All That Glows, Page 2

  “Oh, they’ll come,” Breena says. “It’s Friday night. They’re hungry.”

  “Then it’s a good thing you’re here,” I tell her. It’s assuring to have Breena’s magic, about a century more seasoned than mine, as a backup.

  “Yep.” Her brilliant red lips curve into a smile as she glances over the dance floor. “How’s Richard doing?”

  I follow her stare. The prince is stumbling off to a table, half dragged by an eager, skimpy brunette. “He’s certainly the life of the party.”

  The hair on the back of my neck suddenly bristles. Another immortal is here. Breena feels it too.

  “See anything?” I ask Breena, unwilling to look away from Richard.

  “Two of them,” she says. “Front entrance.”

  For just one second I break eye contact to view the new threat. Two women, tall, blonde, and breathtaking, break through the crowd. Men and women, everyone they pass, stare at their lithe, supple bodies. More than a few mouths drop open.

  The one in the pale green dress scouts the room for suitable prey. I can tell by the way her dark eyes widen that she’s caught Richard’s aura. She starts walking; each stride brings her closer to the prince.

  “Move,” I grunt, and push Breena out of the booth. My head spins, at the mercy of the club’s stacked subwoofers. I push past the pain, the dizziness. There’s no time for it.

  The Green Woman has eyes only for her victim. She doesn’t notice as I slip through the crowd and stop directly in her path. It isn’t until we’re inches apart that she suddenly registers my aura. She stops, her beautiful face wrinkles with disappointment.

  “Back off,” I warn in my most threatening tone. My fists are clenched. It’s doubtful she’ll try anything in a room full of mortals. Yet sometimes, if a Green Woman is desperate enough . . .

  Her pale pink lips protrude. “Just a taste . . . I promise I won’t kill him.”

  My eyes narrow. “There are plenty of other men here. Go seduce one of them.”

  When the Green Woman realizes her opportunity at the prince is lost, she bares her teeth. They’re flawlessly white and sharp. Fury clouds her eyes and I get a glimpse of her true form: the dead, gray thing that lurks behind such saccharine beauty. A shudder creeps down my spine, but my face doesn’t flinch. I refuse to show fear.

  She saunters off to resume her scouting. A rain shower of relief breaks over me—for a moment the world becomes steady again. The feeling is short-lived, however, when I turn to find that the prince is gone.

  Curses form under my breath. I reach out and search for him with my mind. His aura is strong—he’s still in the club. Pins and needles of worry bite into every surface of my body when I realize who else is missing: the other Green Woman.

  “Bree!” My friend is closer than I expect. Just a few steps behind me. There’s a wildness in her face. She’s ready to fight. “Did you see where Richard went?”

  “He ran off to the bathroom.” The sequins of her dress slink and glow like a wet serpent as she turns, those wintery eyes tearing the room apart. “Go! I’ll take care of the other one.”

  I run, faster than I should through a crowd of mortals, in the direction of the bathrooms. Two men in black suits—the prince’s human security—stand outside the men’s room. The Green Woman must have spelled them to stay away. I mutter a short spell and ghost past them, unseen.

  The restroom is empty, with one obvious exception. A pair of forest-green stilettos peeks out from the bottom of the final stall. My heart flutters at the sight. I practically fly the distance and wrench the door open.

  The prince leans against the side of the stall, head wreathed in obscene graffiti and eyes half closed with the weight of his evening drinks. The second Green Woman lurks close; her pale hair spills across his chest as she leans in. Her head jerks around when the door opens, eyes lit dark with rage. When she sees me, all the beauty of her flesh melts away. Her pink skin withers to a sickly greenish gray, like some corpse frozen in the depths of a peat bog. The teeth beneath her mottled lips grow ragged, meant for tearing tendon from bone. She hisses and grips her prey with long, ratty fingernails.

  Although I’ve fought Green Women before, this one’s ghoulish grin is unnerving. I have to look at Richard and see the smooth, unblemished skin of his throat to remember why I’m here.

