I crossed over the moat and under the portcullis, and then into one of the magnificent gardens within the stone walls. I still hadn’t gotten a chance to fully explore the gardens, but tonight wasn’t going to be the day. Crossing through the garden quickly, I entered the castle proper and followed the sound of people to a dining hall. There was a huge banquet room in the castle somewhere—I’d wandered into it once by accident—but this room was narrower, holding only one long table in the very center of the room. A roaring fire crackled in an enormous fireplace along one wall, directly beside the table, which should have made the room uncomfortably hot and dry since the weather outside the castle was so pleasant, but instead the room remained at a constant ideal. Magic. The fire and the half dozen candelabras scattered among the serving platters on the table were the only light in the room. Typically I would have needed a little more light, but here it was enough for me to see by. This place might have been a blend of mortal reality and Faerie, but there was a lot of Faerie magic here.
Holly, Caleb, and Ms. B sat at one end of the table, talking and laughing as they ate. Falin sat at the other end, alone except for the smartphone in his hand. He looked too preoccupied to be interested in joining the cheery gathering at the other end of the table.
And maybe he was.
But I doubted it.
Falin was the Winter Queen’s knight, her enforcer, her bloody hands. He was subject to her commands, and she’d made him do some pretty terrible things in her name in the past. It hadn’t made him very popular. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a job one could easily resign from.
The queen’s nephew had been poisoning her, driving her increasingly insane, possibly since before I’d first had my less-than-comfortable introduction to her. Many of her commands had reflected that growing insanity. I’d been told she was getting better now that she hadn’t been exposed to the drug in nearly a month, but she still hadn’t reversed one of her last commands to Falin, that he live in my home to keep an eye on me. So he lived in the castle with the rest of us, much to the disapproval of most of my castlemates.
You would think a magic castle would be big enough that everyone could avoid each other if they wanted, but the castle had other plans. It served an enormous feast, family-style, every night. The kitchen and pantry went missing during the evening hours, and even normal, mortal food we brought into the castle and secreted away in our rooms disappeared. If you were in the castle and wanted to eat, you came to the table or went hungry.
Some days Falin came down long enough to fix a plate and carry it back to his room, but mostly he sat at the far end of the table, alone. It always forced me to choose whether I should sit with him or the rest of my friends, like some grade school cafeteria table dilemma. Today I wasn’t in the mood to choose. I’d had a long, hard day. I didn’t feel like having to think about it.
Walking around the table, I scooped up the plate in front of Falin. I’d intended to keep going, walking away with it, but I didn’t make it a full step before he caught my arm. He frowned at me, but I grabbed his wrist with my free hand and gave him a tug. Now, I’m not a small girl—in my boots, I’m easily six feet tall—but Falin was taller, and broader, and all muscle. I couldn’t have moved him if my life depended on it, but when I tugged again, he rose to his feet. The look he gave me was skeptical at best, but he followed when I led him around the table. I sat down beside Holly, placing his plate on my other side.
“—which is why I said bikes,” Holly was saying as I sat. She turned, offering me a friendly smile while completely ignoring the blond-haired fae standing at my back. “What do you think, Al?”
“About bikes?” I said, leaning forward to fill my plate with some sort of carved bird that had been cooked until the outside was crisp but the pale meat oozed with mouthwatering juices. “What about bikes?”
“To reach the house quicker. A bicycle would cut down the time it took for us to respond to things happening outside the folded space.”
“True.” I accepted a plate of rolls as Caleb passed them my way. “But you’d get pretty sweaty on a bike. Wouldn’t a vehicle of some sort be faster and more convenient? “
Caleb shook his head. “How would you get a vehicle through the door, not to mention my house?”
“An ATV could work,” Falin said, finally sitting down. “Though we might have to carry it through the door and put the wheels on once it was on this side.”
The others at the table frowned at him, and I wasn’t sure if it was because he’d joined their conversation or if they disagreed.
“That could work,” I said between mouthfuls of food.
Ms. B shook her head. “Those things are loud and the wheels rip up the ground. You’ll give our poor gnome a fit.”
The elusive garden gnome. I was starting to think he was a myth. I still hadn’t met him.
“Well, I bought a bike,” Holly said, setting down her fork and leaning back in her chair. “Maybe it will help me work off all these elaborate feasts.”
I laughed and shook my head. “It’s Faerie food. I’m pretty sure it magically lacks calories.”
“It has to have some calories,” Rianna said from the door. “Otherwise we’d all starve while gorging ourselves. But we do seem to be able to indulge rather more than we would in mortal food.”
“Well, in that case,” Holly said, picking back up her fork, “someone cut me a thick slice of that German chocolate cake.”
Caleb and Ms. B chuckled, but I was focused on Rianna. She crossed the room slowly, leaning heavily on Desmond as she moved. She was paler than she’d been when I saw her in the office earlier, her movements labored. When she finally reached the chair across from me, she sank into it gratefully. Desmond fussed at her side a moment longer, as if ensuring she wasn’t going to collapse sideways out of her seat, and then he turned and climbed into the chair beside her. I might have commented on the huge black dog sitting at the table, but the barghest wasn’t really a dog, he was a fae, and he actually had a man-shaped form, though I’d only seen it twice.
