Drayce.
As I leaned toward the glass, the clouds darkened until the surface of the glass became obsidian-black and reflected my face. My brows drew together, and I tilted my head to the side. I hadn’t imagined seeing my mate.
Nessa whispered an enchantment, and the bead of blood separated to form a red vapor that swirled around the confines of the bowl. From the way it changed direction each time Nessa addressed it, I supposed the blood was communicating directly with the gruagach.
I turned my gaze back to the glass, and green eyes stared out through my reflection. My breath caught. That was him. I held the stare, waiting for the person on the other side to morph into Drayce and tell me how to save him.
“Neara?” Drayce’s voice curled around my eardrums. “Can you hear me?”
I flinched, and a wave of moist heat engulfed my body. When I opened my eyes, I stood at the foot of a bed with four posters made of tall trees whose leafy branches formed a canopy over a mattress of moss. Moonlight shone through an open window, highlighting the contours of the bed’s surface, which took the shape of a well-muscled man.
“Drayce?” I whispered.
He sat up and stared at me through bleary eyes. “Neara?”
“What are you doing?” I rushed around to his side and pushed open a curtain of long strands of lichen.
“Sleeping.” He stretched out his hands, pulled me onto the bed, and cradled me in his arms. “Join me. I know you didn’t rest last night.”
“Drayce.” I ran my palm over the moss covering his bare chest, making it crumble under the warmth of my skin. “That oak sprite cursed you to sleep, and we can’t wake you.”
“Sprite?” he asked with a yawn.
As I wiped the moss from his chest, his arms, his legs, I repeated what the sprite had told us under torture. Drayce allowed me to turn him onto his front, and I removed the rest of the moss. The skin underneath was warm and smooth and as pale as his scaled appearance.
“Come with me.” I rolled him onto his front and wiped the moss from his face.
Drayce’s wide smile of brilliant white teeth made my heart ache. “Where?”
“Back to the palace.” I pointed through the curtain at the door. “We’ll go together.”
His eyes fluttered shut. “In a moment.”
The sting of a tiny hand hitting my cheek made me jerk back, and I stood in the cupboard with Osmos’ arm around my back. My stomach turned to stone and plummeted to the hard floor.
“Send me back,” I said.
Nessa stared up at me through her milky eye. “What did the seeing-glass show you?”
“King Drayce,” I replied, my voice thick with loss. “He’s in a bed of moss.”
Osmos frowned. “Can you tell us anything else about his location?”
“It was warm.” I gulped. “With a full moon outside.”
Nessa tilted her head up. “If the moon was white, that means he’s still in the realm of the living.”
I shook my head. “He was covered in moss, just like the sprites in the cursed oak tree.”
“It sounds like a soul-removal enchantment to me.” Nessa swept her arm to the bowl of liquid. “King Drayce’s blood also confirmed that he was still somewhere within our realm, wanted to be found, but only by his mate.”
My teeth worried at my bottom lip. How long could his body survive without a soul? “Can you send me back?”
She raised her shoulders, and the wall lantern above us dimmed. “Your desire to see King Drayce brought you to him. Why don’t you keep the glass and try to convince him to leave the room?”
I took the glass and held it to my chest. “Thank you.”
Nessa hopped onto Osmos’ palm, and we stepped back into the kitchen, where she rejoined the other gruagach at the dessert table. We bade her goodbye and stepped through an archway I made that led to the throne room.
Aengus sat at the steps, drinking from a large flagon of what smelled like mead, while Rosalind glowered down at him from where she stood beside the oak sprite’s cage. They both stood to attention when my footsteps clinked on the marble.
“Your Majesty?” asked Rosalind.
“We still don’t know his location, but I have an artifact that will allow us to communicate.”
Three heavy bangs on the throne room’s wooden door stopped me from elaborating.
“Yes?” I said.
The door opened, and the gancanagh poked his featureless face through the gap. “There’s someone powerful here to see you, Your Majesty.”
“Who?”
I handed the seeing-glass to Osmos, who received it with an incline of his head.
“He calls himself Crom Cruach, a master of curse-breaking, destroyer of maledictions.”
My lips formed a tight line. When I was cursed to see the fae, I was also cursed to see the damage they wrought on humans. Mothers carrying bundles of sticks that took the appearance of an ailing child, men being drained of vitality by fae females who presented themselves as lovers, leprechauns that stole people’s hard-earned money, and a host of creatures who made humans act strangely.
I helped as much as I could but another menace plagued these beleaguered humans. Charlatans who pretended to know the source of their torment, sold or bartered miracle blessings or curses, while the faerie causing the victim’s misery reveled in the fraud.
News must have spread about Drayce’s curse, and this Crom Cruach fellow must have decided to take advantage of the new queen. I shook off those thoughts.
“Has anyone heard of this person?” I turned to the others in the throne room.
Osmos rubbed the back of his neck. “I have a vague recollection of him visiting Melusina.”
Aengus stepped forward. “We should interrogate him for her location.”
“Very well.” I turned to the gancanagh. “Let him in.”
The clink and clank of metal and the slide of stone against the marble echoed from beyond the door. A boulder of dread rumbled through my belly at the sound, and I allowed Rosalind to guide
