by Meg Xuemei X
A large, rough hand landed on my shoulder.
Without turning, I knew it was Ephraim, one of my oldest friends. For an eon, we had fought shoulder to shoulder in every battle and bedded females together. He had just come to Earth to rejoin me a few weeks ago.
“The prince will share my table,” Ephraim told the brunette.
“Your Highness,” she said, focusing on me, “we have better seats at the top floor.”
“When I asked you for the best seat,” Ephraim grated, “you said it’d been reserved.”
“Well, reserved for His Highness,” the hostess said.
“You didn’t know he was coming,” Ephraim insisted.
If the hostess was any other species than angel, the offended angel would have struck her in vengeance. But I was their high prince, and the hostess was an angel, so there would be no further dispute.
“My friend will join me,” I told the brunette. “Take us to the table, and bring your best drinks.”
“Absolutely, Your Highness,” she said, flapping her wings and lifting into the air.
Ephraim and I followed suit.
“My name is Joliette,” she said over her shoulder.
A polite, pleasant female who was eager to please me. She was the opposite of Rose. It seemed every female was the opposite of the fey princess.
Rose should watch and learn from those amiable females. But first, she needed to understand the concept of compromise. To live a healthy, happy, and fulfilled life, she must bend, like anyone else.
My mind drifted to the picture of having her bent over a table and penetrating her from behind.
My cock hardened, which only added more frustration. I went there to get her out of my head, not to invite her back in. I couldn’t even jerk off like other males. There was no relief and no break for me.
I eyed Joliette. Why couldn’t she be the one who evoked my lust? She would never grab me by the balls as Rose had been doing with delight. Joliette, Lolietter, or whoever, would be flattered by my interest instead of treating my lust as an insult.
I had heard that many female angels entered a bid to see who would be the first in my bed and break the seal of my celibacy. I could tell from the way Joliette looked at me that she knew about the bet as well.
If only Rose could see what other females saw in me and would do to win me—
Then a sharp realization hit me: it wasn’t going to happen.
The Mysthians had dominated the planet of Earth since the beginning of their existence, until we angels came.
They were an extremely arrogant race that looked down their noses at any other species. They titled themselves as the Earth’s favorite and held a firm belief that their royal bloodline was descended from the Earth Goddess.
Other earthlings resented the Mysthians for their arrogance yet admired the Earth immortals to no end. They made numerous poems and music about the fey.
The more the Mysthians insisted on standing alone within the walls of their twilight realm, the more the mortals wanted a glimpse of their beauty and magic. Their obsession with the fey stopped after we conquered Earth. They now put our images on their altars and called us the sky gods. Unlike the fey, we were quite accessible to the Earth natives, only we made them our subjects and slaves.
The proud Mysthians had never thought an alien race would cross the universe to their isolated planet in the Milky Way and dominate their home world. Despite that they knew we were more powerful than they were, they still refused to bow. The fey didn’t know how to bend; the Earth immortals weren’t as adaptive as the mortals. They called us the trespassers.
By the time I strung all the pieces together, I knew the fey princess hadn’t come to Atlantis to marry the king; she had come to find a way to fight us and to end us, despite how futile it was.
Beneath her veil, she’d always seen me as her sworn enemy. Yet she’d ceded to my proposal to sleep with the high prince of her foes, in exchange—
Then a spear of light pierced me and dazed me.
Rose had never intended to fulfill her end of the bargain. She’d been using that to play me against Agro and thus divide the angels’ house.
Tales of the cunning fey were told on all lands. They were the craftiest among all species, forever good at finding loopholes in any contract. The Mysthians always knew how to get out of any thorny situation while leaving the noose around the neck of their opponents.
The princess had insisted on choosing the time and place of our future coupling. She hadn’t so much as blinked when she had agreed to the time limit I had set: two weeks before her wedding night.
She’d already laid out all of the steps to slip out of my grasp. She had planned her escape before I could come near and claim her.
That was why she had gone to see her ally the Dragonian.
That was why she hadn’t allowed herself to come for me on the mountain. She’d held a deadly control of herself, no matter how much her body had wanted me.
She was going to cheat me out of the sex contract and laugh at me in my back, as she’d laughed in my face when I’d first fled from the Spring Hall.
She’d never planned to lie with me and would never sleep with me.
Cold rage exploded in me.
I recalled how she’d played the king. She had brought over a hundred courtiers to Atlantis and sent them to him and his court. She’d started the war right from the beginning. Only it was so subtle and sinister that no one had seen through it except me.
She had also played me for a fool. She was still playing me.
She flung the spell into my face and watched the unholy lust burn me and drive me mad. A shitty thing to do! Yet she cleverly hung a string of carrots in front of me to lead me by the nose. “I’ll let you fuck me two weeks before the wedding or maybe sooner.” Ha! The bitch!
That cunning fey female had the map of Atlantis and was familiar with the secret tunnels under the great city.
The tunnel would be her escape route. She was only waiting for—
Another light struck me.
Forbidden Glory was her mark.
That was why she’d broken into the angels’ vault.
