Gabrelle

Gabrelle

Home is where the heart is, right? Well, not for me.

I lived in the Mirror Palace, where every wall, inside and out, was reflective, a place of such cold beauty that no heart could survive.

I approached at sunset, and the palace façade reflected the vermillion, orange, and pink from the setting sun.

Mother awaited me inside the Peacock room where vibrant green and gold animals strutted among plush velvet furniture. This was Mother’s favorite room—it probably reminded her of herself.

“You look beautiful, Gabrelle.”

Never in my life had Mother greeted me with anything other than a comment on my appearance. I crossed to the cocktail bar and poured myself a considerable measure of gin with a drop of nectar. I’d need it.

“Have a seat, Gabrelle. There is something I’d like to discuss.”

I gulped my drink and swallowed my annoyed response. If there was something my mother had taught me well, it was to hide my emotion. People called me an ice queen, and I was proud of it—the name was hard-earned.

I reclined on a chaise longue and glanced at myself in the wall. The mirrors in the Peacock room reflected the most beautiful version of the fae who entered. Some visitors were entranced by their reflections and had to be physically dragged from the room. I never saw anything but myself: my soft pink hair, brown skin, and hourglass curves. Everything that made my mother proud.

I sighed and waited for her to begin.

Never one for small talk, she dived right in. “What do you and the other heirs think about the Shadow Walker threat?”

Shadow Walkers were taking more shifters every night, and nobody knew why. Why target the shifting communities? Why infiltrate the capital of Verda when there were easy pickings in the rural areas? Why now?

“Not much.”

“You and your colleagues must learn to operate as a team. That’s why you are trained together and given so much leeway at the Lakehouse.”

Mother must have spent many hours hanging out with her pals at the Lakehouse. I’d never known her as anything but a poised and graceful queen, but she must have been young once.

Did she ever miss the Lakehouse? I dreaded the day I’d have to vacate it for the next generation of heirs; perhaps she had too. Perhaps her emotionless mask was so perfected that it hid a turmoil of longing and loss.

“Leif thinks of nothing but sex and balls,” I said dismissively. “Dion and I have discussed it, but there’s little we can do.”

“And Ronan?”

Mother knew as well as I did the Mentium contender was the most sensible of the bunch. He was the logical and reasoned heir with whom I could have a productive conversation.

He and I would win the top two ranks when our time came to rule—we just had to fight for the order. We would share the heavy decisions, giving Dion the time to cook and Leif the freedom to goof off.

But at the moment, Ronan thought of very little besides his Floran pet. He certainly hadn’t mentioned the Shadow Walkers to me or shown the slightest interest when I brought them up other than asking whether I thought Neela would be safe.

If he continued down this path, he wouldn’t be among the highest rankings. As long as he kept his head in the game and continued to perform well at the trials, I supposed it didn’t matter.

Frankly, it was odd he was helping Neela at all. She was fierce and determined and looked set to become a competent fae and would probably make an excellent queen. But at what cost? I would never trade Ronan’s life for hers, and I hoped his pigheadedness would blow over before our time came to make that choice.

But Mother didn’t need to know any of that. “I will discuss it with them. I have everything under control.”

Without my peers’ help, I devised a plan I intended to implement that night. I gulped the rest of my gin and excused myself while Mother watched me leave, probably assessing my gait.

I spent the rest of the afternoon in my room, running over my plan, then I changed into black pants and a shirt with a black hood.

When the night was at her darkest, I crept out of the palace to put my plan into action, pulling up the black hood to cover my hair. I followed moonways to a lion shifter community on the city’s outskirts and settled in to wait among a thicket of trees.

Tonight, I was flexing my Stealth. Everybody assumed I would Ascend into Lure, like Mom, especially since I was already quite accomplished with that magic, but I wasn’t so sure.

My father had Stealth, and that power intrigued me. He could sneak up behind a transformed wolf shifter, and they never heard him coming. My little trick in the forest obscuring the log so Neela couldn’t see it was nothing compared to the glamors he could cast. He could even throw them over himself and become invisible.

I was fascinated by the line between truth and lies. Beauty was a kind of lie, a promise of goodness and virtue that didn’t necessarily exist. In storybooks, the wicked witch was always ugly and the heroine beautiful, and these ideas of beauty and goodness were inextricably linked in the fae psyche.

But it was a lie. Beauty was nothing but a trap—nobody knew that better than a Lure.

Stealth also played between the boundaries of falsehood and truth but approached it from the other side, the dark side. The one that attracted me.

Recently, I’d begun testing spoken lies to hone my craft, make sure I could speak falsehoods without a flicker of emotion. It seemed the perfect arrow for my quiver, which was so full of tricks of deception.

I wouldn’t become the beauty queen. I’d be the obscuring queen.

The thought made me smile. Alone here in the dark, crouched among trees and shrubbery, nobody was here to see my emotion.

Tonight I would practice Stealth. I didn’t intend to use my powers for evil. It was another storybook lie that the truth was good and liars were evil. They were nothing but skills, and the goodness or evil lay in the fae’s intent.

My intent was good. I was here to observe the Shadow Walkers and seek weakness. So far, the only move against them had been to put down their victims, but what kind of defense was that? Salting and burning walking corpses made no difference to the Shadow Walkers themselves.

We needed more information. Rumor had it the creatures flitted between shadows and couldn’t survive in the light, but was that even true?

I didn’t plan to fight. I just wanted to observe, watch how they moved, attacked, and how many there were.

Even my cold dead heart picked up pace when a cool breeze tickled my bare arms. Dread stopped me, and I sensed a threat nearby. It had to be the Shadow Walkers.

Why had I chosen to hide in the darkest shadow? I was a damn fool, but all I could do now was stay as still as death and hope to go unnoticed.

A single shadow, darker than black, seeming to devour the light around it, flitted to the lions’ cave mouth, then inside.

I heard nothing. No shrieks, no screams, not even a scuffle, and the night was suddenly so cold that the hairs on my arms stood erect.

After ten minutes, the shadow emerged from the den. No, two shadows. Had that thing just reproduced?

The creatures blew through the night like smoke, then they were gone.

I hid behind my thin cover of trees until the cold in my bones had gone, then I nocked an arrow on my bowstring and crept toward the den.

“Hello?” I hoped to hear an answering growl from a pissed-off lion.

Nothing.

I called again, but there was no point in waiting, so I walked into the cave mouth and looked around. Four bloodied bodies lay on the stone floor, one female fae, two young faelings, and an enormous lion in beast form. All dead. They smelled like fresh meat, like a trip to the butcher instead of the grisly stench of death I’d feared. But that was revolting too.

These bodies were still, not the empty walking husks I’d heard about. Perhaps that hadn’t been a Shadow Walker but a regular beast.

But as I watched, the lion’s eyes flicked open and fixed me in their golden stare.