Page 26 of Dark Hunter's Touch
So dirty, yes, and dangerous too… The fae were wise to avert their gazes and step back from his impatient circuit.
From his position a quarter way around the hall from the Steel Throne, he had only a sharply angled view of the enormous double doors. At the moment, the doors were fashioned into two half circles of shining wood etched with steel filigree, closed tight together like an inescapable spiderweb. Within the throne room, the glimmering veins of steel grew ever thinner until they converged on the throne itself. Some other time, the queen might conjure another look, but this one was a classic. Maybe she too felt the restlessness and hoped to keep the rabble in line with a reminder of her abiding power.
Vaile ran one finger under the edge of his studded hunter collar and flicked out a chunk of ice that had been melting down his chest, unnoticed. When had he gotten so cold?
He cut a glance toward the throne where Queen Ankha sat at the center of all those steel threads, appearing to beam with silvery light. She posed with her head tilted to one side, listening to her favorite courtier, the ylf who seemed to be trying to compensate for his rounded human-looking ears with the pompously high points of his collar. Streaks of silver decorated the queen’s black hair, but that too was illusion; her beauty was ageless and infinitely sharper than the ylf’s collar, a match to the net of honed diamonds that ringed her bared neck.
As a powerfully attractive fae and as his liege, she should have won all his attention. Still, his gaze skipped past to the grouping of her attendants. Undines, dryads, nymphs and the squat hobgnome who served as her chancellor stood arrayed on the tiers of risers that spread out around the throne.
But no Olette.
As if the ache in his shoulders wasn’t bad enough, his chest tightened with misgivings. He hadn’t seen her since the poppy field when she had turned her white-winged back on him and walked away, with crimson petals drifting behind her. The memory still burned in his mind.
He touched the blue amber pendant through the front pocket of his leather jeans. Giving her the necklace had been madness when she could have turned its power upon him. He hadn’t needed the touchstone on her person to track her; his knack didn’t require help. But at least the amber warned other hunters to stay away, that she had been claimed by one of their own. When she had thrown the necklace back at him, she had lost that protection.
The weight of the steel in his pocket seemed heavier than it should, and he half turned to adjust the coil of links.
Which left him facing the throne room doors just as they blew open.
Heavy as they were, their wood warped with the force of the blow. The steel filigree screamed in the sudden distortion. The hunter guarding the entry was thrown aside, while the nearest dozen fae stumbled backward, hair and wings and tails streaming in a tempestuous wind. Vaile inhaled the scent of ocean touched with a wild sweetness, like some exotic bloom cresting a tsunami.
Olette. He did not speak her name aloud, not in the midst of the treacherous crowd, but his heart lingered on every syllable.
Slowed by the tangle of gawkers, he pushed between the fae who had recoiled from the newcomer with panicked cries.
Olette. He might not have recognized her if he hadn’t spent one night memorizing her every detail. What had happened to his flighty sylfana? The butterfly-winged spirit had left him and returned as something…else.
The wind prowled like an unseen beast to lift the red-gold curls of her hair in a blazing halo and plaster the wintry-blue shift around her curves. The princess in pink had remade herself in fire and ice. The will-o’-the-wisps knew her though and whirled around her in a joyful spiral.
She stared toward the Steel Throne, her eyes bluer than any sky Vaile had ever flown, and his wings flared, instinctively—ecstatically—seeking the storm she had brought. The nearest fae scattered from the hunter mist that spun from his dark vanes.
He cleared only a few steps before the queen’s voice rang out from behind him. “Hunters, stop her! She is Undone!”
Ankha had risen from her throne to point across the room, sending the ylf-man reeling back.
The accusation halted Vaile in his tracks, all the momentum leaving his muscles as if the destructive power of an amber sun had gone off within his bones.
Undone? Like the old mad Lord of the Wild Hunt? The knotted scar behind his shoulder cramped, half folding his vanes.
At the same time, Olette spread her wings. Against the wide-flung doors with their steel spiderweb filigree, the butterfly scales looked soft and fragile—not dangerous, as the Undoing implied, but endangered.
At the queen’s command, a half-dozen hunters converged from the far points of the throne room on the lone sylfana. Several of them were too young to have witnessed the old lord’s Undoing, and the new Lord Hunter had been away at the time, but he led the phalanx of killers with a brittle smile.
The gathered fae scrambled to clear the way, getting moreinthe way. In their haste, slip-sliding on jeweled heels or cloven feet, a few stumbled into Vaile. He pushed them aside roughly to keep his gaze pinned on Olette.
The chaos churned in waves around her silent form—as if she were oblivious to the queen’s charge of coming Undone, not to mention the charging hunters.
Vaile’s chest burned with the compulsion to cry out her name. He had found her, and he had lost her.
But here she was. Was his knack giving him one last chance to find his way to her?
He had learned to fear the Undoing even before he had lost the whelp’s chain. He had taken up other chains since—the hunter’s collar, the hounds’ leashes, the steel links of the amber sun—but it was that first chain that bound him still, in knots thicker than the scar that would have kept him from flying if not for a sylfana’s fearless touch.
He could not let her get away again.
With a hard snap, he straightened the remembered twist to his wing and launched himself over the heads of the fleeing fae.
The throne room, large thought it was, offered little room for maneuvering. His trailing boots made the fae below duck and squeal. But the awkward hop put him between the other hunters and Olette. He landed with a solid thud and angled himself toward the throne, arms and wings outstretched to ward them away from each other. The hunters slowed their rush, and their lord stared at him expectantly, waiting no doubt for the violent undoing of the Undone.
