All That Glows

Twelve

It takes a miracle and a little bit of magic to escape the palace unnoticed. We walk down London’s streets, together but distinctly apart. My hands are tucked into my elbows, and Richard has his shoved into the pockets of his trousers. It took me a few minutes to decide where I should walk. In front of him? Behind? How close? I settle for two feet from his right side, farther from the steely cars that rip past the sidewalk, leaving behind the stench of peeling rubber and exhaust.

The afternoon is gray, overcast. The smell of almost rain swells through the air. Even so, Richard soon starts sweating in his dress shirt. He rolls up his carefully pressed sleeves and loosens his collar.

“I hate this bloody getup,” he mutters, and undoes the button I just fastened. “It makes me feel like a mannequin.”

“It used to be a lot worse,” I tell him. “Fur cloaks and chain mail. You’ve got it good.”

“I think I’d cut a rather dashing figure in chain mail, don’t you?” He laughs. It’s strange how quickly his mood has lightened, away from the palace. The storm clouds that dampened his spirits and lurked behind his eyes are gone. The weight of his father’s death is only a shadow.

“You’d be dashing no matter what you wore.”

“You think so?”

“Stop fishing for compliments. You know you’re sickeningly handsome.” I mean for these words to be teasing, but they betray me. Come out earnest.

“So you’re saying I make you sick?” Richard pulls a wry face and teases back. I don’t know what’s behind his verbal parry. Unlike most humans, he isn’t very easy to read. Even his aura is murky and muddled. It’s difficult to pick out his feelings from my interpretations of them.

“You flatter yourself.” I skirt the subject, like a mouse that’s decided it’s had enough cheese. “The machines do that well enough.”

We turn off of the street, into an abundance of trees and grass. All of the breath abandons my body in a single gust when I realize where we are. Without meaning to, I’ve followed Richard back here: Hyde Park.

“You’re okay though, aren’t you?” he asks.

“Yes, I’m not old enough to be seriously affected. For now.” I can’t help but shudder. Such talk only serves to remind me of the Old One. Of the threat that looms, far more heavy and devastating than a group of rain clouds.

“Does being here help?” He nods at the collage of trees, all bursting into the shades of early summer: mint, jade, emerald, olive, celadon.

So much green. It reminds me of the wilderness. Of the feelings of wholeness and health. It makes the constant nausea at the base of my throat all the more awful.

“As much as it can,” I tell him. “I haven’t thrown up since The Blind Tiger. I’m getting used to the city, I think.”

“That’s why I brought you here, you know. Last time. Figured it would be better than a pub.”

“Much.” All at once I see where this conversation is going. Just like our physical steps, crunching hard on beige gravel, getting closer and closer to that bench.

“Look, I just want to know.” He stops and scuffs the ground, calling up clouds of chalky dust. “Why did you stop?”

“Stop what?”

“You know . . . our kiss.”

I try to keep walking, but Richard stays anchored. Soon there’s a haze of gravel particles roiling through the distance between us. We’re up to our knees in it.

He goes on, trying his hardest to kill the silence I’ve settled into: “There was something there. I know you felt it too. Why did you stop?”

There’s an ache. An emptiness inside me I didn’t really know about until now. Has it always been here, waiting for this one moment to show me how much I° don’t have? My mouth falls open, hoping to let it out.

But all that escapes me is more wordlessness.

Richard watches, relentless. “You’re different from all the other girls. . . .”

“That’s because I’m not a girl!” The words explode out of me like some triggered land mine. Hot and piercing. They rain on the prince like shrapnel. “I’m your Frithemaeg, Richard! My job is to protect you . . . nothing else!”

“But you felt it, didn’t you?” He doesn’t give up. Doesn’t flinch. “Just tell me you felt it too!”

Those eyes, I feel them on me, staring through darkened lashes. And I’m sure he knows the truth, sees it rising in the blood just under my skin.

