“Will do,” the fae said. “If he asks, how many shall I say are aboard?”
“Just you and an old friend.”
“Got it.”
Geraint ran back up the steps. Seconds later, the boat rocked as he leaped to the dock.
“Are we all planning to stay here on the boat?” Reeps asked. “Going to get a bit cozy.”
“None of us are,” Aril said. “The boat is too well known and glamours aren’t foolproof. We’re leaving as soon as Bobi is ready to be moved.”
“I’m ready,” Bobi said.
Everyone ignored her. Her condition had improved since I’d rejoined the others in the forecabin after a shower. She now sat up on the sofa. No one trusted her to stand up on her own, though. Her face was pasty, and her dark blue eyes had dark blue circles under them to match. Her hold on the tea mug in her hands was shaky.
“It’s almost dawn,” Reeps said. “Maybe we should wait out the day? Give Bobi here…”
He paused. I knew what he was thinking and didn’t want to say out loud. Bobi wasn’t the only one who needed rest. Aril did, too.
He might have used the shower after me and be wearing fresh clothes, but whatever had happened back at La Piazzetta San Marco, it had taken a lot out of him, not to mention torn open the wound on his chest, which had only just re-healed. His new shirt was pristine, no stain or bulk from a bandage under the chest hugging tee, and the scent of tree resin from which Frankincense was manufactured was greatly reduced in the boat’s confined space, but I wasn’t fooled. He and Bobi weren’t that far apart in terms of physical condition. Neither was in fighting shape if fighting became necessary.
Without warning or even looking at the golden-haired fae, Reeps suddenly backhanded Bobi. His hand connected not with Bobi’s head or face, but rather the mug in her hand, knocking it to the floor, tea splattering the sofa and wall.
“Hey!” Bobi said.
“If you were ready, I never would have gotten close to you. And you’d still have your tea.”
Aril frowned. “Point made, Reeps,” he said. “Nightfall it is.”
Reeps nodded and went to the galley for a cloth to mop up the tea. He’d achieved his objective without having to insult Aril’s fitness. Passing the boat’s two-burner stove he pointed a finger and fire whooshed up under the kettle.
“New cup in a minute,” he told the female fae.
I’d been watching Aril since he’d entered the forecabin and seen the pair of swigans he carried with him. He was determined to give me Eolande’s hide boots. Just like Reeps, I dreaded any confrontation with him. He’d been in a foul mood since emerging from the stateroom and hadn’t once looked my way.
That changed now. Walking over to me, he dropped the swigans on the floor in front of me.
I didn’t move to pick them up. “I told you I—”
“Put them on,” he said. His tone brooked no more refusals.
I looked over at Reeps for moral support and got zip. He busied himself cleaning.
I picked up one of the boots. Butter-soft in my hands, the sunny, wheat-colored leather showed no signs of wear. Eolande’s swigans might have been new, other than the fact I could smell her on them. Her perfume was a mix of jasmine and herald’s trumpet and some other woodsy floral scent too exotic to have grown anywhere near Venice. I prayed to God I wasn’t smelling her blood and these weren’t the shoes she’d been wearing when she’d died.
“They’re not,” Aril said.
I looked up, surprised. Pain hardened his eyes.
“Fae read minds?” I spoke under my breath so the others hopefully wouldn’t hear.
“It doesn’t take a mind reader to guess,” he said. “Those boots are extras. And that’s not her blood you’re smelling. Her magic involved elixirs.”
I didn’t know how to reply or what I was supposed to say, so I did what he wanted and stepped into the right boot, almost crying out when the leather animated itself around my foot. The sole narrowed and shortened. Seams remade themselves. Straps and laces were repositioned. The color of the leather changed to a purple so dark that if it was a cut gemstone, it wouldn’t have a name. Lastly, embroidery appeared, stitched in the same lightless purple so that the design was difficult to make out. Horned moons, I thought, but surrounded by vines and flowers I didn’t recognize.
