Page 41 of The Shadow Heir

My gaze flicked to the space beside Felipe, my only escape. “I was only exploring.”

He nodded. “Indeed. I expect it of the more…courageous souls we collect.”

I couldn’t help the way my upper lip curled. “Please excuse me.” My heartrate continued to climb the longer I stood backed into this corner.

“May I?” He lifted an elbow. “The evening meal is set to begin soon, and I imagine you are hungry.”

Had it been an entire day already? I’d wandered these halls longer than I thought.

The faint gurgling of my stomach was proof that he was right, so I stepped forward and offered a polite curtsey. His features appeared dim and his elbow was slight, wobbling a little under my touch and giving me the impression I walked with a hollow corpse. While Casimiro’s arm had been rigid and unyielding, it appeared that wasn’t a trait common to all fae.

Felipe strode with graceful, unhurried movements. I yearned to reach the cavern and be set free from holding his arm. My feet clacked on the stone, while his made no sound at all.

“Do you have doors to many lands here?” I asked, hoping to murder the awful silence pressing around us.

“We do. A door to all the lands in which the shadows operate.”

“Operate?” I repeated. “Are there some lands without any shadows at all?”

Felipe pinned me with a narrow look. “There are many lands, and in all but one our court has power.”

“One?”

“Sunara, of course.”

“Oh. Right.”

He chuckled. “You’ve never heard of it, have you?” I pinched my lips, annoyed that I really was that easy to read. “It is a place with no darkness at all, the place in which the First and Last dwells, as the legends go. But as no Shadow Lord or Lady can travel there, we have no knowledge of this place save from rumor and myth.”

His tone drew to a sharpened point, and I sensed I was treading on dangerous ground. But I was finallylearningsomething. A point of weakness. There was one place where these fae could not go.

“What’s in Sunara?” I pressed.

Felipe scoffed. “Besides light without the accompanying power of darkness? I don’t know. And considering I hate the light, I’veno desire to ever see for myself what lies there. I’ve no desire to perish from attempting to enter a land I would hate.”

My steps faltered slightly, and I gripped Felipe’s featherlight arm a little tighter. “But I thought you were eternal.”

His dry chuckle surprised me. “We do not die naturally. But we can be killed. Why are you so intrigued by this, young mortal? You seem to be as fascinated with our death as we are with yours.”

That stopped me in my tracks, and Felipe whirled to face me, his kind expression replaced with a fiendish one.

“Death is something we cannot have so we crave the experience of watching it,” he said. “Death is something you fear so you crave the experience of watching your enemies endure it. You cannot hide it. It’s written in your eyes.”

Just then, another figure, silent as a shadow, dropped into view from an adjacent staircase, his boot appearing a second before his crinkled white shirt.

“Cas,” said Felipe, turning to offer a stiff bow.

The heir’s eyes cut to me, then back to his friend. “Having a cup of tea with the mortal?”

Felipe straightened. “Discussing death, Your Highness.”

“My favorite topic,” he said, flashing me a wolfish smile that twisted my gut. But behind his carefully crafted sneer, I detected the faintest pinch around his eyes. If fae could kill one another, then I wondered how they were that different from humans.

As the heir turned his back to us and sauntered down the hall, I muttered, “In the mortal world, someone like him would have many enemies.”

The heir stopped walking but did not turn around. “Oh, and let me guess, you would be one of them?” His profile came into view as he turned his head slightly. “I shake with fear.”

My knuckles cracked in my free hand as I fisted it by my side.

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