Zodiac Academy 8: Sorrow and Starlight

My hazel hair was pinned back with a silver clip which hid a tourmaline crystal, the magic of which I was going to need tonight if I was ever going to pull this off. I brushed my fingers over the colourful stone, casting a concealment spell to divert anyone’s attention from it.

My heart was galloping like a Pegasus about to take off into the sky, and I took a moment to relax as I sat in my car not far from the gates of The Palace of Souls, just out of sight of the guards. Mom’s voice rang in my head, her words always knowing how to calm me.

“Francesca, you are only as strong as you feel you are. Power is nothing without confidence.”

She’d taught me how to claim my place in the world, and I’d followed in her footsteps in the end, taking up a position in the FIB. I’d never known my father, and it had never occurred to me to go looking for him either. My mom hadn’t planned on having children, but later in life, she had fallen pregnant with me by chance while she was out training on the Isles of Kahinti. There was an entire town there built with the sole purpose of FIB agents partaking in simulation exercises.

FIB units from all over Solaria went there every year, and my mom had had a brief fling with one of the officers. She’d told him about me, but he’d decided he didn’t want anything to do with me, and I’d taken up the same opinion when I was old enough to care.

So Mom had been my person, but a few years ago, I’d had to watch her fade away from me, piece by piece. She’d had a good, long life, and she hadn’t been afraid of stepping beyond the Veil. In fact, she’d been excited to see long lost friends and family again, but her single regret was leaving me here alone. I’d tried to ease her worries; I had lots of friends among my colleagues and outside of them too. But I was pretty sure she was angling at something else, because towards the end, she’d kept asking about one man. The man who I’d seen a future with once. The man who was the reason I was sitting outside this palace now, about to do the unthinkable for.

I’d coped with Mom’s loss in the end, though it changed me, as all death does. I’d seen agents die long before their time in the line of duty, leaving young families behind to try and handle life without them. That was the kind of death that seemed devastatingly unfair, though others would say that as long as they had died fighting for a better world, then their death was not in vain.

Mom had known that too, and she had instilled in me a moral compass which was spinning now, driving me to do the right thing even when it terrified me. But of course, it wasn’t really my morals that had me sitting here in a fitted red dress with a slit up one leg and gold jewellery draped around my throat and wrists. It was him. Forever him.

I flipped the sun visor down and checked my makeup in the mirror on the back of it, my eyes smoky, my lips the colour of blood. Lance Orion may have been mated to another woman, but I had loved him first, and I wasn’t going to let that love turn to bitterness. It may have been unrequited, but that didn’t make it invalid. Though that didn’t make it hurt any less.

I vividly recalled the moment when I’d been summoned into work after his arrest, my friend tipping me off on the whole thing. And I’d actually laughed, certain there was a mistake, that I’d turn up at the precinct to find Lance telling me the truth, then I’d use my Cyclops gifts to clear his name. But it hadn’t turned out that way. When I’d seen him, he’d looked desperate, broken, terrified. He’d turned me away, and I wasn’t sure if that was the moment my heart had shattered or if it was the moment when he’d pleaded guilty and been sent to prison.

I knew him. And I knew that what he’d spoken on the stand had been a lie the moment it left his lips. He sacrificed himself for a Vega princess, a girl who he had spent months agonising over because of her threat to the Celestial Heirs, and in particular, Darius Acrux.

None of it had made any sense until I’d been delivered the final piece of the puzzle in the form of one of the worst nights of my life. Finding him under the stars, newly mated to Darcy Vega, watching him kiss her like she was the lifeblood of his soul, like he could no longer see anyone or anything else. Yes, my heart had broken the moment his illegal affair had come to light, but it had been crushed and set on fire the night he had been mated to her.

I guessed I’d foolishly held onto some quiet hope that she and him wouldn’t last, that he would one day come back to me and we’d pick up where we left off. But no one could defy silver rings.

I’d convinced myself the two of us were meant to be, but the stars had had other plans the whole time.

Wasted. All those years loving him, trying to pretend what he and I had was just sex, telling my friends that was all I wanted from him, and that it suited me just fine. But deep down, for years, I’d harboured that love for him and had been too much of a coward to admit it. Now all that silent suffering seemed so fucking pointless.

