Page 22 of Blood On His Lips

Nora fixed me with a firm gaze. “Your education, Aerinne. You must attend to it at once. The library at the university will give you the answers you seek, or at least start you on the path. The path of knowledge regarding your avatar, and the Ancient. I would not ask the Prince about either, he’ll only inform you of what he wants you to know. Or rather, ask him, and make note of what hefailsto say, for that will reveal much about his plans and interests.”

“Why can’t you tell me what you know? About the avatar, at least, even if you don’t want to draw his mother’s attention.”

“The development of an avatar can be a volatile thing, and I do not have one. I’m useless to you on that subject. I cannot instruct you in something I’ve never experienced. In fact, I could inadvertently do you harm.”

“And everything else?”

She looked at me for a beat, then left the kitchen.

I sat frozen, fighting frustration and anger. My cousin reached out and tapped the back of my hand. “She probably can’t help you much,” he said quietly. “I’m not Fae, but I listen. She’s always said she is still half in sleep. And the High ones never like to admit when they are ignorant, or outmatched.”

My anger fled. I sighed, and finally opened the tin of cookies. “This is why no one likes them.”

A cookie halfway to my mouth, suddenly my body seized.

Remember, child.

The pain.

A sea of iron nails were embedded in my psyche, holding in place the great lie that had consumed my life, each wound healed over with painful scar tissue. She—who,who?—sliced into each one, yanking out the nails to make my mind entirely my own again.

I screamed, the pain like nothing I had ever felt.Please, stop,I begged.Please.

“Aerinne!”

As layers of my mind unpeeled, the first Vow lying in wait around my throat tightened, and struck, cutting off my breath.

It had sensed my wavering after all.

ChapterSeven

Renaud consideredthe body at his feet. The pawn’s screams died down, his vocal cords shredded. Aerinne would not approve of torture, so he resigned himself to amending his methods in the future for her sake. Torture was a clumsy method of extracting information in any case—but he was impatient. And. . .pissed.

Yes. That was the correct word. The young ones were so delightfully crass in their use of that mongrel mortal language over the last several centuries. He was coming to understand the appeal.

Years ago, his first instinct had been to kill Muriel's girl, though destroying children should have been beneath him. He'd come within a breath of ending her life to address the danger she posed, halting only due to a sensation so foreign it had taken him years to unravel it—love.

He’d loved before, and those he’d loved had even survived him. But not like this. Never like this.

Once he'd finally understood his own heart, the girl was no longer a child, and had begun to look at him with eyes too old for the body she inhabited.

Children grew so quickly. One blinked, and they were adults trying to kill you if they had any power, the halflings always seeking to fill the void of their dual nature. To findmeaning.

If she bothered to ask, and she asked every other question but the ones that mattered, he could tell her that the search for meaning had nothing to do with the accident of her birth, and the drive to determine her place in the world should never be predicated on the perceptions of others. There would always be those who doubted her worth. Wisdom, and strength, came from delving internally for truth, and standing firmly in it.

Let others break around you, my halfling. Or break them yourself—that is more amusing.

Besides. . .heunderstood her value. That should be enough for her.

In the end, he'd refused to make his father's mistakes. Once the decision was made, he'd also refused to inflict on Aerinne his mother's pain—as a young girl, Nayya had not had an easy time with his father. Not that Renaud was optimistic enough to believe he would inflict on his halflingnopain. But what was the point of suffering from the mistakes of one's parents if one did notlearn. If he must err, at least let the error be new.

So he'd allowed her to live despite understanding she represented a glaring weakness, and in time, the wisdom of that decision became clear. If he had killed her, he would have inadvertently relinquished the last locks binding his mind into his body. If he had killed her. . .he curled his hand into a fist. But he could not kill her.

His mother would be highly displeased by how he was handling the dilemma. But Nayya was not easily pleased in any case. Typical. None of the three females currently plaguing him were simple to placate, and all of them were dangerous.

His Ancient mother, her reach extending across realms.

Zephirre, who taunted him by her peripheral presence in Aerinne’s life and whom he was constrained from moving against due to that damnable Vow she’d forced on him as a condition of their divorce.

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