  I launch myself between her and the prince. At the same moment she lunges, grungy teeth aimed for Richard’s throat. I catch the bite with my shoulder, gasping with shock as the pain lances my bone. The force of my body throws the prince onto the toilet, far from the Green Woman’s reach. He blinks slowly; his jaw grows slack at what he sees.

  The Green Woman shrieks with frustration as she pulls away from me. Dark blood coats her teeth and stains her lips. Her feral eyes wheel to where the prince is slouched over the toilet. There’s intense, desperate hunger behind her gaze. She’ll do anything to have him.

  “He’s under Queen Mab’s protection,” I tell her, once more positioning myself between the pair.

  “And what are you going to do to stop me, little woodling?” the Green Woman rasps. Her eyes focus past my wounded shoulder.

  I ignore her name-calling and invoke the old magic: “Blodes geweald.”

  The familiar rush of power surges through my veins, seizes my body till I feel only barely in control. Every piece of me buzzes with the pure energy of it. The Green Woman jumps forward again and I hold out my hands. When the edges of my fingers brush her dead skin, a massive shock rattles through me. The world grows white with savage magic. It throws the Green Woman back with such force that the stall door crumples around her body. I watch the wreckage. Nothing moves. Small wisps of smoke rise from the Green Woman’s body, but I know she’s not dead. It takes more than a little flash of light to unmake them.

  “Stay away from the prince,” I warn the crisp, blackened body, “or it’ll be worse next time.”

  There’s a long, low hiss and the room fills with black smoke. She’s gone.

  A sharp cough draws my attention back into the stall. The prince is trying to stand, bracing himself with unsteady hands.

  “Who—who are you? W-what the hell just happened?” The alcohol has messed with his balance. He slips and falls back against the toilet.

  I sigh and walk through the clearing smoke to where the door lies. The Green Woman’s outline is clear in the wrinkled metal. At my touch it smoothes back to its original casting. I direct the door back through the air to the frame, where it comes to rest on its hinges.

  “I’m Emrys, your Frithemaeg. Your Faery guardian,” I say, and turn to face him again.

  He stares at me, his mouth gaping. When I kneel down close, he stays perfectly still. Our eyes meet, this time for real. My body hums with the same strange current that caught me on my first sight of him. Half of me expects it. I push past the feeling, forcing myself to focus on erasing Richard’s memory.

  “Bloody hell!” the prince exclaims, and breaks our eye connection to stare at his hands. They’re soft, unworked. Only the fingertips are calloused, relics of practiced guitar chords. “Did you feel that?”

  I fall still, uncertain of what to do next. Richard felt it too? What was it? I check the air for traces of a spell, but there’s none outside of the banishing magic I used on the Green Woman.

  The squeal of the restroom door breaks my concentration. Another mortal is here, in the room. I should get rid of him before he witnesses any magic. He’ll have less of a headache if I use a banishment spell instead of a memory wipe.

  This man is even drunker than the prince. That much is obvious as he swaggers across the dark tile floor. His eyes are oddly detached as they fall on me, on my body. A sick grin plasters his face.

  “Well, well. What do we have here?” He lurches forward. The movement highlights just how arched and beaky his nose is. Like some bird of prey. “A pretty girl, all by herself in the loo. That’s l-lucky.”

  Disgust overwhelms me. If I were mortal, truly powerles
s, there’s no telling what this man might do to me. He moves forward with awkward, wide steps—like a puppet being worked by a five-year-old. He’s less than an arm’s length away when he reaches out, his fingers twitching and eager.

  The magic isn’t even on my lips when the man falls to the ground. I blink. Richard is by my side, standing over the howling drunk as he writhes on the floor clutching his face and his awful, running nose.

  “Don’t touch her.” His words are deep, forceful. The slur of his drinks has vanished in the adrenaline of the moment.

  Hands fall from the drunk’s face, revealing a nasty, crimson split above his lip. It melds perfectly with the blood from his nostrils. He snarls and tries to get up again. Tries to grab for me.

  Richard’s fist descends on its target with sobering precision. This time the man doesn’t move. He’s a loose marionette, all angles, out cold on the tile.

  “Are you okay?” Richard asks as he shakes out his fist, wincing.

