Page 9 of Blood On His Lips

Darkan, damn you.

I hadn’t felt like this since I was four. Édouard had thought the best way to teach me to ride a bike was to remove the training wheels, then send me downhill towards a copse of trees with the instruction of “figure it out, or break a leg.”

I’d done both.

“Aerinne!” Numair shouted.

Sea Eyes turned and walked to him as he waded toward me through a barrier of three warriors. I sucked in a breathas Numair doubled over from a blow.

She lifted her sword and glanced at me, eyes crinkling. “Don’t the humans say turnabout is fair play?”

“Numair!” I screamed.

Sea Eyes stiffened, attention caught by something in the distance. A second later, she ran, her form collapsing into shadows. Another enemy took her place, but Numair was wounded and off-balance, responding too slowly. A sword arced down—

—and the enemy’s body exploded in a storm of blood and meat.

Numair turned as I ran forward, the warriors retreating as we faced a bigger threat.

A percussion of power ripped through the square, an ice cloud scented of forest smoke and crushed blackberries I’d come to associate with one person. I shivered, my cheeks suddenly cold as if it were a biting midwinter night rather than late spring.

The Prince.

Renaud walked down the boulevard. Behind him flickered the great scaled wings visible to only me. For a moment, black-and-gold armor superimposed over his form, so fast I wasn’t sure I hadn’t hallucinated it. He wore the same white shirt and black pants as this evening, his hair loose and unadorned.

For a moment, he encompassed my sight. As mad as an arctic thunderstorm, eyes a flash of lightning, his beauty that of an ancient deity risen to life.

I almost sank to my knees.

This was the male who claimed he wanted me.

His gaze brushed mine, the blue furrowing deep, deep, deep, piercing my psyche, and instead of ice, weighted warm silk ran between my fingers like a fall of hair, a satin brush of bare skin, a puff of red-wine scented breath on my lips—

Aerinne,a voice in my head murmured.Do not succumb to the glamour, my halfling.

I shook my head, brows creasing. I didn’t know who had spoken, and confusion nearly paralyzed me. Darkan and Renaud overlaid, their voices a harmony in my mind that pushed aside that curtain until I—

But he was merely Renaud, strolling under the stars, right into the middle of an open skirmish as if every stone under his foot was placed for the convenience of his passage. The fading solar lights flickered and deadened, the square now lit only by the moon.

Invisible fingers brushed under my jaw, but it wasn’t enough to prevent my knees from collapsing. Not just from him: dimly, I recalled my bleeding wounds.

“You’re injured.” The malevolence in his eyes sharpened tenfold, seeped into a voice now twisted with a need for vengeance. “Who touched you?”

Oh, shit.

He turned away from me, and his black wings snapped open, the millions of iridescent scales shimmering under the moonlight.

Power slammed into the retreating warriors, one falling from their post on a rooftop. Renaud moved, a blur of air and light, and grabbed a fleeing enemy.

Wind lifted his hair in rivulets around his shoulders. I blinked. The strands swayed in. . .undulating coils of snakes? The hand wrapped around the throat of the unfortunate warrior morphed, dense black claws tipping white fingers.

“You dare,” the Prince said, “attack whatIhave said shall not be harmed?”

“Renaud.” Fear strangled the sound in my throat.

I tasted his rage on my tongue, the impression ofan invisible hell opening up under my feet to suck us all in, guilty and innocent alike.

I braced myself, gripping my fear and stuffing it away. “Renaud—don’t spiral!”

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