by Cate Corvin
I finished off my third glass of water, but my throat still hurt from constant singing. “What does a Warden have to do to become a Justiciar?”
“Have a mastery.” My eyes dropped to his sleeve, under which there was a black sigil emblazoned on his arm marking him as a Master of Mirrors. “I already had mine when I became a potential, so I was promoted straight into the role. Next step up is Inquisitor.”
“But you found yourself here. Looking for Simon.”
Dominic’s features had smoothed out as he talked. The hope that grew on his face as I asked him more about his life was almost painful.
I still hated Warden Vega and others of his kind, but Dominic had proven over and over that he wasn’t like them.
“I worked for the witch-prison Carnelian first.” He met my gaze squarely. “That was another lie I told you. I’ve seen Obsidian many times before, when my duties brought me there. I was on track to be promoted to Obsidian’s Inquisitor task force when I heard about the job opening here and took it.”
I nodded, taking it all in. I couldn’t imagine going through five years of Warden training, let alone working in a prison, nor could I imagine how much harder the Inquisitors must be than the Wardens I’d seen before.
He’d told me he was glad they sent me here instead of there… how much worse was Obsidian if he considered Cimmerian under Gilt’s rule better?
“And they know you’re here.”
The faintest smile touched his mouth. “They do. A lesser cousin from a Great Coven was sent here some ten years ago. The case never went anywhere, but my superiors weren’t averse to having feet on the ground for a year or so.”
“Why didn’t they care about Simon?” I met his gaze squarely. “What did he do that was worth sending him here?”
Dominic’s face hardened, but his eyes were sad. I remembered the picture in his house, the two teenage boys who had no idea what waited for them, Simon only months from death. “He did nothing at all. That was the injustice of it. Simon Wicke was just one of the warlocks unfortunate enough to be born without magic.”
I felt like I’d swallowed an ice cube. He’d done nothing to earn his death but be born a human.
“It’s a rare phenomenon, but magic-less witches and warlocks usually stay with their families as servitors or coven liaisons. But the Wickes… they couldn’t stand to have a human son.” Seething anger simmered just under Dominic’s clipped tones. “Fenwicke spent years intermarrying in the hopes of producing more mirrorwalkers. Henrietta Wicke, the current matriarch, took Simon’s lack of magic as a personal affront. She sent him away while I was matriculating in Bellhallow under Lord Bell. When I came back… the deed was done. She didn’t care if she ever heard from him again.”
“All because he was human.” The injustice of it seemed monstrous. Who would give away their own son just because of a lack of magic?
“Yes. His crime was being born flawed. Henrietta didn’t want to send him to the human world either, afraid that word of his provenance would come back to bite her.”
I didn’t have any words. I would’ve said it was impossible to believe anyone could be so callous, but I had experience with a cold and uncaring matriarch myself. Alicia Darke and Henrietta Wicke were two of a kind.
Suddenly my feelings towards Simon were much more than distant sympathy and pity. Like him, I’d been tossed aside like trash.
Without magic, the boy hadn’t stood a chance.
“I think it’s admirable that you’ve spent so long trying to do right by him,” I said, reaching out to take his hands without thinking. His fingers closed around mine, warm and calloused, sending electric zings through my veins. “If… if any of us died here, I’d hope you would send us on, too.”
Dominic’s eyes darkened. “Don’t talk like that. I would die before I’d let them hurt you.”
Electricity seemed to crackle in the air between us.
I couldn’t hold back a yawn, even though I had a thousand more questions. The curses had worn me out more than I thought.
“You need to sleep. This won’t be any easier tomorrow.”
“Right,” I said, my mouth suddenly dry. “So… you should probably let go of my hands.”
He hesitated, then released me as abruptly as if I’d burned him. “Good night, Lucrezia.”
I wavered internally, wanting to stay and talk to him, let down the walls a little more, but I needed to have patience. I’d already decided he was mine… but first I needed to take Ivy down a few pegs. Then I’d be able to open back up to him without regret.
“Good night, Dom.”
Two days. It felt more like an eternity.
