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

  “We need to talk before I bleed.”

  When we entered the pyramid, the light had changed, softening the edges, but the crisscross claw marks on the walls were still visible. I stopped at the plinth, exactly where Kellee had stood… where, long ago, he had made the wrong choice and killed the human woman. I wasn’t losing him to the past. I wasn’t losing any of them.

  I plucked a dagger from my belt—borrowed from Arran—held my wrist over the stone plinth, and pushed the tip in.

  “Not yet!” Talen lunged in, but abruptly stopped when he saw the look on my face.

  “I survived Faerie for over two decades,” I told him. “I survived the saru harvest, survived Dagnu and a thousand battles in Faerie’s arenas. I survived the queen, survived Oberon pouring acid under my skin to make me a tek-whisperer, survived the warfae markings never meant to touch mortal flesh. I survived the so-called affections of every fae who thought they could play with a saru and throw her away.” He flinched. Good. “I survived the worst of them. The Dreamweaver got inside my head and under my skin until I didn’t even know my own name anymore. I survived what he did to me.”

  My words settled in the following silence.

  “Don’t make me add you to that list, Talen. Because whatever or whomever you are, if you hurt me, I will survive you, and I’ll stop you. Don’t make me your enemy.”

  “I’m not your enemy,” he replied firmly.

  “You told Sirius how to save Faerie.”

  “Yes.”

  Yes?! “By-cyn, Talen, tell me I can trust you. Promise me that.”

  He closed his cool fingers around my hand and drew the knife away from my wrist. “You can trust me.”

  “I wish… I wish I knew you. The real you, beneath all the secrets.”

  “Do you really?” He still had my hand in his. He pressed it to his chest, and his heart galloped beneath my palm. “I wish the same. But you do not know what you ask of me, Mylana.”

  Because he wouldn’t tell me!

  He was too close again, too Talen, and just like before, his presence filled this room and drowned me in the feel of him, the overwhelming sense that he was more than this fae standing in front of me. More than I could understand.

  “I cannot speak the things you wish to know, but some answers you have already seen.” He pressed his other hand to my chest. “The bond was a mistake. It was meant to temper something in me. I saw power in you, and I thought I could calm these things inside if I was bonded to a mortal, but I didn’t know… I didn’t understand who you are, but I do now. I know you. I see you.”

  Why was there sadness in his eyes?

  “I can’t tell you who I am.” He swallowed and said carefully, “But I can tell you who you are.”

  “There is no mystery in me.”

  He smiled his sorrowful smile and lifted his hand to press a finger to my lips. When he pulled away, I sensed the weight of his words and the truth barricaded behind them.

  “Talen, this isn’t about me.”

  “You’re wrong. It has always been about you.”

  You’re wrong. She is everything.

  “The magic you feel,” he breathed, “the power you believe is mine, it was always in you, Mylana. Just a spark so small it could be hidden among the saru, where you grew, where you survived.”

  I pressed my hand over my heart because an ache was spreading, a terrible, hollowing emptiness that threatened to change my past, my future. Everything.

  “My lana,” Talen said. “It has meaning. You know this. It’s why you guarded your name so fiercely, and it’s why you told me, because you had to breathe life into it, and I knew for certain from that moment.”

  Mylana. My slave name. The only truth of me I truly owned. “Talen, Kellee needs us—”

  “It means my star.” The words were free, and the truth with them. “You don’t see it. You can’t see it. No one can but me. I saw it in you from the moment we met. There is a light in you, Mylana. Put there by Oberon. You are a caged thing. You always were.”

  His words clicked into place, like a key slotting home in its lock, but I dared not open the door those words had revealed. “You can’t do this, Talen. You can’t say these things.”

  “I can. Because they are true.”

  I flung my gaze at the chamber door behind me. The light was fading. “You can’t do this now. It isn’t fair. I am saru. I am… I am the Wraithmaker. My past… is mine. Not theirs, and not yours to twist like Eledan tried to. I will always be saru.” I placed the back of my hand on the plinth, watched my veins throb in my wrist. Saru. My blood ran red. “I was born of the earth, grown for the fae, and harvested into their service. I fought with everything I ever had to survive, to be saru. Faerie can’t take that away from me.” My voice shook, parts of me cracking open. “Your words can’t take that away from me.”

