Yew Queen Trilogy Read online

  The buzzing of my magic faded. I took a deep breath and let go of him, desperate to feel in control of my own damn body again. I hated this need I felt.

  Kaippa got to his feet and tugged his sleeves down at the wrists. “It’ll take three days to bring forth the book.” He looked up. “Lucus.”

  I frowned, wondering why he had said his name. “Three days. I can go back to my bakery and my life for a little while, hmm?” Oh, how I wanted to hear a simple Yes.

  A vine reached toward Lucus, and he plucked one of its leaves. With careful movements, he wrapped my cut palm. The cooling relief was immediate.

  “Coren, you may return to your life,” he said, “and we won’t lure you back for three days. On one condition.”

  “Spit it out. I’m losing daylight here.”

  “You must allow me to feed on your aura.”

  “Oh, nice. Aurelio is the one who seems like he’s starving. And how does that help Kaippa?”

  “She cares.” Kaippa put his hands over his heart and grinned like a psychopath.

  “Don’t get excited, pal. I’m just trying to figure this shit out.”

  Lucus’s face darkened. “You know better by now not to question my love for my brothers. I have the most control of us all, and therefore, the best chance of keeping you alive. And withstanding the sudden rush of your powerful aura. And as an alpha, I can give some of your aura energy to the trees in the courtyard. My brothers can feed off the trees’ energy, and Kaippa can feed on the sap.”

  “I remember you saying you could eat the trees or whatever, but why do you even bother with humans if you can do that?”

  “They don’t hold enough energy to sustain us properly,” Lucus said. “Not without a fae feeding energy into them.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  “No.” Kaippa raised his chin. “I demand the equivalent of one vial of blood. Real blood. I haven’t had any since our second appearance. I’m already losing my eyesight. I am desperate, and you know where desperation leads, Lucus.”

  Lucus stared at the floor, his body vibrating with anger or frustration—maybe both. I wasn’t sure whether it stemmed from his basic hatred of Kaippa and vampires as a whole or if this tightly leashed rage of his had something to do with Kaippa and me.

  “Coren, do you agree to Kaippa’s request and to allow me to access your aura?” Lucus’s words came out like punches, quick and furious.

  I swallowed, my mind whirling around a thousand possible problems with this, the biggest being death, but I had to get back to Hekla, to the bakery, to life. I wanted to enjoy a few days, plot without these immortals breathing down my neck, and say goodbye to Hekla just in case this whole thing went south, which it most likely would.

  I gritted my teeth and said a prayer to the universe at large. “Agreed.”

  Chapter 20

  My stomach did a not fun cartwheel. “I’m guessing you can’t use the palm slice I already opened up?” I waved my leaf-wrapped hand.

  “That wouldn’t be pleasant for you.” Kaippa glanced at Lucus. “If I take you by the neck, my venom will numb the area.”

  “You’ll feel much like you are under a lure,” Lucus bit out.

  “Well, that sounds slightly less horrifying.” I turned to Lucus. “And you’ll stay here just in case he gets greedy, right?”

  Lucus nodded but moved back a step as Kaippa came closer.

  “Before we get down to business here, I have a question.” I felt like an idiot, but I had to ask. Aunt Viv hadn’t covered everything. Not even close. “I’m not, like, going to become a vampire at some point after this feeding thing, am I?”

  Lucus shook his head. “You would have to drink the blood yourself.”

  Shuddering, I held up a hand. “Okay. Not a problem.”

  Kaippa locked gazes with me, his slightly canted eyes stirring the raw female inside me, the one that tended to urge me off cliffs into wild waters. “You shouldn’t decide against activities you have yet to experience, Coren.”

  “No one’s perfect.”

  I pulled my collar farther from my neck. Might as well get this over with. My heart was a jackhammer between my ribs as I tipped my head to give Kaippa access.

  He took me in his arms like a lover, and I stiffened, really wanting to jam a knee into his groin. Kaippa winked, then his mouth was on my throat. There was a jarring pinch, but then a tingling sensation replaced the pain, and my muscles relaxed. The tingling spread down my chest, and my nipples pebbled inside my lacy bra.