Reeps and Bobi observed the embroidery taking shape and exchanged concerned glances. Aril’s chest expanded with a grim breath he held until he finally had to release it.
“What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“Swigans like to tailor themselves to the person wearing them,” Reeps said.
“So?”
“Those vines are known as Acura’s nightshade,” Aril said.
“Never heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t,” Reeps told me. “Unless you tried to cross the barrier in or out of Ashia Hollow. They’re hard to avoid out there. One touch, and you’re dead. Rumor is when Rasha created the hollow, there was only so far she could banish the Dark Lord Acura’s evil. She couldn’t push it past the barrier to whatever lay beyond, so it clings there, living in the form of a deadly vine.”
Aril glowered at Reeps. “Myth, not rumor.”
Reeps held up his hands, conceding the point.
“It’s a story, Lunari, nothing more,” Aril said. “For superstitious idiots who can’t keep their mouths closed.”
“That’s it. I’ve had it.” I yanked off the boot, which for all its snug tailoring flowed off my foot like water. I flung the swigan and its mate away. “I’m tired of people telling me I’m darkness incarnate.”
Aril squatted down in front of me, where I sat on built-in storage cubby.
“Who told you that?” he asked.
“Donato Nazario. He didn’t say it to me. I overheard him talking to Tomas Gagliardi when they were planning my execution.”
“What did he say?” Aril asked. “Can you remember?”
“Something about an apocalypse coming,” I said.
“Great,” Reeps said. “Like we need another one of those.”
“We’re still not over the last one,” Bobi said.
“Is that what he said?” Aril asked. “His exact words? There’s an apocalypse coming?”
Instead of recalling the words spoken to me in my Piombi prison cell, I flashed back to the noose around my neck and that deranged woman who’d worn a headpiece with me on the gallows being hanged.
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“We need to know,” Aril said.
I still didn’t get what any of this was about. Why did the human council fear me so much they’d wanted me dead? What did I mean to the fae? What part did Aril and his friends play in all of this? One day I was alone and on the run, a few days later, I had four dark fae rescuing me, none of whom had thought twice about forfeiting their lives in the process.
I sighed and nodded. I squeezed my eyes closed as if shutting them extra tight would help me remember. We waited. Nothing came back to me.
“I can’t…It’s not…”
“I told you they had her juiced up on a custom cocktail,” Reeps said. “And you made me give her a Guariti Dolori grape on top of that.”
My eyes snapped open. “The grape was real? I thought I dreamt that. You were the mouse?”
Reeps bowed faintly.
“Lunari,” Aril prompted. “Nazario’s precise words. What were they?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to. I can’t.”
“Yes, you can.”
He reached out for both my hands, folding his fingers around mine.
Suddenly, I was shivering. Freezing. I looked around. Aril’s boat was gone. I was shackled to a chair, back in the prison cell in the Doge’s Palace. My head drooped. My eyes flickered closed. I heard talking. Nazario and Gagliardi. Their voices faded in and out.
“They know exactly who she is.” I was the one speaking, but it wasn’t my voice.
“That’s Nazario,” Reeps�
� voice was a ghost in my cell.
“Good, Lunari,” Aril said, another ghost. “That’s very good. What do you hear? Repeat it for us.”
“We simply got to her first.”
“Still Nazario,” Reeps said.
“Our job is to deprive them of her. Of course, if you prefer the dark to rise and destroy us all as it’s been prophesized then, by all means, lieutenant, let’s sober her up and dump her free in the middle of St. Marks.”
“The dark to rise?” Bobi said.
“As it’s been prophesized?” Reeps said.
I went quiet, my mind adrift. I could feel Aril’s hands clasping mine, but nothing else.
“Is there more, Lunari?” Aril said. “Anything that will help us?”
“You misunderstand me, Monsignor el Doxe. “My only concern is with public perception. If they think she’s fae, some might question our hanging a person we have no right to hang.”
“That’s Tomas Gagliardi,” Aril said.
“And?” Nazario prompted.
“We could always gouge out the eyes. They can’t question—”
Aril’s fingers suddenly tightened around mine, and then he released me.
