A House of Cloaks & Daggers: Wrenlock's POV

The body left a trail of thick, black blood on the stones and grass as I dragged Enyd’s fucking sentry to the graveyard at the back of the House. A melancholy grey had reclaimed the sky once Lucais’s power bled the darkness out of his Court, but the atmosphere was charged with a quiet sense of dread, accompanied by the bitter chill in the too-still air. The only sound for miles was the suppressed thump of my boots hitting the ground, and the eerie scrape of the corpse ruining the well-kept grounds.

I gripped the decapitated head by the roots of his dirty brown hair, holding it to the side with my arm fully extended as I stalked away to carry out my unspoken orders. My proximity to the noxaeterna gave me the heebie-fucking-jeebies. I’d never been a superstitious man before the curse, and I’d fought through years of bloodshed and magic bombings in the Gift War without so much as flinching away from the gore and violence, but the swollen veins covering the carcass of Enyd’s toy soldier were far more disturbing than anything a war could conjure. 

High Fae simply shouldn’t be that shade of green.

Lucais believed the Malum were reproducing. I hadn’t heard anything about that happening yet, and I fucking hoped I never would. Things were bad enough without a full-scale apocalypse falling on top of us, too.

If the last couple of months had demonstrated anything to me, it was that the High King was more than willing to let both worlds fall to ruins as long as the shield he created around Aura held fast. Typical. The man had a one-track mind, proven to us time and again. He made it incredibly fucking difficult to get anything done when I had to spend so much time preventing him from dropping the metaphorical match before the accelerant was flushed. And, unfortunately, time was the one thing I was short on when it came to Aura and the Malum.

There was a hair-trigger on another war. I just needed a little more time before someone decided to pull it. Until then, there was a chance. There was hope. After that, I would have to start making some pretty heartbreaking fucking choices.

Sometimes, my mind wandered back to the day the High King wove the notion of an apocalypse into human history before he sealed off their new world at the end of the war.

Zombies—that’s what he called them. He had based a monster created solely to star in human nightmares on my sister and his own parents. Lucais’s reasons for it were equal parts noble and insulting, like his reasons for doing most things were. Objectively, the conceptualisation of new mythology protected the image of faeries. It stopped them from resurfacing in human dreams and breaching the spell between our worlds, but by the same token, I was convinced he genuinely believed that mocking the fate of our families would make it hurt less.

I stifled a sigh.

He was wrong. He was often wrong, but he was the High King. 

The garden bed came into view, the colours dulled and muddied while the graveyard flowers lay dormant. I approached it, releasing my hold on the sentry’s ankle with a grunt, and then shook my hand as if the motion would cleanse my palm, though I knew it was useless. The noxaeterna wasn’t a contagion; it couldn’t be transferred from one being to the next through innocent contact even when it was in its worst form. If it could, I’d be well and fucking truly doomed.

“Dinnertime,” I called to the graveyard flowers in a low, sing-song voice. Notes of wisteria and thyme filled the air as a gentle breeze swept through the garden while the flowers awakened. They lifted their sleepy heads, blinking at me curiously, and I grinned through my disgust. “Who’s hungry?”

There were a variety of carnivorous flowers in the graveyard, but only one was large and bloodthirsty enough to devour the sentry’s skull whole—the vibrant, crimson trap-flower at the end of the first row. Stalking over to it, I held the head out in front of me, jiggling it above the closed blossom. When dormant, the buds were small and curled in on themselves, the stems short as they burrowed into the soil at their roots; but when tempted by the meat of freshly deceased bodies, they sprang to life, capable of growing up to twenty times their size.

I wasn’t sure if they’d want an infected corpse, though. I’d never had to feed one to them before. During the Gift War, the bodies were often slain by the blade. Occasionally, the humans were armed with guns and iron bullets, and those were the dead bodies the graveyard flowers had always rejected.

The chill in the air was biting as I stood alone on the House’s grounds with a corpse and a bed of carnivorous flora. I shifted from one foot to the other impatiently as the trap-flower’s petals unfurled, revealing the blood-red core of teeth masquerading as seeds to unsuspecting visitors. Beady eyes studied me, evaluating the offering in my hand. Graveyard flowers seldom attacked the living. They much preferred the ease of digesting bodies already in rigor mortis over the violent struggle of subduing live prey, but they would devour me if they felt it necessary. We had that in common, at least.

The flower swayed, delicately sniffing the air—then, in the blink of an eye, it pounced. In a whirlpool of green and red, the trap-flower rose up from the ground and opened its jaws, snapping at the head in my fist.

“Shit.” I let it go and leapt backwards, a sick kind of thrill sparking through my veins. “I’m out of practice, then, aren’t I?” I muttered, giving the graveyard a sidelong look as I shuddered to dispel the nervous energy. “That should be a good thing.”

The graveyard didn’t talk back. I watched with a grimace as the sentry’s face disappeared, swollen mouth agape and eyes closed as it sank down the inner stem the way large prey would roll through the body of a snake. With disturbingly little effort, the flower petals folded over the seeded core, and it slowly retreated to the safety of the soil to digest the sentry’s head. I whispered a little prayer for his last rites in soft tones, but it wasn’t anything special.

