“Uh… No… I didn’t mean…”
She shrugs. “Your loss, gargoyle boy.”
I’m not sure how it’s possible for my jaw to drop lower than it already has.
Gargoyle boy?
“What the fuck is going on here?” I whisper, at which the woman with the lilac hair rises swiftly off Lucian, revealing how tall she is when she stands at her full height—certainly as tall as Lucian, if not taller.
She doesn’t seem to care that she’s completely naked. She gives herself a quick once-over, casting her gaze at her legs, arms, and hands before giving a laugh that sounds like a far-off melody, pulsing with magic.
“Twolegs.” She reaches up to her ears, pushing her hair back to reveal what I couldn’t see before: elven ears. “My beautiful pointy ears!”
She gives a groan of apparent happiness before she promptly tries to see her butt. “Where is my tail?” She stops. “Oh, that’s right. No tail. Ha!”
“Okay,” I say, more loudly this time. “What the actual fuck?”
She plants one hand on her hip as she turns her gleaming smile on me. “Well, hello there, Darkness.”
“Uh…” I squint back at her. “Hi?”
Now that she’s facing me, I can see all of her facial features. Her eyes are the palest blue, a color that looks otherworldly in contrast to her hair, and her cheekbones and chin are as delicate as they first appeared.
Behind her, Lucian rises to his feet, pressing his hands to his apparently healed face and testing his wings, both now seeming to be functioning normally. I’m not sure how she healed him, but my more immediate concern is her identity.
I direct my question at the woman. “And you are…?”
She bows her head briefly but solemnly. “I’m Anna-ve-shaleia of the House of Dark Dreams, but I prefer the name you gave me.”
My forehead puckers. “Anarchy?”
She tips her head, and the male panthers suddenly grin up at me, their eyes bright, each of them chirping softly.
I don’t know what question to ask first. “How…? Why…?”
“What,” she replies, tapping her ears. “I’m a dark elf.”
She turns to the keeper, bowing her head briefly to him. “Keeper of Dark Magic,” she addresses him as solemnly as she acknowledged me. “I am not prone to gratitude, but it would be dishonorable of me not to thank you for breaking the curse that was placed on me.”
He clears his throat. “I assure you it was completely unintentional.”
She acknowledges his response with another brief bow. “Naturally. You could not have known that your dark magic would break a spell that had caged me for nearly a thousand years.”
She continues before he can respond, although her voice sounds more cautious now. “A curse that was particularly painful to me because I had already cheated death and prolonged my own life for nearly a thousand years before that.”
“You’re two thousand years old?” The keeper immediately stands more upright, his lips pursed as he looks at her with renewed interest.
“Yes, keeper,” she murmurs, her eyes glimmering darkly. “I was a youngling when you were created. My people felt the force of your creation all the way into the heart of our domain. Whatever terrible power was used to make you, I can’t imagine the devastating cost to your creator.”
The keeper is now frozen. He told me once that he doesn’t remember his creation or who he was before he became thekeeper. The panthers were present for that conversation, so they’re aware of it.
“What do you know of me?” he asks, and I sense the stillness of his chest, the way he’s holding his breath.
She shakes her head, a hint of regret in her voice. “I apologize, Keeper, if I gave you hope. My brothers and I felt the impact of your creation, along with the creation of the other keepers, but your identity was a mystery that nobody seemed able to answer.”
“Oh.” He withdraws a step, his expression closing off.
“Your brothers and you?” I ask carefully, feeling the need to take the focus off the keeper while latching on to the way Anarchy didn’t refer to herself alone.