  The prince came to my rescue. He protected me. This is so shocking, so unprecedented, that I can’t think of anything to say.

  I can’t let him remember what happened.

  “Forgiete.” I face him, murmur my enchantment in the old tongue.

  The magic is gentler this time. His face grows blank as the spell takes him, wiping away the past few minutes. I guide him toward the door before his senses clear up enough to see his passed-out victim. Dazed and disoriented, Richard wanders through the crowd back to the bar top.

  Breena is there, lounging on a bar stool. I grab the empty seat next to her and try to ignore the sickness that’s once again worming its way through my stomach.

  “The other one?” I search the dance floor for a glimpse of the pale green dress.

  “She’s gone,” Breena assures me. “Nice work in there. I see you haven’t lost your touch. Need another sparkling water?”

  I’m about to answer when there’s a commotion at the other end of the bar, where Richard is sitting. I look down to find him pointing at me. For a moment, I doubt my spell’s effectiveness.

  “Get that pretty redhead a drink on me!” he shouts at the bartender, and slings his arm over an ecstatic, big-breasted blonde.

  I start to breathe again. He’s forgotten all about the Green Woman. And that moment between us. Whatever it was.

  Three

  The prince’s Monday morning starts early. An anxious rap on his bedroom door from one of the butlers wakes him only an hour after sunrise.

  “Your Highness?” the staff calls through the crack in the door. “Your father’s here. He wishes to speak with you in the dining room.”

  Richard’s curses get caught up in the goose down of his pillow. To my amazement, he manages to twist out of bed and change into a freshly pressed shirt. The only evidence of his eventful weekend are fly-aways in his tawny hair and swollen knuckles. My own head still swims, hungover from the electrical buzz of subwoofers.

  “Yes, thank you. I’ll be there in a moment,” Richard says to the door. He’s thrown on his royal demeanor like a well-worn dinner jacket.

  His father is in the dining room, just as the butler promised. Even surrounded by gold mirrors and turquoise walls, the king manages to stand out. He sits at the head of the table, owning the seven chair lengths of mahogany stretched in front of him. There’s no food, only a steaming cup by his interlaced hands. I glance over at the king’s guardian. She looks disinterested in Prince Richard’s arrival and barely acknowledges mine with a nod. I have a feeling she’s witnessed this scene before.

  King Edward in his anger is an intimidating sight. The dead weight of his stare disrobes me, the invisible witness. Richard, however, seems unaffected. He stands at the side of the table with his arms behind his back and his jaw set.

  Slowly, deliberately, King Edward spreads a crumpled magazine out on the polished wood. The front-page photograph reveals Richard, drink in hand, dancing. PRINCE RICHARD UNCENSORED: THE ROYAL’S TRUE COLORS looms above it in bold, blocky letters.

  “‘Prince Richard punched me in the face without provocation,’ one insider reports. His face is deeply bruised from the encounter with the underage royal’s fist. ‘He knocked me out cold in the restroom.’”

  Partway through the reading, Richard tucks his hands behind his back, the healthy one covering its damaged partner. I curse myself for not thinking to wipe my attacker’s memory.

  King Edward looks up. “Did you attack this man?”

  Richard barely glances down at the page. His face remains stiff, unreadable.

  “Did you attack him?” his father asks again. There’s a dangerous edge to his voice.

  “I—I don’t remember,” the prince says finally. He’s not looking at his father or the magazine. His eyes dance around a nearby vase of flowers: all purple, green, and white, popping beneath the paradise-blue walls. Some of the petals hold crystal-domed dewdrops, fresh from the florist.

  For a moment his father is silent. “You don’t remember?”

  Almost imperceptibly Richard gives a small flinch.

  “You’re making a fool of yourself, a fool of the crown!” The king’s fist thunders down. His teacup of Earl Grey tips and bleeds its contents across the table. “You aren’t even a week out of Eton and you’re already getting so bloody plastered you can’t remember if you attacked this man or not!”

  The prince is a statue, still taking in every minute detail of those flowers.

