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Calix turned and marched away down the path.
“Is this how you want to live your life?” Aurelius yelled, throwing his words like a punch. “Denying who you are? Denying what you are?”
Aurelius caught up and grabbed at the prince’s arm. Calix spun around, trying to free himself. Their eyes connected.
And it hit him. A lightning shot of desire sizzled inside Aurelius. Not just for sex, but for everything! The desire to do and taste and feel everything.
It was passion incarnate.
It was pleasure manifest.
The feeling vanished as the prince pulled his arm free. Calix’s face was blanched white. Tears were forming in the corner of the big man’s eyes.
He... felt it too?
“You have no idea what I am!” he roared, before disappearing back into the shadows.
The fine mist covered Aurelius’s skin like icy fingernails.
He hadn’t had a drink in a month.
He’d kept his pledge of abstinence.
And yet the feeling had returned.
This could be no wandering vigor.
There was only one thing remaining that could cause that effect.
As decades of sneering confidence were ripped from Aurelius, it suddenly all made sense. The hot and cold. The push and pull. Letting people think he had ashen passion, retreating from society, all to hide something even worse!
For his entire life, Aurelius had mocked those who believed in such ridiculous things. Those people who observed the Sable Moon Sanctum and kept statues to the Five in their homes. Superstitious young men who stored musical instruments and workman’s tools in boxes painted with an apotropaic eye, warding off the hungry gaze of the skill-thirsty eidolon; or old women burning rosemary and sage as the nights grew darker, all to stop the temptatious songs of a trickster siren from crossing their doorstep.
And yet, they had not been the fools...
Aurelius’s legs felt unsteady—as if the world was swaying beneath his feet. It was like the park was stretching away around him. Though he hadn’t voluntarily attended the Pentheon since childhood, Aurelius said a silent prayer to Mesti.
Teigra had been right the first time.
The therians were real.
And Calix was a satyr.
48
AURELIUS
Yellow-green hills rolled away from the royal villa—a natural auditorium at the bay’s northwest headland. Rows of grape vines filled the stands, each twist of green heaving with purple and gold, the early set of fruit that would, by autumn, be so plump it could burst.
Down on the stage, manicured gardens were teeming with the nobility of Ardora, laughing and wandering through brightly colored stalls that extended to the azure water, so clear you could see to the navy-green depths below.
Across the bay was the distant outline of Ardora proper—only a fifteen-minute journey by steed, but far enough to seem a distant memory.
Aurelius breathed deep the atmosphere of the Wax Crack, the festival that marked the debut of last year’s wine vintage. Family banners waved in the warm breeze, soft with the sound of strings and sweet with the smell of rose—with red, pink, and white blooms climbing over every column and arch.
The air held the promise of gorging on roasted seafood and dancing in the sunset. Of sampling the wines held captive for a year, yearning to escape. Of stealing kisses in secret nooks and diving out from the cliffs that overlooked the sea.
It was fabulous.
