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

  They worked better apart.

  Kellee hadn’t said a single word about the starfruit, but he didn’t have to. The vakaru’s glances and silences were loud and clear. He preferred Aeon. Aeon, he understood, and Aeon had understood Kellee. They were both battle-hardened warriors. They had bonded on sight. Arran was… different. Arran eyed Kellee like he didn’t fully trust the lawman. Possibly because Kellee looked at Arran like he was permanently disappointed. But it was me Kellee was disappointed with. I was supposed to have stopped Aeon from taking the starfruit and losing his memories. I hadn’t.

  Maybe Arran was picking up on Kellee’s innate threat. Arran wouldn’t have guessed Kellee was unseelie. The unseelie were little more than a cautionary tale in a land made of myths. But there was no denying Kellee carried the kind of lethal aura that moved most people out of his way.

  As I walked through the long grass between them, I wondered if I should have left Arran at a resistance camp. He hadn’t asked to leave, but keeping him around was much harder than I’d imagined. Arran was still Aeon, and when he flashed his quick, bright smile, I died a little inside. I still loved him. I always had. But he didn’t know me at all.

  Since the starfruit, Kellee had gotten colder, and Talen… despite knowing him better than ever, he was still a mystery. He and I hadn’t spoken much since I’d asked him to tell me his name and I’d given him mine.

  I was trying to make this work. Wasn’t that enough? So why did it feel as though everything I was nurturing in Talen, Kellee and Arran was slipping through my fingers? And all the while, chatter in Halow’s communication channels spoke of the Messenger who would save Halow from the fae. The mythical messenger who had killed hundreds of thousands of fae during a Game of Lies. I hadn’t killed that many, but the legend was growing. I, however, wasn’t. Inside, the kernel of truth the myth was built on threatened to break open and reveal who I really was. A saru slave. A nobody. A nothing girl. And Halow was pinning its hopes on me.

  Eledan was probably laughing.

  Goosebumps chased up my arms as my thoughts darkened around the memory of the Mad Prince. His phantom still stalked me and probably would forever. Nothing girl. How could I be a hero when half the time I didn’t even know who I was? I was trying, but Kellee’s cold shoulder and Talen’s distance meant it wasn’t enough.

  A low whistle pierced the night. Arran’s warning signal.

  I dropped to my knees in the grass. Kellee would have surely taken cover too.

  I waited, listening to the breeze hissing through the grass, until a different whistle pitched into the quiet, dart-like and constant. A slim organic vessel flew overhead and was gone again in a blink. Single-fae ships. Talen’s warcruiser carried some, but there was no way of knowing if the vessel was his or Sirius’s.

  I waited for Arran’s all clear, heard the two pips, and emerged from the grass. Grassheads tall enough to conceal fae scouts waved like ocean rollers. We were too exposed here. The fae could be hiding in that grass and attack at any moment.

  “We’re clear.”

  My heart leapt into my throat and my hand shot to my whip.

  The marshal quirked a single eyebrow and the corner of his smart mouth tugged upward. He leaned in and whispered, “I didn’t know it was possible to creep up on the Wraithmaker,” as he sauntered past me and plunged into the wall of grass.

  I followed, narrowing my glare on the back of his head, watching his ponytail bounce. In the arena, nobody stalked me and lived. “It’s not.”

  “You sure looked startled.”

  His voice held that irritating note of laughter. The same note I’d first heard in the sinks when I ran right into him. I silently mouthed his words back at him, “You sure looked startled,” and said aloud, “Vakaru were made for this shit.”

  He grumbled agreeably. It was true. The vakaru came before saru. When they hadn’t worked out, the fae harvested child saru for their arena bloodsports.

  I stepped in his tracks through the grass, watching him sidestep and carve through the field as easily as a shadow. He could probably vanish right in front of me and I’d never see which way he went.

  I was slowing him down, and I knew how to stalk. He had better eyesight, better hearing, better sense of smell. Everything about him was made for the hunt, the chase, the kill.

