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Her mate leveled her with a stare that saidsupreme prince of demonshere. “It’s the difference in whether I can hit Noxx with a strike team to extract the kids, or we can rally an army with other kingdoms that won’t violate any treaties.”
“Oh.” She hadn’t thought of political implications. No, she had been awash in the misery of knowing other children suffered as she had.
Not softening his gaze, he said, “You are not a science experiment. You’re my angel.”
Memories of what they’d spent the last week doing at his home—theirhome—had her cheeks flushing. “Really? Even after our mating ceremony, you’re sticking with the angel theory?”
“Almost the truth,” Alys said. “After analyzing the shackles and following every lead, my best guess would be you’re descended from a celestial being. A star. Not the Hollywood kind. An actual freakin’ star.”
A tingling spread through Joelle’s chest, one having little to do with magic. Her mouth went dry, and anxiety sent her senses spiraling. It couldn’t be. The impossibility hammered at her mind until she couldn’t think straight. “I can’t.... it’s too much.” She squeezed her eyes shut and hid her face in Alexei’s neck. Their lightning-fast courtship and her acceptance into the kingdom affectionately called the horde seemed normal compared to this. “What demon prince wants to be mated to an alien?”
ChapterTwenty-Six
“You’re mine.” Alexei needed to wipe the doubt from Joelle’s gaze. The idea that he wouldn’t want her because of whatever metal and rock fragments his sister had studied in her lab? Ridiculous. “No tests or data can change that. Besides, she didn’t say you’re an alien, right?” He stared at Alys to make this better, no matter what lies she might have to tell.
“Right,” his sister insisted, her firm tone a clue that she might’ve caught the obvious horror in his mate’s use of the wordalien. “If anything, the stones in the shackles indicate your kind would have been here before demon hybrids in the supernatural timeline when you consider my research as to the—”
He interrupted before she hopped down the brainiac rabbit hole of whatever origins work she’d done that didn’t pertain to Joelle. “What’d you find in the shackles?”
“Meteoric iron,” Alys said. “Radiocarbon dating puts it as over three billion years old. Noxx must’ve spent a fortune accumulating samples this ancient, though the ones she used on the ship didn’t come back quite as aged.”
The faster his sister babbled, the more Joelle shut down in his arms. Her muscles went tense, her breathing shallow, her skin pale. “Plain language,” he said.
“Star iron.” His sister talked with her hands, still clutching the remote. “Literally, iron from meteors. Early humans worshipped it, believing the rocks were gifts from the gods. They used them in tools and weapons, but I didn’t find any sadist before the Order who worked them into restraints.”
He hoped Alys hadn’t brought the damn things in here to terrorize his mate further. “That’d better not be what’s left of the shackles in that box.”
“It’s not,” she said. “But it got me to thinking how comic books use kryptonite as a secret weapon so what if the same principle works on your mate?”
Joelle’s powers flickered. It’d taken them a full day and lots of good sex to turn off the light after the ship. “I’mnota comic book character,” she said, some bite back in her voice. “What other proof do you have supporting your theory?”
Theory.Good word for it. Whatever story his sister was selling—he wouldn’t believe without solid evidence. He sat back, letting his mind spin on both mysteries she’d handed them. The map on the screen showed targets in several kingdoms. If he could find Noxx and the missing kids, he could mobilize entire armies ifhe had a week and links to children of other kingdoms. With that lead, he could actuallydosomething. As for Joelle’s origins, he could only manage whatever fallout came—either from her feelings at the unknown, her dislike of a proven fact, or having to tell everyone about her new powers before they figured out the reason or how to control her magic.
Alys scrolled on her phone and the television flashed to another photo. This one of a crude engraving on the shackles, the dark metal showing signs of rust and corrosion. Those must’ve been the irons he had taken off Joelle when they first met.
“How’d I miss that?” he asked. Sure, he hadn’t checked the shackles too closely when his main concern had been breaking them off Joelle. But he would’ve noticed a cutting so obvious. When she skipped to another shot on lighter metal, he cursed.
“You didn’t,” Joelle said. “Those markings weren’t on my cuffs. I spent years in the first ones. I would’ve known.” She sounded as though she had left something out of her explanation—something important.
Before he could ask what she hid, his sister answered her. “Because Noxx carved the inside of the cuffs and, after I studied them under the microscope, I found both symbols in the star iron fragments themselves.” She flipped to vivid photographs that looked almost like stained glass. “See?”
He didn’t see anything more than pretty colors, but Joelle must have.
“Polarized,” she explained. “You took those digital photographs with your microscope here in the lab? Incredible pixelation. Did you isolate the symbols?”
Alys grinned as if she’d found her new nerdy best friend. “Of course I did.” She scrolled again, and a rainbow of the symbols he’d seen on Joelle’s skin now shone across the screen.
“What the hell?” he asked, reaching for his mate’s arm. “How’d these—” He studied one on her wrist. “—get into a damn moon rock?”
“Meteor,” both women corrected him. He took comfort in the fact that neither seemed on the verge of losing her magic. The last thing he needed would be for his sister to invoke her pain-bringing powers or for his mate to wipe out everyone in the warehouse like she’d done on the ship. He looked to Joelle. “When she showed the markings on the shackles, you recognized them?” Not his most to-the-point question, but the best he could manage with all the new information coming at him.
She glanced at him, a wariness to her eyes. “Yes, but I figured Noxx carved them based on my skin, not from a crystal formation she found in meteors. I looked all through your library and found no signs of my marks. I don’t understand. If these space rocks have been here for billions of years, surely someone before Noxx would’ve found the same patterns and shapes. So why didn’t they show up in any of your supernatural histories?”
His sister cut in. “Because people thought the symbols were a hoax, not real magic. A century ago, the human son of America’s first multimillionaire wrote a book that he swore had been revealed to him by a goddess. He published it, but his family committed him to an asylum within the year so no one believed his rantings. Instead, the press ridiculed it as the wild imagination of a rich man. When the same symbols he had drawn in hisBook of Truthsturned up in cave drawings from Mexico to China to Africa, people thought he’d paid to have them planted.”
“TheBook of Truths?” Joelle asked. “I’ve never heard of that.”
“Nita found it this morning.” Alys sounded proud. “She tracked a copy to a small private college supported by the man’s descendants. A friend portaled it to her while you two waited here.”
