Capture the Crown (Gargoyle Queen #1) -Jennifer Estep Page 0,37

sleep out here on the settee.”

He stiffened, as though I had slapped him across the face and offended his honor. “You take the bed. I can sleep out here.”

“You’re the one who got hurt, so you take the bed. I’ve slept on far worse things than a lumpy settee.”

Something flickered across his face, but it vanished in an instant. Leonidas opened his mouth as if to keep arguing, but I stabbed a finger at him.

“Don’t be an idiot. You need rest far more than I do. Especially since you look like you’re about to pass out again.”

He grumbled something under his breath, but this was a battle he would never win. Miner, princess, or spy, Gemma Ripley was nothing if not a good hostess, even to her mortal enemy.

Leonidas shuffled toward the bedroom. He stopped at the door and looked at me. “Thank you. For saving me. I would be dead right now if it wasn’t for you.” His lips twisted a little, as if the sentiment left a sour taste in his mouth.

I shrugged off his thanks. “Just promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“That you’ll keep giving Andvarian girls flowers instead of trying to kill them.” The words came out harsher and crueler than I intended, perhaps because of our shared past.

Leonidas flinched, but he tilted his head. “As my lady wishes.”

He lifted his right arm out to his side and crossed his left one over his waist, dipping into a traditional Mortan bow, although the motion was stiff and shallow. The prince straightened. He gazed at me a moment longer, then vanished into the bedroom and shut the door.

I waited a few seconds, but the lock didn’t click home. Perhaps he finally believed that I wasn’t going to murder him. Not tonight, anyway. Soft footsteps sounded, then the faint creak of bedsprings whispered through the walls.

I yanked my sword out of the dressing screen and grabbed my shield. I set the weapons within easy reach on the table beside the settee, then built a fire.

The heat warmed my face, but the continued crack-crack-cracks of the wood reverberated through my mind, just as those phantom screams had been doing all day long. I didn’t always have to be around other people in order for my magic to overwhelm me. Sometimes, a smell was enough to upset my power. A particular color. Or, in this case, a sound.

I grimaced, got to my feet, and spun away from the fireplace, trying to ignore the storm, the magic, rising up inside me.

Too late.

I took a step toward the settee, but from one moment to the next, the living room dropped away, and I found myself standing in the middle of a forest . . .

Crack.

A twig snapped under someone’s foot, and I whirled around. Three people were trudging through the woods.

The first was a short, sixty-something man. Wrinkles grooved into his ebony skin, and a generous amount of silver glinted in his short black hair, but his hazel eyes were warm and kind. Alvis, the Seven Spire royal jeweler.

The second was a woman, also in her sixties, with wavy coppery red hair, golden amber eyes, and bronze skin. A snarling ogre face with the same red hair and amber eyes that the woman herself had was visible on her neck. Lady Xenia Rubin, a famed spymaster.

The third person was a twelve-year-old girl with long, tangled dark brown hair and pale skin. Her dress was tattered and torn, and purple circles of exhaustion ringed her blue eyes. Me. Gemma Ripley. Or Gems, as I’d thought of myself back then.

The three of them approached me, but I didn’t bother hiding. They couldn’t see me, since this wasn’t really happening. At least, it wasn’t happening right now. No, this trek had taken place in the Spire Mountains about two weeks after the Seven Spire massacre.

My mother, Merilde Ripley, had been a time magier who had often seen the future. I had inherited a bit of her magic, but more often than not, I got dragged back into the past, as if I were a spectator watching previous events that had been recorded by a memory stone. Yet another frustrating way in which my power controlled me, rather than me controlling it. Because if I could have managed my magic, I never would have thought about the massacre or its aftermath ever again.

My mother and Alvis had both called this cursed ability ghosting. I could see and hear everything, even remember everything I had thought, felt, and experienced.