Dark Prince's Desire (5 page)

Chapter Seven

The court palace was never the same when he visited. Raze knew that, of course, since he’d been the one to anchor the magic that siphoned the worst of the phae’s devastating passions. The emotions hadn’t simply vanished, though. Instead, the seething energy fed the palace’s never-ending metamorphosis.

Though the beauty or terror of its exterior were never entirely indicative of what might be found within, he’d learned to be cautious of the place when it was at its most heartbreakingly lovely. Because while the
phae
had renounced the true emotion that had once been their Undoing, they had kept their keen appreciation for irony.

He stepped just far enough within the doorway to let Yelena enter behind him without fully exposing her to any lurking dangers, then paused to let his perception adjust to whatever the palace might present.

His stomach twisted when she edged out around him and gasped.

He had seen wonders before, but this... The Queen had quite outdone herself.

Probably because she was teetering on the edge of becoming Undone.

His sacrifice could not come soon enough if his other option was being trapped in this lushly overblown boudoir. The palace had become literally—if not actually—the center of a dusky-red rose, with curving velvety walls that arched overhead to reveal only glimpses of something like sky. The bright flutter of butterflies passing above sent sparkles of prismatic light cascading down between the multi-story petals.

He started walking, listening for the soft patter of Yelena’s bare feet behind him.

“It’s stunning,” she said.

“It feels like a labyrinth, and more than a few have died making their way to the heart of any labyrinth.”

“Should I knot a thread of my dress to the front door and unravel it as we go so we can find our way out again?”

He’d get to see her naked again. His pulse surged at the thought, and agreement hovered on the tip of his tongue. And other tips of his anatomy. But just as the Minotaur had eaten both Athenian youths and maidens, the Queen’s hungers were equally...democratic. Teasing her would be foolish.

“Such simple tricks won’t save us,” he told Yelena.

Her long stride brought her to his shoulder and let the musky warmth of her fill his senses. “Are we going to need saving?”

“Someone will, mostly likely.” He had ceded rule of the
phaedrealii
to the Queen, though his own claim had been stronger, because he’d had more pressing concerns, but some things he would not share.

The tigress was his.

The depths of his selfishness should have disquieted him, especially when he’d already made note of the court’s fracturing and forfeited so much to stop it. But part of obsession’s power was its willingness to succumb utterly and eagerly to entrapment. To the
phae
with their ruses, such commitment was almost impossible to believe.

And apparently even more impossible to resist.

The curves of the petal walls tightened as they went, forcing Yelena closer to him. “We must be getting near the center,” she said. “We’re almost going in circles.”

When the back of her hand brushed his, the skin-to-skin contact jolted a word out of him. “Stay.”

He halted abruptly, mortified at his lack of control despite the most glancing of connections. Why did that word emerge with such entreaty? Did he believe she would listen?

She glanced back at him. “Stay? I’m a cat, not a dog.”

“I meant...” Since she had walked a step ahead before looking back, they were no longer in direct contact and so he did not have to continue.

Indeed, he was not entirely sure what he’d intended to say. If it was a truth she’d forced from him, then it was buried too deeply for him to unearth.

Unless he touched her again.

He folded his arms over his chest, tucking his hands away. “You should wait here while I take the edge off her mood.”

“No.” Yelena matched his pose. “I’m done with waiting. Where has waiting gotten me?”

“You think confronting that warlord or your council would have gotten you further?”

“Maybe not, but holding back has left me...” She let out a slow breath. “A tigress shouldn’t try to change her stripes.”

And keeping her here in his den of illusions was as contrary to her nature as restraining her beast. He shouldn’t forget that.

Yelena lifted her chin. “Whatever your Queen does, it can be no worse than what I’ve done to myself.”

The certainty in her tone—and his painfully personal knowledge that she was oh-so-wrong—paralyzed him long enough that she slipped around the last tightly furled petal-wall, out of sight before he could muster another argument. He hastened after her into the center of the court.

