Mirabel wondered if he meant it was imperative they conceal their activities from the rest of the Lords. It seemed the nights the two of them spent alone with each other were over. “What do you intend to do?” she asked, her eyes moving from one strikingly attractive face to another. They were beautiful as only pure light and shadow can be, yet when she reached out a tentative hand it was real material she touched—smooth and warm beneath her fingertips from the heat of their bodies—not the insubstantial moonlight from which she had once woven their shirts. These were real jackets they wore now, not just shadows.
“You’re here!” she breathed. “Really here!” She wondered what it would be like when they all pulled out of her at once and suddenly dreaded it. She had planted the seeds of their desire to take physical form in her heart, which meant they were rooted inside her, and her feelings were inextricably entwined with their willpower. If they should be forced to rip their naked force out of manifestation abruptly, how would it affect her?
“Yes, we’re definitely here,” the blond Lord agreed with a smile as stern as a frown.
The dark-haired Lord grasped both her hands in his. “Are you sorry?”
“No.” She was realizing they could move freely through the kingdom now, which meant they could behave like young noblemen. She snatched her hands away. “You mustn’t make others like me! You can’t!” Her uniqueness threatened, she fixed Dur with a defiant, even threatening, stare. “You’re here to create endless vessels for yourself—is that it?” she accused.
“It’s an entertaining idea.” The golden-haired Lord whipped her with his hard smile again. “But quite impossible.”
“We are our own sons,” Dur explained. “We’ve used all our power to create life to fashion forms for ourselves. We can’t conceive another one and we don’t wish to. As for others like us, there aren’t as many as the Council fears and even fewer who would risk everything we have.” He glanced down at her naked thighs.
“What?” she whispered. “What have you risked?”
“That’s just it.” His eyes rolled up to meet hers again. “We don’t know yet.”
“But allow us to introduce ourselves,” the blond said lightly. “My name is Rhode and my brother here is Tain. Thank you for trusting us.”
“And for everything else.” Tain was by far the most handsome of the three rebel Lords, yet for some reason it was Dur to whom she was the most intensely attracted.
“What do you intend to do?” she asked again.
“Stay close to you,” Tain replied, unsmiling.
“We would like our own keep, to begin with,” Rhode informed her as if merely requesting an apple from a tree.
“You can’t mean…?” She closed her eyes to the possibility that they were only the selfish cats the older Lord had made them out to be.
“Stop frightening her,” Dur said firmly. “All he meant, Mirabel, is that we must choose a keep to live in as normal men.”
She couldn’t look at them because then she would want only whatever they desired. She was vulnerable to them on every level of her being but she had to open her eyes again, she couldn’t resist, and as she did Tain pulled her down into his arms. She wasn’t surprised, only upset that Dur didn’t insist on taking her first since he had worked the hardest of all of them for this pleasure. She should have known his friends meant more to him than she ever could, no matter how many laws of nature she broke for him. The older Lord had been right, of course. She would surely lose her soul now. Betraying Loric with one other man was bad enough, but with three? Yet there was no fighting it. She was already losing herself in Tain’s kiss…
“Let go of her,” Dur commanded quietly. “I said, let her go.” She was ripped painfully free of the lovely whirlpool of colors that had caught her up in Tain’s tight, dark hold. “There’s no telling yet what you’d do to her. We have to learn how to exercise control first.”
“I agree,” Rhode said. “If we’re going to leave a trail of bodies behind us, I suggest we spend time in the plains first before taking up residence in a keep.”
“I don’t understand…” She found it almost impossible to concentrate while unable to conceal either her naked body or her deepest longings from them. “If you’ve descended fully into flesh why does your kiss still-still do that?”
Tain frowned. “Lords forbid we should be only skin and bones.”
“But what’s the difference then? You were always able to manifest in a similar way before.”
“We had the semblance of a human form but only a very crude and difficult to sustain approximation of your five senses,” Dur explained. “How we saw and felt was much more diffused. It’s hard to explain.”