  At least a year had passed since we’d met, though for much of that I’d been dreaming, and I still knew so little of his kind. What had his people been like? Did he have a family once? How had he come to be the last vakaru? But I’d recognized the truth of him during the Game of Lies. Unseelie. He’d had his teeth in my wrist, and he’d drawn my blood from my veins and more with it. The dark part of Faerie inside him would kill me if it got the chance. There was a monster in Kellee, one he battled every day. Now I was afraid to poke him too much, in case he didn’t know what he was. Or worse, he did.

  The unseelie’s hunger—what I’d heard of it—made Eledan’s twisted torture look like child’s play. Oberon had defeated them so long ago it might as well have been a fantasy. It was to me. Until I’d seen the real Kellee.

  As I followed his path through the grass, I tried to recall what I’d heard about the unseelie, but much of it was nonsense, like the shadowalkers who snatched oathbreakers from their sleep, or the nightwraiths who roamed with the Hunt, unable to resist death’s sweet song. All legends warped by time in the same way the name Wraithmaker had taken on a mythology of its own.

  I pulled my coat tighter around me and shrugged off my shivering. I would ask him. Soon. Once we had Hulia back and we’d dealt with Sirius.

  Sirius.

  More shivers trickled down my back.

  The guardian had hated me from the moment Oberon had plucked me from the arena.

  In all the years I’d spent as the king’s secret shadow, Sirius had barely wasted words on me when his hate-filled green-eyed glare did all the talking for him.

  Had he volunteered to find me? Was this a kill mission, or had Oberon sent him to retrieve me? What of Talen and Kellee? By now, Oberon must have known they were working with me, or I with them. I wasn’t yet sure how we all fit together but we were together.

  The Game of Lies had changed everything. Right up to that point, I could have lied my way out of it all: letting Eledan live, not returning immediately with the Mad Prince, saving human colonies. I could have gone back, dropped to my knees, and kissed the king’s hand. All would have been well. Then I’d set an army of drones on every fae in that arena and cut them down like they were nothing more than the grass I walked through. Immortal lives ended. I could still taste their blood in the air, still hear their screams. Kellee wasn’t the only monster walking through the grass.

  “I’m afraid to ask what’s causing that frown.”

  Kellee’s voice pulled me from the depths of my thoughts.

  “What?” I blinked and halted behind Kellee’s motionless silhouette.

  He had stopped at the edge of the fields. Ahead, a small collection of domed dwellings huddled along a riverbank. I shielded my eyes against the slash of crimson breaking over the horizon and glimpsed a strip of white fabric snagged in a communications antenna. It flapped like a surrender flag in the breeze. Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe someone had risen the white flag when the fae arrived. Whatever had happened here, I saw no signs of life now.

  “Shall we take a look?” Arran asked, emerging from the grass to my left. The morning light lifted the blond streaks in his short hazel hair.

  Kellee’s eyes narrowed on the domed houses, shadows gathering on his face. “We should avoid settlements. The fae will look at dwellings first.”

  “We might need supplies,” Arran countered and then started down the slope toward the buildings. “It won’t take long,” he called back.

  Kellee watched Arran skid down the bank, a perturbed muscle fluttering in his jaw. I brushed his arm in friendly reassurance and descended the bank after Arran. “You should be accustomed to being ignored by now.
”

  “I thought all saru were obedient.”

  I grinned over my shoulder. “There’s a lot you don’t know, Marshal.”

  He half-smiled as he heard his words echoed back at him.

  We crossed a dust-covered road with an eye on the skies and the farmland stretching all around, shadows cast long and lean behind us. Already, Hapters’s daylight heat beat down on us.

  “We may need to take shelter from the heat,” Kellee was saying as we approached the nearest dome, then the wind changed, and the flag fluttered the opposite way.

  Kellee stopped dead. His fingers twitched.

  “What is it?”

  He bolted forward, dashing around the side of the dome. I sprinted after him and saw Arran stagger out from inside and brace himself against the wall, his face flour-pale. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth, saw me, and shook his head.

  Kellee hissed a curse from inside the open doorway.

