My body screamed with effort as I practiced my forms and swung my sword against the dummy positioned in the center of the room, but I didn’t listen. I deserved to suffer, deserved to hurt. With every swing, it was as if I were fighting myself, as if every time the sword made contact with the dummy, I was stabbing the blade into myself, punishing myself for what I’d done to her, what I could do to her if I allowed Adric to return and lead our armies against her people.
That was my choice. Taking a chance on peace with Carolyn. Or destroying them all with Adric. The millions of paths and directions and choices all really boiled down to those two futures.
As the sun began to rise in the distance and the night whispering of the forest and the lake creatures began to settle into the stillness of morning, I knew that I needed to make my way back to Castle Bloc.
But a small voice cut through my battles with myself, and all at once, I forgot that anything else in the world existed beyond her. Managing to do anything else but stare out of the window at the sunrise and think of her seemed impossible.
Rather, it seemed impossible for a moment, until a sharp, accented voice cut through me like the first wind announcing a blizzard.
“So, you really have been waiting up here, haven’t you?”
Spinning on my heel, I turned to see the pixie friend who’d been watching over Carolyn, standing in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest and several anti-incantation totems strung on gold strings around her neck. Apparently, falling in love with my brother hadn’t shaken her species’ inherent distrust of elves.
A new wave of something like guilt crept up on me. Before we’d made peace with the pixies, we’d tried to destroy them, too. That was nearly a thousand years ago and still the wounds between our people hadn’t healed. If I allowed my brother to succeed, what would the next thousand years bring between the humans that were left and the magic folk who’d conquered them?
“Kyra. What are you—”
“Save it, your highness. I know about your little plan and I know about your crush.”
Crush? The unfamiliar word scraped against my ears. Must have been one of those human words she and Tormin were so fond of. “Crush?”
“You have feelings for Carolyn.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I didn’t...I couldn’t allow myself to have feelings for Carolyn. Even if they did exist, even if my heart did stir every time she came near me, recognizing those feelings was a dangerous, risky proposition. We had a duty, the both of us. A crush, as Kyra put it, would be just like the elven version of that word. It would crush and break any chance of our fulfilling that duty.
All my life, I’d known that being a prince and being a king were about rising above one’s emotions. I wouldn’t let a human keep me from that.
Kyra sighed. “Listen, I don’t have time for this. You should know that hiding up here and hoping she’s going to come all the way out here to see you is not going to work. You have to win her back. Make a little effort, yes?”
“We have an agreement that we won’t be seen in public together—”
Kyra practically snarled in frustration at me, but I watched as she fought against her learned hatred of me and my kind to fight for what she thought was best for her friend. I didn’t know much about this pixie, aside from the tiny scraps of information Tormin ever let slip about her, but now I knew one thing for certain: Carolyn was lucky to have her as a friend. “Then don’t be seen in public together. Simple. Hells, if you’re this thick, I am worried about the day that you become king.”
With that, her heavy, heeled boots carried her towards the stairs in a wisp of black lace and annoyed, whispered muttering, but I called out to her before she could go. My father was right. The first step to peace was trust. And, after speaking with Adric tonight...I had the feeling that I was spending far too much time trusting the wrong people.
“Kyra?”
“Yes, your highness?”
“Thank you. For trusting me with your friend.”
The pixie barely turned her head to make eye contact with me. Her hand, instinctively, I imagine, rested upon the hilt of her axe, which was slung in a complicated holster across her back. Kyra’s main claim to fame around The Academy was her bouyant, fluffy attitude and approach to the world. In a blink of an eye, I watched her transform from a bubbly friend to a dangerous enemy, one I wouldn’t ever have wanted to cross.
“I do not trust you. I trust myself, that I could easily defeat you in combat should you ever hurt her.”
Chapter Seventeen
Carolyn
For the last four days, I’d been aching. As a Pixie, Krya had healing magic that repaired the broken bones and the bruised ribs within a matter of hours. Physical bruises and scars, though, weren’t the only ones that I was nursing, though. Begging off classes due to my injuries—and claiming that, as a human, I didn’t want to use their magic to heal me—I was able to successfully avoid being seen by anyone for days.
Days full of reading and devouring the snacks Kyra was able to sneak out of the Dining Quarter for me. Days of long soaks in the bathtub and ignoring all of the messages Anatole set through the whispering dragon statues who passed their messages through the castle like a game of telephone, until the dragons outside of my doorway informed me that he wanted to see me. It would have been a blissful few days....if only I’d managed to avoid thinking about Anatole.
But I couldn’t. There had to have been a million ways to avoid hurting me. He was a friggin’ prince. He could have figured out a better way to diffuse the situation that didn’t include sending a curse in my direction.
Either he relished the opportunity to hurt me, a human, and had been faking his transformation into a decent partner or he’d been so thoughtless that he decided hurting me was the only way to save our cover. In any case, I no longer trusted him. How could I?
Laying in bed, I closed my eyes and tried to force sleep to come. I needed to go back to school tomorrow, needed to show my face and prove to them all that I wouldn’t be so easily pushed aside. Maybe I was a fragile, stupid human, but I was one fragile, stupid human that they weren’t going to beat.