  “You’re a strong spirit—I know that, Richard. Stop wasting what you have and get your arse in gear. How are you ever going to amount to anything if all you do is drink and punch people in the face?” The king’s lip curls with disgust. “Some people think the monarchy is a relic of the past—that it should be done away with. But the nation still needs us, Richard. They need an heir they can depend on. Someone they can relate to. When I was your age, I was planning to travel the world for my gap year—to get an idea of what’s out there. To culture myself! And you? You haven’t even planned one! I’ll go to hell and back before I let you spend twelve months pissing in the corner of some pub.”

  King Edward’s streamlined face, so much like his son’s, flushes from pink to crimson with the effort of his speech. The rage in his aura builds with the power of an oncoming wave. The room grows hot with it.

  “Do you have anything to say?” He relents, once the breath wheezes out of him. “Anything at all.”

  Without a word, Richard turns and walks out the door. I have no choice but to follow, leaving the king to his crumpled magazine and spilled cup of morning tea.

  It isn’t until Richard is far from his father that the emotions begin to bubble up, a scalding boil. He walks quickly, furiously, like a sentinel ordered to march double-time. He wanders the same corridors twice, making anxious loops past the paintings of long-dead men suspended along Kensington Palace’s grand hallways. By his third circuit, he escapes to the gardens. It’s here beside an orangey sea of marigolds that he kneels down.

  “I’m sorry.” I sit next to the prince. “I should’ve erased his memory too.”

  The words don’t make me feel any better. They can’t take back the red of his father’s rage or those sharp, flinty words.

  The prince straightens; air, crackling and static, fills his lungs. Bright pink lines his eyes. Part of me wilts at the sight.

  Richard’s head turns slowly, clearly in my direction. For a moment, I forget he cannot see.

  “You sense me, don’t you?” My whisper grows even quieter as I double-check the veiling spell. It’s as strong as it’s always been, keeping our worlds an unknowable distance apart.

  He shifts and I start, realizing exactly how close I’d sat next to him. Closer than a watching Fae should.

  The crunching of gravel causes both of us to look up. It’s Princess Anabelle, Richard’s younger sister. Her straw-colored curls, round and soft like a china doll’s, almost fall apart from the briskness of her march. The rest of her is just as preened. Penciled eyes a
nd lips. A dash of powder to bring life to her cheeks. At sixteen, the princess looks as pieced together as the portraits of her forebears.

  Helene trails her at an acceptable distance. The distance a Fae should keep from her royal. I swallow, trying to ignore the guilt that’s joined the rumblings of my still-tender insides.

  “Hey.” Anabelle kneels beside her brother, still managing to look all grace in her heels and pencil skirt. “Are you okay?”

  Richard clears his throat. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine.”

  But his sister presses. “I heard the yelling. What happened?”

  The prince, so rigid in the face of his father’s fury, breaks beneath her question. “I don’t know. That’s the problem.”

  “Another blackout?” A frown lurks on the edge of Anabelle’s pearly-rose lips, but she has enough control to hide it.

  “I didn’t drink that much. I swear . . .” Richard sighs. “Some guy told the tabloids I attacked him.”

  “And you believed it? Richard, it’s a bloody tabloid!” The princess pats her brother’s back and I notice even her nails are white-tipped and perfect. “I’m sure nothing happened.”

  “I woke up with this.” Richard holds out his hand, so swollen I can no longer make out the bony ridges and valleys of his knuckles.

  A look close to admiration crosses his sister’s face as she inspects the injury. “Well, you must have had one hell of a good reason to hit him.”

  The prince laughs. There’s no humor in the sound. “I’m a mess, aren’t I, Belle?”

  Anabelle places his injured hand back on his knee. “We all are. You just have a special knack for showing it.”

  “It’s not like you could do anything wrong. Not in Dad’s eyes anyway. You could run naked through the streets and he’d still think you were blooming perfect.”

  “Probably an exaggeration,” his sister points out. “You know, the only reason he’s so hard on you is because he loves you. He’s worried about you.

  “Dad does have a point though.” The princess’s voice plummets into a whisper, even though everything around them—the paths, the flower beds—is empty. “People are watching us, Richard. You and me. We’re a symbol of something, whether we want to be or not. Sooner or later you’re going to have to start living up to that.”