The stone coffin and statue looked like a shrine made to Tianna. The flowers were fresh, as if they'd been placed there recently and the candles weren't missing much wax. They'd either been lit recently or magic kept the wax from melting.
Robyn had to have been there recently to pay his respects to her.
And as I looked at the carefully placed candles and beautiful delicate flowers I realized that he still felt her death. He loved her still after all these years.
Tianna's was also the only coffin in the room.
"Wasn't Robyn supposed to have been dead this entire time? No one questioned that there was no coffin for him?"
Julian shook his head. "He wouldn't have been buried with the Royal Family after what he did. He disgraced their name, he wouldn't have received his rites. Now, why he wasn't killed like Warren said he had been will be a mystery that only Robyn and Warren will know the answer to."
He moved to Tianna's stone tomb and pressed his hands against the side and pushed. Before I could say anything, the stone cover of the coffin moved, scraping stone against stone until he stopped.
Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulled out the pouch from earlier and with his other hand reached inside the stone tomb.
I stepped forward screaming his name louder than I'd meant to. "Julian!"
He stopped as he looked at me. He gave a quizzical brow. "Afraid of the dead, Emylin?"
"I respect the dead, there's a difference. What are you doing?"
I didn't dare look at what he was doing with his hands. I didn't want to look inside, didn't want to add more fuel to my nightmares. I didn't need to see the decomposed body of a queen almost twenty years dead.
He ignored me as he continued.
I ran around the stone coffin and put a hand on his arm. "This is wrong."
I felt the muscle tense beneath my hand as he stared at me. His eyes were swirling in anger as he watched me. "I'm doing this, Emylin. There isn't a damn thing you can say to stop me."
I shook my head. "Do we need this, really need this? Or is this revenge? Are you desecrating this innocent woman's resting place because you know it will hurt him?"
He pulled his arms back and placed his hands on my upper arms. "What do you know of Tianna, Emylin? Other than whatever bullshit Robyn fed you while he paraded around as Damien?"
I was about to open my mouth but he continued.
"I can only imagine what he told you about her. Innocent, indeed." He placed me against the wall and pushed on my arms harder than he'd ever done even in our trainings but not hard enough to hurt me. "It's true. Tianna was loved and did a lot of good for the Underworld as queen. But she and Robyn were together for decades and still, no heir was produced." He turned back to the coffin and continued with his work as I stayed still against the wall. He showed no hesitation as he reached inside the dead woman's coffin where her body rested. "So she took drastic measures. She dabbled in dark magic, forbidden even in the Underworld and made a deal with demons."
I swallowed. "Demons?"
"Yes, demons." He didn't turn to me. "They've been trying to claw their way to our world and the human world for eons. We dark faeries have been the ones keeping them back since the very beginning."
The book had said the same thing, The Dark Kingdom to keep back the darkness in living things.
He grunted as he met some resistance as he worked inside the coffin. "Then the queen goes and makes a deal that will bring them to our world in exchange for a child. Well, she got what she wanted." He looked back and met my eyes. "The demon ate her lifeforce from the inside as it grew in her womb. Robyn wasn't wrong. The Light could have saved her life and the child's but they didn't - they let them die because she almost brought the Dark Ones through with her abomination of a child. Sometimes the dead are not so innocent. Tianna," he said with emphasis, "was not innocent."
