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

  Arran sat crossed-legged to my left, arms braced behind him. We were together, and that mattered.

  Here’s the Messenger myth, I thought. All of us. I would do everything in my power to keep that myth alive. Sometimes fantasy could be stronger than reality, if the people believed.

  Sirius had already made it clear he wanted me alive. The others were expendable, but not to me.

  “Hand me over,” I continued, “the people will go free, we’ll buy time to get this ship into orbit, and then we’ll muscle in and threaten the fuck out of him with a warcruiser.”

  “I don’t like it,” Kellee argued predictably, although much of his dry conviction had fizzled away. His gaze was crisp and honest. A dusting of shadow marred his cheek where Talen had struck him, only visible because I knew to look for it. Maybe the punch had knocked some sense into him. “What’s stopping him from killing you?”

  “He won’t. Oberon’s orders supersede all.”

  Kellee clenched his jaw.

  “It will work,” Talen replied, calm, smooth, controlled, like he hadn’t knocked Kellee flat on his ass with one of the sharpest, deadliest punches I’d seen thrown. And I’d seen and taken many hits in my years. “He only wants Kesh. He’ll forget the rest of us. With the deal done, he’ll drop his guard. I can track him once he withdraws from Hapters and overpower his ship.”

  I glanced at Talen’s knuckles, expecting to find them grazed, but his hand, dangling over his knee, was healed. And Kellee had once believed Talen had no fight in him. The marshal had gotten that so very wrong. Lately, he’d been making mistakes.

  A ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of Talen’s mouth, and we shared a fraction of understanding in a single moment. He had probably been looking for an opportunity to hit Kellee for centuries. Most people who knew Kellee wanted to punch him.

  “But, before we do the trade,” I said, steering my thoughts back to the task at hand, “we need to find and contain the creature I saw, otherwise Hapters’s people are as likely to get killed at home as they are by Sirius. Talen?”

  “It will submit to me,” the fae said matter-of-factly.

  Submit to me. His words made me want to chip deeper and mine for more answers. “How do you know it won’t try to kill you?” I asked.

  “From what you’ve said, it’s a lower creature. I have a talent with some of Faerie’s base creatures. That’s assuming we can find it. The dark fae excel at hiding.”

  “I’ll track it,” Kellee said. “It reeks of the dead. I thought the scent all over Kesh was dead fae… but I didn’t have all the facts.” He paused, letting the fact that nobody had told him about the fae-eating monster until a few moments ago sit heavily in the silence between us. “I’m tracking it alone. I can’t have you all stumbling about in the dark behind me. At best, you’re distracting, and worst, it’s dangerous.”

  “I don’t think you should—” I started, but Kellee’s razor-like glance cut me off. “Okay. Sure. Fine. Go do your thing, just don’t die while you’re brooding out there alone.”

  “Brooding?” Kellee pulled himself into a sitting position, muscles flexing beneath his shirt. “Did you just accuse the last vakaru of brooding?”

  Talen huffed a small laugh. I got the impression I had stepped into a Faerie trap. One with teeth.

  I shooed Kellee’s glare away and turned to Arran. “You and Sota keep an eye on Sirius’s main ship, the one near the town. Strictly scouting. Do not engage the fae. Send Sota back and forth. I want frequent reports on any activity. If I don’t get those reports, I’m calling everything off and we all return to this ship. No questions asked. I don’t like that we have to spread out for this, so let’s stick to the plan.”

  Nods all around. Good. We were making progress. Perhaps we could make something of this Messenger and her men myth.

  “And what will you do?” Kellee asked.

  I waved Kellee’s PI reader in the air. “I’m gonna find out what was going on around here before the fae came.” The magic/tek brooch sat heavy as a stone in my pocket, and the more I thought on it, the more impossible it became. Magic and tek—two opposing forces that were rarely combined. I was one example of how tek could work with magic—Oberon had made me that way—and Eledan’s tek-heart was another. The brooch was important. A mother had reached for it in her last moments, and I needed to know why. Seeing as Talen and Kellee weren’t talking, I’d get my answers without them.

