Siren's Song: The Gray Court, Book 5 (19 page)

“Well enough, my Hob.” Cassie grinned. “But my accommodations could be more comfortable.”

Robin waved his hand and Cassie was free. “My king sends his most abject condolences on the death of your parents, Demetria Nerice.”

Demetria paled, her light dimming. “What?”

“I’m afraid the House of Nerice is no more.” Robin grinned. “My king will arrive shortly to express his emotions himself, I am certain.”

“Queen Gloriana is behind this.” Cassie rubbed her wrists, wishing she could do the same for her shoulders. But she’d been held in that position long enough that her muscles were beginning to scream in protest. She could barely lift her hands past her chest.

“We are aware of that, my queen.” Robin turned his attention to his long, black nails, but Cassie wasn’t fooled for a moment. “Who else was behind this, Demetria Nerice?”

“What?” Demetria floated backward, as if that could save her from the wrath of the Hob.

“Do not lie to me.” That green gaze froze Demetria in her tracks. “This was no mere White Court plot. How did Titannia factor into this?”

“I would never work with the Black Queen.” Demetria’s chin tilted upward. “I would die first.”

“Then slit your wrists, my dear, because you were a pawn in more than one Court.” Robin’s gaze turned toward the window as the palace began to shake. “Ah, he comes.”

“Oberon.” Cassie swam as fast as she could toward the window, gazing down into the courtyard below.

In the distance, a bright light moved ever closer to Atlantis, the rumble of shifting rock and scrambling life creating a wave of sound and fury before it.

“Oh, he’s ticked.” Cassie smiled as the light moved ever closer. “Someone’s gonna get it,” she sang as the light crashed into the city walls. Cassie couldn’t find it in her to feel at all sorry for Demetria. She’d made her bed, and now she’d get to die in it.

“No. I won’t die this way.” Demetria lashed out at Robin, who easily evaded her blow.

But instead of making a run for it, Demetria quickly pulled Cassie into her arms, holding a blade to her throat.

Robin’s form blurred, swirled into a formless mass of jagged edges and flashes of light. In the center, glowing green eyes held steady in the mass of chaos the Hob had become. His voice echoed eerily from within that ball of fury. “Let her go.”

“No. Cassandra is my only way out.” Demetria tightened her hold, the dagger nicking Cassie’s neck. Her blood scented the water.

A bellow of pure rage shook the castle, disrupting the magic that caused the lights to glow. They were plunged into eerie darkness broken only by their own personal lights and the rapidly approaching High King.

“He’s going to kill you in ways you can’t possibly imagine,” Cassie warned her sister. “Your suffering will last centuries.”

Demetria shuddered. “I have no choice. My queen commands and I must obey.”

“You always have a choice.” Robin’s amorphous form floated toward them, forcing Demetria to pull Cassie back. “You just chose poorly.”

And in that moment, the light of the Lord of the Gray was upon them, and Cassie smiled as its warmth touched her soul.

Oberon swam into the room, his body transformed into that of a merman. His upper body scales were pearly gray, slowly growing darker the closer they came to his tail fin until they were just shy of black. That pearly gray color traveled up his torso to his upper arms, darkening down to his hands to gunmetal gray. His nails had grown to sharp points, glittering metallically. His hair flowed around him in white and silver strands and his eyes…

Oh, his eyes. The whites had disappeared into mer eyes, and they were the same gray as his tail fin. They glittered with hints of light, like pinprick stars in a midnight sky.

He was the most beautiful, lethal thing she’d ever seen, and the court of Atlantis would never be the same.

Chapter Eighteen

There was a knife being held at his truebond’s throat. Her blood was in the water, a stain that should not exist.

No one in the history of the world would suffer as much as Demetria Nerice would for daring to draw blood on Oberon’s truebond.

But first he had to get the ex-princess to release Cassie before something happened they would all regret. He was far too strong, too angry, to attack Demetria while a blade lay so close to Cassie’s life blood. He couldn’t risk Demetria killing Cassie in her death throes. He would use Robin, the Hob’s gift tempering his own, shaping his raw fury into a suitable punishment for the last of the line of Nerice. “Let her go.”