She’d seen the Glory’s power. She’d known it would reduce the combined armies of the Mysthians and the Dragonian to ashes. Yet she’d gone to face it. She’d been that desperate that she risked being ripped apart by the Forbidden Glory, or worse.
And she would go to it again to find a way for her people to survive.
My head spy had reported back to me last night that the Mysthians had divided. The majority supported the princess, which meant if she went to war, they would go with her.
A gnawing feeling sank into my bones—Rose had braced for the prospect of getting killed. She would never surrender, just as she hadn’t and would never surrender to her own lust.
She would fight us until her last breath.
And the Mysthians would rather go extinct than let another race rule over them.
That was how proud they were.
But I also made a decision: I wouldn’t allow anyone to kill my lamb, not even the lamb herself.
Ephraim and I settled at the table by an arched window that offered a great view of glimmering Atlantis. The spot also granted privacy.
While the brunette hopped off happily to fetch for me their house special cocktail Sensual Earth, Ephraim regarded me as if studying a near-extinct species. That was actually his hobby when he wasn’t stabbing anyone on the battlefield.
“What?” I asked in annoyance.
“What’s going on, Seth?” he asked with concern.
“Nothing is going on,” I said.
“I’ve known you for an eon,” he said. “And I’ve never seen you so wrecked.”
“It will pass,” I said.
He raised both brows. “Will it?”
He had seen me lose my head when Rose had come to watch us spar in the arena. To cover my trail, I had knocked out my most trusted friend.
Now I not only lusted afte
r her, I felt for her more than that. Every time I thought of her, my chest started tightening, and I didn’t like this feeling.
Last night I had gone to her chamber, cloaked, and I had seen her tears.
She had defended her lowly courtiers and even risked her life for them. When she’d been alone in her chamber, hot tears had streamed down her beautiful face for them. I’d never seen her that helpless and vulnerable, weighed down by shame and the burden that she couldn’t protect her people.
I had wanted to pull her into my arms and lick away her sorrow, but she’d immediately stiffened, ready to pounce when she’d sensed my presence.
Before she had wiped her tears—which she obviously regarded as weakness—I’d left. I had flown in the night sky for a long time until something—a seed that had been buried too deep in my cold, dry soul—sprouted inside me.
Empathy…I finally recognized it. For the first time, I could feel others’ pain and suffering.
Rose had watered it, unaware what she had done, and made it grow and finally break through all barriers.
But angels weren’t supposed to have compassion. It urged me to help others. It wanted me to reshape the politics and culture of my race. It called for a revolution to make angels a benevolent race and something other than fanatic conquerors.
Haven’t we conquered and destroyed enough worlds? it whispered to me conspiratorially.
Eons ago when we had first come to the universe, we angels had been idealistic, with the capacity for compassion. We had helped many civilizations instead of enslaving them. Then my lord father had come to power. There had been a huge power shift and bloodbath amid the angels’ houses. My warlord father had eliminated many powerful houses and started his tyranny. He had then turned our race into what we were now. That had been before I’d been born to his new queen.
But the old idea of who we angels should be and how we should play our role in the universe had been implanted in me by my brilliant mentor, carefully and subtly. My father had taken me to follow him to fight countless battles before I’d become an adult. In the long march of time, the concept of freedom, philanthropy, and morals had been pushed too deep inside me and withered—I couldn’t let it resurface if I wanted to survive in my father’s presence.
Until now, I learned that the seed had always been there, and when the catalyst—Rose—had come along and blindsided me, it burgeoned.
Maybe Rose had seen that tiny bit of spark in me, so she could stomach my touch, even though she considered me her eternal enemy. She would deny it, but we had wanted each other at first sight. I had crossed the many universes to find her, and she was the only one who made me feel again.
“Maybe we should leave those civilizations alone,” I told Ephraim.
“Dangerous talk, Your Highness,” my friend drawled.
I raised an eyebrow.
A century ago, a small group of powerful angels had started to want to observe those primary civilizations from a distance instead of leaving a brutal fingerprint on their worlds. As their influence had spread and their numbers had grown, they’d turned into the rebel force.
My lord father had ordered me to join him in squashing them after I gleaned the elemental earth magic. I wasn’t too eager to return to him. Some of the rebels were my old friends, and I would have no joy crossing blades with them and eventually thrusting my sword into their guts on the battlefield.
Ephraim was one of the secret dissenters who had too much sympathy toward the natives of the colonized worlds, but no one could touch him while he served me.
“You scold me for such talk?” I asked.
“Never, Seth,” he said passionately. “We should definitely leave them alone. Just because we’re the strongest doesn’t give us the rights to slaughter and enslave the weaker. It doesn’t grant us the right to decide the fate of other living beings. Have you ever thought that we might not be the only power in the universe? There might be a power greater than us out there somewhere. We keep going like this and one day we’ll meet that terrible power, and our race will be over probably in seconds.
“We need to stop disturbing the balance of the universe and mind our own business. We can’t be the only top predators, and we don’t want to piss off some power source. Then there would be no turning back. Even Forbidden Glory has its limit.”
