Page 30 of An Heir to Blood and Power

Nicolai must have noticed that I’d stopped dead in my tracks, because he gave my hand a quick pulse of a gentle squeeze again. “The Omnia calls it a ‘kinetic chandelier.’ It’s a bit much, but John wanted a blowout party.”

The roiling sculpture stretched into a scintillating hot pink and green tornado, the bottom of the funnel whipping around before sucking itself into a thick orange spinning disk. It was hypnotizing and over the top and beyond comprehension. “Yeah, it looks like a blowout party.”

The chandelier’s enormous, aligned rings, thirty feet or more across, bounced in time to the pounding music, the bright white beams of its micro-spotlights lasering through the smoky air as it whirled, an otherworldly robot the size of a long school bus captured and suspended in the middle of the enormous space above the thrashing crowd below to crump to our music.

Taking my eyes off of it was hard, but when I managed to, the realization struck that every single one of the people on that private balcony was stunningly beautiful.

Everyone’s skin was unblemished and taut. Their hair, shiny and shaped in a recent style. They stood easily, without favoring a bad back or a trashed knee. They were healthy and strong in their bodies andtall.

Every single one of them had white, even teeth.

Their posture was easy but ballet-elevated, not floppy like toddlers.

No one was acting like a crazed jerk.

They were all so uniformly handsome and beautiful, sophisticated and mannered.

The effect was almostotherworldly.

Were these rich people or—I didn’t know—maybe,fae?

CHAPTER 9

friends of the tsar

LEXI

Nah, notfae.

LOL, the fair folk didn’t exist.

Hey, I’d read the books, the ones about pointy-eared smokeshows with enormouswingspans.

Ilikedthe books.

Heck, I’d started reading the kids’ books about Prydain and the black cauldron in seventh grade because the school library was small and it was one of the few complete series they’d had.

Fairies and fae wereobviouslyfiction.

But the world seemed weird all of a sudden, with all these tall, lithe, beautiful people surrounding me.

Their ears seemed okay, though.

Rounded on top, anyway.

Even though all the fae stories talked about glamours that changed a fae’s appearances.

I was sure it was fine.

But that softly padded, gray elevator that hummed with white noise had been a liminal space, a conduit between myworld of traffic snarls and broken teeth to Nicolai’s perfect realm.

If Nicolai actually was fae, this party or afterward would be the moment he revealed it to me.

Should I eat the canapés on the trays of the roving waitstaff? Should I drink the champagne?

Or would ingesting the food trap me in their world forever?

Or was there a pomegranate around here somewhere that I shouldabsolutelyavoid?