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Ohhh I shouldn’t have looked. I should not have looked. Big mistake. Big one. Stop looking!
Noctus’s barely-there smile grew a little, but his eyes changed—from warmth to regret. He—
The Paragon stuck his head up in between us. “Hello?” he said. “Is this what is called, according to those chick flicks the Drake vampires use for punishments, ‘love-at-first-sight’?”
Thatbroke me out of it like a bucket of ice-cold water.
I sucked in a deep breath. “What?”
“A supernatural long thought extinct, a handsome elf,” the Paragon ticked off on his fingers. “Seems like the start of a good meet-cute. Except you should know, he’s crusty and boring beyond all belief. The best part of his personality is that he’s a pet owner.”
“You’re always so charming whenever you’re asking for something, Paragon,” Noctus said.
The Paragon sat back down and folded his arms across his chest with a grunt. “I was nice to you at first. But it’s beenyears, and you’re still a tight-fisted, frosty wall. Now. What was that?” He waggled his fingers at Noctus and me.
“Um,” I said.
It would have been convenient to blame Noctus’s elf magic, except I was ashadow,and magic didn’t work on me!
I wanted to look at Noctus to nonverbally ask for help, but that was only going to make this so much worse.
THINK!What would distract the Paragon?
“Sorry, it just occurred to me, he’s very different from the tracker, who you think is also an elf,” I squeaked.
“Oh?” The Paragon perked up.
“Yes. The tracker is more agile and graceful than a human but…” I dared to glance at Noctus, but this time I smartly lookedoverhis head. “Nothing like Noctus. Noctus is much more…” I waved frantically.
“Yes, he is quite impressive.” The Paragon tapped his fingers on his chin, frowning when his pointer finger got tangled in his mustache’s long hairs. “So you’re saying Noctus has a more intense feeling of elfness?”
“Yes,” I said. “Muchmore intense.”
“Well I suppose, he is Noctus,” the Paragon mused, which was probably more him thinking of Noctus’s kingship and bloodlines than any personal thoughts about the royal elf.
“He’s likely from a different family,” Noctus said, deigning to help me. “Or—more likely—he’s only part elf.”
“Perhaps,” the Paragon said. “Could a part elf still use full elven magic?”
Noctus shrugged—I think, I still wasn’t risking looking at him straight on. “It’s possible, particularly if he was a halfblood.”
I relaxed—we’d safely moved on. This was good.
“That sounds possible.” The Paragon narrowed his eyes as he studied Noctus. “But while that explains why Chloe was staring at you, it doesn’t explain why she so fully capturedyourattention.”
It was a good thing the Paragon was only a fae, because my heart thumped in my chest with so much force that it physically hurt.
Why does the Paragon have to be so persistent? Why, why, why?
Noctus slow blinked in the unhurried fashion of a large cat. “I beg your pardon?”
“You were staring at her,” the Paragon said. “And the way you said her name. It was…”
A thud that came from the hallway outside the room made us all look over at the door.
It swung open, and Charon—wearing his customary cloak and hood—slipped in, carrying a tea tray balanced on one hand while he tried to wrestle the door shut with the other.
I heard what sounded like a dog’s nails on the smooth flooring—Ker, probably—and some scathing whispers.
