A Court of Night and Shadows

Chapter 8

Azriel

The shadows welcomed me as I slid through the decorative oak door mere inches behind the human girl. It was the same every night in this Cauldron-forsaken manor: She slept until midday, rose only for the last meal of the evening with her sisters, and then went back to bed only to be encompassed by her night fits. I hoped hers were a far cry from my own.

Her room was large with a massive four poster bed at its focus, surrounded by an armoire stained golden-brown like the girl's hair. Velvet curtains of a deep blue hung from the windows covering the south facing wall. I'd slipped in and out through there a time or two, but she didn't know that. She didn't know I was here now as she fell into her unmade bed, covered with quilts of every size and color, still in her lavender tunic and dark pants from this evening's dinner. I slithered across the quiet space, finding some extra shadows behind her armoire. I hid there wedged between it and the entryway to her wash room.

Her sobs had stopped coming days ago, but still she dropped into bed the same way every night. Her eyes were always empty. I never heard her speak.

Her sisters - Nesta, the grouchy one, and Elain, the perky one - noticed too. Elain had tried to entice the girl to join her on a walk through the gardens or to find a paint set in town. Both times she had come back to her room and vomited.

I wondered who this girl was every day I spent here hiding in the darkness, waiting for new orders or an unforeseen threat to appear so I could finally have something interesting to do.

Feyre.

The note from Rhysand came as a wild shock. It had appeared to Amren in her kitchen in the middle of her morning... meal, you could call it. She'd spat the thick animal blood all over her counters and called us together - Rhysand's court - where I volunteered to answer Rhysand's call.

The note described a place over the wall, into the mortal lands and then merely said, Protect her. This ends soon.

We'd all felt the gravity of it - Rhysand sending a letter into Velaris, our home. If he was willing to communicate with us then either this was really coming to an end or this girl was more important to Rhys than he was to himself. We'd tried to chase him Under the Mountain, to save him or even just communicate with him, but every time his magic stood in our way. Mor had cursed her cousin's name in the wind so many times I'd lost count over the years.

Years. It had been years since we'd heard from him. Nearly fifty years without our High Lord and when he finally contacts us, it's to babysit this girl.

I had my suspicions, as I'm sure the others did too, but none of us mentioned anything. Cassian was unusually silent when I knew there was so much he would normally have blurted out with a wry smile, but even he must have felt the weight of this command from our lord, our leader, our king.

So here I was, and had been for the last two weeks.

I heard the steps down the hall - one pair marching, the other trailing behind - before the door flew open, light pouring in from the hall.

"Feyre!" the oldest girl shouted, Elain peering over her shoulder. "I am sick of this!"

Feyre didn't bother moving anything but her eyes which dragged over to her sister. The three of them were strikingly similar - all with the same golden brown hair and sharp features. Nesta and Feyre were nearly mirror images, but Elain had a softness to her that flowed through her brown eyes that was unlike her sisters' blue ones.

I was ready to kick back and possibly even let my thoughts wander to the Night Court - to Amren and Cassian, to Mor... when Nesta said, "I know you weren't off with some aunt of ours, tending to her sickbed. That beast fed us lies and I wouldn't swallow a second of it. That faerie took you Feyre," the girl bit out, "and I want to know what happened to you on the other side of that damn wall."