Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Friends do.”

He left the Sanctuary feeling exhilarated and bruised. He’d loved Cassandra dearly once, but he had no right to ask anything of her except what Protocol dictated a Warlord Prince could ask of a Queen.

Besides, Cassandra was his past. Jaenelle, may the Darkness help him, was his future.

2 / Hell

Dropping from the Black Wind, Saetan appeared in an outer courtyard that held one of the Keep’s official landing webs, which was etched in the stone with a clear Jewel at its center. The clear Jewels acted as beacons for those who rode the Winds—a kind of welcoming candle in the window—and every landing web had a piece of one. It was the only use that had ever been found for them.

Leaning heavily on his cane, Saetan limped across the empty courtyard to the huge, open-metal doors embedded into the mountain itself, rang the bell, and waited to enter the Keep, the Black Mountain, Ebon Askavi, where the Winds meet. It was the repository for the Blood’s history as well as a sanctuary for the darkest-Jeweled Blood. It was also the private lair of Witch.

The doors opened silently. Geoffrey, the Keep’s historian/librarian, waited for him on the other side. “High Lord.” Geoffrey bowed slightly in greeting.

Saetan returned the bow. “Geoffrey.”

“It’s been a while since you’ve visited the Keep. Your absence has been noted.”

Saetan snorted softly, his lips curving into a faint, dry smile. “In other words, I haven’t been useful lately.”

“In other words,” Geoffrey agreed, smiling. As he walked beside Saetan, his black eyes glanced once at the cane. “So you’re here.”

“I need your help.” Saetan looked at the Guardian’s pale face, a stark, unsettling white when combined with the black eyes, feathery black eyebrows, black hair with a pronounced widow’s peak, the black tunic and trousers, and the most sensuous blood-red lips Saetan had ever seen on anyone, man or woman. Geoffrey was the last of his race, a race gone to dust so long ago that no one remembered who they were. He was ancient when Saetan first came to the Keep as Cassandra’s Consort. Then, as now, he was the Keep’s historian and librarian. “I need to look up some of the ancient legends.”

“Lorn, for example?”

Saetan jerked to a stop.

Geoffrey turned, his black eyes carefully neutral.

“You’ve seen her,” Saetan said, a hint of jealousy in his voice.

“We’ve seen her.”

“Draca, too?” Saetan’s chest tightened at the thought of Jaenelle confronting the Keep’s Seneschal. Draca had been caretaker and overseer of Ebon Askavi long, long before Geoffrey had ever come. She still served the Keep itself, looking after the comfort of the scholars who came to study, of the Queens who needed a dark place to rest. She was reserved to the point of coldness, using it as a defense against those who shuddered to look upon a human figure with unmistakably reptilian ancestry. Coldness as a defense for the heart was something Saetan understood all too well.