Oh, Beatrice thought. Shit. I am so not ready to be a step-mom.
She was almost positive step-moms weren’t supposed to have pink faux-hawks. That had to be a rule written down somewhere.
Dorian reached out to brush a strand of that bright pink hair back behind Beatrice’s ear. There was a soft look on his face that might have been appropriate on him more than ten years ago, when he’d still been young and in love.
“Dinner after this,” Beatrice reminded him in a whisper.
“I did promise,” Dorian murmured back.
She disentangled herself reluctantly from his embrace. Nearby, Gabe was studiously looking in the other direction, though he’d handled himself with a bit more composure than Zoe.
“All right,” Beatrice sighed heavily. “Let’s go spelunking in my brain, shall we?”
Gabe nodded slowly. He glanced toward one of the other broad windows in the exhibit hall. “Just walk on through,” he told her. “I can handle the rest.”
Beatrice walked toward the window, doing her best to shove down her apprehension. A soft golden light had begun to lick along the edges of the glass. Inside, she saw a broad, ghostly room, flickering with neon and blacklights.
It was a chaotic, nervous wreck.
Beatrice closed her eyes and breathed in deeply. Great, she thought. Let’s walk into my neurotic subconscious. I can’t put a mask on that.
“You can get through it,” Gabe told her seriously. Beatrice opened her eyes and saw him staring her down with a strange empathy. “It might not be pleasant. But you’ll come out the other side again.”
“If you say so,” she whispered.
Then—before she could think too hard about the decision—Beatrice stepped past the mirror and into her own disordered mind.
Shadows shivered at the corners of Beatrice’s eyes—they lurked in every corner, moving with frantic jolts of energy each time the light blinked around her.
Dorian’s mind had been a neatly-ordered, carefully-categorized series of hallways; but Beatrice wasn’t even sure that hers had hallways. The big, dark room in which she’d found herself changed constantly with every flash. First, it was her apartment bedroom, back in France; next, it looked like Dorian’s office; now, it was the hallway in Place des Arts, surrounded by faceless women on television screens.
It was pandemonium—absolute disarray. Fearful ideas chased one another around the room, completely untethered by rational thought. Every panicked surge Beatrice had ever shoved down inside herself lived in here, festering like an open sore.
Jean Belmont flickered in the blacklight; his suit was as impeccable as ever, but there was a sharp hunger in his posture that made Beatrice step back.
“You are in over your head, Trix,” Dorian whispered in her ear.
Black whispers seethed at the corners of the room. A ghostly, ashen strand of hair floated past Beatrice’s shoulder, and she whirled to see the Lady of Secrets standing behind her with a calm, alien smile.
“You’re not really here,” Beatrice said in a trembling voice. “You’re just my mind playing tricks on me. You can’t walk into the Looking Glass.”
“But you are afraid of me,” the faerie lord whispered back. “And so here I am.” Her white eyes bored into Beatrice with awful serenity. “You will always carry me with you, at the bottom of your mind. You cannot get away from me.”
Fear coiled in Beatrice’s stomach, sick and overwhelming. She staggered back again, pressing her hands over her mouth. This is an illusion, she thought. My mind hates me. This is just what it always does.
She reached instinctively for a mask—for a way to hide from the madness. But the mask flickered and failed, wilting away like tissue paper. There was no hiding—not here, within her own mind.
“This is my head,” Beatrice told herself in a shaky voice. “I’m in control here.”
“You have never been in control of anything,” the Lady of Secrets said softly. “Least of all yourself.”
Beatrice closed her arms around herself, trying to hold on to some semblance of the present. “I’m just here for information,” she managed. “I just need to find it and get out again.”
“I will not let you go,” the Lady of Secrets said. “You may find what you are looking for. But I will still be here when you leave. And you will know me in your dreams.”
Beatrice clenched her fingers around her arms. “I beat this on a regular basis,” she told her fears. “I keep living my life in spite of you. I’m never going to erase you—but I can live with you. I already do.”
