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I shivered. Fae princes are sexual beyond human tolerance. They can instill desire in us, amplify it, feed off it, and throw it back at us a thousand times more potent than it began. It’s too much for us. It chars a woman down to ash inside her own mind, leaving nothing but a willing slave.
I might have run Jayne through with the sword—if he hadn’t already begun letting his glamour fall. Now, if I were to lunge for him, he’d simply blast me with the full strength of it, and I’d be on the floor with no thought left of killing him in my smashed mind.
“You wouldn’t,” I said icily.
“I’m sorry, Dani, but I don’t dare let it fall into their hands. This isn’t personal.”
He’d said the same thing to me years ago when he left me lying in that trash-filled street. “Spell check,” I growled, “when you do something to a person, it’s personal. That’s the funny thing about us persons.” I laid down my mental grid and kicked up into the slipstream.
Nothing happened.
I sighed. Extreme emotion and extreme arousal can short out my sidhe-seer powers, and it always happens at the worst possible times. I’d been working on the extreme emotion flaw and had made progress with it. It wasn’t quite as easy to master the other fault: I had to get aroused to work on it and…well, that hadn’t happened in a while. I cast rapidly about for another option, finding only one. It was a long shot.
“Give it to me now,” AOZ commanded, “and I’ll kill him with it. The Faerie permit only slaves to live and demand worship. We aren’t and don’t.”
As Jayne’s glamour continued to fall by slow degrees—still allowing me time to hand it over willingly—I glanced down to where both of my hands were wrapped tightly around the hilt of my sword. I shuddered as his inhuman sexuality began nudging the edges of my mind, looking for a sweet spot, an easy way in. He was trying to do as little damage as possible. For the moment.
Shivering violently, teeth chattering, I ground out, “Y-You’re w-w-willing to sh-shatter my m-mind for it?” What do you think your queen will do to you? my eyes blazed. I felt tears slip from them as I met his gaze, and didn’t need a mirror to know I was weeping blood.
He said sadly, “Ah, Dani, she will most certainly kill me. But she will have the sword. I’m willing to die to protect our race and yours from these vermin.”
He’d said “our race,” and “yours.” There it was. I knew it. His allegiance was to the Fae, not us. I closed my eyes, grinding my teeth together against the cruel teeth of power now tearing aggressively into the edges of my mind. When I was younger, I experienced a Fae prince’s compulsion twice. And survived. I was older and wiser now.
I took my long shot, focused on the ice in my hand. I welcomed it, beckoned it to spread throughout my body, course through my veins with absolutely no idea what I was embracing. In a battle for your life, your sanity, your race, the weapon you have is the one you use.
I felt a sudden prick of pins and needles through my entire body, a buzzing deep in my flesh as if my limbs were waking up from a long time of being numb. My skin cooled and shivered on my bones, feeling strangely elastic and supple. Blood thunder crashed in my head, slamming against the confines of my skull, as whatever the Hunter had left beneath my skin responded.
And flexed.
And grew.
A wave of dizziness took me and I nearly stumbled as sudden stars exploded behind my eyes and I had a fleeting glimpse of a vast, nebula-drenched nightscape superimposed in the air in front of me. Then it was gone and the inside of my head felt calm and cool and silent as the deepest reaches of space.
I didn’t have time to analyze it. Didn’t think. Just opened my eyes and flung my left hand at Inspector Jayne.
The prince sifted out a mere fraction of a second before the bolt of pale blue lightning exploded in the precise spot he’d been standing. The crackling energy struck the south wall of the room, blowing it apart from floor to ceiling. Plaster exploded, wood splintered, and bricks tumbled away, leaving a gaping hole where the wall had been.
My dresser listed dangerously on the edge then plunged four floors to the street below.
Snarling, I whipped my gaze to AOZ.
He dematerialized instantly into a cloud of murky green fog that compacted, narrowed down to a tight stream, and shot out through the opening blasted in the room.
I stood there a moment, leveling my breath, waiting, while the energy surging through my arm ebbed, until at last it was gone. My legs felt like noodles and my hands were trembling.
So much for my warding abilities. They’d failed to keep out both old god and Fae. Push come to shove, I might end up having to sleep on the heavily warded private residence levels of Chester’s, and I so didn’t want to do that. Then again, I had no idea if they were warded against gods.
I pushed the sleeve of my tee up and inspected myself. My arm was black all the way up to my shoulder, with thin tentacles of dark veins spreading across my left collarbone.
I let the sleeve drop and looked out over my bed into the pale morning beyond where a sea of rooftops stretched, and farther out, the whitecaps of a slate gray ocean. A heavy drizzle had begun to fall, and a sudden breeze gusted rain in, soaking my fluffy white comforter.
I rolled my eyes. My bedroom had been through hell in the past few hours.
But every rain cloud really did have a silver lining.
At least it didn’t smell so bad anymore.
When I was nine years old, Rowena told me a dangerous caste of Fae had infiltrated our city. Slender, diaphanous, beautiful, with a cloud of gossamer hair and dainty features, they were capable of slipping inside a human, and taking over their limbs and lives completely.
