NocC 021 - Jessa Slade - Dark Hunter's Touch - Harlequin 2012-08

by Nocturne

  “Imogene…”

  “You made me happy. You don’t have to save me too.” She stroked her fingertip across his lower lip when he would have argued more. “Till tomorrow.”

  She opened her wings over them, and a delicate swirl of her aphrodisiac drifted around them. He closed his eyes at the rush of pleasure, not just at her touch but at her happiness…

  And he awoke to a tickle against his lashes, light as a fairy’s kiss. He smiled slowly and opened his eyes.

  Above him, the morning sky gleamed pale gray between the coils of ivy that framed his resting place. The soft mist sifting down between the leaves—too fine to register on his skin, just heavy enough to remind him of fairies and kissing—had wakened him.

  Where was the damn roof?

  And where was Imogene?

  *

  Vaile prowled the boundary of the tiny island. Shallow creeks encircled the area, just as she had said, but the cottage where they had spent the night was mostly a crumbled ruin. The hole over the bed that had let in the rain was one of many, and the bed itself was a pile of pine boughs and damned ivy.

  All an illusion—and not one she had cast since she said she wasn’t that powerful. No, he had seen only what he wanted to see.

  He cursed low under his breath, little more than a growl. What else had been a lie? Her story of running away from her heartless brethren, of wanting only to feel? What about her breathless cry as he had sunk into her?

  He scratched at a tender spot on his shoulder. It was probably just a rash from the pine needles. Maybe she had never dug her nails into him while she whispered his name.

  A glint of gold lured him to the picnic table where they had stood, watching the wisps. Time and rot had eaten through the boards of the tabletop to reveal the cracked concrete patio slab underneath.

  At least the chocolate had been real.

  He devoured the rest of the bar and crushed the foil into the pocket of his jeans—her jeans. The scent of her was also real, lingering deep in his skin, rare and precious.

  A faint imprint of slender bare feet led through the moss across the bridge. The cherry blossoms lay undisturbed—pink and still in the spiral where they had fallen when their sustaining breeze vanished. There, the footprints disappeared.

  Imogene had disappeared.

  He spun the ring on his forefinger. Set in the brushed steel band, the blue stone he had kept turned toward his palm looked dull under the sullen sky. He breathed in the fragrance of her again, his pulse accelerating at the memories, false though they might be.

  From the depths of the rare blue amber, a cat’s eye gleam sent a ray of light across the smooth surface. He pointed, aligning his fingertip with the arrowing glint of light. That way.

  He spread his wings, black as his mood, and launched into the mist.

  Chapter Five

  Imogene ran.

  This time, there would be no escape.

  She had gone south along the coast, as quickly as she could, hoping the salty air and flowing water would disguise her scent and her tracks. When her thighs started to seize from the running, she flew, though using her phae magics would draw the Hunters’ attention. Not that flying gave her much advantage in speed or distance, sylfana wings were meant for coy fluttering, not fleeing.

  But she had to get far away—not to save herself. The Hunt was too close this time to lie, even to herself, about having a chance to evade the hounds.

  She had to lead them as far as she could from Vaile.

  The memory of his fingers trailing down her wings made her falter, and she landed with a harsh sob in a spray of sand at the edge of the high-water mark. Thankfully, much of the Oregon coast was still wild, and with night coming, the span of beach was empty except for one strutting gull. The bird gave her a sideways glance of professional disdain at her fumbled landing and launched himself inland.

  She sank to a crouch, one leg folded under her in the wet sand. She hugged her other knee so the pendant pressed into her breastbone. The muscles in her thighs and wings quivered from exertion. The sensation was nowhere near as pleasant as the night before when Vaile’s touch had inspired shivers of desire. She drew the hot memory around her to ward off the chill since her halter dress wasn’t much protection from the settling mist.

  She needed just another moment to remember the tilt of his smile and how it had lifted her heart like a perfect breeze angled beneath her wings. Another moment, and then she would force herself to rise and run.

