Page 93 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

“I’m hot,” I said, following after him. “Where are we going?”

He shed his own jacket and threw it over my shoulders. “Somewhere.”

Visha didn’t look pleased at all when Malik faded back along with her in his tails. She took in the meeting room and then me, blinking a little confused at both of us.

Currently, she sat before us, not moving an eyelid or breathing at all from the way her shoulders and chest didn’t move. The woman was a corpse. A very pretty, red haired, corpse with a voluptuous body. She took in every word that Malik told her and then just stood there, looking more annoyed than she was when she arrived.

“What he says is possible,” Visha agreed. “Something might be feeding off from your magic underneath the land. Could be anything. Whatever it is has established some sort of a tie between you and them. You can sense it and it can sense you back.”

I shuddered.

She turned to Malik who’d remained quiet all this time. “I will need a sample of the earth and some of your blood.”

Malik faded and then returned with a shovel full of mud, slamming it on the table before Visha. He handed me a handkerchief. “Do you want me to do it?”

I nodded. Extending a hand to him.

Taking a dagger from my thigh harness, he brought the blade to the tip of my finger, letting it bleed over the white handkerchief until it formed a massive red splotch.

“There,” he said, throwing it to Visha who sighed, stood and grabbed it all before disappearing inside a portal.

Malik brought my finger to his mouth, sucking on the little cut. “If it happens again,” he said, leaving a small kiss on the tiny cut. “You come to me, alright?”

I nodded, and abruptly stood like a firework that was about to burst.

“Where are you going?” he asked, following after me as I swerved the castle corridors.

Nope. This wasn’t me running away from him. It definitely wasn’t me trying to escape his presence before I did or said something embarrassing. Gods, I wanted him so badly. Ten long goddamn years had changed nothing. I still felt like that nineteen-year-old girl who was out of mind infatuated with him. “It’s Friday. I visit the Tenebrose Academy on Fridays.”

“Not this Friday. Not like this.”

I snorted, trying to keep my composure. “I’m fine. Nothing hurts. And it isn’t like this is new or anything.”

He kept following after me as I made my way out to the stables. “I’m coming with you.”

No. No. No. “Aren’t your soldiers already doing a fantastic job at invading every moment of privacy I have, or terrifying just about every Isjordian?”

“I want to keep an eye on you myself.”

I stopped walking and turned to him. “Malik.”

“You said you wanted my eyes on you,” he said, stepping impossibly close. “Truth is, I want that, too. Let me.”

Oh gods. “Don’t scare them.”

“With this adorable face? Never.”

Just like he’d said, the students liked the idiot's adorable face. They’d surrounded him, asking all sorts of questions that he gladly answered with some wild exaggerations. He went against my wishes of terrifying them, but he did it in such a way that they felt protected from it—he made sure they understood that they were now his to protect and that our enemies would be the ones to face those qualms.

“Is it true that you taught the queen how to control the dead?” one of the students asked, Agnes, the granddaughter of a priestess.

“I do not do that, Agnes, despite what your old grandma says.”

“She’s lying,” Malik said, stretching on a student’s chair and engulfing the tiny space entirely. “She controls me and then I control them.”

They all let out a synchronised awe and chuckled and blushed on my behalf.

“Back to your classes now,” I ordered, and they all grumbled as they waved at us one last time before they left.