Rianna’s movements remained stiff and slow as she served both herself and Desmond, but they smoothed out as she went. By the time her plate was full, they seemed much less laborious.
“You’re frowning at me,” she said as she filled a mug from a pitcher on the table.
Oops. “I’m just concerned. Maybe you should go to the Eternal Bloom for sunrise and sunset.”
She shook her head. “I’m fine. It’s a little uncomfortable during the transition, but it wears off fast. Besides, here I don’t have to worry about losing time to the stupid doors.”
That much was true. The doors at the Bloom sometimes deposited people back into mortal reality hours later than anticipated even when every precaution had been addressed. Still, sunrise and sunset, the times when Faerie’s magic was weakest in the mortal realm, were hard on Rianna. As a changeling, she relied on the magic of Faerie to hold off the centuries she’d lost while a captive in Faerie. If she were ever to be caught in the mortal realm during sunset or sunrise, all those years would catch up to her, aging her hundreds of years in a moment. A mortal couldn’t survive that. The castle, with its strange blend of planes, prevented those transition moments from being deadly to her, but there was still enough of the mortal world here to make sunset and sunrise draining for her.
“I’m fine,” she said again. “Nearly back up to full strength already. Now tell me how the investigation went today?”
I groaned. “Not so hot. I ended up being taken hostage in a bank robbery.”
Around me, the chatter at the table went silent, and I could feel all eyes turn on me, particularly the silent fae at my side who was part spy, part protector, and, despite his attempts to distance himself, my friend.
“Obviously I walked away from it okay,” I said, though with the rash of recent walking corpses, maybe that wasn’t quite so obvious as it sh
ould have been.
“Another bank robbery?” Holly asked, breaking the growing tension, for which I was grateful. “That’s what, the third in a week? Was it the same three people? Did they catch them this time?”
“Uh . . . sort of?” They certainly wouldn’t be robbing any more banks. But Remy had only gone missing last night. While there had been three robbers, he couldn’t have been involved with the previous robberies, could he? “What did the people from the other two robberies look like?”
“Haven’t you been watching the news?” Holly asked, raising one of her perfect strawberry-blond eyebrows.
I shrugged. “Not so much. No electricity in the castle and I’ve been busy at work.”
She granted me that one with a begrudging nod as Caleb jumped into the conversation. “None of the robbers wore masks, but only one has been identified. Annabelle something or other. Her husband had reported her missing a couple days before the first robbery. The other woman and the man have not been identified yet, but the media has been splashing their pictures around.”
Huh. That sounded eerily similar. I made a mental note to look up the coverage as the conversation around me moved on to how we could get electricity and Internet in the castle. I was still deep in thought, mindlessly attacking my food, when I realized Falin was staring at me.
“What?” I asked, turning to face him.
His icy blue gaze swept over me, filled with worry and warmth. “You’re okay?”
I waved a hand, gesturing at my still whole and unharmed body. He studied my face, as if he could find the truth to any nonphysical pains I might be hiding.
“I’m fine,” I said, and I meant it. I didn’t like what I’d done. Seeing those seemingly living bodies drop like marionettes with cut strings would probably join the other nightmares that regularly woke me, but I stood by the fact that I’d done the right thing. They’d already been dead, and my actions meant no one else got hurt.
But it would haunt me.
Falin’s frown deepened, and I changed the subject before he could pry further. “Do you know any fae who could move a soul between bodies?”
“Like Coleman?”
I thought about it and then shook my head. “No, what he did when he stole a body left a lot of magic and glyphs on the body. And the bodies he stole were still alive. I’m looking for something that could put a ghost in a corpse without leaving a magical trace.” I thought about the female ghost I’d pulled out of Remy’s body and how she’d begged to be put back inside. “The ghosts may be cooperative, but I think they need someone else’s help to inhabit and take control of the stolen body.”
“Alex, what’s going on?” Rianna asked, her food forgotten in front of her. Her reaction made sense, as Coleman had been the one to hold her captive in Faerie. He’d used her to facilitate his body thieving, so she might know more about moving souls between bodies than any other living person. At least any I had access to. I hadn’t wanted to rehash what I’d encountered at the bank again until I got a chance to talk to Death at length, but it seemed I didn’t have much choice.
I summarized the story the best I could, focusing most of my details on what little I knew about the walking corpses. Falin listened silently, the scowl on his face darkening. Rianna interrupted to ask questions a few times, but by the end, she was shaking her head.
“That definitely sounds like necromancy,” she said, her voice thin, strained.
“So you know something about it?” Did I sound a little too hopeful to hear that one of my best friends had knowledge of forbidden magic?
“Eh, probably not much more than you,” she said, an apologetic note to her voice. “Coleman used death magic, true, but not necromancy. He wanted his bodies still alive and functioning.”
