“How long?” Marcus asked.
“Yes,” Lawrence gave a sharp look at the leader of Region One. “How long before our potential for peace is destroyed?” he spoke for the first time.
“Not long. I have seen the death of someone important. It cannot be avoided. But that is all I know. And,” her eyes met Julia's, “you cannot be claimed by anyone if you wed the three.”
Julia broke from Scott's embrace. “What do you mean? That I … that there's some pointy eared, green skinned winged something out there that thinks I'd make a great wifey?”
Heidi's brows rose while she translated the unfamiliar slang. “If you mean that you could be mate to the fey, why yes, that is possible. You see, you are a neutral entity: not human, but with the blood of all, the blood of neutrality. A pure blood.”
Great, Julia thought, kinda like O positive. Such a flattering analogy.
“Only consummation of the three will negate their challenge to your authority. Even the deep magick of the fey cannot penetrate your alliance with your chosen trio of mates.”
And here we go again, Julia thought, back to the three husband thing. There was no escaping the eventuality, it was like a cruel wheel that kept spinning.
Jason was shaking his head. “I don't know. There's something that doesn't make sense here.”
Heidi looked at him calmly. “I but come for the benefit of warning those of royal blood. My job is singular: I must keep the royal line from dying out. If my warning of the future aids in that? So much the better.”
Jason didn't look convinced. And even though she and Jason were on shaky terms, it made her uneasy to see his suspicion. Julia supposed it made some sense. After all, it's not every day that your wife's twin shows up claiming that Julia's aunt was a fey warrior. Kinda unbelievable.
William recapped and Julia was grateful that he was talking instead of her, “So you are here as a failsafe of sorts.” His eyes bored into hers and Heidi nodded. “You but confirm that the best course of action is for Julia to marry the three,” William clarified.
Heidi nodded slowly as if they were all rather dull. But that wasn't it, not exactly. It was as if she thought they were all dumb and was slightly superior about it all. She might look like Julia but like Julia noticed earlier, that's where the similarity ended.
William palmed his chin, his gray eyes like the pewter of a coming storm. He glanced at Jason, who raked a hand through his sandy hair. “I'm not really on board. I want to 'save Julia',” Jason said and Julia pressed her face harder into the comfort of Scott, who glared back at Jason. The warning be careful was clear. Jason ignored him. “But this seems like too much pressure, even for the Singers … who are Coercion Central.”
Cyn barked out a laugh. “No shit.”
Emmanuel walked in and shook his head. A female that needed taming to be certain. It was almost more bite than he could chew. But therein lay the attraction. Manny understood the irony of desire steeped in the unobtainable. It was a bitter tea indeed.
“Yeah, I'm with Jace. Let's see some proof that Julia has to marry the world. Maybe she can just take her chances?” Cyn's face puckered in consternation.
“Yes, by all means... please do,” Jacqueline muttered in her cultured voice. Julia shifted a bitter look her way. She was sick to death of Jacqueline. The very rules of the Singers constrained true justice in Julia's opinion.
“Just because our Reader comes and announces the importance of my nuptials,” Julia glanced at Jason, “my Singer wedding,” and she was rewarded with a small smile, “does not in itself mean that I will have to make that choice.”
“It is just as well. I said those things only to ascertain if it was indeed, a reality.”
Marcus' brow screwed up in a frown. “Reader... Heidi.” It was clear her words were puzzling.
She gave him calm eyes and Julia felt a shiver like melting ice slide down her spine, a portent. “Yes?”
“What reality? You have told us what is happening, what will happen if Julia does not marry.”
Heidi nodded happily. “Yes, however, I kept aside one exquisite detail until the very last. Especially for this moment.”
Julia stood very still, her eyes seeking Paul. She found him and they gazed at each other, a perfect understanding passing between them. “Paul,” she called out and the noise that had been only background became a crashing roar. The thoughts of those around her had a flavor. Singers felt a certain way in her mind, likewise, vampire and Were had their own “feel” to their brain signatures. Julia began to strip the voices in her head to identify the one that didn't feel like the others.