I didn’t know the man. He and I were not the same.

While I had buried bodies for Lucais up and down the countryside, the soldier in the garden bed was one of the many who travelled with Enyd, taking turns fucking her before and after the meetings she attended with the other leaders. It eased the stress of the job, I supposed. Honestly, I’d long thought Lucais should give her methods a shot himself. I’d much rather do that than play the part of his undertaker, adding to the burial grounds we planted all over Faerie because of his political indiscretions. 

Enyd was annoying as shit, but she was a good conversationalist after a couple of drinks, so I imagined the men she kept close to her couldn’t be all that bad, either. I hoped he didn’t have a family, though. His skull would rest beneath the garden bed safely and in good company once the trap-flower had finished cleaning it up, but they’d never get it back—if they ever found out what had happened. I doubted they would.

With a resigned sigh, I turned to the rest of the body. It was disrespectful to burn the entire thing when a graveyard was accessible. On top of that, the remaining unfed flowers had perked up and were glaring eagerly at me, so I wiped the invisible traces of noxaeterna from my hands, holding them out to either side as fire blazed on my palms. For a moment, I let my magic burn. It was one of the greatest fucking feelings in the world—the best before I’d met Aura—and it gave me false assurances that my skin would be seared clean of the corpse’s malady.

A guilty pang hit my heart.

Keeping the best side of myself hidden from Aura was fucking painful. I couldn’t risk using my fire magic when she wasn’t looking in case it had an adverse effect on her, given the condition of her own magic. So, it had been building up inside me for weeks. The glimpses she showed me in her eyes—the deeply protected, unknown fire smouldering beneath the surface of her soul—were punishing. I felt an ache building in the core of my being, desperate to ease the torture in her beautiful mind, to share some of the magic that was her birthright, and embrace the connection between our souls that hummed without any expectations or demands. We owed the world nothing. We owed each other nothing—but we could be everything. 

She wanted to know what she saw in me?

Fuck. I wanted to show her. I hated myself for keeping it a secret, but it was a necessary precaution. Aura would have to understand when it was finally safe for me to confess everything. She would have to understand.

I hoped.

Once I finished burning the sentry’s bones clean of his clothing and flesh, I tossed the last of him into the garden bed. The noxaeterna couldn’t be burned away completely, but fire helped. Thankfully, the soil shifted like sand, taking hold of the bones and slowly dragging them under the surface.

“Bon appetite,” I muttered to the graveyard flowers. Then, I turned on my heels and stalked back towards the House, mentally reaffirming my vow that I would share my magic and my secrets with Aura as soon as possible.

There were days when I hoped she would discover it on her own—my part in it, at least. I didn’t know what would happen to her if anyone hit her with the whole, terrible truth unexpectedly, and it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take. Selfishly, I waited for someone to mention my magic to her in passing, and I imagined I’d try to play it off like it was no big deal because she had never asked me. But I had no such luck. She was attracted to me, drawn to me—and led to believe it was due to the bindings of fate, which left her impossibly conflicted when she learned that it was completely her own doing.

Aura’s rejection of our connection stung, though I understood her reaction. It didn’t change the fact that the link between us was the most natural thing in the entire fucking world.

Mating bonds were both sacred and fair game. Lucais’s feelings for her were legitimate, and I didn’t discredit his relationship with her—if it could even be called that—but nobody sat in the same room with their fated soulmate and his best friend and felt more connected to the other man.

Nobody.

Yet Aura had. 

Brushing off the icy outdoor air from my shirt, I entered the House and found the two of them in the front parlour on the ground floor. Lucais had placed Aura on the sofa, her flame-red hair billowing out on the cushion beneath her head as she slept through the repercussions of hitting her magical self-destruct button. Lucais’s shoulders were hunched as he knelt on the ground beside her, his silhouette cast in a rectangle of gloomy light that streamed through the window above them from his weakened sky.

I couldn’t read him beyond the outward melancholy. Lucais’s stature appeared smaller, his shoulders tensed and tucked in the way they had been in the months after he first broke his wings, and his golden locks were a shade closer to a dirty bronze without the excess of power at his disposal. For a moment, I felt a flutter in my chest, like our connection was being revived and I could go to him to provide some solace.

But his temperament was never more volatile than when Aura was in the room with us, so I refrained.

Besides, he didn’t need me to tell him what went wrong.

It wasn’t hard to fathom that the moment Aura found out what we had done, she started planning to leave. I thought part of her stayed simply to know that Lucais was going to be okay—because, deep down, she always cared at least a little about him, and because it would prove beyond doubt that he was the true High King—but she had one foot on the threshold of the front door. She just didn’t realise that the noxaeterna wouldn’t let her activate her magic. She didn’t know that everything she’d ever done had been the result of the curse defending her in the face of danger.

Her father. The fucking Banshee. Even Delia, though I still hadn’t quite figured out what caused that particular glitch. Delia wasn’t a threat, but she was the closest Aura had been to the real threat since the day she was born. 