“Oh.” That made sense. I sighed. It had been worth a shot.
I focused back down on my plate, pushing the food around more than actually eating it. When I glanced back up, I noticed the soul collector watching me from beside the fireplace. I hadn’t expected Death to return tonight, but there he was, waiting and glaring at where Falin sat beside me. I swallowed the food I was currently eating and excused myself. Rianna started to protest, but I wasn’t sure how long Death could stay. When your boyfriend could be called away at any moment, there was no time to dally.
Chapter 8
PC met us at the door to the sitting room in my personal suite of rooms. He barked his greeting, standing on his back legs, front working the air as he begged. I released Death’s hand, taking a moment to lean down and rub the crest of white hair on the top of PC’s head. Rianna and I had a standing agreement that if I didn’t make it back to the office before she left for the night, she’d take PC home and lock him in my room. He would have loved to roam the castle, but we weren’t sure if animals could get addicted to Faerie food, so we weren’t taking any chances.
Once my dog had calmed, I straightened, turning back to Death. I lifted onto my toes and kissed him. Light and quick. Just a greeting. The “hello” that neither of us had said. I started to step back, but he wrapped his arms around me, drawing me into a hug that tugged me against his chest. He held me like that in silence for a moment, and for the first time in a while, I felt warm, completely safe, and content. I relished the feeling, and I hated it because I knew it wouldn’t last.
“I missed you.” He said the words into my hair, still holding me close, blocking out the rest of the world.
“You just saw me this afternoon.” I meant for it to be a joke. It fell short.
He stepped back, holding me at arm’s length so that he could look at me. “I didn’t want to go earlier.”
“I know.” I did. Our relationship was the definition of complicated. He was breaking all the rules to be here. The other collectors kept telling me if I truly cared, I’d send him away. Relationships between soul collectors and mortals were forbidden. Dangerous.
The being in charge of the soul collectors, who I called the Mender, had already stripped Death of some of his abilities because Death had twice exchanged essences with me. The ability to exchange essences was meant to allow soul collectors to pass along their mantle when they grew weary so that they could move on to wherever souls went next. As in, it was meant to be used on another disembodied soul, not a still-living mortal. Under normal circumstances it couldn’t have been used on the living, but because I was a planeweaver and touched several planes at once, Death had been able to use it with me. He’d saved my life, and in the process had become mortal himself, at least temporarily. I’d bargained with the Mender and taken a huge debt I’d yet to repay, but the Mender had agreed to return that ability once Death was ready to pass on, ensuring he wasn’t doomed to eternity as a soul collector.
That bargain didn’t mean the Mender approved of our relationship. What more would he do if he found out we were still together? Relocate Death? Strip all of his abilities and send him along with all the other souls? That was one of my greatest fears. Whenever the time between Death’s visits stretched too long, I worried that Death had moved on, and I’d never get to say good-bye, or even know what happened. He’d just vanish.
Complicated. That was an understatement.
“No running, remember?” Death said in response to whatever he saw on my face.
I tried to smile, but my smile felt too far away, out of reach, buried under all the things we didn’t say, didn’t discuss. I barely admitted it to myself, but I was worried about us. He had never said it, but I could see in his eyes that he was too. That fact hurt worse than I was prepared for. He was always the confident one. The one so sure of his feelings. The one not afraid to say “I love you.”
I couldn’t stand there anymore, staring into his warm eyes and seeing both love and worry. My first instinct was to pull away, to cross the room and focus on something—anything—else. But he was right. When we’d first started this, I’d promised not to run. If I
broke that promise, if I pulled away, I’d be giving up on us. That wasn’t an option. So I stepped forward, toward him, sliding my arms up over his shoulders, pressing my lips to his.
The kiss started soft and sad, and then grew, becoming needy, full of longing and urgency as our bodies mirrored the chaotic swirl of emotions tangled between us. Time was short. He could get called away. But he was here now. Real and warm and mine for right now. My hands slid down his chest, tracing muscles still hidden under his shirt. When I reached his waist, I shoved the hem of the shirt up, anxious to feel more skin under my palms. To drag my fingers through the fine dark hairs on his tanned chest.
He broke off long enough to pull his shirt over his head. Then his mouth closed on mine again. His hands slid over my ass, and he lifted me. I obliged by wrapping my legs around his hips, drawing my body over a part of him that was now very hard. He groaned and walked us to the nearest wall, pressing my back to it. I was pinned between the cold stone behind my back and Death’s warmth seeping into me from the front.
I broke from his mouth, gasping as I said, “I own a bed, you know.”
“So you’ve told me. You own a wall too.”
He leaned in, but I pressed a finger to his lips, stopping him only an inch away.
“I own the whole damn castle.”
I moved my finger, the distance between us closing so that his reply of “You do” was murmured directly against my lips.
His hands moved to my waist, sliding under my sweater, making my skin tighten and tingle as he moved upward, over my stomach, my ribs, until his thumb hooked under my bra and stroked my breast. I inhaled, squirming against him. Needing more.
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