  Lucus’s gaze slid over me, and he took one deep, hitching breath. Kaippa’s lips moved along my skin, but I could barely feel them. I could totally feel his hands curling into my shirt and his lean body against mine. I never would’ve said I could be attracted to a guy like this, but here I was, swooning like hell in his vampy arms. With every pull from Kaippa’s mouth, a surge of desire plunged through me. The room began to spin.

  Lucus stepped forward and gripped the back of Kaippa’s neck. “Enough.”

  The vampire snarled, his teeth grazing my partially numbed skin.

  “Kaippa.” Lucus’s tone was sharp as knives.

  Relenting, Kaippa licked my neck, then backed away as he wiped his red lips with the back of his hand. I blinked at his transformation. He looked like he’d gained ten pounds of muscle. His hair and eyelashes had thickened, making him look like a guy just out of high school instead of a super creepy, dark alley type of fellow. He looked…angelic.

  “Was it delightful?” Kaippa smirked.

  Lucus had the vampire’s throat in his hand before I could do it myself.

  “Allow me.” I pushed Lucus off him, then smacked the hell out of Kaippa’s cheek, going old school. “Have some manners, assface. This is not a date. This is life or death shit.”

  Kaippa sauntered toward the door. “I may be the vampire here, but you’re the one sucking the life out of this moment.”

  He waved his fingers as he began to leave, but then he stopped at the door, forehead wrinkling. His tongue swept over his red lips. “You’re not a shifter, Coren. I can taste your mage blood.”

  I did not like that grin of his. “So what?” My heart pumped too much blood through my veins, and my head pounded.

  Kaippa shrugged. “Another secret for me to take to my grave, so to speak.”

  “Ha ha.” I stared.

  “Will you keep this to yourself?” Lucus asked.

  “I will. This will make casting that much more powerful. I’m feeling quite good right now. Thank you.” He tipped an imaginary hat at me and left the room.

  “All right. Okay. One down. One to go.” I rubbed my frigid hands together, ready to get this horror show on the road so I could return to my life and check on Hekla and the bakery.

  “I would prefer to go to my chamber, if you don’t mind.” Lucus gestured to the door.

  “Mage room cramping your style?”

  “Something like that.”

  And then I followed the fae lord toward his bedroom. Yeah. This was my life now.

  In the corridor, Lucus stopped and turned, his gaze traveling from my eyes to my chin, then back again like he was making sure I was all right. “I want to share another memory with you before we go further.”

  I stepped closer. “Which one?”

  “If you are to break this curse, you will need every scrap of information I can give you. You need to see the curse as it happened.”

  “Like the night the Mage Duke trapped you in here?”

  “Exactly.”

  I didn’t know jack about casting, so it certainly couldn’t hurt to know more. And maybe it would give me clues on how to control my magic. “Let’s do it.”

  With a nod, Lucus spread his wings. One small vine snaked from the edge and slid across my shoulder, along my collarbone. The vine crawled around the back of my neck, and chills spread along my skin.

  The corridor in the castle disappeared as the memory shimmered to life around me.

  I stood
in the castle’s courtyard, seemingly alone. Wind whistled past my ears and shook the leaves on the trees that grew in the center. Rose petals broke from their blooms, flitting into the night sky.

  A whisper turned me around.

  My heartbeat tripled. Memory or not, this quiet courtyard was seriously creepy. Two shapes moved beside one of the archways. I stepped forward, but that invisible barrier was up. The hissed conversation filtered through the barrier, and I understood them just as I had in the last memory Lucus had showed me.

  “They aren’t here.”

  “They must be.”

  A third shape moved through the starlight to join the others. “Where are the guards?”

  “It’s an ambush. Be prepared.” Emerald sparks lit three sets of hands.

  I couldn’t tell who was talking to whom, but I knew it was Lucus, Baccio, and Aurelio. Had to be. They were here to murder the Mage Duke.

