These Hollow Vows

by Lexi Ryan

  “Your turn,” I say, mustering all my bravado. I still don’t know if this will work. “Return my sister safe and alive to the mortal realm—send her to Mage Trifen’s so he can tend to her.”

  His mouth twists with rage, but he snaps his fingers as he glares at me. “It is done.” He steps toward me, but I’m still too numb to object to his nearness. “You think you’re so clever,” he says. “But you never said I had to return you to the mortal realm, and now you have signed your own death sentence. I would rather see my peasant-loving nephew on this throne than let a human woman take charge of my court.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  Mordeus straightens and opens one big hand. Suddenly the scar-faced servant girl who took me to the restroom is between us. He holds a blade to her throat. “You’re not. But she is,” he whispers. “And I hear you’re like my nephew in your fondness for protecting the weak.”

  A thin line of blood appears on the blade where it bites into her skin, and her soft whimper is more piteous than the loudest cry for help.

  He goes on. “You think you can trick me, but your unskilled magic is no match for my power. Your mortality and empathy make you weak. Bond with me, and she will be spared. Refuse me and watch countless others just like her lose their lives because of you.”

  More blood trickles across the blade.

  “Release her,” I say, my voice broken. I’m floundering. The throne room is lined with Mordeus’s sentries, all looking ready to tear me apart at the first order. If this worked, maybe Jas is safe now, but I might be the reason that this innocent girl dies. “Please.”

  “You’ll take the bond?”

  I can’t die without knowing Jas is okay, and I can’t allow the bond and give someone so cruel control of this power. I can’t abandon the innocent Unseelie who’ve already suffered so much from his rule.

  “Bond with me,” he growls. “And this ends.”

  “No.” My voice shakes three times on the single syllable, but my chin is high.

  Mordeus slices the blade across her throat, and blood burbles from her mouth and neck, covering his hand before she falls to the floor.

  When he opens his hand again, his magic flares, and another girl appears in the first girl’s place. This one can’t be more than twelve. She fights his grip, and the knife at her neck bites into her skin as she looks desperately around the throne room.

  “I have dozens upon dozens of humans at my disposal, all bought and paid for thanks to the greed of your kind,” he says. “How many are you willing to sacrifice for your own selfish reasons? How many lives is your stubborn pride worth?”

  The girl’s blue eyes are wild before landing on me. I watch the moment she takes me in. Then I see it there in a flash: hope.

  Hope.

  Even with another girl dead on the floor before her and a blade digging into her throat, she has hope.

  I tap into that feeling and blanket the room in darkness. It’s Mordeus’s element but mine too, and I’m stronger than before. Invisible tendrils of power tether me to the throne and the court. I draw on all of it as I mentally wrap the night around each of his guards, locking them into little boxes of shadow just as I disappear into my own. The king loses his grip on the girl as he lunges forward to stop me, but I reappear behind him, the adamant knife Sebastian gave me in my hand. The moment he spins to face me, I plunge it into his heart.

  Mordeus roars in pain, and everything moves in slow motion—his snarl as he grabs a handful of my hair, the hot, sticky blood from his chest pouring onto my fingers, and the keening cry of the young girl who’s fallen to her knees behind him.

  Mordeus strikes with his bloody blade, aiming for my gut and finding his mark, but he falls to a heap on the ground before he can drive it home.

  With shaking, bloody hands, I help the girl to her feet. “Do you have a safe place to go until I can get back to you?” Countless humans, he said. All just waiting to feed Mordeus’s power and extend his cursed life.

  She nods. There are tears running down her face. “My sister,” she chokes out, and I realize she’s looking at the body of the first girl on the floor. The one I didn’t think fast enough to save.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper. I’ve sacrificed so much to save my sister, but I let hers die. “So very sorry.”

  She sinks to the floor to smooth her dead sister’s hair from her face, and the sight threatens to tear away my numbness. I don’t have the luxury for the pain or the terror that want to claim me. I have to go.

  I snap a thread on my goblin bracelet.

