The strip club owner stumbled along beside us, his face gaunt and shoulders slumped forward. He looked as if he’d aged a thousand years—more than that, actually, as fae didn’t really age.
“And the queen will grant me forgiveness now?” he asked, his voice quavering. “You’ll tell her what I did, that I helped you plan this? You’ll tell her that I showed you where the portal was and destroyed a valuable piece of magic so we could escape? My punishment will be over?”
His voice was little more than a croak as he stumbled through the underbrush. He was clearly limping from the shoes, and there was a glimmer of terror in his eyes as he talked about his punishment.
I didn’t feel sorry for him.
Not one fucking bit.
I’d met Oxonos after he’d forced an exotic dancer to wear those shoes, making her dance until she injured herself. He’d been dismissive of the punishment, acting like he was the wronged party when the queen stripped him of his shoes. Now that he’d had a taste of his own medicine, he was willing to betray Mack and me in the hopes that the queen wouldn’t put the shoes back on him. This time around, he was wrongfully punished, but it was the punishment the queen should have given him in the first place. He deserved what he got.
Oxonos was careful not to look down at me. The lines of his jaw were rigid and his eyes feverish.
“The queen will know who was responsible for catching the alpha,” the man carrying me said.
I attempted to crane my neck enough to see the massive fae, but all I could see was a broad chest and the ends of silky black hair.
Oxonos started blubbering. “Thank you, Prince Summer. Thank you for believing me. Everyone else believed that liar. But you believe me. There’s no such thing as demons, just evil people, and Zeezee Riley is the worst of them. I hoped that you would catch her, but of course she sent her sister in her stead. It’s just the type of thing she would do. It doesn’t matter, though. They both planned the attack on the queen, and Titania will forgive me. She’ll pardon me... Right?”
“I think the queen will be even more grateful for the capture of this one,” the incubus pretending to be Prince Summer said. At least, I was almost certain that was who held me.
The pain searing through every inch of my body was clouding my thoughts, but Mack’s brother from the Summer Court had seemed like the kindest fae prince. I didn’t know the man, but my instincts said that Prince Summer wouldn’t work with the incubus that had attacked the fae court or wrap a werewolf in silver chains. If the incubus had disguised himself as Darrel to lure me in, he would have had to change forms to gain Oxonos’s trust. And what better way to gain access to the queen than taking the form of her obsession?
The incubus paused. “It’s time for you to go. I’ll make sure everyone knows you’re responsible for everything, Oxonos.”
If only Oxonos knew the true extent of the demon’s words.
“Thank you,” Oxonos whispered, holding up his clutched hands. “Thank you. Yes, I’ll go. I’ll leave. Thank you for believing me and letting me help you stop them.” He backed away a few steps before his gaze flickered down to mine. He stumbled, his mouth falling open.
I widened my eyes at the fae, trying to communicate. You’re helping the incubus. He’s going to kill the queen and blame it on you.
Oxonos’ jaw snapped shut, and he spun away, stumbling across the forest floor and out of view.
The incubus held me away from him and studied me like an insect. His resemblance to Mack’s brother was flawless, and it made me wonder if maybe I was wrong. Could this actually be Mack’s sweet brother? Had the kindness he’d exhibited been an act? My questions were answered when a long red tongue snaked out of the Summer Prince’s mouth and immediately recoiled.
That’s right, fucker. Nancy gave me my own set of horseshoe earrings.
I called upon my wolf and immediately felt her filling me. We could break these bonds. I wriggled furiously, but the chains were so tight they cut through the silk gown and burned into my flesh. Pain seared into me in a hundred places. My wolf weakened by the moment, more sensitive to the silver than I was.
The demon watched me struggle, his face impassive.
I kept trying, only stoking the pain, hotter and hotter, until my energy drained to nothing.
Still studying me, the demon spoke in the same whispery voice he’d used the first time I met him. “No laws. No earthly masters.”
He’d said those exact words to me the first time we met, and in all the chaos, I’d completely forgotten.
