Princess of Shadows: A Dark Fae Fantasy Romance Read online

  The bus waited a few moments with the door open, and then it pulled away in a cloud of exhaust. The old woman released my hand as soon as the doors shut, and I felt like I could move again.

  I yanked my hand away from her, confusion winding its way through me. What had just happened? How had this woman kept me still like that? I almost felt like I’d been stuck in place.

  The words rang through my mind over and over again. Trust the Prince. Trust the Prince. Trust the Prince.

  And then a crash filled the air. It was louder than anything I’d ever heard. Not an explosion. Like a massive can being crushed and shredded. Whatever had caused that sound had been terrible.

  I jerked toward the sound and saw a plume of dust rising into the air a mile down the street. I didn’t know what to do. The sane part of me said to run away, but a different part of me, a part that had gotten me into trouble too many times urged me to find out what had happened so that I could help somehow. It was the same part that had been stupid enough to become bait for rapists.

  Still, those words echoed in my mind. Trust the Prince. I turned to the woman to see what she was doing. When I looked, she was gone. Somehow, without a sound, she’d disappeared in less than a second.

  The sane part of me lost again as it normally did. I stood up and began running down the street. My heart raced, and that part of me that needed to help people surged, pushing the logical side of me away. I knew that regardless of what had happened, I was going to do whatever I could to help the people that had been hurt.

  As I got closer, the dust seemed to clear, and I realized what catastrophe had happened. People had begun to gather around the edge of a wide hole that had opened up in the earth in the middle of the street.

  A sinkhole. Supposedly, they were caused by leaking water slowly eating away at the rock underneath roads, but when I looked down at the twenty-foot deep hole, I couldn’t believe that it was natural. It was so perfectly circular. Pipes sprayed water into the hole that held an entire bus.

  The bus that I was supposed to be on.

  Screams came from that bus. The people standing around the hole murmured quietly. People were on phones calling in to 911. But no one was helping.

  I couldn’t just stand there. I didn’t know what I could do, but I couldn’t listen to those screams without moving. I got down on my hands and knees and lowered myself over the edge of the hole. The concrete had plenty of handholds, and there had never been a tree that I couldn’t climb.

  One step, one handhold at a time, I began the descent into the hole that should have been my death.

  Chapter 6

  Sebastian

  Why wasn’t Rose dead? How could she possibly survive a crash like that without any wounds? I’d watched her all morning. She’d been at the bus stop.

  Now she was climbing out of that hell hole? Climbing. Out. Not being rescued like all the other people. Covered in dust and blood, but otherwise unhurt. What in all the realms could she be to make it through that without any training? And, without using magic.

  If she’d used magic, I would have known. I was keyed in on her scent and it still writhed around her with no outlet, no purpose.

  I sat on a balcony overlooking the sinkhole that I’d created. I hadn’t been able to watch the whole thing. I’d needed to be on the ground and nearby to create the hole. It was one of the limitations of working with stone.

  Maybe she hadn’t got on the bus? But why would she be climbing out of the hole, then?

  I turned away from the carnage below me. I’d already counted over fifteen dead. Whatever Rose was, there was no way that I was going to kill her from a distance.

  I hated the idea of being close to her. It would allow the temptation to ignore my command. That close proximity to her, the knowledge that I would gain being within arm’s reach of whatever she was. I was already struggling with the command, and if that bitch Seraphina hadn’t sent Nyx to finish the job tonight, I would have already taken her to the Dark Court and hid her somewhere.

  I ran my hands over the hartskin sheathes around my waist. Unlike a siren, Rose would be able to heal from a cut, but the iron dust that coated the inside of the sheath would be embedded into any wound that I caused with them.

  It wouldn’t be permanent. Slowly, a fairy would push the iron out of them, and then would be able to heal from the wounds, but it would keep her from healing instantly during a fight. I normally wouldn’t worry about this with a half-blood, but this girl had surprised me at every turn. I couldn’t take any chances.