  But she didn’t rise, because more than his touch she longed for the piercing intensity of his gaze, how he had looked past the illusions and gave her what she so wanted: a chance to feel.

  Her throat ached from the wheezing gasps. No wonder more than one of her sylfana sisters had kept their human lovers entranced, never to find their way back to the world. No wonder the Queen was stealing and binding the power of emotion. More than the endless running, more than the strain of flight, Imogene was crippled by the truth that she would never again feel this way.

  She stifled the sobs. Phae tears were too dangerous to shed in the sunlit world. Any magical thing might fall—poison, evil dreams, a river to drown a village. More reasons the phaedrealii existed under prohibitions against the Undoing.

  Not that she would have to feel anything much longer…

  While she mourned, the mist had grown heavy and pressed too close to be natural. She lifted her face, and the droplets beaded on her lashes.

  Through the swirling veil, the three hounds paced. Under heavy studded steel collars, their nine heads hung low, blunt muzzles fixed on her scent, panting up geysers of sand. At least she had led them a merry chase—merry for them anyway.

  She pushed herself upright, grabbing the pendant as it swung drunkenly, and locked her wobbling knees. Mere exhaustion… She was too numb to feel fear.

  The center hound lifted its middle head, and the red-yellow glint of its eye pierced the mist.

  But the hounds didn’t lunge toward her as she expected. Without a sound, they fanned out to surround her. As they prowled in shrinking circles, their claws left tracks filling with water like fatal wounds in the sand; they could have her in pieces in less than a heartbeat.

  Equally silent, another dark shape coalesced through the mist. Black wings arced sharply above the figure, nothing like the languid drape of her wings.

  It was a Hunter, a being as remorseless as the sylfana were silly. Facing him now, she wondered why she had ever thought she had a chance, even in the good old days when she was still lying to herself.

  This made her stolen time with Vaile even more wondrous. She lifted her chin as she waited for the Hunter’s inevitable command to attack.

  He halted, still wreathed in the mist. One of the hounds raised its head and whined, eager for her blood, no doubt. The Hunter snapped his finger and pointed. The hound half closed its red-yellow eyes in appeasement, and all three slunk back to his side.

  She locked her gaze on the Hunter’s finger. A stone gleamed in his ring. Hunters usually armed themselves with amber in flaming colors like the hound’s eyes. The fossilized tree resin held magics perfectly suspended, much as it encased insects, leaves and small stones. But this amber ring was blue.

  Blue, like the pendant around her neck.

  Her fist clenched around the stone, driving the edge of the steel bezel into her flesh. Though the iron was too refined to hurt her, still her heart constricted painfully. “Vaile. If that is your name. I have never heard of blue amber.”

  “Imogene. And yes, that is my name, though I give it as rarely as one finds blue amber.” He stepped out of the fog he had woven to disguise himself from her.

  Actually, part of that fog—the seductive lie that pure sensation would save her—she had held together herself. Her own fault. But it shredded now on the sharp talons that topped his wings and the cold, cruel winds of reality.

  All that time she had been fighting against the phaedrealii’s love of delusion she had never w
anted it so badly as this moment. She would just have to reweave it herself, out of the tattered threads of her pride.

  Lies and pride offered thin coverage at the moment, though, so she drew the edges of her aching wings around her as she tilted her chin imperiously. “One night. That is all we were supposed to have together. That night is long past.”

  “It wasn’t enough.”

  The low pitch of his voice reverberated through her, finding a yearning echo in places deep within her core.

  “It was more than you deserved,” she said. “Even skin to skin, you lied.”

  As she yanked the chain over her head, she swallowed against the hurt that cracked her voice. That was not a truth she would give him.

  “I didn’t lie to you. You didn’t ask me anything.”

  As if that made her feel less the fool… “You should have just let the hounds shred me yesterday when they caught us on the beach.”

  “No.”

