Page 49 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
Even with our backs pressed together, I still felt him roll his eyes.
“Or maybe it’s not the caenim,” Lucais countered darkly.
I knew he was probably right. I was no all-star track runner, but I’d still managed to outrun the feral creatures on every occasion. Their forté was endurance; the caenim persisted, wearing down their prey until they’d burned through their energy and lost the will to keep going. They triumphed in numbers, though even that was subjective. I hadn’t witnessed any signs that the caenim were intelligent enough to play malevolent games with their victims.
“Wait,” I said, holding up a hand, though Lucais wasn’t even looking in my direction. “The night we met in the bookstore, I heard someone pretending to read a book.” I shivered against the fist of fear gripping my nape as the memory twitched back to life. “It scared the hell out of me.”
“I very much doubt that,” Lucais muttered, turning around. “You’ve given me hell every day since then.” He folded his arms over his chest expectantly, meeting my heavy stare with one of his own. I stood like a statue, drilling the answers out of him with my eyes. “Fine,” he conceded at last. “That obviously wasn’t the caenim, but I wasn’tpretendingto read, either. You have no idea how long I had to wait for them to arrive and for you to leave. I was bored, so I sifted through a classic. Sue me.”
“What do you mean youwaited?” I demanded, a blush rising to my cheeks. “How long were you in the bookstore with me?”
The High King might have admitted the severity of his stalking prior to our first introductions, but he might have tried to dance around the truth. I wasn’t going to find out standingin the middle of an abandoned gravel parking lot because the Malum were closing in on us from all sides.
A precipitous chill in the air derailed our conversation as a heavy cloud drifted across the sun, lingering there like a figure casting a shadow down onto the world. My stomach pinched, and I pressed the palm of my hand into it, trying to counter the plummeting sensation.
Obscuring the light, the silhouettes of the Malum plunged us into a creepy midafternoon gloom, and I knew clouds would never look the same to me if I returned to life in the human world one day.
Soft and low, the High King’s voice was a distant wind chime when it reached my ears. “Definitely not the caenim.”
The unsettling reply came down against the fabric of his protective wards in a succession of four heavy knocks reminiscent of the fate motif, and I stifled my gasp with one hand. Lucais reached out towards a steel pole on the closest fence and tapped his knuckle against it three times. The resounding noise was a shrill, hollow ring, completing the threat.
“Fuck,” he breathed.
I shifted from one foot to the other at his side. “Inside joke?” I enquired, trying to lighten the oppressive mood despite myself. For all I knew, Beethoven was a faerie, too.
“Sure,” Lucais agreed dryly, looking down at me with one perfect eyebrow arched. He folded his hands behind his back. “A Malum General walks into a bar and asks for a pitcher of faerie wine. What does the bartender say?”
Suppressing the urge to cringe away from the darkness clouding the edges of his gaze, I rolled my lips together and hummed thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” I admitted after a moment of serious contemplation. “Whatdoesthe bartender say?”
“Nothing,” Lucais quipped, the word swinging out as sharp as a sword. His hands were still tucked away, and he banished some of the distance created by our height difference when he leaned forward and added with menace, “Because the bartender, along with everyone else in the room, is dead.”
A quiver spider-walked down my spine, decorating my skin with prickles. My heart throbbed painfully against the inner walls of my chest, but I schooled my expression into a mask of mock amusement.
“Ha.” Forcing an eye roll, I steeled myself against the rippling aftershocks as another series of probing knocks rang out across the lot in a new, less ironic symphony. “So we’re trapped here?”
“We’ll be walking through the gateway straight into an ambush,” he confirmed with a sigh. “They can’t get in here, so they’ll have to wait for us on the other side, which means I’ll have approximately one millisecond to evanesce us both out of there and back into the carriage waiting for us in Caeludor. Unless,” he added, somewhat reluctantly, “I create a portal.”
Vaguely, I recalled the brief lesson he’d given me on the differences between portals and gateways when we first met. But he was so incredibly rude to me back then that I’d focussed more on his bad attitude than I had on any of the magical specifics. My head was swimming with conflicting information every bit as cryptic as the exterior of his palace, like I had fog inside of my brain, concealing a box of answers.
Shaking it off, I said, “So just do that?”
He pinned me to the spot with a searching look. “I have to take down the ward around Belgrave—”
“Definitely don’t do that, then.”
“—for a split second long enough to create a rip between worlds,” he finished, eyes sparkling with the sudden onslaught of unidentified emotion. His face slipped back into thatunreadable mask with far too much ease. “You realise we don’t have much of a choice here, right?”
I braced myself for an argument, digging my heels into the gravel for support. “You realise I lost eight years with my sister, and I’m not about to let you risk the next eight by giving those bastards even the smallest chance of getting in here?”
He squared his shoulders, facing me fully. “You realise I’m not about to riskyou?”
My teeth were clenched so hard that my jaw started to hurt. “You realise you don’townme?”
“You realise Iwarnedyou what would happen if we stepped through that gateway, and you agreed to do as I said because I was not—and still am not—prepared to make compromises when it comes to your life?”
“Ugh.” I shivered as his words fell over me, serenaded by the maddening tapping of iron nails against the shelter he’d placed on my home. Wrapping my arms around myself, I turned in a slow circle, mulling over our options.
The unfortunate reality was that he was correct. I’d agreed to his terms when we came back, not foreshadowing that we might end up trapped.
