Page 80 of Gemini Hunted
“I loosed Xhevith upon him.” Zephyr offers me the bottle. “More water?”
His dragon. Who breathes acid. If Zephyr used Xhev to kill my father, then surely… surely… my father must be dead.
I close my hand over the Fae’s and drink. This time, he lets me have the bottle while he dips into a backpack I recognize—it belongs to Maxim, who would have shed it before he shifted—and produces the rudimentary first aid kit Neo insisted we drag along.
Between blissful sips of H2O, I watch closely while Zephyr shakes out a couple of capsules. I’ll have to trust his judgment that they’re safe for concussion, but frankly I’ll take anything that might put a dent in this headache. I accept the meds meekly and swallow them down without protest.
I’m far less sanguine about the pinch of grassy, bittersweet-smelling dried herbs the Fae shakes out next, extracted from a tiny pouch at his belt. He sprinkles this weed delicately over my throbbing brow like a pinch of fairy dust, with the words of a whispered spell.
To my suspiciously raised eyebrow, he explains, “Seelie comfrey. ’Tis an herb with anti-inflammatory qualities. Ash never lets me ride into battle without it.”
“Hmmm.” I manage to convey my active skepticism of his primitive Fae medicine without even opening my mouth. Because it would never do to imply that I trust him.
Although his Ash is indeed a gifted healer. I’d be a fool to deny that much.
Admittedly, that sickening lightning bolt of pain—the agony that cleaves my brain in relentless nauseating tempo with my pulse—iseasing.
“That herb should speed your recovery.” Zephyr gives my fretful face a grave nod. “But no vodka martinis for at least twenty-four hours, beautiful one.”
Dear fuck.
Is that a flicker ofhumorwarming that seductive voice of his? Could this Unseelie tyrant actually be trying to makea joke?
With difficulty, I recall my wandering wits to the subject at hand. “You were saying… about my father…”
A subtle chord of tension runs through his supple thighs beneath my head. “What of him? I left him for dead.”
Left him for deaddoesn’t mean much, not when you’re talking about Nikolai Romanov. I let out a sigh and rub an absent hand over the burning ache in my chest.
Zephyr tilts his head and eyes me with a quizzical gaze, very much like the sparrow Ash calls him.
“If by some miracle you did manage to kill him, I will certainly not mourn him,” I say clearly.
Even though I’mnotentirely certain that’s true. But I’m not some archaic pointy-eared Fae. I can and do lie with impunity.
For years, the combustible fuse of my feelings toward the detestable parent who rejected me has been a buried landmine I’m scrupulously careful never to trigger.
“I gathered as much,” Zephyr allows. In the ghostly twilight, his face turns cautious.
I turn my own face away, the better to hide my thoughts, and lean my cheek into the sleek dragonscale that sheathes his quads. “But why target him? I mean, him in particular?”
Zephyr’s silken voice hardens to steel. “I tracked your sire from the hyena-infested wood—where he was clearly behind the entire attack—and found him lurking just outside this chamber. Your father was setting Zara in his sights with a blowgun.”
“What?” Alarmed, I twist my neck to eye my rival.
Rival or no, this revelation carries the ring of truth. When it comes to assassination, poison is often my father’s preferred weapon.
Zephyr levels me with a grim look. “I overheard him telling his four-legged hyena minions it was stonefish venom.”
“Christ.” I recognize the substance (I’m not an assassin’s son for nothing) and struggle to sit. His firm hand eases me back. “That’s a hellish poison. It causes… excruciating pain. Convulsions. Paralysis. Its victims die in agony.”
“Just so.” Zephyr’s jaw knots and his mouth tightens to a ruthless line. “Cleopatra’s courtier babbled about some sort of queen killer, dispatched by that accursed Messalina to eliminate Zara from the Dean’s Challenge. Permanently. It appears to me your father may have been Messalina’s anointed one. Her chosen killer.”
My thoughts swirl and flounder like chum in a shark-filled sea.
“Well… Daddy Dearest is typically beyond bloodying his own hands these days. Although if the queen herself requested it, he might make an exception—but wait.” Desperately I struggle to think. Curse this wretched concussion. “When… when did you speak to Cleo’s courtier?”
“Oh, I may have tortured one or two.” The Unseelie menace lifts one shoulder in a shrug.
