The Nightshade's Touch: A Paranormal Space Fantasy (Messenger Chronicles Book 3) Read online

  ‘The Nightshade’s Touch’

  3# Messenger Chronicles

  Pippa DaCosta

  Urban Fantasy & Science Fiction Author

  Subscribe to Pippa’s mailing list at pippadacosta.com & get free ebooks.

  Copyright © 2018 Pippa DaCosta.

  August 2018. US Edition. All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictions, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Edited in US English.

  Version 1.

  www.pippadacosta.com

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Prince of Dreams ~ Extra Excerpt

  Also by Pippa DaCosta

  What to read next by Pippa DaCosta

  Chapter 1

  For he would be thinking of love

  Till the stars had run away,

  And the shadows eaten the moon.

  ~ W. B. Yeats, Old Earthen

  As a gladiator, there’d been no need for dance in my life, unless I counted the killing dance I’d performed for years in the arena. And so, when Kellee declared we were visiting a backwater colony called Hapters to “celebrate,” I was too curious to decline. But on arrival, it was all I could do to stand on the periphery of the revelry, wide-eyed and uncertain. Saru don’t dance.

  Drums made of discarded barrels and tins thumped out a beat, instruments stringed from horsehair rang tricky notes, and pipes whittled from wood sent the revelers into a merry frenzy. The human colony, some two hundred lives from a ravaged farming planet, danced and sang and laughed. I wasn’t even sure why. There was little cause for celebration in Halow. We had beaten the fae back from Calicto—driving them out after I’d sent a swarm of wardrones into their shiny new arena—but warcruisers still swarmed Halow’s old spacefaring channels, watching for survivor ships. Millions were dead—families, homes, generations snuffed out by the fae who believed it their divine right to cleanse Halow of its human infestation.

  I was about to retire outside, when I caught sight of Arran among the dancing throng. Arran, previously known as Aeon. He had eaten starfruit, wiping his mind clean of his entire past. He now danced like he didn’t have a care in the world because he didn’t. Arran was the first name that had come to me when he had blinked at me and asked who he was. It was fae and unoriginal, but I didn’t know his saru name, and Arran sounded a little like Aeon.

  I had told him he was saru, that he had been a fighter, but that was all. He didn’t know his name for most of his life had been Aeon. He didn’t know he was the saru gladiator who had wanted revenge on the Wraithmaker. He didn’t know he had spent a lifetime at the mercy of the jailor Dagnu. I had told him his new name, and he had smiled back, shallow and polite, like two strangers bumping into each other on a street.

  Aeon was gone.

  Arran, on the other hand, was very much here, in the moment, and he had caught the eye of several women. I couldn’t blame them. He liked to dance, and he looked good doing it. That was something I hadn’t known about him and wondered how it had come about. He’d spent ten years in captivity after I left him for dead, and Sjora—the fae Talen had torn in two—implied he had spent some of that time as more than arena entertainment. He wasn’t namu, humans bred for pleasure, so to make him behave as one would have been degrading, even to a saru. But all of that was in the past, no matter how much of it I still witnessed in my dreams. I loved Aeon, but Arran I had to let go.

  “Have you seen the buns on that man?”

  Hulia appeared at my side, dreadlocks swishing. She took the tankard from my hand, sloshed pink liquid inside it from the cracked drink bowl, and handed it back. Hulia was namu, or so Eledan had told me while he’d had her enthralled. On waking, she had stabbed him in the back. For that alone I would have considered her a friend. But even before Eledan, I’d liked Hulia.

  “I mean, dayam honey. He has enough thrust to rival my old shuttle.”

  Her eyes flashed, and I rolled mine. She had managed The Boot, a mishmash of bar and whorehouse on Calicto, and had also acted as something of a pimp, seeing to it that her girls were looked after and paid well. She was also a musicmaker and could lull humans into a sense of safety and admiration. If I thought about it, her being namu was obvious, but I’d missed it because I’d been living as Kesh Lasota, invisible messenger, and I had wrapped myself in so many lies that I couldn’t see the truth even when it was right in front of me.

  “What did you say his name was?” She leaned a hip against the table and watched Arran clamp his hands on his partner’s hips while she threw her arms around his neck. The two of them practically got it on right there on the dancefloor for all to see. Nobody cared. Everyone here was lost to the party, celebrating like this warm night on a nowhere planet might be their last.

  “Arran.”

  She made a face. With his darker skin and sloped eyes, he didn’t much look like an Arran, especially when he rocked his hips in harmony with his dance partner. Hulia watched like she would happily take Arran outside to teach him a few moves of her own. “I could put him to work and make a fortune.”

  “Don’t,” I snapped with too much force.

  Hulia flinched. “Okay, all right, I didn’t realize you and he were a thing—”

  “We’re not.”

  Hulia frowned with one eyebrow raised. “Touchy much.”

  I smiled at my friend. I owed her more, a lot more, but Arran’s secrets were mine to keep. “It’s all right. It’s just… complicated.”

