Rumpel

I stared out the window of my castle room. The night was aglow with sparks of jagged, vivid lightning. Tonight was an especially brutal night for Harpy, who screamed without ceasing. Her torments rolled through the winds of Never like a haunting melody and made me wince each time I heard it.

In my quest to discover the source of the curse, I’d stumbled over the very object of it. Slowly, I’d begun to piece together the mystery of the puzzle, and what I’d learned was that there were casualties on all sides.

Never was a haunted world full of nothing but nightmares and pain, and it suited me just fine.

“You have to meet with her,” my manservant said, his deeply accented voice full of worry.

I sighed, shaking loose my pensive thoughts. “I don’t have to do anything, Giles.”

I turned on my heel and glared at him. I rued the day I’d ever thought sharing my pain with him to be a good idea. In my defense, I’d had far too many fireball whiskies to think rationally. But now he knew and all the rest of the staff who she was, because Giles had a loose tongue and had told them all of their master’s great love.

I rolled my eyes and dusted off my cuff links at his sliver-eyed gaze.

“She found you, so clearly the twin flame—”

“Means nothing,” I snapped. “Tell her to go. Send her away. I don’t want her here. Not anymore.”

Giles was as ebony-skinned as all Demone males were, so in the shadowy wasteland of Never he blended in perfectly, but when he became truly perturbed his skin would almost seem to shiver with metallic dustings of silver, making him appear reptilian.

“Permission to speak freely, sir,” he groused, stepping forward and clenching his fists.

Good gods above. I sighed. Since when hasn’t my manservant ever not spoken freely with me? That would have been the more proper question. In fact, he and I often came to fisticuffs. It was just the type of relationship we’d built over the span of eons together.

I might be his Crown Prince, but that had been on Demone only. In Kingdom, he’d not needed to follow me anymore, but he’d stayed because of honor. He lived by his own code and always had. Giles had been my master of swords, my protector and guardian—though I’d certainly not needed one, but Father had assigned him the duty since my birthing ritual, and Giles was nothing if not steadfastly loyal, even now. I flicked my wrist.

“You’re morose. Sullen. And a damned bear to be around anymore and have been for the past—”

“Two decades,” I finished for him. “Aye, I know.” I nodded and shrugged. “What would you have me say, Giles, hmm? That only love will restore me? Only love will make me whole again?” I scoffed, curling my upper lip. “Send her away,” I snapped, angry that I could still hear a tremor course through my words. Even after all this time, after all the pain of separation, the moment I felt her presence manifest in this realm full of death and agony, I felt myself come shamefully alive.

I hated my weakness. Despised it, in fact.

“Master, it is belief that love is a type of magic far more powerful than—”

“Bloody hell, man.” I crossed my arms behind my back and clung tightly enough to my fingers that I heard them crack. What I really wanted was to hurt something. Punch it. Bloody it. Break it. I wanted to transfer this bottomless wellspring of pain and torment into something else. I needed to stop hurting all the damn time. I needed to be free of this agony, and the only way to do that was to never let her in like that again. “Losing her almost killed me.” My shame was immense and my voice gruff as I said, “What kind of damned fool would I be to enter willingly into that kind of pain again?”

“Do you love her?” he asked without skipping a beat.

My nostrils flared. “I am too broken now, even for her. I cannot do this again. I won’t. What I put her through before, she almost didn’t forgive me for it. How could I—how could I possibly even consider—”

“But she did forgive you, and that’s the point, sir. Whether you own it or not doesn’t change the facts.”

“And those are?” I snarled.

He lifted a dark brow, and his look was unflinching as he said, “That you love you her still. That it will never end for you. That you only lie to yourself.”

I clenched my fists. I’d betrayed Shayera in the worst way in our life together. I’d brought her to me to test her. There’d been no noble purpose in my bringing her to me, other than I’d wanted a cure for Euralis and I’d have killed her to get it.

And even knowing that, I’d seduced my female over and over again. I’d been the worst kind of heathen, and when she’d discovered the truth, it had nearly shattered her. I would never again do anything else to cause her harm, but I had done other things. Things I would never regret doing and that I’d do all over again for the express purpose of bringing her back to life.

She’d never been a killer. But I was.

Forced to take a good long look at the man I’d become in her absence, I’d learned one thing through the years without her. Beneath it all, I was still that man who she’d hated, who had betrayed her trust. I was still him.