“Okay. That’s enough,” he said.
I opened my eyes and looked first into Aril’s, which begged me to forgive him.
“Gouge out her eyes?” Bobi said. “Why?”
“So no one would know they were executing a fae,” Aril said.
An angry storm front clouded up Reeps eyes. He looked at Aril. “If your draigemor hadn’t melted off half that bastard Gagliardi’s face. I would gladly cleave it in two myself.”
“Draigemor?” I asked.
“The three-headed beast that rose up out of the canal,” Reeps said.
“They’re known as sea dragons,” Aril said. “In our world, before the merge, they used to inhabit undersea volcanoes. Technically, that wasn’t a real draigemor.”
“Technically, that was Aril,” Reeps said.
I sat back, awestruck. Aril was the sea serpent? What degree of magic had that required? Not to call a sea dragon, but for Aril to be a sea dragon? He possessed that much power?
“Half of that was illusion,” Aril said.
“Yet half of it wasn’t,” Reeps said. “And look how it cost you.”
Cost him? I looked up at Aril for an explanation. The wound on his chest? Was that why he’d bled? Because he’d overexerted himself to create the draigemor?
Aril conveniently ignored my unspoken question. “You said people were calling you darkness incarnate.”
“Titus.”
“Titus!” Reeps said. “That old wheeze bag loves to make trouble.”
“Enough, Reeps!” Aril said.
Reeps nodded, though it was more like another bow, and backed away to answer the shrill whistle from the tea kettle we’d all forgotten was heating.
“Titus said something to you while I was gone, didn’t he?” Aril asked, tone sharp. “Something important you’re not telling me.”
Here it was, the conversation I didn’t want to have. What a moron I was to blurt out Titus’s name. Aril didn’t need to hear the seer’s pronouncements that I was a weapon, something quick and dirty waiting to go off. That I wouldn’t live much longer. For all I resented Titus his desire to protect Aril at my expense, he was right. Aril couldn’t prevent my death, so why upset him?
I also didn’t want to admit the real reason I’d run, Aril’s hiding from me the fact he’d been hunting me the day of the decree and had, in fact, been watching me for years, yet pretended he didn’t know me when we met on the island. If he wanted to explain why he’d lied and why he watched, that was up to him, but it wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have right now.
As it had when he left, the boat rocking under our feet announced Geraint’s return. He descended the companionway weighed down with bags of food, bread, steamed mussels, chicken, and wine.
“Hardly breakfast fare,” Bobi said.
“Who cares?” Reeps said. “I’m starving.”
Thank god. Saved by Reeps’ stomach.
24
La Luna was half full when we stepped onto the dock late that evening. Dressed in a shawl of lacy clouds, the moon woke a homesickness in me for the nights I let her magic guide me through the ruins on hunt after hunt for relics from the world before our world. Each time she traced her sacred arc through fields of stars above, I’d felt her benevolence and her strength shine down and through me. I might not have had much back in Santa Croce, but that magic was her gift to me. I’d been grateful for it.
Though it had only been a couple of weeks—some of that spent basically unconscious in the Pool of Peace—I already appreciated how much I’d lost, my home, my freedom, but most importantly, my sense of self. I’d been told too many incredible things and didn’t know which, if any of them, I believed.
Like those nights back home, however, I’d spent the first part of this one watching the moon through a window, this one on Aril’s boat, while he and his fae argued over plans. Who would go with whom and where? What were the safest routes? What would we do once we reached our initial stopover? Had the humans elected a new doge to replace Nazario to head their council? Which of the city’s families would be chosen as the new council guard, and how long did we have before they came after us? Countless questions required tedious hours of speculation and coordination.
None of those on the boat knew why I was important to both the human and fae councils. Mentioning it made everyone, me included, extremely uncomfortable. It felt like talking about the end of the world would bring the end of the world that much closer. In the spirit of denial, they beat every other subject but that one to death, and so the most critical questions went unanswered.
