Dreams of Gods & Monsters (Daughter of Smoke & Bone #3) - Laini Taylor Page 0,93

queen, young and beautiful, and had been smiled at by many a man, flushed to be the focus of it.

Except, of course, that she wasn’t.

When he spoke, his voice was low and sweet and rough with love. “Karou? Are you there?”

Scarab flushed deeper and was glad of invisibility, and glad she’d pushed Carnassial back from her mind a moment earlier so that he couldn’t feel the flare of heat this stranger’s smile had sparked in her.

His beauty—it was of the sort that made you fall very still and conserve your awe like a held breath. His power was part of it—the raw, wild musk of sirithar, forbidden and damning; just to breathe him in was an indulgence—but it was his happiness that pierced, so intense that she experienced it as much with her heart as with her eyes.

Godstars. She had never felt happiness like what she saw in him in that moment, and she was sure she’d never inspired it, either. Her first night with Carnassial in the spring, when the rituals and dance had ended and they had at last been left alone, she had felt his hunger and delight before he even touched her. It had felt like something real then, but, quite suddenly, it didn’t anymore.

This look was so much more than that, and the pierce became an ache as Scarab wondered: Who was it for?

Sendings pulsed back to her from Reave and Spectral, and from Carnassial, too—not Nightingale, whom she had still not told—and for an instant they overwhelmed her. Reave and Spectral were older, more practiced magi and telesthetes than she and Carnassial were, and one of their sendings—the two arrived together and tangled, so that Scarab couldn’t say which was whose—conveyed a reaction of staggering shock that actually made her blink and take a step back.

He spoke again, his brow creasing in uncertainty as his smile faltered. “Karou? Is that you?”

—Someone is coming.

Carnassial’s words, and on the heels of his sending, Scarab heard footsteps in the passage and moved swiftly to one side, which brought her up against Carnassial in a corner of the chamber. She felt him stiffen at the contact and draw immediately away—afraid of angering her with unsolicited touch, she supposed—and she was sorry for the loss of his solidity in the depth and breadth of this stunning strangeness.

Then a figure came into view.

She was a girl of around Scarab’s own age. She was neither a seraph nor one of the chimaera the seraphim here mingled with.

She was… alien. Not of this world. Scarab had never seen a human, and though she knew what they were, the actual sight of one was blinkingly curious. The girl had neither wings nor beast attributes, but instead of seeming like lack, this simplicity of form came across as a kind of stripped-down elegance. She was slender, and moved with the grace of a duskdeer drawing its first substance together out of midsummer shade, and her prettiness was of such a curious flavor that Scarab couldn’t say whether it was more pleasing or startling. She was cream-colored, and as black-eyed as a bird, and her hair was a shimmer of blue. Blue. Her face, like her lover’s, was flushed with joy, and dappled with the same sweet and tremulous shyness as his, as though this were something new between them.

“Hi,” she said, and the word was a wisp, as soft as the brush of a butterfly’s wing.

He didn’t answer in kind. “Were you just here?” he asked, looking past her and around her. “Glamoured?”

And this clicked into place for Scarab. Sensing a presence, the magus had thought it was this girl, invisible, which meant that the human could do magic.

“No,” was her answer. She looked tentative now. “Why?”

His next move was very sudden. He took her arm and pulled her to him, placed her behind him, and faced outward, peering into the emptiness of the chamber that was, of course, not empty at all. “Is someone there?” he demanded, in Seraphic this time, and when his eyes raked Scarab now, they held only what she had expected to see before: suspicion and the low burn of ferocity. Protectiveness, too—for the pretty blue alien he sheltered with his body.

With his body, Scarab noted with curiosity, but not with his mind. He put up no shield against anima but only stood there, strong and fierce, as though that made any difference. As though his life thread and his lover’s weren’t as frail as gossamers glinting in the