by Shana Abe
It hurt. The iron was colder than ice, far colder than anything of earth should be. It dug into the flesh of her fingers and cut and screamed as she pulled, and finally tore along its joint. She dropped it at once, then picked it up and tossed it away from all four of them. Went to the other manacle and pulled and pulled again.
When it was finished she was bleeding, tiny nicks and cuts from the raw metal, the diamond shards digging into her skin. She threw that one away as well, wrapped her hands around Rhys’s wrist and rubbed hard.
“Wake up. Everyone, wake up.” She took up his other cold wrist, twisting around at the same time, trying to see if Hayden moved. “Zut alors! Merde! Wake up!”
Rhys’s arm jerked free of her grasp. She drew back, startled, but both the taloned hands had risen toward her. She felt claws whisper through her hair, the zing of gold curving around the back of her neck. He pulled her down to him, lifted his head, and mashed his lips to hers.
It was icy. Not the winter ice of his shadow touch, and nothing at all like the sweet, warm kisses she was used to from Hayden—not even passionate ones she’d gotten when Rhys had disguised himself as Hayden. This kiss was icy like the cellar, icy and prolonged and tasting of desperation. Deliverance. She needed to breathe and she could not; his tongue invaded her, his claws kept her imprisoned, and even still she could not bring herself to hurt him to break free.
It was Rhys who dropped his head back to the limestone, panting raggedly, muttering in a broken, wretched voice, “It’s you, it’s you, Holy Mother of God, I can’t believe it’s you, but it is, a miracle, it’s you …”
“Zoe?”
Hayden was sitting up, staring at her. She wiped her hand across her lips, shook her head, unable to explain. And then the human was upon them.
In the long, unpleasant days that followed, after she’d replayed the moment over and over and over in her mind, she realized that he was the man she’d seen the cook sobbing over in the kitchen—not dead, only asleep or pretending. He must have been creeping down the stairs when both Hayden and the prince had fallen unconscious. He must have discovered the iron manacle she’d thrown as Rhys began his kiss.
The Other was able to steal up upon them all, even fetid with the smells of city and blood and man, and by the time she saw him there at the foot of the stairs, it was too late.
Hayden saw the sanf as well. He went instantly to smoke, a rush of vapor aimed like a blade straight at the human, but the man clutched the manacle in both hands and barked in French, “Disperse! Do not re-form!”
She watched, baffled, her heart pumping, waiting for Hayden to Turn back, become dragon, leap and kill the Other—
But he didn’t. He remained smoke. He reached the man and curled apart harmlessly against him, drifted up to the ceiling, and vanished.
Vanished.
She stared wildly at the sanf. “What did you do? What did you do?”
The man pointed at her. “You! Lie down! Stop breathing!”
She reached him in three steps, raised a hand.
“All of you,” screeched the sanf backing up rapidly, “all of you stop—”
The connection of her fist to his cheek shattered the bone; she felt it, felt the man’s skull break apart, his neck snapping to the side. He tumbled to the floor and did not move.
She was there anyway, dragging him up by his lapels, shaking him so hard his head lolled against his shoulders and his wig fell off. “What did you do? Tell me what you did!”
A shadow came forward: Sandu, not Rhys. He took the manacle from the stair step at the dead man’s feet.
“It was this,” he said quietly. He held it pinched between his thumb and finger as if it burned. “Just this.”
She glared at him, still clutching the sanf. In the cellar darkness beyond them something new stirred. It was Rhys moving along the floor, his claws making small scritch, scritch noises across the stone.
“It’s a kind of poison,” explained the boy. “Poison in the form of a fragmented diamond, embedded in this metal. Do you know the story of Draumr, Noble Zoe?”
“No.” She released the body of the sanf inimicus, clutched at her stomach before bending double, then dropping to her knees. She was visible again; she was sick and empty.
“You’re the only Gifted dragon I’ve ever heard of able to resist it.”
“It’s only chips!”
