Page 30 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

When I swivel around, I find him standing right behind me.

Unmoved. Untouched. His lips curled in faint amusement.

I must have gone mad. Fighting my own demons made flesh. Beautiful demons, I have to give him that.

“Let me go or I’ll hurt you. I don’t want to. All I want is to get away from here,” I say, hating how my voice trembles, betraying me.

He angles his head as if weighing my words. “I’m afraid I can’t.”

Not hesitating, I lash out again, aiming for his neck this time.Lyrian taught me that when you fight, you have to be ready to kill, or it makes no sense to fight at all. If you are not prepared to kill, you are predestined to die.

There’s another blur of movement, white skin flickering in the darkness, and the shard once again cuts nothing but air.

Then it all happens too fast for me to react, and I’m standing with that very shard held to my neck, so close I can feel the cool glass pressing down on my delicate skin.

How he’s done it, I have no idea.

But he’s standing so close now I can see his eyes in the gloom, can feel his breath brushing my lips. They are indeed still bright, as if they are radiating from within in a simmering, dark purple.

It is beautiful and terrifying at the same time. I almost forget about the shard at my neck. That I’m pinned against a tree.

“Don’t do that ever again.” His voice pulls me back. It is laced with an inhuman calmness that slithers along my bones. Then he lowers the shard and throws it somewhere behind us, deep into the forest.

“Why—why is Lyrian afraid of you?” It is all I can muster. I’m still numb. Dazed from the exhaustion, from the surreality of it.

“He has every reason to be,” is all I get in return.

Yet there’s the weight of truth in his words. A threat. A hint at brutality. Only then do I notice his aura. It is dark, but not too dark. The same midnight blue as his shirt, laced with black and purple tendrils like the aura of the wine-haired woman in the bar.

My eyes come to rest again on his pointed ears. On the rubies and emeralds that dangle from long, obelisk-shaped gems in his lobes. At the golden wing-shaped cuff that covers the peak of those ears.

I say quietly in a way that sounds almost like a plea, “You don’t need me. I mean nothing to Lyrian.”

“You are wrong. You mean everything to him—you are his life.”

***

I follow him wordlessly through the darkness. I should ask where he is taking me, but I just can’t muster the courage. Instead, I watch his movements, so graceful and quiet through the forest that he looks almost feline. Inhuman. Like his ears.

I shiver in my flimsy dress, the air cold and biting, but I barely register it. I feel too numb.

I was about to escape. I would have made it.

I ask again, “Why is Lyrian afraid of you? Really?” The question churns over and over in my head.

“Notofme.” A clearer answer this time, and yet he’s still told me nothing.

I push on. “I saw it in his eyes, the fear when he spotted you.”

To my shock, he lets out a quiet chuckle—a rolling, sultry sound. “I just stand for someone Lyrian is very afraid of.”

“Who?”

“Someone on whose behalf I am looking for you.”

My stomach tightens. Every instinct screams at me to run again, but it would get me nowhere. He is much faster, much stronger than I’ll ever be, I just found that out.

“Are you real?”

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