“I will do what I can to help—” Isander glanced around their prison. “If we can get out of here.” Leaning forward, he gripped Lyandros’s shoulder again. “I am glad to have this time with you.”
“And I you.” This time, Lyandros’s smile had no trouble lifting his lips and his spirits. “Tell me, what happened to you? Were you aware of your predicament? Were you in any pain?”
Isander’s hair remained the silver-white of moonlight. The strands glowed around his shoulders, casting him with an other-worldly air. He appeared no older, but much more distinguished. If this were another place and another time, Lyandros would have teased him about it.
Isander shook his head, glancing again at Akito. “No. No pain.”
The small peeks and bemused frowns in Akito’s direction had begun in the attic room and grown more frequent and less covert the longer they three were together. Lyandros started to ask whether Isander knew Akito, but was cut off by the continuation of Isander’s tale.
“I was taken and kept at the Morgan and Lady Morgana’s home for some time.” Clearing his throat, Isander focused his gaze on the far wall. His expression took on memory’s softer cast. “They held me there and forced me to act as tutor to their son. Teaching him about history, magic, and other arts I have collected over this long…” He made a face. “Some would say too long—life.”
At the mention of the Morgan and Lady Morgana’s son, Akito sat up straighter. Where he’d been merely slouched in the corner before, paying attention with wary interest, now he had grown taut, almost expectant, like a bow drawn back in a waiting hunter’s hands.
“I saw you there. When you visited your friend as a boy.” Isander leaned forward, extending his hand. “James, is it?”
“Yes. But it’s Akito now.” Akito appeared paler then when he had been in ghostly form. “I—I had no idea you were a prisoner back then.” Akito swallowed hard, his words trailing to a guilty mumble. “You look…different now.”
Indeed, observed Lyandros. Isander’s hair and lashes sparkled now like spun silver where once they had been a dark midnight traced with blue-black. His features, gaunt in the earthly realm, had filled out and his muscled bulk had returned here in Faerie. In the Morgan’s attic, however, even Lyandros had been forced to look twice to recognize him.
Yet, Akito’s acquaintance with Isander made no sense. How could the warrior and his brother have crossed paths years ago? “You two know each other?”
Isander crossed his arms over his chest, and dipped his chin to stare at Akito from beneath lowered brows. “I can believe that you did not recognize me when you returned as the Morgan’s captive.”
“I—I want to apologize…” Akito, swallowing hard, looked away. “What I did the last time I saw you. I didn’t know you were alive. I was kind of desperate.”
Isander’s mouth thinned at this statement. “These are excuses, not an apology.”
“Will someone please tell me what is going on?” Lyandros thundered.
Akito swiveled to take him in. Isander briefly slid his gaze sideways to Lyandros then back to Akito.
“I suggest you tell him the story, James,” Isander prompted. “It is his place to judge, not my own. And…I cannot be impartial.”
“Which part?” Akito whispered.
“All of it. From the beginning,” Lyandros growled, more frustrated than he recalled being in recent memory.
Some key information concerning his brother and this man he’d taken under his wing eluded him, and he had a feeling he should have seen whatever it was before now. Perhaps had seen it, but not understood. He felt not a little foolish at being so in the dark.
“I was afraid you’d say that.” Blowing out a breath, Akito shifted away from both Isander and Lyandros. “I don’t know where to start.”
“From the beginning, as the Justice Giver commands” Isander said, gentle where Lyandros would have had him display some of that King Ruler steel.
Akito met Lyandros’s gaze, and shied away again.
“Now, Akito,” Lyandros commanded.
The story, when it came, was told in such a rush that it took Lyandros a moment to parse the sentences. He repeated them back, his jaw tightening with each word until at the last he spoke through gritted teeth.
“You, Nyx and Benjamin met as children in a psych ward. Tzadkiel had…blinded Benjamin and killed his parents. You were about fifteen, when you and your friends struck out on your own, and…” The words lodged in his throat and he had to pry them out. “To hunt vampires. You—you taught your friends to fight, and Benjamin killed our kind with your aid?”
Akito, shoulders up around his ears, nodded. “Yeah. That’s about it.”