Stupid human face. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

“It doesn’t matter what I felt,” I say.

Richard looks on the verge of a smile, ready to chase the matter with the complete dedication of a hound pursuing a fox. But his mouth stays straight, set. “Damn.”

He’s not talking to me. I know this because his gaze has shifted, its arrows no longer cracking my breastbone. “What?”

The prince nods over my shoulder and I immediately understand. Just a few yards away, lurking by a wildly untrimmed hedge, are men with cameras. Their shutters click with bursts as rapid as machine-gun fire. I’d been so caught up in the heat of the moment, the tangle of emotions cocooning me in, that I hadn’t felt them coming.

Richard stiffens. “They can’t see you, can they?”

I check my veiling spells. They’re altered so only Richard knows my presence. All the camera lenses see is the prince, walking through the trees, talking to himself.

“I’ll take care of it.” I face the paparazzi, trying to work out the spells I’ll need to erase the memories in their minds and on their cameras.

Before I can weave the spells, every single photographer stands straight, turns and jogs away.

“Nice work,” Richard says. “Wish that would happen every time.”

“I—I didn’t do that—” The air thrums with magic: a banishing cast that isn’t my own.

I don’t fully sense the other immortal’s presence until it’s too late. The bushes at Richard’s side shudder, and a long arm, pale as larvae, bursts through the leaves. A knife-edged cry leaves the prince’s throat as the attacker drags him back into the towering hedge.

I waste no time. A wordless spell rips through my arm into the bushes. There’s a shudder and a high, grating wail. The hand retreats into the flaming leaves. Richard stumbles forward, eyes wide.

The unearthly keen stops; the only sounds are the light snaps and hisses from the fire. The bush is a torch, blazing, its leaves curling into tiny black scrolls.

A Green Woman bursts out, gold-strung hair radiant with a halo of my fire. She lunges, a terrifying beauty wreathed in flame, fingers gnarled and teeth bared.

The rush of magic is magnificent when we collide. The Green Woman’s power, so foreign, yet familiar at the same time, jolts through my bones. It buzzes between my joints and behind my teeth, leaving a slight burning taste on my tongue.

“Blodes geweald!” I manage to shout just before her hands find my throat.

The soul feeder’s grip is strong, trapping air inside my windpipe—stopping any spells from being spoken. The white burn of my own magic wraps around my neck, eating away at my skin. My failing arms rise to claw her face, only to be singed by the flames there. The Green Woman doesn’t seem affected by the fire that swallows her. There’s a shield between her and my spells—its magic tastes different from the Green Woman’s. It’s far older and richer, like a honey-gold mead poured over vinegar. It reams through my senses, brimming power and shock: the protection of the Old One.

A sharp kick loosens my opponent’s grip, if only for the slightest second, and I scream a well-chosen word: “Adwæsce!”

The flames wither into nothing. My neck no longer feels like pins and needles are being jammed through my veins. I twist, thrash, flail. Try to get away from the Green Woman before she can speak again. Her face is clear now, unmarred by flames, her lips managing a grim smile.

“I see you did not take our warning, sister. I’m sorry!” As the words leave her lips, the mirage of supple flesh melts away. Beauty becomes a beast, peels back into vein-riddled, charred parchment skin. Teeth like a shark. Bared and ready to tear.

I feel the spell building up inside her. It’s powerful—not meant to hinder or disable, but extinguish. She means to end me.

My mind scrambles to find an effective defensive spell. The words, treacherously hidden within the many layers of my memory, don’t come. I’m going to die, and Richard with me.

Shouting, growling fury fills my fading ears. There’s a flash of charcoal suit and human skin; the Green Woman’s withered hands are wrenched from my throat. I cough, sit up. The Green Woman lays only an arm’s length away, paralyzed by shock and the fact that a lanky-limbed man is on top of her. Richard has her pinned to the ground, his face a war mask. The prince just saved our lives.

