“Why would he do that?”
“To get to the Ocelot Court,” she said. “Obviously. At least Mom had to be kidnapped. You’d just invite him into the palace, wouldn’t you?”
I tried to step away, but she held fast. She’d never used her shifter strength on me. It was nothing compared to the other big cats, but it was more than I had. “Let me go,” I growled. “You don’t want to believe anyone could actually like me for myself, do you? Is that it? You can’t believe anyone would like someone with no magic and no throne waiting.”
“I’m sorry Shadow drugged you,” she said. “Just another reason I’m leaving him here. I don’t trust him, Itzel. He’s dangerous. He should never have come along at all.”
“Funny. He says the same thing about you.”
Camila drew up as if she’d just been doused in ice water. “You believe him? And not me?”
“No,” I said. “I just find it ironic.”
“Well, it’s my decision,” she said. “So, it doesn’t matter if he trusts me. He’s dismissed from the rest of the tour.”
“You can’t just ditch him in the middle of Africa,” I said. “In case you forgot, he’s here because he protected you against his own clan. If he hadn’t warned us, none of us would be here.”
“How convenient for him to make you think that.”
I rolled my eyes. “He didn’t set up some big plot against you. He didn’t even know you had the amulet.”
“How do you know he’s telling the truth?”
“I just do,” I said with a shrug. Maybe it was the drug, but I knew Shadow. Though we’d barely talked, I understood him in some deeper, fundamental way. I knew what he was about, and it wasn’t trickery.
Camila crossed her arms. “Not good enough.”
“We can’t leave him,” I repeated. “I won’t.”
I didn’t think I’d ever openly defied my sister, refused her order so blatantly. It was both freeing and terrifying, like I’d just leapt from the helicopter with no parachute. I was already falling now, though. It was too late to go back.
Camila’s jaw clenched. “You can thank him for services rendered in the way I’m sure he wants. Then he’s not our problem anymore.”
“He’s not a problem,” I said. “He’s a person.”
“Fine,” she said. “If you’d choose a crazy swamp creature over your own sister, that’s your mistake. It’s better that I know where your loyalties lie now rather than after I’ve taken the throne.”
With that, she turned, flicked her hair over her shoulder, and strode back toward the house. Did it really come down to this? Abandon Shadow in the middle of nowhere after all he’d done for us, or abandon my sister after coming so far and getting half the amulets? It was an impossible choice, and yet, it was never really any choice at all. I couldn’t survive alone in the Lion Kingdom, either.
I stood watching her go, torn between letting her go and running after her, begging her to forgive me, and saying all the placating words. She was right about one thing. I had changed. I wasn’t the sister who would sit back and be called expendable, who would take whatever scraps I was thrown and make the most of them. I wanted more now. I wanted my own life, and I wanted a say.
If she wouldn’t let me have it, maybe I didn’t belong on her tour, either.
Thirty-Eight
I lay in the grass watching the sky go from blue to white to crimson and orange. Insects sang and buzzed, but I didn’t move. Only my mind moved, reeling like the birds high overhead. Thoughts of Camila, of her accusation that I’d changed, mingled with the discussions I’d had with Sir Kenosi over whether money or title came with more power. Shadow’s proclamation that I was his mate was shaded by the petals of doubt Camila had dropped. Lord Balam’s mysterious motives, the fact that he’d protect me from Shadow one moment, and the next, he’d stand back and watch as Shadow fucked me with no indication that I wanted it.
After a while, I closed my eyes and dreamed. A lion stood over me, its body at least twice as long as mine, muscled with unimaginable power. I gasped, wanting to scramble away but not daring to move, to breathe. It lowered its head and snuffed at my arm, the one the magic had burned. Then it was gone, but I was pinned, unable to move.
“My cherie,” a voice whispered, though there was no one there. It was as if the swaying grasses themselves spoke. “I never imagined my mate would be the incorrigible little ocelot princess.”
