by Abbie Lyons
What kind of present would she even bring?
But before I can move, go back and look for it, someone calls my name.
“Emerald?”
Emerald?
“EMERALD!”
My eyes flew open. Air. I needed air. I sucked in a massive breath, reality slamming back into me like a falling cartoon weight.
I was on my back, in the kitchen of Enchanted Penitentiary. Not in LA. Not anywhere warm and sunny.
Not somewhere where April was still alive.
“Oh my goddess,” I whispered. My head felt full of stars, and not in a pleasant way. I pushed myself up on the grimy tiles, rubbing my forehead.
“That was fucking incredible,” crowed someone—Delilah. “One minute you’re working away, and the next you’re just out.”
“Goddess!” Babs rushed to my elbow, pushing Delilah’s grinning face out of the way. “Emerald! Oh, you’re hurt...”
I hadn’t even registered the pain, but when Babs pulled a dishcloth away from my forehead, it was speckled with blood. And that made me a little queasy. I’d always been kind of a baby about bodily fluids.
“I guess so,” I replied dumbly. I was still half in LA. Still processing everything I’d seen. Did that all really happen? How did I not remember that Gia had been there?
I shook my head, trying to straighten out my thoughts, as Babs helped me to my feet.
“We’ll have to get you to the infirmary,” she clucked. “No question. You’re pale as a sheet.”
“Well, I’ve always had a crappy complexion,” I said. “I’d kill for some bronzer.”
Clearly I was feeling better if I was able to make jokes. But Babs still looked thoroughly worried.
“Paging guardsmen,” she whispered into a charm bracelet around her wrist. The blue stone in the center glowed. “I have an inmate in need of infirmary. Can I get a transport?”
Instants later, the kitchen door sparked open. My heart leaped to my throat, expecting to see Gage, someone who could help me untangle what Gia might have been up to, someone who knew about my past almost as much as I did, but Gage wasn’t there. It was his fellow guard, Cobalt, the narrow-eyed one.
“Come with me,” he said.
And, with the eyes of the entire kitchen crew on me, I had no choice but to follow.
Chapter Eleven
COBALT DIDN’T SAY MUCH on our walk to wherever the Enchanted Penitentiary infirmary was, which was fine by me. It’s hard to make conversation when one of you has your hands bound in crackling blue bindings. Besides, I was still majorly dazed. Like, if little animated birdies were circling my head, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Still, I took a few sideways looks at Cobalt, curious about who this guy who’d gotten so close to Gage—the new Gage—was, but he wasn’t giving me much to go on besides the usual steely Azelorian expression. He was clearly just as into the training as Gage. But maybe a little better at following it.
He led me down a series of mind-numbingly similar corridors (goddess, would it kill the warden to throw up some inspirational posters or something?) until we seemed to have exited the cell block proper and entered a series of more official and administrative rooms. One of the doors we passed glowed with a gold chain wrapped in an elaborate knotted shape around a barred window. Next to it, a small plaque read WARDEN. In spite of my dizziness, my eyes popped. So this was where all the announcements came from, eh?
“That’s the warden?” I said to Cobalt. He just nodded, eyes still front. Okay, so strong but silent type. Got it. In his defense, it was also a super stupid question. Like yes, duh, the door that says WARDEN is where the warden is. Maybe I’d lost more blood than I realized. I was too terrified to touch the throbbing spot on my head, and I shuddered to think of what I looked like with my hair matted down by blood. Ew.
“Here we are.”
Cobalt stopped us in front of carved wood double doors that said, just as obviously as the warden’s door, INFIRMARY. Of course, this wasn’t bound with any kind of fancy golden chains. There was no need to keep people out of this one.
He pushed the doors open and revealed an arched ceiling and a bigger space than I’d expected. Of all the places I’d been shepherded to in Enchanted Penitentiary so far, it was ironic that the hospital part was actually the nicest so far. I wondered if prisoners went of their way just to get injured and take a little break in here; the lighting was way more flattered, for one, and the individual beds looked comfier than the ones in the cells, and were actually given a bit of privacy with shimmering bronze-colored curtains partitioning them off.