“It is the remains of the most dangerous stone in our history. I can’t even imagine how they got it. I’m sorry.” He bent down before her, placed the manacle carefully at her knees. “When Draumr calls to a drákon, even in this form, we comply. Hayden James won’t be coming back.”
Chapter Twenty
Rhys was a problem. Despite the danger of discovery, they had to wait until dusk to escape from the house of the sanf inimicus. Fortunately, it was less than an hour’s wait; the rain still fell in drumming dark sheets, and that helped as well.
The prince had dug up clothing in a bureau in one of the upstairs chambers, ordinary, innocuous clothing, and now he was a workman in wool and cleated shoes and a brown felt hat, and Zoe was dressed in the cook’s spare uniform, which ended at her ankles and hung from her frame in massive folds.
There was nothing else of use in the house. No papers, no wallets upon the men. There was the cook to contain and Rhys to spirit away and—despite what the woman claimed—no means of discovering who else came here, what other faces the sanf inimicus might hide behind. They could not split up and they could not loiter. They had to leave.
Yet they also could not put fresh clothing upon the body of Rhys Langford. The rags he wore were pungent and held together by threads, yet his limbs were frozen—he could barely hobble—and the golden claws punctured all material. Dragon attributes, their scales and fangs and talons, were forged far stronger than even steel. By the time Sandu was able to hail a carriage for them, Zoe had given up attempting to hide anything but the claws. She wrapped him in a blanket from head to foot and sat stoically beside him in the coach, staring at the red-eyed cook across from her who was drákon and not, their knees bumping with every joggle, all four of them sodden. Silent. The only noises came from the joints of the carriage and the thundering storm—and the horses, which balked and neighed all the way back to the maison.
And the manacles, she supposed, although to her they were still quiet as a dead calm lake; even the iron had ceased to whimper. They lay wrapped in a sheet, tied in a fat bundle on the squabs beside her. Every now and then she noted Sandu’s troubled gaze resting upon it from beneath the brim of his hat.
Rhys leaned heavily against her. At one sharp turn he nearly fell into her lap, wheezing as he tried to get upright again without using his hands. He struggled at first but at the next bend gave it up entirely, sagging. Zoe accepted his weight, pulled the soaked blanket tighter around him when it began to slide off. A solitary bright talon caught against her apron, tore a jagged rip through the middle before he shifted his arm.
The maison had not a single candle lit. They entered it without light, through the back, and the diamonds and jasper sang arias of jubilation at their presence.
Zoe lit the candles. She lit the fire in the parlor hearth. She warmed her hands before it for a long minute, feeling the steam beginning to form in the clammy mess of her petticoats and skirts, then turned around and faced the others behind her.
The cook, sans cap, rocking inelegantly in a chair with the knuckles of one hand pressed to her mouth.
The raven-haired prince standing sentinel beside her, still regal in his simple workman’s garb.
And the monster, a broken shadow upon a chaise longue, his feet deformed, his legs unable to straighten. The scar drawn down his face an angry hard line. Hair hanging lank along his cheekbones, that very dark brown now oddly streaked with strands of bright silky metal. He was bony and ashen and frightening. Only his eyes remained unchanged from the ghost who’d haunted her, from the boy she’d once kissed: pale, winter green that watched her unwaveringly.
“What will you do with her?” Zoe asked in French, jerking her chin toward the cook.
“Take her home, for now,” replied Prince Sandu. “Get her back home.”
Zoe felt herself smile, a horrible smile, arctic and unkind. “Shall we not punish her first?”
The woman closed her eyes, kept rocking.
“Is that what you wish?” asked the prince, unmoved. “It is your right.”
She kept her smile, gazing at the woman.
“Zoe,” rasped the monster in his broken voice.
“Shall I?” She stretched her fingers by her sides, felt the fire behind her begin to rise and gain strength. “Shall I, female? Shall I offer you what you deserve? No doubt there’s a great deal we may learn from you before … matters are concluded.”
The cook didn’t answer, her cheeks apple red, her knuckles blanched. Her rocking increased. Now that Zoe knew what she was, she could feel the woman’s deep white panic, the spiral of blind, total fear that cinched her heart and clogged her mind. A true drákon never would have surrendered to such blank sedated fear. A true drákon never would have betrayed her own kind.
