Queen of the Darkness

grain of sand dropped.
    "You are impatient?" asked a sibilant voice.
    Daemon turned toward Draca, the Keep's Seneschal. When they had first arrived at the Keep, Lucivar had given him a cryptic warning: Draca is a dragon in human form. The moment he'd seen the Seneschal, he'd understood what Lucivar meant. Her looks, combined with the feel of great age and old, deep power, had fascinated him.
    "I'm worried," he replied, meeting the dark eyes that stared right through him. "She shouldn't be alone right now."
    "Yet you sstand outsside the door."
    Daemon gave the floating hourglass a killing look.
    Draca made a sound that might have been muted laughter. "Are you alwayss sso obedient?"
    "Almost never," Daemon muttered—and then remembered who he was talking to.
    But Draca nodded, as if pleased to have something confirmed. "It iss wisse for maless to know when to yield and obey. But the Conssort iss permitted to bend many ruless."
    Daemon considered the words carefully. It was hard to catch inflections in that sibilant voice, but he thought he understood her. "You know more of the finer points of Protocol than I do," he said, watching her closely. "I appreciate the instruction."
    Her face didn't alter, but he would have sworn she smiled at him. As she turned away, she added, "The glasss iss almosst empty."
    His hand was on the doorknob, quietly turning it as the last grains of sand trickled into the hourglass's base. As he opened the door, he saw the hourglass turning to declare another hour of solitude. He slipped quickly into the room and closed the door behind him.
    Jaenelle stood by a window, looking out at the night, still dressed in the black gown. As a man, that gown appealed to him in every way a woman's garment could, and he hoped she didn't just wear it for formal occasions.
    He stepped away from those thoughts. Not only were they useless tonight, they teased his body into wanting to respond to her in a way that wouldn't be acceptable.
    "Are they gone?" Jaenelle asked quietly, still staring out the window.
    Daemon studied her, trying to decide if it was meant as small talk or if she had withdrawn so deep within herself she really didn't know. "They're gone." He moved toward her slowly, cautiously, until he was only a few feet away and at an angle where he could see her profile.
    "It was the appropriate punishment," Jaenelle said as another tear rolled down her face. "It's the appropriate punishment when one Queen violates another's court to do harm."
    "You could have asked one of us to do it," Daemon said quietly.
    Jaenelle shook her head. "I'm the Queen. It was mine to do."
    Not if you're going to eat your heart out because of it.
    "There's a traditional way to break one of the Blood, to strip away the power without doing any other harm. It's quick and clean." She hesitated. "I took her deep into the abyss."
    "You took her to the misty place?"
    "No," Jaenelle said too sharply, too quickly. "That's a special place. I didn't want it tainted—" She bit her lip.
    He didn't want to examine the relief he felt at knowing Alexandra hadn't fouled the misty place with her presence.
    As he continued to study her, it struck him with the force of a blow: she hadn't withdrawn so far into herself because she grieved over having to break another witch; she had withdrawn in order to deal with some kind of personal pain.
    "Sweetheart," he said quietly, "what's wrong? Please tell me. Let me help."
    When she turned to look at him, he didn't see a grown woman or a Queen or Witch. He saw a child in agony.
    "Leland... Leland cared, I think, but I never expected much from her. Philip cared, but there was nothing he could really do. Alexandra was the m-mother in the family. She was the one who had the strength. She was the one we all wanted to please. And I could never please her, could never be... I loved all of them—Leland and Alexandra and Philip and Wilhelmina." Jaenelle's breathing hitched on a suppressed sob. "I loved her —and she s-said I was m-monstrous."
    Daemon just stared at her, the sudden rage that engulfed him making it impossible to speak for a moment. "The bitch said what ?"
    Startled by the venom in his voice, she gave him a clear-eyed look before she crumbled again. "She said I was monstrous."
    He could almost see all the deep childhood scars reopening, bleeding. This was the final rejection, the final pain. The child had defied that rejection, had tried to justify the sparse love given only with conditions