The Nightshade's Touch: A Paranormal Space Fantasy (Messenger Chronicles Book 3)

by Pippa Dacosta

  But right now, Talen looked back at me as though his explanation was perfectly fine. Then something cracked in that perfect fae stoicism.

  “You had Marshal Kellee,” he said.

  The two of them weren’t mutually exclusive. “I needed you.” I jabbed him in the chest with a finger. “And you weren’t there.”

  He didn’t give an inch. He lifted a hand like he might touch my face, but if he did I’d either lash out or fall into his touch and wrap myself around him. Maybe both.

  I turned away from him and folded all the rage and fear neatly away like I had all the times I’d witnessed the worst of what the fae could do. “Talk with Kellee,” I said, collecting the clothes I’d tossed away earlier. “He’ll tell you everything that happened. I need to find Sota…”

  “I don’t understand your anger,” he said, sounding hurt.

  A pang of guilt almost had me apologizing.

  “It’s simple.” I sighed. “I needed you. We needed you, and you weren’t there.” His frown said he still didn’t get it. Maybe that was the point. He was fae. He’d made a choice, one that could have killed us, but it was already in the past.

  “Go talk with Kellee.” I picked up my discarded coat and felt the brooch thump against my leg. I’d hoped to ask him about it, to ask him about the creature too, but he was already heading out the door, long ponytail swishing.

  “Talen?”

  He paused in the doorway without looking back.

  “I gave you the only thing I owned. There is nothing left. You know everything about me. You know me now, just like you said you did when we met. I gave you more than I’ve given anyone else alive.” Arran didn’t count. He didn’t remember. “And in return, all I’ve gotten from you is a wall of ice.”

  He hesitated at the threshold, weighing his words. But instead of apologizing or offering some part of him in return, he said, “I wasn’t aware there was a price on your affections.”

  Chapter 6

  The table was Sjora’s—the fae general who originally owned our ship and the same general Talen had torn in two. I approached the edge and realized it looked a lot like Devere’s table, the one he had fucked me against and I’d left him dead beneath. I hadn’t been back in that room since and had no plans to ever go back there. Ever. Maybe I could have Talen ask the ship to swallow that room up and turn it into something else.

  This room was brighter. Talen and Arran were seated at the table on opposite sides. Arran’s knee bounced and his eyes darted. Talen sat so still he appeared to be carved from stone. Both looked up as I approached.

  Sota buzzed in low and took up his usual position behind my shoulder. “Tension. Knife. Just saying,” my drone mumbled so only I could hear.

  If Sota could pick up on the tension, it had to be thick. I had to do something about that, which was one reason I’d called everyone here. One key player was missing from my meeting and I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Where’s Kellee?”

  Arran looked at Talen. If anyone knew where Kellee was, it was the fae.

  “I passed on your message,” Talen said, as though that absolved him of any responsibility for Kellee’s absence.

  “And?” I asked.

  “He’s chosen not to come.”

  I didn’t own the marshal. But his behavior undermined my already precarious position. Arran had come because he thought he had something to prove and Talen was here because I did technically own him. Kind of. Kellee could do whatever the cyn he wanted and regularly did.

  I stood at the end of the table. The silver threads of my coat shimmered. I wasn’t even sure why I’d chosen to wear it here. It was part of the Messenger myth. The coat and the whip. Wearing both helped me believe my own legend. Helped me become that legend.

  “Did you question Kellee about what happened?” I asked Talen.

  He dipped his chin in an almost indiscernible nod. Faerie forbid he waste too much energy on actual words.

  “Do you know Sirius?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  A nice, clean answer. If only Talen answered every question like that.

  “He’s one of Oberon’s personal guardians. He has Hulia and the rest of Hapters’s people. First, we need to get her and them to safety. We can do that now, right? Using this ship?”

  Doubt darkened Talen’s expression. “Not from the surface. I would have preferred not to land at all, but now I have, it will take some preparation to get her spacebound again. It will be days, not hours, before we’re ready for orbit.”

