Page 54 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
The High King waited, waited, waited.
Panic rose in my chest with the quickening of my pulse until—
Lucais spun around so fast my stomach collided with my lungs. A hand shot out, his palm turned towards the onslaught, and an inferno of light and electricity appeared between us and them. White-hot magic splintered across it as far as the eye could see, a kaleidoscope of murderous colours that acted like an electric fence. Lucais’s arm didn’t buckle as the locusts flew straight into it, unable to react in time to pull back and escape a barbaric death.
They fell from the sky, and the High King retreated into the human realm before their bodies had stopped twitching on the ground or I even had time to blink.
He evanesced from the portal back to the industrial estate and gingerly let me down. I breathed out a long sigh of relief to find that the world was as it had been when we left, though it was growing darker by the second, a few stars and the ghost of a half-moon already visible in the twilight sky.
Gravel crunched under our feet as we pivoted in slow motion, searching for masked signs of the disturbance caused by the portal. Logically, I knew the Malum’s creepy little attack bugs would have been programmed to immediately follow us back into Faerie, but I never would have been able to live with myself if they hadn’t—if even one of them had lingered behind.
The High King’s golden eyes met mine through the half-light. We exchanged a look of acknowledgement that the humans were safe and completely unaware. When that fear crumbled away, we moved towards each other in unison and linked hands, returning to the gateway with the next gust of wind.
Our silence was companionable, born of necessity as exhaustion took the place of adrenaline, and we let our hands fall apart when we returned to Faerie.
The back and forth transfers from the magical realm to the non-magical realm had taken a toll on me. I lifted my gaze to the High King, curious to see if he felt the same dizziness. Sensing my attention, Lucais turned his head, lips parting around a question he never got the chance to ask.
With his eyes trained on me, Lucais didn’t see that one of the locusts had managed to drag its injured body towards the gateway.
He didn’t see the pincer still twitching atop its head.
He didn’t step out of the way in time to avoid the razor-sharp edge of its claw shooting open and slamming closed one last time.
eighteen
Kiss It Better
Lucais yelled a string of incoherent profanities on either side of a soul-distorting scream. The locust was still clinging to life, though barely. It spent the last of its energy in a final attempt to bring down the High King by slicing his lower limb open.
Hopping away on his uninjured leg, Lucais swore viciously and left the locust to bleed out on the ground. I lingered, staring down at it as the surrounding dirt grew damper with each passing second. The deathly vacant and cold eyes were pitch-black—and yet, I could feel it watching me as the outpouring of its lifeblood slowed to a gradual stop. The field was muddied with their blood, littered with their bodies, and I felt a mindless surge of rage overcome me.
I kicked the locust so hard that its entire body flipped, and then I stomped down on its head as hard as I could manage, crushing both pincers beneath my boots first, followed by the horrifying eyes, and then its skull. The sharpcrunchas I finally broke through and pulverised it between my boot and the blood-soaked ground was grossly satisfying.
For a brief moment, I almost felt as if the whispering rush of my magic had come flooding back to witness my atrocities, but as soon as I glanced up, the feeling vanished.
“Aura!” Lucais yelled, agitation grating in his voice.
Twisting my head to follow the sound, I found him several hundred paces away from where I stood along the cusp of the battlefield, like he couldn’t get away from them fast enough—even in death. I frowned. Despite the fact that it hurt him, Lucais hadn’t lifted a finger to retaliate, content to let it succumb to its wounds instead.
“Aura,” he called again, a little softer. “Will you please move away from there?”
Brows raised, I threw my hands up in a careless gesture. I couldn’t fathom why it was such a big deal for him when they were all very much dead upon the grasses, but I could see the anguish crossing his face even at a distance, so I relented and left the graveyard behind as I walked over to him.
The High King grunted as he lowered himself to sit beneath a tree. Both legs were stretched out in front of him, the knee of the injured one slightly bent. I couldn’t withhold my grimace as I peered over at the open wound. The skin had been cleanly sliced straight down the side of his calf, cutting through layers of flesh and muscle almost to the bone.
Blood, red as my own, was trickling out of the wound much slower than I’d have expected from a human body suffering the same injury. For a long moment, the two of us hesitated, dallying in the silence that had fallen over the clearing in the wake of the attack.
“It’s not going to heal on its own,” he ground out through his teeth at last. “It’s not a venom sting, but the fucking locusts have iron-tipped claws.”
“Like the caenim,” I murmured, watching the feverish rhythm of his chest as it rose and fell. A faint sheen of moisturecoated his skin, making it shimmer like body glitter under the strobe of nightclub lights.
“Yes,” Lucais whispered, hissing as he tried to straighten his injured leg. His face contorted, beads of sweat forming on his brow. “Exactly like the caenim.”
Glancing over my shoulder, I checked to make sure the field was still devoid of life forms. He’d executed the caenim, and I’d stomped the last living locust to death, but the Malum were yet to show their faces. I didn’t feel like we were being watched, but I still wondered if we might have been because nothing else really made a lot of sense. They’d been within an arm’s reach of us—ofme—and yet, as soon as opportunity showed favour to them, they’d vanished.
“You can’t walk, then,” I surmised, tilting my head to the side as I settled into a crouch next to him.
“No, Auralie.” Lucais threw me a derisive look. “I can’t fucking walk.” He glanced pointedly down at his leg, the gaping wound appearing even worse the second time I beheld it. My stomach churned. “We don’t have a choice. You’ll have to kiss it better,” he said.
