Page 2 of Dark Hunter's Touch
He cowered as the old lord whirled back with a surprised shout. The queen only smiled and loosed her power at the lord’s back in a boom of thunder.
Half blinded, half deafened, half dead, the whelp drifted for a heartbeat…
Until a gentle touch on his cheek roused him.
“Here now, you mustn’t cry.”
He cracked open his swollen eyes. At first he thought the queen, pale and beautiful, had deigned to speak to a hunter’s whelp. But no, it was just a silly little sylfana, younger and smaller than him. Her short white wing buds, not yet unfurled, stuck out awkwardly from her shoulders, bared by her palest pink shift. Even at the peak of their power, sylfaniiacould barely fly. They mostly danced and sang and flitted around the court, their laughter as shiny and empty as mirrored bells. When she came into her knack, she would be nothing but a reflection of the idle whims and pleasures of the faedrealii.
But at least her wing wasn’t hacked half through by the Lord Hunter’s bespelled sword.
“I wasn’t crying,” he croaked.
She wrinkled her nose, easing the strain the queen’s draw of power had left on her heart-shaped face, and held up her finger. A droplet sparkled. “I won’t let them see.”
He looked away from the startling blue clarity of her too-knowing gaze.
Behind her, faewere milling through the destruction. Some of the courtiers had swooned, drained by the queen’s demand. No one attended the black-winged corpses though. Even in death, most faeavoided hunters.
Except this silly sylfana who knelt at his side. Between her bare toes, the end of his leash lay coiled in the dirt and blood. How had she struck the chain? Every other link was pure iron, sapping his fae magics until he was strong enough to control himself. A sylfana should have fled, shrieking, from the metal ore.
Reluctantly, the whelp’s gaze slid back to her. “Where are my brothers?”
“Five are dead, two stayed hidden and won’t come out, and three are wounded, though none as badly as you.” She curled her hand into her lap, her fingertip still glistening with his tear.
He closed his eyes. When the patrolling hunters returned, they would choose a new Lord Hunter from their ranks and deal with the dead. And then they would deal with him.
A wingless hunter could not hunt. A Hunter who could not hunt was…nothing.
“You were so brave,” she murmured. “No one else stood up to him.”
“I could not even stand.” And now he would never fly.
“To fly? Is that what you want?”
Had he let the wistful words escape him aloud? He opened his eyes to glare his fury at her. “I am hunter-born. A hunter needs his wings to find what he hunts.”
She stared back at him, idly winding a lock of her hair around her undampened finger. The shining strands held all the colors of the amber he had smashed: copper, gold, and bronze. “Do you know what a sylfanadoes?”
“I know you’ll never reach even the lowest clouds,” he snapped.
“We have the power of wishes.”
The whelp sneered as he had seen the older hunters do when they complained about the sylfaniiawho served a parallel court function to the hunt, acting as the Queen’s lures. Where hunters were the blade, the sylfaniiawere the hook, wielding temptation and enticement in place of violence, equally merciless but masked in pleasures, the precise nature of which remained frustratingly unspoken around the whelps.
But for the first time, the whelp understood the anger—and the longing—in his older brothers’ voices. He leaned away from the sylfana. “I don’t need your wishes.”
“It is not my wish.” She reached around herself to poise her tear-gilded fingertip over the bud of her wing where the first scalloped edge was just appearing. “It’s yours.”
He shifted. “You can’t do that. It’s magic.”
“Of course it’s magic. We are fae.” She touched the tight furling of white. When she lifted her finger, tiny scales glittered alongside the salt of his tear.
He watched, warily, as she stretched her hand toward his shoulder where the joint of his wing had been so horribly slashed. He stiffened. “I don’t think—”
“It’s just a wish. Are you scared?”
He was. “No.”
