Still missing.
I stoked the flames of the anger inside me until it felt like I could melt the room.
Van’s hand stayed on a sword that hung at his hip, and he stepped toward the queen.
Cosette’s mother was equal parts elegant and evil. There was ice in her gaze. The way she held herself—rigid with her hands tightly fisted at her sides—told me that she was angry.
People were standing around her, but they were all frozen. Their gazes darting back and forth between their queen and us. Not rushing to protect her but not getting in her way.
Helen rose from her throne and pushed her long, golden blonde hair over her shoulder. “What are you doing in my court?”
Van stepped forward, and I went with him until we were only feet away from her dais.
“Your advisors have yet to be helpful in locating Tessa,” Van said. “There hasn’t been—”
“I can only act in matters that benefit the fey. Finding a lost werewolf does nothing for me.” The sneer in her tone was enough to have me stepping forward.
Her gaze snapped from Van to me, and I wasn’t sure getting her attention was a good idea.
But I didn’t have anything to lose.
“Why would I ever help you?” She didn’t know me, but her voice told me enough. The Queen of the Lunar Court hated me. Hated my mate. She might even hate all the werewolves, but I didn’t want to assume too much.
“Do you know where she is?” I asked plainly because I wanted a yes or no, but I had no hope of getting it. I had to ask anyway.
“Everything can be known given the right incentive.”
That didn’t mean she knew anything. It also didn’t mean that she knew nothing. She wasn’t even agreeing that she could find out. She was making a general statement with layers of lies and manipulations hidden under it.
Helen’s power pounded at me, urging me to speak. To give her the incentive. To promise her my life in exchange for some tiny scrap of noninformation.
Michael moved closer to my side. He had to be feeling the same, but his eyes were his normal hazel. No hint of his wolf’s glow. Most thought that because he wasn’t a member of the Seven, because he chose to teach, that he was weak. But they were wrong.
I was starting to shake as I fought her thrall, but Michael placed his hand on my shoulder, feeding bits of his familiar, fatherly power to me all while facing her down.
I’d known my whole life that he was powerful, and sometimes I thought I was more powerful than him. But I was wrong. I was so very wrong. And now I was starting to wonder how well I knew the man who raised me.
“If you want something, then you must, in good faith, make a vow to me.” The queen’s voice had me shaking.
I pressed my lips together to keep from promising her something—anything she wanted. I wasn’t sure how I was going to negotiate with her. There was no way I could force her to tell me where Tessa was unless she volunteered the i
nformation. I wasn’t desperate enough to believe she’d do that for a second.
“I don’t make vows to anyone,” Michael said. “Not even you.” There was no emotion in his voice. He was fighting ice with ice, and if I trusted myself to speak, I would’ve cheered him on.
“And would your wolf?”
“Come now, Helen.” Michael’s voice held a hint of warning below the ice that I was very familiar with. It was the warning he gave right before he put someone in their place. But I’d never seen him do it with a fey. “We know where each other stands. I see no sense in speaking about it in front of members of your court, but if you—”
Helen rose from her throne, and for a split second, before she pressed them into tight fists, I saw her hands shake. The queen of the most powerful court was nervous, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure I knew my adoptive father at all.
“You are quite right.” Helen’s chin rose a degree higher, and she stepped to the edge of her dais. “What I will say is that as of now, I do not know where Tessa is, and I have no desire to find out the information. She’s caused no end of grief for me and my court, and because of her actions, my most beloved daughter is now estranged from me. The only reason she’s not dead by my hand is because she’s sealing this realm from the one beyond it. And if I know this, then others do, too.”
Her ice blue gaze hit mine. “Take comfort in that.”
Take comfort that she wasn’t dead yet? That whoever took her might understand what could happen if they killed her?
There was a world of space between unharmed and not dead, and I took very little comfort in knowing that Tessa wasn’t dead.