I dropped a kiss on top of Nana Vee’s graying hair, which she always kept pinned into a poufy bun. “I’ll warm it up.”
She pivoted, leading the way back across the short bridge and around the deck girdling my bungalow.
Giya fell into step beside me and whispered, “Did you find out what the dinner was about?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
I flicked my gaze toward the lucionaga hovering in their firefly form. “Later.”
She trailed me through my open sash windows and into the bedroom, which had once belonged to her mother but became mine the day I turned twelve. Like my parents’ home, it was fashioned from glass and gossamer-white, but instead of stone, my bungalow was made of lacquered wood and shiny copper.
I plunged my hand into the bath scented with crushed beetle shells and honeysuckle. The water beaded around my fingers and knuckles as it warmed, and my submerged skin began to glisten with tiny copper scales, courtesy of my Daneelie heritage.
I had a love-hate relationship with my reptilian skin—love because it tied me to Nima and allowed me to swim underwater for hours without needing to come up for air, and hate because it had landed me a gajoï. Although my engagement to the devil’s spawn sucked, having to repay Joshua Locklear sucked harder.
As though he’d felt me thinking of him, my wristband beamed a message.
JOSHUA: So?
Sneaking a glance at my cousin, who stood in front of a mirror, smoothing the brown hair Nana Vee had turned into lustrous waves, I touched the chip implanted in the bone behind the back of my ear, and my sentence appeared beneath Josh’s. Something came up. Won’t get to it until a few hours from now.
JOSHUA: Don’t forget.
ME: I’m sure you’d remind me if I did.
JOSHUA: You know me well.
I straightened and pressed on my wristband to make all my clothes blink out of existence.
Giya turned toward me. “At least tell me if it’s good or bad.”
I sank into the bath, releasing a little hiss of pleasure. “It’s not good.”
“Shit . . .”
“Giya Geemiwa, your mouth is much too pretty for such an ugly word,” Nana Vee chided her, bustling around the bathroom for the soap. “And what’s not good?”
Giya rolled her eyes at me the second Veroli’s head was turned, and I smiled.
“My love life, Nana Vee.” I leaned my head back against the mint-green quartz and shut my eyes.
“You have a boyfriend?” Nana Vee exclaimed.
I almost snorted at her shock. Almost, because the fact that my having a boyfriend surprised her so much painted a pitiful picture of my amorous life. “Would I keep it from you if I had one, Nana Vee?”
“You better not, dearie. Because I’ll need to investigate the man you set your heart upon.”
I smiled. “You and Iba both.”
Although I was plenty capable of washing my own hair, Veroli loved the task, so I let her untangle my long locks and rub an oily soap made of the same musk-scented beetle shells and aromatic white blooms that fragranced my bath.
As Giya told me about Sook’s most recent business venture—her twin was always inventing something . . . most recently, volitor surfboards—I scrubbed my scaly skin quickly, then rose, the fire in my veins lifting the water from my body like mist. I was dry before I even set foot on the bathmat, but my skin still glimmered and would continue to do so for an hour or so. The scales would smooth in a matter of minutes, though.
“Here.” Veroli swiped her finger over her Infinity and beamed over the dress I was to wear. “Your aunt sent it over this afternoon.”
When our biometric bracelets had become standard accessories in Neverra, Giya’s mother had gone to Earth to take a digital fashion design class. She’d returned soon after and had opened the first boutique that didn’t sell physical clothes but digital ones, outfits that could be stored inside our wristbands, then beamed onto our bodies.
Giya worked with her mother during the long Neverrian summers, but what my cousin truly wanted to do was become a kindergarten teacher—she had an endless supply of patience and was as sweet as I wasn’t. So Neenee was presently training Veroli’s daughter-in-law, Magena, in the art of digital couture, and Magena loved it. Their customers, too, because the Huntress from Geemee Kaji’s clan injected her designs with tribal patterns and beadwork that had become all the rage in Neverra.
I accepted the beamed dress from Nana Vee, then slashed my index finger over its holographic image to apply it on my body.
