A Court of Night and Shadows

Chapter 22

Feyre

Hands - there were hands on my shoulders, shaking em, squeezing me, I thrashed against them screaming, screaming -

"FEYRE."

The voice was at once the night and the dawn and the stars and the earth, and every inch of my body calmed at the primal dominance in it.

"Open your eyes," the voice ordered.

I did.

My throat was raw, my mouth full of ash, my face soaked and sticky, and Rhysand - Rhysand was hovering above me, eyes wide.

"It was a dream," he said, his breathing as hard as mine.

The moonlight trickling through the windows illuminated the dark lines of swirling tattoos down his arm, his shoulders, across his sculpted chest. Like the identical ones we bore on our arms from Under the Mountain. He scanned my face. "A dream," he said again.

Velaris. I was in Velaris, at his house. And I had a nightmare.

The sheets, the blankets were ripped. Shredded. But not with a knife. And that ashy, smoky taste coating my mouth...

My hand was unnervingly steady as I lifted it to find my fingers ending in simmering embers. Living claws of black flame that had sliced through my bed linens like they were causterixing woulds -

I shoved him off with a hard shoulder, falling out of bed and slamming into a small chest before I hurtled into the bathing room, fell to my knees before the toilet, and was sick to my stomach. Again. Again. My fingertips hissed against the cool porcelain.

Large, warm hands pulled my hair back a moment later.

"Breathe," Rhys said. "Imagine them winking out like candles, one by one."

I heaved into the toilet again, the swell of the tainted magic roaring within me. With a focus brought about almost entirely by desperation I focused on stoking each flame, one by one. Sure enough, the sickeningly sweet heat ceased across my hand until it was mine again.

And when I dared look at my hands, still braced on the bowl, the embers had been extinguished. Even that dark power that laced my veins, along with my bones, slumbered once more.

"I have this dream," Rhys said as I turned to look at him, wiping my sleeve across my lips. "Where it's not me stuck under her, but Cassian or Azriel. And she's pinned their wings to the bed with spiked, and there's nothing I can do to stop it. She'd commanded me to watch, and I have no choice but to see how I failed them."

I clung to the toilet, considering another round of retching. "You never failed them," I rasped.

"I did... horrible things to ensure that." Those violet eyes near-glowed in the dim light.

"Why hadn't you told them anything about the mountain until tonight?" I dared ask, hoping it wasn't crossing any boundaries in our strange, sometimes backwards relationship.

He dropped his eyes and released my hair in slowly waves to cascade down my back once more. "At first I didn't want to burden them with it," he started, reaching his tattooed hand for mine. I watched as he tentatively swirled a finger through the patterns he'd made in my skin. "The more time passed and you didn't wake up... I think I was scared."

My brow furrowed with concern. "You know they would never have judged you for anything you'd done, whether it was for them or not," I pressed.

But he shook his head. "It's not that I was afraid of their judgement. I'm aware of their love for me. My Inner Circle is a Court of Dreams," he said with a soft smile. "I didn't want to feed them my nightmares, potentially give them their own. I have seen what it's like to care deeply for someone and to hear of the pain they've suffered only to be unable to act against that force. They'd want vengeance and I wasn't sure I was willing to give them that temptation on the brink of war."