A Court of Bones & Sorrow (Lunaria Realms #2)

Chapter 20

Chapter Twenty

Samara

“You seem troubled.”

I tried not to jump from where I was sitting on a grassy overlook just above the beach as Draven appeared at my side, seemingly out of nowhere. If it weren’t for the fact that it was still daylight, I would have sworn it was shadow magic.

“Next time you sneak up on me, I’m stabbing you.” I shot him an irritated look.

He just grinned. “Don’t tease me with a good time.”

“You’re ridiculous.” I shook my head even as my lips twitched in amusement.

“What’s bothering the lovely Heir of House Harker today?” he asked lightly.

You , I thought. Trying to reconcile the prince who always managed to make me smile with the traitor who was responsible for killing our people was mentally exhausting. Constantly having to stop myself from falling back into our easy friendship and accidentally saying the wrong thing. Giving away everything we knew about him, his mother, and the wraiths.

Or at least what we thought we knew, because it all felt like jagged pieces that didn’t exactly fit together .

Kieran was struggling even more than me. He’d confessed what had happened between him and Draven immediately when we’d met up before dinner last night. He’d been avoiding the prince ever since. Based on how Alaric had been outright glaring at Draven every time he was in a room with him now, I suspected Kieran had also told him what had transpired between them in the Sovereign House.

Everyone in House Harker knew something was going on, and there was an underlying tension now in every room I walked into.

On top of that, I’d stayed up late last night translating the first journal Rosalyn Harker had written. Reading as she’d gotten pieces of her humanity back had been heartbreaking. The hunger gave way to grief as she remembered the husband and daughter she had lost.

There were some entries where it alternated between begging the moon and cursing it for giving her back the humanity she’d apparently been only too happy to lose. Most of the first generation of humans who had changed to Moroi had become Strigoi immediately and remained that way for years. Some of them had never regained their humanity. Only the Harkers and a handful of others—most of which made up the current House bloodlines—had changed back to Moroi within a matter of months.

The fact that any of them had eventually recovered enough of their humanity to become Moroi again was impressive. As far as I knew, only the original ones had ever pulled that off. Nowadays if someone became Strigoi—they stayed that way.

For reasons I didn’t fully understand, Rosalyn had been pissed off about that. She had tried repeatedly to lose her humanity by completely giving in to her bloodlust and ripping into monsters every night, but by the morning, her bloodlust had always faded.

After a few meetings this morning, I’d been desperate to get out of House Harker, if only for an hour. I couldn’t afford to falter now, but I’d needed an hour to settle my mind away from everything that was threatening to tear it apart.

But it’s not like I could tell Draven any of that. I thought briefly about asking him why he’d found Zosa for me. And why he’d felt compelled to share the memory.

The questions were on the tip of my tongue, but I bit them back. Whatever his answer might be . . . I knew it wouldn’t be something I could handle right now. Not on top of everything else.

“I’m fine, Prince,” I said instead.

He raised a dark eyebrow. “You should improve your lying skills, Heir.”

I held his gaze. “We can’t all be as good as you.”

Draven stiffened for just a second before leaning back on his hands and tilting his face up towards the sun. He’d left his hair loose today, and it fell in a dark wave down his back, the silver streaks glistening in the sun.

I wanted to run my fingers through it almost as much as I wanted to trace his jawline and those entirely too kissable full lips.

Instead, I turned away and watched the waves gently roll in and out. It was good swimming weather. Unfortunately, as inviting as the bright turquoise water looked, monsters swam beneath those waves.

A shudder ran through me as I remembered the cave encounter with those damn spider-like starfish. We were trapped on a small continent full of monsters by an ocean that was full of them as well.

Fucking Lunaria.

Draven didn’t try to get me to talk again, just sat there like the hot, evil prince he was and soaked in the sunshine. Just when I was about to get up and return to reality, a flash of vibrant green caught my attention .

Raising a hand to shield my eyes against the sun, I watched as an emerald green striker circled above us. I held my arm to the side, and it immediately dove down to perch on it. I barely winced as its claws flexed in and out of my flesh, leaving behind little droplets of blood.

Draven shifted and leaned forward to eye the striker, his nostrils flaring slightly as the scent of my blood filled the air.

“Whose?” he asked.