Why did I let the years tick by? Why didn’t I Fae up and confess the truth to him? Or better yet, why didn’t I cut things off and give my heart time to get over him?

As my mom would say, “Regret is the enemy of the future.”

I couldn’t move forward if I kept looking back, and yes, I’d had a little time to heal now, but honestly…it was like my heart wasn’t capable of letting him go. So here I was, about to risk my life for him. A fool? Maybe. But I valued him far beyond my own selfish desire to be loved by him. We were friends, Nebula Allies to be precise, and nothing would change that. I would be here for him whether my heart pined for him or not. And as his Nebula Ally, I was here for his Elysian Mate too.

The moment my captain got wind that Lance Orion and Darcy Vega were being held by the king, I’d put my plans into place. The FIB were firmly under the thumb of Lionel Acrux now, and he had planted several of the Kings United Nebula Taskforce among my ranks to ensure we followed through on the new laws.

At first, I’d thought to run, to seek out the rebels and join their ranks, but then I realised that I was in the perfect position to spy on what the king was up to. I’d had to round up ‘lesser’ Fae and send them to the Nebular Inquisition Centres, but that meant I’d seen inside those camps, I’d seen what the king was doing, and my memories would become a weapon the moment I managed to hand them to the rebels. They could expose Lionel’s regime and open the eyes of the civilians who believed the bullshit the false king fed to them about protecting them from traitors and insurgents.

I rolled the plain silver ring on my thumb, a gift from my mother who had also been of the Cyclops Order. The ring was a memory loop, something that could only be created by Cyclopses, and was now home to any memory I wished to store within it. It was the truth as brutally as I could present it, the things I had seen so chilling that I pitied the Fae who had to watch it. But Lionel could not get away with his plans to cull the ‘lesser’ Orders, taking everything they owned, then handing it out to his Dragon friends and anyone he deemed worthy. He was a monster. And I was about to walk into his lair and cast my first stone against him.

I placed a firm barrier over my mind, then stepped out of the car, locking it and slipping the key into my purse which hung from a chain over my shoulder. I walked around to the gates on high heels, a couple of Dragon cronies eyeing me in my skimpy outfit before letting me pass.

My heart was beating faster, but I called on my training and worked to convince myself that this was just another drill, pretending I was going through the motions to pass my latest evaluation. It was easier to think of it like that, a trick I’d picked up from my captain.

By the time I’d climbed the steps up to the imperial entranceway to the palace, I was calm, composed, and ready to face the Dragon King.

I was let inside by a servant, and I followed her along the winding corridors, the scent of smoke hanging heavily in the air. I was led into a grand lounge with low lighting where Lionel Acrux was manspreading in a huge wingback chair by a blazing fireplace, puffing on a cigar. He wore a dark, blood-red smoking jacket, and his eyes glinted jade green for a moment as his gaze fell on me.

The servant bowed and hurried away, leaving me there like a meal for the beast, and my confidence faltered for a moment. Fake it ‘til you make it.

I raised my chin, not letting him see a fraction of fear in me. I was a predator just like he was, and I wasn’t going to let him turn me into prey.

“Good evening, my King.” I bowed my head respectfully and when I looked back up, his head was cocked to one side.

“I am glad you responded so quickly to my invitation, Francesca,” he said, smoke streaming between his teeth as he exhaled. “Though I have to say, after our last meeting, I am surprised you did not reach out sooner.”

“I would never be so brazen to assume you wanted me here, Your Highness. Besides, I am always so busy with work,” I said apologetically, falling into the act I’d been practising for days in front of the mirror, preparing myself for this interaction. He had to believe I was here for him and only him, wholeheartedly trusting that I wanted him, and that no other cause had brought me to his door.

“You could not take a night off for your king?” he asked, a lilt of charisma in his voice.

“I was only trying to please my king by doing my duties in the FIB,” I said, and he released a rumbling laugh.

“Hm, you are a well-bred creature indeed, Francesca. Duty above pleasure, that is the way of powerful Fae such as you and I. But we must indulge ourselves occasionally, no?”

“This is quite the indulgence,” I said, biting my lip a little as I moved deeper into the room and brushed my fingers over the back of the green armchair that sat opposite him. It was far smaller in size, the seat much lower than his, and I had to wonder if that was intentional.