Glancing to Isander, Lyandros paused. “How did you know these three hunted the mora?”
Isander’s gaze had darkened so that ugly purple storm clouds seemed to cloud the blue. “I didn’t.”
If Akito hadn’t been sitting, Lyandros bet he would have slid to the floor. Fear’s stink emanated from him in nauseating waves. “What were you talking about then?”
“I had been referring to your ham-handed attempt at transformation.” Isander smiled tightly. “The rest was…enlightening. Particularly as regards your friend, Nyx was it now?”
“Yeah.” One arm crossed over his stomach, Akito chewed on the knuckle of his opposite hand. “To hide from her parents, she uses a transfiguration cuff.” His gaze drifted from the doorway to Isander. “I don’t think she knew you were a vampire when we were kids. I know I didn’t make the connection until today between you back then and now.”
Cold blooded murder made sense to Lyandros in that moment. He would have happily choked the life out of Akito if it weren’t for his role as Justice Giver. Trial first, he reminded himself. Then sentencing.
A tic formed under his right eye. “Go on.”
“I, uh…” Akito swallowed audibly, his gaze skating past Lyandros, over Isander, and to the locked door. “I’m not a full-blooded vampire.”
“Not a vampire at all, in fact,” Isander supplied.
The blood running through Lyandros’s veins had chilled, moving in sluggish pumps that had nothing to do with the unseasonable temperatures in their dungeon cell.
“That makes no sense.” If Akito wasn’t a vampire, then why did his aura say he was a Son of Pollux? How had he survived the fall into the Charles? “You have vampire blood in your veins. I see it in your aura—it is why your body lived on.”
When Akito refused to look up at him, Lyandros stood, hauled him up by his burlap collar, and backed him into the wall. Palms pressed to the cold stone, Lyandros hemmed him in, fangs snapping to the fore. Blood pumped in loud rushes through his ears. This man—this villain—had been trusted to guard his back, but had lied to him repeatedly. Possibly at every step. He had perpetrated crimes against the mora that were unspeakable capital offenses.
“Answer me.”
Sweat formed on Akito’s brow, glistening in the dim light. “What do you want me to say?”
Sick to his stomach, whether with anger, disappointment, or some other unidentifiable emotion—he refused to call it heartsickness after so short of an acquaintance—Lyandros gave his command for the last time.
“I expect the truth. In its entirety.” Leaning in, he whispered the rest in Akito’s ear with unholy menace. “Lie to me again, and you will learn what it is to live under my sentence. I will not just play with you. I will rule you, Body. Mind. Soul. Forever.”
Chapter 14
Using one thigh, the vampire pinned Akito to the wall in a terrifying maneuver, hemming him in with hands on either side of his head. No passion lit the gaze that bored into his own. Ice coated those hard eyes a frosty blue. Akito’s cock, idiot that it was, took notice of the pressure from the Justice Giver’s thigh and labeled it sensual. His mind, however, knew better. The growl in Lyandros’s command had been zero-percent sexy and one-hundred percent pissed-off Justice Giver. A slight increase in pressure on Lyandros�
��s part left Akito in no doubt about which portion of his anatomy would experience the first taste of the vampire’s wrath.
“Could you…” Akito struggled to breathe, unable to move a hair without increasing the pressure against his groin. “Back up? Just a little?”
For one thing, it was impossible to think when all he wanted to do was kiss that sumptuous mouth. Gods help him, but Akito wasn’t above pressing his lips to the vampire’s in a silent plea for mercy. Hysterical laughter threatened at Lyandros’s imagined response.
A snarl lifted one side of Lyandros’s upper lip, revealing the lethal point of one gleaming white fang.
Akito shuddered. “I guess that’s a no, then.”
Closing his eyes to escape the accusation and anger in Lyandros’s stare, Akito began the story of how he had come to drink Isander’s blood. He fully expected Lyandros to kill him when he finished. The passing thought made him frown. If he were corporeal in Faerie—alive again—did that mean he would still be when they went back to their own plane? Brushing the questions aside, he breathed deep and offered his confession.