Some strikers didn’t belong to one person in particular, those ones were trained to simply travel to one particular location and back again, but most of us had at least a few strikers that we trained ourselves. It took more work, but we could teach them to deliver messages to specific people and not just locations.

I thought about lying about who this one belonged to, but the red tips on this striker’s tail were easily recognizable, and if Draven asked around, someone would tell him.

“Ary’s,” I said and gave the creature a scratch under her chin. She nipped at me with her blunt beak but didn’t break the skin, just a warning. Ary’s favorite striker was such an ornery thing.

I plucked the message from the pocket on the back of her harness, and she immediately took off to fly back home. My eyes skimmed Ary’s neat handwriting, and I worked hard to keep my expression blank.

“Problems?” Draven asked. I was holding the letter at an angle so he couldn’t read it.

“No.” I folded up the paper and slipped it into my pocket. “He was just thanking me for hosting him here earlier this week and inviting me to visit him at House Tepes,” I lied through my teeth.

“Interesting,” he drawled. “Ary doesn’t usually bother with such polite words and invitations.”

“Perhaps he just finds me a delight to be around.” I rose to my feet and brushed some dried grass and dirt from my deep purple dress, the letter burning a hole in my pocket. I needed to find Vail. Immediately.

“No doubt,” Draven murmured as he plucked a pink wildflower and rolled to his feet until he was standing right in front of me. My breath hitched as he pulled my long braid over my shoulder and wound the stem of the wildflower into it. “Everything about you is delightful. That’s why I’m going to marry you.” He winked before tugging on the end of my braid and leaning in to kiss me on the cheek.

“Still not marrying you,” I said a little too breathlessly to be convincing. Damn it. Damn him. I cleared my throat. “I have some meetings to attend to. See you for dinner tonight, Prince?”

“Of course.” He smiled. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

It took me a while to find Vail because he wasn’t in any of the training yards. Emil had been the one to tell me Vail was inspecting some tracks that had been found in the woods nearby. Less than five minutes later, I had Zosa saddled up and was racing out of House Harker to find him, Emil’s bay gelding hot on my heels.

Zosa nimbly leapt over fallen trees as we turned down one of the lesser-used trails that had never been cleared away after some of the winter storms. It didn’t take long for me to spot the bright chestnut mare tied to a tree.

I jumped off Zosa and looped her reins around the saddle, loose enough that she could nibble on grass but wouldn’t get tangled up in them, trusting her not to go far, then set off to where Vail was.

Emil was at my side a second later, sending me a curious look. When he kept staring, I glanced at him. “What? ”

“I didn’t tell you where Vail was,” he said slowly. “Only that he was in the forests outside the House, but you seemed to know exactly where to go . . .”

I stopped dead in my tracks. He was right. I’d been so caught up on getting to Vail that I hadn’t thought about it, but I’d been growing more and more desperate as I’d searched the House for him. Then Emil had told me he was in the woods and . . . I rested a hand against my chest.

A pull. I’d felt a pull and had just naturally followed it. This had happened before when we’d found the body outside one of the outposts that had been attacked, but I’d assumed that had been because of the blood magic involved and I was just more sensitive to that kind of thing because I’d experimented with it so much over the years.

I rubbed my chest as the pull intensified the more I focused on it. This . . . wasn’t normal. I’d never read about anything like this in all my time at Drudonia.

“Okaaay.” I drew out the word and dropped my hand from my chest. “We’re going to add this to the ‘Weird Shit We Need to Figure Out Once We’re Not in Danger of Dying’ list.”

It probably said a lot about my life that strange, unexplainable magic happening in my own freaking body was far down on the list of mysteries I needed to solve. But here we were.

Emil grunted, and we started walking again. He let me take the lead since, apparently, I could magically find Vail now. “Kind of a long name, but I suppose it’s accurate.” His gaze cut my way again before focusing on the woods around us. “You gonna tell Vail?”

“Depends,” I said lightly. “You gonna rat me out if I don’t?”

Emil sighed. “I’m getting too old for this. Maybe I should listen to Adrienne and retire.”

“Probably.” I snorted.

“I’ll leave it up to you to tell him,” he said. “Unless something changes and I think it becomes important for him to know.”

“Fair enough.”

“So . . . are you going to tell him?”

“Tell me what?”