I squeezed my eyes shut even as the pain in my chest spread far and wide, consuming me like a cancer. I wasn’t the same man who she’d tamed, not anymore. I’d changed.

And the thing of it was, I didn’t want to go back. I didn’t want to go back to being that a damned contented fool who’d been so happy that he’d failed to anticipate an end to his happily-ever-after. He’d failed to plan for it. He’d never even believed it could have been a possibility.

That man was dead, never to return. And what remained was good for no one.

Giles stepped past me and looked through the window, down toward the trail where we’d spotted the boy holding her hand earlier. “I cannot confess to understanding what it is you are feeling—”

My laughter was high-pitched and crazed. “Gods, to be you. To have known that kind of joy but to not be daily speared by it, how must that feel, Giles? How could you have forgotten your own bride? How do you carry on this way?”

He looked up at me with soft, sad burning red eyes. “I carry on because I remember nothing else. For so long, I did not know whether I could even believe your stories of this woman and me, but I feel that maybe it is me and not you who suffers worst.”

I scoffed, turning aside, hating him a little bit as I always did whenever he admitted to forgetting his feisty Lilith, who, as my Shayera had at one point, ceased to be entirely. Wolf and his Red were still lost in the ether, a memory remembered by only a very few.

I’d come to Never to end the curse. I thought, in my own superior way, that I could somehow find the connection between what was and what had been then sever those ties entirely and fix the world. I thought I could get my Shayera back—not this one, not the one who’d very nearly destroyed me when she’d touched me that night. My Shayera would never have been so selfish or spoiled. My Shayera had been sweet and kind and perfect, and she was the one I wanted back.

But what I’d discovered was the curse went much deeper than I could have imagined. The whole thing was nothing but a damned nightmare with no end in sight. There was nothing that could be done for anyone, so I’d done the only reasonable and rational thing there’d been left to do. I quit. I quit wanting. I quit hoping. I quit... her. That was the moment I gave up.

“At least you remember, Rumpel, what it is to know such a great love. Me? I remember nothing but darkness. Emptiness. Loneliness. The feeling that I will never again be whole or well, and knowing there is nothing left for me other than to breathe and hope that someday it will get—”

“It can never get better! Ever!” My voice rumbled like a demon’s snarl. “It only ever gets worse. Lilith doesn’t exist anymore, and maybe that’s not a bad thing, because there is no guarantee that what you’ll get in this life is the same. I want what I had, not what she is today.”

Furious, I slapped at a figurine of a couple dancing that sat upon an end table, watching as the fragile porcelain shattered on the ground. The woman’s face remained intact, and her pretty blue eyes and rosebud lips smiled up at me.

My heart hurt.

Giles’s lips thinned.

I ignored the shudder that rolled through me when I said those words, but I wouldn’t deny that it was also true. This woman wearing my bride’s face wasn’t the same. And I should have damn well known it, because Betty and Gerard hadn’t been either, but I’d been so resolute and obsessed with regaining what I’d lost that I’d failed to count the cost. Not all choices would be remade, and not all paths would be taken. For each decision that was altered to the one in the other time, the outcome in this world would be a completely different Shayera.

Giles shook his head. “I think you’re wrong. And I will not send her back. The girl stays.”

Fury whipped through my bones, and I took a step toward my man, ready to pummel him for his defiance. Giles notched his chin, staring at me with the cold, blank look of a killer.

Manservant or no, there was no one more physically deadly in the castle than he was. Not even me, much as I was loath to admit it. I could outmaneuver Giles in magic, but to me that had always been a form of cheating, so I’d never resorted to it. When it came right down to it, Giles was loyal because he wished to be, because that’s who he was, and I was still his Prince because he allowed it. But he was then and always would be the Black Death, whether we lived on Delirium or not.

“Leave my sight,” I whispered, my voice cracking as I turned my back to him.

Giles dipped his head, and vanished in a plume of dark-black, sulfurous smoke. Exhaustion suddenly claimed me and I dropped like a stone into the seat behind me. Rubbing my temples, I told myself not to look and to shut her out entirely. I couldn’t allow the obsession to rule me once again.

I had a good life there, all things considered. I was isolated in many ways, but my servants—who were far more familial to me than master-and-servant dynamics should dictate—had willingly chosen to follow me.

