Ash to Embers (Courting Shadows) Read Free

aesthetically pleasing, Little Death. Your disfigurement is offensive. It puts me off my vapors."
    "Apologies, Oracle."
    Tian averted her face to obscure the lines of scar tissue that streaked diagonally over her right cheek. She watched through her peripheral vision as he exhaled a plume of bright orange smoke that had been a different color when it had entered his body.
    "See, now don't you feel better?" He speared a gaseous pocket of lavender haze with the pipe balanced lazily between the middle and ring fingers of his right hand. His skin took on the same cast as the cloud he'd just discharged, causing him to look bloated against the white cushions.
    "If it pleases you," she answered.
    She didn't feel better. She didn't feel anything except the usual hollow agitation in her ribcage. Then again, if she hadn't been theoretically afraid of him she would have told him to go fuck himself, so maybe she did feel something after all. It was hard to tell.
    Tian watched the trapped cloud of lavender vapor as it billowed a hairsbreadth before shooting down the metallic tube. The Sidhe Oracle ignored her, sucking hard on the other end of the pipe with the singularly focused zeal of an addict. He paled along with the inhalation, going boneless, as a light purple flush started in his throat and worked its way through a body perfectly formed for leisure. It took less time than she had expected to consume the garish orange color that had made him look like a kumquat. He still looked plush, though.
    There were no harsh angles to the Oracle's physique, no leanness that indicated he had ever known hunger or struggle. He was well made in the way of all Sidhe, but soft, like a bully aware he'd never be troubled by karma. And under his pampered aesthetic lurked something off kilter, a taint that worried at the foundation deep below the pristine veneer like a plague. The undeniable sense of decay, or alienation, or insanity spread outward corrupting the temple around them in subtle ways. The realization made her twitchy.
    "Such a pity about your face." He belched around a writhing mass of emerald green smoke. "Even for a mongrel you were never without charm."
    He leaned forward and used the filigree pipe to trace the curve of her breast. Tian quit tracking him through the corner of her eyes and stared at the swirling patterns in the tree bark as she made a concerted effort not to flinch or fight back. She slipped beyond thought, beyond the near equatorial heat of the space, dissolving into a vacant balm of apathetic lassitude until she was devoid of response.
    "A female is not meant to have hard edges, and you," he continued in a business like tone, "now have entirely too many. Tell me Little Death, do you find that you miss the ministrations of your first Lord, or does Eamon put that extraordinary resiliency to good use behind the confines of closed doors?"
    Prick.
    There was a beat of silence that indicated he might continue. When he didn't, she responded wondering, given the now greenish tinge to his flesh, if he would be amicable or unnaturally inclined to be contrary to whatever came out of her mouth.
    "You would have me answer?"
    The Oracle hit her hard, snapping her head to the side with enough force that at least one vertebrae was dislocated in the process. He'd left his seat and struck out with such speed Tian had barely seen the blow coming. She sure as hell felt it land though. She landed and skidded on the aether as the surface solidified in a series of angry pops and crackling noises. Tears welled reflexively at the corners of her eyes.
    "I did not call you here because I had the desire to be questioned by a mongrel. Speak."
    A flare of white hot fury arched through her, ashes even before it had formed. She struggled to hold on to the rare spark and came away with nothing. Obviously, it had been the wrong thing to say.
    Tian shook her head to clear the fog and bit back a curse as her neck popped back into place. She stood, noting