All That Glows (17 page)

“I received a warning that there might be an attack. I came back to check, and when I didn’t see the prince in his bed I broke the window,” I explain as if it had been the most rational reaction in the world. “Anything to keep Richard safe, yes?”

“Everything’s been quiet,” Gwyn tells me with a frown. “The soul feeders are lying low.”

I clear my throat and gather what’s left of my dignity. “Well, I guess there’s no need for me to stay. I’ll be back in three days.”

This time I leave through the doorway. I try not to look back at Richard’s crumpled slumber as I walk out of the room. A foot, angled and odd, pokes into my vision, igniting a new wave of anger.

After all the warnings . . . everything I’ve told him, showed him, Richard still decided to put himself in danger. He laid himself out like a lamb for slaughter, drunk and open throated. An assassin would barely have to try.

Something dangerous, lethal writhes inside me. It’s beyond anger, although there’s plenty of that shooting through every vein. It’s myself as I was in the beginning: spirit unsoiled by the sugarcoated trappings of humanity, unbound by Mab’s laws. Snarling, carnivorous magic. Magic that, with the right trigger, is meant to destroy.

I stop walking, lean against the hallway’s art-smothered wall. It takes more than a few drawn-out breaths to clear my head, silence the rage inside. With great will, I force the creature I once was back to where she’s long slept, beneath years of civilization.

I shut my eyes, imagining Richard’s face behind the darkness of my lids. My insides are a mess, puddles of anger and sorrow swirling together, making me sick. I hate that it hurts so much. That I let him get to me.

Sixteen

I
spend the next three days in surveillance, watching the other Fae, noting their every move. But even after so much watching, I have nothing to report back to Mab. If the Old One has an agent, they’re craftier than a few days of observation can uncover.

At twilight on the third day, I return to Richard.

He isn’t in Buckingham Palace. The unmistakable gravity of his aura pulls me to a pub two blocks off of Regent Street. The prince is in a private back room, crouching eye level with the forest-green felt of a pool table.

The old crew is here, in this room of delicate smoke, dewy pints, and pool cues. Edmund tosses his stick back and forth between his hands as he crows about his last victory. Eyeliner leans against the edge of the table, her cleavage thrust unsubtly in Richard’s direction. Mousy Hair and her boyfriend stand to the side, watching as the prince tries to sink the last of the colored balls.

Helene and Gwyn are eager to be off. Their report is brief, made only of snippets before they vanish through the door’s treated wood. I glower in the corner, burning hotter every second, like a coal fanned completely orange.

The other Fae are long gone when I snap, the agony of my anger sparking against dry tender. They don’t feel my magic work. They have no idea when I drop the veiling spell.

Edmund is the first to see me. His hands grow stiff, forget to catch the pool stick that’s sailing into them. It clatters to the floor, forgotten.

“Woah. Hey, Ginge,” he manages.

All at once the others find me, heads whipping about like a murmuration of starlings, perfectly synchronized. Eyeliner’s face withers into a scowl.

“Embers!” Richard lays his pool stick on the table and straightens up.

Edmund, clearly more than a beer or two into the evening, takes my nickname in with a snicker.

“All of you leave. Now.” The poison of my anger drives into Edmund’s face with a single stare. I don’t dare use magic to make them leave. There’s too much emotion venting up; I’m a volcano on the verge of eruption.

“And just who do you think you are? Ordering us about.” Eyeliner pushes off the pool table, her body made of slink and sex. I hate it. “Where the hell did you come from?”

Richard swallows when I look at him—his Adam’s apple bobbing with the sudden knowledge that I’m angry. That he messed up.

“Go,” he tells his friends.

Edmund doesn’t hesitate. Instead he’s the leader of the pack, snatching his still-frosted pint from a nearby table before he heads toward the door. “Good luck with that, mate.”

I have eyes only for Richard as the others shuffle past, though I can feel Eyeliner’s snarky pout behind my back. It lasts long after the door closes.

I stare and stare and stare. Richard swallows twice more before he attempts to speak, “You’re back.”

“You thought I wouldn’t be?” My voice is sharp, armed.

