All That Glows (12 page)

The slats, coated in lichen and splinters, groan as I come to rest on them.

Richard settles next to me. His leg presses lightly against mine as he throws his arm on the bench behind me. I’m closer to him than I’ve ever been.

I don’t pull away. Instead I stare at the sky. Deep purple has seized the horizon, bleeding out all of the pastels of daytime. The colors are like souls being swallowed back into the depths of the earth. Quick and fleeting. Soon gone.

I’m not cold, but when Richard’s hand curls around my shoulder, I shiver.

Notes—music—carry through the falling night. It sounds like the soft chords of a piano.

“What’s that?” I ask. Richard cocks his head to the side, drinking in the sound.

“Must be a concert. They have them out here sometimes.” He flicks his wrist up and looks at his watch. Movement made of habit. “Lucky timing, I guess.”

I think back to the candy-apple shine of his Stratocaster, how he hates piano. “This doesn’t sound like your kind of music.”

“You’d be surprised. I like a lot of things.” I feel him looking down at me. His breath tickles the side of my neck, causing all my finer hairs to prick awake.

I close my eyes and try to listen through this intense, unmovable feeling. The melody is there, woven with harmonies into intricate chords, flowing across the fields and through the tree branches. I soak it in, along with the goodness of nature and Richard’s touch—heavy, always on my shoulder, sending notes of its own under my skin.

It’s frightening, this song of his fingers. This thrill of his touch. Unknown and new. I should pull away from it.

I should, but I don’t.

We sit like this for over an hour beneath the music and the rising moon. Every few minutes the melody changes as a new musician commandeers the keys, but our bodies stay the same. Eventually the music fades and the noises of night take over. Somewhere in the distance is the ever-present hum of traffic.

Sooner or later, we have to return to that world of rot and endings.

The prince’s fingers stroke up and down my shoulder as he traces invisible patterns against my skin, keeping time to music now silent.

I look up, suddenly very aware of how close Richard’s lips are to mine. He draws closer, pulling me toward him. His other arm wraps around me, strong and steady, pressing me to his chest. The magic of his blood thrums through me, causing each and every hair to stand on end.

I don’t know how long the kiss lasts. I’m too distracted by the life pulsing through his lips, tender on mine. All I know, all I care to experience is Richard.

Finally it’s the prince who pulls away.

“Strawberries and spring,” he murmurs. “That’s what you taste like.”

What Richard has just given me, my very first kiss—it’s beyond anything I’ve ever experienced. Nothing in my existence compares to it. No magic, no adventure, no flight has ever awoken me with such great urgency as this meeting of lips.

All of my insides are alive, thrilling with light. I never knew it could feel this way.

He leans down again. And for the slightest moment, in another life, I let him.

But now, I turn my face to the side, catch his lips on the softness of my cheek. They linger against my skin, his breath ghosts out, down my neck. I hear the sadness in it.

“I’m sorry.”

It’s all I can say, because I don’t trust myself to speak further. I don’t trust myself to do anything. The past two weeks play back at me and I see everything I’ve done at a new, illumined angle. Dropping the veiling spell, showing and telling who I am, reaching out my hand . . . Had I done all of those things because I wanted to? Because I knew, in some unreached part of myself, that there was
this
—spark, flame, inferno—between us?

Suddenly I feel selfish. Undone. No self-respecting Fae would do what I just did. She wouldn’t be so weak.

It doesn’t matter how many soul feeders and sorcerers I’ve fought. How many missions I’ve completed at Mab’s command. How many long-dead kings and queens I’ve guarded. In this, I’ve failed.

Richard pulls back. Says nothing.

I don’t move, because I know that as soon as I look at him, as soon as I turn my head, I’ll want more.

“I’m sorry, Embers,” he offers finally, his voice rough and low.

“We—” I falter, not knowing what I was going to say. The flavor of him is still etched into my lips. Cinnamon and clove. Sun-soaked spice. My head spins with it.

“Should we walk back now?”

I nod. He’s the first to stand; his arms fall away, release me. I hadn’t realized how much warmth he held into me. The air creeps damp against my skin and blouse.

