I opened my eyes, knowing that Adonis would be staring into pools of silver. Pale-gold hair whipped in front of my face. Still, I wasn’t shifting. Who knew what would happen if I went feral with Adonis again?
Adonis reached out to brush my hair from my face, and the featherlight touch of his fingertips stroked against my skin, ice-cold and fire-hot at the same time. “But that’s still not the real you, is it?”
“Just because I have a feral side doesn’t mean it’s the real me. Maybe this is the real me. Or my human glamour. Maybe it’s Angela Death, the succubus, dressed in sequins on a stage. Maybe my disguises are the real me.”
Without my glamour, I felt completely exposed before him, like I’d walked into his room naked, submitting myself to his judgment. I closed my eyes again, summoning my human glamour, hiding my ears, my inhuman hair, as the magic whispered over my skin.
I opened my eyes again, catching a flicker of disappointment in his gaze. I cocked my hip. “That’s enough of that. I’m not a performing monkey. And anyway, I’m not as convinced as you are that you’d be able to handle me when I’m feral.”
He peered down at me with a wicked smile. “Oh, but I would love to try.” With his hands in his pockets, he moved deeper into the garden, and I followed. “Do you like it here?”
It honestly surprised me that he cared what I thought, like he was looking for my approval. “I do. It’s a little bleak, admittedly.” I gestured at the dark, craggy shoreline below us. “How long have you lived here? It’s elegant, but it’s…unforgiving.”
“Nearly a thousand years, I suppose. But it has its own strange beauty.” His eyes drank me in, the corner of his perfect mouth quirked in a smile. “Like the fae. Do you want to see?”
“How could I resist that description?”
The path twisted around the castle’s walls, and thorny shrubs crawled over the path around us. A vast canopy of stars spread out above us.
Adonis met my gaze. “Kur was wrong. You don’t need to disguise your fae side around me.”
He led me toward a crumbling stone wall.
“I lived among humans for my whole life. It’s just an old habit, I suppose. I’ve always glamoured myself.”
He pushed open an old, creaking gate. In the darkness, the silver seemed to burn brightly in his eyes. “But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.” As we moved through the gateway, I cast my gaze over an enormous, untamed garden, the plants and flowers silvered in the moonlight.
A jagged tree grew in the center of the garden. A stream ran past it, burbling out of the ground. It had carved a sinuous path through the plants. On the far edge of the walled garden, the stream poured under a low archway, cascading off the cliff’s edge to the rocks below.
Myrrh trees grew by the riverbanks. Blood-red flowers dappled the grasses—poppies maybe—growing among blue and white anemones. The air smelled of wild thyme and marjoram.
One of the ancient walls had partially eroded, giving way to a view of the ocean. Moonlight glinted off the water.
My breath caught in my throat. “This is your private garden? It’s beautiful.”
“This is where I spent many of my days when I wasn’t off getting tangled up in shadow demon wars. Reading. Writing. Drinking with Tanit and Kur, hosting visitors from the shadow realms.”
Tall wildflowers brushed against my fingertips, featherlight. “Why would you fight with shadow demons? You’re not one of them. Why would you be loyal to Nyxobas?”
“The god of night?” He snorted. “I have no loyalty to him.”
I nodded slowly, my gaze trailing over the perfect planes of his face. “So what were you fighting for, then?”
“For my friends. They saved me when I escaped the fae realm. And I saved them, whenever I could.” Adonis’s exotic scent mingled with the heady perfume of the wildflowers.
“Let me see if I understand this correctly. You have close friends who you love, who you’ve been with for thousands of years. You have this gorgeous garden, where you read books, drink with your friends. I’m going to wager you’ve seduced a few beautiful women in your time. I know it must suck—like, seriously suck—to have to stab yourself in the heart. But isn’t there another way? Do you really want to give all this up to float around in heaven?”
“The thing is, Ruby, angels were never meant to walk the earth.”
I’d said the same thing many times over the past year and a half, but I still felt the impulse to argue with him.
He froze abruptly, staring up at the sky, and an icy chill rippled over my skin as the temperature seemed to freeze around me.
“Speaking of angels going where they don’t belong...” Ice chilled his voice. “You need to get inside.”
Chapter 18
Adonis’s voice had changed, became commanding. No longer was it the sexual purr of a lover, but the voice of a general.
I narrowed my eyes at the sky, but I could see nothing among the stars. “Can you at least tell me what’s happening?”
“It seems some of the angels have found us. Not the archangels, but still a nuisance. Hide in my room. There’s a secret passage behind the garden tapestry.”
My heart began to hammer. “Are you going to fight a whole horde of angels?”
“Oh, you don’t need to worry about me. Go.”
I hurried back to the castle door, my fingertips brushing over the holster at my thigh. I still had the knife, though I wasn’t sure how much good it would do me in a fight against a legion of angels. How many angels were we talking here, exactly?
I sprinted through an open archway to the courtyard. Distantly, the sound of trumpets pierced the air, and the noise rumbled through my gut.
I raced up the stairs to Adonis’s room and flung open the door. I scanned the room, searching among the old, faded hangings for one that looked like a garden. The tapestry of blood-red flowers hung just across from his bed.
First, I rushed over to the window. I peered through the glass, catching sight of a small horde of angels racing toward the earth, bodies glowing with golden light. If I narrowed my eyes, I could make out the swords glinting in their hands.
My mouth went dry. Were all these angels really after me? Being a spy was one thing, but I didn’t have much supernatural war experience.
Adrenaline burned through my veins. I hurried over to the tapestry, then pulled it aside. Just as Adonis had said, a door stood inset in the wall. I pushed it open into a dark, narrow passageway. For just a moment, I froze, my heart thumping hard.
Complete darkness in here.
Which was worse? An angelic horde hell-bent on my death, or a dark hallway? Clearly, the hallway was the better option.
With my heart slamming against my ribs, I began to run. I had no idea where I was going, just that it was away from the angel horde.