  Kellee looked at me curiously, trying to read my thoughts on my face. I barred everything from my expression, like I had for years. He saw nothing I didn’t want to show him.

  “Let’s get to work.”

  Chapter 8

  While the others went their separate ways, Kellee told me to follow him.

  We walked the corridors, Kellee content to stay quiet until we reached his chamber. Not long after claiming this room as his, he had torn down the bright fae fabrics and bundled them into a corner, leaving the chamber stark and exposed with no dividing walls between the bathing and sleeping areas.

  I entered behind him and noticed the bed hadn’t been slept in. So he slept elsewhere on the ship? He had never liked the idea of living inside a living entity. Wherever he got to rest, it would be secure and defendable.

  “Tell me about the creature,” he said, striding across the room, shrugging off his long coat, and tossing it on the bed. The shirt went next, up and over his head, revealing the exquisite musculature of his tanned back. A few nicks and dimples marred his otherwise flawless skin. Old scars. He’d had a long time to collect them and those were just the visible ones. He likely had hundreds more that weren’t visible.

  The chamber door closed with a heavy clunk, jolting me from my thoughts. “It’s the size of a single person shuttle…” I continued to explain everything I remembered while Kellee efficiently stripped, but I found my description of the creature lacking. When I’d thought back the first time, I’d remembered black eyes, but then I remembered peering into those black eyes and seeing other colors. Or its shadowy outline was sometimes solid, sometimes smoke. Claws and teeth. Talons and tentacles. The more I tried to remember, the more my recall failed me.

  “It’s not you. Some of Faerie’s creatures are known to cast glamour, a way to obscure their appearance so your mind can’t piece the memory together.”

  Great, illusions. I shouldn’t have been surprised. My coat had much the same ability to cloak my appearance.

  Kellee had replaced his shirt with soft, gray and black, breathable leathers over a figure-hugging undergarment that looked as though he’d painted it on. The pants went next. I crossed my arms, wondering whether to look away or pretend seeing him virtually naked didn’t arouse me. We’d had our hands on each other not long ago, and I recalled exactly how the hardest part of him had fit against my palm.

  He tugged on pants that matched the jacket—completing the scout leathers. But these were fitted to his vakaru physique, not the svelte form of normal fae. Fae leathers couldn’t be bought; they were all made by hand. So where had his come from? Sonia—Devere’s saru—was the only person who could have made them. A ridiculous stab of jealousy at the thought of her measuring Kellee’s assets had me looking away.

  “There’s something else you should know,” I said, still puzzling over the riddle of Marshal Kellee, who now looked disturbingly fae in his fitted leathers. He had once warned me never to compare him to fae. I figured he didn’t look in the mirror much.

  He combed his fingers through his messy hair and used a thin strip of leather to tie it into a ponytail. He hadn’t met my eyes since leaving the pilot’s chamber, and his darting gaze and hard press of his lips indicated his thoughts were far away.

  “It’s unseelie,” I said.

  He dropped his hands from his hair and frowned. “Unseelie? Impossible.” But he wasn’t surprised, just confused. The unseelie were myths, but not to him. He hardly reacted at all.

  “I know what I saw.”

  His frown deepen
ed. “Your description is unreliable.”

  “Because the thing used glamour.”

  He hesitated and looked across the chamber, his thoughts turning his gaze heavy. “This far from Faerie… how would it survive?”

  “You said this planet has a weird history. Crops growing where they shouldn’t… And the unseelie… they’re different from the seelie. They don’t follow rules, right?” You know this, I thought. You are unseelie. But I hadn’t yet confronted him about what I knew, and while our relationship was so fragile, I wasn’t sure I could.

  His eyebrows lifted. “True.”

  “There was a magical reservoir on Calicto, right under Arcon. Maybe there’s one here too.”

  “Unlikely,” he scoffed.

  “Why, because you’d know?”