“But I don’t know, I’m undecided,” she said gently. “I do have a certain sympathy for your position. You say you have a son. It’s a great pity. Yet perhaps I don’t like you well enough to kill you when I’m finished with you. Perhaps I like you only enough to make you suffer.”
“Zee,” said the creature who had been Lord Rhys. One of the clawed hands twitched against his chest. “Stop.”
“Why should I?”
The monster shook his head. “It should not be you.”
The woman had bent over completely, hiding her face between the skirts at her knees. Her hair was sand-colored and wet and fraying from its braids. Zoe gazed at her, then gave a flick of her hand.
“Fine. Live.” She looked back at the prince. “I’m leaving. Don’t follow me.”
“My lady, it’s not safe—”
“Do you imagine,” she said, in the same gentle tone of before, “that I care even the slightest jot about your opinion? I’m not asking permission, Highness. I’m leaving. I will return. That’s all you need know. If you’ve left for your home by the time I get back, Godspeed.” She moved to the doorway, paused with one hand upon the wooden frame. She spoke her next words to the red-and-cream runner in the hallway; she didn’t face the parlor again. “Make certain you take her with you, or I won’t be responsible for the consequences.”
The Palais des Tuileries was also unlit. The rain remained steady, which made it simpler for her to walk there. She’d shed the cook’s gown and moved unseen along the streets, but they were nearly deserted anyway, despite the fact that it was a Wednesday and the bells of the cathedral upon the Ile de la Cité were ringing over and over for the midnight Mass.
The gate into the royal gardens had a new lock upon it. Zoe cupped the weight of it in both hands, water beading and rolling along the metal. It was shiny and thick and each little piece had been fit together like a clever puzzle. The king’s crest was stamped across the front. The bolt felt warm against her rain-cold fingers; she hooked her thumbs through the loop of it, gave it a swift jerk.
The lock broke into its pieces, and without nearly the fuss of the iron manacles.
Her path through the gardens felt familiar enough that she hardly paid attention to it. Her feet knew the way. She passed hedges and faceless eerie statues, fallow flower beds and the entrance to the labyrinth. Her favorite door into the palace was a hidden servant’s entrance set behind an overgrown yarrow, still unlocked. She eased inside.
It was vast. So vast. How could she have forgotten it that quickly? She went from invisible to seen with scarcely a thought, no longer worrying about footprints, or sound, or human eyes peering past windowpanes. She was small as a flea in such a space.
There was no one else about. Tuileries greeted her as it always had: with marble hush and the promise of echoing solitude. Even if someone were to discover her footprints, she’d be indiscernible before they could speak a word.
Her apartment was just as before. Clearly no one had discovered it since she and the prince and—
Her apartment was the same. The bed, stripped of its covers; on the night they’d come, she’d returned each piece to its rightful owner. The broken mirror, still propped massive and hulking against its wall.
The fissure of silver that marked the divide in the glass. The stark-faced woman on one side, and the deep bottomless blue on the other.
She stood motionless a moment, taking it all in. Rainfall peppered the lead gutters outside, cascaded down the slick walls. It penetrated the stone palace, changed the song of the foundation from sleepy to sleepier, notes that suggested undiscovered quarries far and away, mountains untouched, rivers undammed. A world flowing free.
Zoe walked across the chamber. She knelt before the mirror, her palm pressed to the cold flat glass. She felt naught but that: the cold, hard and unforgiving.
Her head bent; her forehead touched it. Nothing.
Her breath clouded it. Nothing.
Even the usual spirits were gone; nothing bright moved before her. She gazed at an endless span of dark cobalt blue, the silver fracture, unrelenting.
The air changed then; it went so thin her lungs closed. She could not breathe any longer. She could not breathe or think. He wasn’t there. She thought he would be, and he wasn’t. He wasn’t anywhere anymore.
Something hot at last—her tears, chilled already by the time they reached her chin and dripped upon her thighs.