Chapter 6
Locke
Memory was like a broken mirror. It came back in bits and pieces, some larger than others, some so small they didn’t seem to fit anywhere at all.
Names. Faces. Smells.
I blinked, and Josephine was creeping down the tunnel with a torch, a gangly eight-year-old with black hair down to her knees. She peered through the bars of my cage, then laughed and called over her shoulder. “Come, Elijah! Or I’ll call you a chicken all your days!”
I blinked again, and she was gone.
Only a memory.
The phantom scent of lavender and roses blew in on the wind. My waistcoat was sweltering in the midsummer heat, but Josephine was glowing, an angel in white, spinning in the arms of the groom…
He looked up at me with a wide grin, auburn hair like embers in the evening sun. My sister had chosen a handsome husband, the Lord of Giltglass, and today they both looked radiant…
“This is the happiest day of my life, old friend,” he said. “We’re truly brothers now.”
A pang of sadness plunged through my heart like an arrow. Jo had grown up for good, now.
“Take care of her, Albrecht.”
A name. I sighed, and the waistcoat was gone, the scent of lavender became dust, and Jo and Albrecht faded away.
I wasn’t at a wedding but locked in a cage.
The moon rose and tiny wisps of consciousness winked to life, brushing the edge of my mind. Dreams and nightmares. I knew hers the moment it came alive.
It was tentative at first, no more than a faint spiral of mist, but it steadily resolved until it winked in my own mind like a glimmering jewel: a dream.
I invited myself in.
Lucrezia’s dreaming self was a bright point of light, as always, but tonight was different. We stood on a mountain peak, looking down over a sea of swirling, sea-blue clouds. Snow fell around us, piling in drifts, but it wasn’t cold.
I caught a flake on a fingertip and pinched it between forefinger and thumb. White smeared across my skin. It wasn’t snow, but ash.
Lucrezia wasn’t wearing the sheer, fantastical dresses I’d grown accustomed to ripping from her in a haze. Thick, spiky armor covered her from head to toe, as black as pitch and sharper than thorns.
“Sunlight.”
She tore her eyes from the endless sea of clouds and looked at me. “Locke. I hoped you’d come.”
Lucrezia raised her arms and reached out for me, the spiked armor melting away into a white gown. She stopped when I tensed, the thick scent of copper caressing my senses. Several drops of red spread over the white fabric, staining the entire dress scarlet.
She looked down at herself, her face twisting. The sea of clouds darkened, becoming a roiling sea of ink. “No,” she whispered. “I don’t want to dream this.”
The landscape shifted, no longer a mountaintop but a cavern lit with fire.
I pulled Lucrezia into my arms. She shook like a leaf, wavering in and out of solidity. “Do you see it, Locke?”
My gaze followed hers. Silver glinted in the darkness above, the legs of something enormous overhead. “I see it, sunlight.”
Her mouth dropped open and she closed it with a snap. “Locke. You can see!” Her ash-gray eyes were wide with fear and exhilaration. “The geas doesn’t apply to my dreams!”
&nb
sp; I couldn’t stop myself from gazing upwards again. It all looked so familiar, like this was a dream of my own.
Lucrezia’s breath shortened as smoky figures prowled through the shadows, resolving into people: Mallory Gilt, beaming at Lucrezia and me, and a hunched creature in one of the old asylum wheelchairs that had wheeled past me so many times.
Recognition scraped its claws through the back of my mind.
A trio of squat, grub-pale witches surrounded the figure in the wheelchair, like a perversion of the Three Graces, pulling layers of stiff, worn cloth from their subject.
Lucrezia let out a low whimper as the petrified creature in the chair was revealed, his bulging blue eyes focused on her as saliva dripped down his chin.
I slid in front of her, a low snarl ripping from my throat.
“Are you a man, Grandfather?” Mallory touched his shrunken shoulder.
“This isn’t how it happened,” Lucrezia said, her nails digging into my arm.
“You are my jewel. Mother of many.” The thing they called Grandfather leaned forward, his dried skin crackling. “Am I a man?”
I peered begins me to see my sunlight frozen in place, staring at him in horror and disgust.
