Page 35 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“Isaid…” I swallowed the ball of nerves threatening to affect my voice and turned to look at him.“When do the shadows come back?”
“What shadows?” he questioned, slowly dragging his gaze up from the pages. He lowered the book from his face like it was a pair of reading glasses and he was deep in a completely different train of thought.
“The ones covering the Court of Darkness.”
“No,” he remarked, already turning back to his book. “They’ve been there for years and never move. They won’t budge.”
“Well,” I huffed, shrugging one shoulder that felt like it had spiders crawling all over it. I glanced back down at the Map to double-check I wasn’t just seeing things. My mouth twisted, and I clicked my tongue before telling him, “They literally just did.”
He slouched against the counter, slapped the book against his thigh, and rubbed his temple with his free hand. “Come again?”
I gave him a beseeching look. “They’regone. The shadows over Blythe’s Court have exited stage left, evacuated the building. They’re on vacation, gone fishing—”
Faster than lightning, the High King leapt to his feet. A light bulb moment must have exploded on top of his head at last. His book was discarded, thrown over his shoulder with such force that it crashed against a shelf and sent preserving jars clattering into the sink below. One jar landed on the bench, the high pitch of heavy glass rolling across the marble countertop all I could hear for the longest moment in history as Lucais dove across the room like I’d tossed a grenade into the sink.
His eyeballs scraped the Map, registered the absence of the shadows, and grew to twice their normal size. And then his arms were around me, yanking me back from the table while his hands pinched my arms in a death grip. Frantic, he searched me from head-to-toe as if checking for the entry and exit wounds of a gun that hadn’t been fired outside his own mind.
When he found nothing except the quizzical look on my face, he returned to the Map, tugging me with him. The colour drained from his skin until there was nothing but a deathly pale hue where the golden glow of pure light belonged.
His fingers were still burrowing into my flesh.
“Lucais,” I said, loudly. “What is it?”
He met my gaze again, his face stricken, and we stared into each other’s eyes, swapping anxious dread with brutal understanding. We stood as still as statues for devastatingly prolonged moments.
I clocked weakness in him for the very first time.
Finally.Finally.
The High King’s golden eyes had dimmed to a barely-there yellow—it was the colour of the final straw, the one that would snap and break the faerie’s back if I so much as breathed upon it. His face hovered in front of mine; close enough to kiss, close enough to blow out the candle burning in his eyes if I wasn’t careful.
But I could not hold my breath for long.
After all, much like the High King himself, I was not a water faerie.
“What the fuck have you done?” I hissed.
One step forward. Come on.
His eyes shut as my words hit him, and his grip on my arms slackened. When he spoke, his voice was hollow. An echo. “I was wrong.”
He was wrong?
I frowned. “What does that mean?”
“It means I was wrong, Aura. That’s what it fucking means.” His long fingers flexed around my arms, and something inside his throat tensed and bobbed like he was trying to choke it back up. “The Court of Darkness never disappeared at all. It’s there, and they’re in there. Alive. They’re still alive,” he whispered. “And they have been all this time. For sev—for seven years.”
My heart was thumping against my chest painfully, coated with the dread oozing from him like blood from an open wound. Still, I had to ask. “Is it not a good thing that they’re alive?”
“In exile.”
Then, he let me go.
He was sinking.
I could not think of moving my arms fast enough to catch him, and suddenly, it was too late.
The High King of Faerie was on his knees before me.
