The Son of Night & Spring

Chapter Twenty

If Lotus learned anything, it was that the Mother herself hates him.

He wanted to drown in his own sorrow with booze, but he couldn't even do that without running into her. He couldn't even grieve in the right way, he couldn't get lost without an obstacle in his way from falling. He felt claws growing from his fingertips, flashes of blood staining his hands as she would lay dead before him.

The beast in his taking control of himself- he wasn't aware he began to hide in the shadows and watch her. Stalk.

She stood a few feet away from him, hair glistening like a red sun before a storm.

His vision betraying him, she kept shifting in his mind, from alive to bleeding out on the floor. He growled in frustration, he tried to focus on the reality before him instead of the alcohol and monster inside him.

There was something different about her, different from how he saw her earlier.

Pale, but not corpse like, more as if her skin was carved from the moon itself. Something elegant, beautiful...

And her eyes.

That was what was different. It was her eyes.

Her eyes that made him think of the deep sea. The one Talia dreams about, where the water glows sapphires. He had only ever read about it, dreamed it once and he knew that if he was ever to see it, he was seeing it at this moment. In her eyes.

The flash happened again, death now in her gaze and Lotus hissed and he knew she noticed him. That cape of vulnerability gone- again that wall she puts up.

They seemed to have been staring for a while and he would have preferred it that way, the silence and the stare until she opened her mouth. Her eyes sharp and dark again, looking at him up and down. "Just in time prince, I was running out of something to drink."

He glared at her, "What am I, your servant?"

"That is a temptation, Leave the bottle and go then."

He took her glass and drowned down what was left. The acid tastes going down his throat like sandpaper. "I should have guessed you prefer bitter wine, it matches you."

She rolled her eyes, "And I suppose I should drink dandelions and lilies in my tea like you?"

Lotus felt genuinely insulted, "I'd rather you cut me open then criticize good tea."

She glanced at him and turned away. He felt the world shift for a moment, but this time there was no pain, no agony. This time, he felt her shift, and the turn of her head before she could hide, he thought for a moment, that she had smiled.

He didn't know what to do, his hands felt useless as he tried to understand. So he poured himself a drink.

He cannot do anything with her sober.

"Why are you here, boy."

He scoffed, "It's my court, I go where I please."

She smirked, taking a swing directly from the bottle, "Just because Feyre spreads her legs to the High Lord, doesn't make this court yours."

He dropped the glass and pushed her to the wall, his hand on her throat, and in the corner of his eyes, the glass reflected his glowing eyes, full of hate. "Be careful how you speak about my Mother." his voice like cold death.

She pushed against his chest and Lotus went flying to the wall, groaning as the concrete collided with his back. But he would not back down and it felt as though fire burned his skin and boulders crushed his bones.