Had his wife sat here across from him? Had she ever loved him? Or had she always feared this terrible man? I couldn’t help but pity her for the life she’d been forced to lead in his shadow, the article which had been published about her marriage to him filling my thoughts for a moment. He had trapped her mind with Dark Coercion, had made her bend to his will in everything, even making her play whore with his friends for political advantage. And yet the woman I’d seen in the photos accompanying that article on her marriage to Hamish Grus only filled me with admiration. If she had endured a lifetime in the company of this monster without breaking, then I could certainly hope to survive a single night.

My gaze slipped to Lionel’s shadow hand which was as black as soot and smoky like it wasn’t entirely solid, the sight of it making me wary, though a twinge of satisfaction filled me at the thought of the original having been destroyed by a Vega.

Lionel stubbed his cigar in the gold ash tray on a table beside him, pushing to his feet and dominating the space with his enormous size. He moved toward me, and I dropped my eyes subserviently as he approached, stepping right into my personal space so the scent of cigar smoke and danger wafted into my lungs.

Keep breathing, Francesca.

“You are lucky,” he said with a chuckle. “I do not bring many women to the palace.”

“What of your queen?” I asked, my skin prickling at the thought of the shadow queen lurking in this cavernous place. Was she close? Could she see us now? I found I feared her even more than the monster now standing before me. The press spun stories about her, touting her as this mystical goddess who had come from the shadow realm to offer all of her love and power to Lionel, but I saw the truth. She wasn’t Fae. She wasn’t even Nymph. She was a weapon more powerful than anything I had encountered during my time in the FIB. I’d faced plenty of monsters, but she was something wholly else. An entity that defied nature and offered Lionel untold power.

“She is preoccupied,” he purred, leaning closer and caressing the gold necklace around my throat, a perfectly intricate little chain that a Dragon would certainly be captivated by. “And I am the king. I do as I please.”

“What is it you would like, my King?” I glanced up at him through my lashes. He would have been attractive if he wasn’t so awful, but it wasn’t impossible to pretend if I imagined him as anyone else but the man he was.

“Is it me?” I pressed. “Am I what you want?”

He nodded, and I leaned into him, placing my hand on his powerful chest, the sturdy thump of his heart sitting right beneath my palm, though I could sense an air shield against his skin too. He wasn’t taking chances. He would have been a fool to.

“Yes, and you want me in return, do you not?”

“I do,” I said huskily. “I wish to please my king more than anything.”

I knew how far down this road I might have to go, and I’d made my peace with that. It was the price I’d pay to get an opportunity to reach Lance, but I had a plan to distract the false king yet that might buy me time.

I leaned up, looping my arms around Lionel’s neck and touching my mouth to his in an offering. He gripped my back, yanking me closer and sinking his tongue between my lips, fire and brimstone washing over my senses.

I pressed my finger to my left palm, casting the emergency response spell that linked directly to my FIB partner. I’d had to entrust her with this plan. She was a good friend and despised Lionel as deeply as I did, but it had taken some convincing to get her to help me out tonight. I hated to put her at risk, but the plan was solid, and Lionel shouldn’t suspect her so long as things went smoothly.

Lionel’s kiss became hungrier and I tried to ignore the crawling sensation in my skin as I let the monster have me.

Come on, Lyla, hurry up.

A knock came at the door but Lionel ignored it, his hand sliding down to squeeze my ass.

“My King?” a woman squeaked. “Apologies, but there is an urgent matter.”

Take the bait, asshole.

Lionel sighed as our lips broke apart, his frustration clear. “Forgive me.” He turned, striding over to the door in anger and wrenching it open. “This had better be important.”

“The northern wards were breached,” the woman stammered.

Lionel stiffened, then glanced back at me. “Wait here, Francesca. I will return shortly.”

I nodded and he slammed the doors between us, a lock clicking before the heavy pounding of his footfalls headed away from me.

I took a steadying breath, wiping my mouth a little to try and get the taste of him off of my lips. I counted to sixty before I moved to the door, pressing my ear to it, and listening for any sound of anyone out there. The faint shuffling of feet made me certain he had stationed someone there, and I shut my eyes, drawing on my gifts and reaching for the mind of the guard. Their mental shields were poor and my power was great. I snagged them under my control in moments and urged them to open the door.

Lionel’s butler was dumb-looking with a shock of red hair and teeth too big for his mouth, his glazed eyes falling on me as I kept him trapped within my thrall.