  Bakken’s eyes go wide when he surveys the scene before him, his gaze locking on the false king who is dead on the floor in a pool of his own blood.

  “Take me to Finn’s catacombs.” I wipe my hands on my skirt, my stomach roiling at the smell of blood and the feel of it under my fingernails and soaking the silken sleep clothes that cling to my skin.

  Bakken steps back and shakes his head. “You ask too much.”

  “I always pay,” I say between clenched teeth. I squeeze the handle of the dagger in my hand so hard the threads in the hilt bite into my palm. “Take me to the shadow prince’s catacombs.”

  “The location is a highly guarded secret. This isn’t your average information.”

  Without thinking, I wrap my fist around my hair and use the bloody knife to sheer it all off. I shove the handful of hair toward him. “Here.”

  His eyes bulge, and spittle drips from the corner of his mouth as he takes it from me. “Yes, Fire Girl.”

  I close my eyes, prepared for the nausea that comes with moving through the world with a goblin, but it doesn’t help. When the world stops weaving beneath my feet and I open my eyes, I’m surrounded by darkness so deep even my eyes can’t quite make out where we are.

  “I leave you now, Fire Girl.”

  I sense more than see Bakken disappear, and I don’t try to stop him. The air is cold and smells of damp earth. We must be deep underground.

  Mordeus thought he could drug me to convince me to bond myself to him. Then he thought he could use innocents to force me. Which means that Mordeus is as untrustworthy as everyone said and as devious as I feared. But I was prepared for Mordeus to be devious.

  I wasn’t prepared for the same from Finn.

  All this time, that’s why Finn helped me. He was hoping I would fall for him and eventually trust him enough to bond with him. He planned to claim my life force and with it the magic crown I didn’t even know I carried.

  I believed I had friends here, actually felt less lonely than I did in Fairscape. But Sebastian is the only real friend I have, and I have broken his trust too many times to count.

  Slowly, my eyes adjust and I have to bite back a sob. I don’t know what I expected to see. These are his catacombs. Of course the dead are kept here. But even so, I never expected this.

  The catacombs hold row after row of glass coffins. I rush forward. The woman inside the first one is young—probably my age—and her long blond hair is pulled over one shoulder, her eyes closed. Her hands are folded across her stomach.

  She wears a soft white gown of lace and looks like a bride ready for her wedding. I put my hands on the glass—to push it aside, to wake her up, to . . . Save her?—it won’t move.

  I press my hand against the glass. “No.”

  I step to the next and see a young man. He has sunken cheeks and sallow skin. He was probably starving when he offered himself to Finn. Maybe he was like me and had a younger sister relying on him. Maybe he handed his life over so someone he loved could survive.

  Coffin after coffin, human after human, these catacombs tell a story of a monster who was willing to take the lives of men and women to protect his own. When I come upon a coffin with a familiar face inside, I lean on it and choke back a sob.

  Kyla. I watched as she offered herself to him. Sacrificed herself because whatever life she’d been living had been worse than this fate—eternity in a glass coffin.

 
; I wanted to believe that Finn was good. When Bakken told me about the curse, I wanted to believe that Finn would never take a human life, that he’d let go of his magic and sacrifice his own immortality before falling victim to the awful choice offered by the curse. Part of me knew—part of me has known for a long time—just what it means to be a tribute.

  I wanted to believe we were friends and that the connection I felt when we touched meant something. Instead, the connection was nothing more than a crown I don’t want. A crown he needs. A crown he planned to kill me to take.

  “I keep them here to honor them.”

  I spin around in the darkness. Finn stands behind me, the orb of light floating at his side illuminating that criminally beautiful face. That lying mouth. Those deceiving silver eyes. “Are you going to finally ask me to bond with you? Or maybe you’re too much of a coward to take the crown you and your friends have been grooming me to hand over.”

  He leans one shoulder against the stone wall and closes his eyes as if he is very, very tired. “Then you know everything now?”