“But now we have your senses.” Tain didn’t look at all happy about having to wait to possess her. “We no longer have to make do with mere approximations of senses that use up all our energy trying to sustain them so we can’t truly enjoy them.”
“You are our instrument, Mirabel.” Rhode seemed to think it best to clarify the matter further. “But it’s our own feelings we play on you. Your trust and your belief in us tunes your limited yet deliciously specific senses to our frequency and in essence your veins become the strings we strum to produce the complex melody of the bodies you see before you.”
“You’re losing her.” Tain’s tarnished silver stare was pinned on her breasts with their long, erect nipples.
“On the contrary,” Dur disagreed. “She understands perfectly.”
“You mean,” she struggled with the concept, “your bodies are a mysterious music that is created when your energies come into contact with my…desires?”
“And your senses play the keynotes for us,” Rhode confirmed.
“We’re only a brief song,” Dur lamented, but he smiled.
She stared past him up the tower steps. It seemed such a long way back up to Loric, and she had strained both her health and her virtue to the limit. She could no longer pretend she met with Dur because he taught her about the Lords. It was part of her attraction to him, that he shared her boundless nature, but it was only the root that had grown her stimulating yet poisonous obsession with him, for her life as she knew it could not survive it.
“You understand now why we want to stay close to you.” Tain cupped her breasts for a hungry instant and she couldn’t help the way they rose up into his hands as she caught her breath.
“I have to get back,” she whispered desperately. This had to be a dream she was having. But if it was, then there was no reason to assert such painful control. If she could soar on their transcendent kisses until the wings of her pulse beat to an exhausted end then she wouldn’t have to face the loss of her life and love…
“It’s all right.” Dur grasped her hands. He seemed to guess that if her thoughts and feelings turned against them she would no longer be tuned to their desire to play themselves through her. She also sensed he wasn’t worried—he was simply more skilled at handling her. She looked from one to the other, at the lines and curves of their features like mysterious consonants and vowels all silently telling her she couldn’t resist them.
“Oh Lords!” She sobbed. “I can’t! I can’t do this to him!”
“But you already have,” Dur whispered. “Face the truth and come with us to the plains.”
“The plains…” If she could run far enough into a completely different world, she might be able to forget.
“Decide now, Mirabel, if what you want is to explore and develop yourself or if you simply intend to let nature have its way with you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You know what it means.” Tain thrust one of his very real thumbs between her lips and smiled darkly when she couldn’t stop herself from sucking on it. “Loric will grow old and feeble. He will not be able to do all those things to you that—”
“Stay out of this.” Dur shoved him down a step.
“But I still have no idea what my limits are.”
“There is a way
,” he told her softly.
Only then did she remember that night in the hall and the deadly path of the knife he had wanted her to follow to her death. “No!” she breathed.
“But don’t you see, it’s worth the risk for all of us.” Tain’s intent expression made him look so beautiful she felt her willpower slipping dangerously on the ideal lines of his face. “It would focus you completely. Right now you’re fluctuating between fear and excitement—”
“And making us all quite dizzy,” Rhode interrupted.
“Your moments of fear and doubt weaken us, Mirabel,” Dur elaborated with his marvelous patience. “We cannot go on like this. Until you are absolutely sure of yourself, our powers will be crippled while we inhabit these forms. As long as you’re ashamed of what you want, or don’t trust it, or believe that ultimately your feelings are as corrupt as your mortal flesh will one day be, we won’t be able to play ourselves through you the way you truly want us to.”
“You can’t keep going out of tune.” Tain gave her a look that felt like a serpent’s tail whipping her between the legs as he sank the burning fangs of his eyes straight into her soul.
“But if I die?” Her tone was a shrug. What did it matter? If the fulfillment Dur promised her wasn’t possible, her life was ruined anyway—her virtue and Loric’s faith in her were irreparably damaged. And even if she did make a supreme effort to save their marriage, her emotions would be edged with a disappointment on which her happiness would never cease cutting itself.
