Page 51 of Explosive Chemistry

Liliana wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say. She could tell him that it was raining and hailing and windy, but he already knew that. He knew where she needed to go. And he had already told her that he would not take her there. Asking him to change his mind was pointless. “Your seat cushion is getting wet.”

“So are you,” the Fae colonel pointed out.

Liliana looked down at herself, blinking rain out of her eyes. The velvet scarves that made up her blouse and skirt were plastered to the leotard underneath. “I am already wet.”

“Then it won’t matter when you sit on the wet seat cushion.”

“I need to go to the base.”

“I’ll take you wherever you want to go. Except there.”

Liliana considered that. “Okay.” She opened the door, climbed up on the steel running board, and into the car with the giant tires. The heavy door shut out the wild wind and pouring rain as he pushed the button that rolled up the window.

Colonel Bennet looked at her expectantly.

He would take her anywhere except where she actually needed to go. Maybe she could affect Pete’s path just enough to get him there in time? It was the only option she could see.

“Take me to the police station.”

The prince turned the heater up a little higher, then told his GPS where to go as he accelerated down the road. She noted that he drove manually with his own hands on the wheel. She wondered if he didn’t trust the auto-drive, or if he just disliked sitting and doing nothing while the machine navigated.

As the warmth of the heater sank into Liliana’s skin, her muscles loosened. Her teeth stopped chattering. Lightning still flashed bright outside the confines of the car. It painted the scars on the prince’s face in harsh contrasts, making his appearance shift abruptly from handsome man to nightmare demon. The wind whipped trees in every direction. A few small branches blew across the street in front of them.

“Why did you give me a ride?” she asked the prince.

“You did save my life.”

“You would probably just have been injured. You are not that easy to kill.”

His mouth quirked up on the edges. He glanced away from the storm-swept road for a moment to look at her. “I’d also like to know more about what you said. We have more time to talk.”

Oh. Of course. Answers to his questions were the price for the ride.

“Who’s going to die today on my base?” His voice sounded casual, calm, almost bored, but his long-fingered hands were tight on the wheel. She did not think it was because of the storm.

The Fae prince showed little of his emotions on the surface, and Liliana had been forbidden to look with her third eyes, but she strongly suspected that he was worried for his people.

Some things began to make a disturbing kind of sense to her. This Sidhe colonel had confronted the pride-king specifically because he suspected he’d done harm to his soldiers. The artificial stone around him shared his anger. Both of those things hinted at old world power and obligation. Liliana remembered that when this Sidhe prince called, not just the living tree, but the earth itself had answered him.

Sidhe were no more powerful than other Fae unless an area of land chose them. The larger and more populated the land area that chose them, the more powerful the Sidhe became.

Since the slaughter, decimation by disease, and displacement of the native tribes, the American Sidhe had faded. No land in the United States that she knew of still had a bond with the old Sidhe. Just like spider seers, North American Sidhe had been hunted, so very many of them killed, some perhaps gone to sleep in their mineral or plant forms for centuries or forever. Everyone thought them extinct now.

Liliana suspected they were no more extinct than her own kind, but kept their existence hidden for the same reason she did—to stay not extinct.

The old Sidhe might be gone, but the land remembered. For centuries, it refused to choose any outsider. No non-native Sidhe had ever been chosen by any land in North America. Those who hoped to be chosen gave up and went back to their homelands across the sea.

Yet, it seemed natural that a Sidhe who had dedicated his life to the military would have an affinity for a military location, and Fort Liberty was one of the oldest military bases in the United States.

“Did you land bond with Fort Liberty?” she asked him. It wasn’t her turn to ask a question, but that seemed like an incredibly important thing for her to know.

His gaze did not leave the storm ravaged road. He showed a total lack of reaction. “I don’t know what you mean.” Everyone reacted when someone asked a question, whether with confusion or curiosity, fear or irritation. People always reacted to questions.

“I don’t lie to people. I don’t like it when they lie to me, especially since I almost always know,” Liliana said. He had old-world manners and old-world abilities. Of course, he knew what it meant to be bonded to the land.

The prince glanced down at his steering wheel for a moment, but he didn’t apologize for the lie.

Liliana looked out the window at the tall pines, oaks, cedars, and elms waving wildly in the fierce wind.

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