Just before we passed the last of the brightly colored stalls, I thought I saw the griffin man, Vexer, moving through the crowd and into the shaded doorway of an inn, his white and brown wings the last part of him to disappear as they reflected back the spring sunshine. But then I blinked and he was gone, leaving me with a hollow feeling that said maybe, just maybe, I should've accepted his offer of a date.
The three of us continued on, walking down a narrow street, the sights, sounds, and colors of the market fading as we entered the Thread District, the area of New Akyumen best known for its collection of tailors, clothing shops, and fabric makers. It also featured the Threads' Guild—the prestigious society that overlooked all merchants selling raw or finished fashions. Thinking about trade guilds made me think about that Vexer guy again, and his big, beautiful tattooed hands.
Shaking my head, I stretched my wings, promptly smacked a hanging pot filled with brightly colored flowers and sent it smashing on the cobblestones in a spray of dirt.
“Flub!” I cursed as I curled my wing around me and rubbed at the sore spot. Air was already on top of things, opening the shop owner's door and paying an exorbitantly inflated price for the plant.
“Accident one,” the prince said, reaching out to cup the side of my wing and then leaning in to kiss it. He may as well have tried to kiss away a boo-boo I'd gotten on my nipple. I punched him in the stomach, but his abs were so hard that all he did was laugh. “Expect three more before we return home,” he told Elijah and I spit at him. I missed, but it was the principal of the thing. “Hocking loogies at the crown prince is a crime punishable by death,” Air challenged, hooking an arm around my shoulders. “I could have you executed for that,” he whispered against my scalp, his breath twice as warm as Elijah's.
And that … was why a ghost could never compete with a living person, no matter how powerful a spirit whisperer they were.
Speaking of … Elijah was casting a somewhat dirty look in our direction.
“If you do,” I warned Air, ignoring his cousin's glare and glancing up at the crown prince with his dazzling white smile, “then I'll haunt you forever. You won't get a moment's sleep.”
“Who says I ever sleep anyway?” Air challenged, wiggling his eyebrows at me and elbowing me playfully in the side. “So, where is this shop we're looking for anyway?”
“Keep walking, oh great majesty,” I said with another eye roll. Air had suggested we take a small carriage through town, but I'd wanted to extend our time together by any means possible so I'd opted to walk. Even with the sun beating down on us, I didn't regret it. I had Air's arm around my shoulders and a peach-lemonade in my hand.
Poor Elijah had … a dead mouse in his pocket and a ghost dog trotting at his heels. If he would just let me exorcise him, his soul could move on, he could be reborn, and then he'd have a life again. Why he wanted to stick around here and play games with this resurrection spell was beyond me. Besides that, Air and I had forgotten to keep our hands clasped, so the prince couldn't even see his cousin anymore.
“Your mother gave me a special mission,” I told Air casually, playing with the double necklaces at my throat. He noticed and reached up, moving my hand out of the way so he could do the same. I didn't stop him because despite everything, all the impossibilities between us, I loved the feel of his fingertips tracing over my collarbone.
“She said as much to me this morning,” Air replied, voice wistful and far away. When I glanced up at him, I saw that perfect smile slipping a little. He missed his sisters, his parents—both his biological father and his mother's other husbands—and stood to gain just as much from my success at this as the queen.
Air loved being a prince.
But he definitely did not want to be a king.
“Here we are,” I said as we stepped just beyond the technical borders of the Threads' Guild and into the Whisperer District. Magic sang bright and fierce from every corner, shop windows glowing with spells, storefronts decorated with the symbols of gods.
I spotted Haversey's silver star right away, tucked Hellim's beneath the white silk of the low-backed agapa I was wearing—a shirt made of thin, breathable material that tied behind the neck and sunk low on my back, giving my wings plenty of room to breathe. It was a type of fashion rarely seen in Amerin, something from my father's homeland of Saraph. It was an angel garment. To be more specific, a light angel garment. Dark angels … wore a lot less clothing. And I share a quarter of their blood, I reminded myself as we paused outside the front door of the shop, Air removing his arm as we turned to face each other.