A cold breeze swept up my neck like a breath from invisible lips. I tried to roll over, but my body was pressed to the earth. I struggled, but nothing happened. I was as trapped as I had been under the lion’s stare. My legs were parted, and another sigh swept through the prairie.
“Are you Kwame’s ghost?” I whispered, going still.
“Can you see me?” he asked. The cold shimmered over me, and my dress was pushed up.
“No.” I struggled to free myself as I searched the dark, starry sky for a sign of him. There was nothing, only the cold pressure moving over me, insistent but without substance. I didn’t know how it could pin me to the ground while he had nothing to brace against when I reached to push him away, bucked to get him off. It was like a person made of air, a person with no substance but with the ability to pull aside my panties and circle my clit until I whimpered and squirmed harder. It was as if one point of pressurized air was drawing a circle around my sensitive bud, burrowing between my folds.
“What I wouldn’t give for one taste of this succulent flesh,” his sighing voice whispered in the night. “To suck the honey from this sweet cunt.”
I tried to close my knees, to squeeze my legs together, but they were held open, splayed wide. My pussy lips were spread open to the night air. Cold suctioned between my legs, and I gasped, arching up despite myself. A rumble sounded through the savannah, but I couldn’t tell if it was thunder or the ground itself trembling beneath me. Coldness coiled around my limbs, and I shivered, but it only increased. Cold pressure teased my opening, worming inside me like snake made of pressurized air. I pictured Kwame as I’d known him, a young man about my age, his teasing smile. If I pictured that, maybe I wouldn’t scream myself awake from this nightmare.
The cold shaft of air filled me, harder now, thicker, pumping into my dry flesh with quick, sure strokes. I cried out, trying to free myself, though there was no pain. There was nothing there, no friction to cause pain, nothing forcing into my resistant flesh. The violation felt deeper than that, as if he were plundering my soul instead of my body. He had me pinned like a moth, spread wide and helplessly fluttering against him.
“Stop,” I gasped. “Please, stop.”
“Come with me,” he said. “Come with me into the spirit world. We can be together forever.”
“No,” I said, louder now, my panic giving me strength. “I’m not ready to die. Let me go!”
“You won’t die,” he said. The snake of cold air thrust into me faster, harder. I struggled, squirming and bucking to free myself, but it kept on, pounding into me relentlessly until I couldn’t help my body’s reaction to the stimulation. Wetness slicked my walls, and the cold invasion went deeper, aching as it strained against my depth. Cold spread through me, tingling from my core and through my limbs. I gasped despite myself.
“Say yes,” his cold breath whispered against my neck, sending a shiver through me.
“Then let me go,” I panted.
“If you’ll come with me,” he whispered. “If you come, I’ll give you the amulet. We can be together in body there, not only in spirit. Don’t you want to be with your mate?”
I started to say Shadow was my mate, but I didn’t want to anger this ghost. I didn’t know what he would or could do to me, or why he’d picked me, or why he thought I was his mate.
What if Camila was right about Shadow? What if he was tricking me? Just because I’d pictured a mark on his arm, this didn’t mean he had it. I’d seen his body a dozen times, and there was no mark. Even if there had been, that didn’t prove that it
was my mark. He could have found his True Mate a long time ago, maybe even lost her in the conflict with our people. Maybe he wanted revenge. Some people never met their True Mate, or he was already dead. That’s what he’d said. So maybe this ghost really was mine—or I was his.
“I don’t know,” I said at last. “How will I get back here?”
“You’re living,” he said, as if that answered everything. “Don’t you want to see your mother again?”
“Mom,” I gasped. My heart erupted in my chest. I wanted that more than almost anything. I had missed her every day—her kindness, the way she looked at me like I was just as good as the shifters, the way she combed my hair, her smell. More than that, I missed her for the things only a mother could do. She hadn’t been there to help me with the embarrassment of my first periods, to advise me on my first love when I fell for Tadeu. I missed what it felt like to know someone was always on my side. So, I’d replaced her with my big sister, believing she was like our mother because Father had said it so many times. But maybe she wasn’t the kind and gentle soul I’d always believed.
