The Shadow Queen (47 page)

He reached into the box for the steak pie. “The food needs to be warmed a bit.”

Her hands settled over his, stopping him.

“Daemon, why don’t you say what you need to say? The food will settle better on an easy stomach—and an easy heart.”

He removed his hands from the box and slipped them into his trouser pockets. He wanted to hold her, but he chose to keep the table between them.

“I am my father’s son,” he said.

She tipped her head. “That shouldn’t come as a surprise to you, Prince. You’re more than his son. You are your father’s mirror.”

“Yes, I am. But despite all the things I’ve done, that wasn’t as clear to me before as it was last night.”

He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. He and Lucivar had taken shifts, one standing watch while the other rested, and during one of those vigils, as he replayed that dance with Saetan, he’d acknowledged a difficult truth.

“Last night I saw the man who had destroyed an entire race, and I understood something about myself. That kind of rage is in me, Jaenelle, in a way it’s not in Lucivar. I am capable of doing what Saetan did to Zuulaman, and unlike my father, I wouldn’t need to be drowning in grief or insane rage before I made that choice. Given the right provocation, I could do what he did.”

“I know.”

That stopped him, had him rocking back on his heels. When he’d first met her, those sapphire eyes had looked through him and she had made some decision about him, passed some judgment. Had she known then, at twelve, the depth of his temper, his potential for violence?

Probably.

“And yet you love me,” he said, “despite what I am.”

Jaenelle walked around the table and took his face in her hands. “No, Daemon. I love you because of what you are. Because of
all
that you are. Right now, you’re feeling raw, which is understandable, and you’re shining a light on one truth about a complex man and not seeing the rest. So I’ll see the whole of who you are and not let you shine a light on one part for too long.”

He wrapped his arms around her. “Do you know how much I love you? How much I need you?”

Her arms twined around his neck. “Why don’t you show me—”

His stomach growled.

“—after breakfast?” she finished, laughing.

They ate, they slept, they made love. When they were heating up the remainder of the food for a midday meal, Daemon said, “Your strategy was quite brilliant. In case you were wondering.”

“Strategy?” Jaenelle said, setting two plates on the counter in anticipation of simply dividing the food.

“Having Lucivar draw that particular line.”

She gave him a puzzled look. “I told Lucivar to give Saetan a nudge that would remind him of his family as it is, here and now. You would be able to get him to the border, but that reminder is what Saetan would need to take those last steps out of the Twisted Kingdom.”

Daemon laughed. “Well, it was a damn good bluff, threatening to toss Daemonar into the library unsupervised and let him at the books.”

Jaenelle dropped the silverware. “What? Lucivar said
what
?”

Daemon turned away from the stove and studied Jaenelle’s pale face.

“That
was
your bluff, wasn’t it?” Daemon asked, feeling the blood draining out of his head.

“I would
never
threaten Papa that way.”

“Hell’s fire.”

“Daemon?
Daemon!
”

One moment he was standing by the stove. The next moment he was sitting on the floor with Jaenelle kneeling beside him.

“That wasn’t your idea?” he asked weakly.

She shook her head.

“Lucivar is Eyrien.”

“I know,” she said.

“He wears Ebon-gray.”

“I know.”

“He doesn’t bluff.”

She plopped on the floor beside him. They sat there for several minutes before she said, “Did Saetan think it was a bluff?”

“I’m sure he did—at least after he woke up and thought, as I did, that you had told Lucivar to say that.”

“Oh.”

They pondered that for a few more minutes while their meal got cold.

“So,” Jaenelle finally said, “how long do you want to wait before we explain this to Papa?”

No point having children who could match a man’s temper if they weren’t going to be a pain in the ass on occasion.

“Let’s give him a couple of days,” he said. “By then he won’t be expecting anything.”

“That’s mean,” Jaenelle said. “I like it.”

Picturing the look on Saetan’s face when he discovered the library threat
had
been Lucivar’s idea, Daemon wrapped his arms around Jaenelle, lay back on the kitchen floor—and laughed.

