The Banksy. With the purple-eyed angel in the bulletproof vest.
Just a little ironic.
I sweep my gaze across the crowd before me. If this was once a traditional theater, the raked seats have been removed, though the golden gilding and deep-red velvet curtains remain along the walls, pillars, and sconces. The patrons of the illegal auction are arrayed at round tables, six or seven people at each. Deep, large booths are set along the sides of the room, and a few upper balconies fan out alongside the stage.
Every single patron, all of them decked out in suits and pretty dresses and expensive jewelry, stares at me, frozen in uncertainty that quickly edges over into unrestrained fear.
Because my eyes blaze with the power writhing around me and the children. My unfettered essence undulates across the raised stage, primed to cascade over the edge and into the audience.
I smile, fierce and biting.
When I open my mouth, it’s not my sweet princess tone that gently flows through my words.
“I’ll deal with the rest of you entitled, soulless assholes in a moment. But which of you sick fucks thought you could kidnap children in my fucking realm?”
10
CHRISTOPH
Which of you sick fucks…
Mirth, her eyes blazing violet orbs of power, stands on the raised stage. Next to a Banksy these privileged assholes have stolen — I saw the installation in New York when it first appeared — and are now auctioning off to the highest bidder. She holds a young blond girl in cute pajamas, maybe eight or nine, by the hand. All the immense power that Her Highness carries, usually so tightly that I can barely scent it, wraps around them both, as well as a metal cage that contains an older boy. The boy is painfully stuck mid-shifter transformation. And appears too young for that transformation to not have been forced upon him.
I jerk to my feet, knocking the table of the booth tucked in the back corner of the theater enough to slosh posh drinks over a half-dozen nauseatingly expensive cigars. The rest of the table’s occupants— the assholes who invited me to the auction— don’t even notice.
Mirth has them completely enthralled.
Not one of the three fuckers at my table displays even a hint of surprise at the appearance of a child in a fucking cage. An auction for rarities and magical antiquities, they said when they sidled up to me at the club. Presuming that I’d be amenable to it all because not only am I a low-born bastard, shipped off to the United States by my duke father, but I’m now also well-known among the asshole toffs — thanks to Eli — for running an exceedingly profitable underground, illegal fight ring.
Apparently, the auctioning of children as one of the ‘rarities’ wasn’t even worth an offhand remark.
At my movement, the awry goddess on the stage snaps her radiant purple gaze to me, narrowing her eyes as if sighting prey.
That mere look slices through me, instantly scarring my soul. I open my mouth to explain my presence … or to declare my utter devotion … or to demand that she get the fuck off the stage, to stop exposing herself to a theater full of stupidly powerful essence-wielders.
She offers me a twist of a smile, reaching for me with all that intense power. Her energy teases over and along a binding that I can now clearly feel, hooked just under my rib cage, near my heart. That mutely felt but previously unseen bond — our soul connection. A soul-deep bond that my seer mother murmured about when I was much, much younger.
The princess that my mother’s long sight, normally tuned to financial prognostication, promised to me … but I didn’t believe, couldn’t believe. Not literally, anyway. I was only the bastard son of a duke, with a line of heirs before me. And how many actual princesses even exist?
But my mother saw true.
I never understood why she stayed with my asshole of a father, tucked away in that cottage and treated like a precious commodity when it suited him, and like a convenient fuck when he couldn’t get it elsewhere.
Mirth and I were forged from the same pocket of the universe. Everything my mother did to protect me, to care for me, steered me toward the destiny unfolding before me. My path tweaked and prodded according to my mother’s sight, enough for me to be standing here and now.
The revelation is overwhelming.
Mirth tugs on the bond between us. Just lightly. But it definitely snaps my attention back where it belongs. Had she been blocking that connection? Shutting it down along with the immense, intense power that now pours from her?
It doesn’t matter. Because now I know for certain it’s there. Now I know for certain why the burgeoning friendships with my other bond mates are so … unburdened of expectation. Now I know why other relationships were, are, difficult for me. Why I never really bothered to look for anything more than the most casual of connections.
Why I held Mirth in the garden at Lake Thun.
Why I gave her the peaches.
I can see all the strands of essence between us now, including the power spilling over the edge of the stage, creeping across the floor toward the nearest audience members. I’ve always had a sight for essence — a genetic gift from my awry mother — but it’s never been this intense, this exact before.
Thewhyof that twists through my chest. As if Mirth herself is reaching within to grab hold of my heart. And my lungs, because I’m not certain I’m breathing at all.