  “Something like that.” He tightened the belts and straps and tugged on a pair of boots. When he straightened, he looked utterly fae. Broader, built for warfare, but still fae in the striking maleness. I preferred him in the coat, wearing his gold star, snarling at criminals. Like this, I almost didn’t recognize him. He kept so much of the real Kellee locked away. I doubted I’d ever see the truth of him.

  He approached, his eyes on the door behind me, and would have walked right by had I not touched his arm. The touch was light, but it brought him to a halt.

  He looked at my hand and then up into my eyes. “I’m…” The break in his voice betrayed emotion he otherwise kept expertly hidden. “…relieved he was there, earlier.”

  He meant Talen, because neither of us was under any illusions. Kellee would have sunk his teeth into my neck, and he wouldn’t have stopped there.

  “I’m sorry for my behavior.” He drew in a breath and added, “You drive me crazy, Kesh. All of me. All the time.”

  My own apology tried to fall from my lips, but I swallowed it and dropped my hand from his arm. I dug into my pocket and handed over a comms unit. “Stay within range. If you have to go farther, let me know.”

  He plucked the comms from my hand and pressed it behind his ear. “I’ll find it.”

  “I know you will.” When Kellee had his target in sight, nothing could stop him, not even Faerie’s own monsters.

  He eyed the door like he wanted to be outside, running through the night. He could, but something held him back. His hard eyes softened, and when he looked at me again, more of the smart-mouthed marshal from Calicto shone through. “I am sorry,” he said again. “For many things. I’ve been hard on you, and I… This place… this war. For so long I deliberately forgot who I was. That’s no longer an option.”

  I knew that feeling. “I understand and it’s fine.”

  “No, it isn’t.” He lifted his head and looked away, but I caught the flash of pain across his features. “I want this to work. We have something remarkable. I want us to work.” Us. Kellee, Talen, and the Messenger myth.

  “So do I.”

  His eyes searched my face for the truth. He didn’t trust me, but he wanted to.

  He had told me time and time again how he wasn’t a good man, when all I’d seen was evidence to the contrary, but if he knew the truth inside him, he likely believed he had a lot to make up for. In his heart, Kellee knew he was unseelie. How could he not?

  “It can work.” His glare intensified.

  I smiled. “A messenger, the last vakaru, a champion, a wardrone, and a fae pilot. There’s never been a crew like it. We’ll make it work.”

  He nodded and strode from the chamber like a fae soldier from a sidhe’s flight.

  I was halfway back to my chamber when the comms crackled and Kellee’s smooth voice poured into my ear. “You said you wanted an apology. You got one.”

  “I seem to remember, way-back when you made that promise, you said I’d get an apology any way I liked, Marshal.”

  Laughter lifted his voice. “So how would you like it, Kesh?” Hidden among that laughter, implications simmered, hints of long, pleasurable moments, of Kellee’s mouth roaming where his hands had already ventured. Nervous flutters shortened my breaths. I’d wanted all of him, and he’d shown me what I was teasing. I still wanted it, perhaps more so.

  “I’ve got ideas.” Most of them involved Kellee naked, spread before me like an all-you-can-eat vakaru buffet. Now I knew blood flipped him over the edge, I relished the thought of walking the edge between pleasure and having my throat torn out.

  “Will I like these ideas?”

  “Bring me a monster and you’ll find out.”

  He growled low and the comms cut off. My chuckling laughter echoed through the ship’s corridors.

  Silver veins glittered through the pilot’s chamber ceiling and the background thud-thud of the ship’s two hearts accompanied my thoughts while I sat on the floor, an ocular link filling my vision with the PI’s information. Daily entries, the airstrip’s comings and goings—most of the information had me glazing over. But there were snippets of interest. Reports of sinkholes opening close enough to the strip to alert Hapters’s maintenance crews. Missing crewmembers. Tremors. Isolated, each report didn’t mean much. But in hindsight, I noticed a pattern and the pattern drew a picture. The fae had been here to Hapters past, and they had left something unseelie behind. Maybe all the fae activity in Halow of late had stirred it awake, or perhaps it had always been awake but in hiding. The message on the buried slab was part of that.

