The Nightshade's Touch: A Paranormal Space Fantasy (Messenger Chronicles Book 3) Page 20

  Chapter 19

  I emerged from the pyramid with a new perspective on the silent city and Marshal Kellee.

  “You have the talisman?” he asked, squinting into Valand’s greenish light.

  I dug the talisman out of my pocket and held it out. It sat on my palm, as innocuous as the brooch I’d thought it was. But the magical throb warming my hand and beating in waves up my arm made it clear it was no ordinary piece of jewelry. The fact it was a replica of Eledan’s heart had me itching to throw it as far away as possible and leave it behind for Valand to claim.

  I dropped it into Kellee’s hand. The marshal’s eyes narrowed as he lifted it and turned it over in the light, watching its facets catch fire. “After the original Hapters people fixed Eledan’s heart with magic and tek, I figure he had them make more, watched where they got the magic and how they threaded it through tek, and used that knowledge to root out Hapters’s secrets, including the map.”

  “But how does that help us find fragments of the polestar here?”

  “Us? It doesn’t.” He tossed the talisman into the air, caught it, and started down the steps, his gait lighter than before. “But it came from Hapters, a planet saturated in early fae magic right alongside the trapped unseelie and likely a piece of the polestar too. Faerie magic knows its own. Talen can make this trinket dance for him.”

  I joined Kellee on the straight path back to the shuttle, catching his smile and sending one of my own back. He had shown me his painful truth, and finally, I was beginning to know my marshal. Seeing that lopsided smile anew and knowing what it cost him spread a strange, comforting warmth through my chest. Maybe he and I would be okay. Now all I needed was for Talen to open up. He didn’t have to tell me all his secrets, we all knew I wasn’t ready for that, but the silver fae’s silences felt as heavy and laden with dread as Valand’s.

  “Talen’s been quiet lately.”

  Kellee nodded. “In the prison, he once spent a whole year in silence. He has the patience of the ancients roaming Faerie, watching time pass them by.”

  I’d heard the tales of ancient fae who had lain still for so long that Faerie had reclaimed them. Saru said Faerie ate them, made them part of her sprawling meadows, or her warm Summerlands breezes, or her secret murmuring brooks. I wasn’t sure how true such things were, but I had no wish to lose Talen to that kind of silence.

  Back at the shuttle, Arran was sitting on the ramp, twirling his daggers, eyeing Sirius as he strode along the inside of the long, high walls.

  “Where’s Talen?” Kellee asked Arran.

  “Went that way.” Arran jerked his head at the path branching off the main thoroughfare, through the wall and out into the city. “I opted to babysit the fae most likely to kill us all while Kesh wasn’t looking.”

  Kellee’s eyebrow arched. “Good move,” he praised, prompting a grin from Arran.

  Kellee started down Talen’s path. “Kesh?” he called back. “C’mon. We shouldn’t stay here longer than necessary.”

  Arran smiled up at me. “Go with him. I’m fine here, and Sirius isn’t showing any signs of staging a coup.” He stood and sheathed both daggers inside his thigh straps. He lifted his chin and lost his smile. Some of the cold gladiator in him hardened his eyes and closed off his expression. “What happened in there?”

  “I saw something of the real Marshal Kellee.”

  Arran glanced after Kellee. “Do you trust him?”

  “Implicitly.”

  “Then so do I.”

  What? No argument? No fighting? I shouldn’t have been surprised. Of everyone, Arran had never questioned me. “Thank you.”

  He looked up and back at Sirius. “Kellee’s right, though. This place feels wrong. We should get this done and move on. I can’t shake the feeling there’s something else here.”

  I felt it too, a crawling itch between my shoulder blades. “If Sirius gives you attitude, remind him this will be easier for him if he works with me, not against me.”

  “Sirius is armless,” Sota quipped, dipping in to hover close.

  Arran frowned.

  My drone did not just go there. “Sota, really?”

  “Too soon?”

  Arran chuckled and nodded at Kellee’s shrinking outline. “Go, or he’ll leave you behind.”