“Wake up, Lucrezia.” I cupped her face, turning her away from Grandfather. “This is a nightmare. It’s not real.”
“But it is real,” she whispered, her lower lip trembling.
The shadows shifted. The bonfire crackled.
“This is the happiest day of my life, old friend.”
If I’d had a heartbeat, it might have stopped in that instant. Lucrezia’s brow creased, and we both looked back at Grandfather.
A handsome, auburn-haired man lounged in the wheelchair and bit his lip with a wink at Lucrezia. He still wore his wedding suit, a spray of lavender pinned on his lapel. “Am I man? Shall I feed on you?”
“Who-?” she breathed, drawing closer to me.
“Albrecht,” I whispered.
He stood up, holding a gloved hand out to Lucrezia. I felt like I was watching both a dream and history. Albrecht had held his hand out to his new bride in exactly the same way, so many lifetimes ago.
“Not our first dance, not our last.” Josephine took his hand, an apparition that appeared in a swirl of mist, the lace of her wedding dress blinding and glittering with tiny beads.
I kept my arms wrapped around Lucrezia as she watched Josephine and Albrecht dance for the first time as a married couple.
“This is your nightmare, Locke,” she whispered, her breath warm on my chest. “Your history. It’s merging into my memories.”
Then she screamed, the nightmare shivering at the edges and collapsing.
The desiccated corpse of Grandfather crawled across the floor, his grasping fingers reaching for the hem of Lucrezia’s bloodstained gown.
Albrecht stepped on his back as he danced past, whirling Josephine in a circle and laughing as bones crunched underfoot. The metal limbs overhead creaked.
The nightmare vanished, nothing more than wisps of fear now. Lucrezia was awake in the real world, safe in her own bed away from the night-terrors.
My body, trapped in the cave, drew in an automatic breath and tasted nothing but dust. I was still alone. Albrecht was dead.
Other dreams shimmered. The night-creatures’ dreams had vanished into mist when Lucrezia woke. I was glad that she had someone awake to comfort her.
The flavor of one of those dreams had grown more familiar: the Warden. His dream was a gem too, but harder at the edges than Lucrezia’s.
It took a little more finesse, but I managed to wriggle in. He kept so many secrets locked in his head I couldn’t resist the urge to see what he kept hidden in there.
My lungs instinctively drew a breath when I stepped into a classroom. It smelled like paper, wood polish, and my sunlight’s perfume.
For once, I saw her in a dream but it wasn’t the real her. Lucrezia sat on the Warden’s desk, her clothes askew, hair tousled. One heeled foot was planted squarely in the middle of his chest, keeping him seated in the chair.
“Why do you always have to be in control? You don’t own me.” Steele’s Dream-Lucrezia slid her unbuttoned shirt off her shoulders, running her hands over the half-moon mating scars. “You didn’t leave a mark.”
Her hand slid up her thigh. Even though she was only a figment of Steele’s subconscious, I still shivered just from watching her stroke the thrall-mark by her sex.
“Not for lack of trying.” Steele watched her with hooded eyes, every line of his body tense, expression starved. “I gave you my ring.”
“You gave my sister a ring, too.”
The Warden gripped her ankle, pulled it from his chest and stood over her. “Don’t be childish, Lucrezia.”
“What’s childish about wanting to know I’m loved? I gave you all my trust and you gave me… what? Sex?” She laughed. The sound echoed unnaturally off the walls. “Shane and Roman gave me their eternal commitment. Locke gave me his humanity. I trust them with my life, but now it’s in the hands of the man who lied.”
“I lied to keep us all alive,” he said quietly, his hand sliding around her throat, thumbing her pulse. “To keep you alive.”
Dream-Lucrezia held up a palm-sized wooden box between them. “You can’t even teach me how to break a curse. Do you want me to die?”
“I would do anything to keep you safe!”
“Why?” The box vanished. She wrapped her legs around his waist, pulling him closer with a lascivious smile. “You can get pussy anywhere, can’t you?”
