahold of the bottom of the volitor basket, scaled it, then leaped inside. She wrung out her hair. “Dawson, take me to my husband.”
Dawson’s eyes darted around anxiously. Poor guy was probably thinking this would be his last run as a runa driver. He rose and the basket rose with him. And then we were flying over the panem. I stared down at the dandelion clovers and my heart contorted. I raised my face toward the sun, willing its bright rays to blind me.
Would this ever get easier?
When I tipped my face back down, my gaze collided into Kajika’s. His lips were pressed into a soft line.
“With time, Lily,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear. “With time, it will become easier.”
But time passed so slowly in Neverra…
“When you lose someone,” Kajika said, and Cat and Magena stopped chatting, “time comes to a standstill everywhere.”
A faraway gleam appeared in both girls’ eyes. Both had lost loved ones. Cat had lost her mother and Blake. Magena had lost her sister and countless others.
For the first time since I’d fallen for the hunter, my jealousy of Ishtu waned. He had loved her like I had loved Cruz, but both were gone, and we remained.
We remained…
46
The Traveler
Although I’d headed to the cliff before leaving Neverra, I hadn’t yet seen the Valley, hadn’t yet witnessed the Gottwas’ new settlement.
Huts made of the same pale-gray rock as the cliffs peppered the perfectly round valley like stone igloos, circling a huge edifice made of curved glass filled with concentric, raised beds of soil.
The Gottwas had built a biodome? Did they fear our farmers would refuse to sell them their wares, or were they setting up competition? Then again being self-sufficient was a laudable quality.
By the biodome’s entrance stood a cluster of people and bodiless Unseelies, their smoky forms weaving through the settlement. Did they live here too now?
I turned to look at Kajika, wondering what he could be thinking. But he wasn’t looking down at the Valley. Something had caught his attention on one of the stone ledges cut into the sides of the cliffs. A capra slithered there, or perhaps a quila had taken flight? A tuft of blue grass swayed, hiding whatever animal had passed through it.
I stared back below. Several people had turned to look up. My gaze caught on one face. I dove ahead of the runa into the Valley and straight for the person that face belonged to—my brother.
The second I landed beside him, I moved my hands to form words. How could you?
Ace gripped my wrist and pulled me aside, away from Negongwa and Menawa, with whom he’d been discussing skies only knew what. I snatched my hand away.
“It was a test, Lily,” he said, his voice low. “I wanted to see how much you meant to him, because you mean the world to me, and I didn’t want to see you get hurt.”
My heart shook in my chest. I wanted to sign a thousand words, but my fingers trembled so much I couldn’t even form one word.
He reached out and squeezed my quivering shoulder. “I’m sorry, okay? I should probably not have gone as f
ar as to concoct a fake engagement.”
You think? I managed to sign.
He sighed, and it bulked up his chest. “Maybe it was a shitty way of apologizing, but the page from Ley’s book—”
That you stole from him!
“Stole from him? I may be a bastard at times, but I’m not a thief.”
“Ace Wood!” Cat sprang toward him.
Ace cracked his neck from side to side as though gearing up for a fight. Cat did seem exceptionally angry. Her wet hair flogged the air as she strode over toward my brother, still clad in her black one-piece swimsuit that made her look like a sexy action figure.
She poked him in the chest, and Ace raised his palms. For an entire minute, he let her talk—yell at him. And then he wrapped his hand around her still poking fingers and lowered them. “Got it out of your system?”
“How could you do this to them? Would you have appreciated if someone did that to you?”
He tipped his face to the side and studied her a moment. “Someone did do that to us.”
That quieted Cat.
He leaned toward her and although he spoke softly, I heard every word. “And next time you yell at me, wear some clothes. Your outfit is very…distracting.”
Spots of color appeared on Cat’s cheekbones.
Kajika had stepped out of the runa, but he hadn’t moved toward us. He was still scanning the rocky ledges.
