But I don’t feel free. Even as I run to the other side, working my way through the long chant, my chest is locked. I’m doomed to torment if the silver does what it’s supposed to do to the friend who was never supposed to leave us this soon. I hoist up Des and run him away from the purple petals. I know they’re powerful enough to knock out the likes of the Gorgonell, though she used significantly less this time.
I leave General Klein to bleed in the flowers.
T’was a thin silver blade I yanked from Des’ shoulder, which I make sure is on the other side of the gate, nowhere near him. Though the puncture was small, the silver is determined Des will lose far too much blood. Silver wounds on a vampire always gush. My hands are slick as I turn Des onto his stomach on the grass, making sure Lily can get near the wound, if tha’s a thing tha needs to happen.
The moment I finish the chant, Lily grips Des’ shoulder, closing her eyes as tears rain down on his back. “It’s not working!” she panics. “Come on, Des!”
Alex drops to his knees and flips Des onto his back, pressing down on Des’ sternum in three bursts at a time, forcing his heart not to stop. “Breathe, Des! Just keep your heart beating!” Alex shouts, jerking my own heart around.
Des is too still between Alex’s pumps. His eyes are open but they don’t see me. They don’t see my panic. They don’t see tha I love him. The lads are always saying it to me, but I just grunt in response, as if tha’s enough. “I love ye, Des,” I tell him, though it’s a pathetic offering now. “I’ll take care of this. I’m not leaving ye here, aye?” I’m reasoning with a man who can’t hear me. I scramble through the charm again, in case I missed a syllable in my haste. I’ll say it a thousand times if it’ll do a damned thing.
Lily’s eyes are closed as she keeps her trembling hands on him while Alex pumps through intermittent shouts of terror.
Then finally, when I’m certain I will die right along with Des, Lily lets out a cry of relief. “I’m burning! It’s working. It’s working! It’s okay, Des!” Her chin angles in my direction. “Des will be asleep for a while. I put him to sleep with the purple petals. I… Ah!” She screams, and I have half a mind to jerk her away from Des, but I force myself to let my mate burn from the inside out. My wolf howls, bangs against the cage of my chest to get to her, so I move to her side and brace her through the pain while it hits her in bursts.
The Gorgonell’s curse was delivered in a blast, so it only takes her a minute or two to absorb those ones. King Ronin’s poison was administered over the course of months, so tha took her a day or two to get out of her system. This silver knife was a burst tha didn’t stay in Des more than half a minute, so I know my mate will only burn from the inside-out for no longer than a handful of heartbeats. Otherwise, I’m going to lose my mind. I’m on the brink as it is. My whole being is in agony, knowing she’s in pain. A panicked whine escapes my lips.
Jays, I’m tired.
Not until she goes limp with relief do I realize Alex’s eyes are starting to droop. “The purple petals!” she warns him in a quiet voice. “Get farther away from the flowers, or you’ll all pass out. That’s why Des is alive but asleep. We’re not far enough from them. A few more feet should do it.”
Alex stumbles away, but I can’t separate my body from hers. I’m not capable. So I pick her up and move us both the requested few feet away, resting her back against my chest, which suddenly doesn’t feel quite as tired. “So a few purple petals put people to sleep, and buckets of them can take the Gorgonell down?”
She nods, her eyes focused on the General, who’s bleeding from his gut, surrounded by a small smattering of flowers. “Des will live. Des will live,” she breathes over and over. “He’ll get through this. He’ll wake up. I can’t believe that worked.”
Alex is blinking at her from a few feet away. “What did you do? You can’t do what you did. You told us you couldn’t. But I saw it. I saw you do magic.”
I’ve been through the shock of this, but it’s hitting Alex for the first time now. I’m just glad the other fae are far enough away tha they can’t hear us.
Lily’s breath comes slowly as she recovers from the trauma of taking Des’ poison into her body. “I can’t do normal magic, so what I told you was partly true. I can’t even grow a tree.”
Alex’s eyes are so wide, he looks like he’s seeing a ghost. He’s frightened of this lie, of her. “Tell me the whole truth this time.”
