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The corner of Bael’s lip would turn up in a smirk, completely unashamed. “Fair enough.”
But none of that mattered.
Evidently, I’d miscalculated because it was not Bael who stepped out of the shadows and fixed me with a withering silver stare. “Hello, brother.”
* * *
“How doesit feel to know you’ll die down here?” the human guard sneered at me, shaking me from my reverie.
I jerked, blinking several times, and assessed him as he pushed me into a cell and slammed the door.
I typically liked humans and fought for their rights in Elsewhere, but this man was unmistakably the exception to the rule. His ruddy face and cruel, beady eyes spoke of one with a small amount of authority in a lightweight arena. Sadly for him, his future was as bleak as his appearance.
“I could ask you the same,” I said lightly.
“What’s that ’posed to mean?” he spat.
I opened my mouth to answer and closed it again as another prickle of awareness tugged at the back of my neck. Not a vision, but certainly a presence. I looked to the side, as if there were someone in my cell with me…but that was absurd.
The guard looked at me with a mean smile, probably thinking I was already going mad. I ignored him. It wasn’t that…not yet, anyway. It was something else.
The guards walked away down the corridor, the echoes of their footsteps and voices growing quieter with every breath. “I’m not sure it’s really him,” the human said, his voice carrying back to me. “Does anyone even know what the Dullahan looks like without his mask?”
“It’s him, you fucking idiot,” the Fae guard replied under his breath. “I’d get my affairs in order if I were you.”
“What’re you on about?”
“I’ve worked in this palace for nearly two centuries, more than long enough to remember when the prince left and changed his name. Believe me, that’s him.”
They moved away, their voices fading, and with them, so did my only means tosee. I now stood, frozen in the dark, as blind as any mortal for the first time that I could remember.
I sank onto the ground, prepared to fall into silent meditation for the coming weeks.
As a prophet, I could not see myself and therefore always traveled with a companion, but the other prisoners were too mad and too far away to be suitable subjects to see through. I’d known that I would be mostly blind for these weeks until my brother came to find me.
Leaning my head back against the filthy stone wall, I closed my eyes and tried to even out my breathing.
The gentle sound of breathing and the faint rhythm of a heartbeat on the other side of the stone sent a shock wave through me. Sucking in a breath, a faintly familiar scent reached me through every other foul smell clouding the air.
My eyes widened, my heartbeat speeding up.
It was impossible, and yet, there she was.
The source of my weakness. The source of that faint hum of awareness. The source of everything, right here, in the dark.
SCION
THE OBSIDIAN PALACE, EVERLAST CITY, PRESENT
She wasn’t even fucking here, and Lonnie Skyeborne’s loathsome presence was ruining my life.
Like a virus, she’d seeped into every aspect of this castle, waging silent war on everything she touched: the monarchy, my family, my tower; she’d even tainted this damn room.
In another life, I might have held council meetings in this room, but not now. Now, I sat, nearly catatonic, staring down at the gleaming black steps that led to the obsidian throne. It was the throne that had once belonged to my grandmother and should now belong to me; the throne that, like so much else, remained just out of reach; the throne that Lonnie Skyborne ruined with her mere existence.
By the Source, if this was how my legacy was to end, I only hoped history did me the kindness of forgetting my name altogether.
“How is she?” Gwydion’s voice rang hollowly through the echo-filled room.