As we walked towards the opposite end of the room, where a broad desk housed a check-in station manned by a severe-faced Fae, I realized why the partitions were necessary. The first bed I glimpsed had some seriously gruesome stuff on it: an ashen-faced Fae with one of her wings torn to the point of being nearly severed from her body. I felt a visceral pang of disgust—Fae could extend and retract their wings at will, but to see one only half extended like that was so unnatural and disturbing. It was like seeing someone without a face, and I had to clench my eyes shut to avoid losing my crappy breakfast all over the marble-tiled floor.
“Yes?”
The head nurse, or whatever, gave me a flinty, evaluating glare before seeing the bloody gash on my head and realizing I wasn’t faking.
“Incident in the kitchens,” Cobalt said shortly.
“Cooking accident?”
Cobalt looked to me. I shook my head. “No. I...passed out. Basically.”
The nurse pursed her lips. Her skin was faintly green, probably a result of using a great deal of restorative magic, which had an inherently green aura. She wore an old-fashioned nurse’s hat, too, white and peaked like a paper sailboat atop her shock-white swirl of hair.
“Very well.” She nodded at Cobalt. “I’ll take it from here. You’re her handler?”
Cobalt shook his head. “No, but I’ll handle the incident report and alert him.”
“Very well,” she said a second time, and extended her wings with a swish sound, flying right over her desk to my side, wasting no time (or maybe showing off). Cobalt departed with a salute, and I was left with Nurse...whoever she was.
“You may call me Nurse Clodia,” she said in clipped tones. “And we’re very busy today, so I regret that I won’t be able to hold your hand.”
“Oh no,” I said, still managing a bit of sarcasm. My dizziness was feeling better—marginally.
Nurse Clodia gave me another pinched look and led me by the elbow to one of the partitioned-off beds. She practically pushed me to lie down, and I had to wonder if prisoners ever left the infirmary with a new injury to complement the one they’d just had patched up.
“Um, ow?” I said. Nurse Clodia ignored me and conjured some small magical tools with a snap of her fingers. Nothing extraordinary—a small healing wand and an opal jar of a gritty-looking salve that had a familiar burnt-almond smell that took me right back to childhood, scraped knees and splinters.
Running around, playing with Gage.
Pain at my temple jolted me back.
“Ow!” I said again, more emphatic this time.
“I’m sorry,” Nurse Clodia said. “Is something about your time in prison making you uncomfortable?”
“Hmph.” I couldn’t really say anything to that, because as a fellow sarcastic girl, game had to recognize game here. I sat as still as I could for the remainder of her treatment, flinching only a little as she pressed the heated end of the mini-wand to the wound with a sizzle.
“That should heal up in a few minutes,” she said, retracting from my head and vanishing her tools with another snap. “Any other physical complaints?”
“I...feel kinda woozy,” I said, not dishonestly. Whether it was from the head wound or from the freaky-ass vision of a forgotten moment in my past, I had no idea.
“To be expected.” Nurse Clodia waved her hands, and a mug settled itself onto the small table beside my bed. Another flick of the wrist and it was ful
l of a pungent, earthy liquid—yet another familiar spell.
“Bleh,” I said in spite of myself.
“Dr. Cyrillian’s tonic,” Nurse Clodia said. “Good for putting color back in your cheeks.”
“I know what it is,” I said, suddenly cross. “I’m not a child.”
Nurse Clodia just raised an eyebrow in a could’ve-fooled-me kind of way, told me to drink up, and swished off. Pouting, even though no one could see me, I prodded the mug and eventually picked it up, taking a tiny sip.
“Barf,” I said, not bothering to whisper. Who could even hear me here?
A masculine chuckle resonated on the other side of the partition.
This pissed me off, for some reason. First Nurse Clodia, then some rando...I was not here to be made fun of. I swallowed my first gulp of tonic and addressed the curtain.
“What’s so funny, may I ask?”
“Just the delight of hearing old Clodia getting a taste of her own medicine.” Another chuckle. “So to speak.”
