Page 116 of Sweetling
The whites of his eyes were white—not black.
“Your eyes…”
Grabbing his hand, she turned it over to examine his wrist, where thick veins ran beneath his pale skin. Even in the dimness, she could see how the blackness had faded. It wasn’t blue or green like hers, but it wasn’t the dark spiderweb he’d gone to sleep with.
Allarion silently brought his wrist to his mouth, and before Molly could stop him, he scored it with the tip of a fang. Dark blood dribbled down his inner arm as Molly quickly put down the lamp and grabbed a kerchief.
She mopped up the trail of blood and pressed the cloth to his small wound.
“What’s happening?” she whispered.
He gently took her hand and eased it off the wound. The kerchief came away stained with his blood—a dark claret red.
Molly pushed the cloth back when the wound welled with another bead of blood.
“Allarion?” she said, more forcefully.
“I didn’t know how he did it,” was what he finally said.
“Who did what?” Grasping his chin, she forced him to look at her. “Please talk to me. You’re worrying me.”
As suddenly as he’d sat up, a ridiculously wide smile broke across his face. He laughed, a wild sound, and gathered her up in his arms to sit her in his lap.
“Your blood—it must be your blood.”
“Don’t blame this on me,” she grumbled.
“Oh, my wonderfulazai,it’s entirely your doing. I wondered how Maxim had begun to look so different but never imagined he’d imbibed her blood.”
“Who’s Maxim?”
The name sobered him, and Allarion’s gaze dropped to regard her. Although she had his eyes, his gaze was far away on memories.
“It’s time I told you, sweetling…”
Cuddling her close, Allarion told her a story, one of friendship, love, and sacrifice. He spoke of his dear friend Maxim, a fellow fae and warrior, in reverential tones, telling her how he’d stumbled upon his friend’s deepest secret. A human mate and halfling child.
Everything might have been well—the child wasn’t the first between a fae and human—were it not for the girl’s gift of foresight. Hidden away as they were, still nothing might have happened, but as the girl grew, so did her powers. Her magic, wild and uncontained, touched the magic of the faelands, and there was almost nothing that happened in the fae realm that the Fae Queen didn’t know.
Soon, whispers slithered through the trees, into the faelands. They permeated every street, every home. That a halfling girl had foreseen the death of Amaranthe.
Wanting it not to be so, desiring a child with such a gift, the Fae Queen began her hunt—and Allarion, Maxim, and Aine began to plan.
Allarion told her of Maxim and Aine’s sacrifice in a quiet voice lacking much inflection. The memories were still raw inside him, and Molly wrapped her arms around him and wept with him as he spoke of his friends’ deaths.
His story ended with a hurried escape from the faelands, to a bower built into a hill. In whispers he described how he’d helped Ravenna into the deep sleep to mute her powers, to await when it would be safe again.
His final words echoed in the bedchamber, a somber reminder of his promise to his friend.
Molly lifted her head from his shoulder. “The other bedchamber…Ravenna is the friend you’ve been expecting.”
Allarion nodded, his face a mask of grief.
Molly ached for him—and for the girl, out there even now, sleeping in her bower, awaiting a brighter day. Her past jealousy over the girl shamed Molly; she knew what it was to be orphaned, and to leave everything she’d ever known.
“I hope the estate will be safe enough soon,” he murmured.
“All this…it’s been for her. For Maxim and Aine.”
