2. Cove Moonstriker

Chapter 2

Cove Moonstriker

I’d been too quick to offer myself up to go to Dawnchaser lands. I hadn’t gone back to that cursed place since I was fifteen, and...well, at the time I’d sworn to myself I’d never return. There wasn’t a Dawnchaser alive who could be trusted; the lot of them like a nauseating mass of swarming, seething, scheming vipers who cared only about how to get advantage over everyone else, even each other.

There wasn’t a drop of loyalty in the Dawnchaser bloodline.

All I’d ever be able to see in those beautiful Dawnchaser green eyes were lies.

You’re not being fair, you know , Iri said, smug and irritating. You can’t judge the whole family based on a single visit you made here before we even resonated .

Huxley murdered Oberon Gloombringer last month , I pointed out to her, staring out the window at the gorgeous Dawnchaser countryside. It was a riot of flowers on all sides. Kinds of flowers I hadn’t seen in years. We grew some in hothouses in Moonstriker lands, but it was different here. Not just one or two or even a single bush. They were everywhere, flowers covering every surface, every piece of ground, the sides of houses, growing in trees.

More real, less art.

Once, I’d loved it. Thought I’d loved even more than the beautiful Dawnchaser lands, covered in a blanket of green and flowers, the air as sticky as warm honey. Thought maybe I’d even been in love...

Iri hummed in annoyance, but didn’t disagree. She wanted to say that Oberon was a boor, but I knew that. Everyone who’d ever met the man had known that. But being a boor didn’t mean it was acceptable to murder him, however tempting it might have been every time he’d opened his ignorant mouth.

There were reasons I’d willingly let go of all communication between us and the other ruling families of the Summerlands. The Dawnchasers were snakes, to a man. The Sunrunners were temptation personified, like the lotus eaters of legend, constantly there as a beckoning hand, offering a life of leisure, hazy days floating on a cloud of drugs and alcohol, and fucking everything that moved. And the Gloombringers? Well, Oberon was insufferable, and while I liked Titania, I couldn’t bring myself to watch her throw her life away, falling into that Sunrunner trap. I didn’t blame her for her drinking, but...well, if I were being entirely honest with myself, it was too much temptation for me to fall into the same hole and never crawl back out.

Really? Iri demanded, tone more crystalline than human, and it jangled against my mind, jerking me upright. You never said that before. You’ve never...you’re tempted to drown your sorrows in alcohol?

I sighed and sank down into the car seat again, letting my gaze drift to the sunroof that my right hand, Coral, had opened to let light into the car as she drove. She lifted a brow at me in the rearview mirror, but I ignored it, focusing on Iri.

Iri had been talking more lately, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. We’d first bonded soon after my ill-fated trip to Dawnchaser lands as a teen, when I’d made the same ridiculous trek that Delta had sent the children on just a month ago, each of them to a different corner of the Summerlands to “prove” themselves worthy of leading the family.

I should have fought with her when she’d decided to continue that horrible family tradition. After it had nearly killed me in every way that mattered, I shouldn’t have allowed it.

But after the Dawnchaser had broken me, I’d always been a pitiful shell of a human being who let my sister walk all over me.

Thank fuck that Rain, at twenty-four, was stronger than I’d been at fifteen. Instead of Dawnchaser monsters, he’d met Adair Courtwright, an honest man and a perfect match for my Rain. As much as Delta hated the idea of Rain marrying, I was thrilled for him. For both of them. A partner and equal was just what Rain needed. More important, it was the life he wanted, and it was making him happier than I’d ever seen him before.

I loved my sister dearly. She’d saved me, protected me from the world over and over. But that didn’t change the fact that she was wrong about relationships. She didn’t understand love at all. Love could make a person more and better and stronger.

It just hadn’t happened for either of us.

Iri, though. She was what I’d been thinking about. Iri, and how she was suddenly talking all the time. She’d never done it before. We’d met when I’d been aching after my experience in Dawnchaser lands, and I’d never known if she’d just not been interested in me, or if she wasn’t that talkative.

I wasn’t sure if I liked this newfound chattiness or found it annoying.

Annoying for sure , Iri answered for me. Big strong silent you has never liked talking .

But that wasn’t true. My mother had once called me the family chatterbox. Before. I’d been so much like Rain as a child that sometimes it hurt to look at him. If things had been different, perhaps I could have been like him still.

That thought, for some reason, made Iri go quiet.

“Here we are,” Coral said, sighing, looking no more happy to be pulling up at Dawnchaser Manor than I was.

She wasn’t any happier than me about this. She’d been with me the first time in Dawnchaser lands, too; had been drugged out of her mind and left to choke on her own vomit on the night Afton Dawnchaser had destroyed my childhood. Coral had almost died.

Internally, I felt Iri jerk away at the thought. She was shocked. No surprise. I’d spent nearly thirty years trying desperately not to think about anything that had happened in this hope-forsaken place with these human-faced eels.

“Here indeed,” I said. And then for a long time, we sat in the car, staring at the building’s facade.

Like everything in Dawnchaser lands, it was beautiful. Red brick with wooden beams, lush green vines covered with purple and fuchsia flowers climbing up one entire side of the three-story building. In every direction, for miles all around, were the Dawnchaser gardens. They were famed the world over, colorful and bright and verdant, and if there was a flower that grew in this climate, it existed inside the gardens.

Well, unless it was a dandelion. None of those common flowers were allowed. Certainly nothing that had ever been called a weed.

It was too bad, since I rather liked dandelions, but the Dawnchaser version of beauty was a snobbishly curated one, as false as the faces they showed the world.

