Page 119 of Enchanted Shadows
Miles and Allen were outside our door, as well as a few others while they formed a gameplan for protection duty. It was going to prove more difficult in the castle made of shadows and glass.
I’d had enough of feeling sticky and hot, so I slipped my shirt off over my head.
“You could warn a girl,” Kessara muttered.
“You were right. I’m hot.” I tossed my shirt to a nearby chair.
“You always feel warm, even on days not spent in the forests of Agria.”
I eyeballed the floor. It looked so much cooler than the rest of me felt. I needed a cold shower. But first Kessara and I needed to get a plan for tomorrow so I could relay it to the team.
“So, tomorrow?” I asked, in a hurry to get to the shower.
“I should have expected this,” Kessara responded, heading to a small fridge in the corner of her room and pulling two ice cold waters from it, handing one of the glass bottles to me. “They are playing nice. This is what they do. Get you to remember that they care about you, that you want to impress them, want their approval, and then they begin giving you tasks, making you earn their love.”
“Do you think they’ll give me a test?”
“Absolutely.” She took a drink of her water. “They’ll want to make sure you were worthy of marrying me. And our very public make out fest will likely be in the morning.”
“I’ll brush my teeth,” I promised.
She snorted a laugh and dropped her eyes to her water, still clearly bothered.
Realizing this was not going to be a quick discussion, I gave in to human urge and sprawled out on the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“I. Am. Hot.” The stone flooring beneath my back felt like I was laying on a sheet of ice. A sigh of relief may have escaped out of my lips.
She again laughed. “Come on then.”
I leaned up on my elbows from the floor. I had to admit, even from floor level, my wife was stunning. Her legs were toned from all the days spent training. She’d done her hair and makeup this morning, and while I looked like a sweaty dog, she still looked perfect. “What?”
She moved to the double doors, also framed in black, sliding one open. “It’s going to rain.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. Let’s go get you cooled off.” She gestured with her head for me to follow.
I’d follow this woman into a damn monsoon if she kept looking at me the way she was. Like I was hers to mischief away with.
One moment I made it to her side, the next, I was doused in her cool shadows, moving, but unable to see where. My magic flared, lighting up the darkness around me, and though I wasn’t touching Kessara, I could feel a phantom hand in mine, one made purely of shadow. I looked at it twice. Nothing was there. And yet she was there all the same.
Just as soon as the shadows had wrapped around me, they fell away, and we were standing on the floor of the forest, a trail ahead of us.
“Where are we going?” I asked. “I probably should’ve grabbed Miles.”
“Where we are going will be safe,” she assured me. “Just trust me.”
So, I let her take my actual hand and lead me into the forest. A smarter man maybe would have worried, but I saw that glint in her eye which only promised fun.
She soon wrapped us in shadows again but kept her hand in mine. It was alarming to keep alternating from being able to see, to pure darkness. I tried to be a good sport about it. Things weregoing to get more tense tomorrow, all the way around. So I needed to give her this. This moment to show me her land.
“Artem, Damek, and I used to play hide and seek where we are going. There were lots of... pockets to hide.”
I heard a rumble of thunder off in the distance, the petrichor easing in. She hadn’t been wrong about the rain.
She continued to move us there fast within her shadows. I heard water and when we finally stopped moving, when she sent the shadows back to where they came from, my breath caught. There were waterfalls. Plural. A few shorter ones, as well as a large one. This area was a small clearing in the trees, so the moonlight shining down and the reflections from the water made it so we could see.