“You were gone, Emrys. Just gone.” His eyes drop from mine, focus on the eight ball, so starkly black and white in the middle of the table. “No good-bye or anything. I thought you’d come back, but you didn’t. Not that day or the next—I thought maybe you’d left for good. Then I—I began to think you might have been a dream. When I saw you in my sleep, I thought for sure you were inside my head.”

“It wasn’t a dream.” My lips purse. Any effort to stay calm, too keep myself in check, slides back like a viper coiling to strike. There’s too much emotion roiling through me, ready to be spit out like venom through fangs. “I broke through a window because I thought you’d been kidnapped. You were passed out in a corner.”

My accusation needles and digs under Richard’s skin, making him squirm.

“So as soon as I disappear you decide to get drunk?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “It’s not like that.”

I walk to the opposite end of the pool table and grab the closest ball. It’s striped, one of Edmund’s. My knuckles bleach white around it, the color of bone. “No?”

“Okay, so Ed called. He wanted to go out to the pubs, but I didn’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Right.” I roll my eyes, wheeling them pointedly about the room. “Look where you ended up.”

“I can’t just hide for the rest of my life behind all that wallpaper and iron!” Richard’s arm flails in the vague direction of the palace. “Anyway, that first night we didn’t go out. I was going to say no, but I was worried about you and feeling lonely, and I hadn’t seen them since Dad died. So I let them come over. We had a few drinks. . . .”

“It takes more than a
few
drinks to make a man pass out. Do you really not understand how much danger you’re in? You bloated yourself with so much alcohol it would make a horse stumble! What if you’d been attacked? You’d be dead.” I let the pool ball roll off my hand. It drops onto the table with a muffled crack, rolls over to the corner pouch, and disappears.

“Yeah?” The prince’s eyes cloud dark with sudden anger. His voice swells. “Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing! Then you’ll be free and you won’t have to babysit me and wipe my ass every second of the damn day!”

My breath turns sharp. I hadn’t expected Richard to fight back. My jaw clenches as I struggle to keep my frustration under control. One slip, one spell accidentally brought into being by my wrath, and the prince could die.

“Go on! Leave again! I know you want to! Why don’t you just let them take me and be done with it? At least they’ll put me out of my bloody misery!”

Richard’s words are like punches in my gut. Pointed and perfectly aimed.

“It wasn’t my choice to leave you! I was called away! It’s no excuse for you to get wasted.”

“That’s just what I need. One more person in my life telling me what to do! Why can’t everyone just leave me alone?” Richard aims a stern kick into the base of the pool table. The force of his foot causes the pool cue to shudder and fall to the carpet.

Silence, terrible and great, engulfs us both as we stare at the solitary stick.

“You didn’t mean that.” I can’t keep the hurt out of my voice. It stains everything inside me. “You don’t want me to leave . . . do you?”

For a terrible second, I think his answer will be yes. That Richard will banish me from his life. I hadn’t realized, until now, just how much such a rejection might hurt.

“Would you leave me?” He turns the question back on me. Under the greenish light above the pool table, his eyes have no color. They’re black as dead coal. “Wipe my mind clean so I never knew you?”

“If . . . if that’s what you want.” It feels like someone else is saying this. Someone who isn’t unsteady. Ready to collapse.

“No,” he says. The word is solid and sure. “I want you to stay.”

Richard looks around the room, as if seeing it fully for the first time. An ashtray of half-finished cigars smolders in the corner, spitting out secret, smoky messages. Hollowed pints, scattered on every available surface, seem so many they could make an army of blunted glass. Most of them are congregated in Edmund’s corner of the room.

“You’re right. This is stupid. It’s always been stupid, just like Dad said.” Richard avoids my eyes. “It’s just another way to get lost. It’s easy to hide in here.

“I’m trying. I really am.” He goes on, trying to swim his way out of this reeking, ash-filled cave. “But it’s too much. It’s all just been too much. Dad’s death. The expectations. Everyone wanting something. I didn’t ask to be the oldest! I didn’t ask to be made king!”

No king does. I want to tell him this, but my lips stay shut.

“And I don’t want to think about it. I don’t. All I want is to run and be somewhere else. But it doesn’t help. Even when I’m here doing all this . . . something’s still missing.”

Richard’s words wrap tight around me, carry me elsewhere. And I’m back in the castle ruins, face to the stars, wondering how I’ll ever be whole again.