“I'm a Triad,” I said, and he smiled at me.
“Mother told me.”
“She wants me to live on the Royal College campus.”
“I know.”
Crossing my arms under my breasts—which only seemed to prop them up and draw both Air's and Elijah's attention—I stared him down with a huff.
“Is there anything you don't know?” I asked and Air flicked his eyes from my tits back to my face.
“Nope.” He reached out, pinched my nose, and then promptly and confidently strode into the shop.
“He's heading for a short and tumultuous reign,” an old ghost said, propped against the outer walls of the shop, smoking an incorporeal pipe. He must've had it on him when he died.
“Shut the flub up,” I said, whipping my knife from my belt and putting the blade against the ghost's throat. “Don't make me wish you Goddess-speed and happy endings,” I warned—although we both knew it was kind of an empty threat without my handler around. The spirit scowled, blinking out of sight and leaving nothing but the smoky fragrance of a long forgotten pipe.
Elijah cocked a brow at me.
“What?” I asked, gesturing with the jeweled weapon. “You know as well as I do that spirits only hang outside of spirit whisperer residences when they want to be exorcised.”
“Yes,” he replied with a loose, cocky smile, “but generally, it's polite to ask first.”
With a wink, he whispered himself out of existence, the only sign that he was there at all a faint spiritual signature. In order to see him now, I'd need to activate my second sight.
Smart move though, seeing as he was a spirit … hanging out near a spirit whisperer's residence. The mouse in his pocket disappeared along with him, but the others—including the dog—took up a shady spot under a nearby bench.
I left them—and most of Air's guards—outside in the creeping heat. It was getting hotter and hotter by the hour.
When I walked in, I found the prince frowning slightly at the shopkeeper, an older woman with a gently wrinkled face and long elegant fingers. Of Amerin descent—dark blue eyes, long raven-dark hair—and demon, instead of angel.
Her wings were the color of fire and shadows, sweeping red and black appendages that took up the entire space behind the worktable where she sat. Her handler was a pure-blooded Amerin man, leaning back in a wooden chair with his feet on a padded stool, a hat pulled over his eyes.
Half-angels and half-demons could be spirit whisperers, but angels were better. Still, a spirit charm was a spirit charm, no matter who made it.
“Do not touch my ghost,” I said as the spirit whisperer lifted her head from the glass case in front of her and sniffed the air in a very creepy way. But I didn't have to say it twice. I was with the prince; the shopkeeper wouldn't bother Elijah … wherever he was.
“She only has three charms in stock,” Air said, but really, that was the most I'd been expecting. If Air wanted more than that, we were going to have to hit up every single spirit whisperer shop in the city. The reason I'd chosen this place first was because demons were a lot less picky about selling charms made out of their blood than angels were.
“What sort of durations are we looking at?” I asked, trying not to get excited by all the baubles around the shop. All a spirit whisperer really needed to do their job were Haversey's gifts, their handler, and themselves. Buuuuut, there were always other ways to get the jo
b done, more fun ones, too. Poultices to make the second sight brighter, powders to reduce the energy load needed for an exorcism, enchanted clothing that made it far less likely for a spirit whisperer's soul to be sucked from their body.
“Six hours, one day, one week,” the spirit whisperer said, her eyes as red as blood as she looked at me from beneath charcoal hair—and charcoal because she was a demon, not because of her age.
“That's hardly any time at all,” Air said, but he smiled anyway. He spent at least eighty percent of his day smiling. And then another nineteen percent smirking or biting his lower lip flirtatiously. It was very rare that he frowned or scowled. “But we'll take them.”
The woman smiled—she knew money was no object to the prince, but she also knew she best give him a fair price—and reached under the counter for a box, but Air stopped her by scooping up the leather thongs of all three necklaces and slipping them over his head. He broke one almost immediately, squeezing it in his fist until silver light shimmered across his skin and reflected off the black striped walls of the shop.
“You should've waited,” I said as he looked around with a quirked brow for his cousin. “Elijah is temporarily unavailable.”
“No matter,” Air said, turning and leaving one of his guards to pay the shopkeeper. “We'll find more, won't we?”