  I smelled it then, the coppery odor of spilled human blood.

  Death waited inside.

  At first glance my saru mind struggled to piece together what it saw in front of Kellee where he had crouched down to examine the remains. The scattered bodies were unmistakably human, but from their wrinkled and desiccated carcasses, they had been dead for weeks, maybe months. Dark patches marked the walls where blood had splattered. But the ripe smell of fresh death lingered in the air.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Kellee asked. He didn’t mean the bodies, or the fact two of the six dead were children. He meant the wet scent of the kill, combined with what appeared to be decades-old remains.

  “No.”

  Their clothes were intact, torn and stained in places. One body, I assumed a male from its size, had a pistol holstered against his shriveled thigh. He hadn’t reached for it. The children were huddled behind him, and behind them, a smaller female adult reached beneath a dust-covered bed. Opposite her, two others clutched each other, teens perhaps. Now their hollow eye sockets collected dust and their white bones jutted where their skin had peeled away.

  The dome was a single-room dwelling. Beds. A table. They hadn’t had much. A farmer’s family, perhaps?

  Kellee maneuvered between the bodies and brushed his fingers to a dark mark on the walls. He rubbed his thumb and fingers together. “Wet,” he said. “The heat would have dried it by now. This happened during the night, just hours ago.” He cast his gaze at the bodies, his eyes going distant along with his emotions.

  “It wasn’t theft,” I added.

  Kellee looked up, remembering I was here, and his gaze shuttered behind his mask of neutral lawman indifference. He looked around us, at the simple dwelling, and then left without saying another word.

  Outside, I heard him tell Arran to check the other dwellings and then his boots scraping in the dirt as he walked away. He had seen more death than me, but this had bothered him.

  I looked again at the scene, at a father shielding his children, the mother reaching… Someone had come through the door and killed them all before they could fight back. What could have killed so fast?

  I stepped between the bodies. Where was the blood? A human body bleeds a startling amount. Six bodies. There should have been more blood, not just a few splatters on the wall. I crouched beside the mother and peeled her collar away from her neck. The skin, darkened and as dry as paper, held two puckered puncture marks, constricted now that the skin had tightened.

  I’d seen those marks before, when Kellee had drunk blood from my wrist. Had a vakaru done this? But there were no other vakaru. Kellee was the last.

  There were no other obvious wounds on the bodies. No slashes to the throat. No abdominal cuts, no blast patterns. My gaze tracked the woman’s reaching hand toward the bed. Light had crept across the floor and crawled over the dead, and as I lifted my eyes, something glinted in the dark.

  Crouching, I stretched an arm beneath the bed and touched something cool, hard, and metal. A box. I pulled it from under the bed and flicked open the lid. A hand-sketched portrait of the family lay on top of a collection of trinkets. I pushed the drawing aside and found a brooch. Metal edging plaited around a tarnished green gem. It was likely worthless, just costume jewelry.

  I brushed my thumb across the gem, wiping it clean. Tek whirred to life. The silver plaits unraveled, branching outward, turning the brooch into a star-like shape, and at its center, the gem winked green with a swirl of fae magic—life magic.

  Tek and magic.

  I stared at the impossible thing in my hand.

  “Kesh…” Arran’s outline appeared in the doorway, blocking the light.

  With a start, I closed my hand around the tek. “Yes?”

  “Kellee says we need to leave. Now.”

  I got to my feet, discreetly hiding the brooch in my pocket, and nodded.

  Outside, Kellee’s outline was a dark blot walking the river’s edge, flooded in sunlight. By the time I caught up with him, smoke billowed out of the larger domed house. In seconds, the column had turned black and climbed high into Hapters’s greenish skies.

  Arran’s scowl made it clear he thought Kellee had lost his mind.

  If the fae didn’t know where we were before, they did now.

  But Kellee knew the risk. And he’d set the fire anyway.

  We marched along the serene river’s waters in silence, and behind us, the lives of a dozen families burned to ash.

