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Faye leaned to the side, peering around Sadi at Rune. “What do you want?”
“Eat.”
“You have me in a nice room, trying to get me to eat. Why am I here?”
“I need you for a task.”
Darkness, could this guy be any more vague. “What task do you need me for?”
“I need to look into your mind,” Rune answered simply.
Faye glanced between Sadi and Rune. “What are you looking for?” Now Rune glanced at Sadi. “You don’t get challenged much, do you?”
He took a slow breath staring at her. “It would seem you are making up for my many years.”
“Is this part of your touch invitation? You need me to cooperate?”
Rune canted his head at her. “Are you requesting I tear through your mind until I find what I need? Your suggestion is a painful alternative I can arrange.”
Faye looked him up and down. “You’re a dark-blood. I’m betting if you could, you would have done whatever you’re planning by now. So, I think you need me more than I need you.”
The two dark-bloods exchanged a glance, and Faye got the feeling they were speaking telepathically, which solidified her assumption. They wanted something from her and needed itbadly. “Just tell me what you’re looking for.”
Rune glared at her, and said, “It does not concern you.”
Faye waved at her surroundings. “You holding me here begs otherwise.” She lifted her chin and walked to the other end of the room to sit on the far window ledge and stare off into the crystalline landscape.
Rune took the bowl of soup from Sadi and placed it back on the table. “Leave her. She will eat when she becomes hungry enough.”
Faye drew her feet up on the ledge when they left and leaned on the window frame.
No, I won’t.
Chapter thirteen
Runescannedthetomesthat lined the bookcases in his study. His clarity left him when he stood in her presence. He wanted her close to safeguard her and placed her in the only other room in his wing. Rune reminded himself it mattered not. She was unfamiliar with court and wouldn’t understand the significance. He would be rid of her in a few days at most.
Rune selected the volumes he needed and sat behind his desk. The pages creaked as he opened the first tome. Delicately tracing his fingertips over the page as he read.
Sadi appeared beside him, leaned back, and ran a long red nail over the book spines stacked beside him. “What are you doing?”
“Reading.”
She tugged on a length of his hair. When he glanced up at her unamused, she said, “With her.”
“Containing my liability until I can free myself.” Rune turned the pages of a journal containing the races his father destroyed.
His father hunted each race that sided against him during the Great War to extinction. But Julian lacked focus. Discipline. He slaughtered a great many of them. But a few surfaced now and again through the ages.
“Do you think she’s a descendant?”
Such a simple word fired horrific memories through him, a filth that coated his mind.
“We purged Sadira’s court,” Sadi laid her hand over his wrist. “She’s no longer a threat.”
Sadira hailed from a race Julian massacred. She’d captured him thinking he was his father and kept him to suffer for his father’s deeds. Centuries separated him from his time in her court, allowing him to push the memories away.
Rune took Sadi’s hand, returning it to her. “I am well. I am reviewing the shifting races my father thought to exterminate. Her wings and claws are not a characteristic of any living race. To be reborn as you say she is, she would need to be linked by blood. Likely the same bloodline of the coward behind this spell.”