  “I’m not taking anything of yours, just revealing more.” Talen appeared in front of me. His eyes were bright in the gloom. “You are saru, but you’re more. Eledan knew it. He took Mab’s gift of power and knew then. It’s why he didn’t kill you when your usefulness was over. Why he kept you. Why he calls you the nothing girl, seeking to wear you down, and why he haunts you still. It’s why you’re changing. You feel the truth, Mylana. You always have. You seek the polestar in distant places when a fragment is within you, and always has been. My lana, a name, the gift of truth, given to you by someone who hid you in plain sight. Who gave you that name?”

  “I don’t know.” I’d always had it. It was the center of me. My first memory. My single truth. The one thing I truly owned. And now? What was he saying? That something of Faerie had named me, that Oberon had named me? That my king had hidden a secret in me?

  I lifted the dagger. What little light shone through the door licked down the blade and sparked at its tip. And behind it, gathering in the shadows, Talen’s bright power rippled outward.

  The blade plunged down, sinking deep into my forearm. The pain meant nothing against the screaming inside my head. I tore the blade free, spilling blood where a vakaru war chief had once killed a human woman, sacrificing her to the sidhe gods. Talen’s outline glowed now. I blinked, catching sight of something impossible. I’d seen it before, just for a second when he had torn free of the warcruiser. Hidden inside the light, hidden so deeply behind Talen’s blazing star-like glory, twin shadows beat as one.

  Not shadows…

  Wings. Wings made of Faerie’s darkest night, pricked by a thousand distant stars.

  He couldn’t speak his name, but he could show me.

  Talen wasn’t made of light. He was hiding inside it.

  The truth made liars of us both.

  All around, smoky wraiths twitched in and out of time, blurring Valand’s past and present into one. Wraiths bubbled from the floor, the walls, from between the blocks, and seeped from the score marks. They turned to Talen, and on their unseelie lips, they whispered, “Nightshade…”

  Chapter 21

  A saru and a fae, both and neither. A lie and the truth. We were coming undone.

  I pushed it all away, but I couldn’t push away the sight of the shadows crowding Talen’s back or the knowledge burning in his infinite silver eyes.

  Stardust and shadow. Death and darkness.

  I saw it in him now, the terrible yawning power, as though he could reach out and snuff out the stars of Faerie’s sky one by one.

  He knew how to fix Faerie.

  He knew my name.

  He knew too much.

  He was too much.

  The walls and floors bubbled and boiled with vakaru wraiths. But Talen speared his gaze into me, pinning me still as my blood flowed down the plinth’s sides.

  Fear clutched my heart. The Talen I’d known wasn’t real. He never had been. The truth had always been there, lurking in his silences, in the things he didn’t say, in the power he kept controlled.

  I had asked to know him, the real him, and now I looked upon the truth. But I hadn’t been
prepared for this. Fear’s jagged edges hacked at our bond, and Talen’s infinite eyes widened with an echo of terror.

  “Nightshade…” the wraiths hissed, filling the air. Vakaru who were unseelie at heart. The Nightshade’s unseelie.

  The enormous wings made of shadow flexed wide, like they might consume entire worlds, consume me.

  I stole a step backward, thoughts spiraling out of control. I’d brought him here. I’d freed him. I’d freed the unseelie ruler. And now he had a warcruiser. He had the unseelie on Hapters and the vakaru wraiths. He had me… Had he somehow steered us all here to this very moment?

  And now Kellee was gone, and the vakaru were… rising all around.

  I couldn’t think past him, couldn’t breathe around the weight of his power. I turned, sensing the enormous pressure of Talen’s storm pushing down, and ran from the pyramid.

  “Kesh?!” Arran was running toward me, Sota hot behind him, but so too were the wraiths. They flowed in, thickening inside lengthening shadows, until they rose as one and crashed over Arran and Sota, washing all signs of them away.

