Page 30 of Bound to the Shadow Queen (Frostbound Court #2)
Twenty-Eight
Everly
It happened again.
The ominous, scraping sensation, like claws raking along the shadows of my soul. I gasped, and my water glass slipped from my fingers, shattering on the ground at my feet.
An echo of Draven’s mana pulsed once, then twice, before something…punctured. The wards flickered, then flared to life again.
Wynnie didn’t call out from the bath, so I knew that, once again, she hadn’t felt it. Before I could begin to make sense of it, the door between my room and Draven’s crashed open on a burst of ice and snow.
I froze, my breath still ragged from the bone-deep sense of dread still pressing in.
Draven’s gaze raked over me, his teal eyes carefully examining every exposed inch of my skin as if he were looking for something.
I hadn’t seen him since the early hours of the night… when I had crept into his room and let myself forget that we were enemies for several, several minutes too long.
Minutes that would have been longer if my talons hadn’t emerged, reminding me of every reason we were impossible.
Something like shame burned through me.
For letting myself go to him? For having the nerve to want to break the bond I never wanted to begin with?
I wasn’t sure. I had left his room with more questions than answers.
His gaze swept over the room, then back to me. Power radiated off him in waves too intense to pin down, but there was an undercurrent there, curiously close to…panic.
My eyes flicked down. Shattered glass glittered across the floor at my feet. Before I could move, a chill stirred the air and Draven’s mana reached out. Frost laced each shard, binding them in a neat lattice of ice.
With a subtle flick of his hand, the frozen pieces lifted from the stone and drifted soundlessly to the nightstand, where the ice melted away to leave the glass whole again.
“Did you feel it, too?” I asked, my attention flitting from the glass back to the worry etched into Draven’s perfect features.
His lips parted, drawing more of my attention than I wished they did. “You can feel the wards?”
I nodded. “They feel like you.”
His eyes darkened, and heat spread to my cheeks, my unease from before giving way to an entirely different sort of feeling.
Shards.
“Like your mana,” I corrected hastily. “Why are they flickering?”
A muscle tensed in his jaw, and he looked out the window to where the faint shimmer of the wards gleamed in the distance.
“Something tried to breach them.”
The dread came back in full force. I took a steadying breath.
“What would have the power to do that?” I asked.
Draven must have pierced through the wards around the Shadow Clan to get to me, but those wards weren’t connected to ancient ward stones.
Unseelie wards came from the earth’s mana, and though they were a deterrent, they weren’t impossible to breach.
Even then, Draven might have been one of the only people alive who could have forced his way in.
So who or what was powerful enough to force their way through wards that took his substantial mana and amplified it?
His aurora gaze returned to me, his voice low and dangerous when he responded. “I don’t know. It’s never happened before.”
Something niggled at the back of my mind, something hazy, but he spoke again before I could put it together.
“I’m going to check the wards now, reinforce them if needed,” he said, his attention drifting down to my thigh.
“Do you have your dagger?”
“Always.” Since Wynnie had returned it to me, I never took it off my thigh.
“I need it to test something with the wards.”
I narrowed my eyes, trying to quell an unreasonable surge of panic in my chest at being separated from my only means of defense. Again.
“So by some thing , you mean you think this is the Unseelie?” Why else would he want my weapon in particular?
That brought a whole new surge of emotion. Had my mother come for me when she didn’t receive word? Had she told my uncle where I was?
Then again, there were far more Unseelie in the Wilds than the Skaldwings, and they all had reason to target my husband.
Frost climbed out from Draven, creeping in spiderwebs across the floor in time with his irritable tendrils of mana.
“Potentially,” he allowed darkly. “With enemies all around, it’s hard to say.”
He could have been referring to the Unseelie and the monsters and his own court, but I got the slightest feeling that he was also referring to his wife. I didn’t know what to say to that.
I didn’t know if we were enemies anymore, but I sure as hells didn’t know what else to call us. Allies didn’t exactly lock one another up.
He took a step toward me. “Lumen will guard you tonight.”
“Oh, am I allowed visitation now?” I shot back, pretending I didn’t know what he was getting at.
He narrowed his eyes, moving until he stood only inches from me. “You are allowed a guard , but I need that dagger. So you can hand it over, or I can take it.”
There was the smallest, unreasonable part of me that was tempted to call his bluff. To see if the same male that had recoiled only hours ago would actually drag his hand along my thigh.
But that was a road neither of us needed to go down, no matter which way it turned. So I dragged my skirt up, choosing to ignore the way his gaze tracked the motion, and pulled out the dagger, flipping it in my hand before giving it to him.
He took the dagger wordlessly, carefully avoiding contact with my skin. Because of the reminder of what I was? Or because sometimes our bond was too…eager for our physical proximity?
All the things we were and the things we couldn’t be seemed to fill up more space than we had in the room, sucking out all of the available air until my lungs refused to expand, and my vision was swallowed up entirely by the endless shift of the aurora skies.
Draven let out a low exhale that cut a jagged path through the tension flooding the room.
He crossed the floor, not to the door between our rooms, but to the larger one that led to our shared hallway. As soon as he opened it, Lumen bounded in with more energy than I had ever seen him exhibit.
His oversized presence and comforting familiarity were enough to snap me out of the moment. I let out a breathy laugh, using my non-Batty hand to pat the guard in question on the head.
Lumen pretended to be above such things, but the way he leaned his massive body into me suggested otherwise.
I felt inherently safer with him around, but I still couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that I was missing something obvious about the wards.