I jumped two feet into the air when Vail slid out from between two trees. His dark brown hair was pulled back into a bun, but pieces of it had slipped free and were plastered to his sweat-slicked skin. The light beige shirt he wore clung to his body, and for a second, my eyes snagged where he’d unlaced the top, giving me a good view of his chest.

The man was built like a mountain but could still move as quietly as a wraith. It was seriously hot, and his blood was positively divine.

No. Bad, Samara, I mentally chastised myself. No more complicated lovers. Absolutely not.

Emil snickered. “Apparently you’ll need to practice a little more with your newfound talent.”

Vail shot me a questioning look, but I shook my head. Given all the mixed messages he’d been sending me lately, I had no idea how he’d react to learning I could apparently feel him.

Probably not well.

There were bigger things to worry about. Besides, it was possible this was just a strange side effect of how much we’d been exchanging blood lately. I’d never heard of such a thing happening, but our magic did change slightly with each generation. Maybe this would start occurring more with other fifth-generation Moroi who had lovers they regularly exchanged blood with.

Not that Vail was my lover. My eyes drifted to his chest again. Damn it.

“We’ve got a problem,” I said. Vail’s enticing body and the issue of our new magic connection faded to the back of my mind as the urgency of what had sent me racing out here resurfaced. “Ary sent me a letter. He encountered a wraith last night just north of Lake Myalis.”

“There’s a human settlement there that we haven’t investigated yet.” Vail’s expression hardened. “What happened with the wraith?”

“Ary managed to kill it, but he said it was definitely searching for something before he did.” I glanced through the trees to the west and then up at the midday sun. “If we leave right now, we could get to that settlement not long after sunset.”

“More wraiths will likely head there tonight to continue the search and possibly avenge their fallen friend if they know,” Emil pointed out. “Dealing with one wraith is nasty enough, but if they come in numbers, you’re walking into a death trap.”

I remembered the three wraiths we battled in the temple and swallowed past the lump in my throat. “Like I said, if we leave now, we can get there just after night falls, do a quick search, and get out before they arrive.”

Emil’s brows creased, clearly not liking this idea, then he looked to Vail for the final decision.

“We search fast,” Vail finally said. “Even if we haven’t found anything, when I say we leave, we leave .” He looked at me with an expression that brokered no argument.

I nodded in agreement. “We leave. I won’t argue. I just want the chance to search while we have it.”

Because more wraiths would definitely go to that settlement, and if there was still a piece of that strange obsidian stone there, we couldn’t not take the chance of them getting it before we did.

“Did Ary provide the exact coordinates for where he saw the wraith?” Vail asked. “I want to make sure we’re heading to the right place. ”

“Yes.” I reached into my pocket to pull out the letter, and my blood went cold. Empty.

“Lose something, love?”

For the third time in an hour, I jumped.

By the time I’d landed back on my feet and whirled to look up into the tree behind me, Emil and Vail had already moved to stand beside me, swords drawn.

Draven continued to read the letter— my letter —from where he sat on a branch ten feet above us, one leg dangling casually off the side.

How the fuck had he gotten up there without any of us sensing him? And how had he gotten here ahead of us without anyone detecting him? It was one thing for him to slip past me, but Emil and Vail? I added this to the list of things that didn’t make sense about the Moroi Prince.

I glanced at Vail’s face. Based on how hard he was clenching his jaw and the way the scar that ran diagonally across his face was pulled tight, he definitely hadn’t known the prince was there until he’d said something.

“Drav,” I half growled.

His bright blue eyes finally looked away from the letter to arch an eyebrow at me. “Oh, we’re back to Drav now?” He slid off the branch and dropped to the ground, landing lightly on the balls of his feet before strolling over to me. “I like it when I get to be Drav and not Prince.”

“Will you like it when I strangle you?” I snatched the letter out of his hand.

“Probably.” He grinned and then looked back and forth between the swords Vail and Emil still held. They weren’t angling them towards the prince, but they’d only lowered them a couple of inches. “Are we having a sword measuring contest? I haven’t lost one of those yet.”

Vail took a step towards Draven, and red flashed through the prince’s eyes in challenge. Emil stepped away from me to give himself more space to work.

“We don’t have time for this.” I stepped between Vail and Draven with my hands held up as Emil paused to watch how this played out. Then I turned to fully face Draven. “Talk. Now.”

“I’m coming with you.”