“Maybe,” I warned him as he noticed my eyes straying to the random assortment of goods on a nearby table.
“Browse,” he told me, stepping close, his blonde hair falling into his face, his pastel green eyes as magnificent as the warm, shallow waters in Frisch Lagoon. “I want to buy you a gift.”
“Why?” I asked, heart thundering as Airmienan took the peach-lemonade from my sticky fingers and then carefully grabbed my right hand, bringing it to his lips and … sucking the juice from my fingertips with the hot heat of his mouth. I could feel his tongue swirling against my skin, making my head feel empty and light. “What are you doing?” I whispered because while Air was always a terrible flirt, this was … this was so much more intense than usual.
Closing my eyes, I tried not to think of that night we'd gone out dancing for fun. Well, he had dragged me out dancing because he enjoyed it. When I danced, I broke things at about three times the usual rate. But … we'd drank a lot … and somehow ended up in Air's bedroom back at the castle.
He'd pinned my wrists to the bed, looked into my eyes, and pushed inside of me with a deep undulating thrust of his hips. I hadn't just felt him in my cunt; I'd felt him all over. My heart, my head, my spirit.
Ugh.
Flicking my eyes back open, I yanked my hand away and tried to laugh the moment off.
“Seriously, Air, what are you doing?”
“Tasting you,” he said with a flash of those pointed teeth. He seemed content to brush the moment off, too. “Pick whatever you want and I'll buy it. It's the least I can do considering how close you came to dying in the Grandberg Manor.”
“I didn't come close to dying …” I muttered, but there was a certain … tenderness to Air's face that I hadn't seen before. Spinning away from him, I sent every object on the table crashing to the floor. “Shit,” I cursed and a feather popped loose from my wing.
“Accident number two,” Air said with a bright grin, setting the lemonade glass aside and gesturing for his guard to collect the broken items and pay for them.
“That doesn't count,” I said as I started to kneel down and felt Air's hand on my arm, hauling me back to my feet.
“The guards will get it,” he said and then paused, eyes catching on a voluminous gold silk cloak hanging from the wall. “This is the same color as your eyes,” he told me, waltzing past and sliding his fingers through the material. Flicking his attention back to me, he let his usual smile return to his face. “What's it do?”
Touching my own fingers to the cloak, I teased the large paper tag from the folds and glanced at it, listening to the sound of the magic. Both Air and I could feel the heavy drumbeat of an earth whisperer's signature—that basic grounding sense of primal worship. But Air wouldn't know what that kind of spell would do for my line of work. Most whisperers knew little to nothing about other magics—unless they were schooled at the Royal College. And then they knew a whole Hell of a lot.
“Grounding spell,” I said, staring at the price tag with my gold eyes bulging out of my skull. Holy Haversey's tits, that's expensive! Doing a quick mental calculation—I quite liked quick mental calculations—I figured it would cost about the same to buy this cloak as it would to get all the supplies for the queen's resurrection spell.
“Which … makes it less likely that your soul will be ripped from your body during an exorcism?” Air said and I raised my brows, wondering if Elijah was eavesdropping on our conversation. I could feel his spiritual signature in the air, this confident but somehow comforting sense of a Child of Haversey.
I hated to admit how much I liked it.
“You actually listen when I talk,” I said, throwing out a cocky hip and planting a fist on it. Air ignored me, taking the robe down from the wall and tearing the price tag off. He handed it over to another of his guards—dressed in full plate mail and making me wonder how the flub they managed in the heat—and then swinging the heavy cloak around my shoulders. “I can't accept this gift,” I said as I felt a rush of heat from outside as the shop door opened.
Air's eyes widened slightly and he smiled at whoever it was as I turned around to get a look.
Flub.
Flub, flub, flub.
Oh to hell with it—FUCK!
It was Felixa—FELL-ix-UH, Goddess forbid anyone ever pronounce it wrong—of Haversey.
One of the few people in the world who wasn't a murderer, rapist or enemy of the state that I hated with the scalding intensity of the Nalahari Desert sun was standing right there in the dappled sunshine streaming through the front windows of the shop.
