What Lies Beyond the Veil (Of Flesh & Bone, #1)(102)

“I’ll have a spare set of clothes brought to your room for each of you,” the woman said, smiling kindly. She was the same one who’d handed me soap when we came in covered in blood. “Go on then. Let the rest of us deal with the storm you’ve created,” she said with a smile, stepping away from me and walking toward one of the men in the room.

He caught her by the waist, bunching the fabric of her dress and tearing it off over her head.

We left, the first sounds of the woman’s moans coming from behind us, accompanied by male grunts of pleasure.





32





I backed off the bedroll. Sleep evaded me, driving me to shove my feet into my boots and wrap the spare blanket around my shoulders. The dress the woman from the baths had sent was more revealing than I was used to, designed for the humid temperatures within the caves. Thin straps hung off my shoulders, leaving my arms and a line of cleavage revealed.

It wouldn’t have bothered me under normal circumstances, but I still struggled to cope with the feeling of eyes on me while Caelum had pushed me up onto the ledge for everyone to see. I’d agreed to it, been turned on by it, but the shyness that came in the aftermath was very real.

I pulled back the curtain that gave our room a hint of privacy, but had done nothing to keep in the noises when Caelum woke me in the middle of the night, pressing his cock between my legs and murmuring in my ear.

I didn’t have much experience, but I wasn’t certain that his level of insatiability was normal. Combining that with his almost feral nature after his fight with the cave beast left me curious about the ways being marked by the Fae could change us.

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.