  Thinking about that made me even more confused. A fairy that had embraced her powers shouldn’t be able to touch iron without physical discomfort. If she’d managed to somehow embrace them, she’d be lost in this world. Everything was made from iron and steel in the Mortal Realm, and it was one of the reasons the Fae had created the Immortal Realm to escape into.

  Fairies were immensely powerful, but humans were plentiful. They reproduced a thousand times faster than fairies, and armed with iron and technology, the Fae would have become extinct hundreds of years ago.

  I sighed and walked inside the apartment. The man who lived here was asleep on the floor. He would wake soon, and I needed to prepare for tonight. All of these questions would find no answers because, by midnight, she would be dead.

  * * *

  I sat in a condemned house. The walls smelled of mold and mildew, and the roof sagged. I’d had to run the vagrants living in the place out, and their belongings, along with empty bottles and cigarette butts, littered the floor.

  I didn’t need anything nice. I needed discreet and dark. I needed a place where I wouldn’t be bothered. I needed to be close to Rose. And I needed this mirror. Silver-backed and large enough that I could crawl through it.

  I closed my eyes, gathering my strength, and I built a tether between the two mirrors. With a muttered incantation, droch, I built the bridge that would allow me to both see and travel through the mirror gateway. Very similar to the one I’d used while she was at that club with her friends.

  Rose was already asleep. I could see her snoring softly in her bed. Tanned legs lay just outside the white comforter that she curled up in. There was still dust in her wild chestnut hair from the crash.

  I felt that same stirring inside me, and I gritted my teeth. This had to be done, and it had to be done soon. Nyx would be here. I touched the mirror and felt the pull. The bridge wanted to be used, wanted to be crossed, and its desires pulled me through to the other side.

  I stepped out of the mirror, the surface of the silver and glass rippling as I passed through. Mist covered my black boots, silencing them as always. Creeping across her room, I covered the distance in seconds.

  As I approached, I saw her face. Eyes too large. Too far apart. No elongated features. No sharp features. She’d never claimed her magic. How had she done these things?

  Yet, just as before, her scent filled the room. Like a campfire hidden in the woods, soft cedar slowly turning to ash. It was intoxicating. I’d never felt this way during a hunt, never met a being who stirred this part of me, a hunger for more than her power.

  I needed to know what lay inside this woman, what power she held. I’d never felt this way before. Not in a thousand years. Leaving my daggers in their sheaths, I reached out to touch her. My bare hand crossed the space between us, and with a touch as light as the breeze, I built the connection between us that let me touch the tightly wrapped ball of magic that rested inside every Fae.

  This was not a tether, this was a personal connection, more intimate than any physical touch could be. I was letting my soul touch hers.

  And I pulled back immediately, shocked at what I’d found. “Gods damn you Seraphina,” I hissed. Stepping backward, I moved away from Rose. It all made sense now. All of it. Especially why Seraphina would give me this contract.

  I couldn’t kill this girl. Regardless of the cost, I couldn’t let her die. I began to turn around, to get back to the mirror. My foot caught
on her desk chair, and I stumbled, sending the chair racing across the room to hit her wall.

  Terrified that she would wake up while I was still in the room, I leaped toward the mirror and managed to hit it directly in the center, sending me across the bridge and back to the abandoned house. Landing in a roll, I stood up.

  I took a few deep breaths as my mind raced. Staring at a large swathe of mold that darkened the thirty-year-old wallpaper of the opposite wall, I tried to decide what to do.

  Nyx would be coming for her. Soon. Seraphina knew that I wouldn’t be able to kill Rose. She’d given me this charge for a single purpose: to kill me. Finally, she’d found a way to force my hand.

  Rose wasn’t a half-fairy. She was full-blooded. Half from the Dark Court and half from the Court of Light. The most difficult to fill requirement in becoming Queen of the Dark Court.

