What Lurks Between the Fates (Of Flesh & Bone, #3)(16)

“Mab knows you are not Sidhe. This is where she puts the creatures she thinks are beneath her. The ones who are not Faerie enough for her to see value in. Something about you does not pass her standards,” Monos said, laying her head upon the stone. She curled up as if sleep was next on her agenda, forcing me to cast another concerned glance toward my mate.

“Is he all right? Surely, he should have heard us speaking by now,” I said, using Monos’s affection for my mate to try to gain some reassurance. She’d been close to him; she would have known if he no longer breathed.

If his heart no longer beat.

She tilted her head to the side with a disbelieving smile. “He has not heard us, because there is nothing for him to hear,” she said, reaching out a hand. She leaned forward, crossing the distance between us until she grasped my bare ankle in her grip. I felt the hand that wrapped around my flesh, immediately thinking about how her touch had gone through Caldris when she tried.

“I don’t understand,” I said, staring at her hand and the talons upon it. She didn’t hurt me, shifting my leg to the side. But I didn’t feel like she’d moved me, didn’t feel any sort of connection to the muscle and sinew that had changed positions.

“You have not yet awoken for the day, E,” Monos said, dropping her stare to look at something behind me.

Turning, I took in the sight of my body lying curled on its side, my leg positioned awkwardly as I hadn’t been the one to do it.

“The veil between life and death is the thinnest when we slumber, and the Winter Solstice approaches. You should take more care the next time you leave your body and enter the spirit realm, Wanderer. Not all the spirits you encounter will be so kind.”

I reached out a hand, touching the side of my arm as my horror mounted. It drifted through, sliding straight to the floor of the dungeon as if my body were nothing but air.

“I don’t know how to leave my body, let alone how to stay,” I admitted, swallowing as I stared at my body and at where Caldris had begun to stir in his cell on the other side.

He mumbled my name, shooting to a sitting position quickly as he spun to look at me. His eyes went to my body immediately, his gaze fixated on it.

As if the three shades didn’t exist, and I realized the truth in Monos’s words. He couldn’t see me, and I wondered if he could feel that my soul—the other half of his—had vacated my body.

“Is this how I’m to die? A soul separated from her body and left to wander for eternity?” I asked, tears burning my eyes as I studied Monos. “Is that how you died?”

“Silly creature,” Lozu said with a yawn. “We died because the Queen of Air and Darkness locked us in here and left us to rot. She forgot we ever existed, and we simply wasted away.”

“That’s horrific,” I said, my empathy growing as I considered what it must have been to die so slowly. Even as I watched Caldris panic, clutching his chest as if the pain in his heart—the pain in his soul—was something he felt physically.

Lozu shrugged. “Been here centuries. Dying here was a blessing compared to what Mab does with her playthings. Better to hope for starvation, then I can eats you when you’re gone.”

“Can a shade eat?” I asked, swallowing my fear.

It shouldn’t have mattered, as I would already be dead and gone. I laid my soul on the top of my body, mimicking my position and hoping for the best. The warmth of my body sank into my chilled soul, welcoming me home as I fell back into the rhythm of my heartbeat.

It lulled me to sleep, a soft and steady drum as I tuned out Caldris’s panic and fear. The only way to calm him was to return, to become one with my body once more.

Everything faded to gray as my eyes drifted closed, Lozu’s last foreboding words reaching me in the final moments before sleep claimed me.

“Perhaps we’ll find out.”





4


Estrella


Time passed slowly.

I did not again venture into the spirit realm while I slept. Caldris’s horror and relief when I’d returned was enough to keep me firmly planted within my body. I didn’t know how to control it, only that I desperately wanted to. Monos and Lozu had followed me into the physical realm, haunting me and informing my mate of what I’d done.

Boredom made every single one of my bones hum with the need to do something, with the need to move. Caldris watched me from his own cell, tossing the body of a rat into the air and catching it for entertainment. I tried not to think of how disgusting that was, because we both knew he’d probably touched more disgusting things in his centuries of life. His comment about my snake friend was rich, considering he had no qualms about toying with a corpse.

Playing with the body of a rat was a new low, and it forced me to look over at where Lozu watched me like I was his next meal.

“You could eat him too, you know?” I said, nodding my head toward Caldris.

“Too tough. You just soft enough not to get stuck in my teeth,” Lozu said, not even bothering to look over at Caldris as the words rolled off his tongue.

My mate, for his part, seemed unbothered by Lozu’s half-assed threats. I was nearly certain that we both knew the gnome had grown fond of me during our time in that cell, that his affections would at least give him some pause before he consumed my flesh.

“We’ve had this conversation,” Monos said, a sigh leaving her lungs. “You do not need to tell her you’re planning to eat her. Just do it once she is already dead and gone.” Her casualness made me rethink my assurance that my friendship with the shades had changed anything. Perhaps they, better than anyone, knew how to separate the flesh from the soul. My body was but a vessel, useless to me once I abandoned it in favor of the Void.