by May Dawson
He worked a spell and then ran his fingers through the air around my face. His face was intent, and it gave me a chance to observe him; the ruffled dark hair, the intensity of those sea-colored eyes that had made me think of a madman at first.
He was as beautiful as any Fae, maybe more so, with his jaw that could cut glass, a nose that turned up just enough to give him a mischievous cast, the sensuous mouth above a stubborn chin. Hate him or not, it was hard not to notice his beauty.
And now that we were under the sea, it was harder to hate him at all. I couldn’t entirely trust him, but them, how much can one ever trust a Fae?
Magic shimmered in the air around my face. Raile examined me carefully, then asked, “Breathing all right?”
I nodded. “This spell will let me breathe underwater?”
“Yes,” he said.
I was still figuring out the most cagy way to get him to show me the spell when he added, “Let me teach you how to do it, in case something happens to me.”
“Thank you,” I said, surprised into meaning it.
“Summer magic doesn’t work down here,” he reminded me. “So while you’re safe from the Shadow Man, you’re also at my mercy.”
He didn’t try to hide how that delighted him, and I rolled my eyes.
“I’ll have to give you some of my magic,” he added, and held out his hand.
I wasn’t sure that holding hands was an essential part of any enchantment, but whatever. Raile was being almost decent, for Raile, anyway. I rested my palm against his; his skin was cool to the touch.
“Gifts of magic for my queen,” he murmured under his breath, and I raised an eyebrow at him—of course he was presumptuous—as the scent of salt and sea filled my nostrils and a breeze seemed to rush around us, ruffling my hair.
Then the breeze was gone, but there was no mistaking the sudden surge of magical power tingling through my limbs.
The sea king had lent me some magic, and I wondered if it was a gift or a trap.
I wondered if even Raile knew.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Raile taught me the spell, and then he opened the door. I held my breath despite my best intentions, and he turned away to hide his smile as he stepped down into a small hallway, the walls made of pearl. Another door stood on the other side of the hallway.
“This is the lock between your castle under the sea and the sea itself,” he told me. “When you step in here, the magic should recognize you and either fill or drain the hall with sea water so you can open the next door.”
“Sounds terrifying.”
“You have to trust that I’m a decent magician, no matter what you think of me as a person,” he said. “Snap your fingers.”
I raised my hand to snap my fingers, then paused. “My castle under the sea?”
“I made this for you, not for myself,” he said. “I prefer to sleep in sea water.”
I stared at him. “And it was my drinking habits that made you question our long-term compatibility?”
He pulled a face. “Snap your fingers.”
I could tell I’d inadvertently offended him once again, which was a strange feeling; usually I had far more control over whether I hurt someone’s feelings or not. I certainly wasn’t above a well-placed sarcastic remark when it was merited, but something between the two of us was sharp and awkward in a way that I wasn’t with anyone else.
I didn’t like to think too much about that, so I took a deep breath, steeled myself, and snapped my fingers.
The passage began to fill with water. It ran down the walls, trickling around my feet, beginning to rise above my ankles.
“Alisa,” he said, his voice calm. “I’m right here. Look at me.”
I did look at him then, and I wondered what showed on my face.
“You can snap your fingers again, and the water will stop, and you can go back inside the castle,” he said.
I shook my head.
“My fierce little oyster,” he said, his voice a strange version of affectionate and mocking. “Well, the door will be left open. You can always swim inside. I know your snap won’t be very sharp underwater, but the magic should hear it anyway.”
The water swirled around my thighs. My heart hammered desperately, but I just nodded. Raile was trying to be kind, and he should be rewarded for the effort—it must be difficult for him.
He held out his hand to me, and I took it. His fingers squeezed mine as cold water crept over my belly, then touched my breasts, and I drew in a ragged breath.
But the real test would be the next breath, the next moment, as the water reached my neck, covered my chin. I rose onto my tiptoes automatically, then pushed myself off the marble floor beneath, beginning to swim up.
Raile floated with me, a patient look on his face. The top of my head brushed the top of the passage, and the water lapped my chin again. I tilted my face up, and then the water swallowed me completely.
The world was deep blue around me, and I drew a strangled breath and thought that I was drowning.
But I wasn’t.
I breathed in and out.
I found Raile’s face. His hair floated around his face, and his eyes were kind. “All right?” he asked me.
“Great,” I said, although icy fingers of fear were still sunken deeply into my chest. I could breathe underwater, but every breath still felt like an effort; every time I half expected to feel cold, salty water rush into my mouth and begin to choke me.
My tongue had gone dry, reminding me of how my mouth had felt when I’d fallen onto the grass at the side of that damned lake, struggling frantically to get up on my exhausted, wobbling legs and put more distance between myself and the dark water.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked. “You can go back inside, and I’ll deal with the monster.”
“I’m sure,” I managed. He looked at me with that same look on his face when he’d called me a fierce oyster a moment before, and I said, “Please don’t compare me to any kind of clamshell.”
