Page 27 of Dark Hunter's Touch
Vaile could not force himself to look at Olette, though his body yearned toward hers. “Wait.” His voice cracked.
“Hail, hunter.” Across the empty crystalline hall, the queen raised her hand in an elegant gesture. A few dozen of her courtiers lingered near the throne, their personal illusions flickering with their unease. “Once again, you bring us the troublesome sylfana.”
He inclined his head. “My queen, I bring you nothing this time. My hunt is over.” He took a deep breath. “I have found what I was looking for.”
Slowly, he pivoted to face Olette. The distance in her eyes almost felled him.
When he had first flown the nighttime coast, seeking her, he had for a few frantic heartbeats lost track of where midnight-dark sky and boundless ocean touched. He had spiraled, out of control, before he found his bearings and righted himself.
He did not think he would be so lucky this time.
He lowered his wings, leaving only one hand outstretched toward her. “You,” he said quietly. “I found you.”
Her voice was even quieter when she answered, “It would be best for you to pretend you never had.”
From her shadowed gaze, he knew she meant not just as a hunter finds a runaway fae but the way, together, they’d found sweet release.
“I can’t forget,” he told her. “Do you remember you told me once, long ago, that I wouldn’t always feel your touch as I did then? You were right. I feel more.”
So softly they spoke, and still the wordfeelechoed around them as if it had stolen magic from the very air. Across the room, Queen Ankha descended from the Steel Throne.
Olette lifted her chin, and her smile at Vaile was cold, colder than an undine’s grave water, colder than arctic snow under a manticore’s poisonous quills. “How could you feel anything? I couldn’t even see through your glamour, much less touch you.”
“Maybe you didn’t see that I am a hunter, but you saw something more. Something I’ve never shown anyone.” The furious pressure of the approaching queen almost knotted his tongue. “You saw a way to my heart, which had never been touched. Until you.”
“A heart can’t be touched.” At the icy cruelty of Olette’s smile, the nearest hunter sidled back. “Not unless it is removed from the chest first.” The faintest crack appeared in her cold look when she gazed at Vaile. “As for your so-called heart? It was a lie.”
“No. You didn’t see what I was. But you sawwhoI am. And who I could be.”
“And who is that, hunter?”
“Yours. I would be yours.”
The remaining courtiers—who had drifted closer, drawn by the sentiments they had shunned and feared—loosed a whisper of sound, a sigh that vibrated the silver threads of the walls into a single music tone.
“You did touch my heart,” he promised her. “You made me love you.”
The doubt that turned down the corners of her mouth nearly shattered him. If she escaped him again, this time he would die; like a hunter who lost his prey would be torn apart by his own hounds, so his heart would be shredded. She wavered, as if buffeted by winds that touched only her. But he felt them too, tearing through his veins. His arm, though honed as the rest of him from centuries of flying and fighting, burned with the effort of reaching out. Maybe it would be easier to tuck tight and dive until every sensation was stripped away.
But then he wouldn’t have Olette. He would give her what she wanted—these consuming, dangerous feelings—even if he had to spin them out of the nothingness of his heart into something real.
Slowly, with her gaze locked on his, Olette raised her hand.
“No!” Behind him, the queen’s growl was more sinister than any hunter’s hound.
But it was the sound of glass whistling through the air that made him whirl.
The Lord Hunter stumbled into his hunters’ arms as Ankha shoved him away. The three-sided glass sword of the Wild Hunt beamed in her hand.
She angled the sword toward Vaile and Olette. “This farce ceases to amuse me.”
“Not a farce, my queen.” Vaile took a sidelong step to cover Olette with his body, but he kept his voice steady. “This is true.”
“True love?” The virulence of Ankha’s sneer melted the diamonds around her neck. The droplets fell like tears only to congeal again as the temperature in the throne room plummeted. “A figment of your imagination. We sacrificed that to be what we are—powerful, glorious, forever. Fae.”
Vaile shook his head. “If we lost it, then I have found it again. Here.”
Ankha raised the sword. Its prismatic edges captured light just as it captured magic, and sliced rainbows all around them. A low, ominous drone pulsed from the glass. “That is nothing. Nothing!”