“Take me to Lance Orion,” I commanded, pressing my will into his mind, and he nodded vaguely, leading me off down the corridor while I worked to maintain the connection, binding him to my will, making sure he wouldn’t remember any of this once it was done too.

My pulse came quicker with every turn we took, passing under gleaming chandeliers and through magnificent arches. The Palace of Souls held a beauty like no other, gothic and intimidating in some places, yet quaint and inviting in others.

Eventually, I was led into the throne room where the huge Hydra throne stood with its many heads and hollowed seat at its heart. The prize this kingdom had been struggling over ever since the Savage King fell.

I gasped as my eyes landed on a cage of night iron beyond it, bolted against the wall where two Fae sat close together within the bars. I ran forward, leaving the butler immobilised by the door as love and pain rose together in my chest at the sight of Lance Orion.

“Francesca?” he gasped in shock, rising to his feet and wincing at the half-healed wounds on his bare chest.

Darcy leapt to her feet too, and I took in the girl who had claimed the heart of the man I loved, finding her nothing like the one I remembered. Her eyes were inky black, no sign of a silver ring within them, and shadows clung to her body, her black hair shifting eerily in the way Lavinia’s did. I didn’t know what I was witnessing and had no time to ask as I pulled Orion into an embrace through the bars.

He slid one arm around me, drawing me close, and my carefully constructed mask started to come apart.

“What have they done to you?” I breathed, not wanting to know but needing to just the same.

“It doesn’t matter. What are you doing here? What’s going on?” he demanded, releasing me and stepping back.

Darcy moved closer and I looked to her, feeling so many things towards this girl. I had envied her night after night the moment I saw her mated to Lance, but it had become more than that. I’d seen what she and her sister had done in this war, and I idolised them in a way I never could have predicted. My loyalty had always been firmly with the Celestial Council and the Heirs, but I couldn’t deny the Vegas’ power anymore. She had to get free of here alongside Lance, and they had to return to the rebels to fight.

I cast a silencing bubble around us all, then gripped the bars, using my air Element to bend two of the bars apart.

“Quickly,” I urged, reaching for the clip in my hair and pulling it free. I twisted the small tourmaline crystal out of the clip and gripped Orion’s forearm, running it up and down.

“What is that?” Darcy asked.

“Francesca,” Orion hissed before I could answer. “I can’t leave here.”

“Nonsense,” I said dismissively. “I have a plan. I have a small amount of stardust. We just need to get beyond the wards, and it’ll be fine.”

I ran the crystal up his other forearm, and the crystal glowed yellow in my palm. “Ah, here. They’ve put a tracking spell on you,” I said, pressing my thumb to the spot and shutting my eyes as I cast the spell which would break the invisible tracking mark placed on him.

“Shit,” he growled, but I smiled as I felt the spell break, reaching for Darcy in an offering.

She moved forward hesitantly, and I took her arm, not giving her time to refuse as I ran the crystal up and down, finding the spell on her too.

“Fran, you have to go,” Darcy said urgently. “It’s not safe for you here. We can’t leave.”

“What do you mean you can’t leave?” I scoffed, breaking the spell on her and backing up. “Come on. Move.”

Darcy and Lance shared a hopeless look, then Darcy rushed toward me, squeezing my hand. “Listen, Gabriel is being held here in the Royal Seer’s chamber.” She started listing off directions hurriedly, but I wasn’t listening, looking to Lance in frustration.

“We have to move!” I commanded, hating the way he was still standing there with no urgency to run. I was breaking them out, didn’t they get it? This was their chance to escape. There might not be another.

“I can’t,” he said, shaking his head, and my heart started to splinter. The crystal crumbled to dust in my palm, the last of its power used up, and I pulled my hand out of Darcy’s, moving toward him and cupping his cheek, so many years of loving him pouring out in my chest.

“Please. I came to get you out. I can’t leave you here. Why won’t you move?”

“Darcy is cursed. I am the answer to that curse, and I must remain here until my debt is paid,” he said thickly. “Please, Francesca, you need to get out of here. It’s not safe here.”

“What have you done?” I whispered in horror, panic welling in me. What did he mean he had to stay here? That he had a debt to pay? And what curse?