Giya studied her mother’s creation—stretchy and opaque on top, gauzy and sheer on the bottom—and then her eyes flicked to mine, and a small gasp flitted past her lips. “It’s purple!”
Faeries got engaged in purple and married in red. Although you could wear both colors year-round in regular clothes, no one wore gowns of such shades unless they had something to celebrate.
Or not celebrate in my case.
The brush Nana Vee had been clutching clattered against the pale-green quartz. “I thought you didn’t have a boyfriend!”
I shrugged. “I don’t. I have a fiancé. Well, soon I’ll have one.”
Giya’s eyebrows gathered over her nose. “You’re getting engaged?” Hurt. She sounded hurt. Like I’d purposely kept this a big secret from her. “To whom?”
I pressed my lips together so as not to grumble his name. “It’s a surprise.”
Forever the romantic, tears surged from Nana Vee’s eyes. “Oh, Skies, another one of my babies is getting engaged.” Since she was half-fae, she didn’t have a lot of fire, so her tears didn’t plume right off her cheeks.
Nana Vee grabbed both my hands and squeezed them so tightly she stopped the flow of blood and fire to my extremities. “Which boy stole your heart?”
“Oh . . . no one stole my heart,” I replied, a bite to my words.
Nana Vee’s eyebrows quirked. “Wh-what?”
“I’m not allowed to discuss it, but in fifteen minutes—”
“Fifteen minutes?” Nana Vee screeched before jerking me into the chair.
She crouched to grab the fallen brush and yanked it through my hair. After drying the damp ends with her palms, she braided the lengths into a crown which she pinned to the top of my head. And then she applied a line of kohl to my bottom lashes, swiped mascara over my top ones, and slicked on a nude lipstick that tamed the fullness of my lips.
“Giya, grab the jewelry I laid out on the bed.”
My cousin, who’d stayed silent as though trying to make sense of my sudden engagement, pushed off the wall and strode into my bedroom, her white dress whispering around her willowy frame. She returned holding a pair of dangling earrings fashioned from amethyst cabochons sprinkled through with rose-cut diamonds.
Nana Vee speared them through my lobes, then told me to hurry, that I was already five minutes late. Sighing, I got up, beamed high-heeled sandals onto my feet, and followed Giya back onto the deck.
Before we took to the skies to join the family, and the people who thought they were about to become our family, Giya asked, “Please tell me who.”
I leaned over and whispered Remo’s name into my cousin’s ear.
Her eyes and mouth rounded in shock. “No . . .”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I tipped my head toward the field of purple adamans shimmering like cut glass beyond the forest of calimbors. Even from the distance, I could see bodies milling over the fan-shaped pavilion built for regal functions. “Politics.”
And then we both soared upward, two newly appointed sentinels tailing us. My guards were swapped around so often I never learned their names. Remo’s fault. After he’d become a lucionaga, he’d insisted familiarity resulted in sloppiness and had advised the Council never to assign the same person to me twice in the same month. Oh, and he’d also instructed the guards never to address the princess . . . for propriety’s sake.
Safety and propriety, my as
s. It was simply another way to ostracize me from Neverrians and show off his control.
“Maybe it’ll make him nicer,” Giya said as the pavilion came into view.
I slanted her an extremely dubious look. I didn’t think binding my essence with the man who took such pleasure in ostracizing me from the people in our world would make him any kinder. If anything, he’d probably get a bigger power trip out of it.
It’s just an engagement; not marriage, I reassured myself as we landed on the bow-shaped terrace of the pavilion.
4
The Mothers
Giya and I were surprisingly not the last to arrive in the fan-shaped Adamans Pavilion. Nima and Iba were still absent.
As we stepped past the curved strip of windows facing the Glades, my gaze zeroed in on Geemee Kaji, who stood stiff as a calimbor beside his wife and Remo’s mother. Where Faith and Nima were perpetually on the outs, Faith and Lily had remained tentative friends. If a war broke out between the Farrows and the Woods, Lily would side with Iba and Nima. Since there hadn’t yet been any war, just sporadic skirmishes that led to cold fronts, she’d never needed to pick sides. Giya, though, had always picked a side—Nima’s. Unlike her mother, she had no affection for the Farrows, and Giya was a very affectionate person.