  Without the softening human glamour he had worn, his skin shone like the backlit razor edge of an obsidian blade, highlighted against the velvety black of his wings and the darkly mellow gleam of his leather jeans. The steel-studded collar around his neck glinted like bared teeth. But his naked chest was the same, a broad expanse of flight-honed muscle where she had rested her head last night.

  She squelched the memory and lifted her lip in a sneer. “I know the Lord Hunter keeps all his killers on a short leash. Did you need a night with a sylfana so badly?”

  His bare shoulders squared against the arc of wings as he met her gaze without flinching. “No. I wanted you.”

  The answer silenced her for a heartbeat. “Why?”

  He shrugged, and his wings dipped in an almost bashful movement. “This.”

  At first, she didn’t understand what he was showing her. Then he reached up to spread his long fingers in a V on both sides of a raised scar at the joint where his wing met his shoulder. Though the edges had knit well, the wound must have been horrific. In fact, his wing must have been nearly severed…

  “You,” she whispered. “The Hunter whelp.”

  “I did not even have a name then.” His finger slid over the knot of scarring. “You told me I wouldn’t feel it forever. You were wrong. I still feel it. But it reminds me of what I wished for, what I wanted most.”

  “To fly.”

  “No, I wanted you,” he repeated. “Apparently it was you who decided to fly away.”

  Her throat tightened. “Not soon enough, not far enough.”

  “After I became a Hunter fully fledged, I saw you at one of those never-ending feasts. The wisps danced around you, and the breeze tugged your hair into loops around your shoulders. You just stood there, but every part of you yearned for flight.”

  That could have been any one of hundreds of nights. “The Queen’s illusions are much too strong for me to see through, but her court always stinks of ashes when I face into the wind.”

  “I never noticed anything except you. I wanted to make you dance.”

  Imogene narrowed her eyes. “You are probably a phae strong enough to force me to burn through my slippers.”

  “No. I meant…” The hesitation went on long enough for even a long-lived phae to get impatient. “I wanted you to want to dance. With me.”

  She wished she had seen him on that night, just another one of the Queen’s Hunters, keeping watch from the shadows—for trouble both beyond and within the phaedrealii. They could have indulged in one of the court’s meaningless liaisons and parted ways without this pain. “You felt that longing? Then don’t you see that the Lord Hunter was right? The phae should be free to want, to desire, to feel. It is a magic within us, and we have no right to steal it from others.”

  He loosed a rough laugh. “You say the Lord Hunter was right? He killed my brothers, almost killed me. Wanting you as I did—until you filled all my senses and every path I took on the hunt brought me back to you—only proves the Queen was right to outlaw the Undoing.”

  She shook her head with bitter resignation. “So you told the Queen you would hunt me down, show me the error of my ways.”

  “I told them I could bring you back alive.”

  “I won’t go back. Especially not with you. You are everything I finally left behind. Cold and unfeeling.”

  His eyes darkened as he stepped into her space. The arc of his wings made his looming mass even more imposing. “Not cold at least,” he growled. “Didn’t I prove that last night?”

  Rage at the reminder—and the sudden, fierce longing it roused in her that made her whole body clench with need—conjured one last burst of strength in her, and she hurled the necklace at him. The breeze spun up in answering agitation and flung an arc of sand with the chain. Vaile lifted one arm to shield his eyes.

  She whirled and ran.

  The hounds howled in delight at the renewal of the chase. Their claws hissed in the sand behind her.

  With their hot breath on her heels, she took a half-dozen steps and launched herself out of the Hunter’s mist into the crystalline night sky.

  A sylfana’s wings might not be made for high-speed chases, but desperate fury pumped fresh power past her aches. The breeze that had shed its sand belled under her wings, urging her upward. She thrust herself higher with each stroke and swirl.

  The woeful howl of the hounds, deprived of their prey, echoed in the air, but a darker pressure threatened her from behind.

  Without looking back, she darted sideways. She tucked her shoulder and angled her wing to catch the wind. The force tumbled her end over end, and she jolted onto the new trajectory like a butterfly catching erratic breezes.