No earthly masters?
Was he saying that he needed to escape his earthly masters? Was this the demon equivalent of asking for help?
Fuck that.
I wasn’t a big fan of this demon doing the bidding of someone who was trying to start a war, but I liked the idea of setting the incubus free even less. What I wanted was for Nancy to banish this demon back to hell.
The incubus dropped me to his side again and continued walking. My head spun. Nancy could be dead. Aaron, Lance, and Darrel could be dead. They’d all been there. What had happened after the incubus knocked me out?
My wolf retreated and collapsed, taking away her last dregs of energy and healing. Exhaustion washed over me as we continued forward, and I was barely aware that we’d entered through the giant redwood portal to the queen’s palace. The low-lit foyer flickered with candlelight.
The demon carried me up the stairs, walking past several guards who bowed low. We headed into a hallway toward an enormous door.
“What the fuck, Summer?”
The incubus spun, nearly banging me into the wall.
Autumn paced up the hallway, his expression full of confusion. “What the hell is going on? I thought Mack was bringing proof from the club. Is that Scarlet Riley?” Prince Autumn reached for me, but the incubus swung me out of the way. “Is that silver?” Autumn asked. “Are those silver chains?”
“You need to trust me, Autumn,” the demon whispered. “Don’t blow her cover. This is the only way we can get the proof to the queen. You need to shut Scarlet and me in with Titania.”
I tried to shake my head, to tell the Autumn prince that the incubus was spouting lies, but I was bound so tightly I could barely move, and the effort took every drop of energy I had left.
Autumn didn’t even notice. He’d already returned his gaze to the incubus.
“Of course, I trust you, brother,” Autumn said from what seemed like far in the distance. “I’ll give Naveen a head’s up.”
My eyes slipped closed. The next time I opened them, I was looking into Queen Titania’s beautiful features. I lay on the floor, and the Queen of Spring stared down at me. Her fair features were illuminated by a fire crackling in a wide brick hearth. She stood in a nightdress, her lustrous hair tousled.
“Oh, Marius,” she squealed, clapping her hands together. “You’ve made me so happy.”
The incubus slid his arms around the queen’s waist. “I want only to serve you, my queen. My beautiful one. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
Her eyes widened, and she turned to look up at him in shock.
For just one moment, I hoped against hope that the queen would come to her senses. I hoped that she would realize how out of character this was for the summer prince. If he had rejected her advances for years, maybe the queen would ask herself, “Why is he coming on to me now? What’s changed?”
But she didn’t.
Titania turned in the incubus’ muscular arms and molded against the body of the man she believed was the prince of summer. The incubus leaned down, running his tongue over the queen’s lips.
I tried to will the scene to stop. Queen Titania was my worst enemy—someone who had sworn to massacre my friends and family. And yet, I couldn’t wish this death on her.
She leaned back, a smile blooming on her lips. “Can I ask you something rather silly?”
“I told you, my queen, I’m here to serve you,” the demon said.
“
Will you take me to bed?”
“Yes, my queen. I would like nothing more.”
“May I call you by another’s name?” she whispered.
“If you wish to call me by my father’s name, I would very much enjoy that.”
Oh, fuck. Not only was she lusting over her son’s half-brother, a man who was practically her step-son, but she was fantasizing that he was his father. This shit was never going to leave my nightmares.
Still, as warped as she was, I couldn’t let her die without warning her. I gathered all my energy and screamed into my gag.
“One second, my love,” the queen whispered, rubbing her fingers up the demon’s chest. She pulled away from the incubus, crossed the room toward me, and reared back her foot. Pain exploded through my jaw, and the world again slipped into darkness.
Chapter Thirty
Mack
How could I have let her go? She had been in my arms. I had been inside her. We had experienced something so intense that I was sure there wasn’t even a word for it. And when Scarlet had rushed away from me, I’d let her go.