  “What about that one?” Hulia jerked her chin at the only man in the room wearing a coat. The dark fabric matched his dark hair, tied back in a short, unforgiving ponytail. And all that dark worked to brighten his intense green eyes. He cut through the crowd like an apex predator striding through Faerie’s jungles and eyed the revelers like he might arrest half of them for wanton behavior in a time of crisis and the other half for breach of the peace. He wasn’t wearing his gold star, but he didn’t need to. Lawman was written in the way he walked, the way he scanned for threats, and the way he pinned me under his challenging glare. I’d also recently seen everything beneath those layers of lawman. He had a body to match his impressive presence and a physique made for stamina and strength. A rare combination, but then, he was the last of his vakaru kind.

  Hulia caught my too-long stare in the marshal’s direction. “Huh, guess not.” She snorted something like a laugh. “I hear you have a fae in your harem too. Dayam Kesh, leave some of the sexy for the rest of us.” She smirked into her drink.

  “It’s not like
that.” I turned my back on the approaching Kellee and feigned interest in the food.

  “Being namu means I got a few tricks, Messenger, like sniffing out when someone really, really wants to f—Hullo, Marshal Kellee.” She flicked her hair back and straightened, purring his name and making it sound filthy in a good way. I knew she could flirt, but I figured I’d only seen a fraction of what she could do.

  “Hulia,” Kellee greeted from behind me. I heard the polite smile in his voice. They knew each other. He had helped her get to safety after Eledan had screwed with her head. She likely also knew him from her profession. The Halow law and Hulia had rarely gotten along. Now there was no law, and we were all on the same side.

  “You smell delightful,” she gushed. “What is that cologne?”

  I stomped on Hulia’s foot. Her bright, tinkling, seductive laughter turned half the heads in the room, and she sashayed into the crowd, looping a few unsuspecting males in her arms.

  I glanced at Kellee side-on and caught his puzzled frown mixed with that superficial smile. Once Hulia was out of sight, he took up her spot beside me and eyed my drink. “What is it?”

  “I have no idea. She keeps refilling this.” I showed him the tankard. “And when she’s not looking, I dump it back into the bowl.” The last time I’d gotten too liberal with my emotions after drinking Faerie wine, I’d had sex with a fae ambassador and strangled him with my whip. Granted, I’d thought he was Eledan. But while I wasn’t craving Eledan like before, I didn’t entirely trust myself not to lose control.

  Kellee picked up a discarded cup and sniffed. “Smells like cleaning fluid.” He set it back down and turned his attention to the room. “Arran’s enjoying himself.”

  I couldn’t read the marshal’s flat tone but knew I didn’t want to watch Arran anymore. I nodded and made an agreeable sound. Setting down my drink, I grabbed a piece of flatbread and picked at it. Kellee was too astute to miss my mood. His gaze warmed my face. He hadn’t said much after Aeon had eaten the starfruit. Hadn’t said much about anything since we had survived Sjora and her arena games. He knew something was going on between Talen and me. He didn’t like what had happened with Aeon/Arran, and then there was the fact I’d watched him fuck a powerful, immortal fae unconscious. There was a lot going on in everything we didn’t say.

  A violin, or something like it, started up, but the sound held an electronic note. I instantly recognized Hulia’s music and stiffened. She had played like this in The Boot. She had magic. Not a lot, but enough to lightly bespell. There was no harm in it, but it reminded me too much of all the things I’d been hiding from and everything we had lost.

  Kellee’s hand boldly found my waist, and then he was there, leaning close to my side so that when he spoke, I heard him clearly despite the music. “Do you dance?”

  “No, I…” He pulled back, but the electric flutters he’d sparked to life in me felt too good to lose so soon. I dropped my bread and covered his hand on my waist with my own, trapping his fingers against me. “I don’t know how,” I admitted, expecting him to laugh. I had never danced in my life. It seemed silly here, surrounded by dancing humans, but these weren’t my people. I wasn’t human, not really.

  His fingers closed around mine, and he wordlessly led me to the edge of the crowd. There, he stepped in front of me, took my hand, placed it neatly on his waist, and clasped my other hand in his. He rested his other hand on my hip, where it might as well have scorched a hole through my clothes. I stared at the laces tying his shirt closed. It seemed like the safest place to look.

  “Feel the movement and let yourself drift with me,” his deep voice rumbled.

  My face was hot. I could kill a thousand fae, lie to the Faerie Queen for years, and cut out a prince’s heart, but this… this wasn’t me. Half of me wanted to run, the other half was too stubborn to let Kellee see me weak. And so I stomped on the spot, with no idea where to put my feet. My heart raced as if I were being stalked in the arena, like I was preparing to fight.

  Kellee’s hand slipped to the dip at my lower back and his fingers spread there, and to make it worse, he pulled me close so my lower belly grazed his belt and my chest brushed his. I had been close to him before, mostly while trying to kill him. This was different. What was the point in dancing anyway? Was I supposed to enjoy being this close to Kellee without an endgame?