Her hand holds onto mine. She’s scared. Maybe she’s afraid to tell him. Maybe she’s afraid of herself. I know she’s worried she’ll end up alone. Obviously tha’s not going to happen.
“You don’t need to know it all,” she rules, not unkindly. I feel the tremble in her fingers, the catch in her breath.
“Tell me the truth!” Alex shouts, shifting from scared to livid.
Dread creeps up my spine when it dawns on me there might be far more to her story than even I know.
27
Crime and Confession
Lilya
I don’t know how to talk about it. The words have been stuck inside of me since I confessed my crimes to Fiora when I was eight years old. We don’t speak of it. Whenever the panic bubbles up inside of me, I hear her calm voice. “Magic is what ye make of it.” Then the anxiety settles back down.
But now I have to show my cards, tell the truth, and risk all that I hold dear. I need to hear Alex call me his Lily-girl again. I want him to look at me with that carefree “It doesn’t matter that the world is falling apart all around us. I’m charming and handsome. Let’s have a party,” kind of way. There’s a finesse to his relaxed hips, a sultry curve to his smile, and I’m terrified that once I tell him all he’s demanding to know, those precious things will be gone from my life.
Alex points to the stretch of grass between us as the breeze touches my hair. “You’ll tell me everything right this second, or I swear, I will leave this place without you.”
Salem stiffens behind me, his chest brushing my back. “Tha’s a lousy bluff.”
“I can’t be married to someone who’s got a whole bag of tricks up their sleeve! I can’t be worried that at any moment, my wife’s battering ram is going to take me by surprise.” Lexi isn’t blinking. “Talk!”
He’s yelling at me, which isn’t something I ever thought I would experience. Even when he got in trouble because I smeared blackberries on his white shirt when we were little, he didn’t raise his voice at me. Maybe it was naïve to think we could continue on so simply. Maybe I should’ve told him the truth from the start.
Lexi loves me. He’ll understand. I was wrong to have such little faith in the guys.
“It was an accident,” I work out, my voice rough as the jagged confession forces its way out of me, slicing my tender spots just before it hits the air. I’m not good at talking about this, but I muscle through my resistance and assure myself that Lexi won’t leave me. Salem didn’t. Granted, he only knows half the story, but he didn’t leave. I need to be brave. I need to be myself, even if that person has made some very bad mistakes. “When you knew me all those years ago, I was too young to practice charms and whatnot. You start that work when you’re eight in school under lots of supervision. But I was ready. I had you, who was two years older than me and ahead in that respect. I read the entire textbook over the summer to prepare for being taught. I tried my best in school, but I couldn’t make anything grow. Nothing at all.”
Lexi glares at me. “Then you fake died. How much of your life is true? How many lies have you told me? Fake death, fake name when we met in the pub. Fake magical aptitude. What else?”
His words aren’t uncalled for, but there’s so much venom that I recoil. I hold tight to Salem’s hand, knowing that if he keeps my grip, they won’t leave the second they know the truth. I can’t even feel relief that Des’ chest is moving on its own, though he’s still passed out.
I clear my throat, and though the rest of the rescued fae are out of earshot but in sight, it still feels like we’
re the only people in the world. My mouth is completely dry, but at last I untether myself from my worst secret, spilling it at the feet of the men I finally trust enough not to leave. “I practiced everything I learned in the textbooks, during and after school. I made sure to do it outside, so the General wouldn’t catch me failing.” I remember vaguely how elated I was that I could finally conjure up such pretty petals on my own. The burst of them blooming from my skin was something I’d tried so hard to achieve. “I made flowers just for me in the backyard. All different colors, and then crushed them so I could surprise the General when he got home from work. I didn’t understand why the plants all around the crumbled bits immediately withered. I assumed I just was no good at magic yet, and needed the teacher to help me correct the mistakes I was making.” Panic rises in my throat like vomit, trying to purge the poison of memory from my body. “I didn’t mean to kill the dog!”