I was glad for my cousin’s presence tonight, as well as my maternal grandparents’, my great-aunt Aylen’s, and her daughter Shiloh’s. The more non-Farrows, the merrier.
When my grandfather spotted me, he called out my name and opened his arms, and I strutted into his embrace. He had no Daneelie blood, no faerie blood for that matter, yet he always smelled briny and mineral like the sea. After he released me, Aylen spun me in a circle, gushing about how gorgeous my dress was, how the shade made my eyes seem almost violet, while Nana Em interrupted her soap-making discussion with Shiloh to kiss my cheek.
As Aylen fingered the chiffon, I caught Faith glancing at me through the web of bobbing service fae passing around twinkling golden orbs. Her blue eyes widened before they snapped back over to Neenee Lily. My aunt rolled her fingers into fists, probably to keep herself from signing the reason for this strange dinner—which I assumed she was privy to since she’d designed my dress.
Clutching her goblet of faerie wine, Faith’s eyes cut across the room toward her eldest son, who had his head bent next to his grandfather’s, probably discussing the cleverness of their crown embezzlement venture. If they actually thought I would go through with the wedding, they had another thing coming.
The air churned as powerful wings propelled Neverra’s one and only dragon onto the glass deck beyond the curved glass wall. Remo’s little brother Karsyn, who’d been riding on his father’s black-scaled back, hopped off and traipsed through the open sash windows toward his mother, leveling a serrated little glower my way.
A cloud of shimmery smoke billowed around the draca, blurring his dark contours, shrinking him back into human flesh. Tightening the leather tie binding his shoulder-length brown hair, Silas entered the pavilion, inclining his head toward the assembled crowd. As he strode toward Remo, Faith intercepted him, shackling his wrist. Her hissed words were lost amidst a fanfare of loud stomps.
A line of lucionaga climbed up the sweeping glass stairs, forming an aisle through which Nima and Iba walked arm-in-arm, sporting matching golden leaf circlets and decorous smiles. Nima’s grin lost some of its power when she noticed Faith, and then it wilted entirely when her black eyes landed on me. Her body grew so stiff so fast that when she whipped her face toward Iba, I worried her head would unscrew itself from her neck. Iba winced, even though Nima hadn’t even opened her mouth.
The dust locked in the tattoo wreathing her neck seemed to pulse harder. So hard that for a second I actually worried for Iba’s safety, but for all her temper, my mother possessed unrivaled self-control. Iba placed his glowing palm atop Nima’s forearm, above her second tattoo, spoils from the battle she’d waged to free our kingdom of the cloying mist. Anguish lit up her dark features and made the W on her hand flare like a beacon.
“Thank you all for coming on such short notice.” Iba’s knuckles whitened as though he was physically restraining Nima. “Some of you might have guessed the occasion from the color of my daughter’s magnificent dress.”
He winked at his sister, whose face was much too drawn to register the compliment.
“Tonight, I called you over to celebrate a momentous event in my family’s life—the engagement of my beautiful Amara to a loyal subject of the crown, Remo Farrow.”
The vein at Remo’s temple fluttered his birthmark. I suspected he hadn’t appreciated being referred to as a loyal subject of the crown.
Nima turned the same shade as Giya’s dress, which made her tipped eyes appear black, and then the veins in her hands ignited, a luminescent blue.
Oppressive silence ensued after Iba’s short speech, but it didn’t last long. Soon it was punctured by one long roll of thunder that had everyone looking at the incoming clouds. The lucionaga who’d remained on the deck filed into the pavilion to slide the glass doors shut. Neverrians were surely wondering why another storm was forming when the last one had just abated. Or perhaps they were too busy running to find cover to wonder about the weather, and which Daneelie was causing it.
Aylen clapped. She’d loved Stella, and even though she’d heard Nima’s stories, her fond memories of Faith’s mother made it impossible for her to hate the Farrows. Shiloh and Nana Em clapped along politely and so did Pappy, although he wore a big frown that pleated his suntanned brow.