  “I know you planned to kill me from our very first dance.” I can’t keep the pain from my voice. “Everything you did to win me over you did for the crown—to get me to bond with you so you could be sure the crown would be yours.”

  Straightening, he drags his hands through his hair in frustration. “I can’t solve the problems of my court from exile.”

  My hands shake, but I’m not scared. I’m . . . hurt. My gaze scans across the row of coffins, and the room tilts around me. I press a hand to my stomach and feel the sticky warmth of Mordeus’s blood. Of my blood, still oozing from the dagger’s shallow strike.

  “And while you worked to manipulate me, you were killing all these innocent people because you believed your life was more important than theirs.”

  When I turn back to him, he doesn’t deny it. A mask of resignation covers his face, and sadness glistens in those silver eyes. No, not sadness. That’s what he wants me to see, and I won’t be manipulated. Not anymore.

  I swallow hard, but it does nothing to push down the ache in my chest. “Did you kill them all?”

  “No, but enough.” He walks to the first coffin and gently presses his fingertips to the glass as he studies the woman inside. “Too many.”

  “Do you even know their names?”

  “Every single one.”

  I nod to the coffin his hands are resting on, the one holding the bride. “Who’s that?”

  “Her name was Isabel.” His voice cracks, and he lifts his head to meet my eyes.

  I remember asking him about Isabel—who she was, what happened to her. I remember the anguish in his eyes when he replied, She was mortal.

  “You killed her,” I whisper. “You killed your own betrothed.”

  “Yes.” It’s hard to hate him when he looks so broken, but the facts make it easier. He is not the male I was beginning to believe he was.

  “The king is dead,” I say. I want him to know what I’m capable of—that I’m not so easily manipulated or bested. I want myself to know.

  “I know.”

  I pull my dagger from my calf but keep it wrapped in shadow in my palm. “I killed him.”

  “I know. He underestimated you from the beginning. But your mother didn’t.”

  An image of her smile flashes in my mind. “Don’t talk about my mother.”

  My eyes burn. I can’t think about that. Not when I’ve spent the last nine years so angry with her for abandoning us. I can’t think about all the anger I’ve felt that she didn’t deserve. I can’t think about how much she sacrificed for me. Not yet.

  “I could have forgiven you for the deceit, but this?” I wave my hand toward the coffins. “I’ve lived my whole life in a world that thought humans could be bought and used. I will never give the crown to someone who is part of that problem.”

  His jaw twitches as he flicks his gaze over me. “You should make use of the dagger you’re hiding in your hand and kill me then. Because as long as I live, I have an obligation to my people. So as long as I live, I will fight for that crown you wear.”

  My hand shakes as I adjust my grip on the hilt. Killing him wouldn’t bring back all these humans, but he would be one less shadow faerie taking innocent lives.

  I take a step forward and he doesn’t move.

  Would he even fight me, or would he just let me end him?

  I trusted him.

  And I betrayed Sebastian. For my sister, yes, but for Finn too. For his kingdom. For his chance to take back his throne.

  I try to grip the dagger for a proper strike, but I can’t. My fingers refuse to tighten. So I run. I find the stairs and run up and up and up. I feel him watching me, but he doesn’t follow. My lungs and legs burn as I climb, but I’m driven by something more than oxygen, and I keep going until I smell the fresh air of day and see the light of the sun peeking in from a door beyond.

  I scramble into the sunlight and collapse onto the pine needle carpet of the clearing. I can’t catch my breath, and it’s not just because my heart is pounding so fast or because the pain from the serpent’s bite and the gash in my gut are finally catching up with me.

  Finn betrayed me, I betrayed Sebastian, and it all hurts more than I can handle.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “LADY ABRIELLA,” EMMALINE SAYS SOFTLY. “I’m sorry milady, but you need to wake up.”

  I try to open my eyes, but it’s too hard. I roll over and put my pillow over my head. “No. I need to sleep.”

  Emmaline squeaks, and I’m vaguely aware of her and Tess having a low conversation as sleep claims me again. “Just found her here.” “Bleeding too much.” “Find the prince.”

