“Oh look. Seems I won’t be escorting you after all.”
My nose filled with the sharp, refreshing smell of citrus.
I stepped into the main suite behind her and found the Shadow King standing there, this time in a new set of leather pants and some kind of half cape, half tunic-like shirt with a deep V that revealed his near paper-white chest was also covered inthose strange symbols that looked like no language I’d ever seen before.
He held up the whiteboard: Ready to go?
Was I ready to go?
Either way, it was happening.
Brigid waddled back to the bathroom to grab my clothes for laundering, leaving me with a vague promise. “See you later, babes, if this all works out the way Tadhg hopes it will.”
And then I found myself walking down a long hallway side by side with the Shadow King.
Questions buzzed in my head, but talking and writing probably didn’t go together. The Shadow King had clipped the whiteboard onto a leather cord and slung it over his back, leaving our only form of communication an inconvenient over-the-shoulder reach away.
It was even harder not to stare at him than it had been with Brigid. He was unbearably ethereal.
It felt like walking beside the moon. An incredibly tall moon dressed in black. So tall I had to tilt my head back just to look up at him—and every time I risked it, that scrambled-egg feeling went off inside me again.
Luckily, I had all the portraits hanging along the hallway walls to direct my eyes toward.
They reminded me a bit of the ones in Faoiltiarn, where the past Scottish kings and queens stared down at castle visitors from the stairwell.
But most of the kings in these portraits had dark hair with a distinctive streak of white running through it like lightning and wore imperious expressions under heavy silver crowns.
If these were past High Kings, I wouldn’t be surprised.
They were probably long dead, but I still felt like they were watching me—judging me down their long noses—as I walked past.
Each one wore a knotted bear medallion—an exact copy of the one Tadhg had brought out from under his T-shirt. But unlike his, theirs weren’t hidden—they glinted in the painted light as the only jewelry displayed over their rich blue robes.
The kings were always pictured beside a queen. And while the identities and robes of those queens changed, they all had one thing in common: either one or two bared shoulders.
And on that naked shoulder, a very obvious bite mark—painted in shimmering gold, as if to say it glowed.
Was this just an artistic choice? Or did the male royals really bite their queens in a way that left a permanent mark?
And I did meanroyals.
Only a couple of the early portraits showed just one king and one queen. Most often, another man stood beside them—usually with a white streak of hair. Possibly a brother?
Their crowns were smaller, and they didn’t wear bear medallions. But in those paintings, the queen hadbothshoulders bare, with two golden bite marks on display.
Occasionally, a hulking redheaded king would take that second spot instead. None of them wore spectacles, and they all glowered rather than smiled, but I suspected they were the Mountain King’s descendants.
Then came a portrait unlike the rest. A Mountain King and a white-streak High King flanked a tall, slender woman with heavily hooded eyes and jet-black hair that fell nearly to the floor. She wore an ornate crown, dripping in gold jewels.
Her skin was much darker than the male who walked beside me, and her smoky black eyes held a serene confidence that made me recall the long, slinky models of indeterminate ethnicity I’d seen on posters advertising luxury goods in the Edinburgh Airport’s duty-free shop.
Still, I pointed to the portrait and asked the bear I suspected to be her descendant, “Is she your ancestor?”
The Shadow King nodded once.
And then I saw the next painting—three kings surrounding a short and plump pale blonde queen.
A High King with the white streak to her right. A glowering red-haired Mountain King to her left. And on the far right... a tall, slender king in black robes and black leather pants.
