Moon's Flower: Book 6 (Kingdom Series) (2 page)

“Jericho,” Siria’s sultry, exotic tones whispered across the heated flesh of his neck, making his heart clench with both revulsion and painful need.

“Siria,” he murmured, refusing to turn.

Though they shared the same castle in the sky, the two of them could only meet for an ephemeral period of time each day. The fleeting moment when both sun and moon hung together.

“Will you not turn and look at me?” she whispered. “I’ve missed you so.”

As much as he hated her for damning him to this solitary existence, he couldn’t help craving what she brought him. Twisting on his heel, he turned, attempting to ignore the hunger of her touch. His desperate need for warmth and life.

Siria was as heart-achingly beautiful now as she’d been when he’d first seen her.

Her skin, flushed a radiant bronze, almost seemed to glow. Much like a hollowed out candle would after burning for several hours. Hair—a hundred different shades of yellow—was pulled up into an intricate knot of beauty, making his fingers itch to trace each fat curl coiled enticingly around her face.

Those tawny amber eyes he’d once compared to a lioness’, gazed at him with fierce longing, parting pearl pink lips, she took a step into his space. Rays of sunlight crawled upon the balustrade floor, driving away the shadow. He wanted so desperately to have that light touch him, but he couldn’t. He just couldn’t.

Not again. Not with her.

“Do you not miss me?” she asked, tracing a finger down the front of her slitted gown which exposed more flesh than it helped cover up.

Her warmth cried out to him, brushed against his body.

Jericho had always loved the sun. To be condemned to a perpetual world of darkness was the worst sort of punishment for him. If she’d truly loved him, she would have let him go.

She would have never brought him here.

“Get away from me, Siria,” he snarled, wrapping his cloak of shadow tighter around his body, so that not even a trace of light could penetrate.

Liquid eyes turned somber. “Someday you will forgive me.”

“I will never forgive your lies, your duplicity.” The frothing, churning anger riddled his gut, and lifting his chin high he took a step back, shoving himself against the railing.

Her radiance was already beginning to dim. The moon and sun would soon be separated once again.

Nostrils flaring, she tossed her head. Even in her anger, she was regal. Beautiful. At times he despised her all the more for it.

“I gave you eternal life when I brought you to Kingdom. You only have to serve the moon for a time—”

“Five hundred years is more than a time!” he growled, clenching his fist.

Upper lip curling into a snarl, she waved her hand at him. “Stop acting like a baby about this. I gave you a choice, to stay with me or not. This was your decision.”

“Based on lies, Siria. You know that. If you’d told me the whole truth I would have never come.”

The golden glow of her body merely a flicker now, she took another step toward him. “You will show me the respect I deserve.”

He laughed. It was a sound full of scorn and disappointment. “You deserve nothing from me. Respect is earned, a lesson you clearly never learned.”

Lacing her fingers together, looking more human and less goddess-like now, she took a different approach. “I only wished your love. We could not be together on Earth—”

“Yes, we could have,” he argued, this was the same old argument. “You could have come to me as you did every day, I would have loved you until the day I died, Siria.”

Delicate, golden brows dipped. “That’s just it, Jericho. Now we can be together forever. Once your time is done serving the moon you’ll have no obligations other than to love me.” She held out a hand that was beginning to turn a ghostly shade of white.

Soon it would be the moon’s turn to reign in the sky and she would disappear from his sight.

“Damn you,” he hissed. “I would have given you everything, but you stripped me of choice. I do not love you, Siria. Not anymore.”

For a split second there was a flash of pain in her eyes. But then she was narrowing them and they were suddenly filled with fury. “What does love have to do with this?” she snapped. “I do not need your love, Jericho.” Lifting a nearly translucent finger in front of her face, her last words before fading were a ghostly whisper, “I own your body, now and forever. You belong to me, you always will…”

The burn of anger dissipated the second she was gone. It was too exhausting to hang onto it.

