Midnight Bites Read Online Free Page A

willing to take her place, in exchange for rich compensation to her family.” Amelie was cold, but never unfeeling. Myrnin knew she could have simply forced a hapless double for Lady Grey to go to her death, but she was kind enough to bargain for it. Not kind enough, of course, to spare a life, but then, they were all killers, every one of them.
    Even him. The trail of bodies stretched behind him through the years was something he tried hard not to consider.
    â€œWhy rescue me now, Amelie?” he asked, and fiddled with the ties on his shirtsleeves. The cloth felt soft on his skin, but he was unaccustomed to it, after so many years of wearing threadbare rags. “I’ve spent an eternity in that place, unremarked by you, and don’t tell me you didn’t know. You must need me for something.”
    â€œAm I so cruel as that?”
    â€œNot cruel,” he said. “Practical, I would say. And as a practical ruler, you would leave me where you knew you could find me. I have a terrible habit of getting lost, as you well know. Since you chose to fetch me from that storehouse, you must have a job for me.” It was hard to hold Amelie’s stare; she had ice-blue eyes that could freeze a man’s soul at the best of times, and when she exerted her power, even by a light whisper, it could cow anyone. Somehow, he kept the eye contact. “Do me the courtesy next time of storing me somewhere with a bed and a library, Your Majesty.”
    â€œDo you really think I was the one who imprisoned you? I was not. Yes, I knew you were there, but I had no one I could trust to go to you . . . and I could not go myself. It was not until the arrival ofLady Grey I felt I had an ally who would be up to the task should you prove . . . reluctant.”
    â€œYou thought I’d gone completely mad.” She said nothing, but she looked away.
Amelie
looked away. He swallowed and stared hard at his clasped hands. “Perhaps you weren’t so wrong. I was . . . not myself.”
    â€œI doubt that, since you are so much better already,” Amelie said. Her tone was warm, and very gentle. “Tomorrow we will leave this place behind. I have a castle far in the mountains where you can work in peace to recapture all that you have lost. I am in need of a fine alchemist, and there is none better in this world. We have much to do, you and I. Much to plan.”
    There was a certain synchronicity to it, he found; he had been in Amelie’s company for many years, and when he left it, disaster always struck. She was, in some ways, his lucky star. Best to follow her now, he supposed. “All right,” he said. “I will go.”
    â€œThen you’d best say farewell to Lady Grey and find yourself some rest,” she told him. “She will not come with us.”
    â€œNo? Why not?”
    â€œTwo queens cannot ever stay comfortably together. Lady Grey has her own path; we have ours. Say your good-byes. At nightfall, we depart.”
    She dismissed him simply by picking up her book. He bowed—an unnecessary courtesy—and saw himself out of the room. It was only as he shut the doors that he saw her guards standing motionless in the darker corners of her apartments; she was never unwatched, never unprotected. He’d forgotten that.
    Lady Grey was waiting for him, hands calmly folded in a maidenly sort of posture that did not match her mischievous smile. “Dinner,” she said. “Follow me to the larder.”
    The larder was stocked with fresh-drawn blood; he did not ask where it came from, and she did not volunteer. She sipped her owncup as he emptied his, drinking until all the screaming hunger inside was fully drowned. “Do you ever imagine you can hear them?” he asked her, looking at the last red drops clinging to the metal goblet’s sides.
    â€œYou mean, hear their screams in the blood?” Lady Grey seemed calm enough, but she