The Autobiography of the Dark Prince Page 11

  There was a short pause where Elias supposed he was supposed to either comment or introduce himself. He did neither. Elladora once again seemed not to notice and the Dark Prince merely raised an amused eyebrow.

  "And as you know, this is—"

  "Oh, please, you don't need to introduce Elias," Elladora said, twisting around to look at the Prince. Elias took the opportunity to take several steps back and to his left, putting space between both of them. When Elladora turned back, she seemed slightly confused that he wasn't where she'd left him, then shrugged and beamed at Elias. "Our dear, dashing Dark Prince has been positively gushing about you since I've met him. I feel like I practically know you as well as he does. Well, not as well, of course, since I didn't know you were going to be so cute, and there are other ex-ten-u-at-ing circumstances—"

  "Elladora," the Dark Prince interrupted, his eyes slipping from Elias and narrowing slightly. "I believe I understand what you are trying to say and you're using that word incorrectly."

  Elladora frowned. "Extenu…ating?" she asked, then smiled to herself, seemingly proud that she didn't need to sound the whole thing out again.

  "Gushing," the Prince said flatly.

  Elladora giggled. "Oh, please. I know full well what that means and you were gushing." She turned her attention back to Elias. "He was, you know. Honestly, at least half of every conversation we've ever had has been about you. 'It really is quite wonderful watching him take notes as fast as I can speak,'" she said in a terrible imitation of the Dark Prince. "'Really, Elladora, I can't help that I'm always thinking about him. The way his mind works is fascinating, I've never enjoyed conversation so much', which I do have to say was slightly insulting, but I forgave him at once. And then there's my personal favorite, 'I've never had anyone glare at me in quite the way he does. I find it more enticing than anything I've ever seen and I can't help but try to provoke it whenever possible—'"

  "That's enough, Elladora!" the Prince growled as his eyes darkened slightly.

  It was the first time Elias had seen them do so since he started meeting with the Prince regularly, something he just now noticed. Not that he particularly cared much right then. No, all of his attention was focused on what the clinging annoyance had said.

  "I assure you, Elias, I don't gush, and I've never—"

  "Did you say those things?" he asked.

  He kept his face utterly blank, something he would have been proud of if his stomach wasn't twisted in so many knots.

  "I…" For the first time since he'd walked out of his bedroom dripping wet and wearing only a towel, the Dark Prince seemed unsure of himself.

  For a long moment, which seemed to Elias to stretch on forever, he was silent.

  "Yes," he said finally and with all the enthusiasm of someone removing a bandage that had dried to the wound. He added quickly. "Although some of the wording isn't exactly—"

  But Elias wasn't paying attention to the Prince's demurrals, not with a tightness in his chest demanding all of his focus.

  It was a singularly strange feeling, one made up partly of an all too familiar annoyance with the Prince's provocations, magnified now that Elias knew he was doing it to get a specific reaction out of him, but also partly of a strange warmth which seemed to spread out to the rest of his body. Elias had no idea the Dark Prince thought so highly of him. He knew the Prince found him somewhat attractive—which he still thought was one of the most ridiculous things anyone had ever said to him—but it was the other quotes the clinging irritant brought up which stuck with him. Elias had received praise before, but it had always been for his work or, more recently, his appearance. No one had ever praised him. Not his mind or his habits. Even the Crown Prince, who was more free with his compliments than anyone Elias had ever met, had never complimented the parts of Elias that he himself thought worthy of praise. Yet, apparently, the Dark Prince had.

  And it made Elias feel warm.

  Elias had no idea what to do with such a feeling, or why he suddenly wished to hear those words from the Prince's lips. That desire disturbed him more than anything else, and in the end, he decided to focus solely on the annoyance. It was, at least, familiar.

  "So you harass me on purpose to provoke a reaction," Elias said in clipped tones, interrupting the Prince's prevarications. "Even though you know I hate it."

  "I…" The Dark Prince struggled for a moment. "I thought you knew?"