The Lady of Secrets smiled patronizingly… but Beatrice clenched her jaw and summoned up a different memory.
A soft, long-fingered hand came down upon her shoulder from behind.
“There is no safety to be found in this life,” the Lady of Briars said softly. “Not even in the heart of Arcadia, with all the power of the Briars at one’s disposal.”
“That’s right,” Beatrice whispered. “Even faerie lords know how to fear. And if the Lady of Secrets isn’t afraid… then she should be.”
The ashen figure in front of her tilted its head… and dissolved into black, shadowy whispers.
Those whispers retreated once more to the corners of the room—still present and uneasy, but briefly less pressing.
Beatrice turned her eyes toward the screens along the walls. Screens, she thought breathlessly. That’s something I can understand.
She forced some semblance of focus onto her broken mind. One of the television screens fizzled with static, twisting and changing until it became a computer terminal. Beatrice walked toward it, honing in on the concept with relief. “I can do computers,” she murmured. “Come on… give me a search function.”
Code whirled across the computer screen—a visual reflection of her own thoughts. Beatrice pulled her silver dollar from her pocket, threading it through her fingers. There was a gray whisper inside the coin that made a strange amount of sense now that she was listening to it in the context of her own mind.
“Et c'est parti,” she told the computer.
Let’s get to work.
Beatrice wasn’t sure just how long she spent inside her own mind, breathless with panicked focus. But the worried looks she received when she walked back into the exhibit hall suggested that it had been quite some time.
Her body trembled with the exhaustion of holding off her own demons—but there was a swell of triumph beneath it all that reminded her of the morning she’d run into Dorian and wandered off for victory coffee.
Dorian had taken to pacing in her absence, while Zoe watched him nervously. Beatrice relaxed with relief as she saw that nothing terrible had befallen him. She had definitely found her way into a hundred different secrets she shouldn’t have… but either her own transgression hadn’t counted against Dorian’s rules, or else the Lady couldn’t enforce them while he was in another faerie lord’s realm.
Beatrice stumbled slowly toward Dorian. Even as he reached out to steady her, she half-collapsed in his arms, absorbing the sheer relief of him.
Dorian tightened his arms on her; concern showed openly in his eyes. “You look exhausted,” he murmured.
“I am wrecked,” Beatrice admitted shakily. “That was way harder than I was expecting. But… I came out the other side.” She looked over toward Gabe; the Lord of the Looking Glass still stood to one side of the door to her mind. His crown of glass had appeared again, shifting with golden light.
“Did you find what you needed?” Gabe asked her. His voice was warily hopeful.
“I found what I needed,” Beatrice confirmed tiredly. “And then some.” She tightened her hands on Dorian’s arms. “You planned ahead, Dorian,” she said. “You didn’t just give me a bunch of secrets—you bent your unspoken rule, too. You can’t tell me anything about the Lady of Whispers or her realm… but you gave me the information, and the key to decrypt it myself.”
“The Lady of Whispers?” Zoe asked. She straightened. “Is that her
name?”
“That’s her title,” Beatrice said. “And with what I know now… I think I can make her life a lot more difficult.”
Chapter 13
Beatrice wanted to start work immediately—but her mind and body were both in shambles. Now that the adrenaline of facing her anxiety had started to wear off, she found she could barely stand up straight.
“You got somewhere to sleep in here?” Zoe asked Gabe, before Beatrice could broach the subject.
“I’ve got everywhere to sleep in here,” Gabe replied wryly. He gestured idly at the mirror in front of Zoe, which began to glow with a dull golden light. “Just head through that one. It’ll take you anywhere you can remember halfway-decently.”
Zoe’s eyes lit up at that. “Oh man,” she said. “Me and Dorian stayed at this fancy British hotel with Valentine. I still have dreams about those giant, fluffy beds.”
“Just stay put and don’t wander,” Gabe told her. “There are faeries here—and they’ve got a kind of weird sense of humor.” He glanced toward Beatrice and Dorian. “You can do the same if you want. There’s food here too, but… I get it if you don’t want to take the risk.”
