Princess of Shadows: A Dark Fae Fantasy Romance Read online

  Olivia Hart

  Princess of Shadows

  A Dark Fae Fantasy Romance

  Copyright © 2021 by Olivia Hart

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  First edition

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  Contents

  Acknowledgement

  Newsletter

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Get the rest of the story!

  About the Author

  Acknowledgement

  Cover designed by Moor Books Design

  Newsletter

  Keep up to date with Olivia Hart’s new releases, deals, and other updates by signing up for her newsletter. As a bonus, you’ll receive bonus chapters for a Court of Lies not available anywhere else.

  https://dl.bookfunnel.com/gchd1gizgw

  Prologue

  Sebastian

  The cold obsidian daggers slid into my hands, materializing from gray mist. Lighter than any steel blade, and a hundred times more deadly. They weren’t the weapons of a warrior or a soldier. Only one group among all the Fae courts used these. The Assassin’s Guild.

  A guild that I was not a member of.

  A black cloak billowed around me as I stepped through the silver-backed mirror and left the realm of the Fae behind, stepping into the Mortal Realm. The hotel was old and still had silver-backed mirrors. My prey should have known better.

  A half-breed. Half human and half siren. She had already caused trouble in the Mortal Realm. A trail of bodies lay behind her as her powers had awoken. I knew her hunger, and I knew it would never be sated. Not while she lived among human men.

  A part of me was frustrated by this task. There were already far too few sirens left in either world. Their powers were too dangerous. Much like my own kind.

  A deathly silence hung in the air as I followed the siren’s scent up the stairwell. Soft mists clung to the floor in my wake, the only evidence I would leave. That, and a beautiful woman’s lifeless body.

  I found the door to her room, and with a quick exhale, I touched the door. An in-between, it was a natural doorway for all Fae. Unless it had been made of iron or steel, no Fae would be hindered by a simple door. If the siren had known more of the Immortal Realm, she’d have known to ward the door.

  The door turned immaterial for the briefest of seconds, and I slipped through the in-between. That same soft gray mist stayed behind in the shape of my silhouette as I stepped through.

  The room was luxurious, a perk of being able to control mortals with a single word. Floor to ceiling windows ran all the way up to the vaulted ceiling and looked out over the city that sprawled out below the hotel. A white rug lay under a shiny brown leather couch and coffee table, covering the gold-laced white marble tiles.

  And everything seemed to shine. Not as much as the Court of Light. That was born of magic while this was simply nice décor and good lighting.

  A blond woman with a body built of fantasies turned physical sat on the king-sized bed. A siren used her body as bait for her prey. Where other Fae had sharp teeth or claws, she had ample breasts, a thin waist, and an unforgettable backside. Strangely enough, sirens were usually more successful hunters than the ones with teeth and claws.

  The siren stared at me as I slid through the door. Though her body was the bait, a siren’s eyes and voice were the hook. Golden eyes that seemed to draw you into them watched me. The color slowly twisted from deep gold to a pale yellow and back again. Full red lips the color of coral whispered of future pleasures. The scent of a sea breeze over a calm harbor hung in the air. Her scent. No human would have noticed, but for those of the Fae, it was unmistakable.

  The huntress wore almost nothing. A matching set of red lace lingerie hid only enough to tantalize the mind. She was not new to the hunt, and she knew her tools well. It was a pity. She could have been an asset to the Dark Court, but sirens were notoriously hard to control and almost impossible to keep fed. Especially when her only prey was humans.

  She ran her tongue over her lips seductively. She could taste the power that flowed from me. A buffet compared to the appetizer of mortal men. That dark power that lingered in the air around me should have terrified her. She had no idea who I was. If she had, even a siren would be afraid.

  “Good evening,” she whispered, seduction filling the air with power. Any human would have lost their free will in that instant. Any Fae would have been drawn to her. Any but me. I plied similar tools of the trade, though mine were far less obvious.

  “Not for you,” I said from under the cloak, my eyes hidden in shadow.

  “Come sit down, assassin. Let me show you your fantasies,” she said, putting more force and more power into her voice as she stood up, her body swaying to an unheard song. A siren’s song. My lips curved into a smile as I stepped forward, having known all along that this was how things would play out. She was not the first siren that I’d hunted.

  She began to slip the red lace off her shoulders as I moved towards her, my footsteps still coated in mists. “Siren,” I whispered from only inches away from her, “Incubi aren’t affected by your song.” Mist flowed from my lips as I spoke and covered her face, making her vision blur and her voice muffled.