It was a miracle that the Knight Brothers didn’t blame me for Scarlet’s abduction. I almost wished they would. But like me, they blamed themselves, so I had no one to punish my mistake with the violence it warranted.
It had been eight hours. The incubus had had Scarlet for eight hours, and not one of us had slept a single second of it.
After climbing out of Lance’s van into the parking lot of Luxury Inn and Suites, our group headed for the hotel entrance.
The Knight brothers kept their gazes on the floor. If anyone met their eyes, they’d see wolves shining through. Right now Darrel, Aaron, and Lance were three loaded guns walking into the nicest hotel in the county.
Jane and I walked ahead, dressed in suits. She managed the calm, elegant veneer of business seemingly without effort, and I was doing my best to imitate her composure. We’d spent the entire night looking through websites of hotels in a two-hour radius, trying to find a conference room for rent with blue walls and white stripes. Unfortunately, it was a popular design, and this was the fourth establishment we’d visited.
As I pivoted to open the door for the group, all four of the werewolves with me turned their heads. Their gazes fixed on the high hedge that ran the length of the hotel.
Before I could even identify the disturbance, Darrel pounced. As the large biker closed the distance, there was a loud rustle in the bushes. Three people sprang from them, leaping straight up into the air and landing on the second-floor balcony. They looked like a small family with a middle-aged couple and a school-age child. But all three of them had large-lens cameras around their necks. They also had poorly concealed two-handed axes strapped to their backs.
“Get down here,” Darrel roared.
Wide-eyed, the man and woman hopped up to the next story, but the child pointed his camera down, focused the lens, and snapped another shot. The camera wasn’t pointed at Darrel, though. It was pointed at Jane.
“Mountain goblins,” Lance growled as the third goblin followed the others up the balconies. “Probably working for whoever summoned the demon.”
“How could they have anticipated our arrival?” Jane asked as she shaded her eyes against the early morning sun. “Either we’ve been tapped, or someone is following us.”
The world spun as I had the strangest feeling of déjà vu. A goblin photographer had fled after snapping photos of me before years ago. It wasn’t just goblins, but the goblin had been the one who’d escaped. I was perhaps thirteen. My sister and I had been out to lunch on one of her visits, and as we headed for her limo, a group of paparazzi cornered us, going so far as to stand in the way of the vehicle. Mab’s bodyguards had started grabbing and crushing cameras, but one photographer had leapt over the limo and onto a nearby roof.
Mab had been incensed, and three days later, a tabloid sported the headline, “Princess Mab Dines Out Amid Controversy Surrounding Death of Primetime Rival.”
Jane opened the lobby door. “Well, someone knows we’re here.”
My sense of déjà vu continued as we crossed the lobby. I recognized this place. It had been nearly a decade, and not everything was familiar, but I recognized the great blue vase that stood in the center of the room, overflowing with flowers. I recognized the artistic and colorful chandeliers that hung throughout the entrance hall. Like all buildings, there were deep fissures where daily earthquakes ripped apart the foundation, but I remembered the clear blue material that the hotel used to fill in the cracks.
Jane stopped before the long concierge desk, looking up from her smartphone at the uniformed man standing behind the desk. “We have the conference room booked for ten-fifteen.” Her words were so dispassionate, she almost convinced me. “We’re here with Mage of the Ages.”
The human man’s face brightened. “Are you cast—” He winced and covered his mouth. “Sorry, I know I’m not supposed to say anything.”
The word ‘cast’ hit me like a blow, deepening the surrealness of the moment. There was only one person I knew who used the word ‘cast’ like being in showbiz was a normal part of life everyone could relate to.
“No, not cast,” Jane said, leveling a look at the man. She tapped her fingers on the desk. “Has someone been discussing Mage of the Ages with hotel staff?”
The man’s head shot up. His cheeks reddened to the color of the plentiful freckles speckled across his nose, and his eyelids widened so far that I could see the whites all around his blue irises. He scratched his short red hair, sending flakes raining down to his uniform.