Only problem was...every time I closed my eyes, I saw Anatole’s dark, unreadable eyes staring down at me. And the pain awakened, afresh, within me.
Dammit. This was pointless. I was never going to fall asleep this way. Blindly, I reached out from behind the bedclothes for the rope that would draw the curtains around my bed.
When I did, I immediately wished I hadn’t.
Because Prince Anatole, prince of darkness and prince of elves and prince of looking all hot and brooding and thoroughly bad, was standing in my bedroom. I jumped and yanked the covers up over me. I already felt naked every time he looked at me fully clothed; I didn’t need him to see me in sleep shorts and a tank top.
“What are you doing here?” I spluttered.
“I needed to speak to you.”
“In my bedroom?”
“We have to speak in private. You weren’t coming out to the lighthouse.”
Really? That was the game he was going to play? Blaming me for not wanting to see him after what he did to me?
“Yeah, probably because I didn’t want to get my face mutilated again.”
“I’m sorry.”
The two words rushed out of his mouth so fast that, at first, I thought I’d imagined them. Prince Anatole didn’t say sorry. He didn’t ask for permission. He didn’t apologize. And he certainly didn’t feel anything—much less remorse—for a pathetic human like me. No. I had to be imagining things.
Even still, my heart clenched at even the thought that it might have been real. Stupid, human hearts. They never gave up hope, did they? Not even when every odd was stacked against us a mile high.
“What?”
Emotion twisted Anatole’s usual disaffected mask of a face into something uncertain and very much affected. Oddly, it didn’t make him look weak.
It made him look, unbelievably, stronger than I’d ever seen him look before. “I’m sorry. I panicked and was frightened and I didn’t...I didn’t know how to save you. I’ve never been in a situation where I couldn’t be the hero. And I am sorry that I failed you.”
My heart wanted to jump out of my chest and back into his arms, but the ache that I’d endured over the last few days knew better. I wasn’t going to let myself fall so easily. “I thought you never said sorry. I think you told me that before. So, what is this? A lie or the truth? I’m not good enough yet to tell the difference.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Bullshit.” At least, that’s what my lips said. My heart wasn’t so sure. I surveyed him, searching and scanning for any kind of hint that would give me the truth and bridge the gap between the two. That’s when I realized he wasn’t in his usual princely regalia. He was in much simpler clothes, and his sword hung at his hip. “Hey, what were you doing before this?”
“Waiting for you in the lighthouse,” he responded, too quickly.
“Yeah, but you’ve got your sword. What were you doing there? Waiting to kill me?”
“Practicing my swordplay. I could teach you, if you’d like. It might be good for you to know how to defend yourself.”
I snorted and crossed my arms over my chest. “After the way you taught me to lie? Yeah. Sure. Sign me right up.”
“Carolyn, you have to believe me. I was trying to save our cover.”
“By almost killing me. That’s the thing about you, Anatole. You’re a good liar. So good that I have no idea where the truth ends and your lie begins. If I can’t trust you, then we can’t do this together. I might as well just go back home and—”
“Go back home and what?”
I’d almost told him the truth, almost slipped up and told him about my mother, about the reason I really left Earth. That either meant I really was a thoughtless fool...Or some part of me, deep down and buried, really did trust him.
“I don’t want to talk about it, okay? Apology accepted, but I don’t think we should do this anymore.”
Even as the words came out of me, I didn’t know exactly what I meant by this. Was it feeling things for him? Doing this whole espionage thing with him? I wasn’t sure. For a long moment, his eyes scanned my face, leaving a hot, trailing blush across my cheeks as he went.
“Yes. I suppose you’re right. Say, you haven’t been sleeping well, have you?”
“What makes you say that?”
Also, how I’m sleeping is none of your friggin’ business, I wanted to add. But snark proved difficult when I felt like he’d focused me under a microscope. How did he always manage to do that, to see straight through me? I always thought I managed to get under his skin, but I was a mere student compared to him, the master of infiltrating my defenses with just a sentence or two. Long strides carried him across my bedrooom floor; he fit into the scenery as easily as my books did. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
“Just your room. I can tell that bed hasn’t been slept in.” A self-deprecating laugh escaped his lips. He muttered more to himself than to me as he took in my disarrayed bookshelves. “It looks just like my bed right now, actually.”
“You haven’t been able to sleep either?”
“Not since that day.”
His eyes burned straight into mine, so hot and so true it was as if he’d branded me, leaving a permanent scar in his wake. Suddenly, the embroidered pattern on my comforter became super interesting.
I didn’t want to think about how guilty he’d felt. Entertaining the possibility that he was really sorry meant that I had to entertain the idea of really forgiving him...and going right back to all of the feelings that being in his presence awakened in me. I didn’t know if I was ready to fall back into falling in love with him.
I barely even wanted to admit that I had been falling for him in the first place.
“Makes sense,” I snapped, thinking that a thinly veiled insult might diffuse the war raging for control of my heart. “You do look like shit.”
“Not you. You look like...”