He’d not been lying when he told her he no longer loved her. Yes, he craved her, imagined he always would. But not her, not really. He craved her fire. Her light. Eternal life was his eternal torment, because the light would never belong to him again. Even when the five hundred years were up, he’d never again be able to feel the heated press of sunlight bathe his flesh. That was the price he paid for sleeping with the sun, that was the price he paid for telling her he loved her.

Snorting, he turned his back on the empty space where she’d once been and gazed back down on the canvas of night.

When Siria was in the sky, the canvas was nothing but darkness. But when it was his turn, and the moon possessed the night, that was when the scroll of black became a wash of color.

All he had to do was will to see and he could. There was so much of Kingdom he now knew intimately.

From the deserted dunes of eastern realm, to the liquid lushness of the Seren Seas, the madness of the Hatter’s wonderland, to the old crone’s candy forest… but none of those lands appealed to him.

Not tonight.

Tonight he needed to see beauty. Needed to see that which could only come from the sun. And as the idea formed in his thoughts, so too did it coalesce into the sky. The darkness rolled away like fog over a moor and his world was suddenly alive with light.

Thousands upon thousands of pinpricks of buttery, golden light, setting his soul at peace.

The lights danced and twirled through a verdant garden of lush green. Thick carpets of moss climbed up the sides of gnarled and knotty, ancient oaks. A gossamer haze enveloped the forest, combined with the fiery bursts of glimmering luminescence; he knew immediately where his desires had led him.

Jericho was spying on the Fairy Forest.

Bulbous mushroom caps in varying shades of the rainbow littered the forest floor. For a while he lost himself, watching the hundreds of fairies flitting to and fro.

Some were swinging within thick green vines and any part of it they touched sprouted a miniature flower. Others were racing upon the backs of snails, wearing shells for hats and green leaves for dresses, pumping their fists as they cried and hollered to go faster.

Many flitted through the air on large butterfly wings with a drunken leer on their faces. Bonfires were ablaze throughout the garden, some of them green, others blue, red or purple.

It was chaos and life and slowly he felt his spirits restored as he gazed upon their tiny, happy faces.

Then he spied a fairy acting very differently than the others. Dressed in a silken gown of white, she hugged something to her chest. She was so small, it was difficult to make out her features.

Cocking his head, he leaned over the railing as far as he could, trying to decipher the meaning of her actions.

None of the other fairy’s even spared her so much as a glance. Even so she seemed anxious, nervous even. Zipping in between trees, remaining hidden behind a branch, before moving onto the next.

The whole thing was bizarre and gave him pause, long enough that it took him a moment to realize the fairy garden scene was no longer before him. It was just that little fairy with the bundle in her hands.

After several tense minutes, she finally paused against the base of a tree. Licking her rosebud lips before—with a grin— she planted a hard kiss on the bundle she’d been carrying.

At first he imagined it was a fairy child she’d been holding in her arms, but as the scene before him grew into focus he realized the shape was actually a large, brown seed bulb.

Jumping into the air, she flitted off, still holding on tight to her package. In no time she was in a meadow. The moon’s glow reflected off the surface of the dark, gurgling brook beside her. A silvery haze was draped across the area, making it appear as though she were walking on clouds as she descended to the forest floor.

Bored, Jericho was just about to return back to his perusal of the fairy garden, when a blinding flash of light hugged her body, obscuring her form.

Squinting against the brightness, he blinked his eyes as his vision readjusted, completely unprepared for the sight before him now.

No longer was she a tiny, flitting fairy. She was a woman with a woman’s curves. Large ivory wings undulated gracefully behind her back. The white dress she’d been wearing he now realized was actually made up of thousands upon thousands of white rose petals.

Her body was long and slender, willowy, he thought might actually be the right word. Her face was more angular than Siria’s, but no less pretty. There was an innocence in her startling blue eyes. Waves of chestnut hair spilled down her back, coming to a point right above the juncture where back met bottom and something he’d thought long dead in him began to stir.

Licking his lips, Jericho inhaled.

The scenes, the images before him were so real. Sometimes he got lost in them, forgetting that while he could see the world below, the rest of his senses were deprived.