  She blinked and turned to run, but she felt the bite of obsidian across her back before she’d even taken a step. Crimson dripped from the black edge of my blade, a sharp contrast, as she tried to scream, but the mists covering her face muffled all sound.

  She fell to the white rug that covered the floor. Turning over, she tried to crawl backward, away from me, leaving a trail of blood. Her mouth opened as she tried to scream again, but the mists flowed over her face once more as I stepped forward.

  “You never had a chance,” I said in a low voice as I pulled back my hood. I knew that my green eyes were slowly becoming grayer, becoming more and more cloudy.

  She didn’t know what she was looking at. She didn’t understand why I was different than anyone she’d ever met. The slightly too large eyes, the curved tips of my ears, or my sharper features.

  And
she wouldn’t know why she felt a throbbing between her legs even as she lay in a pool of her own blood. I knelt beside the half-naked woman, and she stopped screaming as I released my own tendrils of seduction through the room. A siren dying under a seductive spell seemed an apt execution.

  She smiled as her eyes glazed over with lust even as I raised the obsidian dagger over her chest. Her hips thrust upward, desperate for a pleasure that she would never find. And then she screamed loud enough that even the mists couldn’t muffle the sound as my dagger moved through skin and muscle and pierced her heart.

  With a single twitch, one of the last half-sirens died, and I withdrew the blade from her body, wiping the crimson on her lingerie and leaving the blade a gleaming black again.

  A knock sounded at the door, and I stood up, giving the half-siren one last look as I dropped the daggers, letting them turn back to mist and appearing in their hartskin sheathes at my waist. Turning to the window, I exhaled, and mists flowed from my breath through the room, coalescing into a tunnel. The window, another in-between, turned insubstantial.

  I ran through the tunnel, and as I reached the window, I leaped. The black cloak on my back fluttered in the air two hundred feet above the ground as I fell towards the building across the street.

  I looked down at it as it raced upward to meet me, and I braced myself exhaling once more. As my boots touch the stone of the roof, the stone softened under me and absorbed my fall. When I stepped forward, I glanced back and saw only the barest of a footprint embedded in the stone.

  I reached out one hand and touched a shadow. As I’d known, a warren ran here. A quick glance toward the window almost fifty feet above me showed a man’s face. A human face. A face that didn’t matter to a creature like myself.

  Then I slid through the shadow into another world. I could go home now. Home to solitude. Home to hunger. Home to nothingness.

  Chapter 1

  Rose

  Moonlight made silver halos in the frosty air around the lampposts on campus. The bags of books were heavy as I trudged back to the sorority house. Four days until everyone came back from winter break. The peace and quiet would end.

  My sorority sisters felt bad that I didn’t have a home to go back to for Christmas. I was supposed to be sad and depressed during the holidays because my parents were dead. What was the point? I’d accepted that I was alone in the world long ago.

  My feet moved slowly down the campus streets that seemed like a ghost town. Places that were filled with laughter and antics a month ago were now silent. The lights from classrooms were black. Everything that normally glowed with life and light seemed dead.

  And I reveled in it.

  The silence. The darkness. The solitude.

  I’d grown up in a world like this. No one had been loud while I was climbing trees in the forest as a child. No one had shouted at me for no reason when I was learning to tie a fishing line. No one told me that I needed a boyfriend when I was learning to steer a sailboat.

  A biting wind blew from the North, carrying snow from the tops of buildings through the air. The night was clear, and the moon was bright tonight. Full without a hint of clouds to cover its brilliance.

  I let my mind wander and imagined being back in those woods. Instead of pavement, I felt the crunch of leaves on a game trail. Instead of car noises, I heard the swooshing of wings as a nighthawk took off.

  Maybe I did miss those days, but it wasn’t because of my parents. It wasn’t because of Christmas. It was because I’d felt at home there. This city, any city, just never felt like home. No matter how many people I knew. No matter how many parties or events I went to. Not even when I’d joined a “sisterhood”.

  I came to the street that separated the campus from the neighbors that surrounded it. The street was empty, and I walked across it without waiting for the light to change.

  The pedestrian crossing signal began to beep when I was halfway across, a reminder that I wasn’t in the woods. There was no natural noise like that. I probably would never live in the woods again. My degree in social services was meant for cities, not cabins in the forest. I sighed.

  I needed to get home to drop off the books, and then I could go running through the greenbelt. I needed that run. Tonight, the woods would be beautiful. A picturesque scene of white snow on silver trees as I breathed the free air.

  “Girl,” a voice called in the silence. I jumped at the unexpected sound and turned. A homeless mature woman who was probably in her fifties stepped from the shadows of an alley. She could have been beautiful once, but now her hair was tangled and dirty, and her clothing was barely more than rags. Dirt smudged her cheeks, and I was sure that she hadn’t showered in days.