“Hold her throat!” I scream at him, my voice hoarse under bruising skin. “Don’t let her speak!”

He responds quickly, his long fingers wrap harsh around the creature’s strung, knotty neck. She’s effectively gagged.

I pick myself up off the ground, wasting no time with sore joints as I move over the helpless predator. A spell as horrible as the one locked up inside her cannot be released without a word, so it stays, corroding her soul instead of mine.

“You have violated the treaty of Camelot,” I rasp. “You’ve committed treason against Queen Mab and the rest of our kind. For this, the consequence is death.”

I bend down and study the shield clinging to her gray skin. It’s older and more powerful than I first realized. I don’t know if my magic alone can shatter it.

“What do I do?” Richard yells. His knuckles are tight, white as a winter moor.

“Just don’t let go,” I tell him, my mind scrambling for the right spell.

Slowly but surely, it comes to me. Word by word, the magic builds inside my body, taking the form of something dangerous and unwieldy. If I don’t handle it right, Richard could end up dead.

“Ábrece innan. Áfeorse!” All of my energies pour out, raging against the shield.

For a terrible moment, the Old One’s magic seems to hold. Then cracks, nearly invisible, race across the Green Woman’s skin, splitting off one another like a quickly spun web.

“Læte!” I shriek the final word.

The huntress’s eyes meet mine, solidly unrepentant. I watch, my jaw set as the body in front of me starts to dissolve. It begins at the edges, pieces of her disappearing like sand sucked through an hourglass. Richard’s gasp of horror reminds me that he’s still straddling the dying creature. I put my hand out.

“Stay there. Don’t let go of her throat.”

He nods dumbly. His hands stay clenched until there’s no longer any neck to choke. The Green Woman is gone. I stand and stare at the smoking ground, where her body lay seconds before.

Richard stands slowly, wiping loose crumbles of dirt and leaves from his irreversibly stained trousers. “What the hell was that?”

I ignore his question as I feel around the park. It seems the Green Woman was alone in this attempt. But her death is fresh in the air; it won’t be long before other soul feeders arrive to investigate. There’s only one safe place Richard and I can go. The place we never should have left.

“We’ve got to get back to Buckingham. Now.”

But he doesn’t move. “Embers, what just happened?”

“I’ll tell you everything when we’re back on the palace grounds. I promise.” I look at his hand. It’s trembling, fingertips blurry with movement. I don’t reach out for it.

Richard’s mother is waiting for him. Her face the definition of anger—colorless and winched tight, ready to snap—as she watches him stumble down the hall. Clods of earth are still wedged in the tread of his oxfords, leaving a distinct bread-crumb trail of dirt as he follows me. Although I know she can’t see me, the queen’s glare is enough to send chills down my spine and give me pause. Richard keeps walking. Past me, past the lifeless, stone busts of his ancestors, past his mother.

“Where have you been?” she sputters once she realizes he isn’t going to stop. “What happened to your clothes?”

He keeps walking.

“I asked you a question, Richard!” His mother marches after him, heels stamping over her son’s filthy tracks. “You just stood up the prime minister and a room full of journalists! At least have the decency to answer me.”

Richard reaches the door to his private apartments, rooms that were once his father’s. It’s here he pauses and looks his mother in the eye. “Not now, Mum.”

She stares at him, her wiry lips slack into a perfect, speechless O.

I slip, fluid through the door as soon as Richard opens it. Every single corner of the room is scoured clean by my magic. No soul feeders. I know now, after our hasty walk back through the gathering rain clouds, that this was my fault. Even though I knew there were assassins on the loose, I’d let myself get caught up in Richard, in these . . . feelings I can’t seem to shake. I ignored my duties, skipped protocol. Richard almost ended up dead for it.

More angry words fly behind the door, all spark and heavy black smoke, before Richard finally enters and shuts it behind him. His back leans hard against the thick wood.

“My father didn’t die of a stroke, did he?”

