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“Check along the Wall, the wasteland,” she told Ameera, who didn’t question why. Only nodded and left the room.
Two hours and forty-two minutes passed.
Two hours and forty-twofucking minutes that Isla was left with the silence of her own paranoid thoughts as a team of stylists and artists scrubbed and plucked and preened her, rubbed her skin raw, and then soothed it to smoothness before lathering her in lotions and perfumes that were somehow subtle. Two hours and forty minutes that she dealt with that pounding in her head.
And still no Kai.
In the small moments of reprieve from being prepared like a fine holiday meal, she tried to distract herself by reading, returning to her book from last night on charting the stars and celestial events. Frankly, that only led to more frustrations because there was nothing about this supposed “dark moon” that Cassius had told Adrien about. Nothing about losing their ability to shift, the loss of magic, or bloodlust-ridden creatures.
The only interesting thing that she could find, if anything, was how, on the equinoxes, one could use the stars to map the other realms, and with the veil at its thinnest, constellations took the form of the eternally sealed doorways between their worlds, and the darkness of their sky, the reason it could be so unique and beautiful on nights like tonight, was because it was actually bleeding with the darkness of others. The realm of the fae, demons, deities, or all of them at once.
Isla shook away the chilling feeling of being watched.
Only hours remained until moonrise.
“Hey, careful, careful!”
From where she’d been reaching for her glass of sparkling wine, Isla snapped her gaze up at Davina, who’d been with her for most of the afternoon. She, herself, looked beautiful in a rust-colored dress that, coupled with her dark makeup and coppery hair, made her appear as autumn-incarnate.
Every one of their friends had roles to play today. While Rhydian, Jonah, and Ameera went looking for Kai, Davina kept her sane, and Sebastian and Adrien, little did they know, were Isla’s eyes on her father’s movements.
“I got it.” Isla drained the bubbling contents in an impressively graceful swig, careful not to mess with the pale blush painting her lips.
“Marin will kill me if I let you ruin your makeup,” Maeve, her handmaiden who’d become more like a friend over these past weeks, said from the small, raised platform behind her. She took a lock of Isla’s hair, threading it through a jewel. “Or your dress.”
Her dress. Layers of silk and velvet, of sparkling jewels and embroidery, that had been worked on over the past weeks by Deimos’s most skilled seamstresses. Seamstresses she’d already showered in gifts and thanked a million times over. Heavy yet movable, so dark that it gobbled up the light in the room, the gown’s embellishments glimmered like a sea of stars. The silver twining and diamond whorls over the bodice, tapering her waist and lining the trim that skimmed the marble floor of the dressing room, told a tale of the heavens. Even tiny gems trailed up her arms along her fitted sleeves and were carefully placed over the cape she’d don this evening.
She looked like she truly had been Goddess-blessed. If only she hadn’t felt like a wreck.
“He would never do this to me on purpose. Something has to be wrong.” Isla gathered her skirts. She’d sat around and played the part long enough. Maeve finished her work just before Isla began moving. “I’m going to find him.”
“But Isla, your dress.” Davina rose from her seat, her hesitant movements betraying that she was all for Isla’s searching and may have actually wanted to search for herself.
“I’ll keep it clean.” Before any arguments could come that there were already people out looking for Kai, Isla added, “Iam his mate, and there is no point in any of this if he isn’t standing next to me.”
Isla heard nothing else. She wrenched open the door and stormed into the hallway, her dress billowing around her like a whirlwind of night.
Watery sunlight spilled through the airy windows of the suspended hallway that connected the North and Western Halls. Through the stone archways, Isla could see down the rolling hills in the expanse of Mavec. Not as well as she would’ve from the overlook before the stain-glassed window, but enough to notice the bustling closer to the hall. Guards were being briefed on their posts and ropes were set up to organize spectators and keep them off her processional path. Streamers billowed from poles, and decorations of harvest were being set across the grounds.
Marin had said the crowd that gathered would be something to behold, and though her actual anointing would take place within the throne room, where the crowd could not be vast, they would hold no citizen back from witnessing when she and Kai emerged onto the veranda to greet them, as alpha and luna. A statement. She was their queen, and she would stick by Kai, stick by them, through anything.
A knot coiled in her stomach.
“Where the hell are you?” Her whisper was caught in the autumn-scented breeze.
“Your Majesty.”
Isla whipped around, beholding a bowing man dressed in a navy staff uniform. He was young, maybe around Kai’s age, and his brown eyes shone with uncertainty as he rose from his bend. She wouldn’t bother correcting him about her not beingher majestyquite yet. “Yes?”
The staff member kept his head lowered as he closed the distance between them. Lowly, he said, “The alpha sent me to get you.”
Isla jerked back, blinking. “The alpha? My mate, the alpha?”
Noticing that she’d drawn some attention from below, she shifted out of the window’s eyeshot. “Where is he?” she whispered so aggressively that the staff member started.
“In one of the old staff quarters. I’ll take you to him if you’re finished…um, dressing.”
The old staff quarters? Had he been here all along?
