Page 53 of The Heir the Fae Forgot
In the end, he’d gotten what he wanted. He’d finished what he set out to do.
He’d brought the glamour out in me.
But all a moment too late.
The moment before the branches snared my body, Icarus’ silhouette twisted to face me. I saw his hand reach out, his fingers curl, and something all around me began to shift.
The branches destined to be the death of me suddenly sprang apart, vines shooting out in their place. They caught my arms and legs and wrapped around my torso. It took me a second longer to understand what was happening, but by then, my body was already slowing.
It wasn’t enough to stop my fall entirely, but they’d shifted my trajectory.
When I plunged through the canopy, it wasn’t only to fall another thousand feet to my death. I fell, instead, into the maw of a great fanged beast.
I’d broken through the top of the cage at the top of the court and straight into Icarus’ bed. The downy mattress could only break my fall so much, despite the best efforts of the vines that had preceded it.
Every bit of air was expelled from my lungs the moment my back hit the mattress. It exploded in a haze of black feathers that filled my vision and choked me as I struggled to regain a single breath. I thought I blacked out for a moment, my consciousness struggling to determine whether or not I’d actually died, and in that moment, the magic that bound Icarus broke too.
He fell from the sky after me, but unlike me, he had wings.
Still, it was with a great thunderous crash that he landed on the floor beside me, broken branches raining down on us as he didn’t bother to command the trees to move aside for him in his haste.
His face was a bloody mess when he hovered over me, a deep cut carving his cheek where one of the branches had sliced him open. It looked painful, but it was nothing compared to the look on his face as he took in the sight of me.
“Don’t move, My Storm. I can fix this.”
He reached out, ready to heal me, but I caught his hand with my own. My head was finally beginning to clear, and though I felt drained, my body was no broken. The only pain I felt was in my lungs as I gulped in what felt like thee first breaths after drowning.
“Icarus…” I started, but he tore his hand from mine and started searching my body, a warmth spreading from him as he tried to heal me. “Icarus,” I repeated again, more firmly now that my lungs had properly filled with air. “Icarus, I’m fine.”
“You arenotfine,” he snarled, his eyes wide and rolling in their sockets. “I saw you fall. I saw you die. I saw…I saw…”
His whole body was shaking where it hovered over mine. He’d climbed into the bed beside me, his hands brushing away the raven’s feathers as he searched my body for injury. But despite the fact that I had none, not even a scratch as bad as the one now dripping red blood down his cheek, he couldn’t seem to force himself to still.
He was on the verge of madness, his eyes unwilling to believe what they saw.
“I dropped you, My Storm,” he whispered, his voice as frantic as the hands now clamping down on my shoulders as if to be sure they were, in fact, mine. His eyes widened again as the horror of it all threatened to take deeper root inside of him. “I let you go.”
It took me a moment to register what he said, to understand what was happening.Icarus didn’t know.
I reached out and caught Icarus’ face between my hands and pulled his lips down to mine, smothering his overflowing fear with a kiss. But even that wasn’t enough to stop the way his body shook. He broke the kiss to pull away, his eyes searching my face as if he didn’t recognize me, still.
“What is wrong with me,” he whispered. “Why didn’t I save you sooner? Why didn’t I stop you?”
“It’s not your fault,” I whispered back, careful not to touch the wound on his face. It was already healing, the skin knitting back together to form an angry red scar. I brushed the hair back from his face instead, tucking the falling coils behind his ears, my fingers wandering to trace the line of his horns where they grew from his skull. “Icarus, it’s not your fault.”
His hands loosened their grip on my shoulders a bit, but only so they could roam the rest of me, as if he still couldn’t believe that I was here, with him, in his arms.
His face was so tortured, his eyes unable to believe what they saw, that I desperately wanted to put him out of his misery. All it would talk would be for me to tell him the truth, to tell him that I’d somehowmadehim drop me, but I couldn’t.
So, instead, I reached for him again. I pulled him into me, crushing his lips against mine a second time. This time I was the one to pull away, to press my forehead against his as my hands reached to tangle up in his hair.
“I’m fine, Icarus. I’m safe. I’m here.”
I kissed him again, the taste of salt mixing with iron on our tongues, and this time he finally stopped shaking. His hands stopped roving my body blindly, and instead pressed into the mattress on either side of my head as he sank further into the kiss, his mouth crushing mine with a growing ferocity.
One that I matched with a feral hunger of my own.
All the fear, the adrenaline, the rush of the glamour had left a void in their wake that I now reached to Icarus to fill—and he, in turn, reached for me. Each kiss deepened until a deep, low growl erupted from the back of the dark fae’s throat. He drew up one of his knees to nudge mine apart. One hand left it’s place buried in the ruined mattress to take hold of my hip, his fingers hitching up the skirt until I could wrap my leg around him.
