Ink Exchange (Wicked Lovely 2)

“You don’t want this answer, love.” He reached out for her, knowing that despite her best intentions, the backlash would soon pull her under.

She backed away. “Don’t. I want to”—she stopped—“it’s my fault, isn’t it? That’s why you’re—”

“No.”

“I thought faeries didn’t lie.” Her knees gave, and she dropped to the floor. She knelt on a wide red stain.

“I’m not lying. It’s not your fault.” His attempts to be the King of Nightmares, the Dark King, all faded because she looked lost. It was him who faltered, not her.

She gripped the carpet, bloodying her fingertips as she tried to hold on to the floor so as not to reach out to him. “Why were they here? Why are they…”

She obviously wasn’t going to stop asking questions, so he stopped avoiding them. “If I’m sated, I feed the court enough that you can have some freedom. The court starves a little, but not enough to cripple them…and as long as you stayed in the suite you didn’t need to know.”

“So we tormented them so—”

“No. You didn’t torment anyone.” He watched her grasp at the horror she wanted to feel, felt it slither into his skin. He sighed. “Don’t overreact.”

She laughed, a sound as far from humorous as a scream would be.

He sank to the floor beside her.

“There are worse things.” He didn’t tell her that those worse things were inevitable if the peace between the seasonal courts grew much stronger, that this was just one step in their path. She stared at him for several heartbeats, and then she leaned forward and laid her head against his chest.

“Can you pick criminals or something?”

Somewhere inside he was saddened by her acceptance of these mortals’ deaths, but that was her mortal essence tainting his judgment. He pushed the sorrow away. “I can try…. I can’t change what I need you for, but I would spare you details of it.”

She tensed in his arms. “And if I can’t take it? What then? What if my mind…”

He said it then, admitted his weakness, “I hadn’t planned this part, Leslie. I just needed your body to stay alive. Most of the mortals from the earlier exchanges…they didn’t fare as well, but I’d like you not to be comatose. If that means a few other mortals die or slip into their own minds while you black out for a few hours or days—”

“Then that’s what you’ll do,” she whispered.

CHAPTER 35

Niall had stop

ped by the loft to gather a few belongings when Aislinn walked in. “I don’t want to discuss it again,” he started, but then Aislinn stepped to the side. Leslie stood behind her. She was wan, with dark circles under her eyes. Bluish veins were so clear through her skin that, to his vision, she had a slight blue tint to her.

Aislinn said, “She wants to talk to you…not to me.” Then his queen-no-more left, closing the door behind her, leaving Niall alone with Leslie.

“Has something happened?” he asked.

“Irial sends his regards.” Her movements were as stilted as her words. She wandered away to stare out the window. Shadows danced in the air around her; he’d seen those same shadows dance in Irial’s eyes, formless figures that leaped and spun on the edge of the abyss. Now they hovered around Leslie, a retinue of nightmare’s handmaidens.

Niall didn’t know what to do or say or think. So he waited.

“Can we leave?” She looked over her shoulder. “I can’t do this here.”

“Do what?”

She watched him, dispassionately it seemed. “What we talked about before.”

And he knew that whatever she wasn’t saying was horrific enough that she’d decided to leave Irial.

“Will you help me, Niall?” she asked. “I need to set things right.”

For a moment, Niall wasn’t sure if it was Leslie or Irial asking: her voice sounded wrong, her words not matching the intonations he’d heard from her before. But it didn’t matter. The shadows danced around her, and he gave the only answer he could offer either of them: “Yes.”