CHAPTER 30

S
hira walked into the Steward’s office and shook her head in response to the men’s unspoken question. “She wouldn’t answer the door, and Vae says Cassidy still doesn’t want to talk to anyone.”

“Why not?” Gray said, hugging himself. “She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“She was in a fight, Gray,” Theran said. “That’s bound to unsettle anyone, and it would be more unsettling for a Queen.”

A hard look from Ranon and an equally hard look from Talon, who had delayed going to his room when the sun rose in order to hear the morning report.

Since they’d come back from town three days ago, Cassidy hadn’t left her suite, claiming to be unsettled by the fight—a fight Theran could have ended before it began.

Should have ended.

Talon had made that abundantly clear when he’d heard their account of what had happened.

And Gray . . . Since the two young Warlords were working on the estate to pay off their debt of ten days’ labor, Gray had turned into a merciless taskmaster, and Ranon’s job wasn’t supervising the Warlords so much as holding Gray back and providing some balance.

Theran didn’t know what to think, didn’t know what to do. Cassidy hadn’t been hurt, hadn’t been harmed. Not really. Shaken up, sure, but not harmed.

Except she hadn’t left her suite since it happened, hadn’t talked to any of them.

Not even Gray.

What in the name of Hell was she thinking?

 

Cassidy brushed her fingers over the cover of each journal, as if touch could be a conduit, and wisdom would seep into her fingers from the leather.

She had been hiding in her room for the past three days. It was time to stop hiding. Time to do the right thing.

Lia had revealed her heart in the journals, but Cassidy had found no wisdom that would help a Queen who didn’t belong. Could never belong. She’d shocked her court, shocked the Blood in the town. Hell’s fire, she’d even shocked the landens by standing up for them. What had made her think she could rule these people when she saw and thought about things so differently from them? And what made her think any of them would accept the way she thought about things? She wasn’t Lia. Could never be Lia.

“I wish I had found some of the journals from when you were my age,” she said as she stacked the journals and set them on one side of the bed. “I wish . . .”

She opened the trinket box and took out each piece of jewelry. Memories. Family heirlooms. Talismans of a life filled with love. She would give the jewelry to Theran, along with the journals—and her resignation. This time, she wouldn’t wait for the court to resign from her. She’d release these people from their unwilling loyalty, and she’d go home before the roots she’d begun putting down sank in too deep.

Before going would hurt as much as staying.

She put each piece of jewelry back in the box, one by one. Would Theran let her take one as a keepsake? Would she have the courage to ask him?

Her lower lip quivered and her vision blurred. She pressed her lips together hard enough to stop the quiver, then blinked back tears.

She picked up the trinket box, intending to set it on the desk while she wrote the letter that would dissolve her court. She heard the
crack
as the bottom of the box broke and fell, spilling the jewelry over the bed.

“Hell’s fire,” Cassidy muttered, shaking her head. Something else she couldn’t do right.

When she picked up the bottom of the box to see if it could be repaired, she discovered it was made of two thin layers of wood.

Then she discovered the paper that had been hidden between those layers.

And when she opened the paper, she found the map—and another key.

 

*There are bad smells up here.* Vae pressed against Cassidy’s leg.

“I know.” The psychic onslaught was bad enough for her. Who knew what else the dog might be sensing?

The attic was a graveyard of furniture. Nothing physically wrong with most of it from what she could see, but the psychic scents that had been absorbed by the wood—the pain and despair or the gleeful cruelty—had probably reached a saturation point where no one could stand being in the same room with the stuff.

Of course, piling it up here in the attic got the furniture out of sight but did nothing to cleanse the house. The weight of emotions pressed down on everyone living here, and most likely, none of them realized why.

Why would they?
Cassidy thought. Theran and his family had returned to Grayhaven shortly before bringing her here, the rest of the court hadn’t lived here before, and the servants were probably so used to these feelings, they had no reason to think things might be different.