“Quels risques?” Beatrice murmured to Dorian. What risks? She was leaned so heavily against him that the only thing keeping her upright was his arm around her waist.
“Faerie food can do strange things to mortals,” Dorian told her. “It can also trap you in Arcadia forever, if the faerie providing it is untrustworthy.”
Beatrice shrugged. “I let the man into my head,” she told Dorian. “I figure eating his food is small change compared to that.”
Dorian eyed Gabe warily. “I’ll abstain,” he said coolly. “But you can eat if you like, Trix.”
“Thanks for the permission,” Beatrice muttered, with a slight roll of her eyes.
“In that case,” Gabe said. “Let me recommend the dumplings down the street. They taste like… nostalgia.”
“What does nostalgia taste like, exactly?” Beatrice mumbled.
Gabe shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he admitted. “You’ll just have to go try it.” His golden eyes went distant then, and he sighed. “I’ve gotta go have a chat with a warlock,” he said. “Why don’t I grab you some faerie food to-go first?”
Faerie dumplings did, in fact, taste like nostalgia.
“These taste like my mother’s dumplings,” Beatrice observed, as she nibbled at one of them. “C'est curieux. My mother never made dumplings in her life. I don’t know how that works.”
Dorian must have taken some mental cue from Zoe—they were settled into a hotel room that was far more expensive than anything Beatrice had seen in her life. The down comforter on the king-sized bed made up almost half its height, and the pillows were so numerous she could have built a fort from them.
Dorian had settled himself into a chair next to the window, looking out over a very convincing false skyline—somewhere in Britain, Beatrice guessed, though she wouldn’t know the difference. “You sound better, at least,” Dorian said. He hesitated, still staring out the window. “Dare I ask what happened in your head?”
Beatrice pressed her lips together at the reminder. “Me and my anxiety had a chat,” she told him. “I won. This time, at least.”
Dorian turned to look at her. His gray eyes were shuttered with unease. “Regarding that,” he said. “I remember… certain things I once said.”
Beatrice paused with a dumpling halfway to her mouth. She raised one eyebrow at him over her chopsticks. “I thought we were gonna talk over dinner,” she said slowly.
Dorian glanced at the dumpling. “This is dinner,” he observed. After a pause, he shook his head. “I don’t mean to press the matter. I just wanted you to know that… your anxiety was never a problem for me, Trix. It was cruel of me to use it against you.”
Beatrice set the dumpling back down in its container. “You were trying to get rid of me,” she said quietly. “It was effective.”
“It was cruel,” Dorian repeated. “Je m'excuse profondément.”
I apologize. Profoundly.
The words hung in the air for a moment. They felt… surreal, Beatrice decided. I would have given a lot to hear those words ten years ago, she thought.
Beatrice shifted to her feet. “There’s no taking back everything that happened,” she said. She padded over toward him, barefoot, and leaned her palm against the chair. Dorian raised an eyebrow in her direction. “I don’t… actually want to rehash everything,” she admitted. “Maybe that’s stupid of me. But life is short and annoying and neurotic, especially for me. I think I’d rather take a chance on something nice for a change.”
Beatrice reached out to brush her fingers experimentally along his jaw. Dorian stiffened—then closed his eyes and leaned into her touch. He lifted his hand to hers, pressing his palm over her skin.
“T'es nul avec les émotions,” Beatrice told him, with a soft half-smile. “You’ve got a lot of stuff to sift through yourself. Is it just easier to beat yourself up over my problems?”
Dorian sighed. “There’s little I can do about my problems,” he replied. “I can’t change who I am… or what I am.”
“Who said you need to change?” Beatrice asked. She settled down into his lap, leaning her cheek into his shirt. The smell of chocolate was finally fading from the fabric, but the scent of cologne was somehow sharper for its absence. “You’re fine as you are. Though… I’ll admit, it’d be nice to have you with a few less rules.”