My phone rang with a video call, and I took it for the blessed distraction it was.

The number was programmed into the phone, so it came up along with an ancient picture, since I hadn’t seen the individual calling in person since we were children together. We’d spoken on the phone many times in the last few weeks, though, and I’d been enjoying it as much as I had thirty years earlier, when we’d been the youngest members of the new generation.

“Titania,” I answered, and somehow, I found a smile on my lips. It hurt if I held a smile too long, the expression was so foreign to my face, but I couldn’t seem to keep it away when talking to her.

She smiled back, but hers was shaky. Tremulous. That was odd. She’d been handling Oberon’s murder like a fucking champion marathon runner—better than I could possibly have dealt with it if someone murdered Delta. “Have you—are you there yet?”

“We just pulled into the drive,” I told her, turning the phone so she could see the manor itself. When I turned it back, I grimaced. “I haven’t built up the courage to go in yet.”

She gave a wet little giggle and shook her head. “You’re ridiculous. You’ve never been afraid of anything in your life, Cove. Not like the rest of us.”

I could feel Iri’s agreement, and it was...odd. How did someone who essentially shared my brain know me so little? It was normal for Titania to think that—it was the face I’d always tried to present to the world. But Iri could see inside my head.

But you never talk to me , Iri answered irritably.

Didn’t I?

No!

Hm. That was odd. I shook off the conversation with Iri and met Titania’s eye steadily. “I will handle this. I promise.”

“I know you will. I do. I’m just...please hurry.” She turned and looked behind her. “The old barn just collapsed.”

Old barn . . . “The one behind the castle?”

It was her turn to move her phone and show me what she was seeing. It was terrifying. The barn that had long stood behind Gloombringer Castle, a structure where they kept the tools to look after the hedge maze and myriad other outdoor equipment, was now nothing more than a pile of broken beams. I could see a mower covered in wood on one side, and stacks of old tile under another section, like the thing had just fallen down atop everything.

I sucked in a shocked breath. “Mount Slate?”

She turned the phone back to her face, and she was nodding. “It gave a rumble that almost knocked me off my feet just now, and then there was an awful noise, and—” She motioned with an arm, and though I couldn’t see where she was pointing, I didn’t doubt it was to the remains of the barn. “It’s getting worse, Cove. If we can’t all four work together, and soon, then people are going to die. And that’s only if no one already has after this morning’s quake.”

And that was an excellent point all on its own. I knew from my research into the subject that the volcano would do this for a good year before there was true threat of an explosion, but from what Adair Courtwright had told me, it had been more than six months already. That left us less than six months to clean this mess up.

Less than six months to get the four families on the same page and working together, though we hadn’t tried to so much as speak to each other in decades.

Well, we had to get them working together as much as vipers like the Dawnchasers were ever capable of working with anyone when it didn’t serve them. When they didn’t stand to gain anything but their lives from it.

Titania and myself? There would be no problem there. I’d happily work with her any time she named, any place she asked me to be, and I suspected she felt the same.

That left Dane Sunrunner, whom I’d managed to get on the phone for about a minute and a half after Oberon’s murder. He’d been glassy-eyed and only half present, but he’d managed to look me in the eye and tell me to stab that fucker Huxley once for him. Oberon, it seemed, had been his to kill if the job had needed doing. Since I’d been calling Dane to get permission to handle the situation with Huxley myself, that moment of lucidity had been all I’d needed, but it also hadn’t been reassuring when he’d fallen asleep on the other end of the line immediately after giving it, and a naked young woman had apologized to me for “his lordship’s exhaustion” and hung up.

And then there was the Dawnchaser. Huxley and the Dawnchaser stone, Soz, were an entirely necessary piece of this puzzle. Well, Soz was. Soz and whatever person they were currently singing to. At the moment, that was Huxley. Soon, it would have to be someone else, both because Huxley had killed Oberon and needed to pay for that crime, and perhaps more importantly, because I didn’t think Huxley gave a damn about saving the world.

Rain had been shocked by the very notion that someone might let the world burn down around them instead of helping, but he was still so young, and as smart as he was, sometimes he was also naive. He didn’t understand the depths to which some people would stoop if they thought it would help them seize power. Some people would rather see the world destroyed than free.

And in this case, “some people” was Huxley Dawnchaser.

The front door of the manor house opened, and out came the familiar, comforting figure of Delta’s son, Frost. He was beautiful, like his father had been, tall and willowy with dark smooth skin and, unfortunately for Frost, that cursed Moonstriker white hair. My hair and Delta’s.

“I suppose I have to go in,” I told Titania, sighing. “Into the viper’s den. Wish me luck.”

“All the luck, Cove. They’ve got a stranglehold on the stuff, so maybe you’ll need it. But you know what you’re doing.” She gave me a concerned look before we hung up, but also, a bolstering nod, like she was sure I could handle it. A twinkle of Verelle, hanging at her throat right beneath her other sapphire, Pip, told me that no matter what other trouble we had, at least Titania and I were on the same page. At least we both cared.

I wished I were as certain as Titania that I knew what the hell I was doing. Nothing to do but start, though. As much as I wanted to motion Frost into the car and tell Coral to turn around and get us the hell out of there, that wasn’t what we had to do. So I put on my neutral face, the one everyone called “so cold,” and opened the door, stepping out into the too-hot, floral-scented air.

“Uncle Cove,” Frost said, looking happier than I thought I’d ever seen him before, stepping forward to wrap me in a hug. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

That made one of us.