“If anyone gets to be mad at me, it’s Kajika. And Lily…but she’s already spoken her piece. Kajika?” Ace called out to him loudly. “If you have something to say, I’d rather get it over with now.”
The hunter finally looked away from the ledges and approached us. Every few seconds, he halted and glanced upward.
What is it? What did you see?
Ace was scanning the jutting ledges too now, and so was I.
“What’s going on?” Cat asked, eyes pinging from us to the rock.
I walked over to the hunter, who still hadn’t answered me, and took his hand in mine. What is it, Kajika?
He ripped his hand from mine and lurched toward my brother and Cat. They both stumbled back in surprise. Lucionaga zoomed through the settlement. They grabbed Kajika by the biceps and hauled him up.
Kajika tore his arms out of their grasp. “You useless people, protect your king and queen.”
That’s when I noticed the arrow protruding from between his shoulder blades. He reached around and yanked it out just as another arrow soared through the purple air from the exact spot Kajika had been watching.
It struck a lucionaga in the thigh.
The guard let out a blood-curdling scream that warbled as he fell over, driving the arrow further through his leg. Smoke rushed out of his wound like a geyser. The arrow hadn’t hit his heart, but if it was infused with Unseelie blood, it didn’t matter.
No one helped him, all too intent on shielding my brother and Cat. I rushed to the lucionaga and tried to pry the arrow out of his flesh, but my fingers kept catching fire. Hands scooped me up and dragged me back.
I fought back, until I heard Kajika’s voice in my ear, “Do not touch it, Lily.”
Just as the guard exploded into ash, Kajika spun me around and sheltered me against his chest. For a second, he held me there, murmuring words my buzzing eardrums didn’t register, and then he screamed Gwenelda’s name, and I thought she’d been hit, but then she was there, next to us.
“Keep her safe!”
He released me, and it felt like a knife had sheared me away from him. I stumbled against Gwenelda.
Kajika! I scanned the chaos around me for him, but he’d blurred away. Gwen was staring upward, her square jaw set in a hard line. I followed her line of sight and finally saw my hunter scaling the cliffs alongside his brother. While Menawa had a quiver full of arrows strung across his back, Kajika was weaponless.
Panic overwhelmed me, and I turned to Gwenelda. Although her features were tense, she wasn’t trembling like I was. How I yearned for her calm. No part of me was calm. Not my mind, not my body, not my heart. All of me was as chaotic as the Valley.
Gwenelda ushered me toward the lucionaga surrounding my brother. Cat broke out of the circle and dashed toward us.
“Who did this, Gwen?” Her voice was shrill.
“I do not know, Catori.” Her gaze had risen from Menawa and Kajika to a spot a couple ledges up from them. “I do not know.”
She squinted. We all did.
And that’s when I saw him. The man who’d launched an attack on the king.
Cat gasped, because she’d seen him too. “How did he get here? Who let him through?” She was yelling now, frantic.
And that was when it hit me. Not an arrow. Thank the skies, not an arrow. But the realization of what had happened to the hunter’s missing page.
My brother hadn’t stolen it; Pete had.
47
The Death
At some point, my brother broke free of his guards and soared into the sky so dizzyingly fast that it took his lucionaga terrible seconds to catch up.
Cat watched her husband blast upward without screaming his name, but her lips quivered. I assumed she was too frozen with fear to speak, or perhaps she didn’t want to distract Ace’s focus.
Menawa had reached the ledge from which the arrows had been shot. The long blue tufts of grass shivered at his feet. Where was Kajika? I searched the wall of rock for his form, my extremities tingling with dread.
Ace landed on the lip of the ledge beside Menawa. Something glittered in my brother’s hand—a weapon forged of dust.
No one moved for so long that I pushed off the ground. I wasn’t planning to intervene, but I wanted to see what was happening. I needed to see. It was visceral.
Gwenelda’s hand wrapped around my ankle and held me back like a child holding onto the string of a balloon.
“He will never forgive me if something happens to you, Lily.”
