“You took something from me.” A rich, velvet voice sent ice racing through my blood.
It was a voice I’d heard before.
Only once before—in the arena.
My mouth went dry, and I turned to find Ruadan looming over us. His bright violet eyes looked striking against the gloom of the bar.
“Ruadan!” I tried to sound cheerful. “I was just talking about you.”
He stared at me with that preternatural stillness. For just a moment, a chill rippled over me, but it was gone within an instant. If he’d wanted to kill me, he would have done it by now.
A hush fell over the bar as the humans began to realize a powerful fae warrior stood in their midst. So much for discretion.
“Why don’t we talk outside?” I said.
He nodded once.
I ignored everyone’s wide-eyed stares as we crossed outside. Clouds covered the moon tonight, and a light rain misted on the old, winding street. From where we stood, I could see all the way up to Edinburgh Castle, a gothic palace on jagged slopes.
“So. You want your crystal back?” I asked.
He pressed his hands against the wall, boxing me in. His glare cut right through me. Silver glinted in his eyes. “How did Baleros compel you to enter the Institute?”
Knowledge gives you power over a person. How much power did I want Ruadan to have? I supposed my life was already in his hands right now. How much worse could it get? Still, I’d leave out the key details.
“How did he get anyone to do anything?” I asked. “He had leverage. Nothing made me happier than to see you cut his head off.”
A gust of wind whipped at his hair, and an eerie stillness overtook his body.
“Am I on the kill list?” I asked.
No answer. Just dark shadows whipping the air around him. The bastard had already broken his vow, but he preferred brooding in silence and generally trying to scare the crap out of people.
“I’m sorry I stabbed you,” I added. “Honestly, stabbed sounds a bit dramatic. You’re a demigod and a fae. I knew you’d live if I didn’t use iron. I mean, for a minute I did consider….” I was nervously babbling, filling the silence with things that would get me in trouble. “You know what? Let’s not dwell on what might have been. I’m alive. You’re alive. Baleros is dead. Let’s try to keep it that way.”
Even though The Wraith stood before me, his magic crackling the air, I didn’t feel threatened right now. I felt an overwhelming urge to close the distance between us, to press myself against his powerful chest. I took a step closer to him, breathing in. There—under the pine and the magic, the scent of apples. I loved that smell. I closed my eyes, inhaling again, and that’s when I realized where I knew it from. It was the one from my dreams.
I frowned at him. “Have you ever heard of a place called Emain, by any chance?”
He cut me a sharp look, eyes darkening. “No.”
The look in his eyes told me he was lying.
“You’re not as good a liar as you think you are. What’s the big deal about it? I’ve dreamt of it. One of the library books says dreaming of Emain is a fae thing. Also that it’s the headquarters of all the Shadow Fae. You smell like my dreams.” I cleared my throat. “Which sounds more like a pickup line than I’d intended.”
His gaze flicked up and down my body, as if he were still considering something. “It’s a myth. Don’t speak of it again.”
Right. Convincing. “So, am I on the kill list?” I asked again.
The cool breeze kissed my skin while his gaze bored into me.
At last, he said, “No. I don’t think you are. I’m coming back for you. The Institute hasn’t finished with you.”
My chest unclenched, and I released the breath I’d been holding. “Are you going to tell me why you’ve suddenly become a chatty Cathy?”
“I can speak again because I’ve completed my mission.”
I nodded slowly. “Killing Baleros?”
“In the arena, I thought you were going to do it. You left him alive. Why?”
I really wasn’t used to the sound of him talking, and his voice was having a distracting effect on me. In fact, its richness seemed to skim over my skin and stroke my body in places I shouldn’t be thinking about right now. No wonder he didn’t talk.
A long silence stretched out between us. I wasn’t sure I trusted him enough to tell him how much Ciara meant to me. “There was something else I had to do,” was all I said.
Before I could ask another one of the hundreds of questions burning in my head, he turned, prowling off.