  No, not Arran. Not Sota!

  “No!” I screamed. “You can’t have them!”

  Talen was doing this. Back at the temple, he hadn’t been looking for the polestar. He’d likely already known its pieces weren’t here. He had been waking the vakaru. On Hapters, he had freed the dark fae. Wrapped in light, I’d missed the darkness in him. He’d calculated every move, and I’d fallen into his trap the moment he had knelt to me, with tears in his eyes, asking me to free him. He hadn’t meant the prison, just like he’d said. He’d meant for me to free him and the unseelie.

  I ran, seeing Sirius on the shuttle’s ramp, his tek-arm outstretched and glistening. Just a few more strides. My boots thumped against the stone path. Blackness flooded across the plaza, rushing in from all sides to swallow Valand’s green stones. It looked like water, deep and hungry. And in seconds, it would slam into me. I’d drown and disappear like the rest.

  Arran was gone. Kellee had been taken.

  But I wasn’t giving up. The darkness couldn’t have them. I was getting them back.

  I hammered up the ramp, feeling it tilt upward beneath me as Sirius hit the button to close the door. A second later, the ramp slammed shut, followed by the combined outraged roar of a thousand lost souls.

  Talen.

  Oh by-cyn…

  What had he done?

  Wraiths crawled over the shuttle’s screen, their twitching outlines a mass of heaving shadows.

  Sirius recoiled from the screen. “Where are the others?”

  I gripped the back of the pilot’s chair and fixed my attention on the pyramid entrance far across the churning black waters. Talen hadn’t come out. “Gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “The wraiths took them, the same way they took Kellee.”

  “Then we should fly out of here and be rid of this forsaken place.”

  I couldn’t leave Kellee, or Arran, or Sota. I wasn’t leaving at all. The wraiths hadn’t killed Kellee. He’d vanished, so they’d taken him somewhere. With any luck, Sota and Arran would be in the same place. I had to go to them. I had to find them. If Talen was right, if I truly had the light of the polestar within me, then he wouldn’t let me die. He needed me and the fragment Oberon had hidden inside me.

  “I have to go back out there.”

  “Where’s Talen?” Sirius demanded.

  The Nightshade is Talen.

  Was it true? My silver fae, my gentle, quiet, powerful, proud fae. Could he truly be the vanquished unseelie ruler?

  I knew only what I’d seen. He could control the unseelie. He had woken them on Hapters, woken the ghosts of vakaru here, and now, he could stop them. I pressed my hand to my heart and felt the bond lashing like bait caught on a hook, trying to free itself before it was swallowed whole. We were bonded. He wouldn’t hurt me. He couldn’t hurt me.

  “Sirius.” I breathed in and held that breath, Talen’s touch fluttering around my heart. “Things just got a whole lot more complicated.”

  The guardian’s expression shut down. “What happened?”

  “Talen is not who I believed him to be.”

  I am not who I once was… I winced at the echo of Talen’s words. Maybe he wasn’t the monster from the myths, but he certainly wasn’t someone I knew.

  “But he won’t hurt me,” I said aloud, mostly for my benefit. The second I opened the shuttle door, the wraiths would rush in. Sirius would be gone too, and they would surely swallow me moments later.

  “You’re opening the door?” Sirius asked, already seeing the answer in my determined expression. “Why? We can leave right now and return to Faerie. Why would you risk your life for them?”

  For Arran, for Kellee, for Sota, I’d risk it all. Perhaps even for Talen too. It was too early to tell. “They are each a part of me, a part of who I want to be.” I didn’t expect Sirius to understand, but perhaps one day he might, if we survived the next few minutes.

  Sirius blocked the door. “I cannot allow this. I lost my arm to keep you safe, and now you insist on walking out there? The king tasked me with bringing you to him, and I intend to uphold that order.” He looked as though he might tackle me. He’d probably win too.

  “Can you fly this tek-shuttle?” I asked.

  He swallowed, the answer obvious.

  “Then you don’t have a choice.” I dropped my hand to my side, hovering it close to the whip. “Get out of my way, Sirius.”

