What Lies Beyond the Veil (Of Flesh & Bone, #1)(101)

Did we become more like them in ways other than just our strength? Our healing? The frenzy that drove him to spend every moment inside of me?

I walked through the tunnels, grabbing a torch from the commons and lighting it on my way to the library that consumed so much of my waking time. The books, even while they hurt my hand, had become a welcome respite.

Knowledge was power, and I wanted to have every opportunity to fight. I trained with Melian and the other fighters in the mornings, but Caelum was very rarely an active part of that. After he’d survived a cave beast, there could be no doubt that he’d pulled his punches where I was concerned, just as Melian had said.

It touched me and made me angry all at once, but he hadn’t hesitated to unleash his violence on me during sex. To claim me so fully I could still feel the ache of him inside me hours later.

I entered the library, setting my torch on the wall next to the table where I worked. The book I’d been translating the day before sat open where I’d left it when Caelum and I hurried out of the room after the altercation with Jensen.

I didn’t know what I wanted to research or where to even begin, but nausea churned in my gut, telling me there was something wrong. I moved to the shelves, running my fingers along the spines and waiting for one to jump out at me. It was how I’d chosen the first books I translated, randomly diving into them one at a time.

A less-weathered book called my attention, beckoning me to pull it off the shelf. I stared down at the name on the front, the words written in the New Tongue.

A Historical Account of the Creation of the Veil.

It wasn’t the same text I’d seen in Lord Byron’s library; this one was far older. I flipped to the front page of the handwritten tome, skimming through the words in an effort to convince myself that this was simply the original version of what had become common knowledge.

When I delved into it, though, the tale this book painted of the witches who’d formed the Veil was vastly different from the one I’d learned as a child. I’d always been told the witches sacrificed their lives to form the Veil so they could protect humanity from the Fae, who slaughtered us in droves.

This told the story of the witches who were neutral to the war between the Fae and the humans, indifferent to either race in their quest to maintain the balance of the world. It told of the curse they’d placed upon the Fae centuries before the Veil, dooming them to having their souls split upon birth. The mirror of themselves would exist inside another person, most often a human, so the Fae would have a reason to stop the enslavement and torment of the humans of the Kingdom of Nothrek.

Children outside of that relationship were an impossibility, further limiting their opportunity to grow their numbers. Birth within the relationship was rare itself, a natural characteristic of their race.

But one line of witches was tied to the land of Faerie, their magic drawn from the soil itself and the elements of nature around them. Those were the witches who’d cast the curse upon the Fae in name of the Primordial of Nature. They had died out quickly after they erected the Veil, because their magic faded without the connection to the land of Alfheimr.

It left me with one single question, something that I couldn’t reconcile and just didn’t make sense.

Why would that line of witches have formed the Veil at all, knowing they would be trapped on the opposite side from their magic? The book recorded it as a great sacrifice they’d made to protect something they’d stolen from the Court of Shadows. But it made no mention of what it was they’d stolen, or why a neutral party would care so much for the object.

The story I’d always known was that the witches had sided with the humans in the war and sacrificed themselves to form the Veil so that we could have a chance to survive the Fae beasts who wanted to kill us. I’d seen horrific photos of them in the history books as a child, but none of the drawings in the Book of the Gods even remotely resembled the horrors in those books.

The Fae in the Book of the Gods were breathtakingly beautiful. They were ethereal and magnetic. They were everything the monsters were not.

A thought danced just out of my reach, a nagging image that I couldn’t capture tickling at my mind.

A memory from my childhood. A moment of teeth on my skin.

“What are you hoping to find in these dusty old books?” Caelum asked, making me spin to face him.

I pressed a hand to my chest as I startled. “You scared me.”

He tilted his head to the side, coming into the space and stopping beside my chair. Touching the backs of his fingers to my cheek, he searched my face for a moment before he smiled. “You scared me when you were gone from our bed.”

The knowledge that the bed that was ours, after our irrevocable claiming of it, washed over me and filled me with warmth despite the chill to my skin.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I admitted, shifting my legs. I couldn’t bring myself to admit that I felt there was something off about us and our relationship; something nagging at me that I couldn’t explain. “I may not be able to fight a cave beast like you, but knowledge is power. Maybe if I know more about what I’m up against, I’ll be able to protect myself better.”

“That’s why you have me,” he said, running a thumb over my bottom lip, then, “I was too rough with you.” He cast a pointed glance down to my lap where I couldn’t seem to stay still.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. He lifted a skeptical brow. “Maybe a little, but you did warn me.”