“I’m not stupid.” Demetria kept an eye on both Robin and Oberon, the blade shaking in her hand.

“Could have fooled me.” Robin reformed, his red merform taking the place of his true self. “Only a truly dim-witted individual could have conceived of this plan.”

“It should have worked.” Demetria’s hand shook harder, nicking Cassie’s neck a second time. “Oberon would have been safe. We would have protected him from Titannia. Gloriana doesn’t seek his death, only his safety.”

“And yet Titannia somehow knew I’d been poisoned.” Oberon drifted closer, watching Demetria so closely he almost missed how his light meshed with Cassie’s dimmer glow. Her song burst inside him, her fear adding sour notes to her harmony. “I wonder how that happened.”

“It wasn’t us, I swear.” Demetria pulled Cassie farther away from both Robin and Oberon, stopping only when she ran into two statues.

Two statues of mermen that looked remarkably familiar. Shane’s sculpture now made sense. Cassie had been tied between those two stone figures. Robin must have released her when he arrived. He was glad he hadn’t witnessed it. Atlantis would have suffered a second sinking, one they wouldn’t recover from.

“Please. We don’t want to fight you.” Demetria’s gaze darted toward the archway, no doubt expecting reinforcements.

Reinforcements that would never come. Oberon had seen to that. While others watched his frontal assault, his Blade had taken out Demetria’s guards. The selkie he’d had Robin assign to the Atlantean court had been more than willing to break his cover in order to save his queen, and Oberon had rewarded him by seeing to it he got home. “There won’t be a fight, I promise.” He smiled, aware how vicious the expression was. “Release my bondmate.”

Demetria’s gills fluttered madly, the siren equivalent of hyperventilating. “The war will come. You can’t stop it.”

“Ah, more of the same.” Every now and then some White Court fool or Black Court sycophant would attempt to garner favor by pursuing a course of action that the gods themselves had decreed could never occur. “You and yours miscalculated.”

“Gloriana herself has raised the cry. The Child of Dunne will change the world as we know it. Now is the time to strike, and end the evil that is the Dark Queen once and for all.”

“It’s far too late to stop the Child of Dunne.” Oberon stared at Cassie. “He has already acted.”

Demetria’s gills stilled, then fluttered shallowly. “How?”

Oberon held out his hand. “Let my bondmate go, and I’ll tell you.”

“And you’ll let me live?” Her lips trembled. “The Hob will too?”

Oberon and Robin exchanged a look. They’d danced a similar dance before. “Of course.”

“You have my word,” Robin bowed. “You will live a long, quiet life.”

Far too slowly for Oberon’s liking the blade withdrew from Cassie’s neck. She swam to him as fast as she could, sighing as he pulled her tightly into his arms. “I knew you’d come.”

“I always will.” His gaze never left the princess, and though his tone was soft, his stare was not. She deserved none of the gentleness his bondmate was receiving. “Tell me the plot, Princess.”

The title seemed to ease her, though it was no longer true. He’d ended the line of Nerice with her parents’ death. Her siblings were in custody, other than Prince Dayton, who’d chosen to remain with Pacifica and his fiancé at the Gray Palace and had denied all knowledge of the plot to overthrow Oberon. “Our agent was to drug you and take you to a special meeting place, where you’d be handed over to Gloriana’s agents. You’d have been safe on White Court lands while we finally dealt with Titannia.”

That name no longer made him flinch the way it used to, not with Cassie so close to him her hair brushed against his skin, her tail twining with his. “Go on.”

“The Child of Dunne was to be secured as well, but Titannia’s agents got there before we could. Gloriana felt that to act after that would draw far too much attention upon her, so the Dunne was deemed expendable.” She was calming, her hands far less shaky, her tone becoming more and more steady as she described the plot to essentially overthrow the Gray and plunge the world into war. “Then her idiot nephew was kidnapped.”

“The first salvo in the war.” Robin was careful to hold still, but his words seemed to remind the ex-princess of his presence.