  I kissed him on the lips, meaning for it to be a passing touch, but I failed to resist him the moment he looped his arm around my waist and pulled me against him. A flicker of heat sparked to life and pulsed low. Arran’s kiss deepened. The feel of him, hard and soft, right and wrong, made that real, fragile part of me flutter to life. Need and want and fear mixed together, because the closer I got to him, the more I wanted to explore the man he had become, but he had resisted going farther, and I was in no rush.

  When he broke away, I was breathing too fast, my heart racing to match all the crazy thoughts in my head.

  “When we get back …” He tucked my hair behind my ear and searched my eyes, looking for answers I shouldn’t give him. “We need to talk, just you and me.”

  “We do?”

  He closed his eyes and backed up. “They need you.”

  The fresh intensity in his eyes made me wonder if there was part of the kiss I hadn’t understood, if there was something happening between us that I didn’t understand either. “Arran—”

  “Go,” he said. “I’ll be right here when you get back.”

  I searched his face. Had I said or done something wrong? Whatever it was, it had to wait. Kellee had almost disappeared inside the heat haze. “Sota—”

  “I’m staying,” the drone said before I could issue an order.

  I hesitated on the path and looked back at them. Arran and Sota. Maybe Sota had sensed something too. He and Arran had grown close these past few weeks. “Don’t stray too far,” I told them and jogged after Kellee.

  The marshal passed through a stone archway into a formal garden made up of a jade brick pathway and several planted terraces. Despite row upon row of trees and bushes, all shaped and pruned to within an inch of their lives, the garden was as silent and motionless as the rest of the city. It didn’t feel real. But it wasn’t dreamlike either. It just felt frozen.

  “You were a…” The word stumbled off my tongue. “…king?”

  Kellee’s soft laugh echoed through the motionless garden. “Ask Oberon and he’ll tell you I was a savage. The sidhe lords called me Droch-fhoula, my people called me Kell-eigh—war-lord. But a king?” Laughter danced in his eyes. “Never that. I didn’t rule the vakaru. Nobody rules the wild things of Faerie, manufactured elsewhere or nurtured by Faerie herself. I was chosen.”

  “Droc-oo-la?” I echoed, trying to pronounce his fae name.

  He screwed up his nose. “Stick with Kellee.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Bad blood.” He strode on, long legs eating up the path. “The sidhe were not wrong.” He had locked his gaze ahead and didn’t notice or care about the gardens we walked through, but I found their frozen elegance unnerving. The crawl of a gaze on me was stronger here, riding my back. I even turned to check no one was following.

  “Whatever you’re doing with the kid, don’t fuck him up.”

  There was no point in denying it, but I’d be damned if I would let Kellee make me feel bad for something that felt as good as my feelings for Arran.

  He took my non-answer as his cue to continue. “I don’t own you. I can’t stop you. But I can ask you not to hurt him.” He looked over. “He didn’t survive you before.”

  I kept my thoughts to myself and off my face. Talen had once told me I didn’t know what love was. He’d meant real love, not the manufactured kind all saru felt for the fae. Arran loved me. He didn’t understand why, and neither did I, but it was real. And I loved him back.

  But I also loved Aeon and wasn’t sure if what I felt was an old love or a new one.

  “I don’t want to hurt him,” I admitted.

  “You already are.”

  I stopped on
the path. We had climbed several sets of steps, passing deeper into organized rows of trees until the city’s walls had vanished behind motionless leaves and static branches. Kellee took a few sides before stopping and looking back. He looked at me with too much understanding.

  “Talen is Talen…” he said, that sentence oddly making sense. “And you and I, we’re like fireworks, the dangerous, out of control kind.” There was a Kellee and me? “I don’t have a problem with your divided affections, and we both know Talen prefers to share but Arran—” Kellee rubbed his eyes and looked around him as though seeing the pruned forest for the first time. “Shit, this is not the place for this…”

  He’d seen the kiss and more. He had seen whatever it was that had spooked Arran.

  Kellee sighed and approached me so his next words were softer and just between us. “He’s just a kid, Kesh.”

