Page 53 of A Reign of Roses
“I’m talking to you.” The silver guard drew nearer. A short, stocky oaf, his armor a little too big. “Are they still fucking?”
Acid singed my tongue even as relief loosened my shoulders.
“Yep,” I said.
The guard nodded, impressed. “Good on him. I’d go for days with that little thing, too.”
I nearly bit through my tongue.
“What’d he send you for?”
“Fresh trousers. Old man doesn’t have the self-control he used to.”
The kingsguard stared at me like I’d spoken sacrilege.
I didn’t inhale.
My sword burned through the scabbard at my hip. I reached for it…
Until the small man broke out in a braying, boisterous laugh. The imbecile wheezed over and over, until tears had gathered behind the red glass that covered his crinkled eyes.
“Off you go,” he barked, patting me hard on the shoulder and sliding his lighte across the spelled door handle.
I let myself into my father’s room without another word. For a moment, bathed in near-darkness, all I could hear were my own shallow breaths and my heartbeat slamming too fast inside my head.
My father’s bedroom was dark and stagnant. A window had been left open, night air sending thin black curtains around like wisps of smoke, but the Solaris breeze did nothing to ease the thick air.
I squinted in the darkness—his bed was perfectly made, as always. Not a crease. Not a fold out of place. The vaulted ceilings and stone floor made for a chilling echo as I strolled through.
My hands raked over the face of his marble desk feeling for hidden cubbies and drawers. I combed through his orderly bookshelves for false walls, and then his armoires for the same. Past each rich tunic and robe, hunting for hinges or the smell of lighte or glimmer of magic. Under obsidian ottomans to inspect each marble tile, I crawled beneath the heavy bed, palmed atop shelves for latches or keys or safes. I even dug through the pristine fireplace that hadn’t been lit in millennia. Nothing.
The room was bare of any blade.
He’s your father, I told myself while lodged under a leather reading chair.Where would he keep the only weapon that could kill him?
The sound of his voice in the doorway stalled the breath in my lungs. “On me, of course.”
My blood ran cold in my veins.
Slowly, I eased out from underneath the stiff leather. “Father.”
“Son,” he answered, closing the door behind him and peeling off his black-stitched formal coat. When he hung the refined piece on the coatrack, a mighty, glinting weapon shone from his scabbard.
Sheathed at his waist—the Blade of the Sun. Its hilt a dead giveaway, ornately encrusted with the nine Holy Stones.
Focus tunneled my vision.
Four feet from me—three, perhaps—was my ability to become full-blooded Fae. To regain my dragon form. To take Arwen’s fate away from her, save her life, solidify her many thousands of years of living along with millions of other innocents…
“So that’s where you went,” Lazarus almost hummed, prowling toward me, so slow I wasn’t sure he was actually moving.
I fought every urge to scramble backward. “Get out of my mind.”
Lazarus unleashed a repellent smile. “It seems I’ve been stood up. Any idea where my harvest has run off to?”
My mind guttered into stillness. Utter silence. I knew better than to think of her or where she was now.
“I’ll kill you for that,” I vowed. “For what you tried to do.”