  As far as excuses went, it was a pathetic offering, and that just angered Elias even more.

  "I thought that was your personality! I thought you were just insufferable and infuriating. Never once did I think you were doing it on purpose because you wanted to see me react."

  The Prince seemed to flounder for a moment, then scowled and crossed his arms defensively. "It's your fault, you know."

  Elias blinked. "My fault?"

  "Yes!" The Dark Prince nodded rapidly. "If you didn't have such charming reactions then I would have no need to provoke them."

  Elias was quite sure he'd never wanted to hit someone more in his entire life. His hands clenched and he could almost hear the snap of the Prince's nose echo throughout his mind as he imagined breaking it with his fist this time instead of his head. Before he could decide if he wanted to go through with it, however, a voice broke into his thoughts.

  "Oh, dear, have I in-spi-red a quarrel?" Elladora asked, looking back and forth between them with a small frown.

  "Be quiet, Elladora."

  "Silence, annoyance."

  They both spoke at the same time, and for just a moment they shared an amused glance. No, Elias reminded himself forcefully. I am not amused; I'm enraged.

  "Well, that just won't do," Elladora said, completely ignoring the both of them. "I simply care for both of you too much to see you fighting."

  "You don't even know me," Elias said at the exact same time as the Prince said, "You only met me two weeks ago."

  Once again, they shared identical looks.

  Why is it so hard to stay angry with him right now?

  Thankfully, Elladora was speaking again so he didn't have to think about it.

  "But I feel that I've known you both for my entire life," she said with a giggle.

  "That's ridiculous."

  "We are all ridiculously different in differently ridiculous ways…or however that goes," she added with a frown. She shook her head and went back to smiling. "If I can't have either of you in any other way, than you shall be my brothers in all but blood. We are the siblings three and we shall be the terror of tea parties everywhere!"

  Elias could feel his eye trying to twitch.

  "Elladora…" the Dark Prince said.

  "No?" she asked.

  "No," the Prince answered.

  She looked back and forth between them. "I'm not making things any better, am I?"

  "No."

  She nodded knowingly. "I'm making them worse, aren't I?"

  "Yes, I believe so."

  "Well, that just won't do." She sighed, then, as if someone had flipped a switch, she stood up straight and broke out into a grin. "Since I seem to be an im-ped-i-ment to harmony, I shall remove myself from the va…va…va-ci-ni-ty! The vicinity at once!"

  "I think that would be best," the Prince drawled.

  In an effort to further cement herself as the strangest person Elias had ever met—at least Elias could think of no other explanation for her actions—she didn't seem even the least bit bothered by the Prince's dismissal. "Then I shall leave you both alone so you can make up and be friends again."

  She nodded once more, then bowed to the Prince before throwing herself at Elias and once again wrapping him in an unwanted hug. She let go before he could do more than stiffen up, and bounced away towards the door.

  When she reached it, she turned back. "I'll see you both later!"

  Elias had opened his mouth to tell her in no uncertain terms that she was never to come within fifty feet of him again, but by the time the first syllable had left his mouth, she
had already waved cheerfully at them and slipped out the door before loudly pulling it shut behind her. Elias closed his mouth and fixed the door with a glare.

  A look which lasted the exact amount of time it took him to realize he was now in the tearoom alone with the Dark Prince. He quickly turned and reapplied the glare to said prince, who held it for a moment before looking away.

  Elias opened his mouth to speak and, once again, he was interrupted before he could even start.

  "It's quite possible that I owe you another apology," the Prince said slowly.

  Elias blinked, but slowly closed his mouth. He wanted to be furious with the Prince. He wanted to yell at him and storm from the room. But even though the desire was almost overwhelming, what was bothering him was that he had no idea why. To be sure, finding out the Prince had been deliberately bothering Elias had annoyed him, but that was all it did. It annoyed him. He'd fanned the embers of his annoyance into a fire of anger all on his own, which was easy enough when the Prince was being his usual infuriating self, but the fire proved to be built upon twigs and ash in the face of the soft breeze of the Dark Prince once again humbling himself before Elias. The fire dwindled, and all that was left was the warmth Elias had tried to avoid, and the question of why that couldn't be answered.