In the darkness, behind his closed lids, Akito hid from whatever expression might have crossed the Justice Giver’s face at the story’s telling. When he came to the part about wanting to find a way to contribute to the fight on the Common with his friends—to really be seen for once, and to matter in the battle for Boston Common—Lyandros inhaled sharp and quick through his nostrils, but didn’t comment. He ended the story with his banishment, leaving out his time with the Morgan and his alienating Nyx. The pressure of Lyandros’s thigh never varied throughout Akio’s telling.
“That is everything?” Lyandros’s voice rumbled, deep and quiet.
Akito blinked open his eyes, nodding. For once in his life, he didn’t want to exist. He wanted to disappear from the shards of anger and betrayal in Lyandros’s eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
Behind Lyandros, Isander stood, a silvered shadow whose gaze said one thing: he knew Akito lied. A blush rose to Akito’s cheeks at having been caught out. He’d not realized that apparently Isander, while unable to move or speak, had been aware of all that had occurred around him. Including everything the Morgan had done to Akito.
Lyandros’s gaze bored into his own.
Akito hastily amended, “It’s all I’m willing to tell—and all that concerns you.”
Lyandros growled.
Mouth drawn, nostrils flared in a vain attempt to suck oxygen into his lungs, Akito did the one thing he dared. He turned his head and bared his neck to the Justice Giver’s mercy.
“I would not drink your blood. It is as good as poison to me.” Lyandros scoffed and pushed away from the wall. “You have committed crimes against the gods for which there is no punishment harsh enough, traitor.”
The word traitor turned Akito’s insides to liquid. If offering himself up as a meal wouldn’t help, then he’d have to make amends. Somehow. What he’d done, drinking from Isander and hunting those vampires with Nyx and Ben, had been wrong, he knew that now. He, Ben, and Nyx had all fucked up, collectively and individually.
“Technically, I’m already dead,” Akito said, trying for bravery and falling short with bravado.
Lyandros smiled, and it wasn’t nice. “There are worse things than death.”
Oh, don’t I know it.
Akito notched his chin. “And as Isander pointed out, I’m not a vampire. You don’t rule me.”
That malicious smile broadened, and the Justice Giver’s regard hardened to a glittering sapphire. “Would you like to make a wager?”
Too deep now to save himself, Akito chose to go down fighting. At least he knew how to do that. “I repeat. You said that I’m not a vampire. You don’t rule me.”
The clanging scrape of the cell door opening brought everyone’s attention to the door, interrupting the argument.
A mundane guard in a plain red tunic stepped in, iron manacles in hand. “Put these on.”
The guard handed them each their own manacles. Lyandros leaned in, took the chains, and imprisoned each of Akito’s wrists with calm deliberation. Akito attempted to jerk away, but Lyandros met his gaze with an implacable stare.
“Let go,” Akito ground, barely moving his lips.
Lyandros leaned in, his breath a hot wash over the shell of Akito’s ear. “I will have justice.”
Akito stiffened, repressing a shudder. It seemed to him, in that moment, that Lyandros was some hungry beast. Designed by nature to subsist on sins, he wouldn’t rest until he’d dined on the flesh of Akito’s failures and spat out his bones.
Lyandros retreated, thrusting Akito from him, and placed his own manacles on his wrists with angry jerks. The restraints were linked by iron chains, the links connecting Akio to Isander and Lyandros, on either side. The guard jerked them forward, leading them out of the cell, and Akito stumbled. Whether out of reflex, or the desire not to be pulled to the floor, Lyandros steadied him with an arm at his waist. Akito attempted to shrug away. Lyandros tightened his grip, making his ownership clear. Each step they took brought Lyandros’s muscled thigh into contact with Akito’s own. The passage they traversed narrowed and sloped upward, forcing the three to walk single file, and Lyandros finally dropped his arm.
An iron door opened at their approach, and they stepped through into a gallery of sorts. Full dark had fallen while they’d been imprisoned in the cell. Akito blinked at the dazzling display of mirrors and hundreds—perhaps thousands—of reflected flames dancing in candelabras and chandeliers up and down the corridor. Broken only by golden draped windows, the mirrors seemed to go on forever. The guard stopped before a set of doors that would have taken most of the gold in Fort Knox to gild and unlinked Akito from Lyandros and Isander. He then produced shorter lengths of chain with which he bound their hands in front of them. The doors opened and they were pushed into a long receiving hall.
