Hereditary (14 page)

Cale was there in an instant, slipping an arm about me and pulling my own arm over his shoulder.

“You look like you’re about to pass out, let’s get you upstairs.”

We had just reached the staircase when a voice carried out across the entrance chamber. A voice that made me cringe.

“Hazen!”

We all turned around, and Rose smiled politely, though Cale looked decidedly amused. Hazen himself didn’t have time to form any reaction, as the moment he turned around, Kaylee was upon him. I didn’t look away this time, and noticed that he kissed her back, which reminded me of what Cale had said the day before, about Hazen and Kaylee ‘finally sealing the deal’ at the party. It shouldn’t have made me uneasy, especially since the only reason Hazen had almost kissed me before was because of my compulsion, and yet…

I watched as Hazen set her gently away, and she turned to us then, masking her surprise with an over-enthusiastic smile, which soon faded as her eyes fell upon me.

“So the rumours are true,” she said dully.

“What are the rumours?” I asked, when nobody else answered.

“You found your real calling and joined the royal harem.”

Cale smirked, though his arm immediately retreated, and I had to reach for the stair railing to steady myself.

“Your own mother tell you that?” he asked Kaylee.

Kaylee frowned, but it was nothing compared to Rose’s outrage. I could see it in her eyes as she glared at Kaylee, but she didn’t say anything, merely turned and stormed back up the stairs. Kaylee looked after her, surprised.

“She seriously still isn’t over it?” she asked, looking to Hazen, whose mouth tightened in response.

Not wanting to get caught in the middle of a lover’s spat, I began to edge up the stairs, using the rail to aid me and ignoring the trembling in my legs.

“Um, I’m going to go,” I said lamely, before turning my back on them all and moving as fast as I could pull myself.

Rose’s room was a fair way away from the entrance chamber, but I made it there in the end, and slumped against the door, breathing hard. It swung inwards almost immediately, and I grabbed a hold of the doorjamb to prevent myself from falling in.

“Oh god! Tell me you didn’t walk all the way up here by yourself!” Rose grabbed my arm and helped me over to her bed, and I slouched down, needing a few moments to slow the pounding of my heart.

“Are… you… okay?” I managed, unable to ignore the telling track of recent tears down her cheeks.

She shook her head, bemused.

“You really are something, Bea, you know that?”

“Is it this thing about the royal harem?”

She nodded, slipping onto the bed beside me and drawing her knees to her chest.

“It’s no secret around here, obviously.”

“Your mother seems like a lovely person.”

“She is, and I hate to see her so hurt.”

At a loss of exactly how to reply to that, I reached out and grasped her hand.

“Every King for as long as anyone can remember has had a harem, but while Father always technically had one, he didn’t always
use
it. That only started a few years ago.”

“I’m so sorry, Rose.”

She gave me a watery smile and squeezed my hand.

“My mother still loves him, but he just hasn’t been the same over the last few years. Maybe all the stress got to him, or I don’t know… maybe it was even the power. But he’s different now.”

That made me think of my own father, who had always been a simple soldier until my mother died, and then, suddenly, he killed people for a living. He disappeared for weeks at a time, and by my sixteenth birthday, he wasn’t even living with me anymore.

“I guess people go through things, and it can change them. They behave differently, care less, maybe even stop caring at all, and we all remain the same, clinging onto what memories we have, hoping that they will come back to us. Maybe they do, and maybe they don’t. I guess only you can decide how long you’re willing to wait for him, or whether you should just move on and accept who he is now, to protect yourself.”

Chapter Ten

Feed the Hand that Bites

The rest of the week passed quickly, with Kaylee permanently attached to Hazen’s side now that she knew I was staying in the castle. I was getting steadily stronger, but my moods were also growing considerably darker, and since I hadn’t taken any more energy, I knew that I couldn’t chance opening the connection again. So I was glad when the day came to return to Sparrow’s Settlement, and I assured everyone that my father had promised to take me home so that I could be alone.

