Page 9 of Reign of Stars and Fire

I flattened my palm over his middle, sliding my fingers toward the waist of his trousers. He sucked in a sharp breath. “What I would like is for you to find a better way to put that busy mouth to work and kiss me.”

Ari hesitated for half a breath until a flash of desire darkened his eyes. Perhaps he realized our time was fleeting, for he wasted no more of it and spun me around, slamming my back against the wall.

His mouth took mine, deep and sensual. Shoulders, hips, legs, every angle of us collided. Cheeks grew wetter, and I’d lost track of whose tears were whose.

Ari kissed me until my heart bruised my ribs.

I held tightly to my husband, I marked every piece of him to my memory, and when I opened my eyes again, he was gone.

Chapter4

The Golden King

I cracked one eye,wincing at the sharp burn of light, then followed with the other eye. Soft sunlight brightened spring grass. The breeze rustled in leaves, and a buzz of iridescent insect wings added natural music to a peaceful hillside.

A few shadows from overhead branches wove through the meadow like fingers threading through the hair of a lover.

“Saga?” My voice was rough, dry. It was as though I’d swallowed a handful of sand then gone to sleep for too many clock tolls. She’d been here, not long ago. Her lips, her body, it had all been mine again. “Saga!”

Nothing answered for a drawn pause. Then, a distant voice, too deep to be my wife’s, lifted the hair on my arms. “You’d better be worthy of that mark inked on your skin.”

On instinct, I covered the dark, black lines of the tender skin where the blood feather mark had been engraved onto my body.

“Hello?” I looked over my shoulder. No one was there, only an empty aspen grove.

The slope of the hill was slight, but I could still make out old homesteads with blossoms snaked around wooden fenceposts and doorways. Some silver blooms even brightened the tops of sod roofs, like a sprinkle of color amidst the dull browns and dreary grays.

I pinched the bridge of my nose. Where had Saga gone? No, one step back. Why was my wife visiting me in a dream? My mind strained to wade through the murky thoughts until it recalled what had happened.

Dying. Hard to forget dying.

Davorin, the battle lord, he’d poisoned me. Hells, it stung like a thousand pins sliding under my skin.

I bunched my tunic in my fists, yanking it up my body, and stared at the space between one hip and my ribs. The skin was bruised and battered, a few black veins scaled my side like an inkwell had spilled across the table.

Not a dream. Iwasdying.

When Saga appeared, I’d known there were reasons we were kept apart, but struggled with the clarity of those reasons. Now, I remembered. Healers of the blood court, they’d been the ones to suggest a fae sleep. The power of it paused life, left me stagnate, but alive.

“I am in a fae sleep,” I announced to the empty trees. “This isn’t real.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure.”

Near a wild lilac tree, a man touched the petals of one blossom. His hair was the shade of tilled soil before planting and was shorn on the sides with black tattooed runes on his scalp. The ridge of his hair was braided down his neck to his shoulders.

A sharp apprehension clung to my heart. I didn’t know him.

Over one side of his face was a black mask. A shape fitted to the ridges of his cheekbones, half the slope of his nose, until it ended down one half of his face. The facemask hid one brow and his left profile, but it didn’t cover his eyes. Whatever scars and pain the stitching on the black fabric hid away, it hadn’t damaged his eye.

His gaze held mine, almost knowingly, maybe irritated. Hard to tell at this distance. He shared the same sharply tapered points to his ears as me, but his eyes weren’t the glossy black of most Night Folk, these were the color of the rocky ledges after a rain storm, or roasted walnuts with burnt, sugary glazes over the shells during the Jul season. They were ancient, wise, and burdened.

On the side of his face without the mask, one corner of his mouth titled into a smirk. With a slow tug, he pulled up his tunic sleeve on one arm. My throat tightened. There, tattooed in the center, was the same rune crest as Saga’s.

“Who are you?” I muttered under my breath.

The stranger dipped beneath a bough and disappeared around a bend in the forest path.

The Otherworld. I’d died. This had to be it, and because the gods loved to entertain themselves, they proffered me the surliest of spectral guides to usher me to the great hall. Me, a man who rarely stopped thinking or talking, had a silent, grumbly phantom who could take the Nightrender to task on the deepest frown.