  “Can’t you threaten Sirius from here?”

  “Not without risking punching a hole in the planet and killing everyone here. Warcruisers aren’t known for their finesse.”

  Dammit. We had enough firepower to send Sirius running and couldn’t use it. “He knows we won’t risk killing civilians.”

  “I can talk with him,” Talen suggested.

  I almost laughed. He said it as though he could walk right up to Sirius, pat the guardian on the back, and catch up on old times like fae buddies. “You said you didn’t know him.”

  “I don’t. But he’ll talk with me.”

  I did know Sirius. The first chance he got, he would use Talen to draw me out. “He knows you and I are working together. If he agrees to meet, it’ll be to capture you and use you as bait. We tried that plan once. It didn’t go so well.”

  Talen’s lips danced around a smile that never quite appeared. “I’m not so easy to capture.”

  “Sjora captured you—” I started, and wished I hadn’t when a sudden fierceness turned his expression from mildly helpful to scathing disgust.

  “I gave myself to her,” he replied, tone dead flat.

  He had. He had given up his freedom for what would have been forever to keep Sjora from killing me, Kellee, and Arran. I hadn’t thanked him, not with everything else happening. And now he looked at me the same way I’d probably looked at him.

  I wet my lips, guilt squirming inside. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so hard on him. He had put himself in harm’s way for me several times. Relationships weren’t something I knew how to foster. With Talen and Kellee, all my emotions got tangled up into knots. I had no idea where to start unraveling them.

  And this was why Mab had kept me away from the Faerie courts. Playing well with others was an art I had no hope of mastering.

  “Kellee captured you for…” Arran spoke up. “What was it… a few hundred years?”

  Talen eye rolled so hard it was almost human. “Marshal Kellee didn’t capture me. He and the Halow law provided me with adequate accommodations away from Faerie.”

  Arran arched an eyebrow and shot me a look as if to say, Can you believe this guy? “‘Accommodations’ implies you could have left whenever you wanted.” Arran smirked. “That’s not how prisons work.”

  Talen smiled back. “Isn’t it? I could have left at any time and often did.”

  Arran brought his fist to his mouth and coughed, “Karushit.”

  I wondered if all these secrets between us would destroy us before we could begin our so-called Messenger mission. Too many egos and too many unknowns. Sota was the only one I trusted to behave, and that was saying something, considering the drone had a habit of doing his own thing when he felt like it. A glitch I could never fix and didn’t feel inclined to. Sometimes, Sota’s instincts proved right.

  “Pass the popcorn,” Sota uttered, lifting my mood. He had skill for knowing when to distract me.

  “So we can’t threaten Sirius with the cruiser?” I asked, bringing everyone back on track.

  “Not while grounded,” Talen confirmed. “Spacebound, I could overpower his flight, but he’ll use Hapters’s people as a shield.”

  So far all Talen had provided me with were more problems. I needed solutions. “How do I get them back? How do I fix this?”

  The pair blinked at me.

  I wished Kellee were here, he would have had an answer.

  I dropped into Sjora’s c
hair—now mine. “There’s something else, something you don’t know.”

  Talen tapped his finger against the tabletop and I wondered if this was what he’d been waiting for—the truth.

  “There’s something else out there. I…” Its heavy breaths sounded in my memories, moist panting touching my neck. I shook off the sensation. “After the crash, Sirius found me and dragged me from the wreckage. He was going to kill Kellee and Arran, but he didn’t get a chance.”

  “You didn’t kill those fae?” Arran asked.

  I rolled my lips together and swallowed to clear the scratch in my throat. “Sirius and I… He had me.” A muscle ticked in Talen’s jaw and my heart flickered in return. His rising emotion now mine too. “Something killed his entire flight. It wasn’t me. It was a creature … I saw it tear them apart…” I ground my teeth, remembering the sound of bones splintering. “When it got to me, it… stopped. I stood between it and Kellee, and it backed down.”

  Talen leaned forward, his gaze intense. “Describe it.”