The red velvety walls flared outward into an expansive space so wide he stumbled over his own feet with momentary vertigo. He cursed his awkwardness; he of all beings should know the phaedrealii’s tricks, not to mention the Queen who played them.

Yelena had not paused. She strode across the faintly pulsing floor—when had the petals become a bloody, beating heart?—toward the shining gray throne rising like a sword thrust through the heart of the rose.

The purification of iron into the Steel Throne had been the doom of too many
phae
smiths, but what remained was a testament to the phaedrealii’s tenacious survival...and its fatal flaw. For all the ensanguined glory of the glamoured throne room, Raze wondered if the Queen who lounged there now with her chin propped in one hand could ever appreciate the sacrifices that had put her there.

She looked young, with tousled red curls framing a smooth, rounded face spattered with freckles. The bulk of the throne and her red robe nearly swallowed her. He reminded himself she
was
still young compared to the
phae
who had walked under the sun before the Iron Wars. But coming of age along with steel had given her a different sort of edge, and her eyes—as crimson as the beating petal walls—were feral in a way even Yelena might not appreciate.

The Queen did not lift her head, though her free hand crept out to grip the armrest of the throne, poising herself like an arrow to be launched.

Yelena must have noticed for she stopped just out of range and gave an awkward bow. “Queen of the
phae.
”

“Wereling.” A careless acknowledgment. “So few of your kind have ever stepped into the court. Had I thought a moment about it, I might have been offended. What brings you before me now?”

“Chance magic,” Yelena offered. “An accident I hope to set right.”

“There are no accidents with magic.” The Queen’s gaze flicked to Raze, accusation a dark veil over her red eyes.

Yelena glanced between them. “Perhaps I should say involuntary.”

Raze matched her even tone as he addressed the Queen. “She should not be here. Such incursions—”
and excursions the other direction
, although he did not add that “—imperil the
phaedrealii.
”

The Queen’s eyes glittered more darkly yet as she studied him, making his exposed skin prickle. “I see the geasa you’ve marked to confine us are essentially complete.”

He stiffened. “Not confine. Preserve. As I promised you—”

“If your scars and your promises mean anything, how did the wereling get here?”

Raze ignored Yelena who had sucked in a harsh breath. “The intensity of her...desire breached the locks. To avoid undoing the geasa, I’ll need a
regalis
spread to send her back through.” Slavic folklore told how spores from
Osmunda regalis
—the royal fern—could unlock secrets and fulfill wishes, and the folklore was right, as far as it went; the
phaedrealii
sprang from secrets and wishes. But only
phae
of pure royal blood could sow the delicate spores into portals. With his magic funneled into the geasa, he didn’t have the power to spare.

The Queen flicked one casual finger. “Simpler for you to just kill her.” She yawned, revealing sharpened teeth that glistened with the red of the walls as if she’d been drinking blood. “Or give her to me and I’ll do it.”

Yelena didn’t even twitch, and Raze wondered if she was frozen with fear. She couldn’t know the Queen wouldn’t eat her. She also couldn’t know the Queen would do much, much worse. But when he glanced over, Yelena’s amber gaze was steady on the other female.

“I was drawn here because I lost something,” she said, “as I think maybe you have lost something.”

The Queen tilted her head against her palm. “And this lost thing, you very much...
desire
to find it again?”

Her mocking pause echoed Raze’s earlier hesitation, and he silently cursed the word he’d chosen. The
phaedrealii
shunned wanton emotion now, but the
phae
still knew hunger. And while the Queen wasn’t one of the breeds who lived off mortal remains, there were rumors she had rendered down more than one human lover, pursuing the enchantments contained within flesh and bone.

He forced himself not to look at Yelena, but for once he could empathize with the Queen’s relentless craving.

Because what would he not do to have the tigress again?

Despite his best efforts to pretend she was safely elsewhere, Yelena stepped ahead of him, the golden shimmers in her spiderling silk flickering like sunlight. “I want all beings to have the chance to walk freely in the world.”

