Reign Fall (18 page)

“What is it?” he mused to himself.

“Michael, what the hell were you doing?”

His jaw set and any amusement fell from his gaze. “Practicing.”

“Practicing what?”

He fixed me with a look that clearly told me he didn’t want to answer.

“This isn’t okay.” Anger finally elbowed in on my previous panic. “You know I can command you to tell me the truth if I want you to.”

Something dangerous slid behind his eyes then. “Yes, you could do that. I’m bound to you as your servant. You can command me at will whenever you choose.” That dark glare fixed on me. Would I pull rank to get him to tell the truth? Would I treat him like a lowly servant boy, even though I continually swore to him that wasn’t what he was to me?

You,
I sent telepathically,
are incredibly annoying sometimes, do you know that?

::And you, Princess, worry too much.::

I hissed out a breath of frustration.
I won’t command you to tell me. I won’t do that to you.

He was silent for a moment, a look of relief spreading over his handsome features, but then it shifted into something else. Curiosity. ::No, wait. I want you to. I want you to command me.:: He yanked his amulet off again and let it drop to the ground. I stared at it with horror.

“Michael!” I shouted out loud.

A glimmer of amusement moved through his green eyes. “Princess, please. Just relax. I’m fine, I’m not in any immediate distress. But I want you to try to command me right now to tell you the truth.”

My heart was pounding so hard and loud I felt it in my ears. “Why? You don’t think it’ll work?”

“I don’t know. It’s an experiment.”

“I think I’m going to be sick.”

His lips twitched almost into a smile. “Sorry for stressing you out. But this is important.

Command me. Right now.”

I wrung my hands and locked gazes with him again, finding it difficult to breathe. He wanted to push the envelope here. For some reason, compared to the first time his amulet had been forcibly taken from him, he seemed perfectly fine with...

Wait a minute. Something clicked for me then. “When Elizabeth took your amulet, she took it from you forcibly. You didn’t have a choice. This, though, this is you taking it off of your own free will. Is there a difference?”

Michael just studied me without confirming or denying my suspicions. “Command me, Princess.”

It was a challenge uttered in a low voice that moved through me like warm water. I could command him to do anything I wanted. It was very tempting.

I could command him to kiss me.

That would be a dare.

However, I was going more for the truth right now. While a kiss would be wonderful, the truth was essential.

I tried to stay calm. Even though he wasn’t wearing the amulet, I couldn’t see through him like a ghost. He seemed solid and strong and totally in control of himself. More confident than I’d ever seen him before, actually.

“Fine,” I said shakily. “I command you to tell me the truth. Why have you taken off your amulet?”

His eyes glowed green for a split second before they returned to normal. “Because it totally clashes with my outfit.”

I stared at him with surprise. “That was a lie! You lied!”

“Not a complete lie. It does.”

“Like you care about fashion. Not with the way you dress.” A slow smile spread across his face. “Ouch. That was not called for, Princess. I know I don’t dress like a pretty faery king with ridiculous designer labels, but I think I do okay.” I wanted to tease him back, but stopped myself. “You were able to resist a direct command from me. That’s not supposed to be possible.”

“You haven’t given me many commands in the past. Maybe I’ve been able to resist for a while.”

I chewed my bottom lip and looked down at his amulet. “No, it’s because of the stone. Is that what keeps Shadows in servitude?”

“It has nothing to do with that. It contains our life force,” he said. “Without it we die.”

“And here you are standing right in front of me and you’re not dying.” Michael looked just as confused as I felt. “Princess, can I see the rock you were given? The one that allowed you to visit the castle undetected and spy on us?”

“I wouldn’t exactly say I was spying.”

He raised an eyebrow. “What would you call it?”

“Observing,” I said firmly.

“Sure.” He put his amulet back on—another big relief, for me, anyway—so he was able to take the stone I held out to him. He studied it closely. “It looks familiar.”

“I know. But I can’t figure out what it is.”