Alien. It slid like grease inside her mind, coating her brain in foreign slime. Julia's eyes flicked to Brendan as Jason glanced about uneasily at the mix of expressions, then his nostrils flared, his gaze shifting to Heidi and narrowing. Suddenly, all the Were who were present looked at Heidi. Julia heard the faintest growl rumble, tickling its way out of Jason's mouth.
“You're not my sister,” Julia said in a voice of conviction and Paul's eyes widened in belated understanding. By giving her full telepathy back to her, Julia had found out the greatest truth of all. Julia watched Heidi give a brief, full glance and tense like a coiled spring as Julia opened her mouth to warn them all. Heidi's image shimmered before her, something lying underneath the excellent façade. Julia swung her face to Paul and he let the reins of her telepathy go entirely. Heidi shoved her hands in the pockets of a long skirt that swept the ground, her fingers disappearing into the multiple folds of creamy fabric.
A sense of foreboding swept Jason like a shroud of needles. Poking, biting. “Stop her!” Jason growled, leaping forward and Marcus moved at the same time that the Were and Brendan, the ones with sensitive noses, leaped forward.
Heidi threw out her arms, her elegant fingers splayed as they flung dust like iridescent dandelion seed. It swirled from the expert toss of her fingers.
Heidi no longer resembled Julia. Those fingers that had so elegantly thrown a weapon broad enough to affect everyone, no longer matched Julia's.
But belonged to an entirely different person.
The group of supernaturals: Singers, Were and the two vampire moved toward the imposter through the cloud of glittering dust, ignoring the storm.
His dark face broke into an easy smile. “Sleep,” he intoned like wind incarnate.
And they did, dropping to the ground like cut flower stems. Even Jacqueline's stubborn evilness was not sufficient to withstand the magick of the fey. Magic that was eerily similar to that which she'd used before.
Julia knew that he could not be anything other than fey. It all made sense now; the strange telepathic signature, the knowledge of the fey's doings- the uncanny likeness. It had all been smoke and mirrors to get close to her. She took in the figure of a man, like a bruised plum, his hair a deeper violet that was almost black. His eyes filled her vision before she slumped to the ground.
The one who did not drop to the artificial somnolence was Scott. He shook his head like a dog shedding water. Scott looked up at the six feet and a half tall fey, skin like black oil on watered violets and managed to croak out, “Don't hurt her,” before his forehead hit the floor.
Tharell bent down, scooping up the unconscious Rare One off the body of her soulmate.
He stood like a silent statue in a room full of dangerous supernaturals, his disguise lay at his feet, a costume of dead skin. He held the girl and opened his mind to those that could not change form and lay about the outskirts of the Region, undetected.
I have the Rare One.
And what of the Reader? Cormack asked, his hint of humor clear, though it was technically unspoken.
She has been subdued.
They all sleep?
They do.
Bring her, Cormack said, the telepathic command was clear in his voice.
Yes.
Tharell moved between the fallen supernaturals, stepping in the holes left between their bodies, his eyes skipping f
rom one to the other like a flat stone upon the water.
Such bounty wasted.
Then Tharell looked upon the sleeping young woman again. Perhaps not so wasted, he thought.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sidhe
Tharell made haste, the lowest of the great Sidhe warriors, his mixed lineage allowing many things, but not prestige, never that. Kidnapping the Rare One, after twenty years of careful planning, was nothing more than another errand given to the watchdog of the fey.
Tharell was a clone shifter, dangerous to all, used in the severest way by the Unseelie Sidhe. A sadness prevailed in his heart that beat no more. It would not beat for another thousand years. It mattered not. He was born to serve, no more. Tharell did not hold to ideals that he could not obtain. It was foolishness.
And Tharell was no fool.
