Page 57 of Sky’s Edge

Avalanche had tired of the tussle and was now slithering between Tanyn’s ankles.

Oh, Lilith, I needed to quit watching.

Pronto.

“Where’s this pen?” I asked Tanyn.

“About a hundred yards, around that bend. Can you walk it?”

Hmm.

Sit on a SnowSprint with thousands of tiny daggers of snow assaulting my face or walk a hundred yards in the freezing cold to see more cuties like the one at Tanyn’s feet?

“I can walk.”

Another smile hit Tanyn’s face, it wasn’t as big, or as free, but it was still damned pretty.

He threw out an arm for me to get going, and I was bummed he didn’t toss it around my shoulders when we started walking side by side.

Or take my hand.

But he didn’t.

And eventually, after we made it around the bend and the pen came into view, I lost sight of everything, including my own personality, and raced through the snow to it like a little girl would race to Princess Lyra’s palace at Culpepper’s Land of Wonder.

There were trees. There were small shelters. There was even a bloodstain in the snow, perhaps from an earlier feeding, or an unsuspecting prey entered the pen. And the space was large.

But four adorable white and black-spotted lynx kits were trundling my way.

“Oh my gods,” I breathed before…yes, me…Catla Truelock of the Nocturn Truelocks…climbed that damned fence and jumped to the other side.

I sat in the snow and the kits attacked me.

I started giggling as I fussed and petted.

I felt Tanyn’s presence join me (not to mention, Hurley was there, nosing some of the kits).

“Do they have names? Are they going to be this sweet, like Avie, because they were born in captivity? What do they eat? Where is their mom?” I rattled off.

“Catla.”

At the uber-strange tone of his voice, I looked up to see him looming over me.

And his eyes were again black, that firestorm of red lightning flaring through them, and those eyes were locked on me.

“Should I…not…be doing this?” I asked haltingly in the face of that look.

“Their mother is dead. They were sent here to be nursed by an injured female who’d lost her kits to a predator but still had her milk.”

“Okay,” I said softly, because that storm in his eyes hadn’t abated.

“Get up,” he ordered tersely.

Disengaging with the still playing kits, I took my feet.

I barely got them under me when he had my head in a firm grip between his gloved hands and his face was in my face.

“Tanyn,” I whispered, struck by his look, our proximity, his hold.