“Yelena.” A chill swept down his spine. It was one thing to speak such absurdity to him. To say it to the
phae
Queen was an invitation to mayhem.

He was even more perturbed when the Queen finally raised her head from her hand and silenced him with a cutting gesture. “Freedom for all? Do you know what happened when last the
phae
walked the earth?” She rose from the throne, and the red robe unfurled around her into giant butterfly wings.

Yelena stood her ground. “I heard you fought a war,” she said. “And lost. I’d think you wouldn’t make that mistake again.”

The Queen’s eyes brightened to scarlet. “The mistake of losing?”

“Of fighting,” Yelena corrected, making Raze choke with her temerity. “The world has come a long way since then.”

Sharpened teeth flashed in a smile. “You must think I know nothing of what goes on in your realm.” The Queen shook her head in mock dismay. “Such naivety from a creature born with fangs and claws.”

Yelena shrugged, her hands lifted to display empty palms. “My claws are not out now.”

“That makes this easier.” The Queen raised one hand as if she would reach out in return.

A glacial cold swept into the throne room. The rose-petal walls blackened as power drained from the sustaining illusion.

Without wasting a shout of warning, Raze leapt.

The flash of formless magic was strong enough to strip flesh from bone as the disrupted energy that had moments before sustained the rosy illusion arced across the space. As he aimed himself at Yelena, Raze noted dispassionately that the spread of the blast was wide enough to have clipped him where he stood; the Queen had not minded if he was caught in the backlash.

Indeed, perhaps she would have found him a convenient casualty.

He slammed into his wereling in a plume of breath that froze on the icy air despite the plasmatic wrath—neither flame nor fluid—that unfurled from the Queen’s fingertips. He rolled Yelena to the floor, wrapping around her to take the worst of the salvo.

The magic flayed the tunic from his back, and his shoulders burned but he stayed hunched around her. The Queen let out a howl that stung the glowing whirlwind into a twisting, wrenching rage.

His own magic was too far away, left behind with his blood in the carved wards locking the portals. Regret burned worse than the skin on his back.

Suddenly, saving the
phaedrealii
seemed less vital than saving this one wereling.

He stared down at her, curled so close he could count the striations of gold in her eyes. “Bite me.”

Those eyes widened. “What?”

“I need you.” He kissed her, hard and fast enough to startle the tigress.

She nipped him, just a tiny sting, but he felt the
verita luna
rise at the threat. Changing shape couldn’t help her though, not this close to the Queen’s fury.

He swiped his finger across his bloody lip, winding his
phae
trickery with her natural body magic. He didn’t have much, but he scattered the shreds of his tunic in a veil around them. The unwoven spiderling threads, reinforced by his enchantment, caught and deflected the Queen’s blast, the filaments flaming incandescent before withering to ash.

They had only moments before the frail barrier was incinerated.

He rose, yanking Yelena to her feet. “Run. Change and run.”

“Not without you.”

“I can’t—”

The petal wall behind them, already shriveled from the withdrawn magic, crumbled dryly around a multi-jointed fist. “Come,” EveStar said calmly, as if the throne room wasn’t a cyclone of fire.

Yelena was already in motion, twisting her arm in Raze’s grip to grab his hand and pull him along. He resisted just long enough to let the ash fall into the shape of bones—a pathetic sleight of hand, but maybe enough to give the Queen pause—then threw himself behind his wereling.

Chapter Eight

Yelena doubted EveStar was any more a friend to her than the Queen, but the other
phae
wasn’t actively trying to fry them, and that difference seemed worth acknowledging. They fled the crumbling labyrinth of the in-retrospect-not-so-beautiful rose, plunging blindly through the dried paper walls, that strange fire licking at their heels.

They burst out through the final wall of the palace, and the thousands of butterflies forming the facade took wing. Yelena batted at the fluttering mass, suddenly not so enamored with butterflies, either.

