The Shattered Dark (5 page)

“Did my directions send you in circles?” he asks, looking past me to Shane, who’s
turning off the engine.

“No, they were surprisingly good for a fae.” He opens his door and gets out.

I swivel in the seat to face Aren. “The remnants have Paige.”

He’s down on one knee, so his silver eyes are level with mine. “Who?”

“Paige,” I say. “My friend. You met her at the wedding.”

“The wedding?” His gaze dips to my mouth, and I can almost taste him. That was the
first time we kissed. I was still in love with Kyol, but my emotions were a chaotic
mess. Aren was making me doubt everything—even how much I hated him—and before he
turned me over to Kyol, he left me with a diamond necklace imprinted with a location.
I could have betrayed him with that necklace. I didn’t. I didn’t because I was beginning
to fall in love with him.

And I’m still falling.

I clear my throat. “I have to find her, Aren. She doesn’t belong in this war.”

“You’re sure they have her?” he asks, refocusing on my eyes.

“The ward was on her purse.”

His jaw clenches, and I almost wish I hadn’t said anything. His role in this war is
changing. Before the rebels took the palace, he was always on the offensive. He’s
used to launching brief surprise attacks on the king’s fae, on supply depots, and
on the gates that are required to fissure anything more than what a fae can carry.
Now, Aren’s trying to keep the remnants from doing the exact same things he did. With
as few swordsmen as he has at his disposal, he’s doing a good job, but I don’t want
to add to his responsibilities.

“She doesn’t know anything about us?” he asks.

“No,” I say. Few humans do unless they have the Sight. Keeping their existence secret
has been a law in the Realm for centuries. If humans ever learn about the fae, there’s
no doubt war would break out. Not all humans would be content to leave the fae alone.
Some would want to kill them. Others would want to capture them. They’d want to find
a way to enslave them for their magics. King Atroth enforced the secrecy law just
as strictly as the previous kings, and whenever the fae decide to approach a human
who can see them, they do so with caution.

Most
do so with caution. My introduction to their world was anything but gentle. A fae
named Thrain abducted me. He starved and threatened me, demanding that I use my Sight
to point out fae hidden by illusion. I did so once, the first day I was in his custody,
and he slaughtered that fae right there in front of me.

Aren draws in a breath. When he releases it, it’s like all his responsibilities fall
away. I know they’re still there, still weighing on his mind, but he hides them behind
a haphazard smile and confident attitude.

“We’ll find her,” he says, pulling me out of the car. His confidence is contagious
to other fae—I think that’s half the reason the rebels were able to win the palace—but
I’m human, and I stopped believing in miracles years ago. Paige could be anywhere
in the Realm or on Earth. The chance that we’ll just stumble across her is virtually
nonexistent.

“Hey,” Aren says, tilting my chin up with a finger. “I found you, didn’t I?”

The half smile on his lips is cocky but reassuring. It’s sexy as hell, too, and despite
all my worries, my stomach flips. I’m trying so damn hard to be smart about this.
I’m trying to take things slowly, to carefully wade into this relationship because,
God knows, we didn’t meet under the best circumstances. I don’t want Aren to be a
fling or a rebound, but I tend to forget caution when he looks at me like this, like
I’m the only thing that exists in this world.

A chaos luster leaps to my skin, traveling along my
jawline until it reaches the nape of my neck. Whether he leans in toward me or I lean
toward him, I don’t know, but our lips touch then—

“Aren.”

It’s not Shane who speaks. I peer around Aren’s shoulder and see a fae—an illusionist
named Brenth—stepping through the thin tree line that separates the road from an empty
field. He’s one of Kyol’s swordsmen, a former Court fae who’s sworn to protect Lena.
His armor isn’t shoddy like the rebels’. It has a smooth, even texture and an
abira
tree etched into its surface, but he’s added four branches to it, one for each of
the provinces Lena plans to reinstate.

“Perfect timing,” Shane mutters, just before Brenth says in Fae,
“We were out of time ten minutes ago.”

“It will be fine,”
Aren tells the latter.

I’m already following Shane to the tree line because I need to walk off the tingling
sensation that’s swept across my body. I’m hoping the heat I’m feeling doesn’t reach
my face or, if it does, the others think it’s a result of the bright Texas sun overhead.

“So anxious to get away from me?” Aren asks, a note of amusement in his tone as he
falls into step beside me. He knows exactly why I needed to move.

“Call it a habit,” I retort, but I let the smallest of smiles bend a corner of my
mouth when I slant a glance his way. I spent the first few weeks I knew him trying
to escape. I was almost successful a number of times, but he just wouldn’t let me
slip away.

He chuckles. “I promise not to make you wear a blindfold this time.”

A blindfold? We step through the tree line and into the field on the other side, but
I don’t recognize this place until I spot the small pond off to my right. This is
where he brought me after he abducted me from my campus. I had no idea—and, more importantly,
the Court fae had no idea—that this gate was here, and I thought…

I turn to Aren. “I thought this place was hours away from my apartment.”

He lifts an eyebrow.

“When you kidnapped me,” I say, “it took at least three hours to get here.”

“Ah.” His gaze goes to my left temple. That’s where he hit me with the pommel of his
dagger less than two months ago, knocking me out so I couldn’t call the police. “We
had some difficulties getting you off campus without any humans seeing you.”

I snort. Yeah, that would have looked odd, me being carried over the shoulder of an
invisible man. With the cops searching the building and Kyol still looking for me,
it couldn’t have been easy getting me away from there.

We reach the pond just after Shane and Brenth. The gate is just a blur in the atmosphere
to the fae’s left. Brenth turns to it, then scoops up a handful of water. The water
is necessary to connect with the gate, and the fissure opens gradually, the stream
of water turning into a stream of white light as it pours between his fingers. A second
later, a deep rumble signals the connection to the In-Between. He hands an anchor-stone
to Shane, then Shane grips the fae’s forearm, and they disappear into the light.