  “Brie?” Sebastian’s voice. The smell of leather, salt, and sea. Sunshine on green grass. “Brie, wake up.”

  I don’t want to open my eyes. I’m in a soft bed, wrapped in blankets. I can smell him all around me, and I don’t remember why, but I know I don’t want to leave this safe place.

  “The healer needs to look at you,” Sebastian says softly.

  With those words, everything slams into me with the clarity of someone pulling the curtain to reveal a sunny day. I don’t want to face the reality of what I’ve done. I can’t handle the thought of Sebastian hating me.

  “Abriella, open your eyes.” Why does his voice sound so gentle? Doesn’t he know? His hand is warm and rough against my cheek, and I lean into it as he runs his thumb along my jaw. “You scared the shit out of me. You know that, right? Please just open your eyes so I know you’re okay.”

  But I don’t want to open my eyes. I don’t want to end this dream where he still cares for me.

  His soft breath flutters against my lips, and then his mouth is on mine, gentle and coaxing. My heart squeezes. Sebastian.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper against his lips, finally opening my eyes.

  “Sorry?” His face is lined with worry, but he’s still bowing close to me, his eyes scanning my face again and again.

  “For stealing the book. For deceiving you. I couldn’t tell you about my deal with Mordeus. I had to save Jas.” I close my eyes before adding, “I’m sorry I trusted Finn when you warned me I shouldn’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  The mattress shifts as he sits on the bed next to me. He pulls me into his arms, his touch and warmth such a relief that tears stream down my face. “Let the healer look at you, and then you can tell me everything.”

  So I do.

  * * *

  We spend most of the night talking. I tell him about my deal with Mordeus, about the mirror and the book. I tell him about training with Finn and about the night I was drugged and Pretha dragged me away from the castle. I tell him about the crown and finding the trick in the bargain. I tell him about Finn’s catacombs and what a fool I’d been to believe that Finn wanted to help me.

  Sebastian listens to every word without judgment, without any of the anger I deserve. And when I’m drained—when the story is told
and my words are all gone, when my body feels weak with relief and exhaustion, I let him hold me and I fall asleep.

  * * *

  I don’t wake again until light is streaming into the bedroom. Sebastian’s still in bed with me, still holding me, watching me.

  “Did you sleep at all?” I ask.

  He nods. “A little. How do you feel this morning?”

  I sit up in bed, rubbing my eyes. “Better.” Tilting my head, I study him. “Still a little surprised that you can tolerate the sight of me.”

  “You were in an impossible situation, and you did what you had to do.” He strokes my cheek with the back of his hand. “My love isn’t so fickle that it fades under stress.”

  I snuggle closer to him. “What would have happened to the crown if I’d died without knowing I wore it? Who would have gotten it if I’d never bonded to a faerie?”

  “We don’t really know,” he says. “This isn’t a situation my realm has ever encountered, but any Unseelie who tricked you out of that crown could take the Throne of Shadows.”

  “And what if I bonded with a member of the Court of the Sun and passed it to him upon my death?”

  Sebastian draws in a sharp breath and his eyes flash with hope. My Bash somehow still wants a life with me after all I’ve done. “Only one with Unseelie blood can rule from the Throne of Shadows, but all any shadow faerie would need is that crown and the throne would be theirs. I hope you understand now why I didn’t want you to come here.”

  He warned me. Sebastian warned me about this world, about Finn, and I didn’t listen.

  “I spent so many years being angry with my mother,” I say, tired all over again, “and I’m beginning to believe she sacrificed everything for me.” Even after sleep, my voice is raw and my throat hurts. “That’s why she left us, isn’t it? Somehow she left to protect me?”

  Sebastian tucks my hair behind my ear. “After Oberon saved you and passed his crown to you, she realized very quickly that there would always be fae chasing you—looking for the crown and trying to trick you out of it.”

  “Is there any way I could . . . get rid of it? If I don’t want it, could I somehow . . .”