I wanted to know if Mom was. Had I built all that in my head, idolizing her out of grief instead of picturing the reality of who she’d been? I wanted to ask her other questions, like whether she had ever loved Father, and if not, had she resented us because we were a product of their forced marriage? Had the panthers really killed her, and if not, what happened to her after she disappeared from the palace in the night?
“Your mother is there,” Kwame said. “All of the dead are there. Anyone you’ve ever loved who has died is in the spirit world.”
“Tadeu?” I asked.
“Every spirit,” Kwame confirmed. The cold invasion slipped from between my legs, but I remained splayed on the ground, my skirt around my waist.
“How will we find them?” I asked, trying to ignore the exposed feeling.
“When a living person enters the spirit world, all souls notice,” he said. “They’ll be watching you every moment until you leave. Every one of them. Your mother, this Tadeu… They will come running to see you.”
“Really?” I whispered as the point of cold pressure shivered up my thigh, over my hip, exploring my body. I wanted to scream, to shove it away and end this violation. It skimmed up, tracing the outline of my curves, tugging down the top of my dress, circling my nipple like a tongue. I squirmed, a strange heat that was both desire and disgust building inside me. “Let me go, and I’ll go into the spirit world with you.”
The cold pressure instantly ceased, and I was free. I began to swim toward the surface of consciousness, trying to find my way out of the dream, but I couldn’t seem to wake up. I could see the stars above me, like diamonds scattered across a sea of black velvet, and feel the cold breeze over the grasses making goosebumps rise along my arms. I sat up and pulled up my dress, then stood and pulled down the skirt before hugging my cardigan closed around me. My breath shook as I inhaled, taking in the scent of the dry grass.
The lion lay so still I almost stepped on it. I bit back a scream, leaping backward. It lifted its head, a growl rumbling through it.
“Well, fuck me,” I whispered, backing up another step. “This is worse than the dream.”
The lion lifted its head, a rumble starting deep in its throat. Its eyes flashed the color of copper, burning in the night. It looked at me a long moment, then lay its head down again, its eyes closing. I turned to run, but before I could take a step, a cold snake of pressure whipped around my arm, pulling me back, anchoring me to the spot.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I’m dreaming. It’s just a dream.
“Come,” he said, pulling me back. “The spirit world is waiting.”
And then I was tumbling through darkness, nothing to anchor me but a current of air squeezing tight around my wrist.
Thirty-Nine
Prince Kwame
Shifter Prince, Lion Nation
I would live again. I would have my human form again, in the human world. I had waited all these years, and now it had come. The thing I had been waiting for—the person. Not only someone powerful, but someone important. My mate.
A moment of regret tugged at my heart, that I had to deceive this way to make it happen. But my mate would be happy when she realized. She would be happy that her mate was not trapped in the form of a lion.
I did not know exactly how this magic worked. I only knew that I must convince her to stay with me here, or to bring me back as a man. I could not return to my world into that lion body one more time. Not with my mate at my side. Not to see her fear and disappointment that she was stuck with a fearsome lion as her mate.
If only she would choose to take me back in human form. If only I could see my mother again, my father, my sisters. To join their laughter. I had missed that the most. Lions didn’t laugh. But human—humans laughed. To laugh again, that was a dream. And now it was within my reach. How could I convince her?
I would give her everything she desired. I would give her the mother she had lost. The amulet she sought. I would give her the mate she deserved, the one she’d come for. Not the one who took advantage of her helpless state as I had shamefully done on the grass. It hadn’t seemed real. Just a little play.
But now I knew how real it was, and how wrong I had been to go about our first mating that way. I would make it up to her when we could both be human. I would enjoy having a human body back for that more than anything. To feel her body with the presence of mine, not just my spirit form. To take a woman again in my raw, solid, man form. And not just any woman. My mate.
