CHAPTER TWENTY
ARABELLA
I stood in front of a well-kept cottage. It was midday and the sun beat down on my shoulders and back. Sweat beaded on my forehead and upper lip. I’d definitely chosen the wrong outfit for this weather. Aromatic herbs grew in the window boxes, their savory and sweet scents carrying on the balmy air. The front door was wide open. I walked forward, slowly climbing the steps, cringing when they creaked underfoot. The woman who was inside might not be a friend. It might not even be a woman. It might be a human-eating monster…
Dingy white paint peeled off the door and the handle was rusted, but I peered into the dimness, straining to see inside. There was fabric all over the place, littered across every surface. Bolts of every texture imaginable were wrapped neatly around wooden planks. Most of the material was black, but some of it was tan and leathery. It looked how I would imagine human skin would look if it were stripped from a body, cured and softened, and then rolled onto a plank…
Entranced by the cottage, I didn’t notice the humming until it stopped. “Who’s there?”
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I think I’m in the wrong place.”
“Come inside,” the voice entreated.
Swallowing, I slowly began backing across the porch toward the front steps. There was no way I was going in there.
“Come inside now, or I will end you, human,” the voice sneered.
She was probably fae. Probably evil, by the looks of her bolts of “fabric.”
“Who are you?” I asked shakily.
The voice cackled. “You came to my house.”
“I didn’t mean to,” I tried to explain, but then an invisible force began dragging me toward her, into the house. Once I was inside, the door slammed closed behind me. I tried the handle, but it wouldn’t even turn.
“I don’t want to hear excuses, I want to know how you got here,” the woman snapped. Now that I was inside, I saw her; her long white hair hung over her face, obscuring it, but her voice sounded young. She sat on a stool in front of a long table scattered with spools of thread, needles, and measuring ribbons.
“This stupid ring brought me here.” I twisted the band on my finger, trying to remove it, but it was stuck. When I looked back up, the woman was standing in front of me. I jumped backward.
She grabbed my hand and glanced up at me, her blood-red eyes narrowed. “Where did you get this?”
“Queen Coeur,” I stammered. “I… I’m a player in her game.”
The girl made a disgusted noise and returned to her stool, picking up her needle and angrily working it in and out of a swath of dark fabric. She whistled and everything in the room changed. The bolts of fabric weren’t dark at all, though the leathery flesh-toned ones didn’t change. The actual fabric pieces were yellow, red, blue, green, and every color in between. There were colorful candles and spools of thread, and even the woman’s clothes took on a dark crimson hue.
“That is my ring,” she revealed. “Rule gave me one just like it.” She nodded to a piece of twine hanging in the window. Tied onto it was the twin to the one I wore. “She’s clever. I’ll give her that. Using you to find me.”
“You’re Esmerelda,” I breathed. “His heartmate.”
She made a noise in the back of her throat. “Was his heartmate. He cloaked the tether.”
I felt a strange kinship with this woman. “I know how the cloak works. It dulls the feeling, but doesn’t erase it.”
She glanced up at me, pausing her stitches. “No, it doesn’t. It makes everything worse, not better. Hiding your problems or pretending they don’t exist is not the way to handle them. But it’s Rule’s way.”
“Is that why you’re here and not with him?”
“Yes,” she answered softly. “Don’t get me wrong – I hate that witch of a mother of his, but his decisions are what tore us apart. He had the chance to be with me, to move away from her control, but refused to take it. He hid me away so she couldn’t hurt me, but it was a selfish thing to do. Because now, I’m alone. I can never leave this place, and only he can visit.” She glanced at the ring. “Until you. What’s your name, girl?”
“Arabella.”
“Arabella,” she repeated, tasting my name and staring at me like she was trying to decide if my name fit my face.
“He caged you,” I guessed, feeling both despair and anger in her words.