I really had no way of knowing how to actively seek out Nareon, who appeared and disappeared at will, so I headed to the abandoned garden and then fought my way through the forest to the game trail. To my relief, he stepped out of the cover of trees almost instantly.

“Why are you so low?” he demanded, his usually soft voice harsh for once.

“It was an accident, I was trying to return life to the garden that I drained, but I guess I gave it a little of my own.”

“Almost all of it,” he amended.

“I’m sorry.” I shrugged.

He sighed, and strode over to me.

“I will give you what you need, but first, you will do something for me.”

“What is that?”

“Follow,” he said, before turning and disappearing into the forest again.

I hurried to catch up with him, and trailed him silently through a short distance of brush to another trail. After an hour had passed, I tried to question him further, but he ignored me. One hour melted into many until finally we broke free into a clearing. It looked to be a wasteland, stretching as far as the eye could see, and I was seized by a sudden urge to turn back the way I had come and run from this place.

“It’s an enchantment,” Nareon explained, grabbing my hand and pulling me into the clearing, despite my unwillingness.

I felt the air ripple around me, and something pass across my skin, and then the feeling disappeared, along with my urge to run. I was now in a whole new world entirely. We stood at the top of a mountain, with a whole city stretched below us, and directly beside us stood the most magnificent castle that I had ever seen. Several tiered towers branched off from the main castle by way of stone corridors. They seemed to touch the very sky with their smooth, white-peaked spires. I could even see people moving inside them, silhouetted by the sun beaming through wide, stained-glass windows.

I could have stared at that castle for hours, except we had been spotted, and a group of men were now running toward us. They all wore grey and white uniforms the likes of which I had never seen before, and they were all extraordinarily beautiful. To my surprise, they snapped into a regimented formation as soon as they reached us, lining up to our left as one of them broke away from the others and approached Nareon.

“Your Highness,” the man gave a short bow. “Welcome back.”

“What’s the report, Grenlow?” Nareon answered, even as my mouth fell open.

The man slid a look to me then, and Nareon cleared his throat, drawing the soldier’s attention immediately back to him.

“The situation is becoming unmanageable, Sire. Something must be done soon.”

Nareon nodded, and began pulling me past the other soldiers as Grenlow followed behind us.

“We were not expecting a visitor, Sire. Shall I make preparations?”

“No preparations. Beatrice is under my protection, Grenlow, make sure everybody knows that.”

The other man hurried off after another short bow, and Nareon led me past another number of curious faces and, finally, into the beautiful castle. The room I found myself in had no roof, and the walls were overgrown with vines. A sandstone fountain bubbled in the centre, seemingly set right into the tiles of the floor. Nareon removed his coat, handing it to a nearby servant.

“Welcome to my home,” he said, almost self-mockingly.

“Are these people all—”

“Synfees? Yes. But they won’t harm you, though you do smell delicious today. It must be the desperation of your state.”

I didn’t know how to reply to that, so I let him lead me into a connecting room and through a maze of corridors until we broke out into the sunshine again. We went down a set of stairs and he pulled me over to a stable, yelling for someone to bring him his horse. Only a few minutes later, a nervous boy led out a beautiful brown stallion, and Nareon jumped easily into the saddle, reaching down and lifting me as though I weighed nothing. He set me on the saddle before him and grabbed the reins with one hand, securing me with his free arm as he kicked the mount into action.

When we broke free of the castle walls, I could once again see the city sprawled below, and he began to point things out to me, different stores and buildings, even different factions and townships as we rode further out. Eventually, though, I began to notice something else. The further from the castle we got, the more the vegetation seemed to be dying off, and the less happy the people seemed to be as they stared out at us riding past. Some even came running to the road and dropped to their knees, yelling pleads to Nareon.

I wanted to stop and help them, but he kept riding until finally we hit the worst of it. This town was completely abandoned, and the ground had blackened. Everything looked dead, and if I had dared to open my connection, I had the sickening feeling that it would buzz with nothing. It would be flat, and dead, just like the town before us.