  “He’s not just a kid. He’s been through as much as I have, if not more. Saru live a lifetime behind bars before we even reach adulthood.”

  “Yes, as Aeon. But he chose to let all that go. Now it’s your turn to do the same.”

  But I’d just found him again.

  Kellee was suddenly close, all his understanding, his past, his knowledge written on a face that didn’t carry the scars on the outside, but they were all there, below his handsome surface. “I’d give almost anything to have the people I loved back, to have my mistakes wiped clean, but not if it meant hurting them all over again. Leave the past far behind you, Kesh. Let the ghosts rest. You know I’m right.”

  I sighed out any denials. “One of these days, you’ll be wrong.”

  “When I’m wrong, people die.” He turned, coat fanning as he paced through the trees.

  I watched the marshal stride into the green and knew he was right. I had to stop this thing with Arran before it went any deeper—if it wasn’t already too late. But just the thought of letting him go hurt in ways I’d rarely experienced before. It was a deep pain, with no source, nothing I could fix with a med-gauze or pain suppressors. I’d felt the same hollow pain when I’d revealed my truth to Talen and Kellee.

  When I caught up, Kellee mumbled, “I’ve spent too much of my life trying to track Talen down and here I am again, stalking his wayward self, playing cat and mouse.”

  “He’s close.” I could feel the bond tugging me ahead, letting me know we were going the right way. “You know who he is, for real, right?”

  Kellee didn’t answer, but his “don’t-ask” glare did.

  “Good, don’t tell me. I just… Just tell me this. Is he good?”

  The marshal looked down the straight path, deeper into the organized forest and far into the distance. “It’s all about choices, Messenger.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s all I can give you.”

  “He’s bonded with me, Kellee. I feel him inside, getting stronger.” And he’s changing me. I couldn’t admit that, not yet. Not here, where words carried far and wide. “This is important. You even suggested I take up the bond, remember? You wouldn’t have done that if he wasn’t good.”

  He winced, as though he’d forgotten that conversation. “All right, yes. I think he’s good.”

  “You think he’s good?”

  “He’s fae, and there’s a lot I don’t know. He’s never told me his name, but Talen doesn’t tell you the important things. It’s all in the silences… the unsaid. I didn’t sit on my hands for the three hundred years he was incarcerated. I dug around and got answers. He’s powerful, he’s a Faerie outcast, a pilot, he’s on the run, and he has his own agenda, which is why we’re traipsing through this damn forest after him.”

  I stopped. “Kellee, wait.”

  The marshal frowned back at me. “What?”

  I took his hand in mine, delighting briefly at its roughness. “Can you show me a claw?”

  “What?”

  “Please.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to... explain something and it’s easier if I show you.”

  He eyed me suspiciously, but let a nail grow into a sharp, slender, curved blade. I turned my hand over and flicked my finger along the under edge of the claw, running its razor edge over my fingertip. My skin painlessly peeled open and a pearl of blood welled. “There, I need to—”

  His eyes shot open. He snatched my wrist and yanked me into a run after him. “Go, go, go…” He stumbled and shoved me ahead of him and then spun. I saw claws glint, saw his fangs lengthen, his eyes blaze. And all around, arching above him, behind him, the perfect trees began to rustle and move.

  One branch struck fast, lashing in like a whip. Kellee swung and sliced through it, severing its gnarly fingers. Another struck, plunging in from behind, but it didn’t wrap around him like I’d expected it too. It punched into his shoulder, wrenching a cry from Kellee. He spun, cutting himself free. His glare found me. “Get out of here!”

  I freed my whip, but in the next second, it was snatched out of my hand so fast my palm burned.

  The trees thrashed and hissed, turning their branches on me and thrusting them in. One tore across my shin. Another struck my face, slicing my cheek open. Something hooked around my ankle and yanked, and before I could tug free, it pulled my leg out from under me. My back hit the path, then my head, and I was hoisted up and held aloft like a dangling saru on a fish hook.

  The frenzy ended as abruptly as it had started.

  I swung upside down over the path and caught sight of Kellee dangling the same way, his coat hanging halfway to the ground.