“Yes. He didn’t want her to kill me, because he knew she would have. But he never asked me if I wanted to live like this.” She pursed her lips together. “His mother has been trying to find me for centuries. It’s only a matter of time until she finds a way. And this time, she just might have.”
“He’s probably watching right now,” I noted with a start. “This is all part of the game.”
Esmerelda shook her head. “He’ll see what Coeur wants him to see, and she won’t want him to see her trick. He’ll never even know you were here. When you picked up that ring, he probably saw it as a plain silver band. Coeur is a master of manipulation. But I guess you already know that if you’re a player in her game.”
Her dark skin was beautiful, a mix of chocolate and honey. I could see her with Rule. She was even more beautiful than he was, and that was saying something. The two would make a lovely pair. If only Rule would stand up to his mother and take his heartmate back.
“I could tell him what you just told me. In private.”
She shook her head. “You are tethered to him, too. I can smell him on you.”
“My heartmate is my partner. His life is at stake, too. If you could help us win the game, maybe you and Rule could finally be together.”
She shook her head. “That would require a desire that I no longer feel for him,” she reasoned. “He made his choice a long time ago, and I’ve long since made mine. I couldn’t help you anyway. I can’t leave this place.”
“There’s no way out for you but through Rule?”
“There’s also Coeur,” she granted. “If she found me, she’d drag me out of here and behead me in front of her court just to hurt him. She’d make an absolute spectacle of it.”
The image of O’Hare’s head flashed through my mind.
“There is one other way,” she began hesitantly.
“How? Tell me, and I’ll try to make it happen.”
“He came here just yesterday, asking if I would break our tether if I could. Was he hoping to break yours, too, I wonder? What game is he playing at?” she mused. Then, struck with a thought, she clutched her measuring ribbon. “I have an idea.”
Her crimson eyes followed the tick marks on the ribbon as she measured the circumference of my head. “Six and three-quarters,” she proclaimed with a smile. “Perfect.”
On the back wall were racks of hats. Some tall, some dainty. Some with ribbon and some with plumes on the side. The one she chose for me was emerald with black lace laid over the green silk. “He will know where you’ve been now, and he’ll know what his mother is searching for. As much as I hate being caged, I do hope for the chance to one day fly away. That will never happen if Coeur finds me.”
The hat was tall, a top hat made for a woman, and fit as if it were made for me. “The color of the day is black?” she asked.
“It was when we left,” I answered, rolling my eyes.
She grinned and waved her hand, and the dark leather suit I’d worn upon entering the day’s game turned into a short, black lace dress. “No shoes?” she observed.
“It pisses Coeur off.”
Esmerelda chuckled. “I’ll remember that. Tell the Queen I said hello.”
With a conspiratorial grin, I removed the ring and was pulled back into the throne room, landing awkwardly in the ocean of rings. Carden was still there, and with my sudden arrival he gave me a quizzical look. “Where have you been?”
But before I could answer, a deafening roar echoed all around us. It reverberated in the room, in the halls, probably outside the castle. We covered our ears and waited for it to end. The rings turned to liquid, cool around our legs, and drained out of the room via a drain at the base of the clock. The hands were moving in the right direction now. I hoped it was a sign that we just might get out of there.
Rule was looking for a way to cut a tether. I could only hope that he wanted to be free of his mother as much as we did.
“We need to find a way out of here. Now,” I said urgently.
“How?”
“Hurry!” I pulled him toward the doors that had suddenly reappeared. “While they’re distracted.”
We pushed the double doors open and ran like hell. We raced down the hallways, hoping we could get out of the castle.
ORYN
I’d been watching the woods for days, ever since that orange-haired fellow appeared in mid-air, only to kill and cut the heads off two fae soldiers and take them with him as souvenirs. I’d been watching the spot where he came from in case anyone else came through or showed up to open whatever door he’d come out of. If this was the way into the world of the fae, I needed to sneak in. I had an uneasy suspicion Arabella might be trapped there.