“It’s a compliment,” he said. “Unlike princesses, clams are useful.”
He swam to the end of the passage and opened the door, then half-bowed, floating in the air with his arm out in a dramatic flourish to invite me through.
The world outside was beautiful.
Together the two of us swam through the sea until we reached a coral village. Mermaids and mermen, their hair streaming behind them, swam toward us furiously. I thought they were headed toward Raile but they diverged around us, swimming desperately for safety.
“Stop,” Raile said, then grabbed one of their fins, yanking them to a halt. They gave him an outraged face and lashed out before recognition dawned across her face.
“Where’s the monster?” Raile asked calmly.
“In the temple,” she managed. She kept looking beyond Raile, her eyes wide with fear. “It trapped some of the merfolk inside.”
“Thank you.” Raile released her and she shot away as fast as she could go, her tail driving in powerful strokes through the water.
The two of us went to the temple and found the monster. It had many long tentacles, all with a sharp barb at the end, and an enormous mouth full of jagged teeth that seemed to stick out in every direction—though these teeth were as long as my arm from wrist to elbow.
“It’s like an octopus and a ravager had a baby,” I said, thinking of the pictures I’d seen in books of the monsters that our kind fought at the rift.
“Sounds like a love story for the ages.” He gripped his javelin as he faced me. “I can do this on my own, Alisa. You can stay back.”
I huffed. “Why’d you bring me if you don’t want me to have any fun?”
His grin lit his face. He gave me a small nod, then the two of us sketched out a plan.
“If we can’t get everyone out of here safely, we’ll need to just kill it,” he said. “But it’s not a monster in its world. So I’d prefer to send it back.”
“I’ll play your weird games, Raile,” I agre
ed, and he favored me with another of those smiles. It raised a strange lurch in my chest.
Raile shot for the monster as it reached for the merfolk who had taken shelter in the back of the temple, behind the altar. I wondered why they didn’t swim away, but then I saw what Raile had mentioned; they were all glued in place. The one who had wrenched away had left behind scales.
Raile threw his javelin at the monster, and it dropped the terrified mermaid, who swam desperately away for the window out into the sea world. Her swimming was awkward and labored and she kept canting toward the right but she reached the window.
The others were still trapped. Raile distracted the monster, launching some successful strikes to plunge the javelin into its sides, always dancing away the next moment as the tentacles raced at him. I kept one eye on the monster and Raile as I edged toward the trapped merfolk, unseen for the moment by the monster. Raile was playing a dangerous game with it; one slip-up and he’d be trapped against the sea floor by one of those enormous barbed tentacles, or slashed open.
But Raile never faltered. He still had that crazy grin on his face as he darted back and forth, daring the monster to catch him.
I reached the merfolk and was able to work a spell to release their bonds. None of them thanked me; in fact, one of them gave me a disgusted look before they all swam for the windows.
Mermaids were a real disappointment.
I signaled to Raile that everyone was free. Then he opened a rift—and to my shock, he swam through it. The monster roared, the coral temple shaking around us, and followed him.
I stared for a second at the now empty temple, and the ripple in the air where Raile had disappeared. Was he all right in that terrifying world beyond where he thought this thing was just part of the ecosystem, not even a monster? Was he coming back?
I gripped my javelin and swam closer, my movements awkward compared to everyone else in the water. If something else came through that rip, I had to deal with it; there was no one else here to do that.
But it was Raile who swam through a second later, still grinning.
“You scared me!” I said.
He tilted his head as he stared at me. “I did?”
He turned and closed the rip, and when he turned back to me, I said, “You’re my ticket back home.”
He huffed a laugh. “I’m sure you’d find a way. Come on, let’s go back.”
The two of us swam toward the castle.
“You were decent today, Raile,” I admitted.
“So were you.”
I shook my head. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Except save a bunch of ungrateful merfolk.”
“How do you know they were ungrateful? You should’ve been watching the monster so you didn’t get killed.” I smacked his arm, annoyed by the thought he’d been careless.
“I know the merfolk.” He glanced at the place where I’d just smacked him as if he’d taken that as a sign of endearment.
And the truth was, it was. That was how I would’ve smacked Carter or Julian for doing something dangerous.
But between Raile and me, that touch felt far more charged.
“You didn’t need me,” I said.
“No,” he admitted, “but I still like having someone watch my back anyway.”
“I’m more myself in the sea,” he admitted. “That was part of why I wanted to come swim in the ocean when we were in your castle.”
The memory of how he’d leaned against the railing, his eyes as dark as the deep ocean behind him, rose like a ghost, and part of me wished I’d gone with him.
“I was scared of the ocean then,” I said. And a little bit of you.
“I know.”
“Were you playing a game all along, Raile? Were you ever really trying to force me to marry you?”
His lips quirked. “The old Alisa and I made a vow, and the magic—the magic still thinks you’re someone else altogether.”
It took me a second to understand what he was saying. “You and I swore each other to secrecy?”
He nodded.