Raze stumbled into her. Avoiding the bugs, she thought, until he abruptly sank to his knees, breaking her grasp.

She gasped his name and crouched beside him. Her stomach churned at the sight of him, back burned smooth of the geasa that had been carved there.

“Go,” he snarled.

“Not likely.” She wedged her shoulder under his arm. “EveStar, help me.”

The
phae
turned back, her long fingers writhing with agitation. “I can’t touch him. We mustn’t...”

Yelena snarled too, feeling the tigress in her throat. But she couldn’t change and still carry him. If only she could summon the tigress’s strength without the shape.

A fighting spirit would have to be enough.

Gritting her teeth, she hauled him upright. “Come on, Prince of Flutes. Ugh, why couldn’t you have hollow bones?”

“I think they had turned to stone,” he said. “That’s why I felt nothing. Nothing until you...”

The confession was forced by the skin-to-skin contact, she knew, yet she couldn’t help but flush with pleasure at his words. Or maybe it was the heat of his burns. “What you’re feeling is shock. We have to get out of here.”

EveStar was gesturing urgently toward the boat, still canted adrift on the black sands. “This way. You need to take him back to his cavern. The Queen is afraid to reach that deep.”

Yelena wondered what was there to frighten a
phae.
Besides the scarred
phae
in her arms.

She staggered forward, barely assisted by Raze’s dragging feet. If he fell, she wasn’t sure she could get him upright again. “Hate to say this, but that ship ain’t sailing.”

“Need has its ways.”

Yelena eyed the boat. The pterodactyl, still chained to the prow, returned her dubious stare. She couldn’t hold Raze up for long—already his weight was sagging more against her as his great strength failed him—and it wasn’t like she knew where else to take him.

Grimacing, she guided him down the steps to the sand that sucked at their bare feet. Fortunately, the awkward angle of the beached boat made it relatively easy to lever him in, though he sucked in a breath as his back skidded over the velvet throws.

She winced and glanced back at EveStar. “How does this happen? Do I just wish us there?”

The phae’s lips twisted, even more unsettling than her distorted fingers. “You werelings are as bad as the humans. You’ve forgotten the magic that made the world dance.”

“Made it dangerous too,” Yelena countered. “Or so I’m told.”

EveStar shrugged. “Is the tigress less beautiful because she bites?”

Not bothering to answer, Yelena pulled herself into the boat beside Raze. His gray eyes were sunken with pain, his dusky skin too pale under the carved geasa and streaks of ash. His lip where she’d bitten him was swollen and her heart felt equally sore.

She bent forward to kiss him gently, tasting blood and dust and his own wild evergreen scent. “I’m sorry. That didn’t go well, did it?”

“Kiss me again and make it better.”

She smiled and smoothed back his hair. “I think you must be fevered. Definitely silly.”

“Never.”

And since she was touching him, she knew he told the truth. So she kissed him again.

The pterodactyl made a disapproving noise and took to the air, flying in a tight circle at the end of its chain.

“Cover yourselves,” EveStar said. “I will push you off.”

Yelena grabbed a corner of the velvet throw and tugged it over Raze. “I just don’t see how the—”

The
phae
flattened her eerie hands against the stern and shoved. Sand screamed under the hull as the boat drifted impossibly forward. The pterodactyl echoed the sound then dove.

The prow wrenched down. Yelena threw her arm over Raze, trying to anchor him as the boat tilted. Sparkling black sand poured over the bulwark like a wave of night.

Raze pulled the velvet over their heads just as the sand engulfed them.

* * *

At the quiet sound of lapping water, Yelena carefully nudged back the velvet. Sand sloughed away, drifting into streamers of glittering smoke.
How...? Where...?

The space around them was as dark as the sand had been and almost as sparkly.

She recognized the veins of phosphorescent light across the ceiling of Raze’s cavern and let out a relieved sigh. But just as quickly, she sucked in the same breath and flicked the cover back from Raze.