All night and all day, nothing happened. I was starting to think I was crazy, when a bright shimmer waved across the air, filling it with the stinging scent of magic. I ran for it. The shimmery slit began to close, but I dove inside and hit the ground hard, knocking the breath out of me.
Coughing and sputtering, I rolled onto my side. Fiery pain raced through my middle and into my chest, and I was pretty sure I broke something. Shit. The ribs on my right side were on fire.
A woman suddenly appeared in the forest with striking white hair, dusky skin, and blistering red eyes. She smiled, grabbed me by the hair, and started dragging me through the woods. “Stop, please!” I cried.
She wouldn’t stop. My chest was caving in and I couldn’t get enough air. “I’m hurt. You’re killing me. Please, stop,” I gasped.
The woman paused, letting go of my hair and looking me over. “You’ve punctured your lung,” she offered clinically, before crouching down beside me and pointing a sharp fingernail in my face. “I will heal you, human. But when I do, you’re going to tell me exactly how you got here, and if you leave any detail out, I’ll break your ribs all over again. And this time, I won’t just puncture your lung. I’ll gouge your eyes out with your own rib bone before I carve you apart… slowly.”
“Help me,” I panted, squeezing my eyes shut against the pain. The healing powers of fae were legendary, and I knew she was just as deadly as she threatened to be.
Easing her fingers over my skin, the bones deftly popped back into place and knitted themselves together. I could feel the moment when my lung filled back up with air. When she sat back and growled, I spilled everything I knew.
“My sister’s missing. I’ve been trying to find her for days, so I wondered if she might be among the fae. I used to deal with this guy named O’Hare. He used to give me faery dust in exchange for killing a few fae he said owed him favors and wouldn’t pay up.”
“Used to?”
“I’ve put his calling symbol into the earth more times than I can count since she went missing, but he hasn’t replied.”
“How is it that a simple human can manage ‘to kill a few fae’? Most fae are stronger and faster than any human. Even one as fit as yourself.”
She thought I was fit? “He’d tell me what their weaknesses were. It was just a matter of using them to my advantage.”
“Said the lion to the lamb…” she quoted.
There was something feral in her expression that set me on edge. Of the two of us, she was definitely the lioness. But I was no foolish lamb.
“You tracked your sister into this forest?”
“I left her in a safe spot and just went to get water from a nearby stream. She wouldn’t have left without good reason, and I wasn’t gone that long. I tracked her footprints through the woods until they opened into a huge, empty field. On one of the tree branches that surrounded the field, I found a ripped piece of her skirt. I knew she’d been there, but I could swear…”
“You could swear what?”
“I heard her yell my name. Her voice was muffled and it sounded strange, but it was her. I know my sister’s voice. Maybe the faery dust I wore helped heighten my senses. I don’t know, but I knew she was nearby.”
“But you weren’t able to find her.” She said it as fact, staring into the space between us as if she were seeing what I saw, as if she knew exactly where I’d been and heard Bella yelling for me.
“There was a male faery in the forest a little while ago, the first I’d seen in days, so I followed him and saw him disappear into thin air. I camped out where I saw him and waited. After a while, he reappeared in the same place and killed two fae soldiers that must have been trailing him, though they didn’t hide themselves very well. He... he was vicious.” I shuddered. “I knew better than to ask him about Bella, but I need to find her. I’m supposed to look out for her, you know. She’s my baby sister. So, anyway, I waited in the woods to see if he came back.”
“He did not return,” she announced confidently.
“No, no one did. But just a few minutes ago, I saw a shimmer, like a crack in the air. When I ran to see what it was, it started closing up and I jumped into it and landed hard. That’s when I met you, and that’s all I know, I swear. I just want Bella back. I mean you no harm.”
“Bella. Your sister is Arabella?” she asked, ticking her head back.
A sudden burst of hope flashed through my chest. “You know where she is?” I stood up, brushing the dirt and leaves off my pants.
“I know she’ll be dead by morning.”