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“It has been many a year since you last requested an audience, Faenir.” Queen Claria’s voice was rugged with age. It cracked and popped as though she needed to clear something from her throat. I hated many things in life, but her existence made everything pale in comparison. “I admit I would have preferred not to have seen your face for an even longer period of time. Looking upon you is a painful reminder of what you took from me. Tell me, child, what has dragged you before me like the unwanted mutt you are?”
Child. Even now she degraded me as though a century was nothing but a blink in time. I supposed to be someone so withered and ancient, one hundred and thirteen years of living was youthful in comparison.
I stood rigid before the curved oak throne her hunched frame sat upon. She looked small within it, like a child sitting on a chair meant for adults. The twisting, intricately woven back of the throne was polished and twisted together like the antlers of the proudest stag. It had been carved from a stump of dark wood, with its roots still rising and falling out of the earth beneath it.
The heart of Evelina.
Where the dense foliage reached above the throne, explosions of blood-red roses crowned the glade as their petals fell like snow around us. If one did not look close enough, they would have been fooled by the trick of life and beauty. I was not privy to such blindness. The glade should have been a place of colour, now it was far from it. Dull and muted, entrapped in the grasp of death. Every year, Evelina seemed to retreat into death a little more than the one before.
I recognised death, for it sang to my soul.
We were one in the same.
“Apologies if my presence disturbs you. My visit will be brief,” I replied, hearing the careless tone that had entered my voice as it echoed across the enchanted forest we stood within.
Claria waved a veined hand as though she wished our meeting to end quickly. “Then get on with it so your presence does not encourage Evelina to perish any more than required.”
I fought the urge to drop her hateful, judging stare. With great effort, I swallowed the stone of defiance and cleared my throat. “I request to be pardoned from the day’s Choosing.”
“Denied,” she barked quickly.
My breathing quickened, my body growing stiffer where I stood. “It is not required for me to visit Tithe. You know what will happen if I partake in the Choosing. It would not bode well for our relationship with the humans.”
As Myrinn had warned me.
Claria leaned forward in the throne, thin arms resting on each armrest as they trembled to hold her weight. “There could have been a time that your Choosing of a human mate would have been celebrated. As heir to this world, it would have secured your succession and ensured your mother, my dearest Eleaen, to step down. You could have been King.”
“Could have,” I echoed back. “Being the optimal words, grandmother.”
“Indeed,” she said through a scowl. All at once she rocked back into the throne, bones cracking with even the most subtle of movements. “You, like your dearest siblings, will visit Tithe and take your mate. If we have hopes of preventing the demise of our kind, then we must continue with the Choosing. I understand you may not see the importance and the part you have to play… you have always been such a selfish, twisted child.”
I am no child. I wanted to scream it. My shadows coiled within the far corners of the forest, begging for me to call upon their comfort.
The child had died when I was old enough to recognise what I had done, what my being alive had caused and why it had made me so hated by Claria. By my family.
“You are aware of what will happen if you force my hand to do this.”
My grandmother smiled. It was the first time I had seen her smile in countless years that I believed it was not something she had the potential for. Bright and gleaming, it smoothed the many wrinkles of her bitter, old face and caused her amber eyes to glow from within. “You will kill the poor soul that you pick. For that is what you do. Your touch is as cursed as you are, Faenir. And it will further prevent you from stealing the crown I have worked tirelessly to keep from you.”
“I never desired to be King, Claria,” I spat, sensing the dancing shadows as though they waited for my command to devour her where she sat. “I have said it many times, yet still, you do not listen. Or simply choose not to.”
“It is all well and good, but until it is proven to the realm that you are barren of possibility to find a mate to rule beside, then I will go to all measures to ensure your failure.”
At that, I dropped her gaze just before her light, amused chuckle spilled out.
“Let the humans see you in the same light that we do. Let them come to know the monster that is Faenir.”
3
Tom was rushing, made clear mostly from his frantic thrusts and his not so careful hands. The most telling sign was his lack of focus, chestnut eyes flicking towards the window as if the impending light of dawn would reach Tithe quicker every time he would look away.
It killed the mood for me. He was so distracted by the arrival of morning that he hardly noticed when I stopped gyrating on his hard, long cock.
It took Tom a moment to look back up at me, beads of glistening sweat tracing down the prominent bones of his strong face. His brows furrowed with a mixture of confusion and annoyance.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, deep voice enough to clear my frustration and lose myself in the sex again. I was certain his voice alone could remove my clothes from my body.
Among many other things, some not as nice as the others, Tom was handsome. For me, it was his only redeeming feature that kept me returning most evenings. I had slept, tangled within his sheets, far more times than I had my own. He served his purpose, of course, acting as a distraction from my mind and the world around me.