I watched as he stalked into Edinburgh’s shadows, blending in with the night itself.
I touched my throat, realizing that he’d left me with the lumen stone. As he walked away, that faint scent of apples hung in the air, and I felt an unfamiliar sense of safety. Did the demonic Wraith actually make me feel safe now?
Surprise flickered in my chest as I realized I was looking forward to his return.
With a sharp pang, it made me think of something that hardly ever popped into my mind these days. A place I’d nearly forgotten on the dirt floor of Baleros’s cages.
Home.
I pushed the thought away. Home was an impossibility, now, and I’d never find my way back. Now, Ciara was my home. When I crossed back into the pub and found that she’d saved half her disgusting haggis for me, warmth lit up my chest.
I beamed at her. “What are you smiling at?” she asked.
“You.” I sat back down in my chair. “Giving me food. Sometimes a butterscotch sweet is a genuine gift.”
“Right. I remember how obsessed you were with butterscotch sweets—that one you hung onto forever in the cage because you didn’t want it to be gone. I need to get you a whole bag.”
I shook my head. “I don’t even like how it tastes. I don’t like haggis, either. I just like that you gave it to me.”
“You’re a weird one, Arianna.”
I reached into my bug-out bag, pushing the headlamp and duct tape out of the way until I found a grape lollipop, then I popped it into my mouth. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Thanks for reading, and book two in the series follows next. If you want to join our facebook group to talk about the series, you can join here: C.N. Crawford’s Coven.
Part II
Court of Darkness
Court of Dreams
Shadow Fae—Book Four
C.N. Crawford
Chapter 32
I had less than a minute before the dragon shifter found me in his bedroom. The rich bastard had a private lift that opened right into his hallway. Through his bedroom doorway, I could see the numbers ticking up as the lift rose from the lobby. Two…three…
If it reached forty-one, the jig was up.
Frantically, I scanned the room. I stood on the forty-first floor of a sleek skyscraper in the center of London. Wind whipped into the room from the open balcony door. Moonlight streamed in through the expansive windows, casting silvery light over tasteful gray and gold furniture. From here, the gleaming lights of London spread out below like glittering treasure.
Only problem was, I couldn’t find the actual treasure, and that was the whole reason I’d come.
The lift’s number ticked up. Eight…nine...
The white spotlight from my headlamp bounced all over the darkened room. Where the hells was he keeping his gold? All dragon shifters had gold. This one wasn’t big on clutter, so it hadn’t taken long to ransack his entire flat. Hunger gripped my stomach. Ciara and I were starving, and I was not leaving empty-handed. The great heroine Ciarianna would rise again.
My stomach rumbled. In the past week, we’d had nothing to eat but three tins of economy beans and two ice cream sandwiches. I could hardly think straight. I hadn’t felt this hungry since I’d murdered the Institute’s hunger fae.
Twelve…thirteen…
The bathroom. I hadn’t fully investigated the bathroom yet, and he had a medicine cabinet I needed to rifl
e through. I rushed into the bathroom, flinging open the cabinet.
I blinked. Among the painkillers and some anti-anxiety medication, the shifter had filled his cabinet with Barbie dolls and plastic dinosaur figurines. Not to mention two tubs of Vaseline.
What in the world…?
I didn’t dwell on it too long, because in the next second, I was crouching down to search under the sink. Toilet roll, cleaning products, an enormous vat of Vaseline. I mean, I supposed a dragon shifter’s scales would get dry in the winter.
Twenty…twenty-one…
Under his bed. I hadn’t yet searched under his bed. It was a stupid place to hide gold, but I hadn’t found a sensible hiding place. Like a safe.
I knelt down and flung up the silver duvet. The white light from my headlamp beamed over a bunch of magazines.
I pulled one out, and my jaw dropped. First of all, in this day and age, who read porn in magazine form? And more importantly—where did one find magazines featuring women mating with men dressed as dinosaurs?
