Captive of Wolves (Bound to the Fae #1) - Eva Chase Page 0,83
put Whitt’s complaints out of my mind and finish my sandwich. Then I curl up on the bed, wishing I’d thought to bring one of the books from the entertainment room with me. After doing little more than lazing around on the sofa all day, I’m not remotely tired.
The thumping of hoofbeats tells me the visitors have arrived. I ease over to the window, which Sylas assured me has a “glamor” on it that makes it look from the outside as if the curtains are always drawn. To my frustration, no angle lets me see the front of the keep. Sylas’s voice rings out in a greeting too muffled by the distance for me to make out the exact words.
A woman I vaguely recognize from Whitt’s revels comes into view, leading three horses more elegant than any steed I ever saw in the human world: slim-legged and necked with gracefully sloping heads, hair and manes glinting with an opalescent sheen, one dusky gray, one pale bay, and one nearly white. They prance across the ground so light-footed I’d believe they were gliding above the grass.
She brings them around the other side of the keep to where the stable must be, and I see nothing more to do with the new arrivals. I sink back down on the bed and rub my foot absently. A trace of the rich smells from the extravagant dinner August will have whipped up—with help from pack members, presumably—trickles around my door. My stomach pinches even though it’s full of a perfectly tasty sandwich.
I lie down and burrow my head into my pillow, but even with my eyes closed, my thoughts keep racing too quickly for me to have any hope of sleeping. I kick off the covers and then pull them back over me. What are they talking about downstairs? Why did this fancy-pants guy and part of his cadre come calling?
Even if they don’t know I’m here, the outcome of this visit could still change how Sylas decides to deal with me.
Finally, curiosity niggles down too deep for me to ignore it. I have proven I can move silently through the halls. The shape of the spiral staircase means that even if someone approaches the second floor, I’ll have plenty of warning before they can get a look at me. I need to know what’s going on here and in the world around if I’m going to make the right decisions, as much as I’m able to decide anything at all about my fate.
Not bothering with my brace, I limp carefully to the door and open it only wide enough for me to slip by. With careful if uneven steps, I make my way to the bend in the hall and around it. My bare feet make no sound against the floorboards.
I don’t even need to walk all the way to the top of the stairs. When I reach the lavatory door, the voices traveling up from the dining room sharpen enough for me to follow most of the conversation—at least on one side. The newcomers seem to enjoy talking in loud, sweeping voices, as if their volume makes them more impressive.
“From what I heard, the stuff didn’t make it out this way very often,” a deep male voice is saying.
“We managed without,” Sylas replies. “After all, until recently, no one had it at all.”
A female voice pipes up, throaty and strident. “True. And I suppose you can’t blame Aerik for not wanting to bother sending his people right out to the fringes.”
Aerik. They’re talking about the tonic he made to cure the fae of the full-moon wildness—the tonic he started making once he had access to my blood. Whitt mentioned that Aerik hadn’t always shared that tonic with Sylas’s pack, but I didn’t realize the snub was major enough that the whole community would know about it. It sounds like he pretty much never let them have any.
With everything I know now of Sylas’s ideas about honor and integrity, I have to think he must have been awfully desperate to have gone as far as breaking into Aerik’s home.
Did this lord come all the way here himself because of the tonic—because he heard something that made him suspicious? I creep a tad closer, my ears pricked and my mouth bone dry.
It seems like the subject only came up so the visitors could needle their hosts, though. The man—Tristan?—starts rambling on about some quest he went on to slaughter an ivory boar, with occasional