  Why did the Dark Prince affect Elias so much? Why were his compliments, delivered by a third party as they were, the kind of compliments Elias had secretly wanted his entire life? Why did the Prince have to be so…himself? Why did Elias even care?

  "And what, exactly, are you apologizing for?" Elias found himself parroting the words he'd said during the Prince's last apology.

  The Dark Prince looked back towards Elias, the ghost of a smile passing quickly across his lips.

  "I believe I've once again put you in an uncomfortable situation, and though the fault isn't wholly my own, I still feel…bad, about it. And also highly embarrassed." At Elias's slightly confused look, the Prince let out a melancholic sigh. "It is one thing to harbor an attraction towards someone that you know is not returned, but it's quite another to have the exact extent of that attraction brought up in front of the person you're attracted to. Especially after making a promise not to press it."

  Oh…

  This time, Elias looked away. It wasn't that he was unaware that the Prince found him attractive, he'd said as much himself, or at least intimated, more than once, yet Elias had never really let himself think about it. He never really wanted to, if he was being honest. But he had never imagined there might be more to it than a base physical attraction, possibly coupled with a royal's childish desire to possess what he cannot have. To actually come face to face with someone who seemed to be attracted to Elias the person…well. He honestly had no idea how that made him feel. And while he'd never given much thought to romantic entanglements—from either side of the equation—he couldn't help empathizing with the Dark Prince regardless.

  At least, that was what he assumed the sudden clenching inside his chest at the Prince's words was.

  "Technically," Elias said after several long moments of increasingly uncomfortable silence, "you only promised not to use your magic to press your desires onto me."

  He looked back at the Prince in time to see him wince, but his features quickly softened. "Well, I know how important technicalities are to you."

  "Quite," Elias said, something in his chest easing slightly at the more natural look on the Prince's face. He raised an eyebrow. "I have also noticed that, technically, you haven't apologized for deliberately provoking me."

  "Oh, Elias," the Dark Prince said as his lips pulled into a gentle smirk. "There's little point in apologizing for something I'm only going to do again in the future."

  To Elias's surprise, he found himself smiling back.

  Chapter 11

  Elias bit back a sigh of annoyance as he found yet another book out of place.

  How hard is it to find library assistants who can decipher a simple system of decimals?

  Considering this was the eighth book he'd come across in the last hour which had been misplaced, the answer was, apparently, "very". And if there was one thing Elias had no patience for, it was a disorganized library.

  Now to find out where it goes… He glanced at the number on the spine of the book, then blinked in confusion. It goes right back where I found it.

  Scowling furiously, Elias shoved it back onto the shelf.

  He had a brief moment of almost-panic as he tried to remember if he'd been mistaken about any of the other misplaced books, but he quickly dismissed the thought. Of course he hadn't been. An hour ago, his mind was focused on his task and not…distracted by other things.

  It was, as these things tended to be, all the Dark Prince's fault. Considering that, it was actually somewhat amazing Elias had gotten as much work done as he did after their parting in the tearoom. There was an air that had hung over Elias as they made startlingly comfortable small talk and said their goodbyes earlier that morning. Like a soft, gauzy cover on his mind which blocked out all the conflicting feelings and confusing thoughts that normally would have been galloping around in his head like race horses caught in a fiery stable. The thing about gauze, though, was that it was very easy to see through, if someone bothered to look. And because Elias was who he was, he eventually had to look.

  All of the questions he couldn't answer, all of the things he felt when he thought of the Prince, were right there waiting for him. The annoyance and frustration were the easiest to identify and deal with, of course. But the warmth? The tightness he felt, like a fist closing over his heart, when he thought that, as ridiculous as it was, the Dark Prince might actually be pining for him? Those were…vexing, to say the least.