Who was I? What was I fated to do that would destroy Venice as we knew it?
Finally, two hours after sunset, Aril and his fellow fae declared us ready. Plans were set, with backups in place and backups to the backups.
Aril took the lead, invisible to humans as he had been to the murders on Isola di Guariti Dolori. He wouldn’t be able to conceal himself from other fae. Geraint was to escort me next. I wore the hated swigans and a glamour that made me into a grizzled human fisherman. We would be the only ones visible to humans in order to bolster the story that Geraint and an old friend were the ones staying on Aril’s boat.
Reeps was assigned to Bobi. Though the Amazonian blonde fae had made an astonishing recovery in less than twenty-four hours, she still wasn’t a hundred percent. Reeps would keep an eye on her while watching our backs for any followers we picked up along the way.
As agreed, no one spoke. For those attempting to conceal their presence, not speaking was a no-brainer. In my case, to have a young woman’s voice come out of a grey-bearded human male with bow legs and rocking gait would spoil the glamour.
Halfway down the floating walkway between boats, I began to feel uneasy. Something was wrong. I could sense it. For reassurance, I glanced up at the moon and instantly found the source of my apprehension.
La Luna traveled backward.
How had I watched her since moonrise more than an hour ago and failed to notice she’d risen in the west instead of the east? This was not a night for us to be out. Danger lay ahead.
We need to go back.
Because I didn’t dare speak, I tapped Geraint’s arm to get his attention and then looked at the moon, tossing my chin upward for emphasis. He followed my line of sight but didn’t understand. He was fae. What was wrong with him? Shouldn’t every fae be able to feel the pull of a wayward moon?
I mouthed it for him. “La luna torna indietro.” The moon goes backward.
This time, when he glanced up, he frowned, and then stared ahead at Aril, three meters ahead of us.
Geraint coughed twice. It was a pre-arranged signal. Aril looked back over his shoulder to find we’d stopped, both looking up at the moon. He, at least, got the clue immediately but shook his head, and kept going. Geraint
and I were outvoted. Either Aril didn’t believe the omen was an omen, or we were shit out of luck anyway and it was too late to change plans.
All of us reached the quay and solid ground.
Like most of Oasi, the calli off the marina were narrow and instantly twisted around on themselves, at times appearing longer or shorter than they actually were. Navigating a straight course to our destination wasn’t possible. With Geraint’s help, Aril had mapped the route least likely to suffer from magical interference, those blocks predominantly inhabited by humans. We passed up the first two streets, which began with human dwellings but soon transitioned to all fae, crossed over a small bridge and then turned down a fondamenta that ran along a canal we knew to be a human and hybrids neighborhood. No shops, no food stalls, just gray brick houses, bleak and unwelcoming, with shallow doorways and thus few places where someone could hide to ambush us.
The brights, it turned out, made their own hiding places.
Halfway down the block, a doorway’s porch light suddenly flicked on immediately ahead of us. Except the door had no porch light. Aril stopped. His muscled body tensed. Next to me, Geraint went on alert, and took a step closer, putting his body between me and the door.
“They’re here,” Geraint said.
“Who?” I said.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
Flowing down from over the doorway, the pool of light changed and coalesced into a person, who stepped out to confront Aril.
Unlike the fake porch lamp, the male fae didn’t put out light, but he shone ten times brighter nonetheless. His presence blinded with its power. I squinted at him until my eyes and mind could adjust. He’d tied up his hair, a shade of white gold that put Bobi’s stunning blonde mane to shame, loosely at the nape of his neck. He had a narrow body, not especially muscled, yet still annoyingly perfect. His tunic was constructed of hide no creature that roamed the human Earth had ever worn, furred scales, ice gray, sliding over one another with a glossy sheen in the night. He looked twenty-three at the most, but when I studied his eyes, the aloof, imperious manner was not that of some cocky male around my age from a wealthy Venice family. It belonged to a being who knew more than I did, had lived centuries longer than I had, who had this world’s every last mystery sorted, cataloged, and conquered.
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 18