He turned it over in his hand and studied it from all sides. “I think I might know...”

“What?”

“Of course. Of course, that’s what it is. But I don’t understand how it could help you see this place from a distance...”

I grabbed his arm, his muscles flexing under my grip. “Michael, I command you to tell me what you’re talking about.”

I just used the word command as a throwback to what we’d just been experimenting with, but his face tensed and he inhaled sharply.

“It’s stone from the castle,” he said, then he groaned. “Okay, that command definitely worked. And it pinched a little, too.”

My eyes widened. “Commands hurt?”

“Only when I try to resist them.”

Outrage filled me. “That is so unbelievably unfair. So you’re trying to tell me that when a demon commands a Shadow, if there’s any resistance, it causes pain?” He shrugged, his face blank of any discernable emotion. “Pretty much.”

“So stupid and unfair...and—and
cruel
. Why does no one seem to have a problem with this but me? I’ll never understand that.” I forced myself to let go of him and crossed my arms and paced in the general area, trying not to focus on the disgusting way Shadows were treated. For now. “So this means the ability to command you
is
related to your amulet. Something about it not only contains your life force, keeps you in a solid form, but it’s what makes it possible for demons to bind Shadows to them as servants and control them. But why? Who’s responsible for this?”

He shook his head. “All I know is that demonkind defeated us, took the Shadowlands away from us, and that was that. Those Shadows who survived were made into servants. The deposit here of the green stone that originally gave us life was mostly destroyed, and we were each given a piece of it to wear to keep us alive. There isn’t more information available, and nobody talks about what really happened.”

“I think Jonas knew the truth,” I said after a moment.

“He did,” Michael said, his face haunted. “He knew some truths, anyway.” I looked at him with concern. “How do you know for sure? I was there for the entire conversation between you two in the Underworld dungeon. He spouted off some rebellion talk, but nothing really useful or sane, in my opinion. That guy was nuts.” His jaw tensed and he looked reluctant to say anything else.

I grew concerned and I grabbed hold of his hand. He didn’t pull away. “Michael...”

“I can hear him in my head, Princess. Ever since I destroyed him. It’s like I absorbed part of him into myself. And I’ve been having the strangest dreams lately. They feel so real. I can never remember much of them after they’re over, but I know they mean something. Jonas—he’d somehow learned a small part of the truth.”

“What truth?” I asked, hanging on his every word.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m hoping to get that book I told you about.”

“Rhys is on it,” I told him, disappointed that he didn’t know more information that I might be able to use to help him. “He agreed to ask his advisors to locate the book and give it to me.” I expected him to say something unpleasant about the faery king, but he held his tongue, instead nodding firmly. “Thank you for asking him.”

“So you can hear Jonas? In your head? What is he doing? Talking to you like an actual conversation or do you just hear random words?”

“Just words that don’t make any sense—like echoes of his voice in the Underworld.” His expression turned grim. “I shouldn’t have told you any of this.”

“Yes, you definitely should have. And you should have said something the other day, too.

You don’t have to keep secrets from me, Michael. You can trust me.” I put my hand on his shoulder and immediately felt how tense he was. His head was bowed a little as if this conversation had been taxing on his energy. His eyes even looked duller green than they normally were—like when he’d used a burst of energy in the past and then had to recover his strength.

He took my hand and looked down at it, his thumb brushing against my palm. My heart did an immediate cartwheel. Then his gaze moved up to meet mine.

“You really do care about me, don’t you?” he asked, as if surprised by this realization.

My breath caught and my cheeks flushed. “Of course I do.” He raised my hand, almost absently, and brushed his lips against it in a soft kiss that felt like it burned right into my flesh. I stopped breathing completely.

“Princess...” he whispered. His eyes brightened from the dull color to a vivid green light again as he drew closer to me. It was so beautiful. Mesmerizing. I could get completely and totally lost in eyes like his...and I was absolutely, positively convinced he was going to kiss me this time.

But then he let go of me completely, and I gasped with surprise as he took a giant step back from me.