  I wasn’t even sure I could. When I reached into my memories, the image of the creature slipped away like it was made of smoke and mirrors. I shook my head, struggling to grasp it. “There’s more. Arran and I found tunnels—”

  “With fae writing.” Talen leaned back. “Yes, Kellee said.” He looked away, thinking. “I’d like to see the tunnels.”

  “Why?”

  He side-eyed me. “I’m curious.”

  “Have you been here before?”

  Talen pinned me under his gaze. “Me? No.”

  Something about that answer felt off, like he was wriggling around the truth. “Time, our prison, Dark, our sentence, Light, our freedom. Do you know what it means?”

  “No.” He continued to hold my gaze, as though he could pin me down, force-feed me the words, and make me believe.

  “Why are you lying?”

  “I’m not lying.” He reached for his chest and rubbed absently near his heart, the same place I felt my anger burn. “Some truths could put you in danger.”

  I smiled my toothy Wraithmaker smile. “I survived for over twenty years on Faerie without you there, not answering anything. I’ve maneuvered my way around wild and courtly fae alike. I think I can make that call myself.”

  “We weren’t bonded then.”

  “And that makes a difference why?”

  He looked away. Again.

  “Shall I just…” Arran started to rise. “I’ll just go see—”

  “Sit down,” I ordered.

  Arran sat.

  The non-answers from my friends, my team, were driving me insane. I couldn’t continue like this. “I’m just about done with karushit answers and fae vagueness. Give me a straight answer, Talen. The thing I saw outside, what was it?”

  “I do not think it is wise—”

  “What was it?”

  “Without seeing it—”

  “Kellee told you about the deaths?”

  “He did.”

  “Are they connected?”

  “I’m unsure—”

  I slammed a hand against the table. “What is it, Talen?”

  He swallowed and shifted restlessly in the chair. “The beast you stared down was unseelie fae.”

  Unseelie fae, here, on Hapters, deep in Halow. Unseelie who no longer existed and hadn’t since Oberon wiped them out. Unseelie, like Kellee.

  The life-well on Calicto. The unseelie here. The tek and magic brooch in my pocket. Time, our prison. It all meant something. Something Talen knew. He was watching me—not just watching, but scrutinizing my expression, trying to read my thoughts as well as my feelings. And I felt it then, the slippery ice-water touch of fear running down my back. His.

  “I thought the unseelie were a myth,” Arran said, “like the Hunt.”

  “The Hunt isn’t a myth,” I said, straightening, but my thoughts were back on Hapters, back in the dome where we’d found the dead family. Kellee was unseelie, and he wasn’t here. Kellee who could move like a wraith through worlds and who fed off the life of others. The puncture marks on the desiccated bodies. He had burned the evidence, just like Arran had said.

  “Kesh?” Talen stood, because I was backing away from the table, from them.

  “I er…” I waved him off and hurried for the door.

  Outside the room, I told Sota, “Find Kellee.”

  “My sensors are limited while we’re inside organic matter. But I cannot locate him on the ship.”

  “Find him, Sota.”

  My drone buzzed off down the corridors and disappeared from sight, no other words required.

  I marched on, listening to the thud of my boots and the beat of my heart. Talen would feel the heady concoction of emotions and anxiety I radiated through our bond, but his faeness was the last thing I needed. Talen and Kellee, when it came to them, I couldn’t think straight.

  Kellee couldn’t have killed those people. He was good. Sure, he had his demons, but we all did.

  I veered through corridors and down slopes, following a path I had memorized over the past few weeks. The chamber I entered glistened. On one side of the walkway lay a perfectly still pool. I’d discovered it while exploring the massive cruiser and kept it a secret from the others. I had no idea what the pool was for—part of the ship’s environmental systems maybe—but I’d fallen into the habit of visiting the pool’s mirror-like surface when I needed space to think. Space alone.

  I’d barely gotten comfortable at the water’s edge when Arran entered. He casually sat beside me, one leg drawn up, his forearm resting on his knee. He didn’t speak, and I didn’t feel the need to fill the silence. Anyone else and I would have asked them to leave, but Arran’s presence soothed my rattling thoughts.