  Vaile overshot her like a black rocket—a cursing rocket. The downdraft from his heavy wing beat almost sucked the air out from under her, but she caught the rising edge of the vortex in his wake and flitted away, out over the waves.

  She would not lie to herself. She could tease the Hunter only so long; his strength and stamina completely eclipsed hers. He could fly circles around her—literally. Even now, he was looping around in pursuit, and though she might dodge him with a butterfly’s whimsy, he would double back again and again. But she would not walk meekly back into her prison. He would have to drag her back. And he would have to catch her first.

  He dove. She dodged. They had skipped the winged phae’s aerial foreplay in their first encounter, and now the dance was a deadly game with only one winner. Another lunge and evasion, but this time she lost altitude. The spray from the waves tickled her legs and added damp weight to her wings. Another reckless midair tumble edged her farther out to sea.

  Too far.

  Her heart crashed in her chest, louder than the waves breaking on the shore that now seemed frighteningly far away.

  “Imogene, come back. Imogene!”

  When she had thought he was human, she told him that the phae believed names had power, but only now did she appreciate how that string of syllables that defined her could lift her—as when he had shouted her name on the verge of his release—or tear her apart as it did now. How she longed for her phae lies.

  He overflew her, and she darted to evade him, but her wings were tiring. Her bones burned with exhaustion, and the fitful wind of her knack whistled a weak apology past her ears. She faltered, and her wingtip grazed the water.

  She gasped as she cartwheeled through the air. Her fingers touched the water. She closed her eyes to wait for the chill kiss of the ocean. This was not such an unexpected way to die—in the embrace of the ocean as cold, relentless and unchanging as the phaedrealii itself, but oh no, she had never meant to bring Vaile down with her....

  A heavy weight slammed between her helplessly spreading wings, and her eyes snapped open at the impact as Vaile, clamping his arm around her belly, tried to lift them from the fatal plunge.

  The trailing edges of his wings hit the water with a vicious slap, and water sprayed up around them. He strained against gravity and the weight of water, as if by the magic of his ferocio
us will alone he could power them skyward.

  His leathery wings snapped out to full extension, shedding droplets in a shimmering arch that caught the moonlight. For a heartbeat, they hung together, suspended in the monochrome rainbow of night-dark ocean, pale foam and silvery droplets. Then one more powerful downward thrust rocked her head back against his shoulder, and they shot free, high above the waves.

  She had never commanded such power on the wing, and the wild thrill of it made her pulse sing in her veins.

  Or maybe that was Vaile’s arm, locked tight under her breasts.

  “Drop me,” she hissed. “Leave me to drown.”

  “Let you escape, you mean? After all I did to hunt you down? That’s my knack, you know. I always find what I want.”

  “Your prey.”

  “You.”

  Why would he tell her his knack? Maybe he thought telling her would keep her from running again. As if she would ever have another chance. Back in the phaedrealii, her desires would wither, like her rarely used wings. Returning to a sylfana’s carefree, thoughtless existence, she would forget everything she had felt. She would even forget how badly she had wanted to feel at all. Nor would she be bothered by the cruelty of Vaile’s betrayal—cold comfort at that. “Just tear off my wings, and drop me in the ocean.”

  His breath was a warm sigh in her ear, and his bare chest almost scorched the damp folds of her wings trapped between their bodies. “Imogene—”

  “Whatever you do to me, it will be no worse than what the Queen has in mind.”

  He tightened his grasp. “Even she is not so…well, she is that cruel, and you said you have seen worse from her, but you haven’t done anything that unforgivable. Yet.”

  “I led that man not to his death but to the loss of everything that made him who he was, from his delights to his fears. I gave him to the Queen, and she took all that from him. And worst of all? I told myself that I was running away to make his sacrifice meaningful, to make sure that even though he had been used up, I would never again be used to ensnare another man. But the truth is, when I saw those treasures of his emotions, I wanted to feel them too. Like our Queen, I wanted to take that passion, all of it, and that is why I will never forgive myself.”