  The three fae brothers flew to the top of the castle walls, the stars outlining their vine wings and dark, twisting horns. Their forest scent blew across my face, and an owl called out mournfully, and wolves howled from far, far away. I couldn’t help but wish they would just fly into the night and leave this terrible place before—

  “Did you think I would wait here, sleeping like a dotard while your foul roots choked the life from me?”

  I spun to see a man in shining armor. He wore no helmet, his dark curls dusting his forehead and broad shoulders. His round eyes should’ve belonged to someone kind and joyful, but the hate flashing inside them—ah. I fell back, realization rushing over me like a sickness. He could’ve been Aunt Viv’s twin. This was my ancestor, Mage Duke Ludovico Sforza.

  Lucus and Baccio flew at him, teeth bared white in the near dark and wings snapping.

  The Mage Duke thrust someone forward out of the shadows and set a hand against this victim’s throat. Magic crackled over the Mage Duke’s fingers, illuminating the captive’s face. He had chestnut hair and broad cheeks. His shirt was blood red.

  Francesco.

  “Should I kill him quickly as you did to my Lucilla?” The magic snapped, and Francesco hissed, his foot slipping as pain tore at his features. The Duke, his eyes welling with shining tears, pulled Francesco up, helping him stand while he scorched him with the jagged streaks of his power.

  Lucus swooped over the trees of the courtyard and slammed down in front of the Duke, Baccio and Aurelio in his wake, hands flashing emerald and mossy green, wings snapping in the night air.

  Lucus’s tangled emotions rushed at me like a windstorm, and I bent over, coughing, my head screaming with pain. I feared for his brothers’ lives, the idea of losing them like falling into darkness. The stark, hollow sensation that had followed my mother’s death engulfed me like yesterday had been her last. Lucus’s emotions rolled through me, stronger now, his regret for the loss of Lucilla trumping every one of his life’s agonies.

  Sweat ran down the sides of my face. Panic spasmed in my chest, but I had to shake this off, to focus. If there were clues to breaking the upcoming curse, I had to see them now. Pressing my hands against the invisible barrier of the memory, I straightened.

  The Duke gripped Francesco’s throat more tightly, fingers flexing and glowing the same color as my own magic, too lovely a color for such a dark purpose. “I think a quick death for you and yours is too easy. My Lucilla lost a lifetime.”

  The veins in his throat shook, his eyes crazy wide, then lightning caged the entire castle in jagged lines of blinding amethyst as the ground trembled under our feet. Dust fell from the walls. The trees in the courtyard shivered. Lucus, Baccio, and Aurelio—held impotent in the situation—snarled and called out in fae, shoulders rising and falling as they stared the Mage Duke down.

  Lucus’s hands flexed at his sides, and the shame welling from him was palpable. “I will never forgive myself for Lucilla’s death.”

  The Duke lunged, his grip still on Francesco’s throat. “Do not say her name!”

  He raised his hands, calling a whirling storm of lightning above the courtyard. A metal and herb taste coated my tongue, and my magic coursed through me, jolting my whole body. My knees hit the stones as one massive lightning strike crashed to the ground beside the fae.

  Chapter 21

  Cobblestones erupted from the ground along with vines and roots controlled by Lucus and his brothers, but the mage’s lightning sliced through the twisting arms of wood and leaf. Another bolt smashed into the ground beside Lucus, and he and his brothers took off into the sky, Lucus veering around the Duke. Through the memory’s emotional connection, I knew Lucus was angling to grab Francesco so they could fight back with their full force.

  The Mage Duke threw Francesco to the ground and lifted both palms. “I curse these intruders, those not of my clan.”

  Lucus flew at him, vines curling from his fingertips, but a sphere of pale light circled the Duke and flung Lucus backward. Baccio and Aurelio lashed woody roots at the sphere, but the earthen weapons sizzled on contact.

  “Every century, you will see the world you can no longer enjoy, the world you stole from my Lucilla. You will travel along the ley line, sleeping in the earth like dead men, surviving on just one victim, possessing only enough energy to survive and endure the torture of a half-life.”

