Page 77 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
Five years or fivehundredyears old—it did not matter. The lashings of parental blame were equally painful.
“Wrong!” Lucais laughed bitterly, casting his eyes around the hillside behind her as if there was an audience I couldn’t see. “He’s scared, mama. He is absolutely petrified that I might change my mind about letting his crimes go unpunished. And rightly so!” he added, shouting the last part into the distance with a hand cupped around his mouth.
Oblivion surrounded us in the portal, but Lucais glared into the darkness as if the darkness might glare back.
The sound of his dejection boomed for miles.
“For what he did—to the Witches, to Margot, toyou…” Breathing heavily, the High King stared at his mother with hard eyes, though moisture lined his lower lids. “And for what he plans to do to the woman I love.”
Letting out a weary sigh, his mother raised her hands, palms turned up towards the sky. “It is not so bad now that we understand how to maintain our true selves—”
“You’remurderers!” he bellowed, and his voice broke halfway through the accusation. With his free hand, he pointed to the pile of corpses behind his mother; and suddenly,Iwas holding on tohimwith a protective death grip, hellbent on keeping him in place at my side. “Look what you’ve done to my people. They aremypeople, mama. My subjects! I took a solemn oath to protect them!”
“It is a necessary unpleasantness,” she bartered, “and we are yourfamily—”
“Not anymore, you aren’t,” he snapped.
Anger flashed in her black eyes. “Who will take our place?” she challenged.
“I have no place for you anymore.”
“A boy needs a family, Lucais, even once he grows to be High King. Don’t you recall when you needed us? Don’t you remember what we had to do? Who will replace us—Aura?” she jeered, nodding her head to me with sudden disdain. “She won’t accept the mating bond. She doesn’t even know if she’s genuinely in love with you or if her feelings have been falsified by the Oracle, not to mention the fact that she positively reeks of another man.”
I blanched, but Lucais was unmoved.
“Trust me,” she implored. “She won’t stand at your side and fight your enemies—not your true enemies, of which you havemany, my child. You need someone who loves the ones you love, and who hates the ones who would bring your downfall. Not the other way around.” His mother’s cool, calculating gaze landed on me. I felt like she was stripping my skin from my bones with nothing but the jealousy in her eyes. “Give her to me, or Faerie will burn.”
Lucais was already shaking his head. “You will have to kill me, I fucking swear it to the High Mother. You. Will. Have. To.Kill.Me.”
“You’re wrong.”
But he was already turning us back towards the portal, which had reappeared, rippling behind us with an ethereal cerulean glow around the edges.
“Wait—” she started.
“No,” he interrupted firmly.
The portal shimmered like the surface of a lake as we approached, much clearer from the Malum’s side than it had been when we had entered earlier. We stepped—
“I love you, Lucais,” she called out softly. Her voice was suddenly worlds away, like we were underwater and she wasabove the surface, but the words were as clear as if she’d whispered them in his ear.
The High King of Faerie paused a single step away from whisking me back through the portal. I felt its pull like a magnetic force battling his restraint as he hesitated for a split second, holding us there. Filled with suspense, my heart was shattering against my sternum.
Lucais lifted his head and turned it to the side, but didn’t quite look back over his shoulder as he spoke, his voice breaking on a whisper. “I love you, too, mama.”
twenty-five
Auralie Starfire
We stepped out of the portal into pouring rain.
Cringing, I ducked my head beneath my hand and flicked my gaze towards the sky. Freezing cold droplets of heavy rain pelted against my shoulders and the top of my head, seeping into my scalp and trickling down the back of my neck. In an instant, my dress was saturated, clinging to my body like plastic wrap.
There wasn’t a huge difference between the swarms of fog and the clusters of rainclouds—bar the excessive precipitation—and the typical sounds of a storm were absent. No warning thunder, no incandescent lightning. It hadn’t been raining when we slipped through the portal, which meant it wasn’t a normal storm.
Something cold and slippery dropped from my chest down into my stomach, triggering a ripple effect of disquiet to scatter across my insides.His mood swings.
Searching for a place in the muddied earth, I staggered a few steps forward while gravity settled around me like a secondskin. The portal’s magic felt tacky and dirty, but the rain couldn’t wash it away.
