Page 48 of Fae Champion

“Come on, guys,” Ryder called from the end of the hall, where he gave a pointed look down the corridor perpendicular to this one—the path we needed to take to the Hall of Mirrors. “What’s the holdup?”

I huffed and told Rush. “Let’s go.” I took one step away, and he pulled me back.

“I don’t think you realize what you do to me.” He scanned me up and down. “Or how stunning you look in that dress.”

Itsowasn’t the time for his confessions. Even so, I leaned forward, silently inviting him to tell me more.

“You can’t touch me like that and expect me not to … react. It makes it hard to think, and right now I need to be entirely focused on … what I need to do.”

The eyeballs near us whirred jerkily, attempting to take in everything happening in the hallway all at once.

A couple in matching pantsuits and dress the color of freshly pumping blood emerged from a closed door forty feet from us in the other direction and didn’t bother hiding their curiosity at how closely Rush and I stood to each other.

The woman openly gawped at us while her partner led them toward us. Irritated at the interruption when our time was already nil, I stuck my tongue out at the woman. She gasped, her hair vacillated precariously atop its artfully coiled pile, and she pointed at me while tattling to the man at her side.

Rush snapped his attention back on me, and I smiled up at him guilelessly.

He rolled his eyes.

“What? She was being rude and staring.”

“That’s Jolanda, the dowager countess of Etherantos, and Conroy, the viscount of Etherantos.”

“So?”

“So, that’s Lennox’s mother and his much older half-brother.”

“Oh.” I glanced back their way; they were close enough to overhear. “Then I should have done more than stick out my tongue at her.”

Jolanda glared.

“Don’t let the likes of her upset your delicate constitution, Mother,” Conroy said, patting her hand linked through his bent elbow.

“Drake Rush Vega,” she called out to him when they were about to pass us, crowding to the other side of the hallway as if my rudeness were infectious. “I advise you to reexamine the quality of the company you keep.”

“And I advise you,” I told her, “to reexamine the quality of your cowardly son who stabbed me in the back with a blade so fine no one would know what he’d done till I was dead.”

Jolanda looked down her nose at me as they sauntered past, causing her to crane her neck as she went. “My son is loyal to her majesty the queen.”

“Your son’s a bully and an asshole, and I hope he dies a death like he tried to give me.”

Jolanda halted in mid-step, spun around, and launched herself at me, curled hands already pointed at my face. Her nails, person-like moments before, had been replaced by thick, sharp claws erupting from her fingertips.

Conroy lunged after her, wrapping his hands around her trim waist in a firmband.

Rush positioned himself in front of me, a solid wall of muscle, and from the end of the hall, West, Ryder, and Hiroshi headed our way.

“Let me go,” Jolanda snarled at Conroy, her arms stretching toward me.

Conroy clenched his teeth together, making his round cheeks puff out as he struggled against her efforts. The dowager countess was like a beast denied her food and then taunted with it.

“She’s not worth it, Mother,” he said.

Jolanda, whether by accident or intention, kicked him in the shin with stabby heels. He yelped, eased his grip on her as she strained to claw my face, then tightened down again.

Rush spread his arms wide to protect me as he caged me behind him.

I scowled at his back. “She’s not a damn dragon. I don’t need you to shield me from her. I can handle myself.”

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