Page 104 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
My vision went blurry, drifting over Lucais’s shoulder. When my eyes refocussed, they landed on Tommy.
The handsome, sharp-eyed Spectre stood with his brows raised and arms folded across his chest, leaning against the doorframe. Tommy didn’t look smug, but his expression wasn’t comforting, either. When his dark gaze met mine, he tipped his nonexistent hat to me, and I felt myself beginning to free-fall.
Tommy parted his lips and mouthed the words, “I told you so.”
thirty-four
Don’t Ask Such Infuriating Questions
Ialways knew I would die before my time.
I had a midlife crisis when I was ten—or at least, it had felt like a midlife crisis. It was definitely some kind of crisis, and if I hadn’t made it to my twentieth birthday, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.
My father made us a statistic, increasing our chances of early and unexpected death according to the studies I’d read, and my anger towards him made me reckless and volatile.
Belgrave was a quiet, uneventful town filled with nosy people, but we got a lot of tourists. It was always at the back of my mind that a random driver passing through on their way into the city might see me sitting down at the docks alone, willing myself to stow away on the next boat, and kidnap me.
It was just a thought.
But even then, sometimes, I wondered if it could qualify as a desire. The deep, dark kind.
Maybe that was why I kept going back despite the fact that I was never going to get on a boat.
Even at the age of ten, I knew that was fucked up—knewIwas fucked up.But the darkness inside of me had never felt like power. It was not a call so much as it was a warning—the persistent echo of an enigmatic impending doom.
Something bad is going to happen. Maybe it already has.
It left me riddled with paranoia, weakening me like I had been ingesting poison since birth.
Deep down in the cobweb-covered recesses of my mind, I kept a truth under lock and key—the unshakeable feeling that all of it was my birthright. I’d always assumed it was my father because that would make perfect sense to anyone who had the displeasure of knowing him well.
The fact that both natureandnurture were set against me from the very beginning made me sick to my stomach.
I’d known that, too, though. My shadow on the ground didn’t follow me everywhere I went in the light of day because it had to, but because itwantedto know where I was going.
Subconsciously, I’d always felt it there—larger than life and darker than night, stalking me through my childhood and growing alongside me like a toxic vine that had its roots buried underneath my skin. Feeding off me. Intertwining with me. Becoming me.
If Faerie was telling me the truth, Ihadbeen born with it. The dark magic was a seed when I was a toddler—something mild that occasionally made me kick my legs and wriggle in an unknowing effort to dislodge it from my body—but the magic fed off every bad thing that had ever happened to me, so it burst into full-bloom and consumed me when I turned eleven.
The Court of Darkness was my punishment.
I was set to inherit a damned Faerie Court, barely functional and populated by dark faeries who had either been traumatised beyond the point of salvation or condemned for their sins inside of it since the moment I’d shown up in Lucais’s life. The ironywas nauseating—that I was the reason he had shunned them, and yet, they were supposed to be my responsibility.
“If I go back there, will I ever be allowed out?” I wondered aloud as Lucais stomped through the palace, his hand tightly wound around mine like a vise. “Can I still visit Brynn, or will it be too dangerous?” I paused, gnawing on my lower lip. The next question I needed to ask started hurting before I’d even gotten it out. “WillIbe too dangerous?”
The High King shoved at a heavy oak side door with his free hand and sent it flying off its hinges with a loud crash. Splinters of wood ricocheted off the ground as it bounced across the cobblestone outside like a rock skipping across a lake, each subsequent bang dropping in volume until the door skidded across the ground, only stopping when it hit the other side of the palace’s exterior.
There was a damp chill in the air outside, perpetuated by the lack of light in the sky beneath the city’s thick layers of fog. Over the courtyard, it hovered well above the ground, somewhat reminiscent of a ceiling. It allowed me to glimpse parts of the palace that hadn’t been destroyed, though the gloom coated it like an accelerant for the sparks of Lucais’s moods and made me feel very unstable.
As he dragged me across the open space by my hand, I gazed up at the palace’s untouched exterior towering over us, the mist wafting between the turrets akin to the water in a river skirting large rocks as it flowed downstream.
“You’re not fucking going back there,” he growled, yanking me across the bailey. “Don’t ask such infuriating questions.”
I dropped my gaze back to the ground and sneered. “You’d rather I die. Got it.”
In the middle of the courtyard, Lucais came to a screeching halt and whirled on me with an expression that had me almost stumbling over my own two feet. His face was contorted withnegative emotion—pain, rage, or hatred, I wasn’t sure. But then he spoke, and it became perfectly clear.
“When are you going to drop thefuckingact, bookworm?”
