Savage Beauty(50)

But this was a risk I had to take.

For Luna.

For us.



I jumped the stone fence and entered the palace grounds, sweat pouring from my head and body. My legs felt wobbly, but I pushed forward and into the roses just past a stretch of lawn that was already turning brown with the autumn season.

There was no sign of Pieces. No sign of Aura.

No indication that anyone knew I was there.

Then I heard a commotion, a bird squawking, and saw the source: a fox was chasing Pieces, its lupine body leaping up into the air to try to snatch a claw or wing.

Standing on a balcony on the highest floor of the palace was a woman in a red gown, her hair the color of spun gold, watching the fox and dove. I darted forward and crouched behind a rose bush, panting from the exertion.

I plucked one of the roses, removing the thorns so that I or Ember could carry it back without injury.

“What are you doing in my garden?” a voice boomed. It sounded as if she were right beside me, but she was still on the stone balcony, her hands braced on the railing. “Did my sister send you?” she asked conversationally.

I stood up and began backing away.

Across the lawn.

“Welcome back, Prince Phillip. I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

I kept backing up. I was half way to the wall.

“I guess you’re looking for an antidote. You don’t look so well, Prince,” she tsked.

Almost there. I tossed the rose across the stone wall and Ember grabbed hold of the stem between her teeth. She hesitated.

“Go, Ember,” I hissed.

“You won’t find a cure in the roses. Only death lies in the blooms. But you already know that. Did Luna need one for her little potion?” She laughed, her tinkling laughter ringing out across the lawn. “What’s the matter, Prince? Cat got your tongue?”

Just then, the ground began to tremble. Roots sprang up from the earth and wrapped around my ankles when I tried to jump over the fence, dragging me back into the garden. I clawed at the ground, at the bushes, shredding my palms.

The vines dragged me on my stomach, further into the walled garden. I managed to flip onto my back and hurriedly reached for the vial in my pocket. I drank it down in one gulp and waited for the change. The liquid was black and thick as tar, but tasted sweet. Sickly sweet. Her roots lifted me to her balcony.

“What do you have there?” she asked, a wicked smile tugging her lips. She tore the vial from my hands and sniffed the inside. “Sorghum?” she guessed. “Yes, it’s a thick, sugary sorghum, tinted with,” she sniffed again, “charcoal.”

“No...” He lied? I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. But then a worse thought filtered through my mind. If Malex lied about giving me his blood, what else was he lying about? I struggled futilely against the vines that held me. “Let me go! Luna’s in trouble.”

“My sister is always getting herself into trouble,” Aura said with a sigh.

I ticked off the information I knew to date. Malex was supposedly helping Luna make a potion to separate her from Aura’s lifeforce. He was either lying about that, or he actually wanted them separated. But why? Why pretend to help and then lie?

What possible reason would he have for helping to unbind them?

“What is it?” she asked quizzically.

“Do you know Malex?”

“Only what I’ve seen of him with your help,” she gloated.

“Why would a dark fae prince want your life unbound from Luna’s?”

She stiffened and smelled the vial again. “What did he tell you this was?”

“His blood. He said if I drank it, I would turn into a fae and it would save me from dying.”

She commanded the roots to release my legs and I slumped to the floor of the balcony. Blood pooled in every hole made by her thorns. She crouched down beside me. “Well, Prince, it appears that he lied to you. And if you want to live, I’m the only one who can help you now. Tell me what you know, and I’ll consider it.”

It felt like a betrayal, that I was going behind Luna’s back, but Malex was up to something and I needed to protect her. This might be my only shot. Whatever it was, she and Aura needed to stay bound to one another until we figured it out.

“Don’t you already know everything? You’ve seen it through me, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know everything. I sleep at night and can only see through you, and through Pieces, during the day, unless I can hook onto your mind right before I fall asleep. If I do that, I can see things for a while. I can even influence your feelings and manipulate your actions a little. That’s a new trick,” she said with a wink. “It’s how I almost made you throttle Luna that night when you didn’t know why you were so angry or why you wanted to hurt her.”

I growled, remembering the strange feelings coursing through my veins and mind.

“Now,” she continued, “even though I’m terribly smart and can piece things together, I need to know the details about what happened while I was asleep.”

I told her everything. How he promised to help Luna when she woke this autumn, how he marked her, about the stupid favor she promised, the strange list of ingredients…everything.

“Thank you for not making me forcefully loosen your tongue,” she said with a glint in her eye that said that what Luna had done to Terigon would have been child’s play.