Lexi’s eyes widen impossibly more. “Commander? That pit bull your dad loved?”
I nod, my stomach lurching as the name of the General’s wrinkle-faced dog comes back from the recesses of my mind where I’d buried the crime. The memory of Commander sitting on my feet while I read in front of the fireplace hits me with such clarity that I can practically smell the stench of his fur after the rain. I think I suppressed a lot of my time with the dog we’d had since I was born.
I swallow the bile before it comes out of me. “He was digging in the flower bed, which always set the General off, but this time, he didn’t come back inside with muddy paws. He didn’t come back at all. I found him dead in the flower bed, near the flowers I’d torn to bits. That’s when I first knew something was wrong with my magic.”
I need Salem’s steady heartbeat to keep me in the present, to keep me in one place. A vivid image of Commander with his four legs splayed in all directions, his caramel body motionless even after I picked him up. I cradled him like he was my baby, promising him all the ways I would make this better. I would wake him up somehow. Stop pretending to be dead. Doesn’t he know how much that scares me?
“You killed Commander?” Lexi’s face is gaunt.
I nod. “It was an accident. I didn’t know the flowers I was blooming were poisonous. I was trying for a small bush, like the book said.”
Lexi’s mouth is in a taut line, his disapproval firm. “You told me Commander got into something in the garden. You didn’t tell me that something was from you!”
“I didn’t mean to!” I plead, a tear running down my cheek.
Salem pulls my curls over his shoulder and runs his fingers through my hair. Salem isn’t going anywhere. Lexi’s mad, but he won’t leave. I was eight years old. I loved Commander.
As if he knows what I need to hear, Salem says low in my ear, “Keep going. Get it all out. We’re not going to take off on ye.” He points to Des’ steadily moving chest. I haven’t even allowed myself to fully feel relief yet, so quickly did we dive into this mess. “Look at tha. Ye bring life. You’re not a bad person.”
I hiccup through the next bit, shifting my butt against the grass as I run my palm over the blades, leaning back against Salem. “We were supposed to try ferns in school later that week. Those are easiest, I guess. Everyone did their best. Some did it and some couldn’t yet, but I did. Only my plant wasn’t a fern, even though I followed the instructions exactly. My plant had little white petals. They were so pretty, I made more. Dozens more. It was easy. It was fun, even. I didn’t connect the dots when everyone started choking except me. I didn’t understand what was happening. Then the teacher grabbed her chest and…” The memory of the tall woman collapsing to her knees slams into me. “Then everyone got real sleepy. I wasn’t sure what to do. I ran to my teacher and…” I remember poking at her, trying to shake her awake through my tears. “I was scared, being the only one alive, so I ran away. I ran home and hid under my bed. When the General found me, I told him what happened. He took me outside and told me to make the fern again. That’s when we realized what had happened.” I close my eyes through the memory of what followed. “He beat me something awful. Till he tired himself out. When he put me in the carriage, I thought he was taking me to jail for killing my classmates and my teacher. But he took me to shifter territory instead and dropped me off there, far enough away that I couldn’t find my way home again. And well, you know the rest. I killed them.” My voice feels loud, though it’s barely a whisper. “I’m a murderer. My magic comes out as murder no matter what I do.”
When neither man speaks, I confess my lesser crime, which is perhaps where I should’ve started. “My ugly cookies that I make to give people better dreams? They’ve got eevana leaves in them. In low doses, it takes away your nightmares. In higher concentrations, they can melt parts of your brain. I know how to measure the strength properly, but that’s one of the other things I do with my magic I don’t tell people about. It’s not the extra sugar and butter that made them the top seller at the pub.”
Lexi stares at me as if he doesn’t know who I am, like I’m a different person on the other side of my magical malfeasance. Salem is still holding my hand, so I cling to the hope that somehow this will be okay.
