Page 95 of Elven Throne

Throwing a fit like a fucking child.

Maxwell stared after him in growing bafflement.

Maleine looked Rebecca up and down. “Honestly, I thought you were dead.”

“I thought you’d be rotting in Ryngivát Prison,” Rebecca quipped.

The elf woman grinned. “Fun little surprises all around, then, huh? Look at us. Aren’t reunionsfun?”

Without waiting for a response, she surged past Rebecca and Maxwell to follow Rowan back into the parking lot.

Rebecca sighed and headed after them, Maxwell moving beside her in his long, slow stride.

“Who the hell isthat?” he asked.

“Maleine.” Rebecca already hated the taste of the words in her mouth before they even came out. “Blackmoon’s older sister.”

27

IfRebeccahadthoughtthe tension was bad just between Rowan and Maxwell, it was evenworsenow with Maleine.

Suffocatingly worse.

It did, however, hearten her by a surprising amount to see Rowan practically squirming in his sister’s presence. Scowling every time she inserted herself into his business.

Maleine was the only person in two worlds who had ever been able to get under Rowan’s skin the way she did now. They’d never been on consistently good terms, or inconsistently good terms.

Now, Rebecca couldn’t help but think of it as a well-timed buffer to Rowan’s more infuriating qualities.

For whatever reason, Maleine had tracked him down in this world. Possibly to make sure he was doing what needed to be done, maybe even to help out a little as she’d claimed.

Most likely, though, her reasons for being here included quite a bit more than either of her claims suggested. Of course, much like her brother, Maleine wasn’t going to tellanyonewhat her true plans entailed.

But she sure did seem to relish the effect she already had on all of them, especially her brother.

Rowan stomped across the parking lot in a huff, muttering to himself with the plastic grocery bag from the liquor store swinging at his side. When he marched right past the Honda, Rebecca stopped.

“Hey!” she called after him. “The car’s over here.”

“Fuck the car.”

“Aren’t we driving?”

“No,” he snapped. “We don’t need to where we’re going.”

Rebecca scoffed and gestured toward the Honda, but she refused to follow him in his current state, without an explanation. “So we’re just gonnawalkthe rest of the way?”

Rowan finally stopped, turned halfway around to glare at her, then jiggled his head with wide eyes, as if all the answers were perfectly obvious and he was now dealing with a bunch of idiot. “Kinda.”

Then he spun back around and stomped some more, crossing the street beyond the parking lot without once checking for crossing traffic first. Like he’d suddenly adopted a brand-new death wish.

With Maleine here now, that probably wasn’t all that far from the truth.

Rebecca had no idea where the hell Rowan was taking them, but as she and Maxwell followed in his wake—and Maleine walked ahead of them, practically skipping across the asphalt—she started to think the Blackmoon Elf had lost his mind.

The only thing that existed on the long strip of sparse grass between the road to the liquor store and the highway, acting more like a median than any measure of public open space, was an enormous metal statue.

A dragon statue, rising twelve feet against the blue autumn sky, its silvery exterior winking in the late-afternoon sunlight.

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