  Chapter 7

  Rose

  I woke to the sound of a crash, and I sat up immediately, my heart pounding in my chest. My desk chair was still spinning against the opposite wall, but that wasn’t what terrified me.

  Black strips of cloth that looked to be part of a long coat were flowing into my mirror. Into my fucking mirror. The mirror rippled as the last bit of black went through it, and then everything was as it had been other than the slowly spinning chair.

  “What in the holy hell?” I cursed. It had been a very long and confusing few days, and I was done with it.

  Something was going on. I’d been a loner for most of my life. I’d gone day after day of feeling like an outsider. I was used to that. This was different. Things were happening that I didn’t understand, and I was done with just accepting them.

  I rolled out of bed and walked over to the mirror. I looked at it, and everything seemed normal except that instead of seeing myself, I saw the black cloth that had fluttered through my mirror.

  It was part of a cloak. A cloak that some thief from a fairy tale would wear. Strips of tattered black cloth had been sewn together in an odd pattern rather than being made of a single piece of fabric.

  It hung from the back of a man who stood looking away from the mirror. A matching hood covered his head, but there was no doubt that the person under it was male based solely on how large he was. He had been in my room. I hadn’t dreamt that.

  There had been far too many oddities these past few days. Too many things that were impossible. I reached out to the mirror and felt something, almost an emotion, coming from the mirror. A pulling. It begged me to just let it pull me forward. To let my hand slide through the glass into another place.

  With only the slightest bit of pressure, I pushed against the mirror, and my hand slipped through the glass creating ripples across the surface. Inside the mirror, I could see it sticking out the other side. Surprised, I pulled back and looked at my hand.

  Nothing was wrong. It was exactly as it had been. The mirror hadn’t hurt me. It was just… a portal? I had a freaking magic portal in my room? I started thinking about what that meant, but then I stopped myself. Not now. I could think later. The man on the other side of the mirror knew what was happening. If I didn’t talk to him now, he might disappear forever. Then, I would never find out what was going on.

  With a deep breath and a prayer to whoever was listening, I stepped through the mirror.

  And tripped on the edge of the mirror on the other side.

  I let out a little shriek as I fell into the man in the black cloak, grabbing the edge of the cloak to keep from falling. He pulled away from me, and I slipped to the floor, falling face-first into a pile of old fast-food wrappers.

  A soft growl came from the man, and I scrambled to my feet. He was holding two black glass knives in his hands as he crouched. He looked ready to get into a knife fight with me. The knives gleamed in the dim light of what looked like a crack house.

  “Hold on!” I said, putting out one hand as if I could stop him from whatever he was planning.

  He just stood there, silently watching me as I wiped the disgusting mess off my face. My heart was beating so fast that I wasn’t sure if I was going to die to those wicked-looking knives or a heart attack.

  “What are you doing here?” he growled. I tried to see his face, but it was shrouded in shadows by the hood.

  I started taking steps back toward the mirror. “I saw your cloak in my mirror. Then… then, the mirror wanted me to touch it.”

  What in the holy hell had I been thinking going through that mirror? This guy had used some kind of spell to walk through a freaking magic mirror in the middle of the night. He was wearing all black, and everyone knew the guy wearing all black was the bad guy. This must be what those blondes in scary movies felt like right before they were eaten by the monster.

  He slid the knives into strange white sheathes on his belt and stood up straight. That made me feel a lot better. I was sure he could still do very nasty things to me if he wanted to, but those knives were more than a little terrifying.

  “I guess this was bound to happen,” he said with a sigh. Then, he pulled his hood back, and I saw the man from the club. The man from my dream. It had all been real. All of it. Or I was completely off the reservation, and this was all some kind of schizophrenic nightmare.

  Jet-black hair that hung down to his broad shoulders. Small strands of it crossed his face as though a wind were constantly blowing around him. A long face with a sharp jawbone and no facial hair at all. Dark red lips that seemed to curl in a smile even though he was pissed. Lips that somehow begged me to kiss them. Lips that called to me.

