CHAPTER 19
he world is rocking up and down, pitching like a ship. Violently.
I try to open my eyes, but it’s too much effort. Ice slides throughT my bones, my blood. So cold. My body shudders, shaking like a dying leaf in the wind.
A voice rings in my thoughts, the sometimes violent sensualist. I will taste you. Wrap your thighs around me. In a dark, consuming flame, we will burn, a comet in the sky.
No violence tonight, then. I sink into oblivion.
I’M IN LOS ANGELES, in my childhood bed, surrounded by my stuffed animals. My head feels hot, my throat burns. I just woke from a terrible nightmare, one of a man with black hair and a spiked crown standing before me, a sword in his hand.
My room looks scarier than usual, with shadows climbing over the walls.
I don’t know if the man from my nightmare is hiding in one of them. A cough racks my chest. Panic crackles through me.
“Mom!” I scream.
Sometimes, she doesn’t come when I call. Sometimes, she’s not at home, especially when Dad goes away on work trips.
Now, I’m sure the evil king is lurking in my room, and I’m too sick to
fight back. “Mom! Mom!”
Hot tears run down my cheeks. It’s hard to breathe. Something is wrong with my chest, and I can’t get enough air. When I cough, it’s a low, strange noise that sounds very wrong. My throat is closing up, and I’m sure I need a doctor. I want to go into the bathroom for medicine, but if I step onto the ground, the murderous king will grab my feet. Is he the one stealing my breath?
“Mom!” My throat aches when I scream, and no one is coming to help.
“Dad!”
Children need looking after.
SOMEONE’S TEARING at my clothes, and I want to keep them on.
Voices float through the air.
“She’s not responding to my magic.” Raphael’s deep voice has a sharp edge to it. “I’m trying to heal her, but it’s not working.”
I open my eyes, but everything is blurry.
“I’ve taken most of her clothes off.” Freya’s voice pierces the air. “Warm her up, will you? I’m going to be sick again. But Raphael, I don’t think you should get your hopes up. She hasn’t practiced enough in moderating her magic use, and she unleashed all of it at once. No one can survive such a temperature drop.”
I want to tell them I’m fine, but I can’t seem to move. Maybe she’s right.
Am I dying?
“She’ll be fine,” Raphael says firmly.
“Well, warm her up, then, for fuck’s sake.”
“I will. She will be fine, Freya.” His certainty is unwavering. “Throw more blankets on us before you get up again, will you?”
A warm body wraps around me, and powerful arms enfold me. The tension in the muscles beneath that smooth, warm skin belies his certainty. A tightness, tautness beneath the surface. Is he naked? Am I naked?
I’m trying to stay in the moment, but I float away again.
My mind slides back through the years.
I’M outside the library in the château. For three years, we visited, and for three years, I lingered near Raphael, standing where I could hear him and watch him from the shadows. He and his demi-Fey friends seemed like gods to me. All aristocrats—beautiful and untouchable. Princes of the château. So sure of themselves. I’d skulk in the corners of the library, pretending to read but listening in to try to understand what they said in Fey.
Raphael was only ever with them at night, his long limbs draped over the velvet chairs, sipping wine. He was only a year older than me, but he seemed so grown up. Sophisticated. I wondered how it would feel to be that relaxed and comfortable with myself, to let the ever-present knot in my stomach just melt. To smile with ease. Raphael was a little more serious than some of the others, sometimes contemplative, dreamy. But never nervous.
It felt like an ache in my chest to hear their camaraderie while I stood by myself. I wanted to be one of them more than anything—like the gorgeous demi-Fey girls who hung out with them, flirting and teasing them.
It wasn’t until our third summer that Raphael spoke to me. I was seventeen, hanging around the library, hoping he’d show up.
One night, when he wandered in alone, I could hardly breathe. He smiled at me. It felt like I’d been raised in the dark, and for the first time, I had sunlight on my skin. He asked what I was reading, and I talked for far too long about my favorite poet, who’d died by drowning, then rambled on about how his wife had removed his heart, saving it before his body burned on the funeral pyre.
Raphael’s eyebrows rose, and I remember my cheeks heating. Then he asked me if I wanted to meet him the next day. I was so unsure of myself around him, I almost said no. But I managed to nod, and the next day, I followed him through sun-drenched fields. He told me about the history of the château—that it was called Douloureuse Garde, a sorrowful fortress.