My True Mate.
I had found her. How lucky I was, to have found her. Or unlucky, if she would not have me. It could be a curse more terrifyingly unfair than death itself, to find one’s True Mate when it was too late.
We still had one chance. She might not understand the True Mate bond yet, but I did. I knew that she would need me in my human form every bit as much as I did.
I would not let it be too late. I would do whatever it took—anything—to be with her. To give her a real man as a mate. Even if she hated me for it, I would give her what she needed.
Forty
Itzel
Princess, Ocelot Nation
I opened my eyes, expecting to find myself finally awake from the dream and back in my body, clear-headed and potion free. But I wasn’t lying in the grass or curled in the hammock they had offered me for the night. I was lying on an enormous bed, the towering posts made of ornately carved black marble. The mattress was soft as clouds. Beside me lay a man.
I jumped up and backed away, rubbing my wrist where the cold still lingered. The man propped himself up on one elbow and smiled at me, revealing straight white teeth with a gap between the front two. He looked like I remembered but older—shorn hair pinched into little twists, dark black skin, scarification tattoos on his forehead, and keen, bright copper eyes. While I took him in, he sat up and swung a pair of very long legs over the edge of the bed.
“It is you,” I said, my tone accusing.
“Prince Kwame,” he said, pressing a palm to his chest.
“Please tell me this is part of the hallucination, and I didn’t just arrive in the underworld.”
“Welcome to the spirit world, Princess Itzel.” He stood and gave a small bow. He was incredibly tall, at least six and a half feet, and still as thin and wiry as I remembered. “Now we can be together in the flesh.”
“I’m not dead, am I?”
“Of course not,” he said, looking offended that I’d ask.
“Are you really going to give me the amulet, or is this going to be another place where I have to do a bunch of humiliating challenges, and then you try to get out of giving it to me, anyway?”
Prince Kwame had the decency to look ashamed as he shook his head. “I don’t have the amulet. It belongs in the world of the physical, the world of substance.”
“You lied to me,” I said, my hands balling into fists. “You don’t even have it?
”
“I didn’t lie,” Kwame said, holding out both hands, palms up. “I said if you came here, I would give it to you. My mother has it. If you return with me, she will give it to you. I swear on my… Honor.” He faltered on the last word, as if forgetting he had nothing to give up. He was dead.
“That might be worth more if you hadn’t just ghost-fucked me.”
To my surprise, he reached out and took my hand, then bent to kiss it. “Thank you, my queen.”
“Um. You know I’m not that princess, right? Because I’m told shifters can tell. But I don’t know about… Ghosts, or whatever you are. Sorry.” I winced at my babbling, so unlike me. He had me flustered with his gentlemanly manner after the little encounter in the grass. I had expected someone more like Kenosi or even Lord Balam.
“If you are my mate, you are a queen in my eyes,” he said. “A prince must die to become a lion shifter. I’m sorry this is the only way we can be together.”
“You mean in the spirit world, or by using trickery? Because if the amulet isn’t here, I came here for nothing.”
Kwame’s eyes softened, and he gave me a wounded look. “You came here to be with your mate,” he said. “And to see your mother, my queen.”
“Is there an actual queen here?” I asked. “Of the spirit world?”
“There are many queens here,” he said. “But none that I care about.”
“Ah, right,” I said, nodding. “All the queens who have ever died are here.”
“Yes,” he said. “And you can meet them all, if you like.”
“I’d like to see my mother,” I said. “How does that work? How do we get around here? I don’t suppose there are cars driving spirits around.”
“No,” Kwame said with a laugh that was both deep and bubbling, like a spring welling up from deep underground. “Come.” He took my hand and pulled me toward the wall. “When you are here, you are living. Every spirit will be watching you, wanting something from you. If you want to see someone, you only have to think of them. They will be overjoyed at the chance to meet a living person. It so seldom happens here.”
Captive Princess: A Dark Paranormal Romance (Feline Royals Book 2) Page 19