We walk back, slow and apart. The first half of our journey is silent, winding through silhouettes of bushes, bowing branches, and speared leaves. I’m very aware of my fingers—how they’re holding nothing.

“You’re right,” Richard says after the fifty-sixth step. “I should go to the meeting.”

“It would be for the best.” These words feel foreign and false, because it’s not really what I want to say. I want to ask about the kiss. What was it? An escape into a moment without pain? Something else?

But Richard, all tall and lank on the moonlit path, doesn’t look like he knows the answer.

More unsaid words ache between us until the pressing noises of the city are broken by something else. Another melody, but one that’s much more fragile and elegant than the ramblings of the piano. Birdsong. At first it’s only a single tune. But then others join in: a duet, a trio. Their notes both clash and sound incredibly right together, as only birdsong does.

The prince hears them too. He looks up into the near-invisible tangle of branches above us. “What’s gotten into them? It’s dark out.”

“They’re nightingales.” I feel into the trees. There’s an entire family of them, weaving in and out of twigs and leaves. Their chorus grows, swells with every passing moment.

“How can you tell? Maybe it’s just some insomniac sparrows.” Richard’s voice is all smile and tease, and I know that, for now, everything is back to normal between us.

“They’re my favorite birds,” I say. We round the final bend. I see the sleeping bodyguards and beyond them, the car. “They sing when no one else will. When it’s darkest.”

The girl in the bathroom mirror glares at me, eyes burning emerald, like Saint Elmo’s fire. Copper hair sweeps elegant around her neck, like a foxtail, curling just past her shoulders. Her face is a contradiction: soft, murmuring angles, ready to become a snarl at a moment’s notice.

The longer I stare at this reflection, the harder it is to see the difference between human and Fae. I look so very much like one of them.

And now I feel like one too.

He’s in the room behind me. Asleep under a mound of downy covers. I’m so aware of every breath that cycles through his body, the presence at my back.

I look hard at my lips. Both fragile and full, like the blooming, spidery letters of Edwardian script. A piece of him is still there, smoldering with memories of that kiss. The kiss that collapsed all the air from my lungs, took me up to the nest of the stars and down to the molten core of the earth. The kiss that changed everything.

I should have seen it coming, in the hand-holding, the occasional tingle of his touch. The laughter. Any human girl would have seen the signs, read them for what they were. But there was too much sickness, too much danger for me to even notice what’s now undeniably obvious.

I’ve become attached. What I thought of as protection, as being a guardian companion, was all along something else entirely. . . .

I bite my bottom lip hard, teeth piercing rose-quartz skin.

It’s not the kiss that scares me. It’s the fact that I want more. I want to kiss him back.

My duty as a Frithemaeg, my existence, is to keep the blood magic safe. Nothing more, nothing less. That’s who I am: this pledge I made at Mab’s feet so long ago. Anything beyond that is an affront to my magic, my essence.

And yet . . . I see the reflection of the door, the room beyond is a charcoal sketch, revealed in shades of gray. Through the dim shapes I can make out the lump in the bed that is Richard.

What if Mab was wrong about the taboo; staying hidden and apart? What if things are supposed to be different?

And maybe, probably, he didn’t even mean the kiss. I’ve seen it so often, humans with heightened emotions, doing things they don’t mean. Things they regret. It could be that Richard was drunk on grief. That our lips touching was nothing more than a way out, his escape.

It doesn’t matter what he meant. Or how these feelings carve like a riptide through me. It doesn’t matter because nothing else will happen. It can’t.

Blood wells, staining the edge of my teeth, running red through the shallow crevices in my lip. I stand straight, dab the hollyberry stain from my mouth.

I’ll keep guarding Richard. We won’t kiss again—no matter how badly I might desire it.

Eleven

“W
e’ve arranged for a press conference at the end of the week. Your speech is being written as we speak, but you’ll have to be prepared to answer the press without a teleprompter. Can you handle it?” the prime minister asks from his seat across the wide oak table.

The prince is ringed on every side with important figures of British politics. Parliament members, the prince regent, and his narrow-eyed mother all wait for an answer.