Rain is falling, beating against the window beside me. The sound should be soothing. Instead all I can feel is the blade of the Green Woman’s magic, still slicing and paring my skin.

“No. He was assassinated. It seems that whoever, whatever killed King Edward is trying to kill you too.”

Richard’s lids close.

“I’m sorry. I should have told you before. But you had so much going on with your father’s death. I didn’t know if you’d be able to handle it.” The excuse seems flimsy now, worthless.

“I’m not a child.” The edge of his jaw bulges, the beginnings of anger knotting his muscles together.

“I never said you were.”

“I’m stronger than you think I am.”

I think of the way he risked his life, a mess of flesh and screams as he overpowered the Green Woman, pulling her off of me. How, again, he’s the one protecting me. “I know.”

This seems to take the fight out of Richard’s voice. “What was that thing?”

“A Green Woman. They look like beautiful, green-clad blondes to bait men. It’s not until they go in for the kill that you see what they really look like. . . .”

“If my blood is so helpful, then why was the Green Woman trying to kill me?”

I pause. The question is an obvious one, but it isn’t so easy to answer. To get into the mind of the Green Woman and the Old One who sent her is a challenge even for me. The answer lies in the past.

“When royal blood is spilled by an immortal’s hand, the blood magic doesn’t just fade. It transfers somehow. The attacker grows stronger from that death. We don’t know exactly how it works—such an outright attack on the crown has never happened before. Arthur and Merlin warned us something like this might happen. We’d begun to think it never would. . . . There’d never be a need for an immortal to kill the royals. Someone’s just gotten desperate. Or greedy. They’re trying to kill you to take the blood magic all for themselves. They’ll go on down the line until they have enough power to accomplish their goal. Whatever it is.”

Something the Green Woman said during the flurry of her attack hasn’t left. It’s been looping through my thoughts, spiraling into me ever since I first heard it: our warning. Our warning. She knew what the Banshee told me under the vaults of Westminster.

This shows me the power of the Old One’s influence. She’s taken two very different castes of spirits: the Green Women and Banshees, who despise each other, and pieced them into allies.

She’s united the soul feeders. It’s not just Richard’s blood she wants, but all of mortalkind. She wants to take the island back as her own, and now she has the numbers to do it.

“What about Anabelle and Mum? Are they in danger too?”

“Everyone in your family who has royal blood in their veins is in danger. Although not quite as much as you. Blood magic is strongest in the crown’s direct successor. That’s why the Green Woman was going after you instead of the regent,” I explain. “But Anabelle and the other royals have Fae guarding them as well.”

Richard opens his eyes and walks around the plush velvet furniture of the ornate sitting room. He stares through the window, at the rain that’s started slapping against glass.

“There are things you can do to make my job easier. The same goes for the rest of your family.”

Richard stops pacing. “Like what?”

“Right now the city is our best defense. Whatever’s after you appears to be quite an old spirit—she won’t stand to come anywhere near London. That’s why she’s been sending assassins to do the job for her. Banshee and Green Women I can handle. An Old One is a different story. It would be best if you stayed within London’s borders.”

There is an unpleasant turning in my gut, as if to remind me of the city’s true feelings for my kind. What it actually means for me to stay.

“Stay in London? For how long?”

“As long as it takes.” I grit my teeth, waiting for the worst of the pain to pass.

The prince shakes his head. Weariness, just a flash of it, crosses his face. “It’s not possible! Once I accede the throne, they’ll expect me to tour—to go overseas.”

“Well, let’s just do it for as long as we can. Until we figure out a better way to guard you outside of the city. Same goes for your sister,” I add.

“And what am I supposed to tell Anabelle?”

“Tell her anything you’d like. Lie. Just don’t let her leave.”

I try to distract myself from the nausea by examining several small, recently acquired burn holes in the top layer of my skirts. The bright teal silk is peppered with charred spots. Ruined. I frown. The skirt, snatched from a duchess’s closet two hundred years ago, was one of my favorites.