“Hilarious,” I said. “You should do stand-up.”
The curtain wavered, then disappeared. I yelped in surprise.
Sitting on the bed—lounging, really—was Prince Tarian.
Shirtless.
He must have gotten some kind of nasty injury, because his bare chest was swathed in a gossamer-colored bandage, with a few light scrapes visible at its edges. Two thin golden bandages held a slash across his cheek closed, and his sea-blue hair was mussed. Still, his eyes were sharp as ever.
“Why, it’s you,” he said, a genuine surprise in his voice.
“It is me,” I said. My heart was pounding. I’d been wondering about this guy for days, trying to get information, but never actually seeing him again. And now here he was, a disgraced heir to the Fae throne, a Fae who might be able to pull the kind of strings to get me out of Enchanted Penitentiary for good, and he was staring me down.
Staring me down after being nearly ripped to shreds, it seemed.
“What are you in for?” he said, cracking a smile.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, “but I’m innocent.”
Prince Tarian laughed, a mellow, rich sound. “I meant what brings you to the infirmary. Relax, Petal Pink.”
“Oh.” I folded my arms and, after considering, inclined my head towards him so he could see the gash.
Prince Tarian let out a low whistle. “My, my. Let me guess: I should see the other guy?”
“I hit my head on something,” I replied tartly. “I don’t start fights.”
“Of course not, Petal Pink.”
“My name is Emerald,” I informed him.
The prince’s eyes flicked to my hair. “And yet you’ve flouted your name with your hair color.”
I fingered the ends of my hair, which had always been pink—well, ever since I’d mastered the enchantment to make it so. Before that...I didn’t even remember.
“It suits you,” the prince said. Which irritated me for some reason.
“I didn’t ask you,” I said, and immediately regretted it. If I wanted this guy to call in a favor for me, getting snippy with him was totally not the smart move. I swallowed. “Sorry. I feel crappy because of all this.” I waved a hand at my head, but also at everything else around us. The infirmary. The penitentiary in general.
Prince Tarian nodded. “Mm.” He didn’t take his piercing eyes off of me, but I willed myself not to be annoyed by it. Except...I wasn’t exactly annoyed at all. “Imagine being on death row.”
Wow. That, I couldn’t.
Presumably recognizing he’d ground the conversation to a halt, he went on smoothly. “So what are you in for? Properly, I mean.”
His words were tinged with an upper-class Fae accent, I noticed—somewhere between British and Eastern European, if he’d been a human. I swallowed again. Could I hold this back from a prince? No, of course not. Him learning about my crime—well, “crime”—was the obvious first step into enlisting him to argue my innocence.
“Don’t you listen to the warden’s announcements?” I asked. “Pretty sure everybody here knows what I’m here for.”
He laughed. “I do myself the pleasure of not paying any of those the slightest bit of attention. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. So enlighten me...what are you in for?”
“My best friend was killed,” I said, the words painful to pronounce. “And they think I did it.”
“But you didn’t.”
I shook my head.
“I believe you.”
I stared at him. “You do?” I said, sounding high-pitched and way too girly.
He shrugged his good shoulder. “Why shouldn’t I? You look too delicate to be a murderer.”
Delicate. I wasn’t sure that really described me, but I didn’t hate that he saw me that way either. I didn’t know what to say, lost for words.
“Wait, don’t tell me. You’re having me on. You did do it.”
“No, no,” I said quickly, catching the flicker of a grin on his face. Was he enjoying this? Was it a game to him? “It’s just...nobody believes me.” I fought a spasm of a sob in my chest. “Even my parents.”
“Mm.” Prince Tarian tore his gaze from me and stared into the center of the infirmary room, unseeing. “I suppose you could say I know what that’s like.”
My mind snapped to what Delilah had been saying in the kitchen. Was this blue-haired boy with the broad, scarred chest really a murderer—a serial murderer? I tried to picture him in a royal Fae hall, tipping a small vial of something pungent and deadly into wine glasses and over platters. Maybe. But maybe not.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I’m in for?” he said, still staring straight ahead.
