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But now was obviously not the time for that. I kissed him one more time, hard enough that he rumbled with pleasure deep in his chest, and then I made myself step back. My cheeks were flushed, but I suddenly felt twice assteady.
“Let’s get our gear and getgoing.”
Chapter 2
Ren
Several hours up the trail,I was starting to wonder if we’d really needed to bring quite so much stuff. I could survive without a sleeping bag, right? Who needed changes of clothes? What good was food? Iknewthe guys had given me the lightest pack, and it still felt like there was a ton of bricks weighing on myshoulders.
Apparently I needed to work on that endurance thing in more than just the shifting department. I hadn’t had the opportunity to get a whole lot of practice mountain-trekking inNYC.
I didn’t want to look like a wimp when my alphas were striding along like the effort was nothing, so I gritted my teeth and kept walking. But I couldn’t say I was upset when Aaron paused and touched one of the walls of rock that had gradually been rising on either side of us. They loomed over the path now, not so high they blocked out the sinking sun, but enough that there was no hope of taking a shortcutout.
“There’ve been fae up here,” Aaronsaid.
“What?” West pushed past Nate to stride over. Aaron pointed to a mark in the smooth rock—a couple of intersecting lines with a glow so faint I wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t drawn my attention. West’s shoulders tensed. The rest of us drewcloser.
“It looks old,” Marco said. “They haven’t charged that any timerecently.”
“Charged?” Irepeated.
“With magic.” He waved his hand toward the lines. “The fae are big fans of making thingsshiny.”
“So by fae, we’re talking... fairies, right?” I guessed if shifters and vampires were real, there was no reason Tinkerbell shouldn’t betoo.
West cut his gaze toward me. “Just like we’re a far cry from werewolves, the fae aren’t anything like your fairy tales. They’re nothing you want to messwith.”
“They’ve had kind of a chip on their shoulder since human beings started taking over so much of their territory,” Marco elaborated. “They do love theirprivacy.”
“But mountains aren’t exactly their usual type of wilderness. They usually prefer places where thingsgrow.” Aaron studied the path ahead with a thoughtfulexpression.
Nate set his hands on my shoulders. “We’ve got to keep going either way. The sooner we find what we’re looking for, the sooner we can leave and not have to worry about dealing with the fae atall.”
No one could argue with that. We started tramping along again, but we were all eyeing the stone walls a lot more carefully now. The path was maybe seven feet wide, not a whole lot of room to maneuver if we had to fight. Which West, at least, seemed to think was a possibility. But Marco had said it was humans the fae took issuewith.
“How do the fae feel about shifters?” Iasked.
West made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a wordless muttering, as if he thought the question was ridiculous. Aaron ignored him. “We used to have decent relations with them,” he said. “Our interests and needs are pretty different, but we share an appreciation for wild, open spaces and privacy from humans. Unfortunately we’ve had some... clashes in the last severaldecades.”
“As humans expand their cities and towns, we end up having to move around too,” Nate put in. “And the fae are getting more protective of their territory. I’ve heard they used to be okay with us sharing ground when we needed to shift and let off somesteam.”
“And now they’re as likely to try to barbeque us,” Marco said. “But those tensions might get better once you’re established in your role, princess. It’s harder to maintain good relations when we’re a little fractured even amongstourselves.”
Had Mom ever talked about that, when I’d been little? I reached back into my fragmented memories, the ones she’d buried with her magic after we’d fled. They hadn’t come back easy, and it was still hard to piece anything very coherent together. I slipped my hand into my pocket at the same time, closing my fingers around the locket she’d given me before she left that last time. The one that had drawn my alphas to me. I’d had to stop wearing it around my neck to make sure the chain didn’t snap during an unexpectedshift.
I could feel a hint of the magic in the warm metal now, whispering against my palm. It helped center my mind on those distantmemories.
An image swam up of Mom standing at the edge of a forest, talking with a tall, slender man whose skin was so pale it looked almost blue. He had a faint sheen to him too, that lit up where the sun touched him. I was crouched in the grass, watching, my heart hammering. Both nervous andexcited.
“Whowasthat?” I’d asked Momlater.
“One of the fae,” she’d said. “I need to negotiate with them from time to time, on behalf of our community. You won’t see them very often, though.”She’d paused, her expression going distant. “I suppose it’s a little sad, how little we interact and how formally. My grandmother told me that long ago the fae and the dragon shifters shared a special connection. But that’s fadednow.”
Then she’d kissed my forehead and ushered me to the dining room for ourdinner.
A lump rose in my throat. I hadn’t known her properly in the last sixteen years, because she hadn’t let me know her. And now that I knew who we were, I might never see her again in anything but a memory or avision.
A warmth brushed my skin, like the feeling of her presence when we’d sat shoulder to shoulder on our couch. At first I thought it was just because of my reminiscing. Then my gaze fell on a small swath of parallel scratches dug into the rock wall justahead.