“It’s just that, the only thing that’s been keeping me sane since Dad’s death is having you around. And when you were just gone . . . I—I don’t know. I just kind of lost it. I made an arse of myself.”

Something behind his words causes me to flinch. I know it’s the memory: the last exchange between father and son, the challenge that he’ll never be good enough. My accusations can only remind him of that awful, last morning with Edward.

Yet as terrible as he surely feels, I feel worse. There’s a sickness inside me separate from the machines. It writhes with a life of its own. I want, more than anything, to get rid of it.

“We have something.” My words are uncontainable, like vomit. “Do you know what I’ve risked showing myself to you? To get close to you? If Mab knew about you, about us . . .” I’m unable to finish. My chest feels raw and bleeding, as if someone has battered it with a mallet.

“I’m sorry,” Richard says softly. “Please believe that I’m sorry.”

Just like that, the fight is gone, drained out of me. Richard takes slow steps around the pool table, draws closer, until he’s only inches from me. I feel the heat rolling off his body, carrying spices of cologne and that faint earthiness. I close my eyes, but the darkness only makes his scent stronger. My heart claws hard against my ribs.

I know where this is going. How it will end. Lips will touch, carrying me away from the wildness of hill and moor, stitching my fate so much closer to the mortals. If things go wrong I can always erase it, say the simple spell that will make the prince’s memory of me fuzzy at best. The one thing I won’t be able to fix is myself.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you, Embers. Your being gone was . . . agony. I never stopped seeing your face. That’s my truth.”

Richard’s fingers brush a strand of hair from my face. I open my eyes to find him staring down at me. “You’re like no one I’ve ever known. When you left—I felt it.”

My heart becomes a lion, roaring and beating against its fibrous, fleshy cage. Yearning to be free.

“You’re right. There’s some connection—something between us. I felt it that first time I saw you, your eyes.”

Richard leans down, closing the gap between us, drawing me into him. Our lips meet, smooth and seamless. There’s a nameless desire in the way he kisses me. I feel it rising in me as well, swelling like clear, triumphant notes. He pulls me close, his kiss growing deeper, a never-ending crescendo.

This—this is something else. It reaches deep inside me. Sparks my soul.

We come up for air. Faces flushed, hair disheveled. He’s looking at me, his mouth quirked into a crooked, bass-clef smile. I’m alight under his eyes. Someone breathtaking.

Want surges through me, searing static, burning away all thoughts of Mab and the taboo and who I was before.

I stand on tiptoes and pull his feather-boned cheeks to mine. Freckles press into white-board skin, becoming one. This time our kiss is even fiercer, desperate—raw energy fuels our lips. My fingers tangle, swim wrist deep through Richard’s damp straw hair as I tug him closer. Something inside me rises, builds. Wanting to consume.

His breath is a razor, cutting and quick as he pulls away.

My thoughts are everywhere, a herd of deer startled by gunshot. They take several seconds to gather as Richard steps back. His fingers are close to his mouth; they come away with a tinge of red. Blood.

Dread, heavy and sick, floods my stomach as dozens of memories return. Memories of Fae who’d fallen in love with mortals: of the choice, the sacrifice they had to make to be with their beloveds. Memories I didn’t need, didn’t want, until now. Because Richard was never an option.

Was
. My lips still prickle with magic and something else entirely. Does that mean I think he
is
an option now?

No. Magic and mortals don’t mix. Breena’s right. I’m playing with fire.

But the hole is there, howling. Begging to be filled. Calling out for more of Richard’s touch.

“What the hell was that?” Richard pulls a small handkerchief out of his pocket, cleans his fingers.

“It’s my magic.” My voice trembles under this earthquake of emotions. They rock me back and forth, thrashing between elation and sorrow. “I’m sorry.”

“Your magic?” He looks at me with an eyebrow raised. The handkerchief is crumpled in his right hand, crimson splashes peek through gaps in his fingers.

“I think I got too excited. . . . I don’t know. I’ve never lost control of my magic before.” I cast him a second glance. “Are you okay?”

“You still taste like strawberries.” Pure joy lights his face, melting away all lines of weariness and grief. He leans back into me, warm breath diving down into mine. Our lips connect before I can stop them. His mouth is soft, like down and velvet. It makes all of me unwind.