Page 14 of What Hunts Inside the Shadows

“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” he said, heaving out a sigh. He stroked his thumb over my cheekbone, his expression softening as he considered his words more carefully. “I have lived for centuries. I have seen what this world does to good things—to beautiful things. I have lived without kindness and been betrayed by people I should’ve been able to trust. This world is ugly and it is filled with brutality.” He paused to smile sadly down at me. “And then came you.”

Something in his expression made my heart flutter in my chest, threatening to cleave me in two with the bittersweet pain there. “Your essence flows down the bond between us—light and good, tainted by my darkness. But at your core, there is this well of beauty that flows from you. You don’t love easy, but you do love hard. And I have spent centuries feeling you fall in love with men who didn’t deserve you. Feeling your heart flutter for men who would never have been able to give you what your soul craved in the end, and knowing that, I was trapped on the other side of the Veil waiting for you. Just waiting for centuries to be able to hold you.”

“Caelum,” I protested, shaking my head to try to dislodge his grip.

He held me steady, staring down at me as if he needed me to hear the words I didn’t want to hear. “And then it broke, and I met you and you were everything I’d ever dreamed you would be and more. I felt you fall in love all over again, but with me this time. I see in your eyes that you wish you could take it back more than anything, but you can’t. Because you and I both know what you felt; we both know you loved me with everything you were. More than you ever loved your husbands in all your past lives. You still do, and you can’t wish that away, because you were born to love me, whether I deserve it or not.”

I studied him for a few moments, trying not to think about how it would feel if our roles were reversed. I couldn’t begin to fathom the idea of him entertaining another woman. The thought of it alone made a rage so unlike anything I had ever known burn through me. To feel that, and know it was love, over and over again for centuries, I didn’t know if I would survive. But I didn’t want sympathy for him or empathy for the situation he’d been forced into by some wicked play of fate at the hands of the witches.

I just wanted to be free, to be myself, and I just wanted to not love him.

But he was right. Something in me couldn’t let go of Caelum. It couldn’t separate the man from the male; I knew they were the same person. A manipulation on the surface, but I’d seen glimpses of Caldris in Caelum. In the way he protected me against everything. In the way he wanted to possess me, body and soul. And in the fact that he’d left Jensen to die simply because he’d wronged me in that library.

I didn’t have an answer for him, not wanting to agree with what he said and give him the satisfaction of knowing that I loved him. He didn’t deserve that. He’d lost the right to those words from me, and whether or not I could control what I felt, I could control what I spoke.

He groaned, hanging his head forward. The severance of our eye contact…hurt, and I hated myself for it. Hated feeling like I’d betrayed him by not offering him the assurance he needed, after I’d given in to the temptation to feel his skin on mine when it was the last thing I should have wanted.

I hated myself and what I’d become.

“I won’t lose you again,” he said, lifting his head until his eyes met mine once more. “I will follow you, because what remains after you’re gone will be a broken shell that that will do more harm than good. All I want is to be with you. Tell me how to make that happen, Estrella.”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to come up with a solution. There was nowhere we could go where we wouldn’t be a danger to the people around us. There was no way we could go to Faerie without risking whatever Brann had warned me about, and no way we could stay in the human realm now that people knew who he was. We couldn’t go back to the tunnels, not with Melian and the others dead and no answer for how we alone managed to escape the Mist Guard. Too many coincidences; too little time.

“I don’t know how,” I said, in lieu of an answer.

He nodded, as if the answer were exactly what he’d been expecting as he studied my face. Placing a chaste kiss against my forehead, he finally stepped back and took my hand in his. “You need to rest. I can feel how tired you are.”

He guided me back toward where the other Fae Marked waited, all but forgotten until now, making guilt rise inside of me. I shouldn’t have cared. They wouldn’t have cared about me. “We’re staying here?” I asked, looking at the darkening sky.

“For the night. The Wild Hunt will be here by morning.” We rounded the corner of the street, the others coming into view. They huddled together in a circle, facing out toward the skeletal remains that guarded them. With their backs pressed together, it would be a long while before any of them went to sleep for the night.

Caldris picked up my discarded cloak and guided me to a dirt clearing on the other side of the street from them. He sat down, tugging me into the space between his knees until I leaned back against him. I immediately felt a target on me from the glares of the other Marked who undoubtedly saw the embrace for what it was.

I squirmed against him as he draped my cloak over my front, cocooning me in warmth. “I don’t want to sleep here tonight,” I said, something about the haunted city bringing a chill to my skin in spite of his body heat.

“Neither do I, Little One,” he said, his chest rumbling against my back. “I hope you never have to experience the kind of pain that I suffered here. We’ll leave at first light, but for tonight, don’t go wandering off with any spirits who try to tempt you away.”

“Spirits?” I asked, glancing around the darkening street. There was nothing unusual, no sign of anything but us and the Fae Marked.

“They can be quite vengeful, and they have a good reason to hate me,” he said, wrapping his arms around my chest. He pulled me tighter into his body, and in spite of the independence that made me want to push him away, I snuggled tighter.

How could I fight a vengeful spirit that I couldn’t even see?

6

ESTRELLA

Isnuggled deeper into the warmth on the side of my face, the soft tingling of fingers running through my hair drawing me from the depths of my sleep. Hovering in that space between sleeping and waking, I tried to shrink away from the touch. I didn’t want to wake up and face the reality that haunted me, worrying at the edges of my awareness and threatening to dissolve all the peace I’d found in the realm of dreams.

“It is time for the stars in the sky to rest for the day, Little One, and that means the star I hold in my arms must rise,” Caelum murmured, his voice resonating in the depths of my soul. I’d have recognized it anywhere, even with that somehowotherbaritone that tainted it from the man I’d known.

“I don’t want to wake up,” I grumbled, pressing farther into the fabric beneath my face. It was coarser than I remembered his shirt being, and a quick peek from a barely cracked-open eye confirmed he’d shifted us while I slept. My head rested in his lap, my body curled up on my side.

“What pleasant dreams they must be to keep you from waking. Perhaps you should make them your reality. You hold that power within your grasp,” he said, his voice taunting as I closed my eye once more before he could notice. He stretched forward, jostling me only slightly as he grabbed my hand in his. He traced the circle on the back, drawing a shudder from me as the contact awoke that shadowed thing that existed inside of me. “With the God of the Dead wrapped around your finger, you can mold the world into whatever you want it to be.” He seemed to grasp the thread of fate, tugging against it to remind me of the very real tether between us.

Finally opening my eyes to see the flash of gold shimmering in the rising sun, I ignored the weight of his stare on the side of my face where he peered down at me. “I don’t want to mold the world. No one person should have that kind of power.”

“Those who do not want it are the only ones who should wield it in the first place,” he said, his tone turning melancholic. I tilted my head, turning so that I could stare up into the sadness that had claimed him so suddenly. “Unfortunately that isn’t often the case, in my experience at least. Even if those who rule weren’t always evil, power like that has a way of corrupting even the kindest mind.”

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