“Like what?”
No longer content with avoiding his gaze, I looked up just in time for his breath to catch and a soft warmth to invade his cheeks. When we’d first met, every stare he offered me was a painful reminder of my humanity...Now, when he looked in my direction, it was as if being human was the most beautiful thing about me.
“Very human. And it’s perfect. So much life and color in your face, your eyes, your lips.”
“Don’t talk about my lips,” I said, even as they began tingling for him.
“I’m sorry.” A soft laugh escaped him and he took a few hesitant steps towards my bed. When I didn’t object, he took a few more, closing the gap between us until he stood just on the other side of my drawn bed curtains, one strong arm resting on the bedpost. “Why haven’t you been sleeping?”
There were two answers to that question, really. There was the fact that thinking about him had been keeping me up at night, and then...there was the other, even more embarrassing truth. I shrugged, trying to make it as small a deal as possible. “Every time I try, I just see them again. I feel like the second I slip into sleep, they’ll be there to hurt me again.”
“I could protect you,” Anatole said, his voice as gentle as a breath of wind.
“Like you did last time?”
“No. Really. No more hiding. No more secrets. Let me protect you. I’ll stay here and stand guard so you can get some sleep. This is my fault. I should be the one to make it right.”
The prince of Velkin was a known liar, a hater of humans, and everything that was bad in this world. He was a symbol of everything the people of Earth hated and feared about this alliance between our people...And yet, in that moment, I trusted him with every fiber of my being. A stupid decision, really, but one I made with both eyes and my heart open.
“What if they come in and see you here?” I asked.
“I’ll tell them the truth.”
“But the saboteur—”
“We’ll find them. Together. No matter who knows about us. I don’t want to hide anymore, Carolyn.”
I didn’t want to hide either. I wanted to be at his side, wanted to fight this war with him and face down the dangers of the world together. But I didn’t know how to say that. Instead, I just tucked myself deep into the covers of my bed, lowered the light near my bed, and closed my eyes.
Immediately, I felt the difference than every night I’d spent previously in this castle. With his presence nearby, my muscles unwound. Darkness wrapped around me like a warm, familiar blanket. The sounds of the night no longer frightened me, but conducted a lullaby that threatened to send me deep into the land of dreams.
His presence also was the one thing keeping me from letting sleep take me. I was hyper-aware of his presence, of his closeness and of his distance. Eventually, I opened my eyes and spoke into the dark room around me.
“You can’t just stand there all night.”
“Why not? I’ve promised to keep watch.”
The smart thing to do then would have been to close the bed curtains and force myself to sleep, to forget about him and focus on my own, selfish need for a long night worth of rest. But I couldn’t manage it. He didn’t deserve to be kept up on my account.
And...if I was being honest with myself, my curiosity got the better of me. What would it feel like to share a bed with Anatole?
“Just...just come here and sleep in the bed. I’m sure you can protect me just as well from here.”
In the darkness, a floorboard creaked. Then, it stopped as Anatole hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
And I was. I hadn’t ever been more sure of anything in my life. I wanted him near me, wanted to melt against his skin, wanted to feel safe and small in his arms. No, I didn’t want it. I needed it.
Slowly, his shadow crept across the room. A short shuffle of fabric and skin echoed in
the quiet darkness. A moment later, warm, bare flesh pressed against my back. A strong arm wrapped around my waist. The prince of darkness, hater of all humans, held me in his grip, yet danger seemed unfathomably far away.
For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of our breathing and the pounding of my heartbeat in my ears. Sleep tugged at me, but I pulled back just as hard.
“Anatole?”
“Yes?” he asked, his voice bated as if he’d been waiting for me to speak.
“Should we call another truce? Get back to saving the world?”
“I’d like that.”
Did he realize that he held me tighter then? Or was it just a reflex, an involuntary response to the moment we were sharing? I didn’t know, and I wasn’t entirely sure I cared.
“Good. Me too. But you should know something.”
“What’s that?”
“If you ever let them hurt me again, I’m going to find the saboteur and help them kill you.”
A breathy chuckle danced across the sensitive skin at the back of my neck. This time, I knew he held me closer on purpose, because his lips brushed against my ears, a deliberate tease.
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Chapter Eighteen
Anatole
We hadn’t yet gone public with our friendship—or our partnership...or whatever it was we were calling ourselves—but over the next few days, Carolyn and I settled into a pattern that almost approached normal. During the day, we would collect whatever information we could find or overhear in the hallways, then we would meet back together after supper to discuss what we’d found. Evenings would find us out at the lighthouse, mulling over theories or writing our Human-Velkin Relations essays or joking about what she called the “thirsty” humans in the Compatibility Seminar.
Then, when her eyes grew heavy and the yawns started to come, I would carry her into bed, slide my body against hers, and together, we would sleep. Or, rather, she would sleep and I would stay awake watching her, memorizing the soft lines of her beautiful face and the way the candlelight played games with her long eyelashes, until finally sleep came for me, too.
Magic Exchange: A Supernatural Academy Romance (The Velkin Royal Academy Series Book 1) Page 14