“I’ve given speeches before.” Despite the steadiness in Richard’s voice, his hands don’t stop twisting under the table.

The past hour has been a painful session of details. What Richard has to wear, what he has to learn, who he has to learn it from. Letters, banquets, charity events. How to deal with Parliament. How to handle foreign diplomats. Richard has taken in all of the information with never-ending nods.

I’ve watched it all from the far side of the conference room, seated just out of the prince’s view. This action is just as much for my sake as it is to keep Richard from glancing my way, being distracted. All morning I’ve caught him staring: those hazel irises darting away with intentional quickness.

I’ve done a good bit of staring myself. Richard’s appearance is the same: sculpted cheekbones, tousled, wet-sand hair, eyes like almonds, phantom traces of freckles over the bridge of his nose. But something is very, very different.

It’s like a gear inside me has shifted. I can’t look in Richard’s direction without thinking of the burn on my lips. And when that memory comes over me, the fire spreads, a flush comes to life over my arms, the top of my chest.

I’ve spent the whole day with my arms crossed and my hair fanned out, trying to hide it.

“It’s different now.” His mother breaks her tight-lipped grimace to speak for the first time. Her hands are in front of her, wrapped around a teacup. Her grip is so tense, with tendons and bone bulging through drawn skin, that I’m afraid the blue-willow china might shatter. “This speech is unlike any of the others you’ve given.”

“You mean now that I have something to say?” Richard cuts her off. “Now that Dad’s dead and I have to take his place?”

The regent, Richard’s uncle, clears his throat. “I think what your mother is trying to say is that a lot of people will be watching you, Richard. You should keep that in mind while you prepare.”

The prince’s answer is short, tart. “I can handle it.”

“Then that answers that,” the prime minister says. “We’ll send some trainers to Kensington to help coach you before Friday.”

“Buckingham. I live in Buckingham now.”

A cloud of confusion wisps through the old politician’s eyes as he processes Richard’s correction. “Ah yes. Forgive me. Things have changed so quickly.”

I look over at the prince, letting the truth of the prime minister’s words color my view. Yes. Things—and Richard—have changed quickly. The prince is morphing, in that strange stage between caterpillar and butterfly.

Only time will tell what he will truly become.

Richard spends much of the week getting trained, groomed for the public like a prime show dog. When Friday arrives, he’s more than ready. He’s rehearsed his speech so many times that he’s memorized its eloquent, carefully penned words. He recites it with a convicting, earnest air. One that will make the kingdom fall in love with him.

But he looks sick as he stares into the gilded, floor-length mirror. He fumbles with the top button of his collar. It slips through his fingers and a swearword escapes his lips, all syllable and punch.

“Need some help?”

He seeks out the echoes of my face in the glass, eyes weighed down with pleading. I walk up behind him and grab his arm. He doesn’t protest as I turn him toward me and secure the button with one swift movement. This is the closest I’ve been to him since that evening in Hyde Park. In many ways I feel like a mouse dancing on the edge of a trap, trying to catch just a taste of cheese. Tempting fate.

Being this close, I can feel his terror. It pulses off of him in shocking, uneven strikes.

“Are you okay?” His face is unusually pale. Sallow even. Before I really know what I’m doing, my fingers leave the buttons and move up to stroke his cheek.

He shakes his head. “I’m not ready. I can’t do this. Don’t make me do this.”

“I’m not.” It’s so nice to be touching him again. I let my hand linger against his cheek, soaking in the warmth of his skin. The ghost of my reflection, the snarling, dutiful beast, is screaming. Reminding me of the promise I made, the blood on my lips. Reminding me that I’m a Fae, and Richard is mortal. That this is wrong.

You are a Frithemaeg
, the Fae inside me growls.
You have to let go.

I’ll let go. I’ll stop touching him. Just not yet.

“Let’s go somewhere. Somewhere else.”

I should tell him no. I should force him to walk out those doors and face the room full of cameras and reporters. But I know, deep down, that this isn’t what he needs. Bullying him to the edge of his fears won’t make him any stronger. It won’t mold him into the perfect king.

“Where?” I know, even as I voice the question, that it’s wrong. I shouldn’t be helping him.