  “I can go if you want,” he said after a few moments. “But I figured you don’t really want to be alone.”

  How did he know? “No.” Softer, with a smile, I added, “Stay. Please.”

  He nodded once, looking ever serious, and then a light, easy lift of his lips banished any remaining tension. “Everything you’ve done, everything you’re trying to do… it’s not easy. If it were, we’d all be heroes.”

  Is that what he thought I was? A hero. No, that had been Aeon’s destiny, not mine. Aeon who had dreamed of freedom for saru. Looking at him now, it was easy to believe he might have achieved great things. Where I was all hard edges and cruel efficiency, he had a relaxed confidence that put others at ease. Even now, in the ship’s strange alien environment, he looked as though he belonged. But he had never been a pushover. He had his limits, like the rest of us. Lines he wouldn’t cross. Did Arran have those same morals?

  “What happened to the unseelie?” he asked, cocking his head at the pool. Side by side, our reflections gazed back at us.

  I leaned closer to the water’s edge and dipped my fingers in, upsetting the reflections. “Oberon destroyed them, or so most legends agree. All the Light Fae—the sidhe, the fae ruling Faerie today—combined their magics with Oberon’s and buried all the Dark Fae—the unseelie—below ground. Other legends say Oberon tricked them into riding into the night sky in search of a powerful weapon, but the weapon was long ago shattered into a thousand pieces, and that’s where the unseelie stay—all the monsters of Faerie trapped between the stars, where the light can’t reach them, forever searching for something that doesn’t exist.”

  “Do you think there’s any truth in that?” He watched me wiggle my fingers in the water, sending ripples outward. Our reflections blurred, color mixing with the dark beneath the surface.

  “Yes. I’m certain Oberon trapped or killed the unseelie, but as for how…” I knew Faerie’s king well. Like all fae, he couldn’t lie, but he could embellish, and oh they loved to paint the dark with light. “Truths get twisted over time, especially when the winners tell the stories.”

  “Talen thinks it was the unseelie you encountered… Have the unseelie ever been seen outside of Faerie?”

  “Not that I know of, but
… all of my knowledge stems from saru myths and those myths are sometimes romanticized. Kellee and Talen know more.” Between them, they likely knew exactly what was happening here and why, but they didn’t trust me enough to tell me.

  I pulled my hand back from the water and watched our reflections reshape.

  Arran’s reflection looked over at mine. “You care for them?”

  “Sometimes, I wish I didn’t.” Arran tilted his head, likely wondering how caring could be such a bad thing. I twisted to look him cleanly in the eyes. “I was someone who cared for nothing and no one. I walked through life, detached from it all. I was a ghost, to tek and to others, never allowing myself to stray from my path. One simple thing drove me forward: Oberon’s orders. I lied, I cheated, and I’ve killed following those orders. I only cared about not disappointing him.”

  If my words unsettled him, he showed no sign of it. “Must have been lonely.”

  It had been, but I hadn’t realized how much until I’d looked at Eledan and seen my loneliness in him too. “I was a hollow thing,” I admitted. Nothing girl. “And then Kellee and Talen woke me up from that dream and… everything changed. I cared what happened to them. I care now, even as they shut me out. I care more than I understand and it hurts to care. I care for Hulia and those people Sirius captured even though I don’t know them. I care because what the fae are doing throughout Halow is wrong. I care about the billions of lives already lost and the people left behind and I want to do something to stop all the hurt, but I don’t know how.”

  “I think you’re missing the point.”

  “I am?”

  “The hurt is a good thing. It means you’re free to care. You’re not that hollow thing anymore.”

  I laughed softly. “Tell that to Kellee.”

  Arran shifted, stretching a leg out, getting more comfortable, if that was even possible. “Kellee keeps his distance because he’s afraid of what you do to him, and Talen… Talen thinks you’ll break if he pushes you too far.” Arran’s little smiled bloomed into something mischievous. “They don’t know you very well.”