  And distracting.

  It didn't help that he was forced to throw all his assumptions about who the Dark Prince was completely out the window after their meeting in the tearoom. He was still arrogant and infuriating and vain, but he was also possessed of a deep reservoir of feeling, which Elias had never credited him with, nor could he properly define. Companionable was the word he eventually decided on, even though it didn't quite fit. And while before, Elias was able to partially dismiss that aspect of the Prince as part of his desire to either keep Elias from storming away from their biography project or possibly entice him into a physical encounter, he'd had also shown similar traits towards Lady Elladora, someone who Elias very much doubted inspired similar goals in the Prince. Normally, Elias wouldn't care; his concern about how people socially interacted with each other generally hovered somewhere around "absolute zero", but it was pointless to pretend the Prince was in any way normal. At least in regards to how Elias reacted to him. The main problem was, as always, why.

  It was this question that distracted Elias as he wandered aimlessly through the stacks, his project temporarily forgotten, and it was this question that eventually caused him to walk straight into a rather solid object that somehow sprung up in front of him.

  An object which yelped.

  "Hey! Watch—" The voice abruptly cut off with a small choking noise, and Elias shook himself mentally and very quickly realized he was staring directly into Dunbar's face.

  As if today wasn't trying enough…

  Elias waited for the inevitable insults, but after several long moments of silence, he was shocked to see Dunbar's eyes widen just before he grabbed the book he'd dropped during their collision and scurried away.

  Elias blinked.

  —What just happened?

  He wondered if, perhaps, he'd somehow stumbled into one of those alternate universes the Dark Prince had forbidden him to speak about, before abruptly dismissing the idea. And then berating himself for actually having to dismiss an idea that ridiculous.

  Still, this was something he could focus on that wasn't the Prince…

  After taking a moment to figure out exactly where he was in the forest of stacks, he made his way through them to the Head Librarian's desk. Which, of course, was absent a Head Librarian
. He asked the visibly terrified library assistant where he was and the girl, who couldn't have been more than fourteen, practically collapsed in relief that his question wasn't about books. She said she didn't know, but almost as soon as Elias asked he'd realized where he must have been. He nodded to the girl and left, holding back a wince as she shouted a "Good day, scholar!" which echoed through the library and earned her more than a few hostile glares.

  Elias walked towards the back of the library, once again navigating the stacks, until he came to a small, nondescript door by the Home and Garden section bearing a small, engraved sign which read Restoration Room 8. He knocked once, waited, then knocked again until the Librarian barked out a disgruntled "Come!"

  Elias opened the door to find a grumbling librarian, eating a rather large sandwich over several incredibly old and fragile looking documents. One was already stained rather heavily.

  "You're ruining those," Elias said, closing the door behind him.

  The Librarian glanced down at the papers and shrugged. "It's Melquhart."

  "They're still incredibly old…"

  The Librarian bit off a large chunk of sandwich, spilling crumbs and something yellow all over the documents. "I'm doing the world a favor," he said around his food.

  Elias shuddered in disgust.

  "These are from a two hundred page treatise about the color of his dog."

  "Regardless—" Elias paused. "Two hundred pages?"

  The Librarian swallowed, then nodded. "And those are just the ones we found. Some damned jackass of an archivist pulled them out of the depths of the lowest hell and sent them to the restoration department without even reading them, even though it's in their fucking"—Elias curled his lip at the repeated swearing—"job description to make sure anything they send up isn't written by that lunatic."

  A sensible precaution…

  Melquhart was rather infamous in scholarly circles. A little over two hundred years ago, an archeological expedition uncovered the ancient mansion of what appeared to be a noble from the time before Ellington was founded. Inside, they found a library filled with journals and essays written by a man named Finneas Melquhart. It was thought to be one of the greatest historical discoveries of all time, since the tomes went into great detail about the daily lives and happenings of the people who lived back then, and they were quickly boxed up and sent to the Great Library for study and preservation.