During the Hundred Years’ War, the English army had massacred everyone in the castle. Back then, they called those massacres the chevauchées, the harrowing, scorched-earth raids of the English. The kind that led to the capture of Joan of Arc.
And after the chevauchée, only one person was left here. The viscount had hidden in the dungeons while the rest of his people were slaughtered. He
stumbled up the stairs to find the stones of his castle bathed in blood. So, it became the Douloureuse Garde.
Raphael told me about happier things, too—the château’s alchemists and magicians from seven hundred years ago, who could predict the future by the stars. They foretold the rising and falling of empires.
He talked about the language of wine: how the vintners read messages in the leaves, how the roots and soil murmur secrets to the grapes. And under stress, when the earth whispers of famine, the grapes grow more flavorfully than ever. The vintners would purposefully try to stress their vines to make them thrive and burst with flavor.
In his beautiful Fey accent, he asked what I did for fun. All I could tell him about were the books, but he seemed to like hearing about them.
I remember the gold of his skin, and the cold silver of his eyes reminded me of the sun’s rays breaking through storm clouds. I stole glances at his beautiful pointed ears and breathed in his masculine scent, faintly spiced like cedar wood and forest soil. That gorgeous scent is all around me now… That day, he led me to the dungeon of Douloureuse Garde. He took me down beneath the earth where shadows swallowed us and told me the stone chambers were haunted by the viscount. The guilt had driven him mad.
When I was scared, I leaned into him, and he wrapped an arm around me.
His silver eyes shone even in the dark. Half-lidded, playful.
Beneath the earth, the air was freezing cold, but I felt the heat radiating off of him.
I’m still cold, the air piercing me, shaking me. Making my lungs freeze.
Hard to breathe when everything stops moving, the air still as ice… We wandered from the dungeons, back out to the sun-dappled grass under a yew tree, and lay flat on our backs. Our arms stretched toward each other.
When our fingertips touched, I heard words in my mind: Beautiful. Beautiful.
That time, I wasn’t scared of the voices because they described what I saw before me.
But everything changed after the kiss. The kiss told me who he really was under that beautiful, golden-tongued exterior.
Warm arms pull me in close against a steely chest, and I gasp for breath.
EVERYTHING IS MOVING UP and down, a rocking motion. Normally, this would make me feel relentlessly queasy, but right now, I feel warm and safe.
Magic thrums over my skin, making my pulse speed up. There’s something particularly enjoyable wrapping around me.
My eyes flutter open. Bare skin on bare skin, Raphael’s naked body pressed against mine. One of his arms is hooked around my waist, pulling me back into his abs. His arm is tight around my ribs, and my camisole is pulled up to just beneath my breasts. I’m not totally naked, I realize. I’m wearing underwear, but nothing else. I think it might be the same for Raphael behind me. My exposed lower back curves against his stomach, and his legs are wrapped around me. Blankets cover us.
I turn to look at him, and a tendril of my dark hair falls before my eyes.
He looks back at me from under his long eyelashes.
“You’re awake, pixie,” he whispers. There it is again, a note of sweetness in the nickname. A half-smile flits over his lips.
“What’s happening?” I croak.
He props his head on his fist to look down at me, but he’s not pulling his arm away from my waist. Except now, his muscles grow more relaxed against me. “You had hypothermia. I had to warm you.”
I frown up at him. “This never happened before when I used magic. At least, it wasn’t this extreme.”
“You’ll need to learn to modulate it, and then it won’t be as bad. You disabled the entire veil this time, for at least a few seconds. Hundreds of miles of a magical barrier. That was a tremendous surge of magic you unleashed. You nearly died, Nia. When we get back, you’ll need a lot more training before I’m willing to let you risk your life again.”
My gaze trails down his broad shoulder and his chiseled bicep, tattooed with dark lines that sweep over his collarbone. I have the strongest impulse to run my fingers over those inked vines, but I remember what happened the last time we kissed. “Is there any reason you still need to be in bed with me?” I ask. “I’m warm now.”
His expression shutters. “I suppose not.”
He rises from the bed, and I steal a glimpse at him. He’s wearing only a small black pair of underwear, and my gaze trails over his powerful body. He pulls on his trousers, and I watch the sculpted muscles shift in his broad shoulders and back.
His gaze returns to me, and I jerk my head away to pretend I wasn’t
staring.
“Do you need some water?” he asks softly.
I lick my lips. “Yeah, I think so.”