“Is this my niece’s choice, or yours, Ace?” Geemee Kaji’s voice cut through the applause.
“She is the crown princess, brother,” Iba answered.
A look passed between the two men. A look that made Geemee Kaji’s corded arms tighten in front of his massive chest, the myriad of confiscated Seelie dusts writhing in their tracks. Unlike Nima, he couldn’t use the dust he ensnared. Merely stored it until he felt the misbehaving Seelie deserved their power back.
Where Gregor and Silas governed the royal guard, Geemee Kaji, along with a handful of other Unseelies, ran the Neverrian police. He was trying to get his twins to join, but Giya had zero interest in patrolling the kingdom, and Sook was much too passionate about his inventions.
As I watched my uncle’s inked forearms, I wondered if I’d be like Nima—able to use the dust—or like the rest of the Hunters—merely a storage unit. I’d come close to seizing a Seelie’s dust once, but Sook had beat me to it, slashing his skin and exposing his blood. That was how we Hunters magnetized wita. Our iron-rich blood attracted the dust and trapped it in the form of dark whorls.
Lost in thought, I’d missed Remo walking up to me.
“The Cauldron has arrived, Amara,” he gritted out, as though my name were the most detestable word in the Faeli language. Considering amara meant love, I bet it was painful for Remo to utter.
I glanced at his proffered arm. “What? Not Trifecta?”
His pupils distended, almost entirely obliterating the gold surrounding them. Was he worried someone might ask the meaning of his unpleasant nickname, which he employed as a substitute for freak? He raised his arm higher as though to hurry me to take it. I shot him an icy smile, scanned the pavilion until I spotted the black cauldron hovering between Gregor, Iba, and Nima. Refusing my future fiancé’s escort, I strode toward the vessel of fae essences that magically materialized for betrothals and weddings.
Remo’s boots banged against the copper floor, the weight of his anger striking the nape of my neck. Not only had I openly demeaned him by refusing his arm, but I’d done so in front of his fellow lucionaga.
Go me.
When I reached my parents, Nima who hadn’t spoken a single word since her arrival, broke away from Iba and clutched my elbow. “I need a minute with my daughter.” She towed me away from the men and the Cauldron spitting up glittery tendrils of smoke, her fingers cool and firm. When we were far from prying ears, she threaded a fugitive te
ndril of hair back into my braided crown. “Why?”
One tiny, loaded word.
“Because Iba asked this of me.”
“Why would he ask you to . . . to . . .?” One of her eyes spasmed from the mixture of worry and annoyance she was surely trying to contain before the clouds she’d called forth ripped.
I placed my hand over hers. “It’s okay, Nima.”
“Okay? How is it okay that you’re being forced to tie your essence with a boy you don’t love?” Her eye twitched again, her thick black lashes flapping. “You don’t love him, do you, abiwoojin?”
“Skies, no.”
Lightning slit the sky, this time cleaving the steel clouds. Raindrops fell in droves, clapping the flat copper roof like mallets.
“But it’s just an engagement, Nima, not a wedding.”
Her eyes darted toward Iba, who watched us steadily, even though he was discussing something with Gregor and Remo.
“Did you marry the man you were engaged to?” I whispered just as Faith stomped toward us, curly red hair bouncing violently against her shoulders.
“I object,” she bellowed over the deafening cacophony of my mother’s anguish, “and I’m guessing you do too, Catori.”
Nima schooled her features back into her sovereign’s mask. “I might not be fond of the union, but I trust our king’s judgment, as should you.”
Faith set her hands on her waist, crinkling the emerald satin of her floor-length gown. “The king is your husband. Of course you’d trust his judgment.”
Nima seemed to grow a few inches taller than the full head she already had on Faith. “Everything my husband does, he does for Neverra.”
“Well, I don’t want my son marrying into a family of murderers.” Spittle flew from Faith’s mouth, smacked Nima’s chin.
Reckless Cruel Heirs Page 4