“I...didn’t think that’d be polite,” I said. He shifted and looked back at me, eyes a bit gentler.
“Why is everyone so obsessed with being polite to me?” he wondered. “Is it because I’m royalty? Or just because they’re worried I’ll poison them?” His eyes widened. “Ah, so you have heard.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “Is it true?”
I asked before I could stop myself, but Prince Tarian grinned wickedly as soon as the words left my lips. “So much for being polite, Petal.”
“Emerald.”
He waved a hand. “I suppose you think I did. The situation has been...well, hard for any of us to escape.” He glanced at me. I shook my head.
“I haven’t been in the Invisible Cities in years,” I said. “I was living in the human realm.”
“You don’t say.” The prince appeared intrigued. “Where?”
“LA,” I told him. “That’s where...it happened. April died. Was killed,” I corrected myself bitterly.
Prince Tarian nodded. “Well, I’d be happy to fill you in. But with the understanding that I’m a very biased source. And one who’s likely to lie to you.”
“If you say you’re innocent,” I said slowly, “I’ll believe you. If it makes sense, anyway. If it all adds up. Or...doesn’t add up, I guess.”
Prince Tarian opened his mouth, shut it, and opened it again. “Well. That’s very magnanimous of you. Further proof that you’re not a murderess.” He sighed and folded his hands on his bandaged stomach, which I couldn’t help but notice even through the bindings was well-muscled. Six-pack, at least. Maybe eight. “The shortest version is that there was your typical petty Fae power struggle. My father died suddenly—poison. That much was abundantly clear. And his brother was next in line, my terrible uncle. But even so, he decided that it was necessary to marry my mother, to doubly secure the crown.” He spat the words out like they themselves were poisoned. “And needless to say, I found that disgusting. And before you say it, yes, I’m well aware how familiar this whole scenario sounds.”
“Yeah, it’s kinda...Shakespearean,” I said. Fae don’t typically consume a ton of human media, but since Shakespeare did write a lot about Fae—well, “fairies”—he was one of the better-known human writers.
Prince Tari
an sighed. “I think the cliché is working against me—the vengeful orphaned son. Between the downright incestuous remarriage and the fact that I was unlikely to take over the throne, everyone assumed that I had a grudge. So when the courtiers all ended up mysteriously dead of the same poison that killed my father...” He waved a hand in the air, pretending to be casual even as his eyes were blazing. “They assumed it was me. That I’d murdered dear old dad thinking I could usurp the crown myself, only to have my uncle intercede. So then nothing to do but more murders.” He spun his gaze to me. “And that’s it. Now I’m here.”
I chewed this over in my mind. He was being so flippant about it that I found it pretty hard to think that he had indeed committed these murders. But then again, everyone else I’d met so far in here in Enchanted Penitentiary seemed...guilty as sin, for lack of a better word. But then again again, I was here, too, and I was definitely innocent.
Stay away from him.
Gage’s words darted into my mind unbidden.
Well, I can’t, I argued back with imaginary Gage. I’m stuck on a hospital bed next to him.
Still, though. I trusted Gage, not only because he was guarding me but because I knew Gage, really knew him. Better than I knew this prince and possible murderer I’d seen all of twice.
But if he was here, and we were both innocent...
“So why are you in here, your highness?” I ventured, looking at his wounds. That felt like an important piece of the puzzle to determine. Was this guy a fight-starter? Maybe he just snapped from time to time.
Prince Tarian smirked. “Oh, please. You can call me Tarian. And I’m afraid that much is confidential.”
I thought of the other day in the cafeteria. “You can cast spells in here, though.”
Tarian shrugged. “My magic is powerful, often more powerful than the magic wielded by those pitiful guards. So in a sense, they’re at my mercy.”
“But if you’re so powerful, and you’re innocent...why haven’t you escaped yet?”
It was only after I’d said it that I realized how rude of a question that was, and for a moment I worried that Tarian would get angry and shut up. But instead, he just cocked his head with a grin.