  “What the cyn, Kellee?” I snapped, twisting keep him in my sights.

  “Blood,” he said, like that answered everything.

  “Blood?! I was trying to show you something.”

  “I know what happens when you bleed.”

  “Not like this.” Speaking of blood, much of it was rushing to my skull, flushing my cheeks and making my head throb. “Your forest likes blood?”

  “You’re surprised?”

  We dangled quietly, branches groaning under our weight, but none would break. We weren’t that lucky.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  I had swung back around and saw the sheepish look on his face. “I’m fine,” I huffed. My itching skin meant the cuts were already healing. My coat kept falling over my face and had ridden up to my elbows. I didn’t even know where my whip was. The trees had taken it. “Why are they keeping us here.”

  “Snacks.”

  I closed my eyes. Snacks. Right. We were tree food. How very… Faerie.

  “Your face? I saw the cut…”

  I opened my eyes and felt Kellee’s glare drilling into me.

  He cocked his head, staring harder. “You’re healing.”

  “That’s what I was trying to show you before your trees tried to eat me.”

  He gaped, or I thought he did. He’d swung around, facing the opposite way again. I was about to ask him what he thought it meant and how we were getting down, when I realized his upside-down coat was jiggling. Was he… laughing? This was hardly funny. His carnivorous trees were about to eat us and he was… I saw the laughter in his eyes, saw his lips twitching… He was snickering? At the sight of my glower, Marshal Kellee laughed loudly and freely, shattering the deathly quiet. I was turning away from him again, and although nothing on Valand was remotely amusing, my own laughter threatened to bubble free.

  “The all-mighty Messenger is…” He laughed harder. “…hanging by her ankle from a tree.”

  The laugh escaped me, and by the time I’d swung back around to see Kellee, my sides ached. It felt good to laugh with him.

  Talen cleared his throat. He stood on the path below, looking up at us. “I followed the sounds of hilarity.”

  “Hey.” I waved, gulping down the laughter. “This is all your fault.”

  “I don’t see how,” Talen replied, violet eyes glittering at the absurdity of finding me and the marshal hanging from trees. “These aren’t my trees.�
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  “We were looking for you.”

  One eyebrow sprang upward. “You knew exactly where I was.”

  “Yes. No. I mean…” I growled and rolled my eyes, ending the roll on Kellee. “So, what happens now? Do either of you speak tree?”

  Kellee got himself back under control. “I always hated these fucking shrubs.” He rocked his arms, swinging into motion. I didn’t have enough upper body strength to haul myself upright and fluttered my lashes at Talen instead. Talen stopped watching the marshal with mild interest and clicked his fingers. The grip on my ankles vanished. I plummeted, twisted, and somehow landed on my feet. My knee clipped the path, but I was upright and hadn’t slammed onto my ass or broken anything.

  “A little warning next time?”

  Talen’s secret grin was on his lips and gone again before anyone but me could see it.

  Kellee had enough swing to grab onto a branch. He heaved himself into the canopy and then sliced off the branch fingers clamped around him. He dropped to the floor in a balanced crouch and straightened to his full height, wearing the kind of marshal stare that wilted flowers.

  “I’d have freed you too,” Talen offered.

  Kellee’s glare thinned. He tugged his coat back into place. “Do I look like I need a fairy to save me?” Kellee tossed him the talisman. “Don’t answer that.” The fae snatched it out of the air. “The polestar,” Kellee declared. “It’s what we’re here for. Will you make yourself useful and help us find it?”

  Talen eyed the talisman and tossed it back. Kellee caught it.

  “I know where it is without that trinket,” the fae said.

  Of course he did. He was Talen, lord of secrets and silences. He turned back the way he’d appeared and headed down the path, his long hooded coat a silvery river running down his back.

  Kellee veered into the trees and emerged a few seconds later with my whip. “I guess we’re following the fae.” He handed the weapon over. “I’d apologize for the trees, but they haven’t had company in a while, and if you’re going to bleed all over a vakaru garden, you should expect to get eaten.”