But he could imagine that if he smelled the air hovering around her it would be dripping with the rosy scent of petals. A gentle breeze ruffled the ends of her hair and swayed through the branches above her head.

Frowning, she tipped her face up and his heart sped because he felt the press of her eyes. She was looking at him.

Well, not right at him. She was looking at the moon.

Involuntarily he reached out his hand, maybe from some deep-seated need to grab hold of her, to hang on, to keep her looking his way.

With her face tipped up the way it was, he could pretend, even for a little while, that she was actually looking at him—Jericho. That she saw him. Not the craggy cliffs of his moon, but the man behind it.

Swallowing hard, he felt trapped by the weight of her gentle gaze. Those big blue eyes were so radically opposed to Siria’s. There was no agenda, no hidden meaning dwelling behind them, simply curiosity, and he felt his own brows twitch in response.

Could she feel his stare? Even across space and time? Was such a thing even possible? He’d studied many in his life and none had ever seemed to notice…

But the spell was soon broken. With a little sigh, she opened the palm of her hand and gazed down at the bulb inside.

He wanted to scream at her to look back at him. But she wouldn’t hear him. No one ever heard him. No one but Siria, and he couldn’t abide the thought of her intruding on this moment.

Heart speeding in his chest, he watched as each step she took upon the bed of emerald green grass bloomed into a trail of purple flowered vines.

Holding her hands up to her mouth, she pressed them to her lips and it seemed to him as if she were cooing at the seed. A look of delight spread across her face, lit through the icy beauty of her eyes and made her already beautiful—almost alien-like features—radiant.

The creature had literally begun to glow. Light poured off her in waves, pooling at her feet in a golden puddle.

Palms sweat slickened, he gripped the railing tighter, completely transfixed as she knelt down and passed her hand across the bed of grass, upturning it to reveal the rich soil beneath.

Placing one final kiss onto the bulb, she buried it, patting the soil back into place.

And that’s when something strange began to happen inside of him.

First he felt warmth, sliding like sweat soaked fingers up his legs in a gentle, almost erotic caress.

Mouth going dry, he frowned as the warmth turned into a fiery kiss. As if someone had taken flame to him. It didn’t hurt, but there was a lot of pressure. Like something were being ripped from him from the inside out.

Glancing down at himself, he watched as his body suddenly exploded in a silvery-purple sheen of light. This had never happened to him before, he wasn’t exactly sure what was happening to him now.

He knew if he asked Siria about it tomorrow, she’d probably know. No doubt this had happened to other men in the moon in the past, but the thought of asking her for help sat like bile in his throat.

Running his fingers across his palm he smiled as the light swirled, coalescing into a tight ball of dense matter, growing bigger and bigger in his hand, pouring out of him until he was no longer glowing. All the light was now trapped within the sphere he held.

He’d glowed many times before, but not this shade, and not like this, where the light was literally being pulled out of him.

Frowning, he turned back to her image, sucking in a sharp, almost painful breath because she was looking back up at him again.

This time there was a worried frown pinching the corners of her doe shaped eyes. She looked like she was waiting for something…

Jericho looked back at the ball in his hand, then back at her, before understanding finally dawned.

Whatever this light was that’d come off him, she’d called it forth. Licking his lips, he held his hand out over the railing. Nothing happened.

Twisting his lips, he watched her again. She was definitely worried now. It was obvious by the way she chewed on her lower lip as she idly patted the mound of dirt where she’d placed the seed.

“Maybe if I…” he said, and tipped his hand over so that the sphere fell out. It fell through the sky, as if in slow motion, heading straight for her and as it did it turned from a ball into a sphere of radiant silver-purple light.

~*~

Calanthe had stolen the seed. She shouldn’t have done it, if the head mistress discovered her thievery she’d be in big,
big
trouble. But tonight was almost a full moon.

It was the perfect time to seed.

The moon flower rarely ever grew, in fact, it was so rare as to be just another tale in a land full of them. But under the right conditions the fairy seer—Miriam the Delighted—had promised that it would. Only the light of a nearly ripe moon on the thirtieth day of the month could bring the treasure forth.