  Chapter 3

  We sheltered in a ravine during the hottest part of the day, keeping to the shadows so that any passing ships would miss us. Kellee scouted ahead, leaving Arran and me to our thoughts. He didn’t say much, and after the gruesome discovery back at the farming settlement, I didn’t feel talkative either. I’d asked Kellee if there was any beast on Hapters that might explain the deaths, but he’d told me predators had been wiped out long ago, when the planet was first settled.

  The mysterious brooch sat heavily in my pocket. It had returned to its tarnished state, but now I knew to look for it, the tingling thrum of fae magic tickled my thigh. As to what fae magic was doing on Hapters? I didn’t have an answer, but it felt wrong. We were deep in Halow territory, far from Faerie. Until the recent discovery of a well of magic on Calicto, the idea that any magic could exist outside of Faerie had been as far-fetched as the fae themselves.

  Kellee returned as the day cooled and the light faded, his unshaven chin and dark hair peppered with dust.

  “We need to keep moving,” he urged, as spritely as when we’d started out. “It’s another day’s hike.”

  Arran fell into step behind him and I followed, hoping we could get off Hapters soon so I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the long horizon and miles upon miles of flat fields.

  We kept words to a minimum but I watched them both. Arran constantly scanned our surroundings, while Kellee strode ahead, relying on his senses to alert him. We hadn’t said much since the settlement, and I wished I knew the right words.

  Arran fell back into step with me, offering a small smile I’d seen on him countless times before. Memories rushed in. Memories of the times we couldn’t talk, but there were other ways a saru could communicate.

  He eased my hand into his like it was the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t notice until his little finger brushed my wrist, the gentle tip tracing the outlines of saru marks meant to comfort.

  I yanked my hand free, startling him. “What are you doing?” I hadn’t meant it to sound so harsh, but he wasn’t supposed to remember anything about being saru.

  He lifted his hands and stepped back. “I er… I’m sorry. I…” His brow furrowed in confusion. “I didn’t realize. I was just…”

  “Well don’t.”

  And now he looked hurt, and dammit, I didn’t want to hurt him. It was just a touch. He probably wasn’t aware of what he’d done.

  “Right.” Arran, usually so open and easy to smile, guarded his expression and withdrew several steps away from me. “I didn’t mean to o
ffend.”

  “It’s fine.” It wasn’t. “It’s nothing.” It was everything.

  I turned away from him and saw Kellee up ahead, jogging toward a watchtower erupting out of the skyline. I assumed he was heading toward it to get a better look at our position. An outcropping of boulders jutted from the ground between us and the tower. I veered off and waited beside them. Arran joined me moments later, his hands rammed into his pockets. Around us, heat rippled off the plains, warping the landscape, making Hapters look dreamlike. Huge skies, painted mauve as the daylight faded, pushed down.

  On Faerie, something always interrupted the horizon. Huge weeping trees, sprawling jungle, rolling hills, rocks, walls, bars. This endless open space and its emptiness made me want to dig a hole and hide in it. My back itched, senses tricking me into thinking someone was observing us. I never did like vast, open spaces.

  Arran leaned against a boulder and watched Kellee’s rippling outline cut its way back through the heat haze.

  “The yard’s not far…” Kellee said, handing a canvas bag to Arran, who peeked inside and beamed. He took out a square loaf and tossed me the bag. I dug around inside and found a wrapped parcel of oatcake. Tasteless, but it chased away the hunger pangs. Now all we needed was water. We had veered away from the river some hours ago, but the dry, ash-scented air had quickly parched my throat and tongue.

  Kellee’s keen eyes scanned the surrounding land, probably seeing right to the horizon. The light was fading fast. Hapters’s twin moons climbed into the sky, signaling another long night ahead. With the constantly waxing and waning light, it was a wonder anything grew on this farming rock.

  “You think they’ve given up?” I asked Kellee.

  He looked at me as though silently asking, “When have the fae ever given up?” and said, “We’ll rest here a while and then make the push to the yard.”

  He allowed himself a moment to meet my gaze, and this time, a tentative smile touched his lips. Nothing like his usual cocky grins, but it warmed me to see it.