Page 24 of Dark Hunter's Touch
So while the rest of the courtiers made their way to the throne room, she went the opposite direction, down into corridors of the faedrealii she had never roamed. A few wisps accompanied her, and their tiny lights reflected off the old white tiles that lined the walls. When she trailed her fingers over the tiles, pieces flaked away to reveal packed earth. A red worm curved out of the dirt below her hand and plunged right back in, scattering dark crumbs on the cracked stone floor below.
The queen’s illusions had not graced these halls for a very long time, perhaps not since iron ruled the sunlit world. For a moment, Olette almost understood the need to fill the halls again with fae power…until the old tiles gave way to iron doors, staggered at intervals down the corridor into the shadows.
The metal filled the hall with cold power, older than the fae, and the wisps whirled in agitation. But Olette crept to the first door.
It stood ajar, and the cell beyond was empty. She crossed the hall to the next door, two solid panels of embossed iron. She reached for the small wooden latch in the center of the door and then hesitated.
Even through the iron, she sensed silence waiting on the other side—a silence so vast, the mischievous wisps hung motionless.
Ice rimed the doorway a hands-breadth thick, and as she watched, words appeared, melting into the white frost to reveal the black iron underneath:Touch. And die.
She hurried on.
The next cell was closed with nothing more than a churchyard gate. The whitewash had chipped off the iron bars, and the decorative spear points did not even reach the top of the door frame.
Not that this particular prisoner could escape…
In a rush of sick shock, Olette wondered why they had bothered to lock the man up when they had taken his second leg.
She must have gasped because he pushed himself up onto his hips to stare at her with his one remaining eye. His collared shirt hung open, framing the ruin of his chest where the queen had taken her prizes. “You. I remember you.”
Hazel. His eye was hazel, and his hair was sandy; she hadn’t remembered those details about him. Now she would never forget, although there was nothing of blame in his eye or the hatred she expected. He was empty—that hatred having been taken by Ankha for her magics.
Olette sank to her knees in front of the gate. The nearness of the iron made her skin prickle like the first burn she had gotten from the light of the sun and its reflection from the ocean, but the stone floor sucked the warmth from her palms. “I am so sorry. I didn’t know…” She swallowed back the pointless excuses. Maybe she hadn’t led this man astray, but others had followed her and she had no idea what became of them.
“I did.” He pulled himself toward her and wrapped his fingers around the bars, immune as any human to the touch of iron. When he tipped his forehead into the gate, the metal rang with a hollow gong. “I knew better than to follow a pretty young girl into the alley. But it wasn’t even you, was it? Just someone who looked a little like you.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered again. “She wouldn’t have known either about this…this terrible thing that was done to you.” As if merely toying with him would have been better. But he might’ve escaped eventually, if memories of the human realm had won him back from the fancies and fantasies of the court.
“I thought of terrible things,” he murmured. “We’d danced together all night and I wanted to think I’d be getting something more than the tickle of her fingertips and her lips.” He made a sound—a laugh without humor or a cry without tears—that grated like the broken edges of carved stone. “She teased me with glimpses of what might be, but I never imaginedthis.”
For a minute, they sat in silence. The wisps floated between the iron bars without touching.
The man reached through to clamp his hand over hers. “Can you make this all a bad dream?”
At the clammy chill of his skin, a dozen red worms seemed to squirm down her spine. “This time, it isn’t an illusion.”
“I want to go.”
“I might be able to get you out of the cell, but you can’t leave the court.” She eased out of his grip. “The queen’s magic is the only thing…”
“The only thing holding me together?” He snatched at her wingtip instead, holding on with more force than should still remain in him. “I wish what is left of me would just fall apart, and then I’d be gone.”
The crumpled edge of her wing ached, but she was frozen by the tear that welled up in the man’s hazel eye. Apparently the queen hadn’t taken everything from him. But of course, who would ever want to steal regret?
The wounds, the tear, the wistful words… Though the white stone hallway was nothing like the blood-soaked hunter den where the old lord had come Undone, Olette stiffened against the intrusive memory.
Except… The wing-torn whelp who became her hunter had wanted to fly again, and her knack—not just a wayward breeze, but a powerful yearning—had knit fae magic and sylfana wishes into his wing, just as it had loosed him from his chain. Even though Vaile had betrayed her and brought her back to the court, she had never once regretted freeing the broken hunter boy.
Could she do it again?
Hesitantly, she closed her eyes. From nowhere, a faint draft ruffled her lashes, and her eyelids fluttered with the effort to restrain herself from the urge to run from this man who had been led to his doom by a sylfana’s gossamer promises. At least this time he could not follow his wicked dreams. She tightened her hands into fists, as if she could hold herself in place.
“I just wanted…” he murmured.
Of course the poor man had wanted; a sylfana had made him want. Now she had to deliver something real, not illusion. And if he wanted to leave the faedrealii, well, she could certainly empathize with that.
She summoned up the sensations she had pursued in the sunlit world, how she had felt when she was free, the wind under her wings…