I just stared at him, not understanding what just happened. Why had he pulled away?

His attention was on the ground where he’d dropped the black rock, and he snatched it back up. “Like I was saying, when you commanded me to tell you, I think this is from the castle itself

—the stone it’s constructed from.”

I struggled to clear my head of the previous fog. “Uh...the castle? Really?” I looked up at the back of the castle. It was built from smooth black stone. All of it, right up to the sharp spires that reached into the sky above. I couldn’t see the spires from where I stood. The magical blue sky obliterated anything, as if it was a movie screen fifty feet above our heads. I glanced around at the courtyard. It was enclosed by a tall impenetrable wall also made of the black stone.

Maybe that was why the black rock had seemed familiar to me before. I’d stared at the castle many times. I still thought it was one of the scariest things I’d ever seen.
Architectural Digest
wouldn’t be calling to make an appointment for a photo shoot here any time soon.

But the castle was made entirely from this type of black rock.

I took the rock from Michael and weighed it in my hand as if holding it for the first time. It was heavy for its size and cool to the touch. “The castle is magically infused, right? It keeps anyone from the dark worlds from just strolling through the Shadowlands to get to the other side.

And when a visiting demon is in the castle, their power is automatically zapped so they don’t try something funny.”

“Yes. And the castle is also warded.” He traced his finger over the rock in my hand and when his skin touched mine, again I felt that immediate tingle and the pull I always felt toward him.

Even when he was pushing me away.

I didn’t know what his problem was and why he was acting so strangely with me lately, when things before had been more comfortable and relaxed between us. If I was in Darkling form I would have asked him directly.

But I wasn’t. So I didn’t. But I wanted to.

“We should show this to your father,” he said. “Come on.” He grabbed my hand and led me up the stairs to the entrance to the castle. The blue sky, green grass, flowers, and fake sunshine disappeared and we were back inside the dreary interior of Castle Dread.

Michael knew his way through these halls much better than I did. By now I would have been lost, but he took turn after turn through the labyrinthine halls without hesitating once.

“Wait.” I pulled him to a stop as I caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of my eye.

It was the boy I’d spoken with the other day slipping around the corner up ahead, I was sure of it.

“I just saw him again.”

“The mind-reading kid?”

“Yeah, he went this way.” I followed after him, around the corner he’d disappeared behind.

“There he is!”

He was twenty feet ahead of us, moving quickly. He glanced over his shoulder at me, but didn’t slow down.

“I don’t see anyone,” Michael said.

“You don’t see the kid right in front of us?”

“No. But I assume you do.”

“Trust me, I do.”

The kid had told me he’d shown himself only to me. Talked only to me. He could also show himself to my father, but he hadn’t yet for some reason. I didn’t understand any of this, but I wanted to get to the bottom of this mystery. I took it to mean he’d been hiding, but maybe he meant that they
literally
couldn’t see him.

We went in the direct opposite direction from where we’d been headed to talk to my father.

But I had to talk to this kid again and find out what he wanted. Why he was here. And why he’d given me a piece of magic rock from the castle itself.

He disappeared through a door ahead of us. He didn’t open the door and go inside, though. He walked right through it like a ghost. I stood there, eyes wide, as I realized what I’d just seen.

I tried the handle, but it was locked.

“He went in here,” I told Michael. “He walked right through the door.” He also tried the handle with the same result. Then I pressed my hand up against the door.

That kid had shown himself to me for a reason, I knew it. He’d wanted to talk to me and he specifically wanted to give me that rock.

And seeing him again made me think he wanted another chat. But he was making me work for it.

Enough of this. I was sick of depending on my Darkling form to give me the courage and strength to do what I had to do. I could be just as strong-willed in either form—only in my Darkling form I had wings and more physical strength. Same brain. Same mind. Same me.

I could be courageous and strong no matter what I looked like on the outside.

I pounded on the door until my knuckles hurt. “Let me in. Right now!”