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“You see what happens to those I touch?” Faenir asked, voice peaked with the question. “Then tell me why you still stand. Why did you not die as you should have when your fingers took my wrist and stopped me? What,Arlo, makes you so different?”
I did not take my eyes from Tom’s rotting corpse as Faenir stepped towards me. It was as though the shadows in the room closed in around us, blocking out the light from the moon and covering every wall until we stood within a hellscape of darkness in another realm.
“Until you can answer me,” Faenir said, voice urging the darkness to creep closer as if his presence commanded it. “You will be mine.”
8
Iwas lost to a sea of darkness. Its current was resilient, dragging me from my feet and throwing my world into chaos.
I had a sense I was moving but not because I was walking. It came in the unsettling jolt that filled my stomach as though I was looking down at the world from a great height, except there was nothing for me to see, only the endless darkness as though hands were held over my eyes.
There was no use in crying out, to scream from fear or wail like a broken-hearted creature from the memory of Tom dying before my eyes. No one would hear me. My throat would fill with the shadows the moment my lips opened, blocking my airway and silencing me with its greedy hands.
Was I dying? It was the clearest thought that I could latch onto. Faenir had reached for me, fingers grazing my cheek in what should have been an affectionate touch. But then the darkness took over.
Perhaps his touch, the one that had killed Tom, his father and mother, had taken me too.
An image of Auriol’s face flashed through my mind suddenly. It was an explosion of brilliant light fighting away the shadows so I could see her clearly. Life. That was what the halo that surrounded her frame was.
The edges of the vision were blurry, but the life that encompassed her was bright and frightening. I was beside her. My body glowed with the same aura of light as hers. I could see the horrific embarrassment on her face and the determined hatred in mine. How my mismatching eyes glared at the person’s viewpoint I was getting a glimpse of. Faenir. I was seeing from his eyes during the Choosing.
It lasted only a moment.
Then everything stopped. The world stilled. The darkness quietened its siren call.
Only four words seemed to whisper in the silence, so faint, it was the only thing for me to cling to.
You will be mine.
* * *
It was the cold breeze that dusted across my sodden skin that woke me.
Then I heard the gentle brush of… water, lapping up against a shore of smoothed stone which joined in with a chorus of bird calls. I laid there with my eyes pinched closed, enjoying the calming feeling my senses kept me entrapped in.
But then I remembered that in Tithe there was no body of water large enough to cause such a sound and certainly not one close to home.
I bolted upright, eyes snapping wide, to find that I was laid out across a bed I did not recognise in a room I had never seen before. It was a vast bedroom constructed from walls of white stone with veins of dark grey that spread through them like rivers. Directly before the bed, which was big enough for at least five grown men to fill, was an arched doorway generously giving view to the world beyond.
Sheer curtains moved in the breeze, twisting like ghosts dancing to the chorus of nature.
I focused on the open, cloudless skies and the faint outline of what looked like the peaks of a mountainous range far in the distance. This world was certainly not the one I knew.
I was no longer in Tithe.
Heart pounding, I threw myself from the bed. The sheets that had been draped across me almost caused me to fall flat upon my face as they tangled with my feet. Steadying myself, head thundering in harmony with my heart, my hands went to my belt. One hand clasped the pouch hiding the vials which calmed me somewhat. The other went to the empty sheath that should have held my knife, the one I had last brandished towards Faenir whilst standing above the dead body of Tom.
“I thought it best to keep this from you. It would be foolish to allow a weapon to be kept in your hands when I do not know what you do with it.”
I turned on my heel, fists gathered into balls before me, and faced the speaker.
Faenir leaned against a doorframe at the other end of the room. His legs were crossed at his ankles, rivulets of dark hair falling over his chest like waves of shadow. A shiver spread down from my skull as I watched him, stupefied, as he twisted my knife in one hand with the tip of the metal spinning upon his finger. He pulled it away to reveal a droplet of ruby blood before swiftly sticking his finger in his mouth, raising his golden stare to me, and cleaning the blood with his tongue.
“Where have you taken me?” I hissed, nails cutting crescent moons into my palms.
“To my home.”
I wished to take my eyes from the elven prince and glance across the room once again. But I knew that would have been foolish.