  “Just tell me if you want to stop.” His words tickled my hair against my forehead.

  He swayed to the music. I focused on my feet and the feel of him moving, and soon, everything else fell away.

  “I didn’t know you could dance.” I sounded okay, not like the high-strung mess inside my head.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know.”

  Of course there was. He was the last of a race the fae had all but wiped out centuries ago. He looked young, my age, but he wasn’t. He looked human, but he wasn’t that either. He had a hunger inside him, one that had once looked at me like prey. Marshal Kellee had teeth, literally and figuratively. And beneath all that rugged prettiness lurked something unseelie. Something forbidden.

  My footing stumbled. Kellee caught me. The music quickened, and so did our pace. His rhythm swept me with him, his body strong in ways that had nothing to do with combat. “We’ve fought often enough that this should be second nature to you.”

  “Give me a weapon and I’ll know how to dance with you.” My hand had moved to his back, inside his coat, so I felt the warmth through his shirt. I didn’t remember moving it there, but it felt good to feel the smooth shift of muscle, feel him move beneath my touch. I wanted to feel the heat and softness of his skin under my hands. I had dreamed it over and over and over, and Eledan had ripped those dreams away. I wanted the real Kellee in my memories. Always had, since I’d first seen him walking through the sinks like he, alone, was the law. But in many ways, the marshal, like Talen, was untouchable. I’d seen him fuck a fae general. He hadn’t killed her, but he could have. I was sure of it. Their lovemaking was one memory I could have done without. The two of them rocking together, her fae skin glistening magic, his mouth on her shoulder, her breast, his sharp teeth sinking in—

  “Then dance like that,” he said, bringing me back into the room. “Use your emotion.”

  If I did that, I’d probably kill him. I laughed at my dark thoughts.

  His fingers touched my chin, tilting my head up. Delight sparkled in his eyes. “You don’t laugh enough.”

  Those eyes, flecked with green… sometimes they were black, sometimes rimmed in gold, sometimes red. He had so many facets, all of them dangerous. But I hadn’t feared him until I’d seen the truth at his center. The unseelie. Did he know he had the darkest part of Faerie inside him?

  The music still played, and bodies moved around us, caught up in Hulia’s spell, but Kellee and I stood motionless. He looked down at me, seeing… I wasn’t sure. But he seemed puzzled, like I was the mysterious one. He knew more about me than I did about him. I wanted to know more, but getting answers out of him had never been easy. Getting a kiss was even harder. If I rose onto my tiptoes, I could kiss him… and ruin this tentative truce we’d built up over the past few weeks. I wouldn’t force him. There were more lies than truths between us. I’d betrayed him. I wouldn’t make this decision for him. It had to be his, even if I ached all over for him to lower his mouth, sweep his tongue in and claim me the way the rest of him wanted. I knew what he was, both sides of him. And the only thing that frightened me was never having him know me in return.

  The violin sang, its vivid notes weaving a spell through the crowd.

  I brought my hands up between Kellee and me, creating space and room to think, but as I did, I noticed the crowd no longer moved. “Something’s wrong.”

  Hulia played, but the rest of her band members gazed slack-jawed like all the others. She swept the bow across the violin, her body locked in its own dance, and the crowd watched her with glassy, unblinking eyes.

  Kellee’s eyes narrowed, golden edges glowing. �
�Stop Hulia’s song.” He cocked his head, listening to something I couldn’t hear. “Go.”

  I shoved through the bodies. “Hulia!” Her eyes had glazed over too.

  I heard Kellee’s growl and glanced back to see him pitch the bowl of pink water off the table, splashing the entire contents across the floor. Poison.

  “We’re not alone.” Kellee ran from the room, his swirl of coat the only part of him I recognized in the blur.

  The floor shook and the strings of lights overhead swung. Thunder followed, but it rolled on and on. A ship. And Kellee was out there alone.

  He’d be fine. He was always fine.

  “Hulia.” I scrambled onto the makeshift stage made of rows of tables. She continued to dip and sway, her body one with the music and the magic. And it was magic she wove. I could taste the sweetness of Faerie sprinkled in the air. This wasn’t Hulia’s doing. Something mixed with the drink had left an entire people susceptible, including Arran. He stared up at the stage like all the others.

  This trance was fae made. It had to be.

  I placed a hand on Hulia’s shoulder, moving with her. “Hulia, snap out of it.”

  She didn’t respond, just played her hauntingly beautiful music.

  I slapped her, putting weight behind it. Her grip on her bow slipped, and the violin jolted in her hands. Silence.

  She blinked and touched her face.

  “Fae.” Kellee was back. He grabbed a table, upended it like it was as light as paper, and wedged it against the door.

  “How many?”

  Hulia fluttered her lashes and frowned at her audience. “I’ve never done that before.”