But I couldn’t just stand there.
“Please,” she begged, and I started to drift back down, but then a wild, gravelly scream shook the Valley.
Gwen’s fingers uncinched, and I bounded upward, leveling off at the ridge just in time to see my brother’s glittery sword slice into Pete’s waist. The man writhed against Kajika, who had him pinned to his chest.
“Who sent you?” Ace growled.
“No one!” Pete screeched. “No one!”
“You really want us to believe you’re working alone?” Ace asked calmly.
Could my brother be right? Could the Daneelies have ordered this attack?
“It was all me. Only me!” Blood had blotted into Pete’s navy t-shirt and soaked into his jeans. It stank up the air.
Kajika caught me staring. Although his eyes sparked with fury—probably because I’d disobeyed him, or maybe he was furious with Pete…I hoped it was the latter—he didn’t yell at me to return to the Valley.
He let me watch.
Let me approach.
The crescent scar that spanned Pete’s cheek writhed as he grunted, wringing his body, trying to break free from Kajika. He could try all he wanted—there was no breaking free from the hunter once he’d caught you.
I knew this firsthand. Unlike Pete, though, I wasn’t looking to break free.
“Who gave you access to the portals?” Ace asked.
“I did,” Kajika suddenly said.
I gasped.
The hunter was so far beneath the ledge that I couldn’t read his expression. “I had a page from Ley’s book, and that page was stolen from me. I did not report it, because I thought you had taken it from me, Ace.”
You could’ve led with that.
The hunter’s eyes flashed to mine.
“Why would I— Oh.” My brother’s pinched shoulders relaxed the merest bit.
Pete squirmed again, and Kajika tightened the arm he’d wrapped around the man’s throat.
“We let you into our home,” Menawa hissed. “We taught you our ways, and this is how you repay us? By trying to k
ill Ace Wood?”
“How did you get down from the portals?” Ace asked, voice as rough as sandpaper.
Pete wheezed, clawing at Kajika’s arm. The hunter must’ve loosened his grip, because Pete managed to blurt out, “I jumped.”
“And no one saw him?” Ace skimmed the faces of the guards bobbing around him. “Or did someone help him?”
A volley of protests rose from them in a cacophony, matching the one below me in the Valley where everyone had congregated around Cat and Gwenelda and were squinting to see what was happening.
“What did he do? Brainwash you? Just because one of your people married him, it doesn’t make him a virtuous person. He’s a murderer! Just like his father and his grandfather. A fucking murderer!” Pete yelled.
“We are all murderers,” Menawa said in that thunderously calm voice of his. “We have all killed, Pete. But we have also learned to set down our weapons and use words instead of arrows and dust.”
“Fat good that did you. Look at where the lot of you are living. Ostracized in a fucking valley.”
“We chose this place. We were offered a calimbor. We were offered the Glades. We picked this site. No one forced us to live here,” Menawa said, but then shook his head. “Why do I bother explaining this to you? We owe you no explanation, Pete. We owe you nothing.”
“Not even mercy, oh peaceful warrior?” Pete bit out, but then his cheeks rounded and flushed as Kajika flexed his arm.
Menawa didn’t let Pete’s taunt rattle him. Instead, he calmly turned to Ace, “What would you like us to do with him, Massin?”
Massin… Even to the Unseelies, my brother was considered a sovereign? Since the Hareni was built, no Unseelie had spoken the term, always referring to the Neverrian kings by their first names.
For a moment, the only noise that could be heard across the Valley was the swaying of the long grass and the soft wheezes coming from the traitor’s flapping lips.
Then Ace said, “I will let Kajika decide his fate. After all, it was Kajika who was tortured and stolen from.”
Tension thickened underneath that dark ledge as the hunter weighed my brother’s invitation. His gaze moved off Ace and onto me. Was he trying to see if killing the man would frighten me? Even though I hated the idea of inflicting death, I hated the idea of letting Pete live more.
Raging Rival Hearts Page 27