  She still stood tall with more poise than I’d ever seen in one of the homeless that populated the streets around the college. Her steps were slow with no sense of shuffle as she moved away from the alley.

  “It’s a strange night, girl.” Her eyes seemed to focus on things beyond me even though she stared at me. “Don’t stand in the dark for the shadows have claws tonight. And eyes and ears. Death comes for the daughter if the mother hears her call.”

  What the hell was this woman talking about?

  Her gaze focused on me, leaving whatever madness behind. “And you will call tonight, won’t you, girl? You’ll call your mother. Only the mother will call the prince.”

  “My mother is dead, and I have no idea what prince you’re talking about. Have a good night.” I turned to walk away from the insane woman, hoping she’d leave me alone to the winter night. I wasn’t that lucky, and she called out one more time.

  “She left the dark and reclaimed her light. That is not your path, girl. Your heart is dark like your father’s.”

  I ignored her as images of my father came to mind. The kindest man I’d ever known. The only one that had ever cared for me. One that had ignored my oddities like a father should. I barely remembered him, but every one of my memories was of him smiling.

  Jet-black hair, emerald eyes that seemed alive, and a smile that could fix anything. He was handsome. I knew it like I knew that my mother was beautiful. Both of them could have been models, and I’d been born looking hideous. My eyes were too far apart and slightly too large.

  My hair wasn’t beautifully black like my father or icy blond like my mother. Instead, I had plain brown hair that was always just a little bit wild no matter how hard I tried to make it straight and pretty.

  I pushed the memories out of my mind, but I couldn’t help turning to see if the old woman was following me. She was gone, probably back to the alley that she’d come from. Her words reverberated in my mind.

  Don’t stand in the dark for the shadows have claws tonight. And eyes and ears. Death comes for the daughter if the mother hears her call.

  What a creepy thing for someone to say. I guess that’s what happens when you listen to crazy old women living in alleys.

  The whole experience made me a little more nervous now that my imagined peace had been broken. I hurried along the sidewalk to the sorority house, passing more houses and more alleys.

  I heard a noise as I passed one. A scratching noise from behind a dumpster. I froze, the old woman’s words running through my mind once again. My heart began to race as I stood there, not sure if I should keep walking or find out what the noise was.

  An explosion of movement and howling made me drop my bags of books. A cat flew out of the dumpster, landing on its feet and running straight for me. Right behind it, another cat chased it, screaming like a banshee.

  My heart felt like it was about to pound out of my chest as I shrieked. I stumbled over the bags of books as the cats dodged me and ran across the street to the opposite alley.

  When the cats were gone, I still lay on the ground trying to convince my heart that I wasn’t actually going to die. “What the hell am I doing?” I muttered with a soft laugh.

  I stood up and brushed the dirt off my jeans. After picking up the bags, I began to walk
towards the sorority house again, very ready to be done with creepy stuff for the night.

  Still on edge, I checked the alleys that I passed, seeing dumpster after dumpster. This was a strange night. The old woman hadn’t been wrong about that. You could feel it in the air that something was off.

  When I was two blocks away from the sorority house, I heard a scream from the alley in front of me. Then what sounded like more muffled screams. My heart began to race again as I stepped in front of the alley.

  A fat man held a sorority girl against the dumpster while another watched. One hand was held over her mouth as muffled screams tried to escape her. The other hand was pulling at her skirt.

  I froze as I watched the scene. I’d never seen anything like this. Everyone knew that this kind of thing happened, but it didn’t happen in front of you. It wasn’t something that anyone saw.

  The woman was doing her best to keep her skirt on, but the second man grabbed her hands. “Shut the fuck up, whore. Don’t make me get my knife out.” The words were quiet enough that if I weren’t standing there, I wouldn’t have heard them.

  The woman stopped screaming, but nothing was going to stop her sobs. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t fight off two men, but I couldn’t just ignore it either.

  I did the only thing I could think of. I began to scream like someone was murdering me. The two men immediately turned to me, ignoring the woman pressed against the dumpster. The one who had been holding the woman’s hands raced towards me. The other turned towards me and zipped up his pants.

  As soon as the men turned towards me, the woman slipped by them and ran, leaving them to me.

  I tried to turn and run, but my feet felt like they were cemented to the pavement. I should have been able to outrun them. I ran every day, and they were out of shape thugs.

  But my body felt frozen. The man who had rushed towards me caught me around the waist. Suddenly, my body began to move all on its own. I kicked at him as he pulled me into the shadows of the alley, trying desperately to make him drop me so I could escape.