“You will not die,” Dur promised her intently. “Trust me. You will come into your true self and we will make this world ours as it was meant to be.” In an elegant gesture, waving away all her irrelevant mortal fears, his hand brushed open one side of his jacket.
She closed her eyes and pressed herself back against the stone wall, bracing herself as best she could because she had nothing to hold on to now except herself. If her eternal soul was only a dream she would suffer disappointment only for a few seconds before her pulse fluttered like heavy eyelids into an eternal sleep.
When nothing happened, she forced herself to open her eyes and look up at Dur again.
The black sheath holding his weapon was embroidered with white roses made of silvery threads of moonlight. She felt he wanted her to watch, that she had to watch to if this dark act was to bear any fruit. Her will to live was the haunting seed she absolutely could not lose sight of.
He pulled the dagger out slowly enough for her to take a breath as shaky as his gesture was smooth. The blade looked cold and relentless, cruel like nothing else in the world, yet it was his intensely warm hand that commanded it. For an endless moment he rested the sharp metal against his black-clad thigh, giving her time to ponder the forged element’s mysteriously pure determination. The dagger’s lines were clean and fine, in no way dulled by doubt or hesitation. In his confident grasp it would see any matter straight through to the very end until nothing stood in his way and now—his irresistibly eloquent eyes told her—all her negative emotions had to be pruned.
She was helplessly torn between Dur’s intense stare—willing her not to run for her life as the natural part of her longed to do—and the blade. One promised her absolutely all she could hope for, the other less than nothing. Her terror climaxed into absolute desire as he took the fatal step toward her and thrust the knife deep into her belly.
Chapter Thirteen
“My lord! My lord! She’s dead! Mirabel is dead!” Alina ran into the prince’s chambers like the howling wind outside grown arms and legs and a grief-contorted face. “My lord!” she wailed. “My lord!” Without knocking, for the very heart of his world had ceased to beat, so what was the point, she ran into his private room with astonishing speed for a woman her age. The Lord of Visioncrest was still asleep. She stared at him, gasping for air, loath to disturb his last few moments of happiness. “My lord,” she repeated quietly.
He sat up abruptly. “Alina? What is it?” He flung the sheets away and got out of bed. He was completely naked.
She was speechless with shock. She had seen two things this morning she had never dreamed of laying eyes on—Mirabel’s stabbed and lifeless body and the prince’s soft but breathtakingly large penis. She gaped at him as he snatched up his robe.
“Alina.” He tied the sash closed and gripped her shoulders. “What is it? Where is Mirabel?”
“Oh Lords!” she sobbed and pointed mutely through the open door. “Down…there!” She nearly choked on the word, swaying on her feet. He rushed past her and she knew the entire keep would suffer the tempest of his grief now. She followed him, compelled to witness his confrontation with the unthinkable.
Her husband had run down to fetch Landru, even though they both knew right away he would be of no use. At first she had thought the body was a drift of snow blown in through the open window during the night but the illusion lasted only half a second. The next instant her shrieks were beating against her eardrums, trapped like bats in the tower while her husband calmly knelt and felt for a pulse. She remembered thinking how foolish this was of him because Mirabel was as still as the world outside.
But what had truly horrified her was the smile on the princess’ face. Her lips were parted and her eyes were closed in an expression of utmost ecstasy—there was no other way to describe it. Who had done this to her? Who had dared kill the Princess of Visioncrest? Had she done it to herself? Had she perhaps fallen down the steps? Yet what in the Lords’ names had she been doing naked in the tower stairwell in what must have been the middle of the night, for she had been alive and well earlier that evening in the great hall. It was true the princess had been looking unusually tired of late but lack of sleep never killed a person, did it? There had been some strain in the marriage—Alina and her husband knew that better than anyone—and the younger you were the easier it was to die of heartache. Alina stopped short as the stairwell turned and she came upon the tragic tableau.
