Page 21 of Shadowed

"The passage requires contact with court blood to open."

"Of course it does." She shifts the bag on her shoulder. "Wonderful. Magical portal with a handholding requirement. Is there a less—a wrist, maybe. An elbow."

"Any contact will work."

She grabs my forearm. Not my hand—my forearm, just above the wrist, her fingers wrapping around the muscle with the grip of someone who is used to holding onto things that try to pull away. Practical. Unromantic. The minimum viable contact for the transaction.

It doesn't matter.

Her skin touches mine and the world tilts. Seven hundred years of grey nothing—of a body that forgot how to want, of patience that kept me standing while everything around me died—cracks open like ice in spring and the hunger that pours through is so raw it steals my breath. My cock surges hard against my thigh, the prehensile curl of it with such urgent intent that my breath locks in my chest. My shadows explode across the alley wall. My wings strain against the bindings under my coat. The scent of her—copper, sweat, the sweet dark underneath—floods my system unfiltered, without the distance of shadow-carried traces, without eight miles of Ashworth between us, and the wanting that hits me is not the slow patient ache of the throne room. It's a fist. It's a door blown open. It's the thing that dormancy has been holding back for seven centuries and it has her hand on its arm and it's awake.

I hold still. I hold very, very still, with the discipline of a male who has been controlling himself since before her country had a name, and I don't move, and I don't breathe, and I open the passage.

The wall splits. Not visibly—the bricks don't move. The darkness between them deepens, thickens, becomes a tunnel rather than a surface, and the temperature drops and the smell of Ashworth—coal, horse, river, human waste—is replaced bysomething older. Stone. Lichen. The mineral cold of a place that has never seen sun.

She tightens her grip on my forearm.

"It's dark."

"I am the Shadow Court. It will always be dark."

"Reassuring. Truly. You should write pamphlets."

I pull her through.

The passage is three seconds of absolute blackness. No light. No sound. No sensation except her hand on my arm and the pressure of between—the nowhere space that separates the human world from the courts. Most humans panic in the between. Their minds can't process the absence of input. They scream, or freeze, or let go.

She counts. I hear her do it—one, two, three—under her breath, the way she counts tumblers in a lock, and her grip doesn't loosen and her breathing doesn't change and she comes out the other side with her feet under her and her bag still on her shoulder and her eyes already moving.

"That's it?" She drops my arm and brushes off her coat as if the between left residue. "Three seconds of dark? I've had worse on the Metropolitan line."

Shadow Court opens around us.

I haven't seen it through someone else's eyes in a long time. I forget, sometimes, what it looks like to someone who has never stood in perpetual twilight. The sky is the colour of a bruise three days old—purple-grey, starless, with light that comes from no visible source. The palace rises from the rock like it grew there, which it did—spires of black stone, gothic arches, flying buttresses that connect buildings across chasms that fall into darkness. The architecture shifts. Not obviously—you have to watch for it. A corridor that was straight a moment ago develops a curve. A doorway that faced east now faces north. The palace breathes. It's always breathed. It's the most sentient structure inany of the eight courts and it's dying the way the rest of us are dying, slowly, one room at a time going dark.

"Bloody hell," she says.

I haven't heard the court described with such accuracy in centuries.

She drops my arm. The loss of contact hits me like a blow to the sternum—the wanting doesn't diminish, it compresses, pulling tight into a hot knot behind my ribs that I'm going to have to learn to live with because she's here now, in my court, and she's going to be here for a long time.

Her eyes are everywhere. Not with wonder—with assessment. She's cataloguing exits, sight lines, structural weaknesses, the distance between the arches and the ground, the width of the corridors, the placement of shadows. She's looking at my dying court the way she looks at a building she's about to rob.

Good. I'd be disappointed if she looked at it any other way.

But she's also flushed. The colour is high in her cheeks and the vein in her throat is pounding and she's crossed her arms over her chest—not defensively, but the way someone does when their body is responding to something and they're trying to hold the response inside. She doesn't know why. She doesn't know that three seconds of skin contact in the between has woken something in her bloodline that has been dormant for generations, that my scent is in her lungs now, that her body is making calculations her mind hasn't caught up with.

I know. The satisfaction coils through me—dark, possessive, patient. Let her catalogue exits. Let her plan her escape. Her body is already learning the thing she'll spend weeks denying, and the knowledge pleases me more than it should.

"The rooms I've prepared for you are in the east wing." I begin walking. The corridor stretches ahead of us, lit by shadow-lamps that give off light without flame—cold, blue-grey, the colour of deep water. "You'll find them adequate."

She follows. Three steps behind. Measuring the distance, I suspect, that would allow her to turn and run.

She tries her first escape fourteen minutes later. I know because my shadows track her—down the east corridor, left at the junction, through a doorway that leads to the lower galleries. The architecture catches her at the second turn. The corridor extends, stretching like taffy, the far end pulling away from her at exactly the speed she's running. She stops. Turns. Tries a different route. The palace shifts a wall, closing the passage she came through, and she's back in the east wing corridor with the shadow-lamps and my shadows pooled at her feet like obedient dogs.

She kicks one. My shadow. She kicks it with the toe of her boot as if it were a cat that tripped her, and the shadow recoils with what I can only describe as offended surprise.

"Stop herding me," she tells it.