As if I summoned her with my thoughts, a flash of a blue silk gown suddenly swims before my streaming eyes. I blink rapidly, struggling to focus. “Aurelia!”
Somehow, impossibly, Aurelia is standing at the end of the corridor, pulling a heavy door shut behind her.
I call out to her again, but my tongue feels thick. I hear my own voice coming out slurred and strange, but my brain is moving sluggishly and I can’t piece together why I sound like that.
“Had to find you,” I mumble, shambling down the hallway. “Somethingsss wrong.”
My knees nearly buckle with relief when I finally reach her. I stumble the last few steps, my trembling fingers outstretched toward the blue silk. How can she be standing here when I saw her collapse? It doesn’t matter, she’s here now. Everything’s going to be fine.
I reach Aurelia, and grip her shoulders tightly, trying to hold her gaze even as my vision sways. I can’t seem to meet her eyes, they’re falling in and out of focus.
Aurelia doesn’t say anything for a moment. Her silence sends a spark of panic shooting through me.
“The wine—” My words slur together, but I need her to understand. “I told you…sword…need to leave.”
Aurelia stares back with an unnatural stillness. Then, finally she relaxes. “You’re confused,” she murmurs. “Come here, let me help.”
“Let’s go home,” I whine, again barely able to recognize my own voice.
“We will,” she promises. “Give me your sword, I’ll take care of everything.”
I frown. No, she doesn’t need my sword. I’m the one supposed to protect her. “No.”
“Give me the sword,” she repeats, more firmly. “Now.”
I shake my head, and the movement feels as if my brain is sloshing against the inside of my skull.
Aurelia reaches her small arms out to steady me, wrapping around my waist. She melts against me, and I fall forward, burying my face in the curve where her neck meets her shoulder, and inhaling deeply. She smells like almond and vanilla.
The sickly sweet scent coats my tongue and claws at the back of my throat. The wrongness of it overpowers me and my body jerks backward before my mind can catch up.
Panic and disgust hits me in waves. I force myself to focus, blinking over and over again, willing my vision to clear. Dark eyes bore into me, familiar and somehow wrong.
“You’re not?—”
The words barely leave my mouth when her fingers twitch, and something invisible slams into my chest, shoving me hard against the wall.
My head jerks back, connecting with the stone with a sickening crack, and darkness swallows me whole.
Iwake up with a gasp, sitting up straight, as if someone just shouted in my ear.
It’s not unusual for me to wake up suddenly with no idea where I am, but it is unusual that even after a few seconds, I still don’t recognize my surroundings.
Where am I? What the fuck happened?
I’m sitting on a filthy stone floor, legs stretched out in front of me. It’s dark, and for a moment I think I’m back in prison, but that can’t be right. This can’t be Dyaspora because it’s not cold enough…but it still feels like a prison.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, becoming aware of a faint pain in the back of my head.
All at once, everything comes rushing back; the dinner, the poison, Aurelia—fuck, Aurelia!
My memory is hazy, but I can still see the servants carrying her unconscious body out of the room. I remember searching for her, then finding Silvia instead. Disgust creeps over my skin at the memory of her cold eyes and strange scent.
I knew I would be able to tell them apart, and I would have realized it sooner, if I hadn’t been poisoned. It all happened so fast.
Why the fuck would Silvia go to the trouble of poisoning me? Why poison Aurelia? If she wanted us dead, she could have killed us from a distance as we approached the castle. And, aside from that, poison is possibly the worst way to murder a shifter. We process toxins so quickly, we’re almost entirely resistant to most poisons. The vomiting, the headache, the confusion was only due to my Fae blood. If I were a full shifter, I probably wouldn’t have felt anything beyond a mild headache and some nausea.
But if Aurelia, being full fae, received the same dose I did...