After that, we rode back in silence, this time going around the towns instead of through them, and when we reached the kingdom, I was beginning to understand Nareon’s sudden appearance in my life. He led me up to one of the highest points of his beautiful castle, and into a sitting room that looked over what could be seen of the kingdom below.

“So,” I said, hesitant, as he moved to a side table and poured two glasses of wine from a crystal decanter. “You want me to heal your land?”

“Not exactly,” he said, moving back to me and handing me one of the glasses. “I want you to find out who’s poisoning them, preferably without getting yourself killed.”

I watched him calmly lower himself into an armchair, and I sank onto the couch beside it, blinking at the floor.

“How would I get killed?”

“I searched far and wide to find someone with the Force inheritance, and while it
is
rare, I still should have found someone in my own kingdom. Unfortunately, they all seem to have disappeared.”

“You think they are doing this?”

“Yes, or someone is forcing them to.”

“So how will that get me killed?”

“If they find you, they will not try to recruit you as they have the others, they will suck out your life-force in the hopes of gaining your power.”

“Is that possible?”

“For us? Yes.”

A shudder raced through me, and I recoiled a little, shrinking back against the couch.

“So what makes you think that I would help you?”

“Two reasons, Spitfire,” he said, setting his cup aside and moving to where I sat, his hands appearing on either side of my head on the couch, his face looming suddenly close. “You’ll do it because you can’t stand to see all that land—all those people—suffer. And you’ll do it because I am the only thing keeping you from killing your friends. Now that you’ve come into your power, you won’t be able to go much longer than a week without losing control and draining the nearest person. And that time shortens the more you use your powers. I am the only person you can safely take energy from. Anyone else here would kill you for your power.”

“Why haven’t
you
killed me for my power?”

His mouth quirked into a wolfish grin, and I could feel the heat emanating from his body as he loomed closer.

“Are you trying to give me ideas?”

“No!” I almost shouted, though from his laugh, I gathered that he had only been baiting me.

“I told you not to believe all the fairytales,” he said, backing away and raising my own cup to my mouth.

I drank reflexively, and he moved away, drinking his own wine down all at once before walking over to the window. I pushed up from the couch and trailed him, following his eyes as he stared blankly beyond the glass to a kingdom full of people who needed my help, whether they were synfee or not.

“I’ll do it,” I whispered. “I’ll help you.”

He turned and nodded, his eyes darkening with emotion. “Now drop your glamor,” he said. “And take what you need.”

It was easy to drop the glamor again, but I didn’t have time to marvel over my newfound ability, as the sudden wave of distracting hunger that swept over me tore a sudden groan from my throat. The familiar compulsion swept my mind, and every nerve ending that I had centred suddenly on the being beside me. I didn’t stop to consider that these weren’t natural or normal feelings, these were things that he was forcing me to feel… but it didn’t seem to matter. Those usually light grey eyes darkened further and I found myself moving quicker than I thought myself able, turning his body as I went, and pushing him back against the glass. His hands cradled my hips automatically, and I reached for his head, pulling his mouth down to my own. The kiss started slowly, as it had the first time, and I didn’t know why I was trying so hard to control myself… perhaps because I now realised the real danger that I was in. If Nareon felt the way I did, whenever we kissed, then it must have taken a Herculean effort for him to end the transfer of energy in the first place. Yet now I was aware of the added incentive of my own powers, which could aid him in the resurrection of his kingdom, and would be much easier to control if he had them himself.

Unfortunately, despite my best intentions, it wasn’t long until my control started to slip, and the more of his desire I felt, the hungrier I became, until I was just a mess of feeling, and there wasn’t a single coherent thought left in my head. His hands moved from my hips sliding lower and dragging me firmly against him so that I could physically feel how much I was affecting him on top of the mental desire that already swamped me. I groaned, my teeth dragging across his bottom lip, and suddenly our positions shifted, and I found my back pressed to the window. Nareon swore softly, and then he was kissing me again, rough and insistent. He drew me higher, and I lifted my legs in reaction, locking them around his waist.