Page 53 of Taken By Shadows

“I will find you faebane. I don’t know how, but I will. If that’s all you care about. I will find it.” The books yet unopened in the unexplored library beckoned me. Books held secrets, stories, legends, histories and truths. There was something in that library.

I was sure of it.

“It’s not all I care about. But I don’t have the choices you might believe I do.” His eyes were unreadable, like a tome bound in secret that needed a cypher to decode its truths.

Kaed gestured to the bathing chambers. I was still covered in my own blood.

“Don’t worry. I’m not joining you this time,” he said, eyes pinning me with their intensity.

I thought he’d joke. Smirk. Grin. Something. But he just waited for me to take my leave. I hesitated on the threshold of the steamy chambers where the bathtub summoned me like a siren. His hands were a deep claret red as my blood dried on them.

“Thank you …” I breathed. It felt paltry in the silence between us.

Kaed seemed to struggle with the words as much as I had. “You’re welcome,” he managed.

And both our words fell flat.

He’d saved me from my own mess.

And there was no cage in sight. No bars on the windows.

Just a bathing chamber to wash away the stains of the morning.

“Who was that?” I asked before I closed the door to the chambers. “The male in Celeste’s house. Her son? You seemed to dislike him?”

For a moment, Kaed hesitated. His tongue worked its way over his teeth, and his hand raked through his hair once. “That rat is Huxley. He spends her money and loses more of it on gambling and females. I’ve resisted the urge to kill him thus far. For Celeste’s sake.”

“You’d be that petty? Kill a male for bad lifestyle choices?”

“Celeste is the best person I know. And she deserves better than a barnacle of a son who drains her every way he knows possible. She is good. She deserves good.”

Celeste was goodness personified. Her warm heart shone in her hands as she had worked her magic, and you could feel the veracity and compassion in her. But for Kaed to see that and feel that was strange.

“You care for her.” It wasn’t a question, but I wondered at the root of its truth.

His eyes were hard as they flashed to me. “I’ve known her for a long time. She is more than I deserve in my life. And I owe her more than I care to admit.”

The rawness of his words hit me like cold water, and I didn’t have the heart to push for more from him.

I had been prepared to level a slew of insults at him for threatening to kill her son. But Kaed seemed unnerved today. Like the pieces of his hard exterior had been rearranged and he was itching to fix the facade he normally held.

“Huxley is less her son and more her beneficiary. He’s grown accustomed to living off the lifestyle his mother has cultivated as a vital part of this city.”

I looked at him, actually bewildered that he was talking openly to me.

“In a past life, many, many years ago, Celeste was a healer before she was a council member. She has given a lot of herself to others. To me.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?”

Kaed sighed. “I don’t know,” he finally settled on. “Maybe I thought that if you knew what she gave you, you might understand that I am trying to protect you. But you’re making it very difficult.”

“Gave me?” I said, confusion knitting my brow.

Kaed cocked his head at me. “You’ve no idea, have you?”

I waited for him to elaborate. Only marginally led astray by the hair that had fallen across his scar. The scars that were not so easily sewn into fae. And yet there it was. Radiant and blazing across his bone structure. Had Celeste tried and failed to heal it?

“Magic. Her magic. Any of us. It takes something from us to use it.” He paused as if checking I was truly as clueless as I felt right now. “It takes vitality from us every time we use it. It might take decades, but magic use ages fae.”