I mean, I supposed when you thought about it, maybe it made a strange sort of sense. Dragon-on-human porn would get old after a while, and he’d need to up the ante. One kink level up from dragons was obviously dinosaurs, and—
Twenty-nine…thirty…
Right. The gold. My wild hunger was making me get sidetracked. Still, I was taking one of these magazines with me because no one would ever believe—
On second thought, maybe I didn’t really want to touch it. Thinking of all the Vaseline, I dropped it with a grimace.
Thirty-four…thirty-five…
I leapt up, scanning the room again. Now, adrenaline raced through my veins. I was out of time. I touched the lumen stone around my neck—on loan from the Wraith—and reassured myself that I still had a way out of here. Shadow-leaping came in very handy sometimes, even at six hundred feet in the air.
Then, my gaze landed on the one thing in the flat I hadn’t yet searched. A potted orchid that stood on a mahogany table in his bedroom. A perfect hiding place.
Thirty-eight…thirty-nine…
I thrust my hand into the soil, and relief washed over me as my fingers came into contact with a smooth, metallic bar.
Bingo.
Forty-one.
The lift doors slid open just as I ripped the gold bar from the plant. Dirt flew all over the shifter’s sleek gray sofa. I slid my bug-out bag off my shoulder and shoved the bar into it.
Now, I just needed to find a way out. Good thing I’d been practicing shadow-leaping. I touched the lumen stone, summoning its icy power as I rushed out onto the balcony.
Behind me, the dragon shifter roared, already transforming into his reptilian form. Scales were forming on his face and arms, but if he fully shifted in here, he’d break everything in the bloody flat. He was practically vibrating with the effort to restrain himself. Talons began to sprout from his fingertips.
I scrambled over the wooden table on his balcony, then climbed onto the short barrier of glass. Adrenaline raced through my veins as the view dizzied me. The lights of Spitalfields twinkled below me. Gods, this was high.
The shifter screamed something, but since he kept shifting and pulling back to his human form, it came out all garbled. Half-dragon speak. Something like mablig blupart plucking skrill you!
I stood on the glass barrier, the wind tearing at my hair, and my heart raced out of control. Time to go.
A blast of hot fire seared the air behind me, and I leapt off the balcony before I had a chance to properly choose my target.
I gripped hard to my backpack straps as I started falling, the wind whipping my hair into my face. My stomach lurched, and I started to regret several of the night’s decisions.
Through the strands of my lavender hair, I spotted a dark corner of Wormwood Street. Mentally, I melded with its shadows, smelling the seared-air scent of the magic within all darkness. Then, I channeled my shadow magic. I leapt.
I slammed hard onto concrete, rolling over the ground with a grunt. Pretty sure the gold bar in my backpack left a dent in my spine.
The impact had rattled my bones. So, I was learning that shadow leaping when you’re already falling at a high velocity only took some of the impact out of the fall. If I were human, I’d be dead now. But as a demi-fae, I escaped with a few fractures and a shitload of bruises.
My gaze flicked up the sleek skyscraper. Dragons could fly, but there was no way this guy was coming after me. Supernaturals had been completely outlawed for the past four years. Executions and assassinations meant the shifters had to lay low, disguise themselves completely. Which meant I could take his gold bar—
My thoughts were interrupted by the sight of a man’s silhouette plunging off the balcony, just as I’d done. My pulse began to race. This wasn’t what I’d expected.
The dragon shifter started to fall, his descent picking up pace, until—midair—black, scaly wings burst from his back.
Okay. Maybe I’d overestimated his intelligence. With a flagrant display of magic like this, he’d be dead within a day, never to defile his dinosaur figurines again.
In the air, he shifted completely, rearing back his head to eject a hot stream of fire into the midnight sky.
Oh boy. London hadn’t seen a reptilian display like this in years.
I jumped up, eyeing the farthest point I could see on Wormwood Street. At this time of night, the streets were mercifully empty.
