Page 66 of House of Mages and Raven

Barbie

Prince Cade surveyed my new room. The house magic had outdone itself, and I nodded at it in thanks. The wand of light twirled in the room in satisfaction before changing into the shape of a cat. The cat landed on Cade’s shoulder, purring to him.

But the mage prince wasn’t lulled. He narrowed his turquoise eyes at a spectacular painting of a horned, naked female riding a white horse above the headboard of my new luxury king-size bed.

“Isn’t that painting from my sitting room?” he demanded. “It cost me an arm and a leg to acquire it. How did it even get here?”

“Huh,” I said, trying to come up with some lies to cover up for the house magic. “I’m only borrowing it temporarily. I couldn’t help it, as a devoted art lover.”

“My house magic rarely takes a form.” He turned to frown at the cat on his shoulder. “Are you now working with my own house magic against its gracious owner?”

“We have too much respect toward you to team up against you,” I said while mind-talking with the house magic to convince it to return the painting to its rightful owner right away to avoid further scolding. “I heard rumors about you hoarding a painting of a female who had three tits. I just had to see it for myself, sir.”

As if on cue, the house magic left Cade’s shoulder, shifted to a big nipple, and pasted itself between the breasts of the female rider in the portrait. Cade’s jaw dropped at the new extra tit on the painting before he shook his head in disgust.

“Now that my curious mind has been satisfied, the painting shall return to its rightful collector,” I declared.

In an instant, the painting vanished from the wall.

“I’m going to check if there’s anything else missing from my room,” Cade told me sternly.

“Sometimes I covet things, shiny things,” I admitted shyly.

“You can’t just take nice, shiny things from other people because you covet them, Barbie,” he snapped. “There’re boundaries.”

“Dixie, Prince Silas’s cousin, said the same thing when I snuck into her room to take a bath,” I said.

He frowned at me deeply. “I know who Dixie is. Why did you go to her room to bathe?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

He snapped his fingers in my face. “Give me the short version.”

“The short version is that I was a boy back then,” I confessed. “Well, everyone called me Little Bob and believed me to be a boy, so I couldn’t exactly go to the public bath house and strip in front of everyone, especially when they assumed that I had a small dick and laughed at me behind my back.”

Cade let out a bark of laughter, the tension in the room lessening and his shoulders relaxing slightly. He’d just returned after being away for two days. According to the gossip that I’doverheard in the common room of the mage house, he hadn’t been in the court either. Some said no one knew where their prince was sometimes, and not even his security detail could find him.

Every prince had his dark secrets, but none could be as horrible as mine. After all, I was the worst monster of all, save my father.

Before Cade ceased laughing, I nearly jumped out of my skin. A tendril of pale smoke phased out of the mage prince’s left cheek and hovered over his face, hissing and showing claws and teeth.

What the fuck?I stumbled back a pace, staring at the smoke as it turned into a shadowy figure two inches tall.

Shit, it was a manifestation! The shadow bore the face of a dark-haired teenage girl.

The mage prince was haunted? Why hadn’t I seen it before? But then I hadn’t been a member of his house. Most of the time, he was with the other heirs, joking and laughing, and when Killian joined them, I’d been distracted by the chaos heir and his sex appeal.

Now it was just Cade and me in my new room, and I saw his shadow for the first time. An odd thought clicked in my stunned mind. The house magic had led its prince here. It wanted me to see what was wrong with the mage heir, a terrible wrongness that no one else could see.

Cade narrowed his eyes at me in displeasure when I stumbled back, so I stepped half a pace toward him and peered at the mini phantom. She hissed at me maliciously, frost escaping her blue lips.

Suddenly, I knew what she was. A dead witch turned Fury.

I wasn’t spooked, but I was disturbed by what I’d seen.

Death had no actual power over me. My father had brought me back from death or the brink of death over and over, sohe could continue to feed on me. I’d begged for death, but it wouldn’t come, so I knew there were things much worse than death.

So, nope, I wasn’t even a little intimidated by a Fury. Sy growled back at the phantom, also unimpressed, but she didn’t threaten to eat the Fury.

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