“Do you think there will be any more attacks?”

“Definitely.” I nod. “Someone powerful wants you dead. I don’t think the death of a single assassin will deter them.”

Richard sighs. The sound deflates him. “I need some tea.”

I watch as he picks up the phone and rings Lawton. He’s calmed down considerably since we first entered the room. Color has returned to his face, and his voice is steady as he requests the hot tea. How had I thought he wouldn’t be able to handle this?

“What made you attack the Green Woman?” I ask when he sets the phone back.

“What do you mean?” He collapses on the end of an embroidered love seat.

“I’ve never seen any man attack an immortal head-on like that. You had no chance against her. Why did you do it?”

“I don’t know. I just did. You needed help, so I came. There wasn’t too much time to think.” He pauses. “Why do you ask?”

“It—it’s happened before. You coming to my rescue.”

Richard knows what I mean in an instant. “Then that man in the tabloids was telling the truth? You were there when I punched him? You erased my memory?”

“Yes. He was harassing me.” I can tell by the look on his face where his thoughts are jumping. Back to that morning with Edward. I want to kick myself for dredging up the painful moment, for forcing him to dwell on that one scene he’s worked so hard to move past.

“At least the punch was worth something then.” But his wavering expression tells me it doesn’t change anything his father said. It doesn’t make things better.

A sharp tap from the other side of the door breaks apart any words I’m about to say. Richard looks warily at the door, as if he expects a pack of hellhounds to come barreling through it at any moment. Considering that his mother was the last person in the corridor, the possibility isn’t all that remote.

But it’s only Lawton with the tray of tea. The young assistant leaves as quickly as he comes, pausing only to pour a bit of the coppery liquid into the china cup.

“It’s been hard, since Dad . . .” he falters. “I mean, just a few weeks ago I was at Eton and my biggest worry was whether or not the prefects would find my stash of booze. Now it seems as if everybody wants something from me. And I have nothing left to give. I don’t know if I even had anything in the first place.”

I can taste his sorrow; it pollutes the air around him.

“Tell me,” he goes on after a moment of silence, “do you ever think about death?”

“What about it?” My question is cautious. This is a holy, sacred subject we’re exploring. Especially in this company.

“I mean, do you ever think of what’s on the other side? What’s beyond it?”

“Not very often,” I admit. Only now in the past week, has death been so present in my thoughts.

“I guess you don’t have to. Must be nice, living forever,” Richard says.

I say nothing.

“Sometimes I wonder if he’s watching me. Dad, I mean.” The prince swallows. The teacup in his hand rattles, spitting amber drops on his suit. “I wonder if he likes what he sees.”

“He might’ve had a few words about what happened today. . . .” I could have said something false, comforting. But I know that no matter what, Richard will stay bound to his father’s ghost. Best to just spill out the truth, quick and cutting. Hope it leaves its mark.

Richard groans. “I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to live that one down. I’m sure the papers tomorrow are going to be fabulous. It’s just—I dunno. I couldn’t make myself do it. Seems silly now, doesn’t it? That I should be afraid of something I was raised to do?”

“Every mortal has that problem. I believe you call it ‘stage fright,’” I tell him. “What perplexes me is that you’re not more worried that there’s an ancient Fae out for your blood.”

“I don’t think there’s room for any more fear. And, I have you.”

I stare at the empty space next to Richard. I want, very much, to go sit with him.

My body—bones, tendons, and all—feels frail. Distinctly human. I’m sick of standing, and the prince’s love seat is the closest piece of furniture. All it would take is three steps. Three steps and I could be next to him.

No. The ambush in the park happened because I got caught up in Richard. If I knew what was best for me, for him, I’d stay far, far away.

I want to tell him he should be scared. That he should be terrified. What he doesn’t know, doesn’t realize, is that he was the one who saved us.

Without him, I would be nothing now. Unraveled into ether and air.