  Lightning snapped across the chests of Lucus and his brothers, and they collapsed, sprawled on the broken cobblestones like corpses.

  The curse was a grip on my soul, a black pain that cracked me open and poured poison into my blood. I gagged, the world spinning as the Duke’s evil magic tore my heart, squeezed my limbs, and ripped my consciousness like it had clawed fingers inside my actual head. This was evil beyond anything. I would never be the same after feeling this. I fisted my hands, stomach lurching and eyes hazy. Never.

  “At the close of each moon cycle,” the Duke said, his voice like breaking glass, cutting my ears and burning eyes with unshed tears, “you will sacrifice a piece of your soul, or you will all die at once. I will spread hate for the fae far and wide. Your kind is no more. Lord Lucus,” the Duke snapped, “as you watch your brothers die, may your unforgiven heart shatter as mine does over and over again until I join my daughter in death.”

  Bleeding from his side and his ears, Lucus groaned and rolled, trying to stand, his pain my pain, his agony and desperate need to get to the mage and take him down so strong inside my own chest that I could barely breathe.

  The Mage Duke clapped his hands together. The lightning sped to the castle’s walls, then crawled like shining snakes over every dip and ledge, each brick and stone. Before the magic reached the castle door, the Duke fled.

  “Duke Ludovico!” Kaippa ran from the back of the courtyard, his face like stone in the amethyst light of the spreading curse.

  The Mage glanced at Kaippa before turning to leave. He shouted something unintelligible, then was gone.

  “Master?” Kaippa ran toward the door, panic pulling his features taut.

  The portcullis hit the ground. Kaippa slammed into its metal grating, roaring in frustration as the magic slithered over his hands, covering the entire structure and everything inside.

  The memory fizzled away, and the real world returned.

  I leaned against the corridor’s wall, sucking air, willing the feel of that curse and Lucus’s emotions away. He touched my shoulder.

  “I’m fine. Give me a minute.” Power shifted inside me, and I jerked, falling into Lucus’s arms.

  “It’s your magic.”

  “I felt the Duke’s power in the curse. It was…” There was no word to describe the pure evil of what I’d experienced. And oddly, I didn’t think a fae could understand it. Only a mage would. I shook my head and straightened. I had only just become a mage. Why would I even think something like that?

  “Did you learn anything?” Lucus kept his voice even, but desperation lanced his tone. It cut me like I was still connected to his feelings.

  I swallowed and took another deep breath. “
I would love to say I have all the answers, but this will take some time to pull apart. There wasn’t anything obvious, but I have no idea what undoing a curse entails, so I really don’t even know what to ponder over.”

  “Listen to your mage instinct. It will guide you.”

  “Yeah, not feeling that.” I wanted nothing to do with being connected to the Mage Duke. My stomach turned thinking of how much he had resembled Aunt Viv. “Let’s get going on the aura thing so I can go home.”

  “Of course.” Lucus tucked a hair behind my ear, his fingertip sending tingling sparks trailing down my neck. “Coren.” I met his gaze and saw that ancient hurt there, the guilt for what he’d done to Lucilla, to his brothers. His grief for Francesco. “Thank you for doing this. I’m sorry you’re tangled in the web of my sins.” His hand lingered by my ear.

  I covered his fingers with mine. “I don’t blame you. It’s just a big bucket of awful. And hey, I am really sorry about your brother.”

  His thumb hooked over my regular human ear, and he smiled sadly. “You may have his blood, but you’re nothing like him.”

  I smiled back but kept my mouth shut. I was a little like him. After all, wasn’t I still planning on trapping them here?

  Chapter 22

  I walked alongside Lucus down the main corridor, his wings brushing the opposite wall and his horns nearly invisible in the low light. We took a turn and entered a warm chamber that had one large, narrow window near the top of a high ceiling.

  The place felt like summer and smelled like Lucus, like pine resin and rain. After draping his cloak on a hook near the door, he lit several candelabras, and the golden light showed a sparkling forest.

  Right there in the bedroom.