Zoe curled slowly down to the floor, one hand still braced against the glass, and wept into the crook of her arm, making hardly any sound at all.
The world hurt. It was a bitch of a thing, because it wasn’t an ordinary sort of hurt, not the kind of pain he’d shrug off as a lad at school after a hard game of cricket, or a harder night of carousing. Rhys had had his share of bruises and bleary mornings. Once he’d even severed the primary bone of his right wing from a rushed landing in a burst of wind amid the downs, and that had been one of the most atrocious moments of his life.
This was different.
It hurt like someone had ground mounds of serrated glass into every crevice of every joint. Like he’d gone to sleep one night in his very prime, a twenty-nine-year-old drákon, and awoken an old, old man, so old his skin had shrunk and thinned and his body no longer obeyed him and little children would stare and point and run away if he beckoned to them. His hair was strange and his hands downright grisly, each a blasphemous mix of his human shape and dragon. His body was stooped. Clambering up the steps into the carriage he’d caught a smeared glimpse of his face in the window glass, and then he better understood Zoe’s constant, horrified calm when she looked at him.
He was a corpse. All that time with her, he’d thought he’d been dead, and it must have been true. Nothing living would look as he did.
He watched her leave the maison and knew there was nothing he could say or do or hope to stop her. He even knew where she was going. The risks she took walking alone in this colossal city of peasants and nobles and poisonous enemies. Had he a wisp of the bravado he’d possessed months before, he would have leapt up, taken her in his arms no matter what she said. Let her shed her grief and fury upon his chest; he could accept her blows, her physical rage. That would have been all right.
It was her eyes that tore him apart. Her eyes, jet-black and beautiful and still brimming with all the tragic, shimmering sorrow he’d never before seen shining out at him. That last look she’d sent him before leaving, a mere sidelong glance from beneath brown lashes, and it had flayed him to the core.
He’d been wrong. He knew that now. She had loved Hayden James. She’d loved him, and now, because of his quest to free Rhys, a good man—a noble drákon—was gone forever.
And poor Zoe Lane. She’d be given to the second son of the Alpha anyway. Even like this, even mangled and destroyed as he was, as truly, truly fucking sorry
as he was … when they got back to Darkfrith, after all her dodging and hiding and intricate devious plans, she would be given to him.
The beast inside him—the dragon that yet smoldered as a cinder in his heart—was green and selfish and glad.
So he’d let her go for now. He let her slip back to her palace, to her looking glass of sallow spirits. He hoped that James was there, actually. He hoped she got to say good-bye, and that afterward James drifted away to his eternal peace.
It was the least he could hope for them.
Because one way or another, Rhys’s future with Zoe was just about to begin.
He gazed down in unwilling fascination at his malformed hands, opening and closing the gold metal claws.
He was alive.
* * *
The prince and his small-blooded female were asleep when she returned. She’d checked on them, slipped into his room to be certain that what she sensed was truth: The boy was in the bed, still fully clothed atop the covers. The cook was wrapped in blankets upon the floor, her hands lifted to her face as if to hide her shame, even in slumber. A weak fire glowed orange from behind the grate.
Neither drákon woke. Zoe allowed the bedroom door to finish its well-oiled click behind her.
Rhys had remained in the front parlor. He might not have stirred since the last moment she’d seen him, hours past. His scent was nowhere but there. There was nothing in the air that suggested food to her, or drink, or movement. He was still angled awkwardly upon the chaise longue with his feet up; the blanket was a heap beside one slanting wooden leg, but other than that, nothing had changed. Ragged clothing. Jutting bones. Bright eyes and talons that rested across his stomach in ribbons of curling sharp gold.
The fire in here had been fed, so the light and shadows were better defined. He watched her in silence as she came to stand by the ash-colored chest placed near the parlor entrance. Finally he spoke.
“Did you find him?”
She closed her eyes and raised her face to the ceiling. “No.”
“I’m sorry. I am,” he added, when she opened her eyes and looked square at him. “I’d hoped … for your sake, Zee. I’d hoped he’d reach you.”
