Page 5 of Obsidian Prince

"The land chose you here," she whispered. She closed her third eyes before glancing up at him.

He looked impressed. "I wondered if you would be able to tell. There aren't many people who would understand."

"How did it happen?"

His eyes looked somewhere far away.

Liliana opened her fourth eyes to follow him as best she could.

"One night, I couldn't sleep, so I came out here to relax. I pulled weeds for a bit. The moon was full, so it was easy to see what I was doing, but I still managed to cut my hand on a thorn from this bush. When the blood fell on the ground, I ..." Alexander shrugged after a moment.

With her fourth vision, Liliana saw him on his knees on that night a decade past. Green rivers flowed up into him, lifting him until he floated free. His mouth opened in a silent scream of agony or ecstasy. Green flowed through his veins like blood, glowing through his human skin until his obsidian Fae form burst free. The Green fountained from his translucent stone form back into the deep earth.

"I can't describe it really, but you wanted to know me. This place is as much a part of me now as my hands or feet."

Looking up at the face of the Fae prince, his face filled with peace and contentment, silvered on the edges by moonlight, and surrounded by the warm, sheltered garden with the rich scent of roses, Liliana had a horrible thought. The land was part of the prince. The prince was part of the land. "What will happen to the land if you die?"

"I honestly don't know. Nudd has been trying to teach me, but he isn’t Sidhe, so his knowledge is spotty." He made that bitter chuckle again. "No one among the Sidhe in Europe saw any reason to teach me about land bonding. The mortal descendant of slaves wasn't supposed to ever be chosen." He put a hand in her hair, leaning down as if he wanted to kiss her again.

She needed to think. Alexander kissing her made that very difficult.

Liliana strode back up the path.

After a moment, he caught up to her. He opened the gate for her. They walked in silence side by side back up the twisting path to his back door.

While he closed the sliding glass doors behind her, she looked down at the flower in her hand in the full light of his living room lamps. It was an ivory-colored barely open bud with traces of red at the edges of the petals.

Lovely, delicate, and new.She would have to take care not to damage it. "I saw you kill Andrew Periclum."

He didn't try to get close to her again. He stayed behind her at the back door.

Her second eyes let her watch him without turning around. The broad spectrums of her second sight made him look otherworldly, like a demon from a nightmare, his warmth glowing in colors that were not red against the cooler not-blues of the curtains behind him

"Killing the king of the North Carolina lion-kin pride," Alexander told her, his deep voice expressionless, "would be politically unwise."

"True," Liliana said. "But Andrew Periclum broke his word to you, killed soldiers under your command with his experiments. He tried to kill Doctor Nudd who was sworn to your service. You couldn't honorably allow that. You used your bond to earth and fire to end his life without physically acting against him."

"Who do you intend to tell about that?" His gun no longer pointed at the ground. It was aimed at her back.

Liliana sighed, exasperated, and shook her head.

"What?" he asked.

She turned to face him so she could see him in normal colors. "You keep pointing guns at me. It's making it very hard for me to like you."

The corners of his mouth quirked.

Liliana realized something then. That tiny twitch of lips was a genuine amused smile. The broad smile he gave her just before he kissed her was for show, a politician's charm. But that tiny twitch, the one her comments kept putting on his face, was as real as the warmth she’d seen when he stood in his garden.

As that subtle smile touched his face, the tip of the gun barrel dipped half an inch. "I suppose that does make it difficult," he said, with more amusement in his deep voice.

He was not going to shoot her. She didn't need her third or fourth eyes to be certain of that. "You like me," she said, surprised.

"I did kiss you," Alexander pointed out.

"You kissed me because you calculated that it was to your advantage."

"And because I like you."

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