Chapter 4 Frozen eyes
Nyx’s POV
I came back to consciousness in pieces hearing sounds first followed by a cold that was not natural at all. The Fae Kingdom has always been warm, nothing too extreme that we cannot manage.
Then I felt the arms around me and that was what finished waking me up. The fact that I was being held knowing the one person that does that is my sister.
I opened my eyes and looked directly into the face of a vampire guard. Red eyes and skin pulled tight over sharp features. Close enough that I could see the small dark veins at his temples and the absolute absence of anything warm in his expression.
The sound that came out of me was not a scream exactly. It was something before a scream and then the darkness came back up and swallowed me whole before I could do anything useful with it.
The second time was slower. The wokeness came back in the same order but gentler but then I felt arms. Different arms this time around.
I did not understand how I knew that before I was fully conscious but I did. These were not the guard’s arms. The guard had been tense, holding me like I was something he had been told to carry carefully but did not particularly want to touch.
This was different. Whoever held me now was not tense at all.
I kept my eyes closed for several seconds longer than necessary. I was upright or close to it, supported against something solid. One arm beneath my knees and one at my back holding me with the kind of effortless strength that suggested the person doing it was not finding it difficult in any way.
The chest behind me was not warm exactly but it was not unpleasant.
The dragon I had hoped was my hallucinate, shifted in my chest and it took everything in me not to lost consciousness again. So much happening!
The burning that had been constant since the cave, that horrible consuming heat moved. It did not go complete or even reduced but its different. I did not know what to do with that so I filed it away and focused.
~Open your eyes, Nyx.
I opened my eyes. The room was a library it seems and that was the first thing I registered because it was easier than registering everything else. The kind of room that had been there for over centuries by someone with both the resources and the patience to do it properly.
The guards were there. Six of them positioned around the room’s perimeter, red eyes forward and perfectly still. They were looking at me or looking at everything, the way trained soldiers do when they are performing the act of not watching something.
And then I made myself look at the person holding me.
I felt him before I properly saw him. That was the strange part. That thing in my chest, underneath the dragon and separate from it registered his presence.
He has dark hair and the sharpest jaw I’ve ever seen. His skin that looked like it had never seen sunlight and somehow was not worse for it.
And the eyes when they finally moved to mine, were frozen red. They looked at me with absolutely no readable emotion in them whatsoever. My heart slammed against my ribs and the dragon hummed.
I became aware that I was in a vampire’s arms in a vampire’s castle and the last time I had checked vampires and fae were enemies and had been enemies for as long as anyone could remember and I should be screaming or fighting or doing something other than lying here noticing his face.
His eyes dropped to my throat for less than a second then back to my face. I stopped breathing.
“Don’t.” He said.
One word said in thhe kind of voice that did not need volume to fill a room. He was not looking at my throat anymore but somehow that was not reassuring at all.
I understood what he meant without him explaining it. Don’t scream or move. Don’t do whatever my face was currently advertising that I was thinking about doing.
I nodded stiffly and not entirely voluntary because something about him made the decision before I did. Some part of me that was apparently more interested in survival and understood immediately that screaming would be the wrong choice.
That whatever patience he was currently extending to me was a short resource and I should not test its limits. He looked back at the middle distance.
The fire cracked quietly and one of the guards shifted his weight then went still again.
I became aware that my hands were gripping the front of his jacket. I did not remember doing that.
My fingers were white knuckled in the dark fabric and I could not quite make them let go, which was humiliating but my body was operating on a separate agenda from my brain and my brain was not currently winning the argument.
“Where am I?” I asked and it came out clearer than I expected.
He did not answer immediately. He lets the silence sit there between us for long enough that I started to wonder if he was going to answer at all.
“My castle,” he said finally.
“I want to leave.”
Nothing on his face moved.
“Please.” I added which I hated myself for immediately.
He looked down at me then. Actually looked, not the peripheral awareness he had been maintaining but direct and full and whatever was behind those frozen eyes was complicated in a way I could not see.
“You will remain here,” he said flatly like he was telling me what the weather was. “Until I decide otherwise.”
“You can’t just—”
“I can.”
Two words and the conversation was over. Not because he raised his voice or threatened me. But because he had decided and the universe had apparently agreed.
I looked away from him because looking at him was doing something strange to my chest and I needed to think.
My sister. The vials were still in my pocket, I could feel them. The map had gone somewhere or lost in the cave or taken by the guards. Prince Theron was waiting for me to come back with the dragon’s blood, not knowing I had been captured. My sister is lying in that room in the slums getting smaller by the day.
The dragon shifted again. That low move like it was responding to something in the room I could not see. I looked back at him despite myself.
I had walked into a trap I never saw coming. And the worst part, the part I could not explain and refused to examine too closely, was that his arms still felt like the safest place in the room.
I hated that more than anything else.
