Page 133 of Heart of Mischief

And everything went dark.

Epilogue

From his place beside thebed,Elias Everhart kept watch over Charlie.

She looked so peaceful and innocent, dark hair splayed across the pillow, freckles like little black eyes in the darkness. She would have no memory of being carried here by Mason and Loki. Would have no memory of him leaping from his bed, where he’d been lying since he regained consciousness, and running to her side, yelling out questions.What happened? Is she breathing? Is she alive?And she certainly wouldn’t remember the time that she had spent pressed against his body in that same bed, healing energy moving from his form into hers.

Her no-longer-quite-human form.

Because she was a mare now.

Charlie Hudson was a mare.

And she’d only done it to save him.

Elias didn’t know what to make of that. Didn’t know if he should makeanythingof it, other than it being confirmation that she really did consider him a friend. His only friend in the entire world, actually. Except for Olive, wherever she was.

But did she see him as just a friend, or was it something more?

There was an attraction between them—that much was undeniable. It had grown so potent in the moments before they kissed that he’d thought he couldseeit, that it had become a physical object with heft and color and form.

He hadn’t gone into that night planning to kiss her. He hadn’t gone into that week planning to feelanythingfor her. But there he was, sitting beside the bed and staring down at her, still impossibly beautiful even when slack-jawed and snoring lightly.

And what he felt…

Well. He wasn’t ready to say those words. Not even close.

Since the day he completed his Trial and first opened his eyes as a mare, he’d assumed that he would never say those words again. That he would never even think them. That he would never eventhinkabout thinking them. But now…

He exhaled unsteadily.

Back in the forest, when she’d insisted that kissing him had been nothing but a drunken mistake, he’d wanted to cut it all off again. To plug up every hole in the dam of his emotions, to feel nothing at all. But he couldn’t. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t. It was too late. There were too many holes now. Too many soft spots, too many faults in the structure he’d long thought impenetrable. He couldn’t plug them all up fast enough.

He couldn’t say for sure when the dam had started to come down again. Maybe it was at the car wash, when her first instinct—for reasons he couldn’t understand—had been to protect him from Mason’s punch. Maybe it was the first time he saw her float up into the air, the unbridled awe on her face at being able to perform magic. Maybe it was the ache he’d felt when she apologized for what had happened to his family, even though she didn’t need to, even though it had nothing to do with her. The yearning he’d felt for her in that moment had been like a physical kick to the gut. Though, if he were being truly honest, his wall had probably started to come back down the first moment he laid eyes on her in that cafeteria.

So few days had passed, yet there now were so many holes in his defenses.

And every single one of them had been made by her.

Her.

It was hard to be this close to her. It had been hard to be close to her allweek—seeing her and hearing her voice and smelling the impossibly intoxicating scent of her, all without being able to touch her. To act upon the maddening need he felt for her, a desire so strong it overpowered even his thirst for fear.

But at least then, he’d been able to hold out hope that she felt the way that he did.

Now he knew for certain that she didn’t, which meant that being around her was going to be damn near impossible.

And yet he couldn’t leave. No matter how painful it was to be near her, it would be even worse not to see her at all.

Charlie shifted in her sleep, head falling over to one side so that only her left cheek was exposed. Her creamy skin and smattering of freckles. Her eyebrows pulled together, lips moving wordlessly. She was dreaming. And from the look on her face, it wasn’t a good one.

Elias smiled to himself. He could fix that. Of all the things that had gone wrong in the last few hours, he could at least fix that. He reached out one hand, tucking a few strands of hair behind her ear. When he was done, he let the backs of his fingertips linger on her cheek. Let them caress her skin.

He closed his eyes.

That was one of Elias’s many secrets. One of the many things he’d never told Charlie: that mares could give sweet dreams as well as terrifying ones. He didn’t do it often. In fact, he hadn’t even known he could give anything but nightmares before he met her. He’d never needed to. Fear was what made him strong; why would he try to create its opposite?

Most recently, he’d used this newfound talent to change the course of a nightmare Charlie had been having about her loved ones being burned to ash at the old house in the woods. He hadn’t come to her room that night intending to mess with her mind. He’d just wanted to check in on her. To make sure nothing and no one came for her in the middle of the night. But when he saw the cold sweatbeading on her forehead, heard the whimpers and cries slipping from her lips, he’d been helpless to ignore it. He’d had to act. So, he’d pressed his fingers gently to her temple and tuned in to the dream happening in her mind.