I did as he asked, and the instant our fingers touched, I felt a surge—pleasure, want, envy.
My whole forearm flared, an electric ice climbing the webwork of veins and nerves. The sigils were awake now—alive, not drawn but burrowing, shining through my thin rain-wet skin like gold leaf hammered onto glass. The cold went in, and then in again, and where it touched the bone at my wrist, it caught fire.
I made a noise. Not a scream, not a whimper. A noise I did not recognize myself making. It was a sound that belonged to a wet animal in a storm drain, to a person who has never once in her life been allowed to want anything and now finds herself wanting everything at once.
The man—no, not a man, not a thing I had ever written—caught me as the world blurred and righted. He caught my jaw with his left hand, and his thumb pressed under the edge of it, and the frozen knot of my face dissolved, and my mouth fell unguarded open.
“He didn’t move for a moment, thumb pressed just at the hinge of my jaw, holding my head gently but with a pressure that made my next breath come very shallow. The hand was gloved, but I could feel the heat of it through the lambskin. When I dared to meet his eyes again, the mirrors in them had gone soft. Not less reflective, only—less resisting. Letting my own face in.
“Rachel,” he said, and there was a catch in it this time, a fraying of the perfect even voice, as though he had waited too long and was afraid I would not hear. “You understand what this is, don’t you?”
I didn’t. I wanted to. I shook my head, and his hand followed, thumb rubbing the point where my pulse stuttered at the edge of my jaw. The motion unlocked me. I found my voice.
“What are you?” I asked, smaller than I meant to.
He smiled, and his lips peeled back from his teeth in a grin, and the sight of it was exquisitely wrong and exquisitely right, the way the missing word in a poem lands when you finally remember it.
“Envy,” he said. “I am Envy, Rachel Booker, Lord of the Argent Halls, the seventh and the oldest of my father’s sons, the last rival, and the first watcher. I have waited for you through countless human empires and endless years of this place, and I will never not know you again.” The last sentence came out like a confession forced by torture, simultaneous with the tightening of his fingers at my jaw.
I made myself listen. I made myself not look away.
“You’re a demon?” I said. I heard the skepticism in my voice, the disbelief. I wanted to laugh at myself, the way a person laughs at a child who thinks the moon is a god—but I could not. My mouth would not make the laugh. The words sat there, stillborn, in the back of my throat.
He did not look amused.
He did not, for a long second, do anything at all. Then, very quietly, as though he thought I might not want it, he ran the backs of his gloved fingers down the side of my face. The motion was not kind, not yet, but it was careful. Measuring. As if he wanted to see if I would flinch. I did not flinch.
“I amyourdemon, Rachel,” he said. The words landed like the crack of a whip. “And you—” The smile again. Teeth this time.Human, but not. The canines were a hair too long. “—you will be my Queen.”
I think I was still trying to stand, but he was holding my jaw and I couldn’t move, and the cold inside my arm had stopped being cold. It was a live wire now, crackling in exquisite, almost erotic pain, and every heartbeat sent it further: up my shoulder, behind my right breast, under the edge of my ribs. I couldn’t see the sigils anymore but I felt them—crawling, rooting, reproducing behind my skin, staking territorial claims in the tenderest, most private parts of me.
I wanted to weep from the pressure of it. From the impossibility of it. From the fact that I had, by some freak accident of anatomy or fate, survived almost thirty years before meeting someone who could hold my face and not look away from what was inside it. It was a pleasure so sharp it was a wound.
He bent in, and with a motion both frightening and familiar, pulled me so close that the line between my front and his was measured in the heat I felt from him. His chest was solid; it pressed through the coat and into the bones of my own, and though I tried to brace myself, my arms went up and around him on their own. I could feel the ridges of his ribs. I could feel the silk of his shirt. I could feel, most of all, the engine of his heart. It ran so hot that I thought it would cauterize the ice traveling through me.
The world tilted. No—more than tilted. It inverted. The floor that had been warm sky under my feet became the air above us, and the sky above my head became the floor, and there was a moment in which I hung between the two, suspended by nothing but the embrace of a man who called himself a demon and called me Queen.
My head spun.
Me? A Queen?
Chapter 3
Theworldcamebackin increments, the lightest values first, then the mid-tones, then the deep blacks last. The cinder sky finished sliding off the underside of my feet. The mercury floor slid back to where floors belong. Somewhere in the soft canal of my left ear a small bubble released itself with a wet click, and the held world.
He was holding me up. His arm had come around my back, the inside of his forearm laid in a long careful line along the lumbar curve of my spine, his palm spread wide and warm against my hipbone through the damp of the hoodie. I felt him hold my weight and then, as he sensed me come to myself, he released. My feet were on stone. Stone that was polished to such a high mirror finish that, looking down, I could see the ceiling above us coming up through the floor to meet me. Black stone. Black water on black stone. My bare toes curled against it. The stone met them, cool, unyielding, faintly warm at the very deepest point of contact.
We were on a balcony.
That was the next thing my brain agreed to register. A long shallow balcony of the same black mirrored stone, with no rail, the edge falling away into open air some twelve feet from where he had set me. Beyond the edge, below the edge, opened a space my mind refused, for several seconds, to take a measurement of.
It was a hall, but so much more.
Hall was a word for somewhere a person threw a coat. This was a hall the way a stadium was a room. It opened beneath us in long mirrored galleries, one giving onto another, mirrored colonnades disappearing into more mirrored colonnades the way a corridor disappears into itself when you stand between two facing mirrors in a small bathroom and let your eye go. Down the center of the longest gallery ran a pool. The pool was the color of mercury and lay perfectly still, unbroken from end to end, and along its edges narrow walkways of the same black stone ran in two straight unbroken lines into a distance I could not, without dizziness, follow. There was no fire. There were no candles. There were no torches in brackets, no chandeliers, no electric sconces, no source. There was only light, evenly distributed, the same sourceless light I had stood under on the plain, and the mirrors caught it and gave it back to one another in a long quiet conversation that filled the hall to its furthest corners.
Above us, far above us, the ceiling was a dome. The dome was black stone polished to a finish so fine that the whole hall lived a second time on its inner curve, upside-down and fractionally smaller, the long mercury pool running across it as a long mercury seam, the colonnades hanging down from it as colonnades, and somewhere on the underside of all of that, very small, two figures: a tall man in a long black coat and a thin woman in a grey hoodie standing close enough that the line of her shoulder went into the line of his ribs.
I did not look at us for long.