Eyes closed. So still. She settled her fingertips against his neck, feeling... She let out the breath one last time and flattened her palm over his chest, letting the steady rise and fall comfort her for a moment.

She glanced around warily. The boat floated on a dark lake, though she glimpsed veins of the same crystals illuminating the depths beneath them. She’d smelled this wet, mineral scent when Raze had first brought her to his cavern, and she’d suspected there was a spring somewhere nearby. But this...

She trailed her hand over the edge and let out a soft sound of surprise. Though the air was cool, the water was warm, almost hot. She cast a wry glance at her unconscious passenger. She wouldn’t have thought him the hot-tubbing type.

The pterodactyl floated quietly in front of the boat, its neck twisted to stare at its ghostly white reflection. The raw scales where the iron collar chafed it looked smoother, mostly healed; if the water had soothed that squawking beast, she hoped it would do Raze some good too.

She ladled a handful over his brow, and his eyes opened, the usually stormy gray lightened to silver with the crystalline light above them.

She realized she was grinning like a fool. “Rise and shine, handsome.”

“You are confused,” he said, his voice rough.

“True. I suppose it’s always night down here.”

“Not with you.” He caught her hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles.

This time the courtly gesture made her blush, though she knew she should concentrate on more important things. “How badly are you hurt?”

He shifted, grimacing, and she helped him sit up. “Could have been worse,” he said, with more stoicism than she thought was necessary. “We could have been stripped to our elemental components and rewoven into the illusions of the court.”

With him sitting, she was able to examine his back. His damaged trousers clung precariously around his hips. “You were mostly stripped.”

He winced as he craned his neck to follow the light touch of her fingers to his scalded shoulders. “The real damage is to the wards that locked the portals. Without the geasa powered directly through me, through my skin and blood, the wards will fail.”

She paused in her examination, a flicker of uneasy excitement zinging through her. If the locks on the portals failed, she could leave the
phaedrealii
whenever she wished. She had already reached the
verita luna
once and been close twice more; obviously her misconnection with the change was correcting itself.

His gaze was locked on her, as if he was trying to read her mind, so she kept her focus on carefully pouring water over his skin to wash away the rose-petal dust, or whatever a busted illusion was made of. “Would it really be so bad,” she asked, “if you weren’t trapped here?”

She thought he might object to the word “trapped” as he had when the Queen had said “confined,” but instead he just sighed. “You saw what our Queen can do. What she will do. It’s true her power is concentrated here in the
phaedrealii
because all our magic is focused in one place, but there are relatively few triggers to set her off.” He dredged up a smile. “Other than yourself.” His smile faded. “In the sunlit realm, with her court gathered close and temptations all around, she would be a force unlike any the world remembers.”

Yelena resisted the urge to remind him that the Iron Age was long passed. For him, it wasn’t, not really. “Maybe the world is finally ready for magic again.”

“Maybe you are seeing what you want to believe.”

Since she was touching him, she knew he spoke only the truth, at least as he saw it. “You think I’m taking stupid risks because I lost the
verita luna.
”

“I think you could change anytime you choose, but you won’t until the world changes with you.” He took her hands, stopping her ministrations. “The Queen’s
phae
magic is trouble enough, but you, Yelena Morozova, with your dreams are more terrifying yet.”

“I don’t dream anymore.” The worried admission popped out of her. “Not since I got the concussion. If I sleep too deeply, the nightmares come and...”

He waited a moment, watching her with a seemingly endless patience no wereling could ever match, and she found the steady gray of his eyes strangely peaceful. Even the prowling beast inside her, always so edgy, rested in that twilight gaze.

Eventually, when she didn’t go on, he stood. The boat rocked a bit, and she gripped the gunwale. “After I carve a geas, I come back here to soak. The pool has curative powers from a source older than the
phae.
”

He stripped out of his shredded trousers, making the boat rock even more. Or maybe that was just her suddenly rocketing pulse. His sideways stance gave her a coy view of only his flexed thigh and curved butt cheek, ramping up her sense memory of their earlier encounter in his bed.

