Seven Black Diamonds (Seven Black Diamonds #1)(10)

People started running toward them, passing them as they tried to reach the wall of fire. Others tried to run toward the escalator. Both exits were sealed.

Reflexively, he started to warn them, “Wait, you can’t—”

“Don’t,” Violet snapped, cutting him off, reminding him of his mission. Saving them wasn’t it.

The heat from her body grew stronger, and sweat trickled down the back of his shirt.

“Focus, Roan,” she said in a less harsh tone.

“I . . .”

He heard the yelling, the screams, grow louder, and he must’ve said something else because Violet started to glow brighter. She gripped his hand in hers tightly enough that he winced. He knew that if he didn’t act that wall of fire would surge toward them. Everyone not being touched by Violet would be incinerated.

“I have this,” he insisted, as he summoned the water, the force of his call breaking the pipes and driving the water toward the people on the platform, drowning them as they tried to flee the smoke and flames.

He didn’t look at them. He didn’t listen to them. He did his job.

Violet’s fire retracted at some point when he was concentrating. All that was left was haze and ash. “We need to go,” she said, her voice rough in that way that told him that the smoke was covering tears.

He nodded, but couldn’t speak.

“Just don’t look,” she said.

And then her hand was in his, and they were walking toward the charred mouth of the tunnel.





five


EILIDH

Eilidh slipped back into the Hidden Lands. She’d been moving between worlds since she was old enough to walk. Back then, she didn’t know that it was not authorized for the fae to travel. Back then, she didn’t know that the queen had ordered an end to all contact between the worlds. She knew now, and it made her cautious.

. . . but obviously not cautious enough. Her only true friend among the fae sat on the branch of a dead tree. He was twice her age, but among the fae—whose lives lasted for centuries—that made them both children.

“You’ll get caught one of these times, Patches,” Torquil said. His tone wasn’t quite lecturing, but it was close enough that she made a rude gesture.

He laughed and dropped to the ground in front of her, close enough that she felt the warmth radiating from his skin. Even though he was as dark as the night itself, Torquil still glimmered in the shadows of the Hidden Lands like a small star made flesh. Hair so pale it was merely a moment darker than white framed a face that sculptors could only dream of. Some fae could never walk among humans, could never hide their Otherness. Torquil was one of them. Sometimes Eilidh thought it was part of why he seemed so young, despite the years he’d lived before her birth.

She scanned the area, although she knew he undoubtedly had already done so. “I’m as careful as you.”

“Careful isn’t the same for you, now is it?” His voice felt like music to her after the harsh sounds of the mortal world.

“Because I’m so memorable?” Eilidh twisted her hair up to expose the myriad lines and fractures that earned her the nickname only Torquil and Lilywhite ever used.

“No.” He traced a finger over her wrist, following one of the lines to her elbow. If she was any other fae, she’d think it was flirtatious, but Torquil was her childhood friend—despite the dreams she often had of him. “Because the queen worries about you.”

Eilidh rolled her eyes. “Mother worries because I’m her heir. She worries that Father won’t manage to gift her with a healthy child to replace me. She worries that she’ll have to hand the throne over to a broken princess instead of the baby who was lost to the sea.”

“So where were you?” He leaned close, sniffing the ashy scent that clung to her skin and hair.

She debated not telling him, knew that she shouldn’t, but Torquil already had enough of her secrets in his hands to have her locked inside the glass tower forever. One more was no extra risk. “I went to check on someone.”

“You can’t keep going to their world,” Torquil continued. “They kill our kind.”

She brushed the truth away with a sweep of her hands. “And we kill theirs. It doesn’t have to be war between us. There has to be a way—”

“The queen asked me to watch you more closely,” Torquil confessed suddenly. “If she knew that you were going over there, she’d see me punished. She’d see you locked away under guard. You know that.”

“So tell her.” Eilidh folded her arms and met his eyes. It was harder than when she was a child. Back then, she hadn’t realized how ugly she was, how scarred, how pitiful to the beautiful ones. Even the least of the fae were stunning.

Once, many centuries before the war began, humans had thought the fae were gods. It was easy to understand why when she looked at Torquil. He was of one of the purest bloodlines, a family close to the regent of the Seelie Court.

Why the queen agreed to allow him to be her playmate, Eilidh would never know. Perhaps her father had insisted. Eilidh never asked outright, but it was common knowledge that Torquil’s birth loyalty wasn’t to the Unseelie Court. The unification of the courts didn’t change history. His father was devoted to her father, the Seelie King, not to the Unseelie Queen. The regents’ ruling together was new, only a few decades, but the rivalry between the courts stretched as far back as there had been fae courts.