“No one. I’m sorry. I just see you all passing through here. I know these guys all signed non-disclosure agreements.”
“You say that no one has been talking to you, but you know about the NDAs,” Jane mused as she set her arm on the man’s desk.
NDAs was another term only one person in my life threw around in casual conversation.
“It’s probably Morte,” Aaron said in a whisper that carried.
The guy behind the desk blushed so hard that his ears turned crimson. “You guys—you wouldn’t kick him off the show, would you?”
My heart thumped at the word “show,” especially when adding the information that Darrel had told us about Mage of the Ages. When he’d described what the ghost had said through the medium, I’d immediately thought that Mage of the Ages sounded like a magic competition. My mind hadn’t jumped to a reality TV show. Maybe deep in my subconscious, I hadn’t wanted to consider this possibility because I knew only one person who had the resources and motive to pull this off.
Part of me must have been actively trying not to consider my sister because when I truly examined what had happened, her fingerprints were all over it.
Oxonos had told me that my mother made the request to sleep with werewolves at a sex party to scandalize Mab, meaning my mother would have made sure Mab knew about the party and werewolves in advance.
Mab had insisted on going to the police station to learn what happened at the party.
Mab had told Scarlet and Aaron that her film crew would create a distraction at the feast, but the crew had actually let the incubus in.
The incubus had licked the faces of several fae, gaining access to my mother, who my sister wanted to overthrow so she could take the throne.
Paparazzi followed my sister wherever she went. Those photographers weren’t working for the person responsible for summoning the demon. They were lying in wait for my sister. They’d probably recognized me, seen that I was standing with a woman surrounded by huge men, and thought they’d spotted my sister in one of her disguises.
I fisted my hand to keep from grabbing the concierge and shaking him. I wanted to demand that he spill every single word he’d heard about the show.
Jane sighed, sounding truly exasperated. “It’s a little too late for that. We’ll just have a talk with Morte at the meeting. Are the other investors here?”
“Um...” The man’s hands
clattered over the keyboard. “You know, I...” his fingers sped their pace even more as the smell of his sweat grew nearly overwhelming. “The most recent meeting I see scheduled was for a week ago. The crew also seems to have left. One of the producers is still at the hotel, though.” His hands moved faster. “As is one of the cast members. Are you sure you have the right date? The room is booked.”
“It should be booked by us.” Jane tapped the desk. “This is an investor meeting. We’re only supposed to meet with the top producer and Morte—that is who’s still at the hotel, is it not?”
The man’s blue eyes darted between us, and for the first time, a hint of wariness entered his expression, as if it just occurred to him that perhaps he shouldn’t be giving out information about his guests. Clearing his throat, he asked, “Could I get your names, please?”
I knew what I had to do, but part of me didn’t want to know the truth. I didn’t want to believe that I could have prevented all the pain that Scarlet had gone through, that my family could be responsible for this nightmare.
Stepping forward, I grabbed the concierge’s attention. “I’m not about to announce my identity right here, but I’ll show you ID.” I reached into my pocket and set my wallet down on the counter. Time slowed around me. I wanted to be wrong. I wanted to be anyone other than the son of Titania and the brother of Princess Mab.
But I wasn’t. Opening my wallet, I slipped out the official card of Spring Court royalty. It was made of pure gold and had my mother’s symbol of a stylized leaf inlaid in the center.
The recognition in the man’s eyes sent a stab of confirmation through my heart. It was my sister. She was the one behind the hoax TV show. She had framed the werewolves, the love of my life, in her assassination attempt. Just to make absolutely sure, I said, “I’m helping my sister produce Mage of the Ages. But that’s strictly confidential.”
“That’s wonderful,” the boy said, brightening. “She’s been so dedicated to this show. I’m sure it will be amazing, Your Highness.”
Oblivious to the pain he’d caused, he chattered on, unaware that my heart was imploding in my chest.
Filthy Fae: A Dirty Alphas Novel (Heartland Forest Book 2) Page 24