“Please go,” Darcy begged, but I couldn’t turn my eyes from the man before me, seeing that he was really refusing to leave. And I suddenly had the most desperate fear that I might never see him again if I turned away from him now.

“Did you ever love me?” I asked quietly, the words choked and making me feel weak and foolish. The question had haunted me ever since I’d learned of him and Darcy Vega. Had I always been just a distraction, or had there ever been a time when he’d considered a future with me? A time when I’d made his heart beat with the furious passion he always garnered from mine?

“Francesca, please,” he rasped. “You must go.”

I moved closer to him still, refusing to leave and releasing a wave of healing magic into his body to steal away those awful wounds on his chest. Was she worth all this pain? Even a mate offered from the stars wasn’t worth suffering like this for, was it?

Though as I thought of my own unrequited love for him, I knew I would take any pain and more for him. It was my bane, an anchor hanging my neck which I’d never found a way free of. I couldn’t even pinpoint the exact moment when I’d fallen for him, maybe it was in the space between our kisses, or the nights curled up on his couch watching Pitball, drinking beer. Just being with him had always felt like the right place to be. But those days were gone, never to return, and I hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye.

“Answer me,” I begged. “Tell me if you ever looked at me and saw a life at my side, a wedding, children. Was it ever me? Even for a fraction of a moment?”

His throat bobbed and his brows drew tightly together, guilt marring his features before he voiced the word that fell like an axe against my neck. “No.”

I nodded mutely, knowing I should be moving, running, trying to get back to that room before Lionel could discover me missing.

“I love you as a friend,” he said hurriedly, like he sensed the agony he’d caused me with that one word. “You’ve always meant so much to me. But I just never…it was never more than that. I’m sorry.”

I nodded again. All the years I’d spent yearning for this man really had been wasted. I had tortured myself over him, I had convinced myself that there was hope when there had always been none. And I could have saved myself so many nights of longing if only I’d asked him this question sooner.

The tears stung my eyes but didn’t fall. I kept them back in the face of everything, shifting my mind onto what mattered.

“We can figure out the curse together. There may be another answer. I’ll take the two of you somewhere safe,” I said firmly.

“There’s time to get to Gabriel,” Darcy implored, gripping my arm and pulling me around to face her so that I stumbled a step away from Lance. “Go to him,” she insisted. “Get him out. He can leave here, but we can’t.”

“I will never leave Lance behind,” I growled.

“You will do as I command,” Darcy barked and I flinched, the power in her words making something wholly Fae within me quake. I saw the Savage King in her eyes and felt his authority ringing through the air, but that authority belonged to her now, this princess whose bloodline once owned the intimidating throne at my back.

The throne room door was flung open with a resounding boom that made me whip around in terror, my hands raising defensively as Lionel Acrux came barrelling towards me, his features twisted into a sneer.

“You dare betray your king?!” he bellowed, air magic blasting at me, and I cast my own air back with a cry of alarm.

His power outmatched mine tenfold and it crashed through mine, snatching me up and throwing me at his feet against the stone floor, a crack sounding as my arm broke beneath me and agony tore through the limb.

His hand latched in my hair, and I looked up at him as pain splintered through me, my two eyes sliding together into one and the full force of my Cyclops gifts slamming against his mental shields. He roared in anger, his teeth bared as he worked to keep his shields in place, and I lost my grip on the butler as I focused all of my effort on breaking into the king’s head.

He had a wall of steel surrounding his mind, but my power was a spear of pure, diamond-tipped titanium. With a cry of effort, my gifts flared from me and I punctured his shields, stealing into his mind.

My breath was torn from my lungs as I found myself falling through the black pit of selfish cruelty which tainted the inside of Lionel Acrux’s head, his thoughts a pit of thorny vines tearing into me as I was tangled within them, flashes of memory spilling into every part of my being.

I took it all in, from the glimpses of him raising his fists against his family to the torture he had inflicted upon all who had stood against him.

My mind spun with so much cruelty and the unending desire for power which ruled this dark creature, impossible to sate and endlessly hungry for more. I almost lost myself in the tangle of that darkness, but I was no newly shifted fledgling cast adrift in the mind of a more powerful Fae, and I knew well how to wield my gifts even in the dark.