Even Euralis had remained with me. I had friends there, and family, and peace from the pain of the worlds, even in some small measure. I might no longer have it all, but I had enough. So I must leave well enough alone.

But somehow I found myself reaching for the scrying bowl and whispering, “Illumos.”

Immediately I saw her, and my entire body burned. My blood, my skin, even my teeth tingled. I was a moth drawn to her flame, to the fire running down her back, and to the smoothness of ivory-porcelain skin that still glowed faintly from the siren’s lure. She had angelic features, an unsure and nervous gaze as she studied her darkened surroundings, and a rapid beat of her pulse in her throat. I saw it all, including the way she nibbled her bottom lip, but not right at its center like most people would when nervous. No, Shayera had always nibbled at the very most left corner of it, at the point where upper and lower met.

My heart ached, and a terrible sound spilled off my tongue, echoing like an animal’s last breaths in my chambers.

I was such a damn liar. I deserved to burn.

My love for her hadn’t lessened, not even a degree. I loved her more now than I’d ever loved her before.

Shoving the bowl off my lap, I watched the water soak into my thousand year old Turkish carpet and shook my head. I could not see her again. I could not talk to her. I had to stay away.

Somehow, I had to stay away.

~*~

Shayera

I LOOKED AT THE BOY, becoming less and less nervous with each step we took, as we continued to walk in silence.

Apart from his strange coloration, tail, cloven hooves, and the wee baby horns sprouting from his head, his face was the smooth, rounded visage of a child. He wore a pleasing smile, as though he thought happy, secret thoughts of the kind a child would think.

I stopped seeing the outer appearance and instead remembered the stories Mama had taught me as a child. She had come from Earth, unlike Papa, who’d always been a Kingdomer.

Mama had told me the most fanciful and imaginative stories from her lands. One in particular had always struck my fancy, of a mutant race of humans called the X-Men. They’d fight for justice and truth, even though they looked different from the normal humans, and sometimes those differences got them mocked and mistreated for it. At their heart, they were good people who’d just gotten a bum rap in genetics. Looking back on it, I wasn’t sure if maybe Mama wasn’t trying—in her own way—to prepare me for what I’d face someday. The man I was destined to love wasn’t human at all, but something entirely unique and different.

I’d always felt great affinity for one X-Man in particular, Nightcrawler. He looked like a demon but had the soul of a saint, a dichotomous union of the maligned and the pure. Something about his stories in particular had always tugged at my heartstrings.

I glanced at the boy, who suddenly made me think so much of my childhood hero that I felt an instant affinity to him. “What is your name, boy?”

I could read the shock on his face the moment he looked up at me. “You wish to know my name?”

I shrugged. “Seems a little rude not to.”

His grin was dazzling, full of sharp, brilliant white fangs, and my heart sped up just a little in a mixture of surprise and delight.

A feeling of belonging settled over me. Being there just felt right, as though it was exactly where I belonged. I only hoped I wasn’t too late to prove that to Rumpelstiltskin.

It was odd to me that I wanted so desperately to gain the approval of a male about whom I knew so very little, other than through stories told to me by others and one highly charged night of passion, lust, and horrible shame. If I thought too much about it, I felt like a fool. But I also understood deep in my bones that until I confronted the specter of us, neither he nor I would ever be able to move beyond this point.

And I didn’t know how I knew that. I simply did. Fate had led me there, and so there I remained.

“Turner,” he said.

I grinned. “I like your name.”

A metallic-looking glimmer passed over his cheeks, causing him to look as though he was blushing. “I like yours too.”

I hadn’t realized how far we’d walked until I glanced up and noticed a menacing gray-and-silver-veined castle of rocks sitting like an imposing bulwark before me. My pulse thrashed in my neck and I stopped walking, staring up at the place in awe and wonder.

“We’re here,” he said.

“I see that,” I whispered. A sense of déjà vu swept all the way through me and I recalled an image of a castle with lightning striking behind it and a man in black staring down at me as though he were Satan himself, coming to steal my soul.

I gulped and clutched at my pendant with nerveless fingers.

The scent of sulfur filled the air.

“Shayera Caron,” a tall and handsome male said, his skin as ebony dark as the child’s and his eyes the pure red of dancing flame. He bowed low before me. “Come with me.”