Chest pulling tight, I gazed at her angelic face. My lungs felt weightless, breathless, because—fuck. I loved every one of her freckles, and I could stand there counting them until they made up their own numeric system. But I couldn’t. Not yet. Not until things began to turn around, heading for a long overdue change that she would help me bring to fruition.

Leaning against the doorframe, I cleared my throat to be polite, even though Lucais had heard me coming from a mile away.

“Thanks,” he murmured without turning around. His voice was rougher than normal. “Morgoya’s helping Enyd pack up. They can’t transport the body, and I can’t have it lying around here for someone to stumble on while they sort it out.”

“No problem,” I answered in a low voice. Lucais hadn’t turned, so I pushed away from the doorframe and took a few precarious steps towards the sofa. When he didn’t react, I knelt at the end, peering down at Aura’s sleeping face. My throat was tight, but I forced the words to come out sounding even and loose when I asked, “What are you going to do with our girl?”

A muscle on the side of his neck flickered. “She needs to sleep.” His forehead was resting against the edge of the sofa, the top of his head nuzzled against Aura’s waist. Eventually, he lifted it, meeting my gaze with bloodshot eyes. “I’ll take her to Caeludor as soon as she feels strong enough to travel.”

I knew he didn’t mean when she felt strong enough to travel. He could sense things through the bond that I could only dream about, and it would only get worse if she ever accepted it. The narrowing of my eyes was all it took for him to know my thoughts, and I braced myself for his elaboration.

“I can feel it,” he answered softly. “Her entire system is being suppressed. It’s like she’s on life support, but every so often, there’s a ripple of something—”

“Of what?” The words were out before I could stop myself.

“I don’t fucking know!” Lucais snapped. Shuddering through a long, harsh breath, his eyes slammed closed as he threw his head back, and he dragged a shaky hand through his hair. I felt the familiar sympathy surging up once more, wanting me to comfort my brother or at least explain why I wasn’t, but I held it at bay. Ignored the demands, the questions, the nausea. Lucais groaned quietly. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I don’t know what. And I hate that I don’t know.”

“Look.” I bit my lip, aware that we were balancing on the brink of another fight, but unable to submit to his need to be in control all of the fucking time. “Why don’t you go and get some air—”

“I don’t need air.”

I choked down a humourless laugh because I was unsurprised. “Luc, I am perfectly capable of staying with her while you take a walk and remove whatever the fuck went up your ass while the lights were out.”

He met my gaze with soft, corn-yellow eyes. They were exhausted, but the faintest of glimmers told me that he knew what I was doing and he was trying to take the bait. “I know,” Lucais replied, bringing his elbows up to the couch and folding his hands beneath his chin. He sighed, forcing a pathetic smile that lacked all of his usual mirth. “I just think that I should be the first one she sees when she wakes up. She is less mad at me.”

“Oh, that’s a bit rich,” I returned lightly. There was a lump of tension in my throat that I tried to dislodge by swallowing, but it hurt. I sucked in a mouthful of air instead. “You’re the one who brought her here under false pretences, and she’s pissed that you betrayed her with your name.”

The High King pulled a face at me. “You stripped her bare on the dining room table and then scared her out of the room.”

“Ah.” I chuckled, pinching the bridge of my nose as I squeezed my eyes shut against the memory of that day. I’d never handled something so fucking awfully before in my life, and I still hadn’t been able to make it up to her. “Yeah,” I lamented. “I did do that, didn’t I?”

He bared his teeth at me in a smile, a dark flash of humour evident in his tone as he stated, “You’re an asshole.”

“You’re a hypocrite.”

“You’re excused.”

Fuck.

We lost our balance and fell back into that awkward pit where human traits, provoked by our mutual interest in a human girl, clawed at our ankles in an effort to pull us down. Lucais bent to rest his head against the sofa again, effectively dismissing me, and I silently cursed myself for the attempt at lightening his mood. We weren’t boys play-fighting in the fields behind my home or in his Forest anymore, and sometimes the reminder was like a slap across the face. Especially when we were both so deeply in the wrong.

Before rising to my feet, I placed a gentle kiss on my girl’s forehead. He didn’t comment on it, and I didn’t speak again as I walked out.

I didn’t speak again for days.

I knew Aura would be fine, but it killed me to stay away from her. Lucais didn’t leave the room. Thankfully, he didn’t call a healer, either. He realised she didn’t need one, yet I still paced across every floor of the House while I waited for him to do something else. Anything else. Like answering the door when Delia knocked—anything. But Lucais didn’t make a sound, and he didn’t let anyone into the parlour to see Aura.

And when he finally left the House with her, he didn’t fucking tell me.

“Fuck!” My shout echoed through the House as I kicked the thick hall runner outside the door to the empty parlour. The action flipped a corner over, creating a crease down the middle of it. My hands threaded into my hair, fingers clawing at my scalp as I paced in a tight circle and seethed. “He is such a fucking child.”

I had played nice with him for long enough. Given him chance after chance after fucking chance. Somewhere along the way, I’d let my feelings about our friendship cloud my judgement, and it had almost cost me the whole damned world. Aura was the key to everything, and I’d nearly fucking lost her. Not once, but twice.

I was not going to let it happen again.