“King. I am aking.”
I snicker at his boast. “Whatever you say.”
My dream-lover is so tall that even while I’m standing on the cot, he still looms an inch or two above me. This close, I can see shards of refracted light in that pitch-dark stare. His hair looks so silky that I want to thread my fingers through the shiny strands to see if they’re as soft as they seem. But I’m sidetracked as my gaze snags on the cuffs adorning my wrists.
My nose wrinkles. What in the pits of Droon are they?
I’ve never been into bondage, but maybe Dream-Suraya is? They’re delicately forged metal bands with engraved runes of some kind. They’d be pretty—but something seems trulyoffabout them. With a peculiar sense of doom, I twist my hands and peer at them, searching for some way to unlock them. “How in the realms do these unlatch?”
“Don’t bother,” Grumpy-Hole Prince of Darkness snaps. “We’ve already tried.”
“Did you put them on me?” I accuse.
He stares, lips flattening. “No.We found you like this.”
I shake my head, confusion flooding me anew. This doesn’t feel right. None of this feels remotely right. “These aren’t real,” I say, shaking my head. “And you’re not real, either.” I tremble, a pervasive feeling of dread rising out of nowhere... that I am terribly, horribly wrong about everything. My voice trembles: “Are you?”
I lift my hand toward him again, but this time, he grasps below my wrist, careful not to touch the cuffs. “Oh, I promise, little infiltrator, I am most definitely real.” A smirk curls those smooth lips. “And you are my prisoner, so stop testing my patience, if you value your life.”
His fingers squeeze mercilessly, and I gasp as pain shoots up my arm.
Now, I definitely don’t like this. I pinch my eyes shut.
Wake up, Suraya! Get up!
But when I peek through my lashes, he’s still there like an ominous, unsmiling mountain of wrath. A sinking feeling ensues that perhaps this isn’t a hallucination at all. “Let go of me,” I snap, and shove my free arm up to push him away.
But before my fingers make contact with his chest, I am propelled forcefully but efficiently on a gust of air, falling back onto the mattress, though the man hasn’t moved a muscle. Because histattoosdid. They are no longer on his neck or his hands, which are back on the footrail of my bed. The shadowy ribbons of darkness now tether my hands and legs, keeping them banded to the sheets beneath me. I struggle but can’t move from my supine position. My eyes widen.
“What are those things? How are you doing that?”
Heavy footsteps bring him around to the side of the bed. “Magic.”
“That isn’t possible without a jadu crystal,” I say, the hairs on my nape standing straight up.
He opens his fist, and thick black tendrils melting into liquid smoke curl over his knuckles, and my eyes bulge. “It is here,” he says.
My mouth falls open in disbelief. I am utterly mesmerized by the shadow dance of the smoke that slithers up his forearm in coiling wisps. It has to be a parlor trick or an optical illusion. Even the runecasters in Oryndhr have to use crystals for any kind of magic. No one has pure akasha running through their veins. No one. At least no one... in Oryndhr.
A horrid sense of foreboding fills me. “Where ishere?”
The smoky tendrils retreat, dissipating into nothing. “Everlea.”
My head spins at the implication. I’m inEverlea? The realm ruled by a monster? The occasional traveling merchant comes through Coban claiming to have beast scales, luxurious pelts, and spelled jewelry from Everlea for sale, but the goods are almost always fake. Not much of fact is known about the reclusive kingdom—only that it has been Oryndhr’s hostile neighbor since the hundred-year War of the Gods tore the realms of men apart. And its monarch is as ruthless as they come.
If what this man says is true, then how in the name of rogue sandstorms didIget here? Surely he has to be joking. But there’s no humor on his grim face, no lighthearted delight at my expense, only a stony, arrogant antipathy as though I’ve personally offended him somehow with my presence. Maybe I have. He’s much too arrogant to be someone unimportant.
The way the healer had scurried away at his brusque command makes me balk and swallow hard. Leaps of logic are apparently too much for my poor brain. I glance up uncertainly at him. “And that makes you...”
“Darrius Nightsong,” he says.
“Nightso— thekingof Everlea?” I whimper faintly and bite back my fright. Maker above, hehadn’tbeen boasting before. Becausethatis definitely information recorded in the history books. Nightsong, thenightmarefucking king. Gods, am I going to die?
“Gold star,” he says. “Now your turn. Why have you come to Everlea? Does your deceitful ruler know who you are to me? Did he send you?”
WhoIam tohim? What does he mean?
I don’t know this man; I’ve never seen him before, at least not outside my dreams, which are clearly, in fact, a laughable, hideous coincidence. And I’ve definitely never even met the king of Oryndhr.