He made his way toward the temporal door that led to the fey mound, the portal that would take him to the Unseelie court.
Tharell wove between trees with the speed of smoke on the wind. His form shimmered with his speed, only the young woman in his arms remained a solid thing. To an outsider, it would have appeared as if a large humanoid shape, a soft black shadow, raced through the forest with a woman whose golden hair floated on the wind in muscular arms like opaque mist.
His internal guide, a thin ribbon, not of corporeal reality, but of the fey, lured him toward the mound. It became more solid as Tharell flew toward it on feet that barely stroked the earth beneath them.
Finally, he reached the entrance and he pressed the girl's body against the golden door. He aimed his breath upon the inscribed crest. His breath warmed the intricate design of a dragon's tail twined around an egg. The image began to heat, turning to a scalding tangerine, an ember too hot to touch and Tharell stepped back, the door swinging open as he entered. He knew what would happen.
Still, Tharell entered.
He closed his eyes, waiting for the bite of the briar. The thorns always found him, liking the taste of his mixed blood, not enough fey to move through them imperviously. He heard the dull clank of the door sealing him within the mound of the Unseelie and sighed, tense and waiting for the thorny teeth to set into his flesh.
When they did not he opened his eyes and his pupils grew large, sucking in what light they could find from the gloom. The briar that normally gave him tearing kisses of welcome, ripping and searing pain—parted before him.
It was the Rare One. She provided a hiatus from their dark attentions.
Tharell sucked in a deliciously pain-free breath and walked forward, the briar picking up its thorny branches, caressing the girl as he walked through an artificial pathway made by the soldiers of thorns. Not one thorn bit, the branches turning so the thorn missed her skin. Tharell frowned, only the purest of the Sidhe could boast a thornless entry.
The briar was the first defense of the Unseelie mound. Like skin on a human, it was the first barrier to penetration. Those who possessed little or no blood of the fey would die within their razor's embrace. They lived only to kill, to take blood of those without permission to enter.
And they thirsted.
The warriors were there to greet him inside the cavernous tunnels of the only home Tharell had ever known. He looked about the familiar carved passageways of lava and other trace minerals. Oil from lamps set in the stone burned darkly against walls that Tharell easily blended against.
The Rare One did not blend, her coloring reminding Tharell of fool's gold, veins of false purity set against ebony. She lay as a dead weight against his body, her soft warmth bringing unbidden images of what he could never have. He schooled his thoughts to those of duty, rites and necessity.
“Tharell,” Domiatri greeted, his eyes scanning the girl for injury or other.
Tharell felt his ire rise, bristling. “She is well, Domi- there is no need for concern.”
Domi snorted. “Just doing the job Tharell, you worry overly.”
In Tharell's experience, it was best to anticipate. Expect the worst and if it be better, then he was rich in his relief for a time.
“She is nothing to us, that Queen Darcel would waste the better part of a youngling's childhood on the pursuit of a myth is beyond the pale,” Cormack stated in a droll voice.
“Your words are bold this far from the throne, Cormack,” Tharell stated.
“Aye, I am Sidhe enough to worry not,” Cormack replied in that smug way of his.
Tharell stood in the hollow left by those words, the echo still ringing from the last time he'd heard them uttered. He remained stoically silent, as he always did around the pure bloods.
“You are a colossal ass, Cormack,” Domi said, his gaze on the Sidhe warrior, his defense all for Tharell.
“Yes, what of it?”
“Gods, you never get it, do you?” Domi asked and Cormack stepped into the other fey's space, six feet and a half of muscled warriors, close enough to kiss, too intimate to raise arms, though their swords lay naked in their hands. Clenched. Ready.
“You would raise your sword against me for this mongrel, a servant amongst the fey?” Cormack stated in his haughtiest voice.
How Tharell longed to cut him down. Beginning with his tongue. A fine tremble crept over his body and he fought for stillness, using the girl like a shield so his rage would not show.