“Yes.” She nodded toward Robin. “Or so we believed.”

“And what was to happen to me when this glorious war was won?” Oberon’s grip tightened on Cassie, who gripped him equally tightly.

She had the gall to look startled. “You were to be Lord of the Gray, of course. We never intended to dethrone you.”

“Merely to set me aside while the White Queen went about her business.” Oberon carefully placed his bondmate on one of the moss-covered stools. He glanced at Robin, who nodded once before both of them focused on Demetria. This sentence would come from both of them, for it was Robin’s Blades whose reputation had been blackened by Gloriana’s maneuvering, and Cassie’s life that had been put in danger. His power rolled through Atlantis, his voice heard by all who dwelt within its walls. “I, High King Oberon, Lord of the Gray, sovereign over the White and the Black by holy decree, hereby end the line of the family Nerice and all of their descendants, and declare their rule of the Atlantean people to be at an end. Their treason against the high crown has been marked and judged, their actions deemed abhorrent to the peace and prosperity of their kingdom.”

He felt the shock roll through Atlantis. Only twice before had Oberon disbanded an entire court, and for similar reasons. The people would know what their rulers had been up to. Nowhere would the Nerice family be safe.

But there were two members who did not deserve punishment, and he would see to it that they did not suffer. “Cassandra Nerice, Lady of the Gray, Queen of the Gray Court, and her brother, Prince Dayton Nerice, betrothed to the Pacifica court, shall remain the only true members of the Nerice royal family.”

Cassie shook her head. “Neither Dayton nor I wish to rule.”

He nodded. “Queen Cassandra will take the name of the Lord of the Gray, and Prince Dayton the name of his betrothed, thus truly ending the name Nerice. Those who bear that surname who are not of the royal line may choose another name rather than share in the shame of Nerice.”

Cassie smiled, accepting his compromise.

“A governor shall be appointed to rule over Atlantis until such time as a King or Queen worthy of the name shall present themselves before us.” He kept his power flowing, for there was one more task he needed to perform. “And for kidnapping the High Queen, Queen Cassandra, drawing her blood and threatening her existence, I hereby sentence Demetria Nerice…to life.”

Demetria shrieked as his and Robin’s powers blended, converging on her in a swirl of silver and green light. Her body twisted, bent in impossible ways as together Robin and Oberon forced her to change. Every bone in her body shattered, her blood filling the green and silver swirls around her with bright red.

It was almost pretty.

Her skin expanded and contracted, her hair receding into her skull, her eyes bulging out as her form shrank. Her eyes slid around the side of her head, her nose shrinking, sinking into her face. Her forehead sloped back, her lips stretching, disappearing as her chin sank into her neck and her neck into her chest. Her arms receded, turned in on themselves, the bones protruding from the skin as they turned into dorsal fins, her tail shrinking in size until it matched the rest of her small body. Her blue scales now covered her entire form.

Oberon smiled as he released his power. Robin’s gift had given the princess some beauty, where Oberon would have been content with a simple transformation. “Robin?”

Robin swam forward and scooped up the damsel fish, placing it in a clear pouch he pulled from thin air. “Who’s a pretty fishy? You are, yes, you are.”

The damsel fish swam slowly, exploring its new surroundings. How much the ex-princess understood of her new life Oberon did not know, nor did he care. He’d kept his promise. She was alive, and they had not fought. And all would know the price they would pay for harming his bondmate.

Now he had far more important things to worry about. His mate was against the wall, her hand covering her mouth. She looked utterly horrified as she stared at the bag Robin so carefully held. “Cassie?”

She tore her gaze away from the bag and met his. “I never want to see something like that again.”

“Pray you never have to.” Oberon would make no promises. He couldn’t, and he refused to lie to her. “Come to me.”

He held his breath as Cassie hesitated, but within seconds his bondmate swam to him. She trembled against him, her face buried against his chest. “I want to go home.”

“Your wish is also mine.” He closed his eyes, grateful beyond belief that she’d come to no other harm than some cuts on her neck that would quickly heal. “I won’t ever let you be taken from me again.”