Mirabel lay in her husband’s arms, as lovely in death as in life, only now the wound in her belly was visible. Had she killed herself? Alina searched the narrow space. There was no sign of a knife and she and her husband would certainly have noticed a naked blade lying on the steps. Then her heart tripped over a fact it immediately tried to race away from—there was no blood, no blood anywhere.
“She’s not dead, Alina,” the prince informed her.
She started so badly at his calm voice that she tripped down a few steps and almost landed right on top of him and his dreadful burden. “Oh, my lord!” she whispered. “I’m so sorry!” Where was her husband? She couldn’t handle the prince’s reaction all by herself, for surely his cool composure would crack at any moment.
“He did this to her.” Loric had positioned his wife’s stiff limbs so she lay cradled in his arms.
“He, my lord?” Alina discovered that her curiosity was its usual self despite all the other emotions clamoring around it.
“That young Dragon she’s so fond of, who she trusted as she trusts everyone.”
That was why he sounded so casual, because he had gone temporarily mad! Had he said dragon? Was that a noble title used in another keep, perhaps? Then she remembered the young lord who had challenged the prince in the hall awhile back, on the night of the first snow. But how could he have had anything to do with this? He had not been seen in Visioncrest since then and the Lords knew every maiden kept an eager eye out for him. “You mean the young man who sang for her that night?” she ventured to ask.
“She’s not dead,” he repeated.
Alina heard it then, the distant commotion of people hurrying up the stairwell, and she was so relieved it composed her. She squatted down beside him. “My lord, there is no pulse. I’m afraid she’s-she’s gone.”
“He finally took her.”
“You know who did this to her, my lord?”
His eyes were hollow caves filled with nothing but the dreamy gray mist of his irises. “This is no more to him,” he glanced down at the body in h
is arms, “than her virginity was to me. She’s his now.”
A sentinel of the Brown appeared and stopped short, then another one and another one lined up behind him. Alina glanced at her master but he seemed unaware of them, so she stood up. “Search the keep for the young lord who challenged the prince in the great hall on the night of the first snow!” They would all know who she was talking about—most of them had probably laughed and consorted with him at their table—what they couldn’t believe was that a servant had just given them an order. It was also impossible for them not to devour Mirabel’s naked body with guiltily shifting eyes. “The princess has been murdered!” Alina cried. “Go find the one who did this to her!”
“Don’t bother,” Loric murmured, but only she heard him. The sentinels had already turned around to obey her even though she suspected they had no idea where to begin looking. “They won’t find him, Alina. He’s inside her.”
“Come, my lord.” She gripped his shoulders and tried her best to coax him to his feet. “We should lay her out properly on her bed.”
*
The head of every noble house ascended to the prince’s chambers as the sun—still hidden in a snow-filled sky—set with no dramatic hues to mourn it. The princess, however, was surrounded by vivid colors where she lay on the bed she had shared with Loric. The wives of the men now standing around her had dressed her in white and covered her with a violet veil as fine as mist, her face remaining clearly visible beneath it. She no longer wore the expression that had so disturbed Alina, for Ebonlee’s mother had gently closed her mouth. This supremely sorrowful occasion called for a respectful silence, yet the women who attended her could not help whispering amongst themselves as they dressed the beautiful corpse. Nothing like this had ever happened in Visioncrest for as long as anyone could remember. If the murder had occurred in the spring or summer, everyone would have been simply shocked and appalled, but in the dead of winter the extreme event and the emotions it gave rise to were diversions of irresistible proportions.
Having paid their respects, the women curtsied to their princess one last time and then left the room as their husbands entered. The White Lord, who was still unmarried, entered first, his expression a study in anger and triumph. When Mirabel’s motionless form filled his narrow black eyes, the corners of his mouth twisted up but so subtly no one could really say he had smiled.
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