Dark Hunter's Touch

Until a gentle touch on his cheek roused him.

“Here now, you mustn’t cry.”

He cracked open his swollen eyes. At first he thought the Queen, white and beautiful, had deigned to speak to a Hunter’s whelp. But no, it was just a silly little sylfana, younger and smaller than him. Her short white wing buds, not yet unfurled, stuck out awkwardly from her shoulders, bared by her palest pink shift. Even at the peak of their power, sylfana could barely fly. They mostly danced and sang and flitted around the court, their laughter as shiny and empty as mirrored bells. When she came into her knack, she would be nothing but a reflection of the idle whims and pleasures of the phaedrealii.

But at least her wing wasn’t hacked half through by the Lord Hunter’s bespelled sword.

“I wasn’t crying,” he croaked.

She wrinkled her nose, easing the strain the Queen’s draw of power had left on her heart-shaped face, and held up her finger. A droplet sparkled. “I won’t let them see.”

He looked away from the startling blue clarity of her too-knowing gaze.

Behind her, phae were milling through the destruction. Some of the courtiers had swooned, drained by the Queen’s demand. No one attended the black-winged corpses though. Even in death, most phae avoided Hunters.

Except this silly sylfana who knelt at his side. Between her bare toes, the end of his leash lay coiled in the dirt and blood. How had she struck the chain? Every other link was pure iron, sapping his phae magics until he was strong enough to control himself. A sylfana should have fled, shrieking, from the metal ore.

Reluctantly, the whelp’s gaze slid back to her. “Where are my brothers?”

“Five are dead, two stayed hidden and won’t come out, and three are wounded, though none as badly as you.” She curled her hand into her lap, her fingertip still glistening with his tear.

He closed his eyes. When the patrolling Hunters returned, they would choose a new Lord Hunter from their ranks and deal with the dead. And then they would deal with him.

A wingless Hunter could not hunt. A Hunter who could not hunt was…nothing.

“You were so brave,” she murmured. “No one else stood up to him.”

“I could not even stand.” And now he would never fly.…

“To fly? Is that what you want?”

Had he let the wistful words escape him aloud? He opened his eyes to glare his fury at her. “I am Hunter-born. A Hunter needs his wings to find what he hunts.”

She stared back at him, idly winding a lock of her hair around her finger. The shining strands held all the colors of the amber he had smashed: copper, gold, and bronze. “Do you know what a sylfana does?”

“I know you’ll never reach even the lowest clouds,” he snapped.

“We have the power of wishes.”

The whelp sneered as he had seen the older Hunters do when they complained about the sylfana who served a parallel court function to the Hunt, acting as the Queen’s lures. Where Hunters were the bullet, the sylfana were the hook, wielding temptation and enticement in place of violence, equally merciless but masked in pleasures, the precise nature of which remained frustratingly unspoken around the whelps.

But for the first time, the whelp understood the anger—and the longing—in his older brothers’ voices. He leaned away from the sylfana. “I don’t need your wishes.”

“It is not my wish.” She reached around herself to poise her tear-dampened fingertip over the bud of her wing where the first scalloped edge was just appearing. “It’s yours.”

He shifted. “You can’t do that. It’s magic.”

“Of course it’s magic. We are phae.” She touched the tight furling of white. When she lifted her finger, the tiny scales glittered alongside the salt of his tear.

He watched, warily, as she stretched her hand toward his shoulder where the joint of his wing had been so horribly slashed. He stiffened. “I don’t think—”

“It’s just a wish. Are you scared?”

He was. “No.”

“I am. Just a little.” She smiled at him, and he knew he would never forget the light in her blue eyes. “Ready?”

He wasn’t. “Yes.”

She closed her eyes and exhaled. The sweet scent of her breath and phae magic banished the stink of blood, and he found himself leaning toward her. She touched him.

The fire went through him in a ferocious blaze, a thousand times worse than the prismatic sword’s edge or the Queen’s thunder. He screamed but could not pull away.

“Hush. It won’t always feel like this.”

But it would. He knew he would always feel like this.

Chapter One

She wanted to feel it all. Her body burned. Sweat slicked down her skin, a sensuous tickle, and her chest heaved with each pounding stroke. When she gasped, the taste of salt prickled on her tongue.

Imogene needed her sunlit runs. With her body, mind, and senses so immersed in the moment, she might camouflage her presence from the Wild Hunt. The inexorable path of the sun, immune to any magics, helped keep her on her path, pretending to be a true inhabitant of this earthly realm—but for how long?

She wanted to run forever. That’s how long the Queen’s phaedrealii Hunters would search for her: forever. Creatures who stood with only one foot in the world’s time had that advantage. Though the phae could be blithe and capricious, once Hunters were loosed upon the object of their hunger, they would never falter. The black dogs and their dark masters were so dangerous that the Queen herself chained them when they prowled her inner court.

The sun fell into the streaked clouds over the Pacific Ocean like a fading ember. Its glow burned a red hole through the veil of the blue-gray sky, and the reflection in the water rippled with secrets. A chilly breeze breathed out from the pine forest rising from the rocky headlands beyond the dunes. Imogene slowed to a jog and flapped her oversized T-shirt to let the breeze tickle her belly.

A creep of awareness between her shoulder blades made her glance back.

Down the beach, a dark silhouette closed the distance, tall and menacing. Her heartbeat ramped up again and all her muscles tensed. For a confused moment, a swirl like black wings spread above the figure, and even the ceaseless churn of the ocean seemed to hush.

Then the sun flared out behind the clouds one last time, and Imogene recognized him: just a fellow jogger she had passed many times over the month since she had moved to the Oregon coast. He waved at her again—not wings, just a regular old human arm—and she chided herself for seeing monsters in every shadow.

Still wary, she let him catch up. All the other times, they had waved but never spoken.

“Hey, I think you dropped this.” Still a dozen strides away, he tossed something toward her.

Reflexively, she caught the chain that spiraled through the air. The metal tingled in her hand: steel. From a bezel at the bottom dangled an odd, blue stone—partly clouded but transparent in places with occlusions that caught and scattered the low slanting light. The pendant gleamed like a sky changing from the clear blue of day to the darker blue of evening, a sight she had longed for when she’d been trapped in the halls of the phaedrealii.

With regret, she shook her head. “Beautiful, but it’s not mine.” She held the necklace out to him, looking up.

And her breath, which she had finally caught, escaped her again.

They had always passed each other at a distance—part of her promise to herself to stay far away from humans on this trip through the sunlit realm. She had noticed only that he was dark haired; had a smooth, gliding stride that ate up the beach miles; and didn’t usually bother with shirts despite the chill.

Shirts were overrated anyway—especially if they committed the crime of covering such a perfectly sculpted chest. The hard planes of his pectorals blurred beneath just enough dark curls to declare the undeniable presence of testosterone, and the narrowing arrow of hair over his abdomen commanded her attention down toward testosterone central.

She jerked her gaze up before she could wonder if the ripstop nylon fly of his shorts was rippling from the breeze…or from something else.