  “Your life is worth more to the king than your love is worth to them.”

  That was probably true. But I couldn’t live with myself if I walked away, whether my friends loved me or not. I stepped around Sirius. “Don’t worry. I have a knack for surviving.”

  The guardian sighed behind me. “Until you don’t.”

  I hit the button and the door seal cracked open. Time held its breath, and then the wraiths plunged inside.

  Valand. But so very different. Movement and life and laughter. I blinked into the glare to clear my vision. Color swirled, mixing like the color in Valand’s sky, but it wasn’t my eyes that were blotted with too much color. The world was… blurred.

  I looked back, expecting to find the shuttle and Sirius, but the space behind me was filled not with spacefaring tek, but with people. Stalls lined the walls, bright awnings cast over them like flags, and the people drifted between them. Not fae, not even close. Broader, heavier, stronger, but beautiful nonetheless. Children wove between the groups, dragging sticks behind them so they clicked over the stones, punctuating the rise and fall of the crowd’s swell of collective voices.

  This was… before.

  I wandered forward, letting my feet carry me in no particular direction. They spoke a language I didn’t recognize, but I didn’t need to understand them to know they were happy. Life bubbled everywhere, in their smiles, their voices, the way they touched one another, and in their eyes, rimmed in gold. Vakaru. All of them. But this wasn’t a warring race. These weren’t soldiers. They were just… people.

  A shadow washed over the plaza and the chatter of a thousand people died. I followed their gazes and looked up into the sky. A ship blocked out the light—a world-eater. Enormous, even by warcruiser standards.

  The vakaru fell to their knees, and the scene swirled. Colors bled away like paints washed in the rain, swirling into a storm of gray. When it settled, I set my eyes on the only spot of color left: a fae I hadn’t seen in five years.

  Oberon.

  The prince stood in the center of the plaza, his blue robes threaded with cold silver. No crown, he wasn’t yet king, but he regarded the kneeling vakaru like one. No, not like a king… like a god. His glittering eyes skimmed my way. I dropped to one knee and bowed my head, facing the stone. I had knelt to him a thousand times, I had wept at his touch, but never had it felt so wrong as it did now.

  “Droch-fhoula has failed you.” He spoke in fae, a language I knew well. His words rippled through the vak
aru.

  A man to my right sobbed into his clenched hand. I blinked at him, at the sight of this strong male vakaru crying so freely, at the child clinging to his father’s leg, eyes locked on their god.

  “You have failed me,” Oberon said.

  No. I lifted my head and looked at my king. No, it is you who has failed them.

  “You harbored a human among you, invited her onto your soil. Faerie’s soil. You listened to her poisonous words seeded with rebellion.”

  Oberon’s voice carried far into the silence. More sobs followed in its wake.

  I stared at my king, stared into the past. Don’t do this.

  “Your chief believed her blood sacrifice would suffice, but the betrayal is rooted far deeper and must be torn from this land. Faerie will not suffer betrayers.”

  “Mercy!”

  Oberon’s unblinking gaze settled on the speaker. “Mercy?” he asked.

  More cries for mercy darted about the vakaru, and with each voice, Oberon’s gaze thinned, turning brittle. He was not merciful.

  I rose to my feet in a sea of Oberon’s kneeling subjects and opened my mouth to beg for them.

  “Please,” Kellee said.

  He stood among them, a splash of color in the gray, his head lifted to the king while someone beside him clutched his hand. A young woman or a child, I couldn’t see. But others also reached for him. He wore the same simple clothes as his people, patched with colors. Long dark hair fell in waves down his back, tied with feathers and beads, making the firm cut of his jaw and the pride in his eyes more prominent.

  He walked forward, through his people. The woman’s hand slipped from his, and others brushed their hands over him, their reverence clear. They loved him.

  Oberon watched Kellee approach, his face unreadable.

  Kellee knelt before his god. He looked up, eyes pleading. “My lord, the mistake was mine.”

  “A mistake indeed.” Oberon lifted a hand. His sleeve spilled down his arm, revealing thorned ink spiraling from elbow to wrist. He clicked his fingers.