Page 25 of Dark Hunter's Touch
The gust that whirled down the hall whipped her face with dust and pebbles and the stinging ends of her hair, hard enough to rattle the iron gate. Her clenched fists—and her eyes—sprang open in surprise.
And so did the gate.
But…how? She was fae, her magics ended where iron began.
No, it wasn’t the iron that failed. The crumbling mortar had yielded to her knack, stone etched away by her wish for freedom. The gate sagged wide, and with a wild smile, she reached toward the man.
The dead man.
As she sat back hard against the wall, her knuckles glanced off the iron. The bitter bite of the metal, as if it were furious at her victory, pierced her. She bit back a scream, but the smell of seared skin made her eyes water and she clutched her hand to her chest.
The man had been dead enough before, considering all Ankha had stolen, but something had remained as a spark in his hazel eye. Now that too was gone, leaving him just another pile of dust and dirt in the abandoned cell block. And she had forgotten to ask his name.
“Is this how you wished to be gone?” The whisper of her breath set the wisps dancing. “Because this is not how I meant to free you.”
Was she the first sylfana ever to kill a man with her own hands? The court had its share of murderous fae, but its fairy princesses would never dream of such mayhem. Though Vaile had told her she had launched an exodus with her escape, she had never wanted to change so much that she became a killer herself.
Her eyes burned with the wind-flung dust and tears she would not allow to fall. No one would share her horror and guilt—except maybe a hunter who had killed his own lord.
Of course, Vaile had conjured other feelings in her she wasn’t sure the fae even had words for…
Thinking of him, the way he’d held her, triggered a hot rush of yearning, and she clamped her arms and wings tight as a cocoon around her, as if she could ward off her own wishes.
She didn’t want to want—not anymore.
Though everything in her wanted to flinch away, she looked at the husk of the man slumped against the iron bars. The queen’s magic, which had animated him, was gone, and already his remains were crumbling into the exposed dirt between the tiles and broken stone.
This was her other choice. The poor man had his emotions stripped from him by force, but if she backed down, she would be giving hers away for free.
No, she didn’t want the burning in her throat, the sick churning in her stomach as she risked reaching between the bars to stroke her fingers over the dead man’s lashes, closing his eye before the worms claimed him. To avoid such ugliness, the fae had relinquished their true feelings to the queen in return for sheltering under the power of her illusions. But their sanctuary had become a prison.
The man’s emotions had been stolen. The fae had deliberately forgotten theirs. Was she deluding herself to believe she had any other choice besides these two?
She could sit here beside her last victim until she too moldered, or…
Olette snapped her wings wide, which yanked her to her feet.
She had run away once. Maybe the time for running had passed.
Chapter 8
The court was restless. It breathed out of time, and the languid glory that was its specialty seemed to have morphed into an uneasy blend of crouched to pounce and poised to flee. The vaulted crystalline walls—the illusion du jour in the faedrealii—resonated with the edgy mood, like a thinly blown glass goblet about to shatter.
Even the will-o’-the-wisps were jittery, their normally drifting flight patterns spiking like a seismograph predicting the end of the world.
Vaile stalked the outer edges of the throne room, equidistant from his brethren patrolling nearby. The nearness of the queen’s magic stripped them of their camouflaging hunter mist, so he kept his wings folded in a high, tight arc behind his head. The intimidation factor added by the talon-tipped vanes was worth the tension in his shoulders from holding his wings in suspension.
Whispers spooled out around him as he walked toward the throne room doors.
“Hunters…” he heard, like graveyard toadstools humping up behind his footsteps, trying to knock him off his path. “Filthy, dangerous… Shouldn’t be in here… After the sylfana…”
He refused to listen to more.
Filthy was justification enough to bar hunters from the potent beauty of court. As for dangerous, well, some were just better at hiding it.
But they were right; he was dirty. Before he had been abruptly recalled to service the queen’s gathering, he had been tracking a manticore. The half lion, half scorpion had slipped out through an unwatched gate. Although the man-headed creature was clever enough to sneak away unnoticed, that particular gate was unwatched because it opened to an ice field in Greenland. Vaile had found the desert-born manticore half frozen, and only the scorching fire of the blue-amber sun had melted the wretched beast out of the tundra. But he had refused to consider euthanizing the creature, not when it begged for a second chance. Instead, he used almost all his gate spores to sprout a circle of lichens large enough to drag the manticore back to the faedrealii. Who was he to condemn the creature’s hopeless but heartfelt desire to run under the desert sun?
The reminder of his own failings stabbed at him like the manticore’s scorpion tail. With his leathers still dripping from the ice and tracking muddy boot prints behind him, his mood was every bit as foul.