It takes an effort to wrench my gaze away from the shadows the fissure leaves behind,
but Aren takes my hand and leads me to the blur at the edge of the pond. He presses
an anchor-stone into my palm. He can fissure to locations he’s memorized without it,
but if I want to go along with him, I need it. Otherwise, I’d become lost in the In-Between.

Aren reaches into the pond, opening his own gated-fissure. Before he pulls me into
it, his hand tightens around mine, and he says, “I’ve missed you, McKenzie.”

Then he finishes the kiss Brenth interrupted.

I
’M BREATHLESS WHEN
we step out of the fissure. That’s probably the In-Between’s fault, but I’m blaming
Aren. He kissed me until his chaos lusters slid into my skin, making me forget everything
but him. Then, just when the lightning built to a level where I swear I was seconds
away from losing control, he pulled me into the In-Between.

The
icy
In-Between.

Going from hot to cold like that was both divine and torturous.

As soon as I’m able to stand without swaying, I glare at him. He gives me a maddening
grin in return.

My hand is still in his, the anchor-stone still pressed between our palms. The lightning
darting between our clasped fingers is white in this world, not blue, and it originates
from me. Even so, it’s as hot and tantalizing as his is on Earth.

I slip my hand free before the lightning builds further—it’s already difficult enough
not to press my lips to his again—then scan the cobblestoned area outside Corrist’s
silver wall. Brenth must have taken Shane back to Vegas because they’re not here.
No one else is, either, and that makes me uneasy. Two weeks ago, this place was filled
with fae haggling and making purchases in the shops to my left.

We call the thirty-foot buffer zone between those shops
and the silver wall a moat even though it’s level with the rest of the city and not
filled with water. Kyol and the Court fae fissured me to this area hundreds of times
over the last ten years, but it’s never felt so wrong to stand here. The pale yellow
stone of the shops facing the silver wall is usually tinted blue at night, but no
one has lit the orbs topping the streetlights, and I’m pretty sure most of the buildings
are deserted.

Deserted by the merchants, at least. Remnants have used the abandoned buildings for
cover during their attacks. Some of the shops are two or three stories tall, and from
down here on the ground, there’s no way of knowing if a fae is hiding on a tiled rooftop
or behind closed curtains.

“Any later and you would be dead, Jorreb,”
someone shouts in Fae from the silver wall, using Aren’s family name.

“Then my timing is perfect!”
Aren shouts back, turning his grin on whoever’s watching us from one of the spy holes
above the lowered portcullis.

I clench my teeth together. Since the remnants have been launching random attacks
on the wall, Lena’s issued an order not to wait to identify the fae who step out of
opening fissures; the guards on the wall are to shoot immediately except at the “safe”
fissure locations. Those locations change every half hour. Lena and Kyol devised a
rotating pattern, a code of sorts, that only the people they trust the most know.

“Let us in,”
Aren says.

We duck under the rising portcullis. It’s made of pure silver. The metal doesn’t prevent
fae from using their magic inside the wall—it only prevents them from fissuring in
or out, or around inside the Inner City and the palace. Necessary of course, to keep
us safe from attack, but it’s a significant handicap given that the fae are so used
to being able to appear and disappear at will. Aren looks completely at ease, though,
when he crosses to the other side.

Two swordsmen emerge from an opening in the wall. More are on watch inside, I presume.
The wall is eight feet wide and hollow between the stone blocks that support the heavy
silver plating. Wooden stairs and narrow platforms allow the fae to stand guard inside
the wall. I’ve stood guard
inside it recently as well, making sure no one hidden by illusion was attempting to
enter the Inner City.

I wrap my arms around myself, trying to hold in what little warmth I have left, while
Aren exchanges a few words with the shorter of the two fae swordsmen. The taller fae
is carrying a
jaedric
cuirass and a cloak. He hands them both to Aren, who brings them to me. He helps
me slide the cuirass on over my head, then tightens the bindings on the sides.

I’m more thankful for the cloak than the armor, and not just because I’m cold. The
chaos lusters are bright on my skin. Supposedly, the fae who have remained in the
Inner City support Lena or are neutral in this war, but it’s not like we’ve had time
to interview every individual to see if that’s really true. Without the cloak, the
lightning would draw too much attention, so I pull it on over my cuirass and adjust
the hood so that my face is hidden beneath it.

“One more thing,” Aren says, holding a third item I didn’t see before. He takes the
two ends of the long strap in his hands, then buckles them around my waist, under
the cloak. “Think you can keep up with this one?”

I reach behind my back, feel the hard
jaedric
casing that, I’m assuming, holds a dagger. It’s about the length of my hand and sheathed
so that the weapon is almost parallel with the ground.

I can grab the dagger’s hilt with my right hand relatively easily.

“Don’t trust me with a sword?” I tease.

“They didn’t have a spare,” he returns, a small smile playing across his lips. And
that’s all it takes, that slight curve of his mouth, to make warm, tingling happiness
flare through me. I’ve missed our playful disagreements.

We don’t take a direct route to the palace. Instead, one of the swordsmen leads us
to a narrow passageway between the buildings to the west of the
Cavith e’Sidhe
, the Avenue of the Descendants. Aren stays at my side, his gait more a saunter than
a walk. If his hand wasn’t casually resting on the hilt of his sword, I’d say he wasn’t
worried at all about a possible attack. But the hand
is
there, and his head is cocked slightly
to the side as if he’s listening for an extra set of footfalls or the soft scrape
of a blade sliding free of a scabbard.