Who needed dreams when she had a fantasy in the flesh?

She swallowed hard as he climbed up onto the narrow seat across the bow and held out his hand to her.

“Come,” he said.

Impossible to resist.

She grabbed the hem of her skirt and peeled the gown over her head, though the spiderlings’ bejeweled web still clung to her hair. He hauled her up onto the seat beside him and, hand in hand, they jumped.

The water took them with barely a splash. It felt thick and buoyant around Yelena, and it held her up without any effort on her part. As she floated on her back, her skin tingled delightfully, but from Raze’s breathless muttering, she guessed his open wounds must be faring worse.

She pulled him closer so his head rested on her stomach and ran her fingers through his wet spiked hair. “Shh. Breathe. Let it go.”

He panted a few more times. “I thought cats hated water.”

“Tigers love to swim.” She kept up her petting until his breath evened. “We’ll even hunt through water.”

He rolled to kiss her navel. “Do you have any prey in sight?”

She looked down between her breasts at his glittering silver eyes. “Maybe. If he can be caught.”

“Odds are in your favor. He seems vulnerable.”

The raw truth froze her despite the luscious warmth of the water around them and the particular heat of his lips on her skin. “Raze, you don’t have to—”

“Arazael. When we are alone, it would please me if you used my real name.”

She hesitated. This revelation had not been forced by her touch; she had not asked him his name.

Something forlorn moved across his face, softening the stark lines. “I have not heard it since we retreated to the
phaedrealii.
”

Had anyone ever asked such a small thing of her? So small yet so precious, as if she held this potent man in the palm of her hand. She shivered with the power of it. “Arazael,” she said softly.

He closed his eyes, one arm curling under her backside to hold her closer. “Thank you.”

“Arazael the flute player.” She smiled.

Without opening his eyes, he smiled back. “I have not played in even longer than I’ve heard my name. After a few millennia I would be inexcusably rusty, although I always relied more on enthusiasm than aptitude.”

“I might have guessed nymphs aren’t picky.”

He cracked one eye to peer at her, silver glinting between his dark lashes. “And cats?”

She sniffed. “Cats are very picky.”

His arm tightened on her. “Then I shall need enthusiasm
and
aptitude.”

“Practice makes perfect.”

He rolled up alongside her, sleek and powerful, the water seeming to cocoon them together. She caught her breath as he kissed his way up from her belly, pausing between her breasts where he must have heard her thundering heartbeat, before swiftly claiming her lips.

With the glimmering crystal above and below them and the soft darkness in between, she wasn’t sure if they were floating horizontally or upright or if the pool even still existed. All she knew was her prince, playing her body as if he’d been waiting forever for the chance.

His kiss tasted of the mineral water and his own unique flavor, like a brewing storm, and she reveled in the wildness of it. He clenched her backside with one large hand and kneaded her breast with the other until she felt a conduit of liquid desire arcing between his hands, deep in her core. She twisted against him, making desperate little encouraging noises, until he thumbed her aching nipple; at the same time he slipped one long finger from behind into her cleft, and the arc went molten, fiercer than the magic that had been unleashed against them.

She threaded her fingers behind his head, angling his head to deepen the kiss. Suspended in the pool, there was no up or down, no need to hold themselves against gravity. She let her hands roam down his broad chest, felt the rasp of the remaining geasa under her palms and the leap of muscle as he gasped soundlessly. Lower, she cupped the heavy weight of him, and the hard length of flesh surged eagerly into her hand. Maybe the
phae
had conflicted feelings about touch, but this
phae
wanted it, wanted her.

She rewarded him with a long, lingering stroke, and he thrust against her with a groan. The agitation of the water stirred up a phosphorescent glow around their bodies. It took just a deft shift to impale herself on his cock.