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I can’t do that.
“I’ll stay with you.”
He doesn’t argue which tells me all I need to know. He wants me at his side, even if he’s spent weeks telling us both that he doesn’t.
Instead, he says, “Pull up your hood. It’ll give you a little more protection from the leader of the Hunt.”
I do. “Is that something I should be worried about?”
“Not at all. You’re not the one who summoned him.”
Now why doesn’t that make me feel any better?
The wind starts whipping. I have to hold tightly to my hood so that it keeps me hidden. The sound of the horse galloping gets even louder; I clench my teeth together, squinting, trying my best to tolerate it. The ground is still shaking. I brace my legs so I don’t fall over.
When the horse comes bursting into the clearing, the powerful hoofbeats make total sense.
Back at home, usually when I was on break at my job, I would watch videos on the internet if I was bored. I liked to watch other painters, enjoying their process while picking up on techniques that I wasn’t already aware of, but every now and then I got sucked into other types.
For a while, I watched a ton of animal videos. There are the ones that made me cry, like the stories about abandoned dogs finding their forever homes, and funny ones, like the video that shows how cats react to cucumbers. And then some that made me go WTF?
I watched this one that totally blew my mind. I guess I never realized how fucking huge a moose is in real life because, when I saw footage of one strolling down the street, my jaw dropped.
It’s doing the same exact thing now.
This horse? It’s even bigger than a freaking moose!
Good thing I braced myself. Seeing this monstrous black horse with an equally black mane and blazing red eyes come racing toward us… when my knees go wobbly, I don’t fall, even though I stumble a bit as the horse rears up on its black legs, stopping short before it tramples me and Rys.
Holy shit.
A man is sitting on the bare back of the beast. He looks small—probably because the horse is so damn big—but, when he’s close enough, I can see that he’s a big bastard. He has at least a head on my scarred Seelie.
And that’s not counting the antlers… yup, those are antlers… that are attached to his hooded cloak.
I can’t tell if they’re real or just decoration. When the rider slants a glance my way, and all I can see under the shadow of his hood are a pair of brightly glowing, vividly green eyes, I decide that I really, really don’t want to know.
What the hell is this guy?
I take an involuntary step back right as Rys clears his throat. The rider’s head snaps to Rys again.
“I followed the blood. Why have you invoked the Wild Hunt?”
“I would like the use of your mount.”
“And what would you give me in return for it?”
Whoa. I don’t know what kind of voice I expected the rider to have, but the deep, booming voice is ev
en more powerful than Oberon. And maybe I have that comparison in my head because of those freaky green eyes, but I don’t know. He’s so loud, I feel his voice thrumming inside of me with every word.
I gulp. Oh, no, no, no.
Jim can survive in the Faerie prison until Rys and Nine can reach him, right? I mean, I made it more than three weeks. If it takes them until morning, he should be fine. We don’t need to borrow the rider’s horse just to get there faster. That seems like something we really shouldn’t be doing.
Too bad that Rys doesn’t seem to agree.
“I would be in your debt.”