Still shirtless, he crosses to a table and pours me a cup of water. For the first time, I look around the room. Velvet-upholstered chairs stand against mahogany walls, their surfaces carved with nautical symbols. Light streams through round windows over a writing desk littered with papers and an inkwell. I lie in a lush bed with soft blankets.
Raphael hands me the cup of water. I take a few tentative sips and sink back into the pillows. “Thanks,” I whisper.
“You saved our lives, you know. If you hadn’t shown up in Allevur, we would have stepped into that ambush. Varris betrayed us. Either he double- crossed us, or they caught him, tortured him, and got the information out of him—how to summon us into their territory. Either way, he’s compromised.”
I let out a shaky breath. “Traitor Varris.”
He pulls on a white shirt and starts to button it. “You heard a voice in
your mind, and it spoke true.”
“That’s pretty much it.”
“And this has happened before?”
I frown. “I always thought I was hallucinating. But now that I know I’m demi-Fey, I’m starting to wonder if there’s some magic at play.”
He pulls out a chair and sits in it. “Another power. You have two powers.”
I swallow hard. “Wrythe says that when one person has several powers, they interfere with each other. Diametric powers. They’re cursed and drive a person mad.”
He cocks his head. “And you think the voices tell you about the future?
Like Tana’s ability to predict?”
My mind flicks back over some of the times I heard voices screaming in my head. Sometimes, they came true. Other times, it was lies or panicked thoughts, or just a litany of insecurities. Occasionally, pornographic thoughts boomed in my skull—about me, usually. Occasionally, they talked as if I was merely a passerby listening to a conversation of someone else.
With Tarquin, it was hostile. You need to be put in your place. You should have been nice when you had the chance, and now look what you’ve done.
Whore.
When the sea serpent attacked us, it was a voice screaming that we were
going to die.
All of them were raw emotions. All of them were triggered when others were near me.
“I think I might be telepathic,” I said. “The voices reflect the thoughts of people around me. What they feel or think.”
Raphael folds his arms, leaning back in the chair. “Well, you’re right about powers interfering with each other. If you have two powers, it might explain your difficulty with controlling your magic.”
I nod, thinking of what I’ve learned. Two powers intertwined weaken and destabilize each other. In some cases, over time, they cancel each other completely. And in other cases, the person possessing them is torn apart, either mentally or physically.
In less than a month, I’ve gone from being a bookseller with no powers to being a supernatural spy, to having one power too many.
A line forms between Raphael’s eyebrows. “We will need to suppress your telepathy. If we’re lucky, we can eliminate it altogether.”
I’ve always wanted to get rid of the voices, but suddenly, I’m not so sure.
“My telepathy saved your lives.”
He flashes me a rueful smile. “And I am immensely grateful. But like I said, you almost died. We have several telepaths in MI-13. We have only two Sentinels. During this mission, you’ve demonstrated that you’re on your way to becoming an amazing agent. But if we don’t suppress your second power, you could die.”
“Your bedside manner needs improvement.” Nausea rises in my gut, climbing up my throat. I don’t want to vomit in this bed, but I don’t feel strong enough to get up yet. “Why am I getting seasick now? I was fine a minute ago.”
He flashes me a sly smile. “Well, that was the effect of my magic. It didn’t do much good to heal your magical affliction, but it helped with your seasickness.”
I stare at him, suddenly wishing he’d climb back in bed.
“But you kicked me out,” he adds.
“Perhaps that was a mistake,” I say crisply.
I turn away from him, pulling the covers up over my shoulders.
I feel the bed compress as he slides in behind me, his body curving around mine. Already, his magic is working its way over my skin.
When I close my eyes, I conjure up the memory of being ghosted. After
our kiss, I didn’t see him for three days. And when I found him in the vineyards, he told me that he had lost all interest in me, that he had better things to do than to entertain a spoiled girl from America. Raphael, clearly, had better options, like the elegant and sophisticated women he spent time with at the château. Or women like Ginevra Pendragon. She’s a Pendragon— no one would call her trash.
When I was seventeen, I spent the rest of the summer lying on the floor of my room, miserable.
His arm curls protectively around my waist. For just a moment, all my thoughts narrow to the feeling of his skin against mine.
Mentally, I jolt myself out of the pleasure. Do not let yourself fall for him again, Nia. I’d spent years building up my mental barriers against gorgeous men like him, and I would not let the walls crumble just because of his perfect body.
No more thinking of Raphael—not like that. He’s going to end up with someone like Ginevra. I’d be an idiot to think of him as anything else.