Secrets. The word was a demand which echoed from me endlessly, the world outside of us fading to nothing as I latched onto his mind, whips of my Cyclops power lashing against his defences as I threw all I had into this attack, knowing it was all I could do, the only chance I had against one so powerful as him.

Distantly, I heard Orion fighting to reach me, his yells for Lionel to release me cutting the air in two, but a blast of water magic from the butler silenced his plight.

“Stay back,” he crowed, the sounds of a struggle coming in answer, but I was too deep into my gifts to be able to tell what was happening.

Lionel bucked and thrashed against the talons I was sinking into his mind, but I only dug them in deeper, that command resounding from me again as I gave everything I had to this one chance, his body immobilised while I trapped him in his mind.

Secrets!

I bellowed the demand through his skull, and with a resounding crack, my power carved through his remaining resistance and everything I was hunting for spilled from the false king into me. Thoughts and memories poured from him in an endless torrent, his mind crumbling to my demand, and more knowledge than I could easily dissect filling me at once.

I didn’t attempt to make full sense of any of it, simply channelling every single conniving, deviant, hidden moment from his past into the ring on my finger, recording all of it.

I recognised the image of Lionel’s dead brother Radcliff, his eyes wild with fear as he lay in his bed, woken in the night and attacked in the most unFae way imaginable as Lionel pinned him in place, a glass pressed to his chest containing a norian wasp. Murder. UnFae and disgusting. It was no accident, no divine intervention which had placed Lionel into his brother’s position on the Celestial Council, just the cowardly actions of a jealous man with his eyes set on the greatness he was too inferior to claim for himself in any other way.

More and more of Lionel’s secrets sped through me, whispers into the ear of the Savage King, Dark Coercion flowing into the mind of our monarch and turning him into a puppet of wrath and violence, unable to see the traitor who hungered for his throne. It was shocking, this revelation rattling me to my core, but it all made so much sense too.

There was far too much for me to decipher with the speed at which it passed me, but I took it all greedily, stealing every memory I could take, all the terrible, cowardly secrets this so-called king had used to place his unworthy ass upon the throne.

Blinding pain cut through my side and I screamed as my connection to Lionel’s mind was severed by the unexpected attack, stumbling back, and clutching the dagger of ice which the fucking butler had plunged into my side.

My Order form fell from my grasp as I shifted back, and I barely managed to rip the dagger from my body before Lionel was upon me, Lance’s pleas for mercy ringing in my ears.

Lionel punched me so hard that I was thrown to the ground, my head cracking against the stone floor and unforgiving stars bursting before my eyes, pain carving through my skull and everything spiralling.

The king’s foot slammed down on my back next, and he crushed me beneath him, grinding his heel into the bone until a snap sounded that sent fire raining through my flesh and a scream pitching from my lungs. He stood back, and I tried to crawl away from him, dragging myself across the floor with a gust of air while he prowled after me.

I twisted towards Lance, finding him and Darcy frozen up to their waists in ice so that they couldn’t make any move towards me out of their cage. I subtly slid the ring from my finger, wrapping it in a knot of air and casting an illusion across it to hide it on the tiled floor before sending it skittering away into their cage, hope riding on that precious piece of my mother’s jewellery.

I reached for Lance, his eyes locking with mine, and I used the last of my energy to offer him the best memories of us I had. He let them all in, every one of the beautiful moments we’d shared, every day at Zodiac Academy together. And he saw my truth then, seeing himself through my eyes and how he had made my heart pound and love fill me up to the brim until I had barely been able to contain it in my flesh. He may not have loved me as I’d hoped, but he had loved me all the same. His smiles in those memories reminded me of that, his laughs, his light, all the good we’d shared long before darkness had crept into his life and blotted out the brightness in him. And I realised we’d possessed something far more valuable than what I’d been trying to gain from him all along. He was my friend, and I was his. And there was no truer love in my life than that.

“No one defies the Dragon King,” Lionel hissed, then fire blazed, surrounding my head and swallowing up my vision of Lance as I screamed and fucking screamed.

Starlight flickered at the edges of my vision and the pain roared along with those flames which burned through flesh and bone, until suddenly I was set free of my body, set free of my chains and every regret I had ever had over Lance Orion. Because my fate was set. My life was over. And there was no chance left for me to change a single decision or path I’d taken.

That was the way of life, the past was sand turned to glass, never to be undone. And all I could do now was make peace with my end.