Page 6 of Kingdom of the Two Moons

But Lyrian she didn’t feel, which is strange, but she’ll find out why. How he does it. One step after the other.

First thing, she’s got to find his hidden domicile up here. The wolf shifter wasn’t able to give her the precise location of Lyrian’s house.

Lyrian, paranoid as ever.

Blair isn’t worried, though. She doesn’t think Lyrian, no matter how much magic he’s gathered, will be able to truly harm her—not here in this world, where his elf powers are practically useless. Save for his reflexes and speed. He can’t even wield a spell while she still has her witch’s silver claws and teeth to fight with.

But what about that girl? Will Melody be with him? Or has he hidden her away somewhere else? No. If the wolf shifter could be trusted, Lyrian was using her special skill—to sniff out magic—to help him harvest. So Melody will be close to him.

Blair curses silently.

Melody.The half-blooded girl the new witch queen Perenilla wants so desperately because of just that—this special talent of hers. To use it to find some ancient elven relics. Objects the high elves stored their magic in long ago. They hid them away under the dark reign of Gatilla, so that if the witches came to slaughter them, their magic couldn’t be harvested and added to the witch’s reservoir under Gatilla’s amethyst tower, Windscar. That morbid tower where Blair was raised and honed into a predator.

The memory of those dark times pushes up unwanted, and sheclenches the steering wheel, fighting it. It bubbles up nonetheless. How many nights did she stare at those polished, purple walls? How many times was she chained to the pillory outside on its landing platform and left there night after night until hunger and cold almost drove her mad? How many times was she flogged for talking back, for so much as batting an eye at an order from her cruel aunt, or kicked out naked into the snowstorm when she was still a child?

Too fucking many.

Sure, Perenilla isn’t half as bad as Gatilla. But she is hell-bent on changing that. She even had the collapsed amethyst tower rebuilt further east of Akribea and called the new one—made of polished onyx—Cloudcleaver.

For now, Perenilla’s bad enough. But with the relics adding to her current power… it doesn’t take much to imagine what she will become. Let alone what Perenilla will do to the girl… willmakeher do in order to find them. And what it means that Blair will deliver her up. Ignoring the consequences...

Blair’s hands tighten even harder around the steering wheel. So hard that the material starts to bend under her fingers like molten wax.

Delivering the girl up to Perenilla... it doesn’t sit right with her for all the wrong sorts of reasons. She’s never cared much about rules, but she cares about these humans.

She knows she’s not supposed to. Knows she can’t ignore an order coming from her queen. But sometimes Blair can’t help but wonder what she would be like if she had been born a human. If she had grown up in the mortal world. She might have gone to school, taken her place in the world for granted. Maybe traveled the world or got a real job, as they called them. Had an apartment. A cat. A fucking TV. Eating ice cream out of the tub while binge-watching some stupid soap with her friends.

Oh hells, she would havefriends.

She would be nice and laugh and joke. She definitely wouldn’t rip a girl out of that to put her into a world that is cruel, ancient, and raw. Give her to creatures who will make her serve and suffer.

Better Perenilla has her than Caryan,she tells herself, not for the first time. It sounds hollow.

Blair forces herself to focus on the rain instead. On her mission. On her fucking breathing. She cranks up the music, and Eminem jumps to life in her car, cleaning out his closet and doing a damn fine job at it. Oh, how much she can relate to all the anger in his voice...

As darkness falls, she reaches an accumulation of houses and stops the car in front of the only bar in the deserted greenery. Alarmingly close to the fae gap, and she still isn’t feeling a thing.Weird.

She gets out, her sneakers getting wet as she strolls toward the battered door with a blinking neon sign sayingOpen.

Blair hasn’t bothered to change her outfit since that night in the club. Just patted the shifter’s blood off. Sloppily, she realizes, as she looks down at herself and finds some dried stains still there.

It’s not the blood that’s a problem, but her dress.

Not changing into something else might have been a bad idea, becauseeverythingstops when she enters. She can hear it—their breathing, damn, even their heartbeats—stopping before picking up. All the men ogling her and the dress that clings to her curve-gifted figure. Her lush waves of wine-red hair. Her eyes gleaming in an unnatural, shocking amber.

She suppresses a grin and might even be swaying her hips, just a little. These mortals, devouring her with their eyes. She should be used to it by now, butAbysssave her, she isn’t.

These humans, fawning over her beauty, are unable to sense the danger in her, the wrongness that should make them shrink back in horror. So they don’t. They’re solemnly haunted by the desire to see her again. Unable to see that she is a beautiful, fully grown, flesh-devouring monster. Her teeth so sharp she can open up their skins like a razor blade.

On a deeper level, she knows that fae beauty is different from mortal beauty. Elemental. Painful to look at, even with her glamour up.

And sheisa looker, even among the fae, so can she blame them?

She slips into a booth at the far end. From here, she can overlook the bar, waiting until the humans recover and get back to whatever it is they were doing before. The table in front of her is filthy, covered by a patina of grease. Probably beer and frying fat judging by how sticky the laminated menu is. Not to mention the heavy, sour scent of old sweat that hangs in the air. Blair licks her teeth so as not to cringe.

Sometimes the acute sense of smell is a burden, especially in the human world. She envies those mortals who wear the cheapest, artificial crap on their skin and still are able to call it perfume, while it smells like some sort of detergent they use to wipe the floors with. Not to mention all those other smells they seem to be immune to.

A shy waitress pads closer and Blair orders three extra-large burgers with fries, the meat still bleeding, and some red wine, before she props her sneakers up on the bench opposite her, listlessly following some silly game where a lot of humans chase a ball over a field like dogs.

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