After the gaudy passage, the room’s dove white palate came as a relief to Akito’s eyes. Cool serenity dominated the room. The throne, positioned at the far end, appeared made of crystal, its curved edges and sharper decorations casting rainbows around its occupant. A translucent-haired fae, too insubstantial to be real, perched with parchment-thin presence on the edge of the throne. Hands so old they seemed transparent gripped the curved throne arms. Each of the fae king’s fingers, Akito saw, had been adorned with silver-etched nail caps that sported pointed tips. Lethal elegance at its finest.
Akito knelt, shoulder-to-shoulder—or rather, head to shoulder—with Lyandros and Isander. Wordlessly, the fae king held out a hand. As the senior member of their unwilling entourage, Lyandros rose and bent to press his lips to one outstretched nail tip.
“We thank you for your gift, Lyandros, Son of Demarchos.” The fae king spoke with a voice like bells on a breeze.
Akito peeked at the back of Lyandros’s head, frowning. They hadn’t brought a gift.
Isander muttered a curse word in Greek.
“What is it?” Akito spoke out of the side of his mouth.
“The bastards know we didn’t come here intentionally, and hold us prisoner; yet, they demand an envoy gift.”
“I take it that’s traditional?”
Isander nodded once, the movement slight.
Shoulders stiff, Lyandros bowed. “We were fleeing the Morgan and did not expect to enter your realm. The oversight is mine.”
“Your words of apology are meaningless.” The bells were sharper now, made of shattered glass. “If you have no gift, then you are nothing more than barbarian invaders from the Otherworld.”
Fluttering filled the momentary silence. Akito chanced a glance upward and realized the room’s gallery hosted hundreds of powdered and wigged fae. The king stretched out a finger. White satin collected the rainbows cast by his throne as it moved. Shimmering, the fabric swallowed the light whole and seemed to make it part of the material itself. Dazzled, Akito didn’t at first realize the fae pointed at Isander.
“You know our la
ws, King Ruler. You who have visited us before for your brother, the War King.”
Isander stood to join Lyandros. “We bring you a gift of news, majesty.”
Courtly fans fluttered in agitation in the gallery above, reminding Akito not of birds, but of bats. The crowd was in no mood for news. They wanted a show.
The king flipped his hand up, silencing the commotion in an agitated gesture. “We will have you as our gift, King Ruler. For our pleasure.”
The blatant insult made the court murmur, eager to see what the vampires would do. In chains, without weapons, they had no hope of fighting and winning. Somehow, however, Akito could picture Lyandros trying.
Lyandros’s “Take me instead. My brother has suffered enough,” brought Akito’s chin up.
“You can’t be serious?” Akito’s voice broke with his shock.
The idea of Lyandros kneeling to anyone was beyond ridiculous, and every fiber of Akito’s being rebelled at the image. The fae king lifted his scepter, a crystal confection that appeared all spun sugar and no substance. In any language, the gesture signaled judgment.
Lyandros, appearing to realize this, lowered himself to one knee. “I humbly beg His Majesty’s favor.”
Seeing the Justice Giver subjugate himself seemed so wrong—so vile—it turned Akito’s words to ash. Isander was bad enough, but no way would Lyandros become a paramour, bed slave, or whatever to the fae king. He might have been at odds with Lyandros, but Akito had seen enough of unwilling subjugation to last a lifetime with himself and the Morgan.
“No!” Akito stood. Lyandros was made to judge and rule, not to bend to anyone. “Take me.”
The flutter of fans rose to a din. Even the king’s upturned hand couldn’t command the court’s silence. Akito felt the blood leave his lips as Lyandros bore down on him. Grabbing Akito by the collar, the Justice Giver dragged Akito to his feet.
“This man is not free to speak, Majesty.” Lyandros turned, Akito’s collar bunched in his hand. “I judged him not an hour ago for sins against my people. If there is to be a gift, he has nothing—not even his freedom—to give.”
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