Dorian reached up to thread his fingers through her hair. He dropped his arm to her waist, holding her with a sudden tightness. “I would be very frightening without my rules,” Dorian said. “All of the secrets I still possess… I can’t imagine the damage I might cause if I could use them as I pleased.”
Beatrice smiled dimly. “No,” she said. “You wouldn’t. Be frightening, I mean.”
Dorian paused his fingers.
“You know the real power of a secret, Dorian,” Beatrice reassured him softly. “You did everything you could to save me from mine. In fact… I think you understand secrets a little better than the Lady does.” She closed her eyes against him. “You’re more human than some humans I know. I wouldn’t have fallen in love with you otherwise.”
Dorian brushed his lips over the top of her head. The ghost of his breath whispered at her hair. “I still love you, Trix,” he told her quietly. “Je n'ai jamais arrêté, je crois.”
I never stopped.
Beatrice’s heart fluttered in her chest. She opened her eyes and tilted her neck to look at him. The expression on his face was at once both rueful and sentimental.
“I still love you too,” she told him. “It’s messy and confused… but I guess that’s not so much different from the rest of my head.”
Dorian leaned down to press his forehead to hers. “Your head is fine,” he informed her gravely. “It has never held you back from anything you wanted to do. But on those occasions when it does bother you… I don’t mind holding onto you until it stops.”
Beatrice smiled in spite of herself. “Okay,” she said. “But you still mind my hair?”
Dorian’s mouth twitched. “I’m getting used to it,” he admitted.
“Don’t get too used to it,” Beatrice warned him. “I’ve never been so stressed in my life. I’m probably dying it rainbow after this.”
Dorian pressed his lips lightly to hers. “I will get used to that as well,” he murmured against her mouth.
Beatrice leaned up into him, curling her fingers around his tie. The kiss deepened, slow and satisfying. There was a gentle, melting heat to it this time—the constant, buzzing panic in her stomach had quieted for the moment, driven away by the sheer relief of his touch.
I missed this, she thought. God, I missed this so much.
Years fell away effortlessly beneath his kiss. Beatrice melted into him, letting go of the last tense wall she’d kept between them. Dorian’s body relaxed against her. His finger
s dropped down to her blouse, tugging it down to reveal the pink lace bra beneath. Briefly, he turned his face to kiss a pale, washed-out pink lock of hair.
“I do appreciate the matching lingerie,” he murmured.
Beatrice grinned in a dazed sort of way. “I like matching sets,” she mumbled back. “I guess I’m gonna need something rainbow ne—ah!” The word cut off in surprise as Dorian dipped his head to graze his teeth across her bare collarbone.
He slid the sleeves of the blouse down Beatrice’s shoulders; the silk dropped to pool at her waist. Heat rose inside her, languid and hungry, and Beatrice shifted in his lap, parting her legs around his waist.
Dorian’s lips descended down over the curve of her breast. He took one straining nipple into his mouth through the pink lace of her bra, and Beatrice let out a moan of shocked pleasure. She dropped her fingers from his tie, searching for the button to his slacks.
“Impatient, as always,” Dorian murmured against her with a smirk. He didn’t stop her, though, as she opened his slacks and slid her hand down between them, grasping at his already-hardened cock. Dorian lifted his head from her bra, dropping it back against the chair as she touched him.
“I’ve never been big on delayed gratification,” Beatrice panted. She stroked him firmly, watching with rapt attention as his breath quickened and his eyes clouded with pleasure. Dorian had always known how to make her moan… but Beatrice had always known how to make him lose his control in return. “Stop being polite,” she told him. “I hate it when you’re polite.”
She gave his cock another long, slow pump—and this time, Dorian let out a soft curse beneath his breath. He tore at the waistband of her pants with his fingers, tugging them down her hips. Beatrice shifted to pry one leg loose of them. Her panties were already wet. Her body ached with need. There was a lot of lost time between them, and she knew they had only just begun to scratch the surface of it.
Crown of Whispers Page 16