“This mongrel, as you call him, is the finest warrior, he is part Sidhe, Cormack- and finer than you could ever hope to be,” Domi said through gritted teeth, his fist bleeding to white around the hilt of his sword.
Tharell shifted his weight, the Singer's body going from the dead weight of true sleep to that of wakefulness.
“She wakes,” Tharell said in the middle of their fight.
They looked at him, startled, one with navy blue hair, a stripe of purest black running from temple to the ends that brushed his shoulders. Cormack was gold. All gold. His skin like that of a finely piece of polished jewelry, his eyes a flat low black. The most coveted of the colors of the fey. Tharell's own skin was so deep a purple it was almost black, his hair streaked violet and black. It was neither coveted nor not, but considered neutral. Whereas Cormack's deep eyes showed an utter lack of emotion, Domi could not help that his emotions shone in the silver of his irises. At present, they glittered with his anger.
Domi stepped back cautiously from Cormack. “We will discuss this later.”
“I do not wish to entertain the same old boring argument time and again. There are those who matter...” his eyes fell on Tharell's and he kept his chin high, “and those who do not.”
It was the girl who broke the tension between the three warriors, looking from one to the other, having been quietly listening to their interchange. “Sounds like a conceit problem.”
Tharell balked. He could not believe the Rare One could silence three warriors of the Sidhe.
Yet, she had.
*
Julia
Julia let the comment sit there in the new place she found herself in. Let them chew on that, she thought as she looked around at the rough-hewn walls made of some kind of dark gem.
She looked up at the huge man who held her. Who had fooled them all, she reminded herself. Julia scraped up the shreds of bravery that remained and knit them together in a shield. They obviously were not keen on killing her, so she'd take her chances. “Please, put me down.”
Shouldn't she feel the effects of being away from Scott? What had he said; they might have three days before incapacitation from lack of proximity. Another thing to worry about besides the wonderful kidnapping.
Again.
She gazed at the three curiously, the two who had almost come to blows were shocking. Julia knew she should stop being surprised by the events in her life, but they kept cropping up. The weirdness. Every time Julia thought she finally had a grasp, another strange group or event transpired.
They looked like men; big men. But one had skin the color of Easter egg grass and navy hair, so deep a cobalt it looked almost black. But Julia ha
d the walls of the cave for comparison. His was a rich blue that caught the muted light and flung it back like midnight kissed by the sea. His eyes were like silver dimes stuck in a face with aristocratic planes and angles- hard, but ending in full lips that were almost red but not quite. Julia heard Cyn's voice in her head, kinda like a hot Christmas elf. And he was... but there was the sword in his hand, and his very presence screamed dangerous. Her face swung to the gold one and she kept her jaw from dropping with an effort. He was like a low burning flame with two ebony jewels for eyes. But for all the hot coloring... his stuck up attitude made him less beautiful. If he would have just stood there and said nothing, he would have been beautiful. But he'd spoken and his words made him ugly. Not that their looks were important. Julia's thoughts already turned on how to get out of this latest disaster.
But it was the man who stood beside Julia that caught her attention. After all, he was strong enough to carry her from Region One to...
“Where are we?” Julia asked to the three. If she knew more, then she could figure out a way to get out. After all, she'd escaped the vampire coven.
“We are within Unseelie territory,” Tharell said.
“Huh, that explains so much, thanks.” His brow quirked at her words and brilliant blue eyes with violet rings around the outside, blazed out of his dark face. It would have been easy for Julia to classify him as African American. But he wasn't human. He was other. And his skin was truly violet. She had never seen a purple that dark on anything. Julia studied his face and found his eyes kinder than those of the gold fey.
“Okay... so you guys are the fey?” Julia asked the obvious and the gold one replied, “Yes.” He looked down on her. Not just from his height, but in his bearing. “You will be taken to meet our Queen momentarily. I am Cormack.”
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