was breathing, but its breath left no vapours in the air—cold then, and ice-cold rather than corpse-cold. Fuck, faeries were dicks. Who did that to a person?
I tasted blood and frost again, and I heard the crunch of snow under neat, precise footsteps.
Turning my head, I saw the Prince of Wands, his white linen suit dusted with snow, his hands folded neatly over a silver-topped cane. His eyes had changed, one stained black now, the other mirror-bright. Deep down, though, I was sure he was the same arsehole he’d always been.
“Miss Kane.” He gave me his most patronising smile. “I had hoped that Yelena would have dealt with you already. I see I shall have to reprimand her.”
He raised his hand, and an unseen force lifted me to my feet. My arm was fucking killing me and I was starting to wish I hadn’t got quite so drunk and suddenly I was really, really fucking angry.
Somewhere in the Deepwild, my mother began to pay attention.
23
Snow & Sunlight
The new magic contact lenses didn’t make the Prince of Wands look any less smug.
“I’ll be honest,” I told him. “I almost wanted to be wrong about this. It can’t be Sebastian Douglas, I thought. He wouldn’t be so sloppy.”
He smiled. It wasn’t a cruel smile, which was by far the cruellest thing about it. “Oh, bless you, you’re trying to bait me. What’s the idea, you insult my intelligence, and my fragile ego trembles under the assault and I’m just forced to tell you everything I’m planning before I walk away and leave you in a perilous situation from which you can miraculously escape?”
Fuck. Yeah, that had been the plan.
“Pitiful, even for you.”
And he could still read minds. Fucking brilliant. “Okay, how about this. I’ll tell you what I think you’re planning and you can laugh at all the bits where I’ve guessed wrong or where I’ve guessed right but can’t do anything about it.”
“Do you ever tire of hearing yourself talk, Miss Kane?”
Nice to know he wasn’t the least bit afraid to sound like a giant fucking hypocrite. “Between listening to me and listening to you, I’ll pick listening to me.”
“Then speak. But do remember that these dogs will do exactly as I say and while, as I’m sure you’ve realised, it is far from my intention to kill you any time in the foreseeable future, you would be truly amazed what I can keep you alive through.”
The wolves snarled at my feet. Yeah, I was acutely aware how long I’d be able to live with monsters chewing on my legs, and it was way longer than I would have liked. “Okay.” I tried to stare him down, but it wasn’t happening. “Let’s do this.” I shut my eyes a second and tried to put my thoughts in order. What was his endgame, other than revenge? “You know that your reputation depends on you doing the bloody vengeance thing against anybody who crosses you. This is far more aggressive than you normally get but that’s because normally you’re fucking with vampires so you can take your time, but you needed Tara and me to pay before old age came along and did your job for you, and so you had to get apocalyptic fast.”
He wasn’t showing me any signs so far. But I was sure I was on the right track. “Killing us wouldn’t be enough. You’d need to make us realise we’d lost everything. For Tara that meant destroying Safernoc as completely as you could manage. Giving it to a faery lord would have fit your sense of poetry but—I don’t know, Sebastian, I think working with another power must have galled you, just a little. This”—I did my best to indicate the storm around us despite my whole body being held in place by sheer force of his will—“this looks to me a whole lot like borrowed power. And I don’t think you’re a man who likes borrowing power. Maybe you’re working an angle and you’ll come out of this one with the upper hand, but I think you know that the King of Shadows, the Queen of Winter is getting more out of this deal than you are, and I’m betting that hurts.”
He made the faintest of gestures with his free hand, and my arm twisted in a way it wasn’t meant to twist. It fucking caned, but I’d got to him.
“When you think about it, you’re practically his-her minion here.”