Heir to the Shadows (The Black Jewels, #2)

by Anne Bishop

Surreal stared at the dirty, trembling wreck that had once been the most dangerous, beautiful man in the Realm. Before he could shy away, she pulled him into the flat, threw every physical bolt on the door, and then Gray-locked it for good measure. After a moment’s thought, she put a Gray shield on all the windows to lessen the chance of a severed artery or a five-story uncontrolled dive. Then she took a good look at him and wondered if a severed artery would be such a bad thing. He’d been mad the last time she’d seen him. Now he looked as if he’d been sliced open and scooped out as well. “Daemon?” She walked toward him, slowly. He shook, unable to control it. His bruised-looking eyes, empty of everything but pain, filled with tears. “He’s dead.”

“Frigid,” he said with a snort of disgust. “Well, Cat, if objecting to having someone slobber on you or grope and squeeze you is their definition of frigid, then I’m frigid, too. They have no right to use you, no matter what they say. Any man who tells you otherwise deserves a knife between the ribs.” He gave her a considering look, then shook his head. “You’d probably find it hard to gut a man. That’s all right. I don’t.”

In one of the dreamscapes Black Widows spun so well, Jaenelle had met the boy he had been and had drawn the poison from the soul wound. He had wept for the boy, for the things he hadn’t been allowed to do, for the things he hadn’t been allowed to be. But he didn’t weep for the man he’d become. “Ah, Lucivar,” she’d said regretfully as they’d walked through the dreamscape. “I can heal the scars on your body, but I can’t heal the scars of the soul. Not yours, not mine. You have to learn to live with them. You have to choose to live beyond them.” He couldn’t remember anything else in the dream. Perhaps he wasn’t meant to. But because of it, he didn’t weep for the man he’d become.