  Time, our prison,

  Dark, our sentence,

  Light, our freedom.

  Time. Dark. Light. Faerie’s driving forces. Its foundations were built on those three elements. Take one away and Faerie’s foundations weakened. But why leave the stone here, on Hapters? And why was the unseelie creature awake now?

  What if there’s more than one?

  I tapped my comms. “Kellee, where are you?”

  Kellee took a few moments before drawling, “Soaking up the rays.”

  I arched an eyebrow and chuckled silently to myself. “Your sass is showing.”

  “It’s hard to stay stealthy while talking to the devil on my shoulder.”

  I was the devil now, was I? “I thought you said I was a male-eating arachnid?”

  “That too. Do you want something or may I return to stalking the unseelie?”

  I hesitated. There was little point in throwing guesses his way. Better to have him focused. “Just checking in.”

  His light chuckle sounded down the comms. “Trust issues, Kesh?”

  I was not getting into a comms conversation about trust. “Let me know when you find something.”

  “You said that already.” I heard his smirk. “I’m starting to think you like the sound of my voice.”

  I tapped my comms, cutting off the signal and his ego. I cut the ocular feed too, and looked up at the silver-veined ceiling. Talen was in the ship, doing whatever he did when he vanished. I knew he was close; the constant flicker from our bond made sure of that.

  A floral-scented breeze tickled my hair against my cheek. I turned my head toward the shift in the air, narrowing my eyes at the empty chamber. The walls throbbed their soft orangey hues, but something had stirred the air.

  I put my hand down, spreading my fingers to stand, when the cool, hard kiss of metal touched the side of my neck. The blade nicked my skin, stinging.

  “Do not move, Messenger.”

  Sirius.

  Panic reared up, dumping ice water through my veins. How had he gotten in?! I couldn’t see him, but I could smell his fae combination of warm leather and Faerie’s intoxicating blooms. Blood trickled down my neck.

  “Where is the pilot?” the guardian asked, his accent sharp and refined.

  I clenched my teeth. His words had landed warm against the back of my ear, putting him so close he could probably feel my heart racing. “I don’t know.”

  He shifted, and I felt his weight against my left shoulder, but I couldn’t see him. If I could reach around and twist, I could maybe pull him over me. He wouldn’t cut my throat. He needed me.

  I sh
ifted the placement of my knee, pressed against the floor, and my hand, moving my weight to one side.

  Sirius’s fingers brushed behind my ear. He tore the comms unit free and threw it out of sight. “Now throw the whip away.”

  I swallowed. The blade cut deeper, spilling more blood into my coat collar. He pushed the sword deeper, angling it so it lodged under my chin.

  “The whip.”

  His tone revealed no emotion. And why would it? He was a sidhe lord and the king’s guardian. And I was the girl Oberon had plucked from the arena for some inexplicable reason only the king knew. Sirius had always looked at me like he was waiting for the perfect opportunity to cause an unfortunate accident. Well, here was that opportunity. But he wouldn’t dare return to Oberon with my carcass.

  I dug my fingers under the whip’s loop and unhitched it from my belt, using the movement to dip my shoulder further, but the more I twisted, the more I realized I couldn’t see him. The air shimmered like the heat haze off a shuttle’s cladding. He wore glamoured clothing, like my coat. I couldn’t see anything of Sirius to know where to grab him. I needed another plan.

  His body crowded against my back. The ghost of his hand brushed mine and tore the whip free, tossing it across the chamber.

  I had other tek-tricks sewn into my coat, but I needed space to reach them.

  “Stand. Slowly.”

  Keeping my hands loose at my sides, I rose to my feet.

  “Your other guardians all left, but the pilot is still here.”

  He had been watching the ship, likely alone. We would have seen a flight of fae lurking nearby, but not one stealthed guardian. This subtle thinking was exactly what made the guardians so lethal.

  Sirius’s sword dug deeper, forcing my chin up. “Where is Talen?”

  I began to deny Talen was anywhere nearby, when an icy voice declared, “Right here.”