“This feels too much like the day we arrived here, Vexxion.” My voice croaked. How could it not? The memory of the razor’s edge to his voice, how snide he’d been around his father, and how he’d made me believe he had been betraying me all along. This man was a master at subterfuge while I was a mere apprentice.
He had what it took to do this while I still held my doubts. The realization shook me, gouging across my soul.
“I’ve told you everything I could.” His words were a whisper on my hair. He tapped my ass and backed away, leaving my arms to flop at my sides. “Hurry.” Turning, he strode back into the bedroom.
I joined him a short time later. Drask soared over from his perch and landed on my shoulder, grounding me when nothing else could.
Vexxion held out his hand.
“Can Drask come with us?” I asked, and he nodded.
When I touched Vexxion’s fingers, he flitted, taking us to themeadow where we’d trained. He quickly wrapped his threads around us, shielding us from the feral world determined to spy on anything we might share.
“I have a gift for you,” he said.
I fingered the pendant I wore all the time. “I don’t need more than this. More than you.”
“What about this?” He magicked something into his hand, holding aloft twisted strands of thorny gray vines with delicate appearing red leaves bursting from the surface.
“That looks too much like the collar you coiled around my throat.” I swallowed past the ones embedded beneath my skin and willed the strands to stop writhing. Poking. Devouring me one moment at a time.
“These are different from the one I used in the Claiming.” He tugged them apart. “Three.”
Studying them, I tilted my head. “Three?”
“One for you. One for Reyla. One for Brodine.”
I couldn’t breathe. I could barely think. But oh, how my heart surged up into my throat. “You’re going to free us like I did the creatures, with magic.”
He nodded. Looping two of them over his arm, he let them slide in a jerky way down to his elbow as he unlinked the last one and held it toward me.
“I trust you,” I said.
His mouth quirked up endearingly on one side. It killed me each time he did that, because I knew that smile belonged only to me. “They’re ingenious.”
“What did you have to give for them?” There was always atrick. Like everything in faerie, nothing like this would be granted for free.
“A price I was willing to pay.”
I peered up at him. A few shadows drifted through his eyes, but his expression remained neutral. “What did you promise?”
“Nothing significant.” He blinked.
“Vexxion.”
“Tempest.”
“Tell me. What price did you pay?”
“Don’t ask.”
Fear rocked through me, and I could no longer breathe. My heart shattered, but with one stroke of his fingers down my face, he fused me back together again. “I want to know.”
“Pleasedon’t ask.”
My eyes pinching, I jerked out a nod.
“When I place this collar around your throat,” he said. “It will destroy the vines.”