“I told Azrael that I couldn’t tell him our secrets, because they weren’t mine to tell,” I said. “But I couldn’t have, anyway.”
He shrugged.
“If we broke the spell, would you tell me everything?”
“I don’t mind the spell,” he said. “I’m not sure who you’ll be, what you’ll want, when the spell wears off.”
“How convenient for you,” I said icily.
“For now, I like who you are,” he finished, as if he hadn’t heard me. He leaned against the doorway, studying me for a second, then sauntered off. “I’ll have breakfast served in the library. No rest for the wicked, Alisa—we have spells to unearth.”
And I had a diary to find.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Duncan
Seven Years Earlier
Back at the academy, I woke to find Alisa framed in the window of my room. She tapped her fingernails against the glass. I glanced at my roommate, who was still snoring steadily. She touched her finger to her lips.
I sighed in exasperation at the danger she always loved to put herself into. It was easier to give in than to argue with her. I grabbed my boots and coat and moved silently to the window. Her wings stretched to either side, so that she could hover above the snow.
I watched my roommate’s face as I eased the window open. He never even stirred.
“You’re going to get us both beaten, at best,” I whispered, but I wasn’t saying no, and her smile said she knew that. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”
“No need,” she said, catching my wrist and drawing me toward the window.
I shook my head. “No way.”
“Trust me.”
“I know better than that.”
Her white teeth flashed under the moonlight when she laughed. “No, you don’t.”
She always saw right through my insults.
I slid my feet into my boots and threw on my coat. “Terrible idea,” I whispered, even as I set my toes on the windowsill.
I let her pull me into her arms. The two of us lurched through the air, and she giggled into my ear. The lightness of that sound turned the sudden pit in my stomach into something else.
“I’ve got you,” she whispered. “Until one day, you learn you really can trust me.”
I huffed. “I’m twice your size—there’s good reason to doubt your wings can carry us both.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and you know it,” she chided. She flew me down to the ground, then returned to softly close the sash from outside. Otherwise, the bitter cold that stung our faces would soon wake Arrel.
Then the two of us went out to the lake. She caught my hand in hers as the two of us made our way across the ice at the edges, which crackled under our feet, toward the center. The lake was warmed by hot springs deep below, but still froze over now that winter raged out of control—as if whatever royalty the winter court still had were grieving their land, and the land reflects their feelings. Most of the royal family had been murdered, but someone must have survived and gone to ground.
I glanced at Alisa. It was hard to believe that the same blood as murderous Herrick ran through her veins.
Or maybe it wasn’t hard to believe at all, with that wicked gleam in her eyes no matter how innocent the smile she turned on me. Alisa was the most capable person I’d ever met—and she was capable of anything. Good or evil. But I bet she’d always choose good.
When she wasn’t choosing simple mischief, that was.
The ice groaned beneath me, and Alisa laughed to herself as she pulled her hand loose of mine. “You’re a hazard to be on the ice with.”
“We’re going in,” I reminded her.
“I’d like to enter the water in my own time, though,” she said, already shedding her tunic. Her hands moved to the belt of her own trousers—then she changed her mind and reached for my buckle instead.
“I don’t know why I even come
out here with you,” I grumbled. She’d stolen my clothes once when we came out here with some of the other first-years.
“I’d never repeat a trick,” she promised.
Somehow she always knew just what I was thinking. I’d never felt so understood by anyone before.
She unbuckled my belt, humming to herself, then paused with her fingers wrapped around the leather. “Is your enchantment up?”
“Not yet.” I started the spell to warm myself.
“Then let me.” She ran her hands up under my tunic. Her fingers were warm, pleasantly so, and tingles spread across my skin everywhere she touched—as if the sun itself were beating against my skin. I turned my face up toward the sky, where the night was deep and cloudless, the stars all standing out brightly like cold diamonds. Her hands caressing my skin made my cock hard, and I bit my lip, trying not to respond. The two of us shouldn’t lose control of ourselves out here.
We shouldn’t lose control of ourselves anywhere. It would put her at risk.
But when her hands were on my body, it was hard for me to push her away. She ran her thumb over my nipple, tweaking it, and a jolt ran through my body. I wondered if she wanted me to do the same to her. My skin felt suddenly flushed with heat, and I realized the two of us were letting off soft swirls of steam into the chilly night air.
“Not bad, Summer,” I said.
“Oh, I’m just getting started, Autumn,” she whispered.
“This is a bad idea.”
“What is?” she asked, and her hands delved lower. She pressed herself against me, one hand sliding into the front of my trousers. When her hand pressed against my cock, I bit back a groan. “Doing this, here? There’s no one around.”
When she looked up at me, I could’ve sworn there was vulnerability in her gaze for once, despite the easy smile.
She asked lightly, “Or do you mean, you and me? Are we the bad idea, when we’re not supposed to be friends? Forget lovers?”
The way she looked at me made my heart lurch in my chest, and then I was afraid I’d misunderstood, that I’d look like a fool.
I pressed, “Lovers? Is that what we are?”