I gazed out the window at sparkling Atlantis; the once earthling’s great city would be gone one day and leave no trace in history, just like many other worlds from many other universes that had vanished. I turned away from the shimmering skyline and looked at my friend. “Stop this idle talk. I’ll forgive you this time because it’s the booze talking.”
Then I realized that the drinks hadn’t arrived yet, but I didn’t care. This was my father’s rule we were talking about.
My father believed that his words were the only law in the universe. He would never let the universe be. No one could defeat my lord father. I wasn’t going to fight him either, no matter how many angels put their misguided hopes in me.
“We have to talk about this, High Prince,” Ephraim said. “I’ve followed you for an eon. I’ve been waiting for you to open your eyes all this time. Now there’s finally a crack in you to let the light in. Only when you see will we who disagree with the Lord of All Angels stand a chance to fight for the rights of the universal citizens.”
“Have the rebels finally sent you, messenger boy? Or have you been their spy in my ranks all this time?” I asked coldly, lethally.
“I’ve never betrayed you,” Ephraim said. “I’ll never even think of it. But I’ve been praying for you to see the truth that you’ve ignored and repressed for so long. The Mysthian princess has done what I failed to do—shed the light into your soul, shaken the scales from your eyes.”
My hand shot out, grabbing Ephraim’s throat. Despite his weight, I lifted him off his seat and was about to toss him out of the window or through the ceiling. “You have no fucking idea what’s in my soul,” I snarled.
My lightning would follow his fall and finish him, regardless that he was one of the few whom I actually trusted, regardless that he was my friend and would die for me without blinking an eye.
I was still the coldest, heartless, soulless High Prince of All Angels, and I was going to prove that when I sent him to death!
Ephraim didn’t fight back. Neither did he beg.
Joliette landed with a tray of drinks a few yards away, her eyes widening at me choking Ephraim. She could have sent servers to bring us the cocktail, but she came anyway.
I sent the brunette a cold look and released Ephraim as an unexpected shame that I’d never felt slammed into me with a blunt force.
Ephraim smiled wider, studying my face, as if he’d just found a treasure, despite that he’d almost being killed by his cold-blooded prince. “I apologize for being insensitive, Your Highness,” he said, then smoothly took the drinks from the hostess, waved her off, and placed the metal goblet in front of me.
Joliette fled into the air.
I tossed aside a small decorative umbrella made from wax paper from the top of the goblet and took a swig. The hard liquor was dry, tart, and strong, just what I needed.
Acoustic music blasted like a storm. I wondered if Rose liked this type of music and what it would be like if she was here drinking with me. I would have her perch on my lap with my hardness against her, and she would protest fiercely.
“Rose has awoken me and now I’ve had these damned sensual feelings and reactions,” I said, at last deciding to trust Ephraim, deciding to tell him about my secret and burden.
My friend went very still, then he blew out a sharp breath. Fortunately for him, he’d let the booze down his throat when I’d told him this stuff.
“How can it be?” he drawled. “It’s been over two thousand years—”
“It’s her scent,” I said. “It’s in my bloodstream, and I can’t purge it.”
“Unless you bleed yourself dry,” Ephraim said.
I glar
ed at him. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Of course you don’t want to do that. That would be suicidal in a foolish way.”
I bared my teeth in displeasure. “One can fight the alluring beauty and purrs of the females, but one can’t fight—”
“—the air you have to breathe in,” my friend said, then started laughing.
“Get hold of yourself!” I hissed. “This isn’t amusing!”
After he had nearly laughed himself hoarse, he quieted. “She’s the only female you can’t have,” he said, his face turning grim and sympathetic. “You can never have her as she’s forbidden to you. In a month, she’s going to be in your brother’s bed.”
Picturing Agro taking Rose to his bed made my blood boil with rage and my stomach churn with nausea. I’d have felt better if someone twisted a knife in my guts. If I let Agro have her, if she survived, Rose would come out of his bedroom battered and broken every night.
Ephraim looked up at the twinkling stars mournfully. “It will be a miracle if the girl lives to her twentieth birthday. The king won’t care. After he consummates the marriage, he’ll have a legitimate claim on Mysth, the magic kingdom he’s been coveting.”
After he assassinated the Emperor of Mysth and discarded Princess Rose when he grew tired of her, my brother would become the Emperor of Earth.
“There’s nothing you can do, Seth,” Ephraim sighed, turning to me. “You’re in an unfavorable situation. You have to let her go. I feel like an ass for saying this, but at least she broke the curse of your celibacy. Now you can enjoy females every night.”
I barked a low, dark laugh. “I tried. I summoned many of them to my quarters.”
“I guess it didn’t end well?” he asked.
So he’d heard of the bet that the unpaired females placed on getting my cock hard.
“Their scents smelled wrong to me,” I said. “I’m hot for only her.”
“She did smell good when I guarded her.”
I growled. Ephraim raised his hands in surrender. “Not the way you think, Prince.”
“I assigned you to safeguard her, Ephraim, not to sniff her!”
“I know. I’m just saying that I can see why you’re so smitten with the Earth’s beauty.”