“They don’t punish children for capital crimes,” I say once my tongue unsticks itself from the roof of my mouth. “But the General didn’t want his name associated with someone who can only produce poisonous plants. When Fiora took me in, she wasn’t scared of me. She brought me out into open fields and trained me how to grow different kinds of poisons. She taught me how not to be afraid of myself.” I point to the purple petals surrounding my father. “Those put people to sleep. In larger doses, they can put a person in a coma. The breeze cuts the potency.”
My gaze lands on my father, his belly bleeding as he moans through this haze. He looked so much bigger when I was young. Now he looks like an old, angry man.
I don’t know how I find my way to my feet, but my wobbly knees manage to support me as I walk toward the General. I scoop up the petals and bury them, and then wait half a minute for the night air to clear the General’s head enough for his eyes to open. Des is still asleep, but it’s only a matter of time before he wakes.
I kneel beside my father, looking down at his salt and pepper beard that hides the scar he got on his chin from a run-in with a shifter battalion years ago. He blinks up at me with panic widening his eyes when he comes to. He knows it’s time.
“I can’t let you live,” I tell him, afraid of him still, even though I’m the one in control this time. “You tried to kill me twice now. Tried to kill Des. Tried to kill Salem and Lexi, too. Tried to kill all the fae you locked in the Stone Graveyard.”
He murmurs something, but it makes no difference now. I lower my head and press my palms together, taking a deep breath to clear out the screaming in my mind so I can focus.
“No!” Salem shouts, jogging toward me. “No, Lily. This isn’t the way.”
I lift my head, tears streaming down my face and splashing onto my father. “You know he’s a murderer! What I did was wrong, but it was an accident. He tried to kill Des on purpose!”
Salem kneels on my father’s other side, his hand reaching across to still my wrists from their quaking. “But if ye do this, it will be on purpose. Ye didn’t make tha choice when ye were eight, but ye can make this choice now. Let him be tried for his crimes.”
I scoff. “We tried that already. King Fairbucks let him off without a blink for what he did to me.”
Salem’s eyes darken. “Let him be tried by Ronin for an attempt on the future King and Queen of Drexdenberg. Let him be tried by the Jacoba courts for trying to get me killed in this graveyard. I want him to live long enough to see ye inherit the fae throne and the throne of Drexdenberg. I want him to see ye marry a filthy shifter.”
My heart stutters, but Salem doesn’t give any notion that he regrets his roundabout hint at us getting married someday. “But he knows I’m dangerous!”
“And he won’t have the audience to tell a soul. I’ll see he�
�s buried so deep in our dungeons, he’ll scream himself mute and no one will hear.” He shakes his head at me. “Let me patch him up, and we’ll take him to my courts. Ye cannot kill him, Lily. You’re going to be a queen someday. This is the kind of skeleton tha doesn’t stay buried.” He motions to the fae in the distance who are watching without hearing. His thumb rubs slowly over the silk of my wrist. “Let me do this. Be the queen they deserve.”
Too many things are rocketing around inside of me, but I know Salem is right. “He won’t escape?”
Salem touches his heart. “I give my word. I won’t take my eyes off of him until he’s locked up.” The moment I find the strength to nod, Salem calls over his shoulder, “Alex, help me with your new da-in-law. I need rope. A rope, a gag, and something to stop the bleeding.”
Luckily, the General’s lost too much blood to escape, lying pliant and weak as Salem gags my father before he works out two words. My mate nods in Des’ direction. “Go sit with Des until he wakes, pup. Ye don’t need to see this.”
I take his advice because I’m just that overwhelmed, and the verge of shock. I don’t know what the right thing to do is anymore.
28
Prince Alexavier and Lilya
Lilya
I’m surprised when I make my way over to my first husband and see Des’ eyes are opened. I’m not sure how long he’s been awake. “Did you…”
Des nods once, his gaze on the heavens. “I heard it all. Maybe I should care, but I don’t. I’m alive. You saved my life. I felt myself dying. Felt my body burning from the inside-out.” He glances down at his injured shoulder and frowns. “What happened to me?”
I scoop up his hand and hold it to my face. “Silver. The General got you with a silver dagger.”
Wicked Prince: Book Two in the Territorial Mates Series Page 18