I summoned the icy shadow magic, channeling it throughout my limbs. Then, I melded with the dark pools of shadows under a pedestrian crossway. I began shadow-leaping through the financial district—past pharmacies and skyscrapers—using alleyways and the darkness beneath the trees lining the street. The wind rushed over my skin, and my heart hammered from the flight. I leapt into a medieval churchyard, melding with the shadows behind a crooked tomb. It was three in the morning, and I hardly passed anyone.
But while I raced through the city, moving like the wind through the trees, the dragon soared just above me, managing to track my path. His fire scalded the air. I glanced up, my blood roaring, as he started to dive for me.
With the magic igniting my body, I shadow-leapt across the street. I needed to hide from him, to go underground. Fortunately, I used to live under the streets, and I knew how to navigate subterranean London.
I leapt south, zooming closer to Guildhall, until I screeched to a halt by a manhole. Beneath this pavement flowed one of London’s underground rivers.
A wild roar ripped through the skies as I glanced up, my heart skipping a beat, and saw the dragon dive-bombing for me.
With a grunt, I shifted the manhole cover. I jumped into the hole and dropped down into three feet of freezing, stinking water. From above, a blast of fire exploded through the manhole opening, singeing the hair on the back of my arms. With magic flowing through my body, I leapt away into the tunnel’s darkness.
Underground, shadows reigned. Only the bouncing white light of my headlamp pierced the darkness.
The dragon’s enormous body wouldn’t be able to fit through the hole, and in his human form, he’d never catch up with me. Now, the tunnel was mine. I leapt through the darkness, the water growing higher and higher on my body, past my hips, my ribs, until it covered my head.
I dove deeper into the cold water, swimming under the surface. Once underwater, I wasn’t able to shadow-leap, and my lungs started to burn. My headlamp flickered out.
At this point, the dragon must be long gone. I could only hope he hadn’t been clever enough to predict where I’d emerge out of the tunnel.
Just when I was certain my lungs were about to explode, thin streams of light pierced the water as the tunnel opened up into the Thames—London’s largest river, no longer underground.
I kicked my feet as hard as I could, rushing up to the surface. I gasped, sucking in air. I scrambled for the stone embankment, then hoisted myself over the edge. A quick glance at the sky told me that the dragon hadn’t caught up with me yet.
Unfortunately, a low iron fence blocked my path to the pavement. Iron would burn me if I touched it, though it wouldn’t kill me.
Grimacing, I gripped the iron bars, wincing at the pain. Fast as I could, I climbed it, then leapt over the top. Exhausted, I flung myself down on the pavement. I rolled over on my back, my backpack bulky beneath my spine. I stared up at the night sky, catching my breath.
It took me a moment to get my bearings. I’d ended up just south of the river. Here, the streetlamps cast amber light over an empty walkway and neat rows of plane trees. My little white sundress clung to my body.
It wasn’t just the underwater swim that had exhausted me, but the overuse of shadow magic. My muscles buzzed and burned. Shadow magic wasn’t native to my body like it was to Ruadan’s. I could draw it from the lumen stone, but it tended to overwhelm me and wear me out. This must be what drug addicts felt like on a comedown.
On the pavement, I closed my eyes for just a moment, still gasping for air, when a familiar power brushed over my skin—a dark, sensual magic that raised goosebumps on my body.
When I opened my eyes, I was staring into the penetrating, violet gaze of Ruadan.
Chapter 33
Moonlight sculpted the perfect planes of his face. My heart thumped harder against my ribs.
I clasped my hand to my chest, staring up at him.
When I’d imagined running into Ruadan again, I hadn’t pictured myself lying flat on my back in a dress soaked in dirty river water.
“Hi, Ruadan.” The sight of him sent a rush of energy through my blood, but I feigned a casual tone. “What are you doing here skulking by the riverside?”
A gust of wind picked up his cloak. I glimpsed the armor that gleamed underneath, sculpting his body. His shadowy magic lashed the air around him, and a shiver rippled over my wet skin.
Institute of the Shadow Fae Box Set Page 19