“Air!” she squealed, grinning and flipping heaps of shimmering yellow-blonde hair over one shoulder. Felixa flicked her attention to me for a moment and wrinkled her nose slightly. Her handler—this poor boy who worshipped his whisperer's every move—stepped in behind her holding about five packages too many in his straining arms. “Brynn. I didn't expect to see—” Felixa paused abruptly, going completely stiff as her handler stumbled around behind her.
My eyes widened as I realized what she was about to do at about the exact moment she decided to do it. Reaching out, Felixa took her handler's arm with her left hand, knocking the packages to the floor. With her right, she whipped Haversey steel from her belt and lunged toward an empty space that, presumably, was Elijah.
“NO!” I screamed, throwing myself at her. Even though my fingers locked around Felixa's wrist, it was too late—the knife was already cutting through the empty air and yanking Eli into view, his eyes wide and his mouth open in shock.
Despair hit, strangely palpable on the back of my tongue, as I swung around, knocking another table's worth of items to the shop floor with my wings. At the same time, I threw Felixa against the window, slamming her into the glass hard enough to make her grunt. A dark shadow fell over the shop and a strange crack rent the air, dropping my gaze back around to Elijah.
With shaking hands, he reached up and jerked the knife from his chest, dropping the broken blade to the ground. Every jewel in the hilt was cracked, and the steel itself shattered to pieces—like glass—when it hit the stone floor of the shop.
A wave of dark energy rolled over me and I swear to Haversey that I heard the Dark God laughing inside my head.
“Let go of me!” Felixa screeched, shoving me off of her and wiping her palms down the front of her red second-year Royal College uniform. Her wings, which were the same soft butter yellow as her hair, shifted in irritation as she knelt down and gathered the broken bits of the knife up. In theory, it should repair itself within a few hours time, buuuuut then again, I'd never seen a shadow whisperer use dark magic to cancel out an exorcism.
I hadn't eve
n known that was possible.
“What the fuck just happened here?” Felixa demanded as she stood back up and lost a feather at the same time. Meanwhile, I wavered in place, panting and shaking and staring into Elijah's blue-white eyes. He was hardly corporeal at this point, but he was in fact still standing in front of me. No silver light enveloped him and his spiritual signature was so thick in the air of the shop that it was almost cloying.
Air hooked his fingers under my chin and encouraged me to look at him.
“Are you alright?” he asked, looking as confused as I was.
“Your Majesty,” Felixa said, trying to get him to look at her. She'd been in love with Air for years, even holding off her admission to the Royal College—of course she'd been accepted from her very first application when she was seventeen—while she waited for Airmienan. Last year, she'd gotten tired of postponing her education and went anyway, but that hadn't stopped her from paying Air far too many visits—even for the daughter of the highest ranking noble family in Amerin.
There were bets in the kingdom on who Air would marry. Whomever he chose, it had to be a woman with strong magic and a powerful bloodline. Felixa fit the bill to a T. I also wasn't a hundred percent certain that she and Air had never slept together. They might have. He was a bit of a slut which frustrated me to no end, but … he couldn't possibly like the haughty half-angel, half-Amerin, right?
“Felixa,” Air said slowly after I'd nodded that yes, I was okay and taken a step back to lean against the wall. Both the shopkeep and her handler just stared at us all like we were insane. “This is my cousin, Elijah of Haversey.” The prince gestured to the ghostly form of his dead relative while Felixa's eyes flicked to broken spirit charm at Air's throat. She was a perceptive one, that was for sure. So it didn't surprise me much when she noticed the double stars hanging from my neck.
“My apologies, Your Majesty,” she said, sweeping into a formal bow and staying bent over until Air told her to rise. Her handler stood to one side, his hair more brown than black, a trait that snooty Amerin royalty usually despised. Blue-black hair was what every real Amerin should be sporting, a lie that they perpetuated by dying theirs if it happened to be brown. The only exceptions were useful half-breeds like Felixa, who had the golden hair of an angel. “I simply sensed a powerful, foreign spiritual energy and was attempting to do my job.”
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