  But his lips were nothing in comparison to his eyes. Piercing blue eyes that burned white-hot. Impossible to forget. Even more impossible to look away from. It was like he could see inside me, like he could touch my soul without moving his hand.

  And yet, I managed to speak. Poorly. “Tinkerbell?” I asked hesitantly. As soon as I said it, I realized that this was probably not the right time to call him anything even remotely funny.

  “No. But yes.” I blinked, and he seemed to understand my confusion.

  “My name is Sebastian, but you called me Tinkerbell in your dream.” He leveled those piercing blue eyes at me and sighed. “Now we’re officially fucked, Rose. There might have been a way out of it all before, but not anymore.”

  “Why? What’s going on?” My heart had started to slow down when he’d put those knives up, but now that the big bad guy seemed scared, it kicked on the turbos, and I was positive that the heart attack was going to win out.

  He looked like he was about to say something when he moved to the mirror. I followed his eyes and saw my room from this side. So weird. This guy had been watching me while I was sleeping. I could see my bed from here.

  The thought was gone almost as soon as it flashed through my mind as I realized what Tinkerbell had been interrupted by. A man dressed almost exactly the same as Sebastian was in my room. He held the same black glass knives in his hands, except his were already covered in blood.

  Whose blood was that? Only Tiffany and Sasha were still in the sorority. Had this guy freaking murdered my sorority sisters?

  “Fuck,” he whispered in a voice barely audible even to me. I began to ask him what was going on, but he put his hand to my mouth, his other hand going to the back of my head.

  All I got out was a squeak, but that was enough. The man in my room turned around almost instantly and began stalking towards the mirror. My eyes got wide as I realized that he was about to jump through the mirror just like both of us had.

  Sebastian realized it at the same time, and without saying a word, he lifted me up and threw me over his shoulder. I began to scream, but it didn’t seem to matter to Sebastian what I did at this point.

  He reached out and touched the ground next to us. “Hold on,” he whispered, and I immediately gripped his cloak in both hands. What kind of madness was I about to get into now?

  He exhaled deeply, and then he hopped into the shadow that lay underneath us. He didn’t hide in it. He literally
jumped into a hole in the floor that wasn’t there.

  For a half-second, I felt a heavy pressure surrounding my entire body. Darkness and silence filled my senses. Darkness and silence that was so intense, it was blinding and deafening at the same time.

  Then everything came back into existence. It was like when a movie or a song stutters for just a moment, and that silence or darkness is impossible to miss. But then everything starts back up like it never happened.

  It was like that, except instead of the stutter happening to a movie or song. It was my very existence that stuttered. For that half-second, I was sure that I was as close to being dead as possible. There was this nothingness everywhere.

  Then it was over, and there was no mistaking it. If I’d had a cute little dog with me, I’d have told him that we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Instead of being in my room or a crackhouse or even a forest somewhere, Tinkerbell and I reappeared into something out of an alien movie. We were in a cave filled with a dim light that seemed to come from the very rock itself. I hesitated to think it, but it felt almost magical. A perpetual gray twilight. No color. No smell. No sound.

  There was a mist, though. Barely noticeable, it filled the tunnel we were in. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down, tried to stop the panic that threatened to make me freeze again, and I felt the mist move against my lips, soft and damp. Like fog on a cool morning.

  I was still hanging over Tinkerbell’s shoulder, and I tried to wiggle off him, but his arm clamped down tightly over my waist, holding me tightly against his shoulder like I was a bag of flour.

  “I’ll explain everything soon, but we have to move,” Sebastian said as he began sprinting down the tunnel.

  He took a deep breath, and the mist gathered around him. When he exhaled, a mirror image of us appeared. It kept pace with us, and when Sebastian ran his hand along the walls of the tunnel, the mirror image did the same thing.