I reached out a hand, touching the side of my arm as my horror mounted. It drifted through, sliding straight to the floor of the dungeon as if my body were nothing but air.
“I don’t know how to leave my body, let alone how to stay,” I admitted, swallowing as I stared at my body and at where Caldris had begun to stir in his cell on the other side.
He mumbled my name, shooting to a sitting position quickly as he spun to look at me. His eyes went to my body immediately, his gaze fixated on it.
As if the three shades didn’t exist, and I realized the truth in Monos’s words. He couldn’t see me, and I wondered if he could feel that my soul—the other half of his—had vacated my body.
“Is this how I’m to die? A soul separated from her body and left to wander for eternity?” I asked, tears burning my eyes as I studied Monos. “Is that how you died?”
“Silly creature,” Lozu said with a yawn. “We died because the Queen of Air and Darkness locked us in here and left us to rot. She forgot we ever existed, and we simply wasted away.”
“That’s horrific,” I said, my empathy growing as I considered what it must have been to die so slowly. Even as I watched Caldris panic, clutching his chest as if the pain in his heart—the pain in his soul—was something he felt physically.
Lozu shrugged. “Been here centuries. Dying here was a blessing compared to what Mab does with her playthings. Better to hope for starvation, then I can eats you when you’re gone.”
“Can a shade eat?” I asked, swallowing my fear.
It shouldn’t have mattered, as I would already be dead and gone. I laid my soul on the top of my body, mimicking my position and hoping for the best. The warmth of my body sank into my chilled soul, welcoming me home as I fell back into the rhythm of my heartbeat.
It lulled me to sleep, a soft and steady drum as I tuned out Caldris’s panic and fear. The only way to calm him was to return, to become one with my body once more.
Everything faded to gray as my eyes drifted closed, Lozu’s last foreboding words reaching me in the final moments before sleep claimed me.
“Perhaps we’ll find out.”
4
Estrella
Time passed slowly.
I did not again venture into the spirit realm while I slept. Caldris’s horror and relief when I’d returned was enough to keep me firmly planted within my body. I didn’t know how to control it, only that I desperately wanted to. Monos and Lozu had followed me into the physical realm, haunting me and informing my mate of what I’d done.
Boredom made every single one of my bones hum with the need to do something, with the need to move. Caldris watched me from his own cell, tossing the body of a rat into the air and catching it for entertainment. I tried not to think of how disgusting that was, because we both knew he’d probably touched more disgusting things in his centuries of life. His comment about my snake friend was rich, considering he had no qualms about toying with a corpse.
Playing with the body of a rat was a new low, and it forced me to look over at where Lozu watched me like I was his next meal.
“You could eat him too, you know?” I said, nodding my head toward Caldris.
“Too tough. You just soft enough not to get stuck in my teeth,” Lozu said, not even bothering to look over at Caldris as the words rolled off his tongue.
My mate, for his part, seemed unbothered by Lozu’s half-assed threats. I was nearly certain that we both knew the gnome had grown fond of me during our time in that cell, that his affections would at least give him some pause before he consumed my flesh.
“We’ve had this conversation,” Monos said, a sigh leaving her lungs. “You do not need to tell her you’re planning to eat her. Just do it once she is already dead and gone.” Her casualness made me rethink my assurance that my friendship with the shades had changed anything. Perhaps they, better than anyone, knew how to separate the flesh from the soul. My body was but a vessel, useless to me once I abandoned it in favor of the Void.
“That’s very reassuring, Monos. Thank you for that wonderful endorsement,” I said, rolling my eyes.
Caldris chuckled, the rat squelching as his body hit the ceiling of the cell. Caldris looked at his largely flattened toy in disappointment the next time he caught it, tossing it to the side and looking for another one.
“You aren’t going to die in here,” he said, rooting around in his cell.
In the time that had passed—which felt like an eternity but was impossible to know or measure without evidence of the sun rising and falling—his body had finally healed. Only the thinnest of scars remained on his throat. They were tiny blemishes in his Fae Mark that felt unforgivable to me.
I would skin the male who did it alive if I had it my way.
“Your wishful thinking does not make that true,” I snapped, pacing back and forth in the too-small cell that I couldn’t seem to escape. For once, my height worked to my advantage, allowing me to stand without having to bend forward. Caldris wasn’t so lucky, having to bend at the waist in order to fit in the cage when he stood.
He didn’t seem bothered, having spent his fair share of time in Mab’s dungeon over the course of his life. “Mab is far too curious to know what you are to allow you to die before she gets her answers,” he explained, a sad smile gracing his face. His words only served to confirm what I’d already learned from Monos, that what waited for me outside of the monotony of this cell was far worse than the threat of starvation.
“Lets me have a taste and I’ll tell her. Then we can eats,” Lozu said, his nose twitching happily as he stepped closer to me.
“If you bite me, I will tear the nose off your face, gnome,” I snarled.
His beard shifted as his lips pulled into the semblance of a smile. “Does you not want to know what you’re made of?” he asked, stomping his foot in frustration. “Lozu can tell you.”
“I am not even the slightest bit tempted to sacrifice part of my flesh to you so that you can chew on it long enough to tell me what I am,” I said, rolling my eyes to the ceiling. Even dealing with the conflicted feelings of wanting to know the truth of my heritage and not wanting the answer to be available to Mab, there had to be slightly less painful ways to uncover the truth than being eaten.
The gates of the dungeon clanged in the distance, signaling a guard coming to deliver the meal of gruel and hard bread I’d come to expect periodically. If I based it on the instinctive feeling of the moon rising, I would have estimated it came in the evening.
The guard who stepped up to the door of my cell wasn’t the typical male who delivered our food, and his arms were empty of the questionable sustenance I both dreaded and craved.
“Up,” he grunted, the keys to my cell dangling in his hands. He was the one who had waited for me in the throne room, who’d chained me up to await Mab’s punishment: Malachi.
“I’m quite comfortable,” I said, forcing a saccharine smile to my face as I leaned back on my elbows and lounged.
No matter where he meant to take me or for what, I knew well enough to know I didn’t want to go. Caldris got to his feet on the other side of the dungeon, leaning forward to glare through the bars of his cage.
“I will haul you out if I must,” Malachi argued, and I winced when I heard the sound of skin sizzling. A glance around his hulking form confirmed Caldris had touched the iron bars meant to contain him.