Page 14 of Queen of the Wicked
Eleven
Adelasia
The night is unusually quiet. The stars hang low in the sky, shimmering above the treetops like diamonds. Or maybe like eyes. Watching me. Judging me.
Perhaps they weren’t watching me at all, and the weight I feel is simply my own thoughts swelling against the inside of my skull.
I haven’t been able to sleep since my nightmare. Since I saw the blood on my hands, pressing into a chest I can’t name.
But fear is not the only thing keeping me awake. It’s also curiosity at the mysterious incubus that has taken residence in my home, and who he and Kaius were before I ever stepped foot on this earth.
Barefoot in my luscious velvet robes, I slip out of the palace towards the courtyard. I pause in the shadows, tucked behind one of the still-broken pillars.
Rowan is there, lying on his back in the center of my decaying courtyard. His wings are unfurled beneath him, spread wide like a fine Cambouri rug. His boots are kicked off, his shirt is loose on his chest, and his eyes are toward the sky.
In this moment, he doesn’t look like a demon that thrives on sin.
I approach quietly, not wanting to completely ruin his peace. His voice reaches me before I get a chance to say anything to him.
“Has Kaius ever told you that your heart is loud?”
I huff out a laugh. “He may have mentioned it.”
His mouth curves lazily at the corners, still staring at the sky. “Your feet carry you across the earth like ghosts, but you can’t hide from me.”
“I wasn’t trying to hide. I actually came to find you, to apologize for your hand,” I say, then sit down beside him. Close enough to have a quiet conversation, but not enough to feel his warmth.
He smirks and holds up his palm. “Good as new.” After a long moment of silence, he speaks again.
“There’s a legend,” he says softly, “That across the Endless Sea, in a world that the gods forgot about, there is a world untouched by magic. No priestesses. No curses. No demons. Human kings rule the land, and their subjects live simple lives and die quiet deaths.”
“Is that really so hard to believe?” I ask.
“Is it hard to believe there’s a corner of the world where the Priestesses haven’t spit their poison?” he retorts. It goes quiet again for a moment, and then he asks: “Did he really never mention me to you?”
I shake my head. “No. Never.”
Rowan smiles, but I can feel the pain in that smile in my own chest.
“Will you tell me what happened between you two?”
Rowan lets out a long sigh, as if wondering where to start.
“Kaius and I grew up together, when we were humans. The world was different then, because the demons had not been created yet. The Priestesses kept to themselves, but no one considered them to be spiteful or evil. Well, except–”
“Yekaterina.”
He nods. “I saw right through her. Kaius was no saint, but she changed him in all the wrong ways. She isolated him from me and his mother, got him to do her dirty work while she sat back and watched the town we lived in begin to hate him. When she changed him, he went into hiding for a few months, ashamed and angry. Lonely. I–”
He takes a deep breath.
“I asked him to change me to be like him, and thought I could help him. But Adelasia, I didn’t know what I was truly asking. I hated being a vampire, but I stayed by his side for three centuries for his sake. Eventually, we started finding pleasure in the same beds. First with others included, and then just the two of us.”
He gives me a side-eye, as if searching for judgement.
“I think we had known each other for so long that the mating bond knew it had to tether us. Looking back, I don’t think it was truly love, at least not for him. Just fate. And the more I fed, the more I hated what I was and what vampirism made me feel. The blood, the rage, the hunger. So I…”
He blinks as if hiding tears.
