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“A beautiful beast,” Aster corrected.
Evelyn rolled her eyes.
“Damn dandelions, Saige. All the single women in Callum have taken note of him. Are you trying to tell me you haven’t noticed those eyes of his?”
Fucking flames.
Evelyn rolled her eyes as warmth spread across her cheeks. “No.”
“What about those arms? The biceps!”
Oh yes, she’d seen those. In action. Now warmth spread in her belly, the kind that elicited wicked thoughts. But she wasn’t about to let Aster know that.
“Again, no,” Evelyn said with a wave of her hand.
“You’re a liar, and you know it!” Aster yelled across the path.
“I work with him,” Evelyn said, but laughter seeped into her tone.
Aster threw up her hands. “That makes it all the more fun.”
“You can’t be serious!”
Aster shrugged. “I must be a weaker woman than you, Saige, because I’d be tempted.”
“The scary thing is, you’re being serious.”
“Damn dandelions, I sure am. Do you have another man out there? Is that why?”
Evelyn snorted. She hadn’t been interested in a man, let alone in a relationship with one, in two and half years. Most of her relationships had been the physical kind, and though that kind suited her on-the-run lifestyle, it didn’t sit well with her since she’d run from her betrothed. But surely Kade Drengr had had women in his life, too. They were in their mid-twenties. To think they’d sworn off the opposite sex until marriage was unrealistic.
She’d run to protect her people, not to start a new life. Men, emotions, flings—Evelyn didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to navigate any of those things, and she wasn’t sure she could without thinking about Kade and that she’d abandoned their union.
Guilt pressed on her chest again, and Evelyn struggled to breathe evenly. Their union had been one of the main reasons she’d run. Not to run from a man she didn’t know. Evelyn had been ready to marry him for the sake of the prophecy. According to the Elders and their belief in the prophecy, for Evelyn and Kade to be their strongest, their magic needed to be connected.
Unlike Aster or Evelyn’s parents, they weren’t fated. It wasn’t possible for witches and werewolves. But with the help of spells crafted by both witch and werewolf scholars, Evelyn and Kade would have tied their souls together during their union in a forced bond, all for the sake of a prophecy.
But according to one particularly cruel Elder, the one who haunted Evelyn’s dreams and thoughts, Evelyn’s success at defeating the vampyr hinged on her flame. That power, that gift from the Sun Goddess, destroyed them instantly. Darkness couldn’t outmatch the power of the Sun.
Evelyn’s breath became shallow. Her chest constricted, ribs squeezing her heart and lungs like a room growing smaller and smaller with each breath.
Like the time her tutor went to desperate measures reciting the importance of her flame. Everything she’d learned, trained for, breathed had been about her flame. The prophecy depended on it.
Not her, but the power given by the Sun Goddess and Moon God.
The vivid reminders of her tutoring heightened her nerves, and Evelyn couldn’t stomach bringing Kade down with her when her flame was gone. What if it hindered his werewolf magic? What if, once they were tied together, whatever ailed her ailed him, too? Evelyn had already failed and let down so many others. She couldn’t add Kade to the list.
Evelyn sighed. Aster still waited on her answer. “No, there is no other man. Cyrus and I work together. That is that. More importantly, he isn’t my type.”
The Goddess knew that was a lie, but her unexpected and intense attraction to the man hardly mattered. Even if she wasn’t promised to another man, a man she’d ruin if they bonded, her life would never be stable enough for a relationship of any kind. Evelyn’s stomach rolled. She also had a murder to investigate and a vampyr to find before she left Callum. There was no need to entertain anything with the huntsman and drag him into her mess. Besides, she kept others at a distance for a reason. Her secrets, her loss of family, or her absence, for that matter, could never reach the shores of Sorin with the risk of war with the vampyrs a possibility.
All of it landed on Evelyn’s shoulders, leaving her empty and hollow as she walked alongside Aster.
The earth witch sighed. “How about I tell you my favorite tales of Callum?”
Evelyn nodded with a small smile, and Aster enlightened her with unique tales of faeries and kings and princesses. With each story, Evelyn allowed herself to be more distracted, forgetting her failures, secrets, and attraction to the huntsman.
Chapter Eleven
