“What I can’t figure out is why.” He pulls his hands from his pockets and turns toward me, shoulder still pressed against the wood shelves, arms crossed over his chest. I refuse to turn and instead tolerate his careful study of my profile. “I think,” he says slowly, “I owe you an apology.”
I whip my head toward him so quickly I almost hit my temple against the bookshelf. “What?”
He rubs a hand at the back of his neck and my mouth goes dry at the sudden strain placed on the buttons of his dress shirt. “I didn’t understand the situation before I stepped in. I...made a snap judgment from my own experience.”
We both know what experience he’s talking about. The admission that he viewed what I did to my subjects in the same vein as my brother and mother’s behavior toward him wraps around my lungs like iron bands, squeezing until I can barely draw breath. No matter what else I do, my family’s behavior will always eclipse me and color my actions.
A faint puff of steam twists up when Smith exhales. I focus on my glamour, desperate to regulate my emotional response. As deep a wound as his words cause, this conception of me will be safer for him in the long run. It means the spell’s bonds can remain strong and uncontested.
“You’re a good leader.” His body tightens, the lines of his suit changing from the subtle flex of muscles, and his pulse jumps in his throat. “I was wrong. And I don’t think it was the first time.”
I shift my position, mirroring his stance, and keep my mouth shut. He can never know how accurate he is. He must not like what he sees on my face, because he forces himself to smile and ask, “Isn’t
it exhausting pretending to be someone else all the time?”
The rough honesty in his question is what keeps my feet rooted to the floor, a direct contradiction to my brain’s command to flee before I say something I’ll regret. His inquiry may be directed at me, but it goes deeper than that.
I take a moment to look at him without hiding my actions behind glamour. For the first time, I let him witness my inspection. He glows with the assurance of mortality, which only highlights his new weight loss. How tired he looks. His stoic resignation is all too familiar.
“About as exhausting as pretending everything is okay all the time,” I say, keeping my voice light and soft. I’m not trying to mock him and the way his smile shivers, then drops, says he understands. “However, it’s my job. I don’t have a choice.”
“It’s my magick. My gift,” he scoffs. “I think I’ve got you beat.”
I lean in. Of course Smith would view our shitty lives as a competition. A competition he will lose. “My mother is the Queen of Air and Darkness.”
“My mother doesn’t know my magick will eventually kill me.”
“Poor boy. My mother doesn’t care if I die, as long as it benefits the Court.” Admitting the truth of the Knighthood stings, but also lifts an unexpected weight from my chest.
His eyes narrow and he leans in as well, close enough I can count the faint freckles decorating the bridge of his nose. I catch the scent of his soap, ginger and spices that somehow blend perfectly with his skin. “And being the good soldier, you’ll make sure it does.”
His grin is all sharp edges. It makes him so real I’m tempted to take him by the collar and crush my lips to his. His breath spills warm against my cheek and ear when he leans in close enough to whisper, “I’m going to go out like a Roman candle and not even leave ashes behind for my parents to bury.”
Everything recoils—body, glamour, mind—and his broken “Beat that” shatters me.
Oh, Goddess. He’s going to die. He’s going to die and there won’t be anything left and I won’t even have a place to visit his remains over the millennia. “Fuck,” I choke out.
“Is that a white flag, Lyne?” He misreads it, leaning back to check my reaction, and I’m grateful and ruined and desperate to pull myself together.
“Yes, you utter bastard. You win. Congratulations.”
He flushes, his vicious grin softening into a shy smile. “Not the prize I wanted, but I’ll take it.”
How are you okay with this?
He makes a funny little sound in the back of his throat and when I look up and see how his eyes have gentled, I realize the words slipped out.
“I’m not okay,” he begins, only to stop. The ley line unexpectedly crests against my glamour, a blanket of heat warming my skin when he reaches out to me. The backs of his fingers brush down my arm, from shoulder to elbow, and I pray he doesn’t notice how my body reacts to the tentative touch.
“I’m not,” he repeats, staring down at that point of contact, “but that’s okay.”
His gaze darts back up, holds with mine, and he starts to say something else, but before he can there’s a commotion outside in the hallway. A scream. Long and high and stretched with the kind of fear that can’t be faked.
Tremendous crashes and more screams join the first. Running in the hall. Yelling. The music from farther in the house cuts out abruptly. Above us, the floor shakes as people run from the second story to the stairs, trying to escape an unknown assailant.
With the panicked noise, I almost miss the rustling and the strange shadow lifting onto the wall behind Smith. I grab his lapel and turn him, partially blocking his body with mine, as I throw a freezing hex at whatever’s trying to sneak its way into our rapidly emptying room.
The vine—whip-thin and decorated with a series of curved thorns, a common Seelie weapon—falls to the ground and shatters. I push at Smith, urging him away from the door, and run to check if there are more. A few creepers are working their way down the hallway, still shuddering and jerking as they grow and expand, slowly coming into a hideous sentience.