Page 99 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
It swallowed me whole, and we began anew.
I never stood a chance.
So, instead of sleeping, I went into the bathroom and sat in the shower until I lost track of time. Even though I knew it didn’t work the way I wanted it to, I couldn’t bear to do anything else until I’d tried to soak off the lingering touch of wrongness that had been left upon my skin.
I sat there, staring at the steam fogging up the glass until my back became so numb I had to turn off the cold tap completely just to feel something again.
Eventually, the hot water ran out because the palace was not the House, and there was nobody—and no one—looking over me. I stayed beneath the stream of water as its temperature rapidly dropped from scalding to freezing, and I didn’t move until the shower head started to sputter.
When I turned the tap off and crawled out of there at long last, I didn’t have the energy to dress. Exhaustion clawed at my eyes, begging them to close.
Barely wrapping a soft black towel around my chest, I stumbled back into the main bedroom and fell onto the enormous trunk sitting at the foot of the bed.
The room was mostly dark, save for a single faelight orb Lucais had left on my bedside table, and I shuddered to see the shadows dancing on the walls from the sparse trees well beyond my window. The fog concealed most of the moonlight trying to be witnessed in the night sky, and I was once again alone with my thoughts in a bedroom that never truly belonged to me.
I didn’t know when I fell asleep or for how long I was unconscious, but I woke with a start during daylight hours, lying sprawled out on the lower half of the bed. I’d kicked at the towel on top of me until it went flying onto the floor nearby because I’d been dreaming of the lapsus and the towel had felt like its sticky magic.
Groaning, I leaned over the edge of the bed and pried the trunk open just far enough that I could yank an item of clothing out of it to cover myself.
A wrinkled grey shirt fought me every step of the way, but eventually slipped out of the gap. As I buttoned it, I thought back to my dilemma with my memories and everything else in my life that was wrong, damaged, or outright broken.
The dreams. The lapsus. The darkness in my veins.
My father, a prisoner of the dungeon. My other father, trapped inside the Court of Darkness. My mother and sister, living their lives in the human world, the former oblivious to everything that had happened to me since the day the caenim crashed through the front window of our little downtrodden townhouse, and the latter oddly suspicious.
The magic that had abandoned me. The magic that had destroyed me. The bond with Lucais, and the pull to Wrenlock, and—
“Fuck, it’s crowded in here. No wonder you don’t sleep well.”
I jumped in my skin, my fingers slipping on the second last button and ripping it clean off the garment. My heart was in my throat, but that was beginning to feel normal, and my throat was still scarring over from all of the screaming I did inside of the lapsus, so I didn’t make a sound as I looked straight into the three eyes of the maroon-skinned faerie I had killed in the palace’s hallway.
Fuck, it’s crowded in here?
I stared at him, then stared at all of the empty space around him as he stood in the middle of the floor at the foot of my bed. He was corporeal, but there was a paleness to his complexion that hadn’t been there when the sword I was wielding went through his chest.
And then it hit me.
“You’re not real,” I deadpanned. “You’re in my head.”
He took a step forward.
In the gloomy daylight, there wasn’t very much of my bedroom that was in a position to lay claim to a shadow, and he certainly didn’t.
Up close, he was strangely handsome and youthful. If I didn’t know that the odds were stacked against me in Faerie, I would have guessed he was around my age. His third eye was slightly smaller than the two fairly standard eyes sitting below it and seemed to blink twice as slowly. He had long, seductive lashes on his two main eyes and none at all on the third. I thought his irises were black, but it might have been the poor lighting.
Mouth turned up into an iniquitous smirk, his full lips were smooth and a shade or two darker than the rest of his body, andhis teeth were alarmingly white and razor-sharp when he parted them to speak.
“Atta girl,” he muttered, his voice husky yet a pitch higher than I was expecting. It was also very familiar, which, like most things in Faerie and the forsaken palace, made me feel exceptionally uncomfortable.
“I killed you.”
One of his thin brows curled upwards. “How considerate of you to remember.”
“I didn’t mean to kill you,” I said slowly. Part of my head felt like it was being stuffed with cotton candy, and I was growing more and more distrustful of myself and my perception of reality. Still, it was only polite to err on the side of caution and apologise. “Oh,” I rushed to add, “I’m sorry.”
He pressed his lips together to subdue his smile. It was amused, but far from friendly. “You’re getting better at apologising. Props to you for that.” He made a motion to tip his hat to me, though he wasn’t wearing one. His hair was thick, plentiful, and dark red. I noticed that his ears were elongated and pointy, but I wasn’t convinced he was High Fae.
I frowned. “Do you accept?”