“You can’t promise that.” Cassie shivered.

Oberon smiled as the remnants of his power scented the water around them. “Oh yes I can.”

“Sire?” The caution in Robin’s voice amused him.

“It’s been a while since I visited a forge.”

“Forge?” Cassie lifted her head as he swirled them away from the Palace.

“Oh, dear.” Robin began to laugh, well aware of what Oberon had in mind. “I look forward to seeing what you create.”

He shot his Hob an amused glance. “Shall I make a matching set for you and
your
truebond?”

Robin tilted his head. “You know, considering the trouble my bondmate tends to find, that might not be a bad idea.”

Cassie tucked her head against his neck and held on as Oberon and Robin brought her home.

“What will happen now?” Cassie paced in front of Oberon’s desk, still too tense from everything that had occurred to relax. Oberon had tried to talk her into going to bed, but she was jittery with leftover nerves. She couldn’t settle down, even when Oberon had pulled her into his lap and tried to soothe her with soft words and gentle touches.

No. There was more going on than just Cassie’s kidnapping, and she needed to have a hand in what came next.

Robin, who’d made himself at home on Oberon’s couch, waved a languid hand. “Demetria will make a lovely addition to my bondmate’s new aquarium.”

Oberon’s little half-smile was typical. If she ever saw him give a full belly laugh she’d probably die of shock. “And Gloriana? What of her?”

Oberon drummed his fingers on his chair. “This isn’t the first time one or the other of the queens has tried something like this.”

“Oberon was appointed High King in order to prevent situations that could plunge us all into war.” Robin yawned. “Of course, that’s never stopped the ladies from trying to scratch each other’s eyes out from time to time.”

“Why do they hate each other so much?” Cassie had always wondered, and now she was in a position to ask the one person who most likely knew the answer. “I get why
you
hate the Black Queen, but why does Gloriana?”

Oberon and Robin exchanged a look. The silent communication between them would have once made her jealous, but now she could hear the hum of their joined song. Each viewed the other as a cherished brother.

It was Oberon who broke the silence. “When my bond with Titannia was strained to the breaking point and war was inevitable, she chose to strike first. She set out, making secret alliances among the fae with the darker appetites, no matter their aspect.”

“She bullied, bribed, blackmailed and seduced her way through half the court before she was stopped.” Robin grimaced. “It’s said no bond, however true, was safe from her.”

“So she seduced Gloriana’s bondmate.” So that was one rumor that had proven true.

Robin chuckled darkly. “So they say.”

Oberon’s half-smile became a full one. “Ever hear the phrase ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?”

Cassie stopped dead, her thoughts tumbling all over each other like a stampede of puppies. “Wha…?”

Robin winked. “We never once said she stuck to only the
male
half of the courtiers, did we?”

Oberon nodded. “Indeed. And Gloriana’s…proclivities were well known back then.”

She was still trying to wrap her mind around that. “Gloriana is a vagitarian?”

Robin burst into laughter.

Oberon’s brows slowly rose. “What did you call her?”

Cassie blushed bright red. She cleared her throat, embarrassed she’d burst out that way. “I’m sorry. Did you say Queen Gloriana is of the lesbian persuasion?”

Robin laughed so hard he fell off the sofa.

Oberon shook his head, obviously amused at either her outburst or Robin’s antics. Probably both, if she was hearing the hum of her mate’s song correctly. “Yes, she is. Titannia seduced her, aware of how powerful the queen of the fairies was. Having her as one of her lovers gave Titannia tremendous influence over the so-called lesser fae.”

Robin wiped tears from the corners of his eyes and picked himself off the floor. “Between Michaela and Cassie I will never be bored again.”

“Where is Michaela?” Oberon glanced toward the door as if expecting the woman to walk through it any second.

“She’s showing Snod around the palace.” Robin settled himself back on the sofa, straightening out his jade brocade jacket with a twitch. “The gods only know what trouble the two of them will find.”

Oberon muttered something under his breath that caused Robin to chuckle again. “Snod is Michaela’s bodyguard, a redcap she accidentally bonded with when she met Robin.”