Dark Breakers by C. S. E. Cooney

Author:C. S. E. Cooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nellie Bly, romance, roaring '20s, 1920s, fairy, faery, fae, goblins, kobolds, fairy tales, Catherynne M. Valente, Theodora Goss, Desdemona and the Deep, C. S. E. Cooney, C.S.E. Cooney, World Fantasy Award, Bone Swans, paranormal romance, magic, magic is real, industrialists, Worker's rights
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Published: 2021-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Gideon’s whole oral cavity went xeric, lips to gullet. “Nyx the Nightwalker,” he whispered. “Queen of the Valwode.”

Nyx laughed, and Gideon experienced a moment of vertigo. She had done something. Or maybe he’d just grayed out. Regardless—somehow, now, in this new dance, he had become the follow, she the lead. As soon as he realized this, his head adjusted, stopped spinning.

“Former queen,” Nyx corrected him, and beamed a bright, startlingly Elliot-ish smile his way. “Queen-in-Exile. No kind of queen at all, really! For I abdicated my throne, and imprisoned my heir, and ventured up to Athe to live with my beloved, setting my heart to the hour of his death.”

Gideon didn’t know when the music had changed from the Peacock Walk to the slow and stately triple time of a Volvene. But there they were, right in the midst of it. In a Volvene—a closed position gliding dance that involved many, many complicated turns—the dancers mimicked planets moving through their solar system. One couple at the center of the Volvene represented the Suns: the binary star at the heart of the system. Gideon had assumed that this Volvene’s Suns would be Desdemona, coupled with whomever she happened to be dancing with. (It usually was Desdemona, even when she wasn’t hosting the ball.) However, in a moment of out-of-body awareness, as if suddenly he were standing upon the second-floor Gallery, looking down at the Great Hall—or yet even higher, on the roof, straddling the skylights—Gideon realized that he was the Suns. That they were, together. He and Elliot Howell’s wife.

Nyx laughed again, tapping his breastbone as they danced. “Tell me, mortal—wretched, favored plaything of Loreila Winter-Touched—dost thou not think this ticking time bomb in my chest hath made me just as mortal as thee?”

“Perhaps,” Gideon countered dryly, “just less.”

But the name Nyx had spoken struck his tongue with the metallic taste of strychnine. It sped his heart rate to a skittering clip, and numbed his extremities.

Last year, when he had first met the Breaker Queen on this side of the Veil Between Worlds, Gideon scarce could breathe in her presence. He was drunk as a fiddler when he finally got up the courage to approach her. When she did not reach out her black-taloned hands and rip his head from his neck, he was never more surprised. He had never been easy with her since, no matter how tenderly she watched Elliot, touched his hair, settled against him like he was more precious to her than all the World Flower.

But now, Nyx, with an untender but not unamused expression, seemed to be auguring with Gideon’s thoughts like a raven’s entrails. When she smiled next, he shivered.

The movement of her mouth rearranged her mask, which had been painted on. But he also thought, perhaps, that beneath her paint, her mouth itself had changed, had become, for a moment, a raven’s beak. Gideon wanted to rear back, but Nyx’s grip on him was firm and friendly. He was trapped fast as he ever was.

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