Jessa Slade - Dark Hunter's Touch

He closed his eyes. When the patrolling Hunters returned, they would choose a new Lord Hunter from their ranks and deal with the dead. And then they would deal with him.

A wingless Hunter could not hunt. A Hunter who could not hunt was…nothing.

“You were so brave,” she murmured. “No one else stood up to him.”

“I could not even stand.” And now he would never fly.…

“To fly? Is that what you want?”

Had he let the wistful words escape him aloud? He opened his eyes to glare his fury at her. “I am Hunter-born. A Hunter needs his wings to find what he hunts.”

She stared back at him, idly winding a lock of her hair around her finger. The shining strands held all the colors of the amber he had smashed: copper, gold, and bronze. “Do you know what a sylfana does?”

“I know you’ll never reach even the lowest clouds,” he snapped.

“We have the power of wishes.”

The whelp sneered as he had seen the older Hunters do when they complained about the sylfana who served a parallel court function to the Hunt, acting as the Queen’s lures. Where Hunters were the bullet, the sylfana were the hook, wielding temptation and enticement in place of violence, equally merciless but masked in pleasures, the precise nature of which remained frustratingly unspoken around the whelps.

But for the first time, the whelp understood the anger—and the longing—in his older brothers’ voices. He leaned away from the sylfana. “I don’t need your wishes.”

“It is not my wish.” She reached around herself to poise her tear-dampened fingertip over the bud of her wing where the first scalloped edge was just appearing. “It’s yours.”

He shifted. “You can’t do that. It’s magic.”

“Of course it’s magic. We are phae.” She touched the tight furling of white. When she lifted her finger, the tiny scales glittered alongside the salt of his tear.

He watched, warily, as she stretched her hand toward his shoulder where the joint of his wing had been so horribly slashed. He stiffened. “I don’t think—”

“It’s just a wish. Are you scared?”

He was. “No.”

“I am. Just a little.” She smiled at him, and he knew he would never forget the light in her blue eyes. “Ready?”

He wasn’t. “Yes.”

She closed her eyes and exhaled. The sweet scent of her breath and phae magic banished the stink of blood, and he found himself leaning toward her. She touched him.

The fire went through him in a ferocious blaze, a thousand times worse than the prismatic sword’s edge or the Queen’s thunder. He screamed but could not pull away.

“Hush. It won’t always feel like this.”

But it would. He knew he would always feel like this.

Chapter One

She wanted to feel it all. Her body burned. Sweat slicked down her skin, a sensuous tickle, and her chest heaved with each pounding stroke. When she gasped, the taste of salt prickled on her tongue.

Imogene needed her sunlit runs. With her body, mind, and senses so immersed in the moment, she might camouflage her presence from the Wild Hunt. The inexorable path of the sun, immune to any magics, helped keep her on her path, pretending to be a true inhabitant of this earthly realm—but for how long?

She wanted to run forever. That’s how long the Queen’s phaedrealii Hunters would search for her: forever. Creatures who stood with only one foot in the world’s time had that advantage. Though the phae could be blithe and capricious, once Hunters were loosed upon the object of their hunger, they would never falter. The black dogs and their dark masters were so dangerous that the Queen herself chained them when they prowled her inner court.

The sun fell into the streaked clouds over the Pacific Ocean like a fading ember. Its glow burned a red hole through the veil of the blue-gray sky, and the reflection in the water rippled with secrets. A chilly breeze breathed out from the pine forest rising from the rocky headlands beyond the dunes. Imogene slowed to a jog and flapped her oversized T-shirt to let the breeze tickle her belly.

A creep of awareness between her shoulder blades made her glance back.

Down the beach, a dark silhouette closed the distance, tall and menacing. Her heartbeat ramped up again and all her muscles tensed. For a confused moment, a swirl like black wings spread above the figure, and even the ceaseless churn of the ocean seemed to hush.

Then the sun flared out behind the clouds one last time, and Imogene recognized him: just a fellow jogger she had passed many times over the month since she had moved to the Oregon coast. He waved at her again—not wings, just a regular old human arm—and she chided herself for seeing monsters in every shadow.

Still wary, she let him catch up. All the other times, they had waved but never spoken.

“Hey, I think you dropped this.” Still a dozen strides away, he tossed something toward her.

Reflexively, she caught the chain that spiraled through the air. The metal tingled in her hand: steel. From a bezel at the bottom dangled an odd, blue stone—partly clouded but transparent in places with occlusions that caught and scattered the low slanting light. The pendant gleamed like a sky changing from the clear blue of day to the darker blue of evening, a sight she had longed for when she’d been trapped in the halls of the phaedrealii.

With regret, she shook her head. “Beautiful, but it’s not mine.” She held the necklace out to him, looking up.

And her breath, which she had finally caught, escaped her again.

They had always passed each other at a distance—part of her promise to herself to stay far away from humans on this trip through the sunlit realm. She had noticed only that he was dark haired; had a smooth, gliding stride that ate up the beach miles; and didn’t usually bother with shirts despite the chill.

Shirts were overrated anyway—especially if they committed the crime of covering such a perfectly sculpted chest. The hard planes of his pectorals blurred beneath just enough dark curls to declare the undeniable presence of testosterone, and the narrowing arrow of hair over his abdomen commanded her attention down toward testosterone central.

She jerked her gaze up before she could wonder if the ripstop nylon fly of his shorts was rippling from the breeze…or from something else.

Judging by the sly smile playing around his lips, she knew he hadn’t missed her once-over, but the confident tilt of his head said he thought he could take it. No doubt he got plenty of once-overs, not to mention twice-and third-overs. Even the haughty courtiers of the phaedrealii who objected most vociferously to the idea that there might be any shared blood between humans and phae would be willing to claim this one as kissing cousin.

The wicked edge of male beauty had carved jaw and cheekbones in bold relief from his deep-set dark eyes. Salt spray and sweat had frozen his dark hair in untamed tousles. Only the fullness of his lower lip seemed out of place, as if some all-powerful fairy godmother had decided this chiseled work of unassailable masculinity needed a touch of bruised tenderness and had taken a soft bite of his mouth before breathing him into life.

Imogene caressed the smooth, blue stone—still holding his body heat from his pocket—and imagined running her finger over that lip. Desire pooled low in her belly, warm and glowing as the stone. She curled her hand into a fist and crimped the chain in her grip. The slide of metal links through her fingers, each coiling into the next, echoed through her body. Her skin tingled again, not from the touch of steel, but as she pictured his big hands on her.

His jet eyes glittered. “Are you sure it isn’t yours? You seem like you want it.”

She wanted something anyway. For a heartbeat, she reveled in the sensations cascading through her. These were feelings the phae could never understand and would never allow. She would be able to summon this fantasy for months, forgetting the cold, remote, untouchable glory of the phae in this sizzling—if only imaginary—craving.