“Is that what you think I want you for?” He pulled her to the edge of the desk, his grip on her throat not quite hard enough to bruise. She licked her lips. “I love you because you care. You’ve done more in weeks than I’ve done in a year just by caring. You try so hard, even when everything seems impossible. I’d let Ivy destroy me if it meant you got to stay alive and keep trying.” He stared at her in desperation, begging this cold doppelgänger of our lover to understand.
Then dream-Lucrezia cupped his face gently, and Steele’s eyes closed in relief.
“I love you, Dominic,” she breathed.
He feared being out of control. He feared he wouldn’t be able to give her what the rest of us did.
He feared he would be the death of her.
“Tell her,” I said, and Steele’s eyes flashed up to me.
“Bloody fucking hell, not you,” he said, releasing her. “You weren’t invited into my mind, vampire.”
I shrugged. Dream-Lucrezia slid off the desk and strolled along the bookshelves, reshelving them and occasionally making a small noise of interest. “Is anything you said real?” she asked, completely unaware that I was standing in the dream with them.
“It’s all real,” he assured her, but his gaze remained on me.
“She loves you,” I said. The classroom was slowly shifting, the ceiling disappearing and becoming a slate-gray sky, the desks transmuting into flawlessly-manicured hedges, the wooden floor shifting into white flagstones. “Your fears are unfounded.”
“Did you invade my subconscious to give me a pep talk?” he asked.
What was a pep talk? “You don’t have to scar her to show your love. She’s already forgiven you.”
“She holds me at arm’s length. Rightfully so, after what I’ve done.” Steele ran a hand through his hair. He wore black leather armor, protective sigils glistening just below the surface. An ouroboros medallion gleamed on his chest. “I just want to bring her home.”
Was that what this was, his family covenstead? The white manor ahead of us was as spare and clean as his coven namesake. “She’s already home.”
“It’s not home yet.” He crossed his arms over his chest, glaring at me. “We have so much work to do-”
A shrill cry cut him off. A lanky teenage boy with sandy hair was being swallowed by the earth, sunk up to his waist and swirling downwards. “Dom, help me! It hurts!” He screamed again, an animalistic sound of torment
as the oozing earth ate him.
Steele blanched, his fists clenching. Once again, a dream shivered at the edges, mutating into its converse.
“Dominic, help me,” Dream-Lucrezia gasped. She pointed a sword upwards at Ivy, who stood twenty feet tall, a wide red grin splitting her face nearly in half. The giant witch loomed over a hedge, reaching down for Lucrezia.
He was stuck between them, unable to run for one without sacrificing the other.
The earth sucked the boy down. Ivy picked up a struggling dream-Lucrezia with a massive hand, crushing her in her fist.
Steele made a strangled sound of pure agony and the nightmare shattered.
I was ejected from the remains and opened my eyes to darkness. The cave was silent.
Any desire to touch more dreams tonight was gone.
Instead, I paced my prison and entertained the fragments of memory, wishing I could reach out to Lu again, but the call of her dreams remained silent.
An hour later, the wolves spilled down the tunnel. Lucrezia rode on Shane’s back, wearing a thin, short nightgown that made her look more delectable than ever. It would be so easy to grab her and yank an artery-rich limb through the bars of this cage…
That is not you, Elijah Locke.
I shook the thought away, even though my throat roared with thirst.
“Locke.” She reached through without a thought for my potential bloodthirst, the scent of fear bitter under her warm skin and floral perfume. “Did you really see? Who was that?”
I laced my fingers through hers, drinking in her smell. Just being this close to her was almost physically painful. I wanted to be buried in her as badly as I wanted to drink from her.
When she touched the thrall-marks, it was like she was stroking my mind, sending a shiver through my entire body. She did it often enough it was an almost-constant torment, my cock throbbing and throat aching.
“My sister’s husband, Albrecht Gilt.”
Lucrezia’s eyes widened. “The one who inherited Lockheart. Josephine was married…” She trailed off, her eyes widening, and opened her mouth.
Nothing came out, no matter how hard she tried. Shane touched her shoulder. “Bambi. You can’t force through a geas.”
