The fires glimmered around me, burning out and plunging us into total darkness, blanketing the world with the nothingness that claimed me.
He stared down at me intently, something searching in his gaze as he raised a hand to my cheek. The stars glimmered once more, casting their light down on Black Water as smoke rose to the sky from the houses where the fires had blazed.
The flames were gone, extinguished as if they’d winked into thin air.
Caldris’s confused stare held mine, the first sign that he was just as baffled as I was by me and what I’d become for a few moments. “What are you, Little One?”
13
CALDRIS
Estrella leaned back in the bathtub, her head hanging over the edge of the metal basin as steam rose from the hot water. The survivors of Black Water had been all too willing to give her the hot water for a bath after she’d extinguished the flames threatening to consume their homes. They’d given a hut for us to share, as well, while the other Fae Marked took another.
Only a few homes had been destroyed by the flames, the rest remaining untouched where they curved along the bridge-forged path of the village. The stilt-based homes surrounded the ancient, gnarled trees that had been grown by the Fae centuries prior, before their trunks grew twisted in the absence of the magic that helped them thrive.
Her eyes were closed, her lashes fluttering against her cheeks as she settled into the warmth of the water. In the moments when I’d touched her immediately following the wave of darkness she pulled from the sky, she’d been cold to the touch, like plunging my hands into the frozen falls.
The heat of the water finally returned some of the color to her bronze skin, bringing her lips back to the pinkish hue that was so much more natural than the blue that had tinged them.
A knock came on the door of the hut we shared, drawing me to step outside and leave Estrella in peace. In the wake of whatever had happened to her, she didn’t care in the slightest about her nudity in front of me, as if all sense of concern for such things was suddenly irrelevant.
Holt peered into the room, heaving a relieved sigh when he saw Estrella’s head hanging over the tub. He couldn’t see her body from this angle, but I still swung the door closed with a jarring thud nonetheless.
“What the fuck was that?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest. He seemed unsettled, as if whatever he’d experienced from the distance across Black Water had been enough to shake him to his core.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, glancing back toward the hut.
“Her anger took the flames out of the air. It extinguished the stars in the sky without so much as a conscious thought. She cannot be human,” he said, glaring back at me as if I was in denial.
But he hadn’t seen the stars glimmering in her eyes, the galaxy shimmering in the depths of her dark stare. With pinpricks of purple and golden light, an eternity stretching out before me and threatening to suck me in.
There was nothing human in that gaze.
“She has to be human. How else did she end up on this side of the Veil?” I asked, not daring to allow my thoughts to stray to the one explanation.
To the one Fae I knew of who had come across the boundary just before the Veil was formed.
“Maybe you need to consider that your mate and the female you’re looking for are one and the same,” Holt said, staring at the door to the hut as I forced myself to meet his gaze. “It would explain her extreme reaction to iron. She reacts as a Fae would, Cal.”
“She isn’t Fae,” I said, feeling my glare harden on him. “You will speak to no one of this. Do you understand me?”
“Of course I won’t,” Holt said with a huff, but the nervousness in his gaze did nothing to reassure me. “But all of the riders here felt it. All of the humans who witnessed it know that something happened, even if they aren’t aware of how significant it was.”
“I’ll deal with the humans. Make sure your riders know that I will cut out the tongues of any who even think to speak of what happened here. Did any of the Fae Marked of Black Water survive?”
Holt shook his head, a silent answer for the horrifying reality. I’d lost count of the bodies that had been run through, impaled on the claws surrounding their island, or drowned in the black water they called home. “You can’t just will this away. If she is what we suspect she is…that kind of power, Caldris.” He sighed, shaking his head in disbelief. “Think of what the two of you could do once she accepts the bond.”
“If she accepts the bond,” I said, clenching my jaw. Estrella still wasn’t any closer to accepting me as her mate than she’d been when we were on the run, and she’d feared the Fae chasing her more than anything. If she didn’t accept it, and she turned out to be…
Gods.
“She has to accept it. Now more than ever. Power like that could rival Mab herself! Mab won’t let her exist as a neutral party. If you cannot get her interests aligned with yours, then Mab will do whatever it takes to worm her way beneath Estrella’s skin and convince her that her path is right,” Holt said, hanging his head forward. “I know you care greatly for her. I know you love her, but she is not just a person if this is true. She is a weapon. You must make sure you are the one to wield her.”
“She’s my mate,” I said, my brow furrowing as I glared back at the man who’d been my best friend for as long as I could remember.
“I’ve been around longer than you can even imagine,” he said, pulling his shoulders back as if he needed to remind me that, while I might be a God, I was a rare second-generation God. Countless Sidhe had existed before I’d been born—including Holt. “I don’t think your mate bond has as much importance as you think it does. Not when we’re speaking of matters that could change the very fabric of the world.”
He shook his head, taking a step back and disappearing into the night without another word. Even hours after Estrella’s show of power, after riders of the Wild Hunt had taken the bodies to land for a proper burial, the night still seemed darker than it had before.
As if she couldn’t quite release her grasp on the eternal darkness clutched in her fingertips.
I stared up at the night sky, at the swirls of stars and at the mists between the eternal, burning galaxies, and at the way they shimmered together, as if everything was connected.
Swallowing and glancing back to the hut behind me, I pushed on the handle and swung the door open. My star hadn’t moved, her head tipped back in relaxation and her fingers clenching the edge of the metal basin. From her middle knuckles down to the tips, her fingers were tinted black, as if she’d dipped them into paint.
But no paint shimmered with the glimmer of the stars above.
“Are you going to continue to stare at me? Or are you going to get into the fucking bath already?” she asked, lifting her head. Her neck cracked as she turned her face to me without opening her eyes. As if she sensed exactly where I stood, sinking into the mate bond farther than she’d ever allowed.
She opened her eyes, her long black lashes fluttering open to reveal eyes that still reflected the midnight sky set within her bronze face. I couldn’t say that I didn’t miss the green of her gaze when she tilted her head to the side and raised an eyebrow at me impassively, but I also couldn’t say that her starry-eyed gaze didn’t feel right.