They could be different. There were cleansing spells that could remove psychic residue from an object. Shira might know some, and if she didn’t, Cassidy could ask Jaenelle and send the information back to Shira.

“And if that doesn’t work, burn the damn stuff,” Cassidy muttered.

*Fire?* The Sceltie sounded much too eager to use witchfire to take care of the bad smells.

“Not up here.” Crouching, Cassidy held up the key. If Vae had been able to find the hiding place under the bed by smelling a key, maybe she could find what this key opened. “We’re looking for the thing that fits this key, that has the same smell.”

Vae sniffed the key. *Not much smell, even for kindred.*

Damn. Well, she hadn’t expected this to be easy. “Come on. Let’s see if we can find the starting point that’s shown on the map.”

Grayhaven was a big mansion, so there were several ways up to the attic, and the map, by accident or deliberate omission, didn’t indicate direction. So she was hot and dusty, and Vae’s tail was veiled in cobwebs, by the time she found the attic entrance that looked like the starting point for this stage of the treasure hunt.

Of course, that assumed no one had removed or added windows in the past few centuries or made other structural changes to the house. And the map had been made long before generations of furniture had been disposed of by tossing it up here.

Cassidy tipped the paper toward the light to read the small print around the section of the attic that had been marked as the end of the search.

“We need to find a large wardrobe that has a mirror beside it and a clothes trunk in front of the mirror.” She looked around at all the discarded furniture. “Hell’s fire, Lia. Didn’t you consider that someone else might toss a trunk or two up here?”

The attic had been divided into sections. The interior walls didn’t go all the way up to the roof, but they did offer sufficient privacy. Would she find remnants of servants’ quarters at the other end of the attic, or would she find more out-of-reach shelves?

“She tells me the number of paces from here to the treasure if I walk in a straight line,” Cassidy muttered. “So were the walls here then, and she assumed whoever was searching would use Craft to pass through the wood, or were the walls added later?”

*Cassie?*

“Do we walk in a straight line as the map indicates, going through the walls and furniture?” Cassidy asked, more as a question to herself.

*No.* Vae shook herself. *Don’t want to walk through the bad smells.*

The dog had a point. Cassidy was feeling mucky enough just being near this furniture. The thought of passing through it and having some of that psychic residue cling to her was nauseating.

“All right, then. I guess we do this the hard way.”

 

“She’s not in her room,” Shira said when she returned to the Steward’s office later that morning. Talon had gone to his room for some rest, which was a relief to her, but Powell, Ranon, Theran, and Gray were still waiting for her report.

Gray hugged himself. “Captured?”

The sharp look Ranon gave her said he was wondering the same thing. The fact that any of them would ask that question now . . .

She could almost feel Dena Nehele dying around her.

Shira shook her head. “No sign of struggle. No feel of anything wrong.” She hesitated, then decided against mentioning the old, broken trinket box on Cassidy’s bed. Might have been an heirloom Cassidy had brought with her, but Shira didn’t think so. She’d been tempted to pick up one of the books that had been on the bed as well, but when she’d reached for one, she’d had the feeling that the moment she touched one, something important would go away, would be lost.

Because it wasn’t time for her to touch one or read whatever was inside.

When a Black Widow sensed that kind of warning, she heeded it—especially when a friend was suddenly, and mysteriously, missing.

Which was why she had put locks and shields around Cassidy’s rooms. Until they knew what had happened to the Queen, she wasn’t taking a chance of anyone upsetting a delicate balance.

“Did you try contacting her on a psychic thread?” Theran asked.

Didn’t you?
Shira wondered as she nodded. “No answer.”

“But she didn’t”—Theran glanced at Gray—“pack up?”

She shook her head.

Poor Gray. Cassidy’s retreat from all of them had been hard on him. Now Shira could see him breaking down, little by little, as the possibility of Cassidy disappearing for good began to take root.